A Citizen of the Country

by Sarah Smith

  “You want them?” he said. “You take them, and you and Gilbert can explain to Toby why I don’t want them.”

  “Alexander—!”

  “I’m going to put a good friend in an asylum, and that’s all I can do for him. I truly don’t need this.” He got up and went.

  She lay back on the dry grass, clutching at her hair in frustration. Some people, she thought, some people are proud of their families. We are his family. We are your family, she said to the air where Alexander had been. This was about claiming each other, belonging to each other, taking a part in each other; it wasn’t about money, and it wasn’t about Alexander’s pride.

  She rolled over on her stomach. Did she really think Sabine had committed murder?

  Buttons and rabbits.

  Enough to accuse her? No. No wonder Alexander didn’t want to do it either.

  But Alexander couldn’t just ignore it. He couldn’t possibly do that.

  ***

  Reisden found Sabine at the entertainment. The sun was an edge of gold on the horizon. She was setting up her table to tell fortunes. One of the cavalrymen was talking to her, flirting, but Sabine was looking at the sunset.

  Reisden went into the Vex-Fort, into the kitchen. The big room bustled; the harried cook-maids were washing piles of dishes and the caterers’ staff were packing boxes with sausages, cheese, and bread to feed the extras for the guillotine scene. He could have asked the castle cook-staff whether Sabine had cooked a rabbit on the first Friday in May. But who would have remembered?

  Tomorrow, he thought. I’ll ask tomorrow.

  He went outside again. Now Sabine was alone. He went over to her and sat on the low wall beside her.

  “Do you know how to cook rabbits?” he asked her.

  “I have a good recipe.”

  He didn’t want to ask this. “Have you ever sent food to anyone but André? A rabbit, perhaps?”

  She was idly dealing the cards as they spoke. The Girl fell on the table, then the smoky black Tomb. Sabine pushed the cards together and laid them down. She looked up at him, her chin high. Their eyes met.

  “Sabine?” he said.

  The entertainers were setting up their lights for the last show. She watched them. “I didn’t do anything wrong!” she said.

  “What did you do?” He didn’t want to hear.

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow,” she said. “After the end of the film.” She smiled sadly.

  “Tell me now,” he said.

  “You think I’m going to die.”

  “You’re not. Sabine,” he said. “I swear to you that André will not hurt you. He’s being watched.”

  “I didn’t do anything that wasn’t going to happen anyway.”

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  She was watching the light fade out of the sky. She took his hand and held it tightly; her hand was warm. “Everything’s the last time,” she said, her lower lip trembling. “This is the last sunset. The raspberries for dessert tonight, I’ve eaten raspberries for the last time. I’m going to die. And I’m frightened.” She bowed her head. The wooden table with her cards was dusty with pollen from the hay; beads of her tears splashed the table and the cards. He gave her his handkerchief. She wiped her eyes and then wiped the cards; she put his handkerchief on her lap and picked the cards up and squared them. She smiled up at him.

  “You were always nice to me,” she said. “I was pretty in the Ball of the Dead scene, wasn’t I?”

  “You’re not going to die,” he said. “You’re not going to be in the guillotining scene.”

  “I am. I asked Papa Cyron to let me.”

  “No! Why?”

  “Because it will be beautiful.”

  “Don’t do it!”

  “I have to.”

  “Why?”

  The actors were arriving; the three-piece orchestra was warming up. “I’m going to tell my last fortune now,” Sabine said, “and it’s going to be for you.”

  “Don’t do the scene.”

  But she was dealing the cards. “There you are,” she said after a moment. “The Serpent, the Garden, the Road . . . And here’s the Lady, and the Tomb, and the Cavalier. Someone’s going to die, someone close to you. It could be change but it’s death.”

  Her finger moved over the cards: the Cross, the Scythe, the Waning Moon, cards of pain and sadness; then she swept them all up together, wrapped them in his handkerchief, and offered them to him.

  “You’ll miss me,” Sabine said.

