These are the first few pages of a novel I’ve been working on since 2008! It is called The Palace of the Seven Stories. Palace is a magical realist work, quite speculative, which is meant for 10-year olds to 100-year olds. It’s gone through at least six completely different drafts; this one, which has taken flight this year, is by far my favorite. I feel the novel is on the right track now. It feels right and it feels alive.
Any creative or scientific work takes an enormously long time; I am grateful that it is something that can’t be rushed. (Except perhaps for the vaccine against COVID-19! Incredible achievement.)
1 Murder & Mystery Along the Seine
Therese sharpened the focus on her telescope. In front of the shimmering Seine, something was happening.
A tall, black-haired woman was talking to a man who liked like a monk.
Therese didn’t know who the statuesque woman was, but she’d often seen her walk the quais, here on the Ile St. Louis. Elegant, graceful, and always wearing the prettiest clothes—even her masks seemed to be spun of silver and gold-- she had to be a model.
The model was talking to a monk earnestly. Not a Christian monk but a monk from Asia. Buddhist, maybe?
Therese turned to call her father—as a professor of comparative religions, he would know the religious background of the monk—when all of a sudden, she heard the softest of splashes.
It was like the Seine sneezed.
She turned back around, peered through the telescope---
and saw the monk’s robes floating in the water.
At that moment the elegant woman turned her back to the Seine and looked right into Therese’s telescope.
Therese froze.
The woman was smiling.
“Papa! Maman!” she screamed. “I just witnessed a murder!”
Unsurprisingly, neither parent raced into her room. Who could blame them? She’d called them at night several times before because she’d sworn she’d heard the ghost of Julius Caesar and his legions tramping through the streets, claiming for Rome the islands in the Seine whose Celtic inhabitants called Parisii.
And then well…she was almost too embarrassed to call her parents for this (but she did anyway): she heard the despondency of the primeval forests whose bark framed the roof of Notre-Dame the night it burned.
Wood weeped as it peeled off the roof. She could feel leaves caress her cheek in sadness. On the night of the blaze the arboreal ancestors of the ancient church’s roof told her: All our beautiful bark gone because of human carelessness!
Oh the look her parents gave her when she exclaimed, “The trees are talking to me! The trees are talking to me!” Her father looked at her, sighed, and said, “Well then talk back. It is rude to ignore trees.” Her mother said, “Tell them hello from me.” And they left her room.
Therese knew she heard the trees speak to her. Just as she knew what she saw happen along the Seine. A crime had been committed. That elegant lady pushed the monk into the Seine!
And the monk hadn’t surfaced. She’d been watching the scene intently.
It was a perfect day to kill someone since most people were huddled in their flats because of the virus—that vile invisible thing which hovered in the hinterland between the color and laughter of life and the traumatic unreachable truths of death. (Oh, how Therese adored the word hinterland. And traumatic.)
Should she call the police? “Maman, Papa, should I call the police?”, she called.
No answer.
She ran into the living room.
No one.
She ran into the kitchen.
No one.
She ran down a hallway.
Ah. Her mother’s study door closed.
Her father’s study door closed.
She’d show them.
There was only one thing to do.
She’d call the police.
She ran to her mom’s phone on the black Ikea table in the living room and dialed 112.
A professional voice answered, “Oui, Bonjour.”
“I just saw a murder,” Therese cried. “A lady pushed a monk into the Seine!”
The voice didn’t sound surprised at all. The voice had heard it all. “Where in the Seine?”
“On Ile St. Louis. Quai d’Orleans. I saw the whole thing.”
“You saw a lady push a monk into the Seine?” Now the voice held a tremor of disbelief.
“Yes!”
“Where do you live?”
“Rue le Regrattier.”
“Did you really see a lady push a monk into the Seine? Did she pick him up and throw him into the river? Or did she kick him into the water?”
Here, Therese paused. Actually she hadn’t seen that at all.
She sighed. It was still hard for her to tell a lie. She kept hoping she’d get better as she got older—since grown-up people lied all the time and it seemed a very useful skill to have (indeed the better you lied the higher you’d rise in the world, she observed)—but it was difficult. She pictured her father’s very displeased face every time she thought of uttering an untruth.
“No I did not see her pick him up and throw him into the river.”
“Then why are you wasting my time? And how do you know he was a monk?”
“Because… because I saw his robes floating inside the water. And then the lady looked at me.” Therese paused, flustered. She knew the operator didn’t believe her. She’d probably called all her operator coworkers over to listen in on this crazy girl’s tale. “The lady just looked…suspicious. And the monk never resurfaced…”
“Why are you outside at all? You are on lockdown. You should stay in your flat.”
