The Same River Twice (17 page)

Groot called out to a boy carrying a coil of fluorescent orange rope over his shoulder. He laid the rope down, and Groot began to undress.

“What about the water?” said Rachel nervously. “You’ll be poisoned before you even get halfway.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t drink it, I promise.”

“Hepatitis, dysentery, conjunctivitis. Polio, if they still have that.”

“I’ll disinfect afterward.” Stripped now to his briefs, Groot secured one end of the rope to an iron ring set into the retaining wall, then went back down the steps, followed closely by Rachel.

Jacques waited for Max to finish the shot, then the two of them took up new positions down by the water’s edge.

“What if he drowns?” asked Jacques. “Wouldn’t we have a hard time shooting a film around that?”

“On the contrary. If he drowns, the film makes itself.” Max held a light meter up and took a reading. “That doesn’t necessarily mean we want him to drown, you understand. What we want is to film. About everything else we’re essentially neutral. Got it?”

Jacques grinned. “Sure.”

“And try to get Rachel to talk. I’ll be shooting him, but she’s our real subject, okay? Let’s do it.”

Groot was tying the line around his waist as he spoke to Rachel. “If I get into trouble, I’ll wave an arm. Don’t do anything unless you see that wave. And don’t panic. In situations like this, things often look worse than they are.”

“Yeah, right.”

Max let the camera linger over their embrace.

“Hurry back,” she said.

Groot waded down the steps into the churning water and, once he was waist deep, started swimming upstream at an oblique angle so the current would eventually drag him to the boat. He was, Max thought, an astonishingly strong swimmer.

“Your boyfriend is risking his life to save a boat,” Jacques said to Rachel. “Is that wise?”

She looked past the sound boom to where Groot labored through the onrushing waters, his broad back twisting from side to side as he swam. “You’re trying to provoke me, aren’t you? For your film.”

“No, I only mean that you must be worried for him, out there by himself, in such dangerous conditions.”

She removed her glasses, wiped them dry, and put them back on, scrutinizing Jacques carefully before turning again to the river. “Groot’s physically courageous,” she said. “I’ve always been attracted to guys like that, probably because my father was in the military—the United States Navy, as a matter of fact. So to answer your question, the
Nachtvlinder
is where Groot and I live, she’s our home, but she’s also a nautical vessel, and there’s a really ancient history of how you’re supposed to deal with one that’s in distress and under your command.” She paused. “Excuse me, but isn’t this going to seem, like, totally contrived?”

Jacques hastened to reassure her. “We’ll fix it in the editing. Just say whatever’s on your mind.”

Keeping Groot snugly framed in the viewfinder, Max struggled to stay calm, galled that he had no control whatsoever over the present action. Yet the scene itself was riveting, so rich with texture that there was almost too much of it.

“What’s on my mind right now,” said Rachel, “is his safety, obviously. But I know Groot, and I can tell you that all he’s thinking about is the boat. Everything we care about is tied up in her. You just get so connected, it’s not really something you can explain.” She hugged herself. “A boat’s like a living thing.”

For the first time Max became aware of the debris being borne along on the current. He panned upriver to take in tree branches, a tire, a plastic bucket, and a battered aluminum canoe, following it all as it flew past.

Groot was more than halfway to the boat, still swimming strongly. His neighbors stood huddled together on the steps.

In an effort to keep Rachel talking, Jacques mentioned their good fortune in not being on board when the
Nachtvlinder
lost her mooring.

She shook her head grimly. “Actually, this is all pretty much my fault,” she said. “We should’ve been on board, but I talked him into taking me skiing in Chamonix for a couple of days, which we definitely couldn’t afford, even without the flood. Now we come back to this.”

“Any idea what went wrong?” Jacques persisted. “None of your neighbors’ boats broke loose.”

“We had her rigged with a system of backup cables. I don’t know, maybe we should have—”

But at that moment a wooden orange crate, hurtling along on the wild waters, spun into the air and struck Groot in the back of the head. Max zoomed in as he went under, panning left with the current. Two, three seconds passed. When Groot resurfaced, fifteen meters downstream, he was bleeding from the scalp and nose.

“Oh my God!” Rachel grabbed hold of the orange rope that now ran some seventy meters from the ring bolt to Groot’s waist. “Help me!”

Stricken, Jacques looked back and forth from her to Max.

“Wait!” Max shouted, holding up a hand as he continued to film. “He’s okay!”

