by Sarah Smith
“I must go and meet Katzmann,” Reisden said. Talk to her, he mouthed to Gilbert. From the other side of the square he looked back at them, his wife and his uncle talking, heads together, now he had gone. He fought a sense that he should go back, that nothing he could do was as important as being with them today.
“André’s here in town,” he told Katzmann at the station. “With Cyron. If I know my country towns, they’re at a lunch hosted by the mayor. It’ll be out by two-thirty; there is a puppet theatre in the street fair; conclusion, by three you should find André backstage at the puppet theatre, re-carving the puppets into figures of horror.”
“Tell me everything that happened,” Katzmann said.
Reisden took a deep breath. “No,” he said. “I don’t want you prejudiced. Look at him; talk to him. You’ve seen him before; tell me what you think has happened. If anything.”
Katzmann nodded. “See you at the fireworks?”
He didn’t want Katzmann seeing Gilbert. “I’ll find you.” He went back to his family.
He found them at the hotel. Perdita and Gilbert were in the hallway murmuring about friends in Boston. Had Gilbert convinced her? Gilbert shook his head silently, no. Reisden went in to see his boy, who was asleep in their room, pink-cheeked, with his black hair fuzzing out in every direction. He lay down on the bed next to Toby and half-heard Perdita and Gilbert talking.
He doesn’t talk to me, she said. He talks to you. He needs you.
Reisden laced his fingers behind his neck and stared up at the ceiling.
They went to the street fair. They watched the juggler and the wild animal man, who was giving rides on a terrible-tempered old camel. The camel spat at them and sidled away on elephant feet. They shared gingerbread pigs. They strolled through the fair stalls, admiring fresh fruit and potted plants, garden forks and rolls of wallpaper, idling away the afternoon before the fireworks, as if they were persons who would be together always. They had nothing to say; they were too far apart in what they thought; they were too close to say it. They went to the puppet theatre, though not at three o’clock, and watched wooden soldier-puppets attack each other with clacking snippets of swords.
In Mademoiselle Françoise’s now-closed shop, the publicist from the Necro had set up a little advertisement-cum-museum. “See the terrible history of Citizen Mabet! Visit the haunts of witches!” There were easel photographs of Cyron in costume, and Guix from the Necro was telling a crowd of shepherds and shopkeepers that they could earn good money by being in the guillotining crowd scene next Sunday. Photos from Citizen Mabet hung in the window. A male and female mannequin wore costumes from the film, and Guix’s assistants were handing out tin buttons, Cyron’s picture in a tricolor cockade, to those who signed up as extras. “Tell your friends! Next Sunday! Skip Mass and impress your girl!”—which made the boys grin and the women scold.
Gilbert saw a picture of Reisden in one of the first scenes of the film. He frowned over the model of the guillotine. “I do not see the point of fright.”
They went out into the plaza. A group of men in rough white jackets and pants and round felt hats came round the corner all together, holding a sign: they were the orphéon, the miners’ chorus, from Wagny-les-Mines. “Look,” said Gilbert. One of the orphéonistes was carrying his son on his shoulder, a little boy dressed in white like his father and wearing a miniature round hat.
Reisden put Toby on his shoulders too. A passerby looked at Reisden and Gilbert curiously, and looked at Toby crowing above his father’s head, and smiled.
A life without Necrosar; Reisden's secret father
THERE IS A SAYING in the Jewish scriptures, that Papa Cyron has often quoted to André: We do not see what we see, we see what we are. Today André does not know what to see. Everything seems to be as distinct as if it is in strong sunlight. He looks at the black-and-white clothing laid out for him, the weave of the fabric, the complicated up-and-down of the threads. He sees the black pores on the nose of the waiter who serves him breakfast, the swirl of milk in black coffee. With Necrosar, everything had meaning. Coffee was poisoned; a tie was to strangle with. Now everything is distinct, flat, and flavorless, like a bad photograph. Nothing he touches seems to belong to him.
He walks through his morning role as the Count. The guns fire only blanks. No one is poisoned at the luncheon. Sabine is not there. Papa Cyron explains to the mayor that Sabine is in a delicate state.