Sheesh. Now she was getting in trouble. She thought of explaining she was on her balcony, when the lady on the other side of the line said quickly. “The monk has gone for a swim. He has used his sacred status to flout the quarantine order. Even the holy ones need to let it all go sometimes. Just hope he doesn’t get sick.” And she hung up.
Hmmph. Adults were positively useless.
There was only one thing to do.
She’d quietly creep to the door of her family’s flat, silently tiptoe down the stairs (she wouldn’t take the lift because it was hundreds of years old and they would hear it), walk out the door,
and nab the killer herself.
*
Whew. No one had heard her.
She blinked quickly on the street; she was very aware that she should not be outside at all during this lockdown.
But then this was murder. She’d explain it to the police if they asked her questions.
Anyway, she was wearing her mask. She checked her purse. Yes, the red telescope was tucked neatly inside.
That was one thing for which she was grateful to her parents. The telescope was marvelous. They had given it to her for her 12th birthday, almost a month ago.
Her father declared affectionately, while handing it to his daughter, “We know you love thinking about catastrophes that can happen to the earth anytime. Asteroids hitting us, a rogue comet, what’s the latest you mentioned?”
“Vacuum decay,” Therese promptly answered, “if our universe is in a false vacuum and unstable it’s possible that we can be pushed into a true vacuum state that would spell disaster and extinction for us all.”
Her father stared at her, as if he were thinking, Is this really my daughter?, shook his head, and sighed. “Exactly. All these things start with looking at the sky. So your mother and I decided to give you a telescope.”
Her mother added, “We know you can’t see much of the sky from Paris. But you can start small. And besides, the telescope is actually an antique.”
“Really?” Therese said, looking at the cylinder in her hands. “It doesn’t look antique.”
“It’s been repainted,” answered her father, “but it’s old. Seventeenth century maybe? I don’t know you have to ask your uncle Ibrahim. It’s his gift actually.”
“That was nice of him!” exclaimed Therese. “Is he coming here again?” Uncle Ibrahim was awfully nice; he was the director of antiquities in the museum in Kabul, Afghanistan. Naturally he had a hair-raising job, taking care of treasures in a theatre of almost incessant war.
“He was supposed to be here now,” answered her mother, sighing, “but the virus changed his plans.”
“The vile entity living in the hinterland between life and death, its existence traumatic to mankind all over the world!” exclaimed Therese, excitedly. “I wish I could kill the virus!” she suddenly blurted out.
She was so caught up in her own dreams of banishing this invisible beast that she didn’t notice her parents look at each other and shake their heads.
Her father replied, “We too wish you could kill the virus. But finish your math first.”
Therese then took the telescope outside and looked at the sky, even though all she saw were gray puffs of water vapor in the shape of misshapen croissants.
She persisted however in using her telescope. Although, well, ….
she was embarrassed to tell this to her parents. But she didn’t stare at the sky as much as her parents wanted her to. She tried, but it wasn’t that interesting, as ironically the skies in the City of Light were rather dull; they were too obscured by the glitter of Paris for her to see the brightness of the zillion stars overhead. And somehow once she focused it on the sky she didn’t see things as clearly. It was odd, as if the telescope wasn’t meant for the sky.
So, one day, she turned her telescope on the street. And never looked back.
She peered into a rich lady’s handbag. And at the mole on her cheek she tried so hard to hide.
Humans are always hiding things, she thought.
She examined the neighborhood baker’s expression as he got on his moto when he left work in the evening. Was the boulanger tired? Angry? Excited at seeing his wife—well, actually Therese figured out it was his girlfriend when she realized the absence of a wedding ring on the girlfriend’s long ring finger. She thought the girlfriend was either depressed all the time or ‘goth’ because she literally always dressed in black. But they seemed to be very close, as they always met every morning before the boulanger got to work—until, one day, to Therese’s great surprise, she saw a ginger-haired woman spend time with the boulanger in the evenings. Therese was incensed! The boulanger was two timing the woman in black! She was determined to do something about that….
Oh the stories on the street underneath her were so fascinating! Like the florist who she suddenly realized one day—by examining the structure of her hands---was not the woman she knew as Madame Allen the Englishwoman but was in truth Monsieur Allen who had become a madame.
People were captivating. Each person she dissected in detail from above was a storybook in himself. In herself. In theirself. Like the old retired policeman, Monsieur Bonhomme, who’d walk the streets of the island every evening. Monsieur Bonhomme had a big head which resembled a box and hair the color of squid ink. He knew every resident on the island and everyone knew him. He was officially retired but didn’t know what to do with the time on his hands; and since he’d always loved patrolling the streets as a young cop, he just started doing it on his own in his golden years.
