The Palace of the Seven Stories
Prologue—THE KNIGHT OF THE NIGHT SKY
A young girl stood silently on the balcony of her family’s apartment in Paris, peering deeply into the night sky.
She was searching for someone.
She’d wrapped herself snugly in a cardigan knitted by her Spanish grandmother, warm fabric crafted from yarn woven into bright canary-yellow flowers here, chestnut-colored birds there. All upon a background of spring meadow-green, and unconditional love.
Her name was Therese, named after the Spanish saint of the same name. Therese yawned; it was late. Near eleven. Much later than her bedtime. Her parents didn’t know she was still awake, much less outside; she’d slipped onto the balcony as quietly as a suppressed thought.
She pulled the cardigan around her closer—the brisk breezes of early spring were chillier than she’d imagined.
She stood on tip-toe, raising herself as tall as she could upon the little balcony. She thought for a second of standing on the railing itself, then looked down at the quiet street below–she swallowed. Six floors up was no small matter.
So she satisfied herself with tip-toe. She hoped her parents didn’t find her; but what else could they expect, really? How else could she find who she was looking for, except during the most forbidden hours of the day?
She wouldn’t find him during bright daylight, upon the Place de la Madeleine, or the Pont Alexandre, after all.
Therese was seeking the Knight of the Night Sky. He didn’t deign step upon the ground; his terra firma was the firmament sparkling with lonely points of enormous energy; the earth ,with its rock-solid stability, only bored him.
Therese had learned of him in a story told by her father when she was very young, six years old or so. Her father, Mahmoud, was a professor of comparative religion at the Sorbonne; their small flat was wallpapered with books, carpeted with religious artifacts—you had to be very attentive in their apartment, or you’d trip over a Rwandan green-glass cross, or an Indian bronze Ganapathi. Her mother Isabelle always complained that the flat was so cluttered with objects there was no space to live; and her husband always answered, “That means there is more time to dream.”
Therese’s father had told his daughter the tale of the Knight of the Night Sky when she’d come home from school once in tears; boys had teased her because she never spoke, and then to top it off she’d fallen on the street in front of them, and skinned her knee. She was convinced she lived in the worst of all worlds.
Mahmoud had hugged her gently, bandaged her knee, and took her upon his lap. “Listen, my darling,” he said, “you must learn to simply laugh them off. They are stupid boys. And you must learn something else—this incident is the best thing that could’ve ever happened to you.”
Therese had her face against his chest; she wet his shirt with her tears. “What do you mean?” she said. “How can this be the best thing that could’ve happened to me?”
“Because now,” he said, stroking her hair gently—it was a golden-black, it resembled the brightly-lit darkness of the night sky itself—“you will find the Knight of the Night Sky. He is always there in the night sky. But you only learn to see him when you are very, very sad. Then you see him, and he assures you are never alone—he is always, always there.”
Therese didn’t remember if she’d seen him when she was six, but she knew she’d tried. She’d tried once again six months ago, when her beloved dog Maximilian had escaped his leash on a Sunday morning walk and had promptly got run over by a taxi. In the midst of her despair, she thought perhaps she had spotted the Knight, near the constellation of Orion, but she couldn’t be certain.
She was trying to find him again tonight, because in three days she’d be twelve years old. And Therese suspected that as she grew older, she’d start forgetting the stories she’d learned in her childhood. Her schoolwork would get heavier, and she’d have more responsibilities. She looked forward to growing older—her mother often told her she seemed twice as old as she really was—maybe she’d finally, one day, fit neatly into her biological age.
But in the meantime, she desperately wanted to see the Knight.
She didn’t have much of a space in which to see him; the glittering rocket-like Eiffel Tower stood off to her left; anonymous rooftops occupied the right side of her range of view. But she tried her best. When she was older, maybe she could go off on her own, at night, to an open field somewhere and study the breathtaking vastness of an opaque starlit sky.
She stood tip-toe, and looked deep, deep, into the darkness…
she caught her breath. What was that?
Therese squinted. In between the rooftops, she saw something flying—a large bird, of sorts? It was strange bird, not a pigeon or anything so prosaic.
