‘Why?’
Axelle leaned towards me, whispering. ‘A few weeks ago, two babies were pulled from the river. Dead. An infant and a child of two. Everyone believes them to be sisters. Thousands of people have come to see them. Only last week someone identified them so they took the poor things off display and thawed them out – they freeze the bodies, so they don’t rot as quickly – they thawed them out and prepared them for burial. But then, a few days ago, someone else claimed the identification to be incorrect, that the children they’d been identified as were in fact alive and well and living with their mother in Chaillot. So the babes have been frozen again and put back on display.’
‘You really wanted to see this?’
‘Not exactly. But I told you. Everyone was going.’
‘And?’
‘Well, it was a unique experience. I suppose I have no regrets.’
I didn’t want to hear any more, but here she was, her knees almost touching my own, and I wanted her to tell me stories until we were hungry or hoarse, until the sky grew dark and the street lamps burned. ‘What was it like inside?’ I asked.
‘Oh. Something else. The viewing salon was dreary. Damp flagstone floor, lamps turned low. On one side of the room there was a window, wall-to-wall, and there were so many of us that at first I could see nothing. And the people were just plain rude, pushing to get a better view. One nasty little urchin mashed my toes with his dirty boots when he budged past me. But there was a guard at the door who moved the masses along, and before I could change my mind again I had been conveyed to the centre of the window and there I stood. Dead people just the other side of the glass, a mere two steps away.’
‘You saw the babies?’
‘I did. I saw them. Other bodies were laid out on tables but the babies were wrapped in red velvet, all dressed in bonnets and boots, sitting up in chairs. It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. Their skin was, I don’t know how to describe it, it was falling apart, like cheese. Clearly some sort of theatre grease had been applied to hide this, but I suppose in the end, you can’t deny death.’
A snore rumbled from Madame’s room then, almost like a machine coming to life. Axelle giggled. ‘Will she sleep for very long?’ she asked.
‘Another hour at least,’ I said. From across the road, the hysteric trill-dance of piano. Axelle looked to the window, then to the clock on the mantel, and I feared that now she had finished with her story, she would leave. ‘Are you sure you won’t take coffee? Something sweet?’ I asked. ‘Madame always keeps a bit of chocolate or bergamot.’
‘Wait, I almost forgot.’ She opened her reticule and brought out a small paper bag, shiny with patches of oil. She patted the empty seat next to her. ‘Come,’ she said. ‘Something for you.’
I moved to sit next to her and peered into the paper bag, which she held open. Inside, like baby mice nestled together, cashews. Lovely. Coated in oil and grains of sugar and salt.
‘Not precisely the same as the ones we were forbidden by your Madame, but it was the closest I could find.’
I dipped my fingers into the bag, picked out a nut and put it in my mouth. I didn’t like it. Bits of cashew stuck stubbornly in my teeth and there was too much salt, but Axelle had gone to the trouble. I reached for another cashew and, as I struggled to get it out of the bag without ripping the paper, Axelle touched my face. She touched my cheek with the backs of her fingers. Her lips on the tip of my nose, a kiss.
I kept my fingers in the bag, unsure of whether or not I had imagined this kiss and wondering if I should pull out another nut, and . . . My heart? It dissolved like sugar on the tongue.
‘Have you ever been with a man?’ she asked.
‘I’ve never been with anyone.’ In this moment I could smell everything. Everything. The salt the oil the morning coffee her skin.
‘I see the way you look at me. You look at me as if you want to breathe me.’
‘Do I?’
Her lips on my lips, so quickly it almost didn’t happen. I couldn’t breathe at all.
She moved away then. As if nothing. She asked for a bergamot sweet and, when I came back from the kitchen, carrying a small plate of them and feeling as if I’d been slapped or woken abruptly from deep sleep, she had put her gloves back on and was preparing to leave.
‘Will you come again?’ I asked her in the vestibule. The sounds of Madame from down the hall: a body rolling in layers of blanket and sheeting, a low moan.
