by Lily King
“But you would never want to see one accompanied by a German.”
“No.”
To take the toy she had to drop her handful and she walked away while he was still bent over, picking up his bits of paper, his hundred nights or more, off the ground.
When she got home, she locked herself in the bedroom to wait for the strange pain to subside. She sat on the chair by the wardrobe and felt the wetness. She lifted her skirt and pulled down her underclothes. It was not blood. For the first time in her life she reached down to where her mother had told her it was bitter luck to touch. It was swollen and soaked. She kept touching and the pain doubled. She jerked her hand away but something drew it back. Soon there was no pain, only an imperious need to keep touching. She could not stop. She heard a whacking sound, she heard her own breath, she felt her mouth open and remain open. She knew she should stop, but she could not keep her hand from its circular path. She marveled at the wetness, the tenderness, the fierce need of her whole body that she continue. She didn’t know where it would end. Would she spurt like a man? She could feel something approaching from within, something that couldn’t possibly escape. But it had to. It had to. She brought the other hand to her shirt and unbuttoned. She pushed her palm against each breast, then squeezed the nipples with her fingers. Slowly and all at once she felt herself unfold, a million dark petals uncurling on the ocean’s floor.
It wasn’t a week after the Liberation before they came for her. They had come for so many that there was no shock. Her children knew—Monique had suspected it from the very beginning, as soon as Brigitte’s pink toy reappeared. It was only Octave who protested in earnest. He had arrived home three nights earlier, in time to watch his father be shot on his knees, tied to a post in the center of town. He had been accused of delivering a message, one sentence, once, to Alt. They placed the note, unmistakably written in his own hand, between his fingers before they tied him up: Colonel Hemmer still awaiting your word. Octave watched and felt he almost willed the shots himself, three shots, a perfect triangle over his father’s heart, one for each of the sons he betrayed. And now his wife. But, he thought, a woman did not instinctively love her country like a man. Still, he struggled with the intruders, demanded to know the accusations, and received a swift blow to his jaw from the butt end of a Resistance rifle.
It was his daughter Juliette, the silent one, who told him. She fetched a warm cloth for his wound. “Maman was with a German.” Was with, not helped. Not the Germans but a German.
Five weeks later she was led back the eleven miles from Alt. Prodded by men on horseback she walked in bare feet, an oversized pair of black shorts, and a white cloth wrapped several times around to cover her breasts. She was relieved her family was not in the last and largest crowd she had to pass through, the crowd that lined the streets of Plaire. The women touched their hair and their husbands held them tighter as she came close. Just like a man, she heard someone whisper. A boy reached out to touch the tar on her chest. Another sang the Vichy anthem, “Maréchal nous voilà, Notre Sauveur,” until his mother clamped his mouth. She wondered which one in the crowd had seen them, which one had uttered her name and why. She focused on every gluttonous face. They thought she had been beaten senseless. They thought she’d lost her mind like so many others and couldn’t recognize a smile—all of their unconcealed, ecstatic smiles.
Schadenfreude. He’d taught her that word. Joy derived from the pain of another. She hadn’t believed such a word could exist. Had he known how well she would learn it? Had he given her the word for protection? Schadenfreude. She held it up before the greedy eyes and moved past. But his memory was contained in that crowd, not in her. They would remember far longer and more clearly the sharp crests of his cheekbones, the angle of his hat upon his head, his gait up a hill, and the way he held a book, tipping it slightly toward the sun while he remained in the shade. They would remember because fear is the most tenacious of all emotions.
The three girls watched their mother proceed up the hill.
“She looks like a goat,” Juliette said, and though the other two said nothing, they saw she was right.
Monique and Marie-Jo tried first to remove the swastika, but the process was arduous and slow. Despite the strong solution they had mixed up, the tar would not loosen without hard strokes with a rough cloth that tore open the skin. Finally it was Octave who had the endless patience for the task.