All of a sudden, another creature flew into view.
Then another.
What were they?
She ran into her room—as quietly as possible—and removed a miniature telescope her parents had bought her for Christmas last year. She ran back out onto the balcony, and looked through it curiously…
She gasped. It couldn’t be.
And yet, there was another. And another….
She looked harder through the telescope. “Therese,” she told herself sternly, “you are not imagining this, are you?”
Mon Dieu. She swallowed. What was she seeing? How could it be?
She was looking at children.
They were flying—or floating—high up in the sky, in the direction of the Seine, and Notre-Dame…black children, and brown-colored children, fair children…streaming into a cascade of ephemeral infantile ghosts…
She didn’t care if her parents found out.
“Maman!” she screamed, “Papa! Maman….”
In less than a minute both parents were in her room. “What are you doing?” her mother said, “You get back into your room this instant. And close the door it’s cold. And why are you wearing that beautiful sweater now?”
Therese couldn’t speak. Her right foot was trembling. “Maman, Papa,” she said, “Look.”
She let them onto the balcony. “What do you want us to see?” her mother said. Her father added, “I have to be up early in the morning…”
Therese pointed to the sky. “Can’t you see them?” she asked, breathlessly.
Her parents looked at her furiously. “See what?” they said.
Their daughter stamped her right foot. Hard. “The children. The children. You must be able to see them.”
The two adults on the balcony stared at her in incomprehension.
“Here,” she said, “take my telescope. You bought me this last year. Look. In that corner, between the two rooftops, away from the Eiffel Tower.”
Both parents reluctantly looked. But they saw nothing, except a dim star or two.
Therese prayed for them to see what she could see. “They are floating in the sky, can’t you see?”
But they couldn’t. Her father said, gently, tiredly, “Look, Therese, go to sleep. Maybe it’s not too late for you, but it’s too late for me.”
The young girl nearly started crying. “I swear to you they were there,” she said, “they’ve disappeared just now. But they were there. I didn’t imagine them.”
Both parents looked at one another, and then marched her back in her room. Her mother tucked her in bed, and father said, “Forget the children. Just look for the Knight. He’s there. I saw him. Did you?” And he kissed her.
After they left her room, she reached in her drawer, and took out a locked journal with a red jeweled cover.
She unlocked it, and started writing quickly, so she wouldn’t forget a thing. She wrote so fast she nearly tore the page.
After ten minutes, she stopped, and put the journal safely in her drawer, with the telescope. She locked the journal, and put the key underneath her pillow.
She forced herself to close her eyes.
But she didn’t sleep.
For this wasn’t the first time she’d seen the children.
Part One—A MYSTERIOUS EPIDEMIC OF MONKS
Chapter 1—A Garland of Skulls
Five skulls glistened upon Lucie’s dining-table.
She opened cream-colored curtains wide, to examine them in bright sunlight. Smelling of layers of unknowable earth, she peered at them patiently, cautiously, thoughtfully, seeking to understand…
shook her head. Don’t be crazy! These couldn’t belong to the five children…it was just a gruesome news article she’d just seen online, about the death of five homeless children who lived in a cemetery in Haiti. But then whose skulls were they?
Wide eye-sockets stared at her with unreachable truth. Gazing at her with the smiling guile of lives smartly and swiftly-lived they dared her to answer their unanswerable questions.
Whose eyes were they? What all had they seen?
Lucie glanced at the opened cardboard box lying on the old Persian rug. She had grown so accustomed to the rug she no longer paid attention to it. It was unique for its color and design—instead of being dyed in shades of burgundy white and black, it seemed to feed itself from an eternally young deciduous forest. Rich in a mesmerizing deep emerald, the rug never faded, although it was several hundred years old. And instead of the usual filigrees of flowers and leaves it was decorated with circular floral patterns and a mandala whose center was a five-petaled flower and dozens of miniature deities of some sort.
And to think, the young girl who sold it to her, from whom she had purchased it in a village in northern India, told her it had once flown…
She used to crash down upon the rug, sink her hands in plush green, and simply shed tears at its beauty. But she no longer did that– you got used to anything, didn’t you?
