by Russ Rymer
“She’s in trouble,” Corie informed me as soon as I stepped inside the door, with such a hustling in her voice that I took it we might yet effect a rescue, were we quick enough. She held a letter, which she read aloud as we hastened back to the study, skipping the salutation and whatever opening pleasantries and diving straight into the paragraph she’d been on when I rang the bell, translating it straight from the page to my ear, so that this letter remains one of only two, among Alba’s many, of which I have no written English version.
I’ve told you I draw the others’ envy, but what would they wish me to do? My comfort is for Magdalena’s sake, she’s the only child on the grounds. I would give up all my privileges, except for the one of being allowed to accompany Alena in hers. I’m not ashamed. The life she enjoys is far from the least she deserves. But haven’t I earned a better opinion? In Ventas—
“Another prison,” Corie inserted.
. . . with the women given la pepa—
“A seed, or, I think, a bullet: sentenced to die,” she said.
. . . as I was, didn’t I use my status to save them from the firing squad? And not just a few! My status has attracted cruelties too, though I don’t pretend to be special. They hung a woman here last week for laying a wreath of flowers on her son’s grave. There’s a teenager here with burst eardrums from electric shocks to her ears, an eighty-year-old who cannot leave the latrine for they destroyed her gut with liters of castor oil and sawdust, for the sport of it. All in the name of the God they wish to convert me to. I’d rather die! Why am I made so alone? The brand I bear should balance any pain of theirs, the scars—
and here Corie broke off to say that she couldn’t make out what was written, and she indicated the place where water or some other liquid had dissolved the ink into a Rorschach cloud of blue pastels and dark linings and eaten the text like a fog bank. Her finger shook. I was as disturbed as she was. Far from deriding Corie’s connection with the poor, afflicted Alba, I increasingly shared in it, though on my own terms. Didn’t I know how this luckless woman felt! What it was like to be kept from a loved one by war. I admired her nurse’s sentiment, between the lines of all her early letters, insisting on procedure and professionalism amid the mayhem. We could have shared a slow drink over that, she and I! Yet in other ways, I couldn’t begin to conjure this Alba who, beset by every ravage and hardship, still found a way to love, to bear a child and raise her. In prison! Who could fathom such fortitude? I’d tried to imagine her giving birth in a killing zone, and was shaken by the horror. Little by legible bit, the handwriting worked its way free again.
. . . breast & my back, especially, that demon’s logo, that five-armed, five-footed devil. How will you delight in me? Only with anger. I don’t feel the burns anymore, but I cannot get rid of the face, she was always so in love when she attacked me, luxurious with her time, attentive, lingering over her art, it will take me a lifetime to live down the disgust. I tell you this wrongly, I am being cruel, but really only weak, my dear & I say I don’t want to upset you but I do. I need you to hate her too, your help in hating them all.
There was an incursion of more fog.
. . . or to apologize. Must I tear my dress & say look at this, this catastrophe of what remains of a woman—now tell me to my face you resent my baby’s room!
Corie’s voice was agonized, and hearing her read in real time, spitting out the words as Alba must have dashed them down in ink, as Alba might have spit them had she spoken her mind not written it, I felt that more was merging into a single seamless whole than a letter and its translation. Two women, author and translator, sang in unison before me. I had long conflated them, Alba and “Alba,” the letters I read being penned by both. For these several minutes they were one. Then the buzzer sounded.
I jumped. I’d never before heard the doorbell’s chime. (It chimed like a toad.) Corie, who’d heard it time and again, seemed startled too and sprang up to check the watch she’d set on the writing desk.
“Oh!” she said, a plea. She looked around frantically, as though she were about to stash me in a cupboard, then she grabbed up the pages of her other just-finished translations and shoved them into an envelope and shoved it into my hands as she herded me out. “Next time,” she whispered. “Tomorrow.” She shoved my coat into my arms and shoved me out the door.