  Then she jumped up and went to find her place among the actors, moving from one to another, talking, laughing, kissing on both cheeks, embracing; and if she seemed a little sad and brittle, it was no more than most of them were on the night before the last scene.

  The Abrahams play a role in the film

  SUNDAY, JULY 23, 1911.

  In the marketplace at Arras, Edythe and Arthur Bernhard Abraham, from New York, are standing in front of a market stall looking at chalk swans. The sun’s heat bounces from the cobblestones and up under Edythe’s hat. In spite of the heat, Edythe and Arthur Bernhard are holding hands.

  Today is their fiftieth anniversary. Edythe is fifty years away from the dreamy Jewish girl who loved Tennyson; the waist-length hair she was so proud of is short and white, and life has turned her sensible, a woman whose hat folds for packing. Arthur Bernhard never built moated castles for her, but he has done well enough. They love each other; they are romantics in a beautiful summer, in Arras, a magical city with its ancient arcades and great squares. So Edythe is buying souvenirs, little Arras chalk swans with graceful heart-curved necks: two swans for her daughters, one for her best friend and downstairs neighbor, and two, perhaps three, to glide on a circular mirror somewhere in her friendly and cluttered apartment.

  On both of their lapels are little Stars-and-Stripes pins.

  It has not been a peaceful summer. When Edythe and Arthur were in Paris, they saw a German waiter beaten up; they walked past smashed sausage shops and broken kegs of German beer. For weeks the papers have been full of the deteriorating situation between the French and the Germans in Morocco. The Abrahams are Americans, neutrals, protected, but still they have almost-German names. Arthur Bernhard has taken to signing his name Arthur B.

  The humid, barely stirring air has a feel that Edythe remembers from the New York draft riots, as if someone is about to shoot. The crowds on the plaza are waiting for something. There are crowds of strange men on the plaza, short, muscular, grimy men, pale as though they never feel the sun. There are policemen. There are soldiers.

  In the middle of the square, the technicians are putting together the huge guillotine that will dominate the scene. It’s blood red, enormously tall. From it hang blue-white-and-red bunting and fluttering tricolor flags. Steps lead up the side. On top of the platform— the Abrahams must step back and crane their necks— two workmen are hammering together two narrow, high beams connected by a crosspiece.

  The workmen unbox the enormous slanted blade. The bunting on the guillotine seems dreadful to Edythe, as if someone were to put flags on an electric chair.

  But it’s only a movie. Making his way through the crowd by the platform, a man is shouldering a mahogany-and-brass box on a tripod.

  Edythe and Arthur Bernhard know the movies. The roofs of New York are covered with glassed-in movie studios, and just across the river, in the New Jersey streets and fields, cowboys fight Indians and policemen chase burglars, and men with tripods film it all. Anybody can be in the movies, especially if they know the rabbi’s nephew who makes them. Arthur, with his crooked smile, was the preacher who married Our Hero to His Little Girl in A Cowboy’s Love. Edythe has played any number of nurses and grandmothers.

  “Maybe they need a couple extras,” Edythe says. “For our fiftieth, Arthur Bernhard—!”

  The cameraman, who’s American, points at the casting office, a shop in the arcade. They change clothes in the back of the shop. Tall Arthur Bernhard becomes a gigantic soldier an
d shorter Edythe, with her white hair and big grin, is in rags at the foot of the scaffold, brandishing a set of knitting needles and cackling, “I want to catch the head!”

  She is perfectly placed to watch the mechanism of the guillotine, which is below the platform.

  Edythe talks in bumpy French with another extra, a big plump lady’s maid from a local château. Most of the pale men are miners, Edythe learns; they’ve been drinking all day, and in the crowd are also real soldiers, who are worn out from dying on camera for the past half-week. It hasn’t been an easy production, the maid Aline says; everyone’s unhappy; there have been deaths.

  “Real deaths?” says Edythe, startled.