Right now all Lucie was interested in was the box. Who sent this to her?
It was so odd—there was no address upon the box, nor postmark. As if the box had simply dropped out of the sky. She’d opened her door to take Jacques for a walk, and found this box right outside of her door.
Five skulls, five dead Haitian children…She shoved the images of the dead Haitian children out of her mind. She’d been doing this all day, ever since she’d seen the news of their murders online. But they kept reappearing, five black ghosts fighting the discipline of her fine mind, haunting it with their short-lived spirits.
The children were restaveks, servants to wealthy families, and lived in the main cemetery in Port-au-Prince. They survived the catastrophic earthquake earlier this year, only to be found murdered days later. Murders were humdrum events really nowadays, of course, but the method of the slaying was horrific—they’d been sleeping in a tight huddle, all three hugging one another, when they’d been impaled with a spear.
Suddenly she remembered a fox she’d seen once, impaled upon an especially searing spear-tipped bluestone in Wales, in the Preseli Hills, its entrails trailing upon the stony ground. She shuddered. She was so used to dealing with the remains of the dead, as a retired (supposedly) archaeologist that death should no longer bother her. And it didn’t so much– it was just the cruelty, the pain life painted the world in that was still so difficult for her to understand.
Well, she wasn’t alone. Who could understand it?
A monk, perhaps? Lucie started—she suddenly remembered there was a monk hovering behind the news reporter on the television coverage of the murdered children. In the background, but he was there. She noticed him because he was Chinese. And she wondered, what in the world was a Chinese monk doing in a cemetery in Haiti right after an earthquake?
Well, she did hear the Chinese were the first to get to Haiti to offer physical assistance after the earthquake. Much faster than the Americans. Not to mention the French. No doubt, the Chinese would rule the world one day.
If they didn’t already.
Lucie stared once more at the skulls, trying her hardest to unlock the secrets seeping from the eye-sockets. Huge eyes. Whoever these people were, they must have looked upon the world with luminous perception.
Or else—she shivered once more. The Mongols used to say wide eyes invited the vileness of evil spirits…
She stared into one socket intently, as if she were on one of her digs in India, focused intensely on the personality now no more than an impersonal nothingness. Surely, this soul-no-more had something to say…
Crumpled yellow caught her eye.
Lucie reached down to the cardboard box. A small piece of paper was stuck in between the two flaps at the bottom of the box.
A packing slip? She carefully dislodged it from folds of corrugated age. How old was this
box?
She gasped. It wasn’t a packing slip.
It was a letter.
Dear Lucie—
Forgive this quick note. It has been a long while since we corresponded, but I don’t have time to write you in length now. The Taliban will be here soon. We are sealing all the Afghan treasures—the Bactrian gold, the necklaces of gold, lapis, and turquoise, the statue which seems to be an exquisite cross of both Aphrodite and Ganga (you can tell how I long to examine them more, and how I will pray they will be preserved until peace reigns once more) and much more in vaults underneath the museum.
But what I am sending you now doesn’t belong here. We found it in some ruins here but I think they came from Pakistan. I don’t know where it belongs. I’ve never seen such a garland of skulls in Afghanistan. It reminded me of the skulls seen on the goddess Kali, and so I thought of you, with your wide knowledge of Indian iconography. I know you will know what to do with this.
I will close by saying, I have no doubt the gods once walked the earth. They will all meet once again, in The Palace of the Seven Stories. And I hope it is their will that we meet one another once again.
Yours ever,
Ibrahim
Lucie stood by her window, gazing over the Boulevard Raspail. She watched school children descend into the Metro Notre-Dame des Champs. She gazed at a clochard as drunk as the day was bright.
She would know what to do with this? Why ever so? She was long retired—she no longer knew the curators of many of the world’s museums. In any case, Ibrahim could have sent it to a curator in Paris, or London…
She went to the kitchen, made herself some coffee.
And who was the messenger who dropped off the box?