That evening they ate dinner at the big table which, for five years, had been used only for writing letters to their father. Juliette broke her vow of silence and spoke to her mother, offering to help make a raspberry torte. Octave came to the table in his best suit, his wedding suit, which was now two sizes too big. Monique filled a tall jar with irises, and Marie-Jo wrapped a bright scarf around her mother’s bare head. Out the window the sun burnished the sky from below the earth, and as the purple dark rushed in, the world glowed eerily.
“The mauve hour,” Marcelle said, laying aside her knife and fork. Her daughters followed her outside, and for the first time she spoke to them of her grandfather and of the thin wafers and smoky tea he served her on his porch. “I’m going to find some of that tea and we’ll have our own mauve hour.” She looked down at their tinged faces, and they tried to look bravely back and not remember their own slain grandfather or their dead uncles or the bruises beneath their mother’s dress. Behind her they could see their father in the window, a silhouette through the lambent glass, lighting his pipe. So this is how it is, he was thinking, to stay behind.
Their last child came to them the following year, and they gave her the name Octave had wanted to give every daughter before her, his favorite name: Nicole, which means victory.
Le Dix
“ROSIE,” NICOLE SAID, FROM THE DOORWAY OF MY ROOM LATE ONE NIGHT. SHE WORE a red hourglass dress and gold necklace that had been hammered flat. “I’m sorry to bother you, but this is not healthy.”
Nicole expected me to have a social life as active as hers. Other au pairs lived for the night, she said. Paris is such an exciting city, especially when you’re young.
“You’re going to make yourself sick here.” She waved her arm at me sitting at my desk with my French textbook in front of me. “You could learn so much more French at a club!”
“But I don’t know anyone to go out with,” I said truthfully.
A few days later I got a call from an American named Leslie who was a friend of the long-legged Leyla. Leslie, it turned out, worked for Lola’s friend Francine. She apologized for not calling sooner, then asked if I’d like to get a drink.
“Tonight?” It was a Wednesday.
“Yeah. After you put the kids down.”
I had no good excuse, and Nicole was beside me, whispering, “Oui, oui!” so at half past nine I headed out to meet her at a bar called Le Dix. In my head, to Leslie whom I did not yet know, I unlodged my English, describing the family, the barge, the raised tub in my bathroom. I looked forward to commiserating about the trials of miscommunication and the humiliations of indentured servitude.
Ahead, the café at the corner was lit up and bustling. A few customers sat outside in winter coats, their hands wrapped around hot drinks. One man sat alone, picking his nose.
Mais c’est dingue ça, I thought as I passed. I liked the word dingue.
The next block was dark and vacant, every shop secured by a metal grille and padlock. The space outside the oisellerie was empty too, though a few feathers were stuck to the pavement. I stepped closer to the shop and listened. There was scratching and chirping and rustling, and after a little while I could make out the low steady cooing of the doves. Lola always touched a dove’s tail for good luck. I wanted to tell Leslie every little detail of this street.
The metro stop was unmarked, a sudden flight of stairs descending beneath the sidewalk. A monthly pass came with the job, and I had used mine twice. I slid the orange ticket through the meter in the turnstile and hurried down the hallway marked Gare d’Austerlitz. Th
ere was only one line at this stop, so the passageways were small and without vendors or musicians, though the walls were plastered with the same enormous advertisements: on the left was a poster for an Italian movie, one large breast held in a man’s hand, and on the right a yogurt ad. They were repeated for the entire walk to the rails. Spoon, lip, smirk, litter, wind, corridor, wrist, nipple, wind, sign, trench coat, slouch. I let English flood inside me as I rounded the corner.
On my side of the tracks there was only one man, pacing, but on the other side the plastic seats were filled with teenagers. They spoke loudly, with great echoes, and their laughter rose and fell and rose again. I listened, uncomprehending, envious. I sat at the cracked edge of a chair and pushed my hands into the shallow pockets of the pea coat I had bought when the weather turned cold. I thought of my sister and how we used to squat in the kitchen after school, our heels pressed hard to our groins to keep from peeing, one of our father’s girlfriends hovering above. There’s no separating you two, one would always say. Another said, Sometimes I don’t know where one of you ends and the other begins. Maybe I’d start laughing again tonight.
