by Heather Munn
I couldn’t say anything. Waves were washing over me. I was at the bottom of the sea. I could feel the blood draining from my face, from all of me. It’s happening after all. Rosa. She wants Rosa. That’s the truth. I was standing there with my mouth open. I am absolutely sure that no one has ever looked stupider than I did at that moment.
“You are not angry, Magali, are you? Rosa, she was worried. I said, no, no, she is your friend. You are not angry?”
“No,” I said white-lipped. “I’m not angry. Thank you for letting me know, Madame Santoro. I … I should go now.”
The café door dinged as I walked back out into the cold.
Chapter 14
The Other Voice
I STOOD looking at Rosa, trying to look like I was over it.
I’d tried to get over it. I’d tried. I wasn’t over it. I’d stayed away from the children’s home for two days, too humiliated to go tell them the truth. Then I’d gone. I had to go. My explanations were lame. Marek’s “adjustment” was awful. He’d had an episode in class and hit a teacher, and they’d sent him home. When I came to get him he kicked me. I hated him. I hated everyone.
I hated Rosa.
It didn’t help that she looked scared of me. Didn’t at all.
“So how was it?” I said. I couldn’t keep the flatness out of my voice. I could see her watching me. I could see her flinch.
“It was all right … We had five kids and a baby …” She was looking everywhere except in my eyes. “It went all right. Kind of tiring. I took the baby.” She hesitated. “You didn’t meet us at the train.”
“No, I didn’t meet you at the train.” And don’t you have the sense to leave well enough alone, you idiot? If you ask me to tell you I’m not angry you will die.
Her dark eyes got darker. She finally looked me in the eye. “I don’t know what else I could have done, Magali,” she said quietly.
“Well, of course not.” I turned away.
“Magali …”
I turned on her. “What?”
“Please, Magali—I—”
“What do you want from me? You want me to tell you it’s all fine? You want me to tell you it was fun packing for Rivesaltes after waiting for a month and then going down to meet her and hearing you’d gone? You want me to tell you I’m just so thrilled? If that’s what you want, dream on!”
Her big, dark eyes. Like a wounded doe. They made me so angry I wanted to hit her. We stood staring at each other for a moment. I knew what my own eyes looked like. Like a snake’s. Yeah, I was the bad one. I’d tried not to be. But she wouldn’t let me.
We stood staring at each other. And then she lowered her eyes. Took a breath.
When she raised them again they were like hot black coals.
“I found something out this summer, Magali,” she said very quietly. “I wasn’t going to tell you. But on second thought maybe I will.”
I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t move.
“I’m good at this,” she said. “You didn’t think I would be, did you?”
I flinched.
“You didn’t think I was good for very much.” She stood very straight and spoke very evenly, her eyes burning. It hurt to look at her. “I even believed you, some of the time. Why not? I’m just a refugee. I’m just a girl who dropped out of school to work in her parents’ café.”
Nothing. I had nothing.
“Well, I’m worth something too. I can save kids’ lives too.”
“Of course you can …”
“And you never thought any different?” Her voice was hard.
“I—”
“And you never thought Lucy was better than me?”
“You didn’t like her, I—”
“Don’t you start, Magali Losier. You think I didn’t want another friend? Whenever she was there you shut me down. Acted like I was stupid. Well I’m not stupid. And I’ll tell you something else, neither is Nina, and neither is Sonia even if she can’t speak French. You think you’re so much better than other people. You think people can’t even see. You’re a rotten friend, Magali Losier.”
I saw someone get beaten up once. He just curled up on the ground, didn’t even try to hit back.
“And I’ll tell you something else. Someone who cared about the kids would’ve been glad I went. Just plain glad. And you know it.”
Of course I knew it.
She turned on her heel and walked away.
I lay on the ground, curled around myself, bleeding.
I guess that’s not true. But since when is what a person sees walking down the street the truth?
I WALKED away. Not toward anywhere. Away. By the time I came to myself I was on the riverbank, walking downstream, already so far north of town that a hill hid most of the houses when I turned to look back. I walked over short green grass and through tall dry weeds. I slipped under barbed-wire fences into pastures. I followed the river. I just kept going.
I think I thought that if I stopped it would all be true.
I knew it was all true. But knowing and walking was different from knowing and standing still. The sound of the river drowned it out. The bite of the cold wind numbed it. The memory of Rosa’s blazing eyes and the message they carried—some people might say things like that and not mean them, some people might have made them up just to hurt you, but not Rosa, not Rosa—those things lived in the back of my mind, but they were pushed backward by my motion, pinned in place. It was there, but quiet. I could see it, but only as a shadow lying over the sunlit pastures and the wet brown leaves plastered to the riverbank by the current, and the tall dead grasses waving in the wind.
But there comes a moment when you have to stop.
It came when I realized I was shivering, and my teeth were chattering, and I couldn’t make them quit. I sat down in the middle of the tall dead grass, feeling the stalks prick my legs, and brought my knees up to my chest and put my arms around them. My teeth went on chattering. I laid my head on my knees, sideways, and closed my eyes. I started rocking. It felt like something inside me was burning. It felt like I was going to die. Rosa. Rosa had said I was a rotten friend, and it was true.