Whoever he was, he was an awfully slow messenger—the museum in Kabul had recently reopened. It closed when? 2001, 2002…so the messenger took eight or nine years to make his way to her door.
A knock on the door.
Ibrahim? Can you just appear and tell me what to do?
She opened it. The huge, malodorous Madame Chataignon stood outside with her terrier Jacques. She’d asked Madame to take him for a walk when she’d discovered the strange box. She wanted peace and quiet while she opened it. And when she discovered what the box contained, she was relieved she’d sent Jacques away; she didn’t want him licking some ancient bones, ruining not just the treasure but his own health.
“Merci beaucoup Madame,” Lucie said, reaching for her purse. She found it—a midnight-blue velvet affair with a snapping steel handle and magnetic clasp. Not very practical, but her niece had given it to her years ago, in the United States. She wanted to give her rather practical-looking aunt a romantic flair, but instead of gracing her with decorum it graced her with what her niece would perceive as a kind of gruesome incongruity when it hung next to her rather tasteless clothes.
Where was her wallet? She reached into the looming depths of the big blue bag, and couldn’t find anything. Had she lost her wallet?
Luckily she had money in her pocket. The concierge gave her a smirk—her closest expression to a smile—and left.
Jacques leapt up to her for a hug, albeit a little slowly.
She petted him worriedly. Where was her wallet? She looked around the flat. It was most unflattering. The place was a disaster.
Well, she’d have her coffee first, and then think quietly about the skulls and the lost wallet.
As she stirred instant coffee in a stained mug, Lucie wondered if she’d lost her wallet. Had she lost it in India? It was certainly possible. While she was there she’d kept her credit-card and passport in her pants-pocket, along with spare change. She hardly used cash. She used her wallet for things like receipts and assorted paperwork. Also her driver’s license…Lucie sighed. Another prosaic thing to attend to. When she just wanted to immerse herself in the mysteries of the world… She sipped her coffee. Why in the world had Ibrahim chosen her to be guardian of the garland of skulls?
Jacques thirstily lapped up warm water. How she envied him. Life was so much simpler for a dog.
She stared at Jacques, who now showed no interest in her, trying as she had in the past, to break through into his consciousness. It was extraordinary—she had known Jacques for 11 years now, shared her life with him, and yet they operated on two entirely different levels of being. How easily people took miracles for granted.
If the gods once walked the earth, why did they leave? She stared at the skulls, skulking at her in their confidential knowledge. They still seemed vividly alive, as if life still longed to linger in the bony carapaces of thought.
Carapaces of thought. A Sandrine sentence. An elegant phrase her friend would adore.
Who else was there to call?
Lucie picked up the phone, still staring at the skulls.
Jacques circled around himself three times, and fell asleep.
Chapter 2—Jacques’ Strange Journey
Jacques,” Lucie commanded imperiously, “be menacing!”
Jacques looked at his master, licked her face, turned around in a circle, and sat down on the bench. Menacing? He looked more welcoming than anything.
Lucie stared at him with her most admonitory look, warning him to ward off the lonely men wandering Les Jardins du Luxembourg. Looks nor age meant a thing to them—in their mind, a single female was a beacon seeking a pathetic peripatetic man. Really, it was amazing—guys always thought they had a chance.
The day had been one of unending dismay. Lucie hadn’t found her wallet anywhere. She must indeed have had it stolen on her last day in India, when she had visited the Ajanta caves. That had been such a strange day—she’d briefly been in the Aurangabad train station, only to hear later she’d just missed a bomb blast. Luckily she hadn’t had much money in the wallet, but she had spent all day in government and university offices, requesting a new driver’s license and new library cards.
The only thing she’d lost had been a map…
She sat in the gardens in the warm spring late afternoon—she’d never tire of a Parisian spring—looking through a notebook of her latest projects. A miniature bottle-green beetle had landed on top of the first page. She shifted it off the paper with a newly green leaf. It fell onto the ground on its back, and slowly righted itself up, continuing its wandering through this wilderness of a wide world.
Jacques softly snored.
