Heart the Lover (26)

We go out one night with my friends from French class, Irish Deirdre and Dutch Loes and Loes’ friend Fabien from Toulouse. We meet at a basement bar near the Pantheon and squeeze into a table in the corner. I go to get us drinks and look back at him there with my new friends, elbows on the table, head tipped to the side, his rooster cowlick, his mischievous grin. He’s telling them a story. I have that familiar impatience to get back to the table so I don’t miss what he’s saying.

Madame Trèves made me promise I would go to her favorite restaurant, Lapis, and I’d waited to go with Yash, but once he sees the menu on its little stand outside the blue-and-gold door, he won’t splurge on the prix fixe meal. He worked all summer to afford this trip, but he doesn’t seem to want to spend any of the money he saved.

I take him to an inexpensive Indian restaurant in the 5th that I like, Le Punjab. I’d never had Indian food until I moved to Paris. We walk in and a woman in back calls out to us and Yash answers and I don’t know what either of them has said. He always claimed he spoke no Hindi. She shows us the only table in the window, raised up on a platform so you have to step up onto it, and her husband brings over the menus. The couple chat with Yash and I can tell he is telling them that he doesn’t speak much, but they disagree and tell me in French that he speaks very well.

Where in India is his family from, they want to know and instead of saying Delhi Yash says something else and they don’t know it so they get out a map and they all look at it together and can’t find the town. They ask him a question in Hindi he doesn’t understand and they ask it to me.

‘Comment s’écrit ce village?’



‘Je ne suis pas s?r,’ Yash says and they are thrilled he understands French, too.

They bring the woman’s father out from the back and go through it again and the old man doesn’t know the town either.

We never order. They just start bringing out dishes. They fuss over us. They think Yash is marvelous.

On the way home he says, ‘They were such kind people, weren’t they?’

‘They were.’

He is silent for a long time. I take his hand. We’re walking up Mouffetard. We have it all to ourselves. The shops are closed, the restaurants quiet. The Parisians are gone and the tourists aren’t interested in this part of town at night.

‘That is the first time I’ve ever been to an Indian restaurant.’

‘You don’t have any in Knoxville?’

‘We have one. I could never go there. I was raised with India as the Death Star. You couldn’t mention it. My second-grade teacher gave me an extra credit assignment on India and my father tried to get her fired.’

He lets go of my hand and rubs his face and is quiet again. Then he says, ‘Four years of college and I never studied its history or Hindi. I’ve never read an Indian writer. Let’s go there. I’m not sure my father would ever speak to me again but let’s go. Will you come? Someday?’

‘Of course.’

In bed that night he tells me he has only one recurring dream, that he is giving his father’s eulogy. ‘It’s an embarrassing cliché. I’m standing there, sometimes in a church, sometimes in a field, once inside a storage unit—but it’s always good, my eulogy. It feels sort of the same from dream to dream. Off the cuff, no notes. But it feels like I’ve said it before. It’s a very good speech. People love it. My mother and my stepmother are right up front and they are weeping and holding hands. I nail it, every time.’

‘And your father is never there to hear it.’

‘Nope. He’s always dead.’

I convince him that we, too, need to get out of the city. We take a train to Strasbourg and another to Davos. Yash wants to see the sanatorium where Thomas Mann visited his wife, Katia, for three weeks in 1912, the visit that inspired The Magic Mountain. The air is as clean and sharp as it is in all the books when tubercular characters go seeking a cure. We feel lightheaded, walking up to our inn from the train station, the Alps rising on all sides, the highest peaks pale blue with ice. Later we stand in front of the enormous building, still a sanatorium, for asthma now that tuberculosis can be cured. It looks like a giant hotel with big balconies off every room where the patients would spend their days breathing in the cold, clear air. We walk around the grounds and imagine we are consumptive strangers meeting there, like Hans Castorp and Clawdia Chauchat. Chauchat, he tells me, was the name of the machine gun used by the French in World War I.

The next morning we go for a day hike, twelve kilometers to a southern peak. We start early in order to get down by dark. The innkeeper’s son packs us a lunch and snacks. He is our age, blond and broad, a bit mechanical when he speaks English. Yash is convinced he has a thing for me, and he has this running joke on the hike that the Swiss man is behind a tree or a boulder.

On the trail we talk as we often do about books, what makes the magic, where the genius lies. He says it’s in the structure. It’s always in the structure. We argue about this. I insist it can be in a number of elements—the images, the dialogue, all the ways in which the narrative comes to life—and he says it’s always the form that makes the difference. I say the structure of War and Peace was no great shakes, and he breaks the book down for me section by section to show how Tolstoy was reconceiving both The Iliad and The Aeneid to build his masterpiece.