  But no time to find out about that now, the actors are arriving. A familiar-looking ugly old man and a bright-haired young girl are drawn into the square on a rough wooden cart. The crowd recognizes the old man and begins to cheer him: “Cy-ron! Cy-ron!” But Edythe and Arthur Bernhard look at the girl.

  Anyone would who knows films. She has a face that captures hearts, huge-eyed in a cloud of yellow hair, beautiful and frightened.

  “That’s Countess Sabine,” the maid Aline says. “Her husband hates her. And that’s her husband, the director.”

  From outside the shot, a blond man with a megaphone is shouting at the extras, lashing them into a frenzy. If the girl is a heroine, this man is a villain. He is tall and thin, pale and terrifying, with long, tangled, yellow hair. He moves like a snake. The megaphone turns his voice into shrieking and hissing, a voice out of a nightmare.

  “That man’s crazy,” Edythe says.

  “He is! And he hates his wife!” says the maid.

  Another actor has been standing on the stairs leading up to the guillotine. Now he descends all the way and begins to talk in a quick undertone to the maid. “Do not let André anywhere near her,” Edythe hears him say. “You watch him too.” The actor is dark, handsome, and young; as he smiles briefly at the maid Aline, his face lights up almost to his careworn grey eyes.

  “That’s the one who’s going to rescue the girl,” Edythe guesses.

  While the crowd scenes are being taken, and afterward, while the platform for the camera is being pulled into the square, men come to make sure the machinery is working.

  Later the police will ask Edythe who checked it. She remembers Charles De Vere, the magician who built the machine; he is with the old actor, Maurice Cyron, and the lovely girl, Sabine. Edythe gets to talk to Cyron, says that she has acted in films, and charms the girl by asking for her autograph as well as Cyron’s. “You’ll be famous in the films! Believe me, I’ve seen stars.”

  The girl smiles heartbreakingly. “Do you think so?”

  The careworn man with the grey eyes talks to Cyron, trying to have him change something, but Cyron shakes his head.

  More people come; people come back. At this point Edythe loses track of who comes before whom. A French general, who talks to the soldiers. The actor Cyron again. The girl again. She just looks at the guillotine.

  Next comes the man she thinks of as the Executioner, the man in the black cloak. The Executioner and the handsome man with the grey eyes watch while a woman checks the mechanism from above. It drops with a thud; it works.

  Because there is no wind, the filmmakers are using an effect Edythe has never seen before, an enormous fan like a ceiling fan, but mounted vertically on a cart. It is taller than a man; the maid Aline says it is a ventilation fan from one of the local mines. Men in the crowd take turns cranking its engine to start it, and then the big vanes moan and reluctantly begin to turn, moving faster and faster, whipping and threshing the air under the scaffold and bringing some relief to the sweaty extras in the square.

  “Be careful of those blades. Stay away.”

  All the extras wait. And wait, and wait. The director wants a particular light effect and hasn’t seen it yet. These aren’t trained extras, used to the delays of the movie business. They get restless and begin to shout. The director takes his megaphone and shouts back. Edythe doesn’t understand what he says but the mood is getting nasty.

  The shadows creep up the houses on the square; Edythe worries that it is too late to film. But the technicians bring out more scaffolding and lamps; they pay out wire from a roll. People are jostled aside and there’s more muttering, then a cry of dismay as the lights go on and add to the grilling heat.

  Now the whole square is unbearable. The extras are crowded elbow to elbow, broiling, thirsty, faint with the heat. The shadows of the Dutch-roofed shops are eating the buildings on the other side; the shadows look like menacing giants. The evening wind stirs the flag on top of the guillotine, but it’s only a tease, making the crowd more restless. The technicians maneuver the big fan’s cart to point it at the guillotine. The flags become alive, the bunting stirs.

  The girl climbs the stairs to the scaffold as the cameraman films her. Edythe steps back as the cameraman shoulders his tripod and makes his way through the crowds toward the platform from which he is going to film the guillotining scene.