It was a good thing she was retired. Academics would find her projects endemic with senselessness:
1. Garland of Skulls–????
2. The Saraswati—where did it once flow? And why did it leave?
3. The Palace of the Seven Stories
She buried her head in her hands, closed her eyes. None of this made any sense.
After she retired—her specialty was excavating ancient ruins in India—she’d stumbled upon more questions she wanted to answer than she’d ever imagined.
When the garland of skulls arrived, she’d been immersed in discovering if the Saraswati had indeed been a real river, and if so, where it had once flowed?
Saraswati was the Hindu goddess of creativity and learning, and in Vedic times had been associated with a mythic river. Later on, she was associated with bodies of water in general.
To be fair, the source of the mythical Saraswati most likely existed only in her imagination. Hydrologists did have ideas now about where the legendary river existed. But still, the idea of a mythic body of water was too tantalizing to just forget about. A body of water…did she believe in a river as a vital, living, breathing thing? Could a river…die? What happened if it did?
In the gentle new green and gold of spring, Lucie shivered. Why did a ghost appear, behind every sudden glimpse of a god?
Too many questions for her to answer. Especially at her age. But she couldn’t stop seeking answers.
Lucie was too romantic for the reality of life. She’d grown up in Tours, in the heart of the Loire Valley, had seen her fill of castles as a child, from Chenonceau to Amboise, and knew she wanted her life to be filled with unending questions.
And hopefully some answers. She had been happily married for a very short time—her husband Alain had been killed in a car accident, very suddenly on a sunlit day, after only three years of marriage. She’d only been in her late thirties when he died. A fellow archeologist—the first time she went to India was with him–he had as much curiosity about the wonder of the world as she had. After the shock of his death, she resolved to dig deeper into the secrets of life, to find out if there was a reason that he had died so suddenly.
Thirty years later, she hadn’t come closer to finding out any truth, not really. She sometimes asked herself if she’d really ever been married—the reality of Alain was no more real than a dream. The only result of her quest for answers was that she had discovered many more questions than she could ever possibly answer.
Lucie reached down to pet Jacques—
he was gone.
She put her notebook down, stood up, looked for him. What kind of a guard dog was he anyway? To leave his mistress unprotected, in a park full of pathetic peripatetic men?
“Jacques! Jacques!” Lucie called, hoping a lonely man named Jacques wasn’t wandering around her section of the gardens.
Where was he? Lucie didn’t see him anywhere. She looked at her watch. Already almost six. She was supposed to meet Sandrine in ten minutes, in her office at the L’Institut Catholique.
She passed a group of Japanese tourists taking pictures by a statue of a god or an artist. Like clockwork, they appeared every two hours. Lucie wondered if they ever looked at their pictures a second time.
Upon the ground, flies buzzed around a dead blackbird.
All of a sudden, a Japanese boy left his group of camera-toting countrymen and walked towards Lucie.
The little boy seemed lost; he kept staring at his own hands, looking up at the sky, and then back at his hands.
He’d suddenly look around him, then back at his hands. He was dressed very neatly, in a kind of school uniform.
Lucie didn’t understand why on earth his mother or father in the group didn’t call for him.
The boy was only yards away now. He said something in Japanese to her, which she did not understand.
She wanted to take him back to his countrymen, but she was too concerned about Jacques.
“Go on,” she said in French, “go back to your group. Don’t get lost here. It’s a big city.”
Lucie had no idea that the group of Japanese watched her in curiosity; even snapped a video of her with their phones.
For, as far as they could tell, she wasn’t talking to anyone. One of the folles de Paris, apparently.
Then Lucie resumed her search for her ancient canine.
Jacques had wandered off on his own before, but Lucie always found him quickly. He just needed a little time on his own now and then, that was all. Seemed quite a philosophical independent-minded little beast at times.
“Madame,” a woman in a leaf-green coat suddenly said, “I saw a small brown dog leave that way, out of the gardens. Maybe he is yours?”
Lucie thanked her, picked up her notebook, and walked towards a gate leading to the Rue Guynemer.
Then Lucie heard the most terrifying sound in her life.
Screeching brakes.