My stepfather, my wife, my child? Sabine and Papa Cyron belong to André, Count of Montfort, who André has never quite been. Once he was Necrosar. Now he is someone else, whom he doesn’t know.
Without Necrosar’s stories to fill it with meaning, the world is dull and strange.
Papa Cyron is disappointed. Today André should have worn a uniform or had a ribbon in his buttonhole. There are fragments of a story in this, but nothing to go on with, nothing André knows how to give a shape to. The mayor is sick; André sees the sharp yellow angle of his cheekbone. The directress of the Institute for the Aged is a slattern; her wineglass is a clutter of lip-rouge and fingerprints. Perhaps she drinks alone. But these are not stories.
After lunch he is let loose to wander on his own (but Papa Cyron’s chauffeur follows him; Papa Cyron must think he is stupid not to notice). He goes to the Grand’Place to think about his film, but he cannot see his guillotine and the crowd screaming for blood. There is only a street fair. Fisherwomen in stiff-starched lace hats sell hake and whiting; hawkers show him candy, cheeses, and pictures of St. Barbara and St. Isidor. There is a puppet theatre, but there is no life in it, only sticks of wood.
He is looking at a stall of cheap rugs when he recognizes a man at his elbow: Philippe Katzmann, whom Reisden sent him to see earlier this summer. The psychiatrist.
“Something has happened to Necrosar,” he tells Katzmann. “Necrosar is gone.” Katzmann thinks this is good news. He questions André eagerly. “No, I have no hallucinations,” André says sadly. He looks at Katzmann, a balding man with brown teeth who wheezes as he smokes his cigars. Necrosar would have had him killed by a vengeful patient. Katzmann will only get older, frailer, his teeth browner, his eyeglasses thicker. “I can’t see anything that isn’t there,” André says.
“Congratulations,” Katzmann says. “You’re proving a point for me. This is extraordinary.”
André thinks, I want Necrosar back.
He walks through the fair and it is a horror in a way that Necrosar’s horrors have never been. Who are these people? What does he know about them? Everything is strange. What do the rug-dealer’s flat eyes hide? André does not know, he does not know at all. Katzmann tries to talk to him, but he doesn’t listen.
It is a relief to see someone he knows. Reisden is sitting at a cafe table with a grey-haired man, whom at first André doesn’t recognize.
“Where is Necrosar?” André strides across to Reisden. “I don’t like this.”
It’s then that he really sees the other man, and for a moment, blazing through his blood, Necrosar is there again, the meaning of the world. Because the other man looks like Reisden. Not only in a general way but in hundreds of specifics: the lean bones of the face; the long Roman nose; the photographable cheekbones; the grey of their eyes.
“Who are you?” says Necrosar. Reisden and this other man turn and look at each other as if they are deciding together who the other man is.
“You’re Reisden’s secret father,” André says. The resemblance is that close.
“Don’t be an ass, André, this is Gilbert Knight.”
The uncle of dead Richard Knight. André knows the story.
“Oh, Gilbert Knight,” André says. “Come stay with me. I want to look at you. To use you in my film. I need you.” If there’s no imagination in the world, if he cannot make up stories, there is nothing. He needs to surround himself with monsters of nature, with fear and guillotines. “I am lonely and so sad.”
If this is sanity, André can hardly bear it.
The ho
tel door opens. Reisden’s wife comes out, holding their baby. Reisden’s eyes turn toward her: no, to the baby, and then to the old man. And there is a story, André sees out of the corner of his eye something interesting, something more complex than the obsessions of the engineer Henri, who wanted to kill his son. “André said he wanted to use you in his film, Gilbert,” Reisden says in English. “But you can’t, can you?” That’s all, but the group becomes four-sided; Reisden’s wife holds the baby more tightly, she reaches out toward the older man. Reisden’s eyes never leave his child. He stands up and goes to her; the dead boy’s uncle stands up, too, as if following Reisden’s lead. Light coming through the archway of the arcade isolates the old man, making him bright and grey: Reisden’s mirror, Reisden’s ghost.