Rosa had said I never thought she was good for much, and it was true.
I mean, I knew it was true. It was what I thought. I just hadn’t known she knew it.
And it sounded so much uglier in her mouth.
You see yourself through your own eyes and you look beautiful. You look strong and smart and funny; you look determined and self-sacrificial; you have just the right blend of compassion and courage. You look almost like Paquerette.
And then you see yourself through someone else’s eyes and you just see a self-centered jerk. A person in love with her own importance. Who wants to rescue children but doesn’t want anyone else to rescue them.
That—that was the worst thing.
I lay down on my side in the prickly grasses, still half curled up. Somewhere inside me I knew what was supposed to come next. I was supposed to talk to God. I was supposed to tell him this stuff as if he didn’t know it yet.
But it was so humiliating.
I just lay there, and silence filled my mind. The grasses pressed into my cheek. Near my left eye a feeble old cricket, one leg torn off, dragged himself through the grass. The river ran, down the bank to my right, singing its liquid song. I thought of Marek. I thought of Lise, Carmela, Chanah. I thought of Zvi. I started to cry, tears slipping sideways down my face into the grass, into the earth.
But I do, I said to God. I do love them.
The river ran. The wind rustled in the grass, in the few brown leaves still clinging to the oak above me. Out of my right eye I saw small white clouds blowing fast across the blue, blue sky. That blue so deep it was almost dark.
And, I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t know at all. But somehow in all these things there was a voice. That was how it was. It wasn’t in my head. It was around me.
The river said yes. The deep dark sky said yes. The wind s
aid yes, and the leaves and grasses all agreed, bending down their heads. There was a voice in them, and that voice said, Yes. I know. You are not lying.
That’s when I really started to cry.
I lay there in the tall grass, sobbing, shaking, the salt of my tears getting in my mouth, soaking into the cold earth beneath my cheek. I lay there and cried, for Zvi, for Marek, for Paquerette, for Rosa. For Nina. For me. I lay there and cried for the things people do here on the cold earth to the people they despise. I cried because people shut women with babies behind barbed wire and let them die as if they were nothing. I cried because I had made Rosa think she was nothing. I cried because the world looked like a world without a God in it and yet there was a voice in the river and the wind. I cried because, of all the things for that voice to speak here and now on the cold earth where people kill each other, it had spoken kindness to me. I cried hard, wrenchingly, until I didn’t have any tears left at all.
Then I lay there silent, my eyes closed, listening to the river and the wind. Hearing the grasses whisper together. I didn’t tell God everything. I didn’t tell God much at all. I don’t know, it’s hard to explain, but somehow it seems to me like there are words you use to say something, and then there are words you use to do something. Like I’m sorry. That’s definitely one of those.
I said that.
I don’t want to be like them. I remember saying that too. And help.
After a while my teeth started to chatter again.
I got to my feet. There was damp earth on my cheek, and tears. I wiped it with one sleeve and then the other. I had that empty, clean space inside me that you have after crying. I was also very cold.
The sun was slanting down in the west, making black silhouettes of the oaks and the pines. The grass was flattened in the place where I had lain. I brushed at the right side of my skirt and my sweater. There was grass seed on them, and dirt. I shivered. Above my head the oak leaves rustled in the wind.
I turned south, and began to walk home.
I MADE it home in time for supper. Mama asked me how Marek was. I shrugged. Then I felt wrong trying to fool her.
“He was pretty bad yesterday. But I didn’t see him today.”
“You didn’t go? Where have you been?”
“I took a walk beside the Tanne.”
“For hours?”
I shrugged.
“Magali! Aren’t you cold? Your hands, they’re frozen. Here now, there’s hot water. Go and take a hot shower, you have just enough time before supper.”
I took a hot shower. It was bliss, the steam rising around me, the warmth seeping back into my chilled white hands. I put on clean, warm clothes and sat on the bath mat, holding my knees to my chest the way I’d done by the river, and drifted. I came to myself when I heard Mama call me to supper.
It was lentil soup, with tomato in it, and steaming mashed pumpkin on the side. It was warm, solid and warm in my belly, it was better than anything. I could barely keep my eyes open.
I went upstairs, and crawled into bed. After a minute I got up and got the extra winter blanket from the closet. I remember the warmth growing in me there, in and around me in that little space of air under the blanket, warmed by me, warming me. I heard the wind singing in the eaves outside. Thought of wind in the withered oak leaves, and a warm voice. I went to sleep.
I WOKE, and thought, Rosa. I will have to face Rosa. I shrank from waking.
I pulled back into that floating place for a moment, under the surface of sleep. There was something I’d forgotten, something I’d just now been thinking about, something so good.
God spoke. God actually spoke to me.
For real?
What’s real?
Rosa, my brain reminded me. Rosa.
I pictured myself walking up to her. Pictured her face. It kept shifting, it said a million different things. There was a Rosa who still hated me and always would and a Rosa who couldn’t believe she’d said that stuff and was scared I was going to kill her and a Rosa who felt bad and said she hadn’t meant any of it. I had no idea which of them was real. And there were so many voices in my head.