A searing half-human cry.
Lucie ran.
–
Jacques found himself lost in a world of white moths.
Instead of a high sky above his short stature all he saw were wings swinging in an opalescent emerald light. Strange; he didn’t know where he was, but he wasn’t scared.
Underneath skies of fluttering lustrous flight his little feet kept padding along. He’d loved new adventures now-and-then but had never seen a world as shimmering yet misty as this one.
He’d simply run after a blackbird, for fun, but then a biker seemed to run over the bird. It must have already been ill, though, otherwise it would’ve flown away.
But somehow, a part of the bird kept flying, and Jacques followed it, until he found himself in the world of light moths. Everywhere he looked, moths kept appearing as suddenly as fireflies lighting up the night’s song of nothingness.
Suddenly, the blackbird took off into a flight of sheer fire; Jacques stopped in his tracks, scared for the first time. Black wings broke into an orange so frighteningly organic he started to whimper; but the creature soon disappeared, taking off into the opalescent emerald light, a firebird embarking upon its very last flight.
After a few minutes, Jacques kept padding along. He must have entered some kind of enchanted forest; animals of all kinds slowly spent their day in the most delightful of ways—running through seas of regal trees, sipping water from limpid lakes, breaking through the thin veil of moths, to find skies endlessly, delightfully high.
And while he certainly didn’t know their names, he saw frogs, owls, and dragonflies; hawks, lemurs, and sloths. And after he came out of the forest—after what seemed like years—he came to a huge lake, ocean or sea, and saw fish, turtle, and laughing dolphins which filled opalescent emerald skies with their joy.
Jacques sat down on the shore of the wide body of water to rest.
He panted for a while.
Suddenly, he felt hands on his wet fur. He looked up.
A little girl was petting him, smiling, her short tangled hair a mess. Her ebony skin seemed skinned of all texture; she was as thin as a papery cloud on a fine summer’s day. She called out loud, and two other little children appeared out of the mist of soft moths, and reached to pet him also. All had black skin skinned of all texture. Soon he had ten hands manhandling his little body, in an excitement he compared only to his own when he’d been a pup at seeing his owner reappear after she would inexplicably disappear for a while.
But why were they so unbelievably happy to see him? He was too old for this. He buried his head in his paws.
All of a sudden, he was soaring through the air. The children were laughing, and were taking him towards the wide body of water. Jacques started trembling; he didn’t want a bath, his hip was arthritic (although that was a term he’d never understand), he couldn’t swim in such a huge sea, he only saw himself drowning in the undertow of a window of such starving water…
he barked
yelped,
closed his eyes—
–
Lucie ran faster than she’d had in years. She sped through the garden, up the Rue de Fleurus, praying she’d find him before the Boulevard Raspail. There was so much more traffic there…
Although she hadn’t been anywhere near Alain when he died, screeching tires still screamed his name in her mind. His reality might now be less real than a dream, but the cries of the tires were unfortunately not.
Where was he? “Jacques, Jacques!” she called, thinking too quickly to say a prayer for her little friend. He was too old, he couldn’t outrun a racing car…
she stopped for a second, breathing heavily. Her right hip had started hurting. She had to slow down a bit. She bent over, holding her knees, reaching for breath.
Maybe she should find a policeman, or a youngster loitering on the street—
first, she forced herself to say a little prayer, “Oh please God let Jacques be ok. I know he doesn’t have long to live, but please, let him be well. Let me be able to find him.”
She stood up straight, took a deep breath, and walked quickly, but stopped running. She reminded herself—this was something she’d learned from experience—if you lose something or someone, they will return if they are meant to return. You didn’t even have to worry. She had learned that from years of living.
She forced herself to find a little space of faith. She cried out, “Jacques, Jacques, mon petit, Jacques…”
A young girl on a cellphone wearing a backpack approached Lucie. She hung up, put her phone in her pocket, and asked the woman trying to fight off a mad panic, “Have you lost a dog?”
Lucie nodded, still breathing heavily.
“I knew you had,” the girl responded, “because I lost one too, and I recognized the look on your face.”