One day, Therese spotted him gazing into the Seine, and asked him why he enjoyed patrolling the streets so much. He turned to her, pulled the brim of his cap down, and smiled. Therese thought, His wrinkled face looks like wrinkled tissue paper you get with a gift. And, he replied, “Thanks to the good God, I have a heart, hearing, and sight, of a young man. I like to walk, watch, and watch out for people. And when I walk, I can’t help but dream. And dreaming is the best state of being in the world.”
Therese liked him but was very suspicious of his squid-ink hair. There is no way that is his natural hair color, she surmised. And one day, watching him through her trusty telescope, she did indeed spot some gray roots. Hah! Not only that, she also spotted a clandestine hearing aid. Monsieur Bonhomme’s hearing was not that of a young man’s but of a new hearing aid! Therese was quite proud of herself—she’d figured out a policeman’s secrets. Soon she’d have to look for his secret contact lenses. There was no telling where she could go from here.
And now, Therese found herself in a murder mystery. She was so excited she could hardly breathe.
A real murder mystery! And if she figured out the killer—although she didn’t know how she’d apprehend her---her ingenuity and heroism would go viral on Tik-Tok, Twitter, and every social media site around. She’d be famous!
But maybe before she found the killer, she should find the body? But what if the body was already floating down the Seine, on its way to Le Havre by now?
Why wasn’t Monsieur Bonhomme out when the murder happened? Well, Therese supposed, it was because of the vicious infectious virus. He was old, after all. And the crime did happen during the daytime—Monsieur Bonhomme liked to sleep in, and patrolled only in the evenings.
Well, no use over-thinking this. It was time to take action. Therese took off. She nearly ran down Le Rue Regrattier—she wore her sneakers so she would make the least noise possible-- to the quais of the Seine. When she reached the quai she turned right, left, and looked in front of her.
No one.
Suddenly she turned around—
a meow. A black and white little feline creature mewed in a doorway.
Princesse. The florist’s cat. Bonjour Princesse, she whispered before turning back around.
She decided to walk along the scene-of-the-crime Seine.
The river flowed quietly as usual, today in a mood of shifting azure and sea-green. Its waters couldn’t be locked down or quarantined—well, its flow could be contained by dams, she supposed—but it couldn’t simply sit still.
A river had to move. Therese liked that, because she liked to move. Life was too exciting to be stuck in one place.
On an impulse she took out her telescope.
She aimed it at the Seine first, watching waves of hydrogen and oxygen molecules dance in a perfectly unchoreographed ballet. Therese took ballet classes, and liked it. She was good too, and knew it.
Hmmm…no floating body…
She quickly turned around. She wanted to make sure no one was watching her.
The coast was clear.
She turned back to the river.
What would a dead body look like? Well he would have wrinkled skin she supposed…
Suddenly she turned around, her telescope in her hands.
She didn’t know why she turned around. She just felt something approaching her…
she looked through her telescope, pointing it all around the island…
There---whipping around the corner of Rue St. Louis en l’ile—
a dog was racing towards her!
A dirty white and brown terrier was heading straight to her—
but as it got closer and closer she seemed to see many dogs through the lens, many different kinds of dogs…a poodle bedecked with a pink ribbon, a graceful greyhound, a mud-colored street mutt..
I think this telescope is also a kaleidoscope, she thought.
She put her telescope in her purse. And just in time too, for the little canine leapt into her arms.
How was she holding a strange dog in her hands?
“Bonjour,” she said, in between licks of a foreign dog-tongue, “Who are you? Why are you here?”
Then, barely, just barely, she heard someone call, “Jacques! Jacques!” Pause. “Where are you mon petit Jacques?”
Therese looked up, and turned back to the dog. “Are you Jacques?”
The dog seemed to nod, and licked her face with even greater intensity.
“We have to get you back to your owner,” she said in between the terrier’s unrestrained displays of affection.
She started walking quickly towards the voice calling for Jacques. It was a woman’s voice.
Therese stopped, stiffened.
What if it was the murderer’s voice?
Well, she told herself, it would be a great way to catch her.
She summoned courage within herself, and kept walking—
and at that moment a white-haired woman turned the corner. She peered through her glasses.
“Is that you mon petit Jacques?” she asked.
Jacques took one last lick of Therese’s cheek, jumped to the ground, and then raced towards the old lady.
After the requisite kisses celebrating the reunion of dog and its owner—no social distancing there —the old lady said in absolute joy, “Merci my dear girl. Thank you for catching him. I think Jacques would have drowned in the Seine if you hadn’t caught him. He was racing to the river like the mad little wolf he is.”
“Drown in the Seine?” asked Therese, curiously, “Madame he jumped into my arms.”
The old lady looked at her, intrigued. “Really?” she said, frowning in puzzlement, “Jacques normally doesn’t do that. He’s very picky about whom he keeps company with, much less licks.” She shrugged her shoulders, in a profoundly Gallic way which clearly transmitted that she did not understand one thing in this universe.