The old man looks at André. “Je suis très désolé que—de—” He speaks French as if he is looking it up word by word. He turns to Reisden.
Katzmann comes up behind them. Reisden puts his arm around his wife and child. The old man looks at them for a long moment, and then he turns to André and smiles.
“No,” he says in English. Even his voice is Reisden’s. His smile is not Reisden’s rare smile, though; it is someone else’s, he can’t think whose. “I am sorry, my dear,” the old man says to Reisden’s wife, and puts his arms around her. “We will see each other in America someday,” and then he and Reisden clasp hands for a moment. André’s theatre eye catches hold of their gestures, like the eternal parting at the foot of a scaffold. Reisden and this man do not want to leave each other. Each is afraid of what will happen to the other, to himself, to all of them. The old man turns back to André.
“You must not make your moving picture frightening, you know,” he urges.
Then he is gone, a pair of bowed shoulders making his way through the market, followed by a discouraged, tired little dog.
The end of a family
EVEN THEN, EVEN UNTIL that moment, Perdita hoped that they would work something out. She would not take it, not understand it. “Please,” she said. “It is wrong.” She stood in the middle of the crowd and had had no more of a goodbye to Uncle Gilbert than a press of the hand. “No, Alexander, you can’t,” she said, “please—”
“You know I must. We must.”
“You cannot,” she repeated. “Please, let me talk.”
She went after Gilbert; so he followed her. “We’ll walk you to the train,” he said.
Halfway down the green boulevard there was a bench. She sat them both down.
“Oh, my dears,” she said. “You tell each other things you can’t tell anyone else. We need one another. I need you both.”
“I will write you,” said Gilbert.
“I want more than that,” she said. She had said it. “I know, I know, you look too much alike, you say. But—but—!”
“What will I say to Toby?” said Alexander. “Shall I tell him what I did?”
“Alexander.” She was really furious. “Yes, Richard’s important, but never in this life will that be the most important part of you unless you make it that way. And you are giving up your family for it.”
“Am I giving up you?” he asked.
She didn’t know the answer. Who am I, she thought, what am I to him? What does he want when he wants me?
“Gilbert,” he said, “I am sorry that we’re quarreling in front of you.”
“You need each other,” she said to both of them.
“Apparently you need him,” Alexander said. “Do you need me?”
“Alexander! Don’t!”
They said nothing after that but only walked together awkwardly. Forsaking all others, she thought. Her marriage ceremony had not contained those words. It had been in French.—She thought about the thousand possibilities for prevarication in a foreign country.
Uncle Gilbert said nothing. She walked between them, cuddling Toby, who began to cry.
The sun would not set for a long time but it had sunk behind the trees. In the station, the train was streaks of red against black. Uncle Gilbert got on the train. She saw him, a white blur, and then after a while a flash of white—he was waving. She waved back with her free hand and then thought, what am I doing? What should I do? Once she had run for a train and caught it. That had been for Alexander. But this time she was Toby’s mother, holding her boy.
The train left.
Then she and Alexander walked back through the streets, which had gone grey. Somewhere ahead she could hear music, but she hadn’t the heart for it, and Alexander turned away, too. “Let’s just walk a bit,” he said.
“You shouldn’t have done this,” she said.
They walked down the grey streets, silently. Toby fell asleep and lay a heavy weight on her shoulder.
They came out on a vast dark square, where their footsteps echoed against the cobblestones; a French square, too large, too regular, smelling of horses and French bread. From far away a first rocket bloomed like mildew against the black. She thought, Do I belong? No. I want to go to a ballpark and listen to the bat crack against the base-ball. I want to cook hot dogs on a stick. I want to be American.
I’ll leave Alexander, she thought, because I can’t speak with him or he with me. I’ll go back to America. He expects it. Toby will grow up speaking English. We will see Uncle Gilbert. And we’ll all be miserable, because we all adore Toby; because no one Alexander can talk to will know he’s Richard, or care; because no one will make me red doorknobs anymore.
I love him. And he thinks I only love Richard.
They walked through the dark, saying nothing to each other. This will be our epitaph, she thought: Even at the last we had nothing to say, as if we had our whole lives to say it.