  Edythe and Arthur move back to get a better view. They are standing between the guillotine platform and the small camera platform, almost underneath the camera platform. By craning they can see all the actors on the scaffold. The Executioner is now standing on the scaffold, to the right of the guillotine, a frightening character, wearing an iron brace around his neck and dressed in a black cloak and hood. The enormous fan is still going and now the evening breeze is rising by itself. It ripples the Executioner’s cloak.

  The girl stands by the guillotine.

  The shrieking director is on the platform with the cameraman. They can’t see him but they can hear him instructing the actors. Then “Three, two, one— On tourne! Iris out!” The camera cranks with a sound like cards being shuffled, which Edythe can hear through all the other noises. The girl looks around her with an air Edythe always will remember, dignified and astonished and somehow final. For a moment she takes the old man’s hand and says something to him, and then she fits her neck into the gaudy lunette of the guillotine and her thin wrists into smaller holes in the board that holds her head.

  The executioner moves across the front of the guillotine, blocking Edythe’s view for a moment. But she can see the girl. Her wrists are twisting inside the holes in the board. As the executioner reaches the lever, his cloak blows aside and Edythe can see the girl’s face.

  The blade hangs trembling against the sky.

  The guillotine; André, Jules, and Reisden enter the boves

  THE SCENE WAS TAKING forever. André had filmed the beginning of it, but now, he insisted, they were too early, the shadows weren’t right yet. The square must be in darkness; the buildings must show the shadows of giant men; the girl and man, and the blade of the guillotine, must be in light.

  The heat was appalling and André added to it. The techs brought out lights and André climbed up to the camera platform while Krauss’s assistant adjusted them. From the edge of the square, Cyron’s Rolls gargled and sputtered. Krauss had taken off his eternal cap; under the lights, his hair was soaked with sweat.

  “Don’t step on the wires,” the techs yelled at the crowd.

  Reisden and Jules were on the scaffold, in costume, by the guillotine. Jules abruptly sat down and took off his hood. Under it his face was slack and translucent, like too-warm wax.

  “Give us our money!” a group of drunken extras were yelling under the camera platform. “Look, it’s the end of the day.”

  “There’s a woman fainted here!” someone else yelled.

  “It’s inhuman!”

  André shouted he was waiting for the shadows to be right. They would be right for only two or three minutes. No one could move, he yelled. Anyone who left the square wouldn’t get his wages. The lights flickered for a moment. “Stay away from the wire, idiots!”

  Ruthie came up the stairs with cold lemonade in a pitcher. She took one look at Jules and started pouring out some for him, but he stopped her, pointing dow
n at the extras. Lead actors don’t get cold drinks when the extras can’t.

  “I’m going to check the guillotine again,” Reisden said.

  He and Jules went down the stairs and looked at the levers while Ruthie worked the machinery from above. It was working perfectly. Cyron came up and looked too. “André didn’t get at it, did he? Eh?”

  “No. Cyron, don’t let her be in this scene—”

  “Nonsense, boy. Everything’s safe.”

  The huge blade inched up the scaffolding again.

  The ventilation fan from Sabine’s mines gave André his breeze but didn’t help; under the lights at the base of the scaffold, they could barely breathe. They went back up on the scaffold instead, in the sun. Reisden persuaded Jules to take off his executioner’s long black cloak and hood.

  The shadows were beginning to touch the platform. Eli Krauss used his second camera to film Sabine climbing the stairs, from dark-ness to light. He very nearly filmed the cloak and hood as well; Ruthie whisked it away at the last instant.

  The late sun was red, rose, yellow, like a fire; the lights hit the guillotine like steel explosions. The shadows had begun to pool around the arcades at the far side of the square. André began to warm up the crowd. They were hot, restless, exhausted, hungry for the ten francs and food and free beer they had been promised, and André taunted them. “Film companies have no money! What makes you think I’ll give you wages?” The extras snarled in fury. The yellow raking light from the west turned their mouths and eyes into black holes. Perfect. Next to André, Eli Krauss was cranking his camera.