Go down and see her this morning, right away, say you want to talk. Take the bull by the horns.
Are you insane?
Don’t go see her. Wait till she comes to see you. When she’s ready.
What if she never comes?
Then good! What part of “I hate you” didn’t you understand?
I rolled over and put my pillow over my face. God? Help?
I didn’t want to face her and I had to face her. Oh, I wanted to run away from the whole thing—if I’d had a choice of never seeing her again I think I would have taken it, but I didn’t have that choice. If I’d had a choice of shoving it off on someone else I would have taken it, but I didn’t have that choice. It was either face Rosa now or face Rosa later. It was either treat Rosa right or treat Rosa wrong. Sometimes it just comes down to it.
And the thing was, now I understood just how bad treating Rosa wrong could backfire.
Yeah, it sounds crass. But that’s how it works sometimes. You have to stick up for yourself or people run over you. People like me. I’d wanted to tell Rosa that a hundred times. And now she’d finally done it.
I respected her for it, to tell the truth.
But boy, I did not want to get out of bed.
I stayed there with my covers over my head till Julien knocked on my door and called, “Hey! Don’t you want any breakfast?” And then I got up and did the only thing I’d been able to think of.
Well, first I got dressed and went down and ate breakfast.
Then I wrote Rosa a letter:
Dear Rosa,
I’m sorry. I have been a rotten friend. I can’t believe I made you think less of yourself, and I’m really, really sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong and it was completely unfair of me to be mad. I hope you can forgive me.
Your friend,
Magali
SO YEAH. I guess it was more of a note.
Made it look easy, didn’t I? I guess I just won’t mention how my hand seized up when I started to write “rotten friend.” Or about the twenty minutes I spent after each sentence, chewing on my pen and thinking of things to add after it, all of which added up to, But it wasn’t all my fault you know, my life is tough too! But I couldn’t do it. Because it was Rosa. Because I’d heard of righteous anger but I’d had no idea what it looks like when it’s directed at you.
And because God said I did love the kids.
So I wrote that letter. It took me an hour and a half.
I folded it up. Twice. Wondered how to seal it. Wished I’d written it in code. Went downstairs and asked my father for an envelope.
“An envelope, Magali? I don’t have very many of those. Are you mailing a letter?”
“No. Just giving it to someone.” I felt stupid. “I just … really don’t want anyone to open it.”
He handed me a piece of string. I rolled my letter up and tied it.
“Are you going into town?”
“Yeah.”
“If you would …” He rummaged in his desk. “Please give this”—an envelope—“to Mademoiselle Pinatel?”
“Sure, Papa.”
“Thank you.”
I walked down into town. It was cold, cloudy, with rain on the wind. I was scared. What if I saw her, what if I didn’t see her, who should I leave the letter with, all that. I peeked in through the café window. She wasn’t there. I went in, my heart thumping in my chest. It was warm and crowded. Madame Santoro was working the tables. Monsieur Santoro was behind the bar. He saw me.
“Rosa isn’t here.”
I held out the letter. “Please Monsieur … would you please … give her this?”
He frowned at it. “All right.”
Oh and please don’t open it, please, please.
I turned and fled.
I crossed the place du centre with Papa’s envelope in my hand and went into the bookstore
. It was open, but no one was inside. I started to lay the envelope on the desk, and stopped. It might be important. Or secret.
I went to the stairwell door at the back of the shop and knocked. Then I opened it and called up.
“Mademoiselle Pinatel? Mademoiselle?”
No answer.
I hesitated, started to lay the envelope on the steps. Then I thought it would be better to just open her apartment door and slip it inside. I started to climb.
Her apartment’s tiny. A little landing with a couple of bedrooms off it, a little living room with a desk, the walls covered with books. To my right was the room Nina’d almost died in, the year before. I’d seen it once. A narrow white room like a coffin, barely room for a chair between the bed and the desk, everything white. I glanced in. It was still the same, except for a half-burned candle and a litter of papers on the desk.
Odd-looking papers.
Sometimes I just can’t help it. That was one of the things I almost put in the letter to Rosa. Lame, I know. I took a few steps closer.
They were identity cards.
Mademoiselle Pinatel’s card lay apart from the others. The others were piled haphazardly except for the one in the center of the desk. Georges Tallier, it said. He looked vaguely familiar. His card was complete except for the fingerprints and the seals, and beside it lay a strip of some kind of gummy cloth, with a perfect backward copy of an official seal traced on it.
Like some kind of stencil.
I picked a card out of the pile with shaky hands. Nicole Saillens, it said. I looked at the picture. The picture was Nina.
The one underneath it said Etienne Michaud. The picture was Stepan.
That’s when I heard them. Feet on the stairs.
I fumbled frantically with the cards. Which one had been on top? I gave up, dashed out of the room. I’d left my envelope in there. I ran back in, grabbed it, ran out. It was around then I noticed what was odd about the footsteps.
Clicking.
There was a click of crutches, after each step. They were very close now.
I bent down by the door, trying to look like I was just delivering the envelope like I planned to. It was hopeless. The door opened.