9
Rating: T
Summary:
Sequel to "Nativity". Driven by an unknown impulse, Larry flew to Paris to find Ahkmenrah and settle the unsettled.
Disclaimer: Night at the Museum and its characters are courtesy of their rightful owners.
Affinity
…il voulut chercher sans doute l'oubli,
que seul il procure parfois,
en engourdissant la mémoire lorsqu'il ne l'anéantit pas.
—Franz Liszt, Chopin
[…without a doubt he desired to seek forgetfulness,
which at times he alone procures,
while numbing the memory while it does not annihilate it.]
Larry sipped on his first Parisian coffee, ate his first Parisian sandwich at a modest café by Quai Voltaire. Everything seemed to him unreal, like the feeling one gets upon gazing at a faded photograph extracted from the bottom of a drawer.
"Voulez-vous du vin, Monsieur?" asked the beautiful waitress.
In a flurry of real-life images which began intensifying, of terrifying speed, the faded picture disappeared altogether and her voice reached him crisply, a real human voice of a real world, addressed to a real person.
"Would you like some wine?" she asked again. He remarked that her accent was charming, a mixture of many, of a foreign, far-off land… a subtle pain punched the inner side of his chest.
"Laissez-le tranquil, Amélie, mon dieu!" the patron placed two espresso cups under the machine, cleaned them with a waft of steam before filled them.
"Yes, please," Larry replied nervously. The waitress nodded with a kind, flirtatious smile.
"Excuse me," he added very soon after, "you have a beautiful accent."
"Very flattering. Merci."
"I knew someone…" but he stopped right away. What the hell, he thought, must be jetlag. He forced a smile, she walked away, then returned a short while later with a glass of Saint-Émilion.
"That's on me," she said. And he had always been told that Parisians are never nice to Americans… "guessing from the way you talk, that someone must be a special person."
"Laissez-le tranquil, Amélie!" the patron placed two plates of sandwich on the counter table, gestured a waiter to fetch them, "il n'est même pas beau, celui-là!"
"Mais si!" she retorted. "How is that person like?"
"Very elegant," Larry said with a smile. His gaze was forlorn, lost as he observed the street outside. Who the hell runs in T-shirt in such weather…? A woman wrapped in furs walked her dog in her heels. The sky was somber, heavy. A large group of Chinese tourists filled the sidewalks, taking endless pictures of whatever object they passed.
"Enjoy your wine, then."
"Reads Latin…," he continued, as if swimming out of a dream, "plays the piano very well, too… Thalberg."
"Oh, Thalberg…! They're performing him tonight at Théâtre des Champs-Elysées."
"Excuse me, where?"
"Théâtre des Champs-Elysées," she repeated slowly, smiled. "A short walk from here, about twenty minutes. You go all the way along the Seine (she gestured in the direction of Musée d'Orsay) until you reach Pont de l'Alma—you can see the Eiffel clearly from there—keep walking until you can turn right to Avenue Montaigne," she said everything with some kind of faith that Larry could actually grasp her completely, "or walk to the Louvre and take the metro 1… no, better the metro 7 to La Courneuve, always from Louvre, go down at Chaussée d'Antin, take the 9 until Alma-Marceau…"
Larry jotted down everything feverishly. Here and there, she corrected and added some missing names.
"I'd walk if I were you," she added, "I hate recommending Parisian metro to tourists—don't laugh. I mean it. The Théâtre is in front of Hôtel Montaigne: you'll find it very easily."
"Thank you."
"What's your special person doing in Paris?"
"A PhD student at the Sorbonne."
"Oh, dis-donc!"
It was as if Larry could already see fragments of scenes in his head of him greeting Ahkmenrah, just like the good old days… What good old days? He's probably forgotten about me, what the hell… He finished his coffee. I don't give a damn. The thoughts replayed infinitely in his head. Must be the jetlag. He took a sip of the wine. Never in his life had he tasted something that good. Why the hell am I in Paris in the first place?...
He thought of everything that had happened so fast. The last incomplete assignment. The dropout. The boring job at the post office, everything was the same every day, until one day… he had decided that he could not live like that anymore: an automate, a robot… He went home and listened to Thalberg. That, and some Bob Dylan. Absentmindedly, he had typed a name, as if it was dictated to him by some unknown force… "Memories and Ruminations in Thalberg's Les Soirées de Pausilippe" signed by a familiar name…
It was raining hard. The metro 7 had "slight technical problems" that he had to descend at the Opéra and spent some ten minutes dodging the downpour trying to reach the Chausée d'Antin subway. Twenty minutes to the concert, under a sudden panic attack, he almost took the wrong direction of metro 9. He arrived five minutes before eight, to the sound of the bell signaling the beginning of the concert, directly ran towards the cashier.