The neighbors all began shouting contradictory instructions.

“He said he’d wave,” Jacques reminded Rachel. “Didn’t he say that?”

The current had driven Groot even with the boat. He struggled to maintain his position, then turned to look at the people gathered on the bank. He seemed to shake his head.

“He’s hurt,” Rachel said, “and we can’t just leave him out there. Help me!”

Jacques again hesitated.

“Okay, I’ll do it myself.”

But before she could begin hauling him in, Groot turned back toward
the boat and resumed swimming. A dozen strokes later, he grabbed hold of the ladder at the aft of the
Nachtvlinder
and, hand over hand, dragged himself on board as the onlookers applauded. Max filmed him on deck, arms upraised against the steel-gray sky. Then, as Groot untied the rope that encircled his waist, Max pulled his focus back steadily until the shot again included Rachel, standing to the left in the foreground with her back to the camera.

She turned around, bedraggled but quite beautiful, and, seeing Max, smiled demurely. “Did you get all that?” she asked.

Some time later, after the
Nachtvlinder
had been hauled safely back to her high-water berth and Groot had been disinfected with a bottle of whiskey and the neighbors had dispersed, Max and Jacques took their equipment back up to street level and stowed it in the Citröen. The rain had tapered off.

“You were right about the timing,” said Jacques. “How did you know?”

“I didn’t. I just waited as long as I could before going in. Mind-set is half the battle in a project like this, especially when you shoot in real time.”

“Well, one thing’s for certain, Max. We’ve really got a film now.”

He gazed irritably over the car roof at his assistant. “Which film is that?”

For an instant Jacques seemed at a loss. “But Max, this is exactly what you’ve been looking for: Rachel in adversity, a woman of the American type, innocent but hardy, all that.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “All that. But suddenly I have the feeling there’s a piece of this I’m not seeing yet. Some overall tendency of events, I don’t know. Fear and pity, maybe.”

“Fear and pity? No, please. It worries me when you quote Aristotle.”

“Ah, you see,” said Max, “that’s my problem. I don’t know how to disengage.” Shaking his head, he opened the passenger-side door. “Really, it’ll be my undoing.”

He had Jacques drive him and the equipment to the studio, where he backed up the day’s work and filed it with the rest of the Rachel footage. Then he crossed the courtyard to the apartment and had a hot shower. Odile was with a client in the fifth arrondissement. Max expected her back for supper at nine.

Watching the TV coverage of the flood, a glass of whiskey in his hand, he was stirred anew by the force and drama of the river: its balletic surge, the sheer mass and velocity of its roiling waters, its absolute conformity to physical law. At times he had to remind himself that it was Paris he was seeing and not some improvident biblical city in the grip of a senile God.

Not everyone had fared as well as Groot and Rachel. The international news channel repeatedly ran footage of a classic Dutch
tjalk
ramming into the Pont Mirabeau, where it stuck fast, the remnants of its superstructure accordioned against the bridge’s steel under-struts. Moments later an errant telephone pole stove in the hull, and the boat sank with dismaying dispatch. Max watched the sequence several times, fascinated.
A boat’s like a living thing
, Rachel had said. He got up and poured himself another whiskey.

Odile arrived at half past nine, flushed and faintly aglow. Her client, an Algerian-born doctor’s daughter with an advanced fashion sense, had some weeks back commissioned a wedding dress, encouraging her to experiment, and they’d just been over the first set of drawings. The meeting had gone well.

“You would enjoy her,” Odile said, pouring herself a glass of mineral water. “She has a natural grace, Fatima. Mischievous and sexy. Like a djinn.”

“But won’t you basically have to cover her from head to toe? I’m assuming she’s Muslim.”

“Muslim, yes, but very modern. No head scarf, no djellaba, none of that.” Leafing through the day’s mail, she blew a puff of air. “Have you heard any more from Allegra? You called her, right?”

“E-mailed her.” Max opened the refrigerator and contemplated its contents. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason. I’m just trying to get a picture of the summer.”

From the meat compartment he removed two veal chops wrapped in brown paper. “Probably what will happen is she’ll spend a month or so with us—June or July. But it still has to be worked out. With her mother, I mean.”

Odile sat down at the kitchen table with that afternoon’s
Le Monde
. “Diana will cooperate.”

“Yes, but she’ll drag it out, exacting her small revenge.”