The door closed with the cacophonous ka-chunk of good old-fashioned munitions-grade hardware. I deliberated, standing in the hall, whether or not I should knock on the door and demand to know what the hell was going on, but a moment convinced me to accede to Corie’s panic—it was something else she could translate for me tomorrow—and I headed for the elevator. I must have been its most recent customer; the cage was still waiting on my floor, but just as I reached for the handle to open the gate there was another decisive, mechanical clunk and the cage began descending.
I’d missed my ride! And I thought, So, no big deal, I’m a New Yorker, when you can’t get a cab, you walk. I headed down the stairs. They were narrow and spiraled squarely around the elevator shaft. The lift motor whirred to life again and the cage rose past me, and I caught a glimpse of its passengers, a man and a woman. Did I recognize his face? I’m not sure I saw it. But the play of shadow across his figure as the light worked its way through the moving lattice made something surface in my mind. Maybe, as the detective explained to the photographer, it’s easier to identify people in the dark. Distractions of color and ornament fade away and you’re left with the essentials, the way a person moves, his proportions and bulk, the ponytail pulled from the balding pate. Or maybe the shadows in the passing cage just echoed the shadows in the Église d’Hiver the brief single time we’d met.
The walk around the block should have allowed me sufficient opportunity to contemplate, but I arrived no wiser at Saxe’s place. Somehow, in the scramble of my eviction, Corie’d left me in full possession of her fear, and her fear grew healthily as I fed it bits and pieces of my own. Was she in some sort of trouble? Danger? I stepped into the closet and then back out to pace my room in agitation, then stepped into the closet again to move some hangers around fitfully on their rods (thinking, You know, Tilde, it’s about time you locate a laundromat), and stepped out again and then back in, and at the end of these convolutions and circumnavigations, I stood before the panel door with my hands on my hips. I reached to pull the knob.
It was an odd thing, sneaking by the back way into the same home I’d minutes ago departed as a guest. I felt like an actor with dual roles in a play, as though my impostor self were out to catch me in the act of being legitimate. But too late, too late—Legitimate Me was no longer there to be caught.
Initially, it seemed there was no one to catch at all—silence was all that emitted from the rooms ahead. For the first time ever, my course through these premises was not a voyage of wonder. Every marvelous, captivating thing was either to my purpose or in my way. I prowled from hassock to column to lamp resolutely aiming toward the study, listening for trouble as I went, but when I finally heard what I was listening for, I’d gone too far. The trouble was right behind me.
I was all the way past the door that led to the library when I heard the voices, or rather Massue’s voice and Corie’s protesting stammer, coming out of it. Three shadows sprawled into the room. It was the room I’d just passed through. If the place had been brighter or if he’d glanced my way, he would surely have seen me, but it wasn’t and he didn’t. He crossed the carpet and flopped himself onto a couch. A woman followed but didn’t sit, just stood beside him like an IV pole. I didn’t know her. He still wore his knee-length leather coat. He propped his stocking feet on the coffee table as though in his den at home. I couldn’t see Corie. I stood there trying to take in their conversation undistracted by my predicament—he was haranguing her awfully on some point. The rest of me was trying to figure a way out of my predicament, undistracted by their conversation.
“I suppose, but . . .” Corie said.
“Suppose? You chose
this. Or am I missing something?” She tried to answer, but he insisted, “What am I missing? You say you’re in the struggle. So this is what you mean, correct? This.”
“It’s an apartment, Massue. It comes with the job.”
“I think what Massue is trying to say—” the woman started.
“Oh, the job!” Massue pushed on, not needing clarification. He rattled a sheaf of papers in the air, which I could see with dismay were a fistful of Alba’s letters. Corie crossed into view, reaching, but he snatched them away.
“‘My dear beloved C.,’” he read, his derision slathered in treacle. “My dear fucking Christ! You know, Corie, you already have a job.”
“That’s right,” the woman said.
“A responsibility. It’s an American war, you’re an American voice.”
“People respond to you,” the woman said.
“No one else can say what you do. You’re American, you’re . . .”