“Well anyway,” she continued, “Thank you. What is your name?”
“Therese,” answered Therese.
“Stay well my dear,” commented the old lady, “This virus may be more dangerous for me but it attacks young people too. I am sure Jacques does not have the virus, I clean him every day.”
You clean him every day, thought Therese, but he looks so dirty!
The old lady thanked her once more—without offering her a bouquet of kisses, as she normally would have done—and left.
Therese stared after her, thinking.
She didn’t know of exactly what, but she was thinking.
How strange to have a strange dog jump in her arms on the same day she saw a murder?
What did it all mean?
*
Therese walked up and down along the Seine for a while, lost in contemplation.
Obviously her parents hadn’t even noticed she was gone because no one had called her.
Her mother was deep in her latest commission—illustrating an Indian myth for a new children’s book her editor was working on. She had to turn in her first draft tomorrow. And her father was working on some academic article no one but a professor could understand.
The universe was in a topsy-turvy mood today. From a bizarre death of an Asian monk to the unexpected affection of an unknown dog.
Something was up. Therese just knew it.
As she walked up and down the quais, her right foot hit the edge of a tarp that was covering one of the bookstalls along the Seine.
She stopped, to squiggle her toes. Good. Nothing broken. But you never could tell with toes. A little toe could go rogue and break away from its family if you just knocked it against a door.
It was all in how you slammed your toe.
Satisfied that her phalanges felt well, she began walking once more—
when she noticed a blue-covered book had fallen out from under the tarp.
She picked it up—and pages fell out. It was a very old book.
She stuffed the pages back in, and looked at the cover:
Stories. By Charles Perrault.
These were fairy-tales! Her favorites were in here. Le Petit Chaperon Rouge. Little Red Riding Hood. (That was the one where she learned the truth about men. Should she tell the boulanger’s girlfriend to stay away from him? I should drop a note of warning into the girlfriend’s purse, she thought.)
Cendrillon. Cinderella
La Belle au Bois Dormant. Sleeping Beauty.
Therese couldn’t help herself. She opened the book to Sleeping Beauty. It was one of her favorite stories in the world. To think a princess and all her servants could be asleep for a hundred years, in a beautiful castle, protected by a forest….
It’s strange, she thought, it’s like the whole world is Sleeping Beauty’s kingdom now. We’re all stuck inside…I wonder if some angry fairy has cursed the whole world?
She started reading the first lines,
and then the pages fell out of the book again.
She started to put them back in—
when a letter fell out. It was on old, crinkled, paper—the age of the paper reminded her of Monsieur Bonhomme’s face and the white hair of the old lady who lost her dog.
She flattened the paper, attempting to read its contents. It was difficult, because the cobalt-blue ink was smudged in several places and the letter was written in Old French.
Therese started reading slowly and realized old English words were mixed in with the French. She knew some English, and so she started trying to make sense of the letter.
“I can hardly believe I am writing you. Your fame has spread so far. You have seen into the heart of the universe. Do you think there might be a possibility of working with me on my idea?”
The words below were scratched and faded. Therese just made out the words ‘humanity, particle, beautify.’
Then, a farewell:
Thank you most graciously for the honor of your time,
M. Perrault.
Monsier Perrault. The author of the book of fairy-tales. But who was he writing to?
Therese was stumped. She had to take the book home. She could ask her parents for their help…
She looked around for a vendor, but couldn’t spot anyone.
She felt bad for stealing it, but she wasn’t stealing it, not really.
Her parents would pay the vendor as soon as he reappeared. She’d just had her birthday; it would be an extra gift.
And the book had fallen out just as she passed the bookstand. She hadn’t even been thinking about books.
Then this little volume fell into her life.
The Universe had spoken.
Her parents would definitely pay the bookseller as soon as the lockdown was over.
After all, how much could an old book of fairy-tales cost?
*
As Therese walked back to her family’s flat, she kept checking behind her to make sure no one—especially the murderer---was following her.
Indeed no one was following her, except for Princesse who trailed her for a while before she got bored and scampered down to the quai.
However, it is most definitely a tragedy that human beings can’t see completely behind their skulls; if they possessed that skill they could avoid so many unnecessary catastrophes.
For while no person followed Therese, a delivery-van did.
There was nothing strange at all about a delivery van in Paris during the lockdown. People needed groceries, books, routers and hard drives. Their drivers were essential.
The essential driver of this particular van couldn’t believe his luck that this girl was wandering alone along the Seine. He thought he’d have to look for her flat, find it, figure out a way to enter,
but voila. The universe had provided her to him with hardly any effort of his own.