The elegant young man behind the counter threw him a depreciative look. Larry realized that he had on a soaked cheap old coat and a crumpled shirt.
"It's really Thalberg tonight, right?" he asked anyway, panting like an old dog.
The elegant young man's expression opened up all of a sudden.
"Yes," he said, beaming, "the Grande Sonate and the piano concerto (followed by two Russian names unknown to him, apparently of a famous pianist and a conductor who was recently bestowed the Légion d'Honneur)."
Was he here earlier? Did the man tell him the two unknown names?... Larry took a crumpled twenty-euro bill from his wallet and handed it to the man. A strange feeling of detachment washed over him, and for a while he felt as if he was adrift, a stranger in a world of strangers.
The concert hall. Larry was sat at the highest balcony, from where the musicians looked like small dots. The seats around him were empty. He placed the soaked coat on the seat next to him. Many images, voices returned to him as concrete blocks when the familiar passage of the piano concerto hit his ears. Even after years, he could only describe it as "beautiful"… But he soon snapped to reality and judged himself as "ridiculous" for holding on to the memories. If anything, it was forgetfulness, seen otherwise, but forgetfulness… like everything that had ceased all of a sudden, the words, the exchange of smiles, and then… forgetfulness. He thought of these and the music altogether, until both melted into one another.
Outside, among the crowds leaving, Larry finally noticed a familiar figure. The slim figure looked almost sickly with slightly slouched shoulders, and the all-black clothing had cast on it an unlikely sadness, but it was indeed him. There was something ridiculous about him trying to light his cigarette using an expensive-looking lighter that itself refused to ignite. Larry watched him intently while thinking of the new student in front of the class, elegant and distant, although now it was the latter more than the former. And the new student had pronounced his name, in a strange accent of a far-off land…
"Ahkmenrah Hasani," Larry said it, his voice overlapping with the one in his memory.
Ahkmenrah shoved the cigarette and the lighter to his coat pocket, turned to Larry and smile. Larry could tell from the look in Ahkmenrah's eyes that he was gazing at a faded photograph extracted from the bottom of a drawer.
"Daley?"
He extended a hand in a refined gesture, which Larry shook hesitantly.
"Here, out of all places! The world is such a small place indeed."
Now that Ahkmenrah talked, Larry remarked that even his voice had taken the same sadness, as his figure.
"How long has it been?" Ahkmenrah asked in an unusually joyful tone, but all Larry could see was his sunken eyes. They were like that back then, too, but now they were more human, matured, the look of someone who had finally understood life.
"Too long…" Larry blurted. "I mean, years pass by, like that, you know. It's scary," he added shortly after having realized that he sounded somehow melancholy.
Ahkmenrah: "Yes… too fast."
A BMW parked nearby. Ahkmenrah excused himself for a while then ran to it. Larry watched the short exchange between him and the driver, who nodded before finally drove off.
Larry: "I mean… you must have things to do, a lot of things. I don't want to…"
"It's Friday," Ahkmenrah replied with a smile. He had tried making it sound as light as possible, but it struck himself and Larry as awkward, fake. Then, to neutralize the situation: "So, what brings you here, Larry?"
"Thalberg… I guess."
A short pause.
"Can't say that I was the one who influenced you…"
"You can say that."
"You have listened to his other works, I imagine?"
"Les… sorry, I can't bring myself to pronounce it."
"Les soirées de Pausilippe," Ahkmenrah beamed, "great choice. My father used to play it every morning… At first I thought there was nothing special to it, but I got something new each time I listened to it."
"Honestly, I can't say much about it. I just listen to it after work, you know, to wind out… I have no exact idea, nothing, those are just… beautiful. Sorry to disappoint you."
"Not at all… If anything, you have understood Thalberg better than you think you do."
Now that they had been talking for some time, Larry realized that there was something off about Ahkmenrah, something had changed, as if a lever inside him had been pulled, such that the real person behind the Ahkmenrah who was talking to him had since long disappeared. His severe elegance struck Larry as painful and clung to his skin like summer air.
"Walk with me, Larry."