“Did yours return?” Lucie asked.
“He was run over, Madam,” the girl said. Tears started immediately glistening in her eyes. “Just a few months ago.”
Lucie’s heart stopped. This is not a sign, she told herself. But the poor girl. “I’m so sorry, my dear,” she said, “I promise you, if you help me find Jacques, I’ll get you another dog.”
The girl shook her head. “I don’t want another one,” she said, “But I will help you.”
So Lucie and the girl raced through pedestrians returning home from trying days at school or work. They reached the Boulevard Raspail, and on a hunch turned right, passing closed stores and open cafes, and kept going.
Lucie said, “I heard screeching brakes—but I didn’t see any accident. I heard a cry, you know, I thought that was Jacques, but if I heard it he must’ve been close to the gardens, but I didn’t see a lost dog, or a run-over dog,” –her heart stopped again—“maybe there was no cry, I don’t know.”
“Maybe something in you just knew he needed you, Madame” the girl said matter-of-factly.
They ran up Raspail until they hit Rue de Vaugirard. Then, afraid of gliding hopelessly into grief, Lucie and the girl turned back around on Raspail, and looked for Jacques until they hit the evening traffic and fanfare of sidewalk cafes of the Boulevard Montparnasse.
No sign of a lost dog.
Lucie wanted to break into tears—it was too much, Alain suddenly gone and now her beloved companion of 11 years—but she held them back, not wanting to frighten the girl in any way.
They stood on the corner of Raspail and Montparnasse for a minute, while Lucie tried to figure out what to do. She looked at her watch. 7 p.m.
“Can I borrow your phone for just a minute?” Lucie asked the girl. The girl handed Lucie her sparkling pink phone.
Lucie called Sandrine. Thankfully, she was still working in her office. She could still meet this evening. Lucie was relieved; she couldn’t face the idea of returning to an empty apartment alone.
Lucie knew she had to call off the search now. If Jacques was meant to return, he would.
She walked the girl—whose name was Therese—to the Metro. Therese told her quietly, “Don’t worry, Madame. If he doesn’t return, he’ll always be in your heart. And I think your heart has so much space in it—I mean, anyone’s heart—it’s so huge it can hold more than the whole world.”
Therese said it so solemnly, so trustingly. Lucie kissed her on the cheeks. “Thank you so much my dear,” she said, “Please give me your phone number. I will call you if Jacques returns.”
They ambled down the Boulevard Raspail, silent most of the way, crossing Rue de Vaugirard, Rue de Rennes. At the Metro Sevres-Babylone, Therese asked Lucie, “Madame, do you think there is a heaven for dogs?”
The girl said it so seriously. Ten or eleven years of deep thought stared out through frowning brown eyes.
Lucie took a deep breath. “I think, Therese, there are more kinds of heaven than we can possibly imagine.” She kissed her again, and watched her descend into the Metro.
Lucie stood still for a few minutes, resting. She was numb to all that had happened. From the arrival of a mysterious garland of skulls to losing Jacques. Her life was losing all remnants of sense.
She started to turn back down the Boulevard Raspail, to head towards the L’Institut Catholique. Thank God she was meeting Sandrine.
“Madame! Madame!”
Lucie turned around, stood stock still.
Therese was racing towards her, with a brown dog in her hands.
“Is this Jacques?” she asked, breathlessly.
“Where…?” Lucie asked.
“In the Metro!” Therese replied, “like he was waiting for a train!”
Lucie took Jacques in her hands. He licked her face with all his strength. He looked exhausted.
And strangely enough, he was soaking wet.
Lucie kissed Therese, for the third time. “We will meet again, my dear, I promise you.”
Therese smiled, a big wide smile. Tears were glistening in her eyes. Lucie wished she could bring back the girl’s dog for her.
The young girl turned quickly, as if she were about to burst out crying. Lucie kissed Jacques. “So finally, you take a bath,” she said, “What did you do, fall into the Seine?”
Leisurely, taking lots of deep breaths of evening Parisian air, nuzzling one another now-and-then, they walked towards the L’Institut Catholique.