Axelle glanced towards Madame Debord’s room. ‘You had better tend to that,’ she said, ‘and perhaps we’ll see each other tomorrow.’
* * *
Axelle did not return the following day, though while Madame slept I read in the salon and pretended to myself that I wasn’t waiting and that I wasn’t looking for her out of the window. She didn’t come the next day or the next, and it must have been a week before the grey face of Monsieur Muller appeared at the door with her letter, which explained that she had been very ill but that she was better now, and that she would like to visit the following afternoon.
Which she did. Sitting together on the sofa, her hands on my face smelled of October and almonds. Madame was asleep down the hall and Axelle, chewing on her lower lip, pulled my shawl from my shoulders and undid the buttons at the collar of my blouse, and she pressed her lips to my neck. She pulled her face away and looked at me as if I were something to be read.
‘What are you looking at?’ I asked.
‘You. You’re fortunate to have naturally pale skin.’
‘Oh.’
Upstairs where the Russian family lived, something heavy dropped to the floor, and then panicked footsteps. The quick, muffled draft of an argument in a rhythm that had become familiar to me.
Axelle’s hands were at my waist. ‘You’re covered in gooseflesh,’ she said, and kissed me.
This time, this first time, was a fumble. We remained clothed, pecking at the edges of each other to where we were barred by buttons and petticoats and corsets. I was afraid – not of being caught; Madame Debord slept for hours and never got out of bed without my help. I was afraid of the way her touch triggered a kind of thickening inside my body, something like inebriation. When Axelle left that afternoon, I felt as if my own clothes could not contain me, and when I put my head on my pillow that night I found that my eyes would not close and that she had become everything. I stayed awake most of the night, sleeping a little at dawn, only to wake and be pummelled again by the sweetest thoughts of Axelle Paquet.
* * *
In the middle of October, Axelle and I sat outside together at a small cafe not far from La Samaritaine. Axelle, careful not to look me in the eye in public, read to me some gossip out of La Presse – a cuckolded man had been accused of pushing his wife down a flight of stairs – while I sipped my coffee and picked at an apple tart with the tines of a silly little dessert fork.
‘I’ve been worrying,’ she said, folding the newspaper on our pedestal table, ‘that I’ve made a dreadful mistake.’ She spoke with her eyes on the street and my heart kicked at my ribs.
‘Oh?’
‘Do you think,’ she said, leaning towards me, ‘that because I’ve seen those dead people, do you think I could have brought a curse upon myself? Do you think it was mocking of me to visit that place?’
‘Mocking towards whom?’ I asked, relieved that my heart, for now, was safe.
‘The dead. I feel like I’ve seen something that can’t be unseen.’
‘That’s true of everything you see.’
She nodded, pleating the edge of the newspaper like a fan. ‘Do you think though,’ Axelle went on, ‘that I might have drawn the wrong sort of attention to myself, you know, from Death?’
‘You do spend a lot of your time at its fringes,’ I said.
She frowned. ‘I’m being serious and you’re making fun of me.’
I
grabbed her hand, only to assure her that I had been joking, and she quickly pulled it away, shifted her eyes to the tables around us.
Because when we were out there, outside Madame’s cosy, shabby salon, Axelle was not the same person as she was when we were alone; one ear, each of us, alert to the sleep of an old woman down the hall, when Axelle pressed her fingers to the sides of my face or when she unlocked me with a kiss, or when she peeled away my corset shell and lifted my chemise over my head and took my small breast, my beating heart, into her mouth. When her tongue was at my ear and her breath how I imagined the ocean would sound, when her fingers like a pestle stone found me.
When we lay naked together (very quickly we grew bold and naked and entitled) we compared our bodies. Axelle was curved and plump and warm, with shiny white tracks traversing the terrain of her thighs where the skin had stretched in growth. The hair at her pubic bone was tawny and rose freely from her body, whereas mine was black, wiry and slick. She had a beautiful potted belly, and if a hundred cakes would have given me a belly like that I would have eaten every one of them, but my body never held on to fat.