They walked along the Seine. The rain had cleared the sky such that there was no cloud left on it. The pale moon in the distant cast on the dark blue sky a greenish shade, but its light meant nothing to the Eiffel towering in the distance, its light reflected on the Seine among many others.
For some time, Larry thought of a thing to say, to ask… but somehow the words would not pass his mouth because he had judged them as ridiculous or useless. Ahkmenrah, as of him, was mostly silent. From time to time, he would ask questions asked to syncopate the silence, to circumnavigate the personal points, to carefully avoid them.
"Do you like it here?"
A pause.
"I'm getting used to…" Ahkmenrah's voice was low, almost lost under the humming of the cars passing by.
"No, not that," Larry retorted. He realized that everything about this meeting with Ahkmenrah had tired him: the distance, the fake cordiality, the confusions… He decided that to finish with the bullshit and get to the point, "the question is 'do you like it here or not?', do you like it here better than Sofia or Cairo or New York or God knows whatever else is on the list."
Ahkmenrah frowned. Of course, the reaction was to him disagreeable, although he was, strangely, somehow, pleased.
"Yes, Larry," he replied calmly, "of all cities, I pass the longest time in Paris. We come back here often, too, because my father is, after all, a research director at the Sorbonne. Everything is sort of starting and finishing here, so yes, I can say that I like it here enough to consider such fact."
Larry, after some time, with a smile: "You're always like that, aren't you?
"Always talking around things so that they won't get to you, always avoiding everything too close to you. But sometimes, you know, sometimes… people do mean you. When I asked if you like it here, it's about you, when I said you played the piano very well, it's about you. Simple as that."
There was a long pause. That's it, Larry thought, it's over. And he could not even justify his anger, disgust, impulse. He was like a child not given his toy.
"What do you expect me to say, Lawrence? …There is never a singular affirmation on everything. Like when you ask if I like it here, saying a simple 'yes' would be useless, don't you think, because I know it's not exactly that way and not exactly the contrary either. What I feel about Paris goes beyond like or dislike. Now, had I said something like that, you would probably think that I'm being dishonest as well… Nativity, belonging, those are difficult subjects…
"The very notion of homeland, in the noble and sentimental sense of that word, is linked to the relative briefness of our life that procures us too little time so as to we could attach ourselves to another country, to other countries, to other languages, in the words of Milan Kundera."
Larry fell silent. In the past, he would dismiss such statement as pretentious. He would even laugh at the person saying it.
"But have you ever attached yourself to something? If not a country, a person, you know, something, even a memory. Something. Like you see something and think: hey, this makes me feel so belong, this defines me, something like that… The music, for example, you seem to like it very much… well, of course, it goes beyond 'like', I'm just simplifying, but you get what I'm trying to say—"
Ahkmenrah chuckled.
"We can never attach ourselves to music (unless at the price of giving ourselves away, of course). It's vowed to forgetfulness, to silence (pause)… but now that you ask it, yes, I have felt it…"
"Well, since you must think of homeland as 'mission impossible' (both chuckled) I assume that it must be a person," Larry paused. He swallowed nervously. Why the hell was he asking all these, what would it bring him…? But it was too late.
They stopped walking. Facing them was Pont Alexandre -III and the daunting façade of Invalides. Ahkmenrah stopped walking, leaned his back against the railing, gazed at the sky, then looked back to Larry, who was still astounded by the view.
Ahkmenrah : "Impressive, isn't it? When I was younger, I wanted to write a symphony of Paris because of this."
"Well, you can very well do it," Larry replied without taking his gaze off Invalides, but forced it back to Ahkmenrah, "I read your article, about the memories of Thalberg… I'm sure there's a musician in there somewhere," he was amazed at how serious he actually sounded, "it must lack credibility said by someone like me, but what the hell… you can always write it."
"I'm surprised that someone actually read it… I mean outside the researchers' circle," Ahkmenrah's face lit up in an honest expression of joy. "I was even surprised when they contacted me to publish it. To be honest it was nothing special: something one would write in a café and that's all about it."
"You won't trust me… but it was nicely written…, at least for me it was that good. There's even some kind of modesty in there, which must be uncommon for… (Larry paused, wondered if he should actually say it) people of your sort."
He then looked back at the Invalides, the white-and-gold sculptures of the bridge, the elaborate street lights, the lights reflected on the Seine. They had always been different. He thought of Metropolis again, of the two separate worlds, of some people born to be under the light while some others… not so much.
