Echoes
by Susan Weber
They can resonate forever or disappear without a trace. They can be empty or full. They can start out empty and fill up by surprise. They enrich and they forgive us. Today, an epiphany of echoes.
Another breakfast, writing at my window. Now to the metro. The cashier with a huge smile makes my route sound easy. Two Asian women exiting the turnstile break off their conversation to show me how to stamp my pass. I follow a young man who schleps a roller bag through the maze of stairs and passageways of underground Paris. That will be me tomorrow. For now I travel light, scoping out the way to Gare de Lyon. Arriving at the cavernous station, I head for a woman in uniform. She says my train won’t be listed on the board until half an hour before departure. If I need help tomorrow, I’ll find her here.
Mission accomplished, I pick up a fancy tuna sandwich and walk home for lunch. My next destination is Place de la République to see Marianne wave her olive branch. Sister statues Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité join her, wielding flags and torches. The square is mobbed with Algerians, their red, green, and yellow flags voluminous as bedsheets. Reverb overwhelms the speeches blaring from the sound system. Listeners are rapt.
I consult my tattered map. Where to now? Our family stayed in the Latin Quarter years ago. I don’t know the name of our hotel. There was that park. A small arena. Mornings I’d go there and wait for the muse to join me. Here’s a green fleck labeled Arènes de Lutèce. I’ve got nothing but time on a Sunday afternoon.
Progress is slow, yesterday’s marathon a factor. Apartment buildings line the streets as far as I can see. My map says the arena should be here where a family pushes strollers through an archway. I skirt around a soccer game in progress and climb the pitted steps. At the top, park benches grow old under dusty trees. I descend the gravel to a street I’ve seen before, in dream or on vacation, I don’t know. Further down the street I climb steep steps two at a time until my joints rebel. I definitely know this place.
At the top is a small plaque that says Benjamin Fondane 1898-1944 Poet and Philosopher. Deported, assassinated in Auschwitz. Okay. This seems different, but I keep going. Here’s an elementary school. A sign remembers Jewish children taken from the school from 1942-1944. Deported and exterminated in Nazi camps with the Vichy government’s complicity. Did I walk this passageway, notebook in hand, on those hot Paris mornings? Wouldn’t I remember the children? Here’s a place where René Descartes lived from 1644-1648. The density of history is benumbing. Above me, another sign. 74 Rue du Cardinal Lemoine. Ernest Hemingway and his wife lived on the third floor of this building from 1922-1923. The famous American said that in the Paris of their youth they were very poor and very happy. A small square is packed with outdoor seating, every table full. Instincts turn my back on them and here’s the sign. Hôtel des Grandes Ecoles. I step through the wide door to the garden and stand motionless; sixteen years accordion and vanish.
The courtyard is burgeoning with flowers. The woman from the office welcomes me. The window over there, is that the room we stayed in—is this the sunny table where breakfast arrived on stainless trays? Memory and longing overwhelm me. Pushing toward the river, pushing tears away, I feel the four of us walking, talking, bounding into life as one creature. I look for our gyro stand but of course it’s a fruit stand now, or a bakery. Too many echoes; I have to stop.
There’s an empty table outside the small café. I’d like to sit for a minute but I can’t decide. I stand with my map tearing on its folds and try to read the tiny letters. I don’t know where I am.
“Do you need help?” A young café worker in jeans and a soft blouse takes my map as though she knows how close I am to crying. With her pen she circles landmarks, repeating directions until I understand.
“I do have a phone,” I say in that embarrassed way elders explain that we do have a foot in the digital age. “I just like maps.”
“I like paper maps too,” she says. A student of geography, she spends a lot of time admiring them. Some are very old and beautiful. Thanking her, what I appreciate the most is how she told me about herself even after I was done being rescued. I think she might be one of those people who is part of me now, especially when, with a phone in my pocket, I pull out a printed map.
My trek home is normal by Parisian standards, exquisitely beautiful by mine. Pont de la Tournelle offers a view of Notre Dame, silent and broken on the Seine. Crossing the river I Iook down the steep embankment where people gather on a wide stone walk. Young men play electric music. Reverb on the slide guitar compliments the drummer perfectly. At the foot of a building on Rue de Rambuteau I look up to see rainbow flags hung from every railing.
My dinner is half eaten. My pen helps me sort the day. Tears come too. I weep for the children, the poets, the philosophers, killed before their time. For my children who lost their exquisitely beautiful father too soon. For my husband who lost all of us and his electrifying life on earth. I weep for myself; I can be so hard on her for seeking out the muse when she could have been with family. Today, sixteen years after I was last in that arena, I knew my way to my husband and sons. I’ve always found my sure way home.
Nothing stays the same. Even Notre Dame has repaired to healing solitude, however long it takes. Loss echoes in everything we do. To feel it throbbing, often through tears, is our deepest testament to life.
Photo Susan Weber CC BY-SA 4.0