Outside the cafe where we sat that day and spoke of death, a chill wind blew up the boulevard, carrying bits of paper and leaves and the smell of leaves. On the road in front of us, a team of men unloaded large sacks of flour from the back of a sagging cart, a cart pulled by two muscular, black and shaggy horses. A pall of flour hung in the cold air about them, whisked into swirls by the horses’ stamping hooves, and the sight of it, the flour dissipating in the air, made me feel mocked – reminded me how loose my hold was on this love I so badly wanted. I was partially, but not wholly, aware of my own stupidity.
* * *
Over the following weeks, as October moved into November, Paris lost its colour but I. I was in love. The river roiled brown and, with weeks of rain, gained momentum like a whipped horse. After the rains, the clouds moved on and the temperature plummeted under a sky pale blue. At night, I shivered in my bed, barely able to sleep, and in the mornings, I would go to my window to see the city frosted white. The chimney smoke that hung over the slate rooftops would catch the early sun and the whole world glowed.
Axelle and I took whatever we could. Mostly in the salon, sometimes in my bedroom, always when Madame was having her nap. Once, only an hour into her sleep, Madame called for me while Axelle and I lay face to face on my bed. She was running her finger along my jawline and I was tumbling deep and blind, and then there was Madame’s voice calling me back up to the surface, and I came up for breath and we both, Axelle and I, froze. Fish-eyed and dumb, we stared at one another, her fingers resting on the blood-pulse of my neck, her knee prodding in between my legs. I rose from the bed, shaking, and stumbled to Madame’s dark bedroom, to the smell of flatulence and wine.
‘What is it?’ I asked her.
‘I’m thirsty.’
‘There’s a glass of water next to your bed, Madame. Where it always is.’
‘Well, it’s been knocked over or something else. There is no water here.’ Then, the sound of a drinking glass toppling, rolling, water dripping from the bedside table on to the floor. ‘Oh,’ she said.
I brought her another drink and a cloth to clean the spill, and, in the semi-darkness, mopped the water from the floor. ‘Will you be getting up soon?’
‘Not likely.’
‘Is there anything else you need?’
There was a moment of silence while she considered this, and then a hesitant, ‘No.’ One tiny word loaded with the awareness that something wasn’t right.
* * *
And it wasn’t long after that, maybe a few days, that I answered the door to find Axelle flustered, flaring at the nostrils.
‘That toad of a concierge,’ she said, pushing past me. ‘He was watching me strangely just now.’ There was the smell of perfume on her but also wood smoke and leaves.
‘He can’t know anything. You’re a friend who comes calling.’
‘Well. We’ve got his attention. And he’ll gossip. They all get together like hens. It’ll come back to your Madame before we know it.’
‘I’ll tell her I’m teaching you how to sew.’
‘I already know how to sew.’
‘It’s as good a story as any.’
That evening, sitting together in the salon and going over the day’s expenses, I told Madame about Axelle’s visits, and explained that she had been coming during Madame’s naps because those were the hours I had free to give. I told her it had only been a few times, and apologized for having had a visitor without her consent.
‘There’s something unsavoury about that girl,’ she muttered, squinting at my small print, the most recent entries on the accounts ledger. ‘She’s bold.’
‘She’s a friend who needs assistance.’
Her face remained sceptical. ‘How can someone of her age and upbringing not know how to sew?’ Madame said. ‘Ridiculous.’
‘Isn’t it? I had to help. And I thought it might reflect well on you.’ I poured a little more brandy into her glass and felt immediately guilty.
* * *
And what a peculiar thing it was, to become as familiar as we did with one another’s bodies. The position of freckles and moles, the way the muscles moved with the bones, the curls of hair at the back of the neck or the particular odour of the skin after climax. The idea of nakedness became much more profound than the simple uncovering of skin. When, with my eyes closed, I kissed all the parts of Axelle’s body, I imagined that I was painting her into existence, as if she hadn’t been a part of the world until she was a part of the world with me.