"You're right, Larry… the… affinity…I felt was for a person…"
Larry turned to look at Ahkmenrah, wondering whether what he had just heard was real, or some kind of illusion created by overlapping sounds of cars passing by, of countless other voices which to him, at the moment, struck him as equally equivocal.
"It was too brief… but it was an affinity nonetheless, almost affection, but I'm not in the right to talk about it, I had no clear idea of it myself… now that I think of it, it was quite strange, I couldn't quite get a right term for it, something that quite depicts it… something… exact."
"It doesn't exist."
"What?"
"The exact term, the exact anything, the exactitude in particular… it doesn't exist."
"You're right, it doesn't," Ahkmenrah smiled, "precision does, but not exactitude—he discreetly looked at his watch—I have to go back now. My flight to Warsaw's tomorrow morning at nine-fifteen."
"So that's it, I guess."
"It was a pleasure meeting you," Ahkmenrah snapped back to his usual cordiality, which now struck himself like an irony, "and to know that someone actually shares an appreciation for Thalberg…" he added as to lessen it. While most of them reduced him to a simple Rossinist crushed under Liszt's feet…
"The affinity (Larry said it as a citation) you felt back then… how did you know that it was actually something of that sort?"
"I still don't understand why it matters so much for you."
"Because somehow I was sure that the person was me," Larry snapped. His jaws tensed up, his eyes fiery, but he quickly calmed himself, "look, man… I felt strange, too, you know… I mean, it was… you know, alright… I'll try again."
Ahkmenrah smiled.
"I understand."
"You do? (Larry frowned) I mean with Amelia, Erica, it was something like that, an affinity, but simpler. But with you, it was more… complicated. Hell, I even had no idea of such thing, when it started. Maybe there wasn't any beginning to start with… it was just sort of… there. All of a sudden, everything which was familiar to me started to unravel. Same places, same people, same everything, but I felt as if I was some kind of paper man planted there randomly. Then your music, your books, hell, even your voice felt familiar to me, and for a moment I even actually thought that we could be friends, that we were not that different, you know… but what the hell. I mean, look at you, you and your kind, and me. An educated and a dropout… if anything, I must be a f… idiot. Plus, you just disappeared (he clacked his fingers) and I knew that maybe, maybe, nothing was real to start with, and truth is—what?" Larry snapped when realizing that Ahkmenrah was watching him intently all the time he was talking.
"I was thinking: if you take your story and place it entirely on my plate, you would pretty much have the same dish."
"Come on now, you can't be serious!"
Ahkmenrah leaned closer towards Larry, looked at him right in the eyes. He remembered the arrogant jock from back then, the one who was laughing at him from the back of the classroom, the one who snapped a naïve "it was beautiful", while the others were always busy looking for too much adjectives, were always dissecting words… without knowing that, most of the time, the right word was never far. And he had the same weakness, same stupidity…
"Would you mind?" he asked Larry. The latter understood right away, although he did not respond.
The shorter man reached out for Larry's chin then leaned over to kiss him on the lips. Larry's lips on his were cold, rough, thin… At the contact, he slowly became aware to many senses, sounds, which he thought he had long forgotten. Then, in his musician's ear, each one of those sounds gradually came together, as if under a baton of an imaginary conductor, forming the main theme of his symphony.
author's note
First of all, thank you to my kind reviewers, especially TimberTinderBox: just in case you have noticed, the outline of this sequel comes from you!
Now, my personal notes. I wanted to write a full-blown lemon (trust me, I really did! I even keep the draft in my notebook!) but after some considerations, I finally decided that Larry and Ahkmenrah's relationship is better interpreted and appreciated in a "noble", if not metaphysical, manner. There is a reason why they name the shipping "Soulmates", it is because the link is of a higher nature, isn't it, logically speaking? Hence the resolution.
Of course, if necessary, I will post the lemon scene as an appendix, because I can't see it attached to the story. I'm not saying that their relationship can never be erotic, of course it can, and honestly I love reading it as such, but writing is as such is an altogether different stories.
The last concluding kiss is seen as an epiphany, as the reminiscence was in the previous chapter: the two chapters are then linked by that motif, the epiphany.
Lastly, this fanfiction is a homage to Némirovsky's "La Symphonie de Paris", my all-time favorite short-story.
Thank you so much for reading, reviewing, faving.
Des bisous xx
F.V.
