Daniel and I had stopped once or twice to admire the hanging prints that danced along the cords on windy days, reanimated images of extinct scenes, and all the other flapping inventory pinned down by heavy stones, and I’d even spotted a reproduction of something from our Gallery, a faded traveller whose palette had been drained in another climate, and my heart had skipped a beat.
Over dinner we compared notes. I described my day and Daniel told me how after writing all morning he’d set out late in the afternoon to catch the last snatches of daylight and ended up at Stern, the venerable old stationers in the Passage des Panoramas. But when he arrived the shop was not only closed but entirely empty. There was no one inside yet all the lights were on, the chandeliers casting a glow over the elegant furniture — carved chairs with green upholstery and matching tables, vertical oak shelves, bureaus with glass doors, a paradise of polished wooden floors and panelling.
Lit desk lamps shone on to vacant surfaces, chairs gathered round tables at imaginary meetings, you could almost see the echo of a face in the mirror above the marble mantelpiece flanked by caryatids. He imagined a company of shadows going about its work, shelving papers, customising letterheads, guillotining paper in two with a stroke.
Never had such elegance, and so much polished wood, looked so ghostly. In one window was a small plaque that read ‘Stern Medaille d’Or 1867’. In the next window, a large sign with a telephone number. In the third, a thick black curtain like those in funeral parlours. In fact, not only the stationers but much of the passage felt forsaken, and its ancient skylights gave it a tired aquatic glow. That’s the strange thing about Paris, Daniel concluded, you go in search of its vestigial glory, seeking traces here and there, but apart from the occasional current, the past denies you entry, and so it was that despite all the illumination, the doors of Stern remained closed.
I was already in bed with the lights out when I heard the brass handle of the door to my room being pressed down and, seconds later, a push. Light entered from the corridor and Daniel’s silhouette came into view. He whispered my name. I didn’t answer. He said it again, a bit louder, wavering in the doorway. I couldn’t tell whether he could see my eyes were half open or whether he assumed I was asleep. We’d said goodnight only ten minutes before. My arm itched all of a sudden but I resisted lifting a hand to scratch it, remaining as still as I could. It was the way he’d said my name.
He didn’t persist. After a few more seconds at the threshold he withdrew, pulling the door closed ever so gently behind him. I considered calling him back. Of course I had thought many times of what it would be like. And I’d always been drawn to his mouth, the bee-stung lips, often chapped, and the small gap between his front teeth. After all, we were in another city, in other beds, under someone else’s roof, now would be the moment, more than any other, to try something new.
But no, to summon him would be too much of a risk, I reminded myself, and as I listened to his irregular steps retreating down the corridor I slipped further under the covers, processing what had just happened, namely, that my best friend had tried, for whatever reason, to step over the silent and invisible boundary we had drawn long ago, almost as soon as we’d met, the boundary that had held our friendship in such perfect place. Together we had composed our hymn to distance, that magical distance that held the best of life in place. The music of the night, Daniel once quoted, lies not in the stars but in the darkness between them. And yet that evening, perhaps driven by nothing more than an impulse or curiosity, he had attempted to redraw the line, which may have been glorious or disastrous depending on the results, but I didn’t want to risk it, no, and as I lay there trying to sleep in the doomed couple’s bed, positioned at the centre in order to not be fully on his side or hers, I began to worry about a new imbalance, the kind that might arise from a small shift, when a tiny peg is removed from one hole and inserted in another.
‘Coffee or tea?’ he asked when I entered the kitchen at half past ten. I’d lain in bed an extra hour, hoping that perhaps I would find him at his desk by the time I came out for breakfast.
‘Tea’s fine,’ I said, reaching for the pot. He reached for it at the same time. Our hands met. Mine quickly withdrew.
He poured me a mug and turned back to his toast.
‘How’d you sleep?’
‘Fine,’ I lied. ‘And you?’
‘Like a dead man.’
I felt his eyes on me as I opened the jar of honey, so delicious it tasted of forest, and spooned some on to my plate.
‘The bread’s still warm,’ he said, passing me the basket.
‘Thanks.’
‘I was thinking… ’
He paused. I bit into my toast, dreading the end of the sentence, and stared down at the ugly vinyl tablecloth.
‘… that we could go to the menagerie today, at the Jardin des Plantes. Have you ever been there?’
I shook my head.
‘It’s one of the oldest zoos in the world. I’d like to go. I have some poems in mind.’
‘Sure,’ I said, eager for some activity and distraction, and relieved that last night’s visitation had gone unmentioned.
A gravel path led us through a sweep of manicured gardens, past rows of thorny hedges and denuded trees, past the seated statue of Buffon, the great naturalist under whose direction the zoo had flourished. It led us past a large rotunda of vaulted green iron and glass reminiscent of a train station, past countless signs in assorted typefaces, their edges darkened by rust, and, finally, to the menagerie itself.
The first animals to arrive in 1793, our pamphlet said, were saved from the king’s private zoo at Versailles, pillaged during the Terror. Many, including a camel, had already been eaten or destroyed. In 1795 France acquired its first elephant and in 1827 its first giraffe (a present to Charles X from the pasha of Egypt), inspiring a craze that featured everything from songs, poems and vignettes to gingerbread giraffes and ‘coiffure a la girafe’, high chignons held aloft by a wire frame.
The first animals we stopped to admire seemed entirely removed from, in fact almost resistant to, this animated past: a giant tortoise in its domed brown carapace resting alongside a rock of equal size, the two locked in a contest of immobility, and a lone black yak dozing on the dirt ground of its enclosure, its eyes half closed and front legs tucked under, its shabby coat like a worn blanket, L-shaped horns pointed upwards as if waiting for signals from a mountaintop continents away. A pair of majestic eagle owls, or hiboux grand duc, seated on high branches like small, sad kings. Placid dromedaries with faded patches on their knees.
Daniel began to say something but I moved away, desiring silence while I looked, and motioned to him before stepping into the vivarium. Inside, three stock-still Nile crocodiles suspended in shallow water like strips of bark, a snake with an unblinking silver eye like a coin, a leaf-green chameleon on a branch basking in the ersatz glow of a sunlamp. A few paces behind, Daniel had followed me in, and once near he remarked on the effective camouflage of some of the reptiles, almost lost to the eye in their viridescent surroundings, too long a word for too simple a thought, and then fell silent. The stuffy air of the vivarium was only tolerable for a short while. After five minutes we emerged and took a path to our right that led us to the monkey section, where large skittish eyes hung over pairs of little black hands clasping the wire nettings.