Déborah Lévy-Bertherat - The Travels of Daniel Ascher

WHEN HLNE THINKS BACK TO THAT FALL, her first fall in Paris, what she immediately remembers are her walks through the Luxembourg Gardens with her young neighbor. Jonas developed habits as inflexible as rituals. The moment they were through the gate, he would run and hide in the park keepers empty hut and close the low door, which afforded only a glimpse of the top of his head. He would wait there a few seconds, just long enough for a lion to prowl around the outside, or for Hlne to look for him and pretend to get worried, then he would leap out with a triumphant laugh.

She used to sit on a bench beside the sandbox and watch him dig; every now and then he would come over to give her a coin he had found and that he wanted her to look after for him. Strolling along the walkways, he picked up smooth, glossy horse chestnuts, filling his pockets and then Hlnes. When there were no more chestnuts, he made bouquets of dead leaves for his mother, and they brought the smell of earth and rain from the gardens right into their home.

Guillaume often went along with them. Hlne had not known him long, he was a student in her class at the Institute of Archaeology, where she had finally enrolled after three interminable years studying history in Orlans. At the beginning of the semester shed immediately noticed how tall he was, and she used to sit two or three rows behind him in class, occasionally letting her eyes settle on the nape of his neck and his very low hairline. They probably shouldnt have become friends. Hlne wanted to seem older than twenty years, she swept her hair up in a chignon, and wore high-heeled shoes and scarlet lipstick. Guillaume was two years older than her but was still passionately connected with anything that reminded him of his childhood: when they went to the Luxembourg Gardens, hed pay for Jonas to have a ride on the carousel just for the pleasure of watching him. The child would wave excitedly, waggling the stick he was holding to scoop a ring off the peg on the way past. The ring, Guillaume would cry, catch the ring. He wished he, too, were four years old, so he could ride on an elephant. He bought crocodile-shaped candy at the refreshment stall, and ate most of it himself. He told Jonas adventure stories about being lost in the jungles of Burma or the forests of the Amazon; he taught him to mimic the sound of a twin-engine plane in free fall, and Jonas tried so hard to get it right, it made him splutter.

It was on one of these walks, halfway through October, that Guillaume first mentioned The Black Insignia. They were sitting on park chairs along the pathway beside the orchard, with their feet up on chairs too. Jonas had lined up lots of gold nuggets he had collected and was counting them methodically. Guillaume then remembered all the collections hed had as a child, the stamps, the bird feathers, the stones with holes through them, the cherry pips, the cartoons, Tintin, Blake and Mortimer, and other book series, his favorite of which was The Black Insignia. He especially loved the first book, it started with a plane crash in which the hero, the only survivor, was seriously injured. Jonas abandoned his counting to listen to the story.

Hlne stood up because her back and buttocks were stiff from sitting on a metal chair for too long. She walked a little way away and noticed one of the gardeners picking apples on the other side of a fence up ahead of her, how amazing, apples in the middle of Paris. She called the boys over, come and look at this, you wont believe it, but they didnt listen. The gardener filled his basket and went on his way; it was the end of the day, Hlne said it was late, they should go home, theyd soon hear the whistle for closing time. Guillaume headed off toward his neighborhood, promising the child he would carry on with the story next time. Hlne helped Jonas put his pebbles in his pocket and took his hand for the walk home.

SHE HAD JUST MOVED INTO A LITTLE BEDROOM under the eaves of a building on rue Vavin, very close to the Institute of Archaeology on rue Michelet. Her fathers uncle had loaned it to her; he lived on the ground floor, but she hadnt seen him since she arrived, he was away traveling. She didnt have much in common with him, so his absence rather suited her. Her room had a low ceiling and was so narrow that the bed filled its entire width at one end, but it did have a proper window that you could open by kneeling on the bed. From there you could look down into the buildings inner courtyard where there was a small tree with a pockmarked trunk and a crack on the wall the shape of an old mans profile; and looking up over the zinc roofs of Paris, you could see the tip of the Eiffel Tower.

She knew Paris a little, but not this neighborhood, between the Montparnasse metro station and the Luxembourg Gardens, and when she first arrived in late September she did a lot of walking around, making the most of the fine weather. In fact that whole fall turned out to be very mild, people should have been wary, but who could have guessed that such violent storms were brewing? Hlne explored the area, looking in shop windows on rue Vavin and rue Bra: secondhand books, Chinese delis, the woman from the candy store waving hello to the man from the hardware store who was hanging multicolored pails under his awning. In among the dusty bushes on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, the rough-hewn statue of Captain Dreyfus hid its face behind a broken saber. Her wanderings gradually took her farther and farther afield.

The neighbors thought she was Mr. Roches niece, his great-niece, she corrected them, oh, Im sorry, he seems so young. He hadnt told his family where he was, but his neighbors knew hed gone to Tierra del Fuego and would be back on October 24, so brave, such a remarkable man, they seemed to her to be talking about a different person. In the early days, one of the neighbors had asked Hlne if she could pick up her son from nursery school, and she had gotten into the habit of taking Jonas to the Luxembourg Gardens twice a week.

ONE AFTERNOON TOWARD THE MIDDLE OF OCTOBER, she met a very old couple by the mailboxes in the entrance to her building. The man raised his Prince of Wales checked hat, revealing an archipelago of age spots on his balding head. He shook her hand, so youre the archaeologist, welcome to the building, Daniel must have mentioned us, Colette and Jacques Peyrelevade, but the name meant nothing to her. The woman gave her a kiss on the cheek, Hlne, the famous Hlne, she had a voice like a young womans but she struggled to find her words, and her bun, like a loosening halyard, had let a hank of long white hair escape. They were thrilled because inside their mailbox they had just found a postcard with a magnificent image of the mountains of Patagonia, sent from Ushuaia, Daniel never forgot to write them, he sent a card on every trip. Hlne opened her mailbox, it was empty, shed never received a postcard from her great-uncle, nor, as far as she knew, had any member of her family.