A November Sunday. Walking along the river on a day that was crisp and sunny: Axelle, Madame Debord and I. After a short distance, Madame grew tired so we found a bench and settled her there. I left Madame and Axelle on the bench, and ventured a few paces upriver to where a vendor sold cakes and tarts and roasted nuts kept warm over a wood fire. I purchased three small pistachio cakes, dusted with powdered sugar and lovely green flakes, because they were pretty, and because I was happy and foolish. When I turned, Axelle was beside me, eyeing the cakes as the vendor wrapped them neatly in paper.
‘I wouldn’t generally eat cake this early in the day,’ she said.
‘Today you shall,’ I said, pulling coins from my purse. I kept one eye on Madame, who watched us like a baby bird. ‘I love you,’ I whispered, handing her the parcel of cake.
She looked away, then shook her head and laughed. ‘Qu’est-ce que je vais faire de toi?’ she said. What am I going to do with you?
20
Nora
Ottawa River, 1987
Nora sat comfortably in the high driver’s seat of Red’s truck. The truck was an obvious choice for the drive to the hospital in Toronto; safer, and there were chains in the flatbed if the snow got really bad. Before they got as far south as Fowlers Corners, the snow was already coming down strong, fists of it buffeting the windshield. The heat in the truck blasted dry air, making her drowsy, but Anouk, feverish and cocooned in a sleeping bag in the back seat, was cold. Nora cracked her window open an inch and the deep pulse of cold air hurt her ears.
After a few minutes of this, Red said, ‘Can you close the window, please.’
‘I’m sorry. The heating is putting me to sleep.’
‘Should I drive?’
She glanced at him quickly. ‘If you want to, but. My eyes are better than yours.’
Under all this snow the world was like the waiting womb. They passed a few cars but were otherwise alone, and then for several kilometres there were no other tracks on the road. Then, a faint double line of a vehicle having turned on from a side road, the track already mostly filled.
The radio was on and the voices began to deteriorate, to skip with static, so Nora reached over to turn it off and now the only sounds were the blow of the heater and the flap of air thr
ough the window. It had been a week since Nora told Red about Jody, and other than those few words the first night, nothing had been said.
Maybe life could be like this, like a finger broken and never treated, healed but crooked. Or a leg. You could walk with a limp for ever. You could get used to anything.
Red: ‘I think we should put the chains on.’ With Red now, everything was a statement, terminal.
‘It’s not that bad.’
‘So we wait until it gets bad, then put them on.’
‘No. I’m just saying. When we stop to eat, we’ll put them on. Don’t you think?’
‘Whatever you think.’ He shifted away and rested his head against the window and closed his eyes.
Not yet noon, but Nora had to turn on the headlights. She kept a steady foot on the accelerator and kilometres passed in silence. The land here was hilly. The road swerved around bends, up and over hills that broke one after the next. Nora took it slowly. Should have stopped to put on the chains when Red suggested it but now, with the visibility so poor, there was nowhere safe to pull over.
The road descended steeply and they came to a single-lane bridge that spanned a river, a cut of black water bleeding a track in the snow. Nora slowed to a crawl, beeped the horn to warn any oncoming vehicles of their approach, as she knew that the road on the other side took a sharp, hidden turn to the left. They crossed the bridge and took the left, which quickly inclined. Nora slipped the truck into first gear and hit the accelerator hard, and the truck fishtailed slightly, the engine whining. She lost the gear and stalled. Looked sideways at Red. He was sitting forward, shaking his head. Nora pulled the emergency brake and restarted the engine, then bit hard with first gear and eased off the brake. The truck jolted up and over the lip of the hill and swung towards the side ditch. Nora spun the wheel with the turn to avoid the skid and the truck straightened out. A tree in the middle of the road and she hit it square. And time stopped on the inhale. A crunch. Nora’s head whipped forward. Her seat belt dug into her neck, and then there was the seize of inertia, then no thought or movement, only the exhale. Truck silent. Nora reached into the back seat to touch Anouk but couldn’t feel her. She unclipped her seat belt and leaned over the seat and saw that Anouk had rolled on to the floor of the truck, still in her sleeping bag, eyes wide open.
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