“Ignore her, then. Your concern is Allegra.”

Max unwrapped the chops and ran cold water over them. While it had been understood, virtually from the outset of their relationship, that he and Odile would have no children of their own, he sometimes wondered if she was as unconflicted about this as she seemed. The official line, that their respective professional ambitions precluded responsible child rearing, was sound enough, and Odile relished her personal freedom. But occasionally he could feel a shadow pass and would worry that something essential had been sacrificed. A room left dark in the marital mansion.

“Max?” She had laid the newspaper open on the table and was scanning the headlines. “Don’t make a chop for me. I think I’ll just have salad.”

“What? But you adore veal. Aren’t you feeling well?”

“No, I’m fine, really. But I—” She looked up.

“Yes?”

She shrugged. “My meat-eating days are finished. I’ve just decided.”

He blinked, awaiting clarification.

“Oh, come on, Max. I just feel like a change of diet, okay? Don’t take it personally.”

Retrieving the brown paper from the garbage, Max wrapped the second chop back up and put it in the refrigerator. “You’re not undergoing a religious conversion, are you?”

“Rest assured,” she told him, returning to the newspaper.

Over dinner he recounted the rescue of the
Nachtvlinder
, taking pains not to embellish or overdramatize, seeking in Odile’s reaction some clue to the nature of the day’s events and the film that had begun to coalesce around them. She listened closely and asked the occasional question, trying to visualize it all. Together they entertained the possibility that a second act of sabotage had taken place, that the firebombers had returned to cut the
Nachtvlinder
loose and send her to ruin. But of course that hadn’t happened, and it strained belief that the would-be saboteurs could have failed a second time.

“What I wonder about,” Max said, pouring them coffee, “is why Groot’s putting so much energy into restoring the engines if he isn’t planning to move the boat.”

“How do you know he isn’t?”

“Various things Rachel’s said. Today I heard her tell him there was no point in saving the boat if they alienated the neighbors. Which wasn’t an exaggeration, I’m beginning to see. Those houseboaters are tough.”

“Okay. But what’s your point? Say he moves the boat. So what?”

Max shook his head vexedly. “It’s not that alone. I have to consider the big picture. Up till now I’ve just been shooting Rachel on spec, a kind of extended screen test, really. But with what I got today I can begin to imagine an actual film, one I’d kill to make.”

“The one you’ve been looking for?”

“Maybe, yes. So the problem becomes, how hard do I push it? Do I let it come to me, which is what I’ve done till now, or do I take a more proactive approach? Because my instinct tells me there’s more at play here than I’ve got a grip on.”

She leaned back in her chair and regarded him shrewdly, holding the coffee cup before her lips. “You know what Bastien says.”

“No, what?”

“Better a lie that’s big enough than a truth too small.”

“Well, good for him, the old terrorist. I’ll have to remember that the next time Allegra tells me film’s just another kind of lie.”

“He likes you, you know. Despite what you think.”

“Spare me. He’d have me sent to the countryside for reeducation if he could.” Max wiped his mouth on his napkin. “To the gulags.”

“That’s Stalinism. He’s a Trotskyite, remember?”

“Whatever. Dustbin of history, either way.”

Leaving Odile to do the dishes, he went outside to smoke one of his small black cigars. The sky had cleared, and in the moonless night the stars scintillated with a fiery brilliance that was rare over Paris. He let himself out through the gate of the mews, turned left on rue Léon Maurice Nordmann, and walked a block west to La Maison d’arrêt de la Santé, the neighborhood’s most notable though least remarked-upon feature, a top-security nineteenth-century prison whose glowering hulk occupied an entire trapezoidal block adjacent to boulevard Arago. Eighteen-foot stone-aggregate walls surrounded the facility, shielding it utterly from view, and in the warmer months Max had fallen into the habit of making a brisk circuit around it while smoking his postprandial cigar. The atmosphere at such times inclined him toward introspection of a strangely detached sort that he often found therapeutic. Lockdown was at six, and there was rarely anything to be heard from inside the prison after that, but earlier the sidewalks outside would be filled with the relatives of inmates—women and children and young men—calling out to their loved ones inside, who would then respond, their harsh voices requesting justice or cigarettes, damning faithless accomplices and friends, vowing love or revenge or vindication in several languages. These scenes made Max uneasy, so he confined his walks to the later hours. The communion he sought was with silence, the massive penitentiary hum of captive souls.