“A woman,” the woman offered.
“You’re young, attractive, a woman. People are drawn to you. They feel your passion.”
I could see the woman nodding. “They feel it,” she said.
“But only if you’re out there being passionate,” Massue said, “not holed up here over your letterbox. Look, people miss you in committee.”
“We do!” the woman declared.
“That’s the whole reason we’re here. We want you back with us. And I need you on the street. You should be leading things! Stopping this madness! You’re the best I have, but you’ve gone halfhearted, and do you know how disappointing that is? How demoralizing for everyone? You have to decide. Read history or make it, it’s up to you. But for me, I need an activist, not an archivist.”
“They aren’t just letters, Massue,” Corie pleaded. “She’s fighting Franco.”
“Exactly! Not lounging around on her ass. You want to know why you admire this woman?” He shook the letters at her again. “Because she wasn’t here, that’s why! She left here and went there. She’d have laid down her life for you. For you! And this is how you repay her. Hiding away in her . . . appartement, sipping from her china”—he mimicked a sip, his pinkie held out mincingly—“while your comrades do the work. Such sacrifice!”
“Massue,” the woman cautioned.
“Fuck it!” he said. He welled up from the couch in a violence of leather and bile and tossed the letters disdainfully onto the coffee table. They skittered across the glass and scattered to the floor. Corie scurried after them, and the woman stooped to help her. Massue said to the two bent backs, “At least change your name. I’m not sure Alba suits you. C’mon, Louise.”
I recoiled from the indictment as though he’d spat it at me—I’d jumped too when he leaped up. And then I kept on going, mincing through the rooms as fast as I was able. I wanted to head back the way I’d come—for one thing, I’d left my door ajar—but how? Circle through the library? It might be just the path they’d choose to take. So I kept on toward the front rooms, propelled by Massue’s invective. They were approaching rapidly behind me, and I sped, barely keeping out of sight, trying not to knock into anything, and in my haste, when I reached the front door I almost blew it with the chain lock—why did Corie insist on engaging the damned chain lock every time? I had the door in mid-yank before I saw that it was hooked, and I caught myself, and released it, and snuck out into the hall.
My relief was crushed by a cannon volley. It wasn’t artillery, of course, though it sounded that loud to ears so sensitized by panic. The ka-chunk of the door latch thundered down the corridor. Had it roared as rudely inside? I raced for the stairs.
I was hardly even a full flight down when the door flew open. I froze. They stepped out into the landing, as furtive as I had been inside. They moved silently and didn’t talk, their shadows looming down the wall as they peered over the banister into the elevator well.
“Flics,” Massue growled: Cops. “Fuckin’ merde.” The shadows receded and the door closed and I ran without caution now because I knew precisely the amount of time I had—the time it takes a man to get his boots on in a hurry—and that turned out to be about right, because the next thunder I heard was his steps berating down the stairs behind me. There were interludes of quiet when he came to a carpeted landing, and then the banging resumed.
I reached the lobby in a near faint—if I hadn’t already tripped the alarm, I’d have run outside and made my way coatless around the block. Now, surely, Corie would be watching from the window: I was caught. What would be the terms of my surrender? Then I noticed, as I hadn’t before, that the stairs continued on from the lobby, and that’s where I went, where they would take me, down into a basement.
Can you lose a pursuer by losing yourself? It was as much of a plan as I had. The stairs bottomed out into a concrete corridor that swerved like a sewer through a labyrinth of utility rooms and storage lockers. There was little light beyond the occasional glint through coal-grimed transom glass, and I passed a furnace room and a large iron-smelling fuel tank and had just miraculously navigated an alcove where a dozen phantomy bicycles were chained in the dark to a central phantomy bicycle rack—these precincts must get more traffic in the sunny months—and gone around a corner and was headed down another hall when out of the gloom the Minotaur appeared right before me, leaping out of the shadows into my path, a beefy arm cradling a laundry basket. I let out a yell.