Le Dix was not hard to find. I could see, from where the escalator brought me aboveground, a cluster of people on the opposite sidewalk waiting to get in. In the cold, their chatter came out in brief white gusts. Cigarette breaths lasted longer, rising in great bulbs up to the second-story windows, from which women in sleeveless shirts and men with faces shiny with sweat leaned out and sent their own frosted smoke up higher. Behind them, bodies moved beneath colored lights, each to their own rhythm.
I realized I didn’t know what Leslie looked like. I hadn’t thought to ask, and the door was flanked by people clearly waiting for others. But as I crossed the street, scanning each person, there was only one American face: the mouth ajar, the cheeks fleshy and vulnerable, the eyes wide and alert but slightly unfocused. Leslie recognized mine as well.
“Rosie. Hi.”
“Hi.”
A few heads turned toward us. I hadn’t spoken English in public before. Américaines, I heard someone say, and I felt myself being dropped into a small disposable bag.
Leslie seemed oblivious. She spoke loudly. “How’s it going? The others are inside. We don’t have to wait in line. I know the bouncer.”
He was hardly a bouncer, thin as my arm and nodding immediately to Leslie even before she began speaking.
Leslie led me down to the basement, which was so densely packed with tables and chairs and bodies that the waiter in front of them deposited his large tray of drinks on the only table he could reach. The people there were responsible for passing them on.
“This place would be a total fire hazard in the States,” Leslie said, letting the waiter squeeze back by her before we pushed our way into the room toward her friends, who were waving in the far corner. I was nervous they would holler out, or Leslie to them, then scolded myself for being so self-conscious. Nicole, I decided, was to blame. She had wanted me to go out, but she had made me ashamed of not being Parisian.
Tables were moved and chairs were tipped to let us pass. Amid the larger groups in the middle of the room, there was a couple sitting close together and speaking a language that was both familiar and entirely foreign. Ahead of me, Leslie had run into someone she knew, so I lingered beside the couple’s table. Neither was French; she was Italian perhaps, he German or Dutch. Since I’d been in Paris, I’d heard so many different languages. There was a train station nearby and I’d taken to loitering there in the early afternoons, watching the departures, matching languages with destinations. I learned sounds quickly and soon could identify the nationality of most of the travelers. Sometimes, I tried to help people at the ticket counter if I saw them struggling with French. I liked being seen on the platforms without bags, being taken for a permanent resident waiting for a friend. But what I heard now at waist level was not a language I’d ever heard at the station, yet I almost knew what they were saying. Then I did know.
“They’re speaking Latin,” I said.
Leslie nodded without turning around.
Latin must have been the only language they had in common. I wondered what kind of relationship you’d have, speaking only Latin.
Eventually, we reached the other side of the room where the friends were waiting: a small frizzy-haired American and a lean well-dressed European.
“Rosie, this is Beth and Mariska.”
We shook hands. I took a seat on the bench that lined the wall. Hot air from a vent in its base came up around my legs and into my face.
“Bertrand’s here,” Leslie said to Beth. “He’s back with the cat woman.”
“You’re kidding. Where?”
“Outside.”
“Did he see you?” Mariska asked. Her accent was neither American nor British, neither truly foreign nor truly native. Each word seemed like it came from a different English-speaking country.
“He pretended not to.” Leslie smiled weakly, her tough face suddenly collapsed by this confession.
“Look,” Beth said to her gently. “There’s Cédéric.”
“Oh, yeah,” Leslie said, glancing up but not seeing.
I began to roll questions around in my head as I did in French, but before I could ask them the waiter waded halfway into the room and they yelled their orders to him. Leslie ordered sangria for the table, Beth asked for extra fruit in it, and Mariska passed him money for a pack of cigarettes.