Ruthie in Mlle Françoise's garden
IN SPITE OF THE horrible circumstances of Mr. Blantire’s death, Ruthie was so happy she could sing.
Jules had come back last night with wonderful news. He was safe, and André was, and Dr. Reisden and his family. That vile man the Ferret was not going to say bad things about anyone. Nobody was going to be hurt. Ruthie was al-most giddy with forgiving the world.
Jules went off in midmorning by the coach to Arras—not to be blackmailed but to oversee costumes being sent back to Paris. Ruthie rolled up her sleeves and sat down to the work for the Ball of the Dead scene and the battle scene next week. Did they have enough film stock? Black powder and lard for bombs? Klieg and Arnaud bulbs? An extra sheet of plate glass on call in Arras in case the Pepper’s Ghost glass was broken? Costumes, wigs, chocolate syrup for blood, sausage and cheese and wine to feed the extras, enough extras to fill the Grand’Place on Sunday? Ruthie hurried from Boomer O’Connelly’s shed to Eli Krauss’s store-room, checking off items on her list. Mr. Krauss was away, filming; she left him a note to count light bulbs.
But Mr Blantire and Mademoiselle Françoise weighed on her.
After lunch she put on a sun hat, pinned up her skirt, and bicycled to Mademoiselle Françoise’s house, she said to count the uniforms for the big battle scene, which were being stored there. But it was really to visit where Mademoiselle Françoise had lived, visit the sort of person she had been.
Inside Mademoiselle Françoise’s house the air smelled of damp and shadow. The parlor and workroom were crowded with costumes, hung on iron-pipe racks to shake out their wrinkles. Ruthie counted dutifully, thinking how profound the silence is in a dead person’s house; and then she looked up at the stairs to the second floor, where Mademoiselle Françoise’s bedroom was.
Nothing had been touched in Mademoiselle Françoise’s closet. Ruthie looked at her elaborate ruffled Sunday dresses, her blouses, even her narrow shoes. One blouse had glass shoulder-buttons with stars, not a bad effect. But Ruthie didn’t see a match to the button that had been in the cellar, the clear glass button with the pink rose.
In the attic, Mademoiselle Françoise had hung a dress under a sheet—but it was a ballgown fifteen years old, black satin crusted with stars and spangles, its skirt drooping over its hard bustle. To
o beloved to alter and too ugly to wear. Ruthie had a dress like that herself.
But there was no dress with rose buttons.
It’s simply not here, she thought. She got rid of it. If I had been wearing it when I accidentally killed someone, I would get rid of it! She shivered again.
She went out thoughtfully into the garden. In the house it still looked as though Mademoiselle Françoise was just round the corner, but in the garden it was clear that she had been dead two months. It was a jungle. Sage sprawled drunkenly under an overgrown rosemary bush; the chalk-gravel paths were whiskered with grass. Among the bolted lettuces by the well, the weeds grew so thickly they looked planted. In the sunny south exposure by the garden shed, white funnel-shaped flowers were being strangled in flamboyant stalks of purple bloom.
They were not only weeds, but noxious; thorn apple and foxglove, poisons both. Ruthie went back into the kitchen and found Mademoiselle Françoise’s garden gloves, long and narrow and with an em-broidery of a little girl watering flowers. They were too small for Ruthie’s capable hands. She wrapped one around the stem of the fox-glove and pulled. The plant came up whole with its roots, and in its shade she saw another plant growing. A small, slender one, with small dangling fruit. She knelt down to see it and pushed her glasses up her nose to look more carefully. Delicate, soft, hooked bristles.
She had researched witchcraft for the film. She was looking at enchanter’s nightshade.
As if Mademoiselle Françoise had grown these plants on purpose.
Ruthie dropped the foxglove plant on the garden path and backed away, brushing her hands against her skirt. Carefully, bed by bed, she looked at all the plants in the garden. Close by the house, near the rhododendrons, she found a large-leaved plant with little lemony fruit. Mandrake. Around the corner of the garden shed, on the rubbish heap, sprawled the tangled dark stems of henbane.