Céleste made no answer. She was as impassive as I was panicked, taking me in almost casually, and it was just then I heard the terrible crash. The room behind me erupted in an apocalypse of rent metal and ripped flesh; my pursuer had discovered the bicycles. The collision seemed to go on and on for an unusual number of seconds, seemed to have first and second and third acts and encores and intermissions and to prolong itself through ornate cadenzas of bell and bone and spoke and tube, aluminum and obscenity, during all of which commotion Céleste’s gaze never faltered from my face and never betrayed even curiosity, much less alarm, at the noise. When the symphony seemed to be petering out, she handed me the basket. “Washroom, first door to the right,” she said, and stomped off toward the collision zone to set the world on its axis one more time. Her nightingale voice wafted back around dark corners, demanding “What’s the meaning of this!” and “Who let you into this building?” and then, in response to the obvious query, insisting no, the only thing she’d heard was the noise of a clumsy bicycle thief.
From my position, with my head in the maw of a front-loading washing machine, I sensed the malign shadow pause at the door, and I heard Céleste more loudly. “Then is it laundry you’ve come to help us with, monsieur, or shall I call the police?” Followed by “I thought as much” and her generous offer to escort him to the street. “Let’s try it with the lights on, why not?”
She returned a few minutes later and said to me, crossly—she hadn’t squandered all of her brimstone—“Non, non, not like that,” and snatched away the basket and pointed me down the hall to the passage that would let me out directly into my courtyard.
Brushing past her as I escaped the room, I heard her say, low and in English, “You have not so nice friends.”
“She’s hardly the first,” Emil complained. He was complaining; he sounded grumpy.
“Everyone’s always the first when it comes to that, Emil,” I said. “Everyone’s first love is the first love in the world. Anyway, that’s not the point.” It definitely wasn’t. Corie’s meltdown had pried open, by a smidgen, my reluctance to talk about her. I felt the need for a confidant. I wasn’t quite confident Emil was the confidant I needed, but he’d have to do. In the car, going down the highway, there were only the two of us. “The point is,” I said, “what makes you so certain she’s in love?”
“She’s doubled over in agony!” he exclaimed. “What’s that sound like to you?”
“You mean she’s a girl, so what else could it be.”
“Oh, poof,” Emil said.
“It’s so trite,” I scolded him.
“Can I suggest some other plausible possibilities?”
“Plausibilities!” he said. “Please, I bet you will. But could you, first,” and he asked me to locate a map in the glove compartment. “They’ve changed all this around.” The old grump; all this being the highway, a long straight stretch through field and forest named (propitiously for our purposes) Voie de la Liberté, though now the Way of Liberty had swerved into a tangle.
We’d given gray Paris the slip for the day, springing Emil’s Citroën out of its garage for a spin through the Champagne region, stopping in Épernay to tour the caves of a famed vintner and lifetime friend of Emil’s. (My lifetime had had no famed vintner friends, I castigated myself. That must be where everything went wrong.) Emil had said we absolutely must go, because I’d never been. As we wandered through the cool chalk, bottle-bottom burrows under the hillside, this bibulous catacomb, I suspected another motive, that we were here because he’d been so many times. Épernay was yet another way station in Sahran’s sentimental tour.
It was also indisputably ideal for a picnic, conditions being right, and with some wishful denial concerning the chill but thankful for a dry day, we pulled a quilt from the trunk of the Citroën (I recognized it; it was the same quilt that had swaddled Headmistress Ralanou’s blasphemous painting) and spread it on the lawn of the little church where, in another month, the blast of an antique cannon would initiate the Feast of St. Vincent and the procession would begin. There we broke bread in our overcoats and uncorked a hand-labeled bottle of local product, courtesy of the lifetime friend. It was beyond lovely, with the sun’s rays diverging through the passing clouds converting the valley below us into a scene from a Bible frontispiece. The friend had asked Emil if he’d be returning to attend the feast, but Emil said no, not this year, he wouldn’t be in France then, and that’s why he wished to come early.