“So where do you usually go, Rosie?” Leslie said, deliberately brightening up.
“When you go out, she means,” Beth said.
“I stay mostly in my neighborhood. There are a couple of streets.” I hoped I wouldn’t be asked the names of bars and boîtes. I wasn’t sure I knew what a boîte was.
“Rosie’s mother is the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen,” Leslie said. “She looks like the woman in that movie we saw last week, you know, the love triangle one.”
“All French films are about love triangles,” Mariska said.
“My mother?” As soon as I said this I realized Leslie meant Nicole.
“Francine is petrified of her,” Leslie said. “But that’s because her mother is a jellyfish.” She waved at a group of guys, very French in sports coats hung over one shoulder and gelled hair, the teeth marks from their combs still visible. One of them made a pistol with his finger and fired it several times at her. She pretended he got her, then turned back to the table. “I’ve often wondered how beautiful, I mean truly beautiful women live. Just day to day, you know? I mean, what it would feel like to wake up in the morning and not even have to think—”
“Of course they think about it,” Beth said.
“Okay, think, but not worry.”
“Yes, they do. They have more than we do to worry about. Can you imagine having this drop-dead gorgeous face and then having to watch it shrivel up?”
Mariska lit a cigarette and swung herself sideways in her chair, away from us. It was obvious she thought herself a beautiful woman.
“But what I really can’t imagine,” Leslie said, “is having a new fille come into your house every year and watch your husband pant around her.”
“Leslie, that isn’t happening to us all,” Beth said.
“It’s not even that I like him all that much. He’s just so bleedin’ French.”
“Bleedin’ French. Are you turning into a Brit now?”
“It’s those Irish girls I went out with last night. They’re contagious.”
“Mine isn’t French at all,” I said. The sangria had arrived and, in combination with the warm air beneath me, it was beginning to relax me.
“Who?”
“The father in my family.”
“What is he?”
“He’s French, but he’s not at all.”
They seemed to understand each other when they spoke like this, but now they just looked at me blankly.
“I know what you mean,” Mariska said, turning slightly back. “He’s not confi
ned to cultural characteristics.”
“Oh, c’mon. You can’t escape them,” Leslie said. “But he certainly doesn’t look French.” Leslie turned to Beth. “Have you ever seen him?”
“Never. Only Lola.”
“He’s hilarious-looking,” Leslie said. “Tall for a Frenchman. Kind of like Abraham Lincoln but not half as sexy.”
“Abraham Lincoln is not sexy,” Beth said.
“Abraham Lincoln is very sexy.”
I wished we hadn’t gotten off the subject of Marc, but I knew I’d blush if I mentioned him again.
Mariska got up to go to the bathroom.
Beth asked me, “Do you tutoie your parents?”
“No.”
“And what do they say to you?”
I tried to hear Nicole, then Marc, in my head. “The mother says tu and he says vous. I think. He’s not home all that much.”
“My mother asked me the other day to tutoie her,” Leslie said. “Just when I’m about to do her husband she wants to get all touchy-feely.”
“It’s probably nothing new for her,” Beth said, and I could see she regretted it.
But Leslie wasn’t hurt. “Probably not. The French have a totally different definition of marriage.” She spread her arms way out and said loudly, “I love being just a number.” Many heads turned briefly toward us. “Do you know what happened to me today?” she continued without a pause. “I was walking down Saint-Mich and some old man tells me to tie up my shoelaces. I told him I didn’t feel like it. Can you believe the nerve of these people?”
“The gall of these Gauls,” Beth said.
Mariska was squeezing her way back toward us. It was increasingly difficult to walk across the room, for groups were less separate now as more alcohol was delivered and bodies relaxed and spread, a leg stretched out here, an arm there, like bread dough in the hot hazy room. No man in the room wanted to make it easy for Mariska to pass by him too quickly. She smiled at each one patiently. Feet and elbows had to be removed from her chair in order to sit down.