Monsieur Muller cleared his throat. ‘A plasterer from the Compagnons. Name is Nicolas. Count yourself lucky we got him today.’
‘Thank you, Monsieur Muller.’ I turned to the young man. ‘Can Monsieur do cabinets as well?’
He nodded.
I opened the door wide and pointed him down the hallway, and watched as he ferried his tools from the stairwell into the kitchen: a tin bucket loaded with speckled trowels and a brush, a broom, a heavy metal case and a large bundle of thick, dusty sheeting.
In a low, sour voice, close to my ear, Monsieur Muller: ‘Do not pay him until the work is complete. He looks like he can’t say no to a drink.’
‘You’re certain he’s from the Compagnons?’
‘Every institution has its rogues, non?’
‘And I suppose this was the best you could do.’
‘As I said. Count yourself lucky.’
Madame refused to leave her room. She sat on her bed, facing the window, fidgeting with her clothing – pulling at the neck of her blouse, twisting the fringe from her shawl tightly about her fingers. When I suggested we go for a walk, she baulked.
‘He’ll steal everything. We’ll come home and there won’t be a cushion to sit on.’
‘What is your solution, then?’ I asked, gently. ‘You can’t stay in your room all day, all week. We don’t even know how long this is going to take.’
‘You go out there with him. Find out how long he’ll be, and how much this is going to cost. Blast that scoundrel Muller.’
In the kitchen, Nicolas had arranged the sheeting over the counter and was laying out his tools.
‘This apartment has running water,’ he said, his eyes on my forehead. ‘Makes my job easier.’
‘Well, I’m glad of that.’
‘Mademoiselle should probably not be here.’ He picked up his crowbar from where it lay on the floor and faced the wall with it poised next to his head. ‘This work is dirty and loud.’ He glanced over his shoulder at me.
‘Please wait,’ I said. ‘We haven’t yet agreed on your fee.’
‘Didn’t the concierge already tell you?’
‘No.’
He leaned his crowbar against the wall, straightened his hat. Squared his shoulders. ‘I won’t discuss my fee with a woman,’ he said.
‘Well, we have a problem then, because it is only women who live here. You may as well pack up your things and count this as a wasted day.’
He tightened his mouth, tried to appear fierce. A boy.
I looked at him and said nothing more. If I learned one useful thing from Tante Huguette, it was the power of silence.
He lowered his face so that it was mainly hidden by the rim of his cap. ‘Four francs per day. Plus materials.’
His wage, cheaper than I expected for Paris, betrayed his low rank in the Compagnons. ‘And how many days do you predict this will take? Can you estimate the cost of materials?’
He kicked at the dusty floor before answering. ‘Five or six days, at least. Have to let this wall dry out before I plaster it again, and it will take me at least half a day to source the materials for the shelving and cupboards.’ He put his hand to his chin, stroked it where sparse, wiry hairs grew. Instead of forming a square jawline, the skin of his neck made a straight sloping run from the bottom of his chin to just above the sternum, like the sag of a crane. ‘It should be about five, six francs for wood and nails, hinges and handles. You’ll want treated wood and nails, of course.’
I had taken out the notebook and pencil I still carried in the pocket of my skirt and began to write.
‘But that’s only an estimate,’ he said, glancing at the notebook. ‘The final addition could be more.’
‘Can’t you use the hinges and handles from the old cabinets? The nails?’
He bent to the pile of rubble in the corner and sifted through it, collected a few small bits and showed me. In his palm lay two twisted and rusty nails, like a pair of dead insects. ‘These were flimsy to begin with. Impossible to use again.’ He went back to the pile and raised the corner of a fallen cabinet with the toe of his boot. ‘I’ll recover these hinges, but the handles are out of fashion. Wouldn’t your Madame like to try something new? I can bring a catalogue, with drawings and everything.’
‘Perhaps we can sell the old handles,’ I said. ‘I’ll discuss it with Madame. Don’t throw anything anyway or purchase any metal finishings without consulting us first.’
He tipped his hat to me.
Simply because he had told me not to, and also because I was emboldened by the haggle, feeling very much that I had won, I remained in the doorway and watched while he used the hammer and crowbar to break away the plaster at the edges of the scraggy hole. As he did this, he tapped the wall, searching for where the damp ended and the dry, sound plaster began. Dust rose in the small space and I covered my mouth with my shawl, suppressed a cough. The plasterer hummed a tune of his own making and soon, my nose and the back of my throat became dry with dust. I could taste it. Eventually, most of the wall was exposed to reveal weathered laths running in neat, horizontal rows. I ran my eyes over the wall. Walked up to it and touched the bitumen-hard mud, pulled at a few strands of horsehair, brittle and orange. I sniffed deeply and discovered I liked the smell of damp wood and cold mud. Wouldn’t it be curious, I thought, to uncover something old and forgotten. A necklace that marked a betrayal, or bones, or a tooth. Something like that.
Nicolas spent the rest of the day filling sacks with rubble and clearing out the mess. I was grateful, dirty and worn out when he finally left at half past six in the evening. In spite of his belligerence, he’d swept and arranged his tools neatly in the corner of the kitchen, leaving nothing behind but some chalky boot prints.
* * *
On the fourth day, the new plaster dry and the cabinets almost complete, I asked Nicolas to give me the hinges and handles so I could sell them. The day before, I had asked Audette the laundry girl to sit with Madame, and had taken a stack of newspapers to five different boucheries, a walk that occupied most of the day. I asked each butcher if he knew where I might sell or trade old cupboard handles, and was given the name of a reputable metalworker whose workshop was not far away. Madame liked the idea of new handles for new cupboards, and I wanted to achieve this for her. And while doing all this I thought of Tante Huguette. Just watch how I can take care of things, I thought. And I thought of Axelle. Just watch how I can take care of you.
Nicolas, at first, pretended he couldn’t hear me. I had to ask twice. ‘The handles?’ I said. ‘I’ve got a man who might be interested in them.’ I swept my hand over the new, smooth wall. It was cool and satisfying to touch, and smelled of the earth, of the parts of the earth that saw no light. The seam where new plaster met old was almost imperceptible. Work worthy of an aspirant in the Compagnons – in spite of his dishevelled look and seedy demeanour.
‘They were worthless,’ he said. ‘I dumped them with the rest of the rubbish.’ He pinched a few slender nails from a pot and held them between his lips, took one and held it to a length of wood.
I put my hand on his arm to stop him working.
He looked at my hand, as if it had scorched him, then at my face, then slowly removed the nails from his mouth. There was an inflamed red spot at the side of his nose.
‘That’s precisely the opposite of what I asked you to do,’ I said. ‘I know all about the Compagnons. I know what they do to thieves.’
‘You don’t know anything.’
‘My father was a baker, a sédentaire. He spoke often of his tour and all the ceremony and the rules. He was very proud.’
‘I didn’t steal anything.’
‘The handles,’ I said, ‘and the hinges, or perhaps the money you now carry in your pocket, will be returned to Madame Debord by this afternoon. If not, it won’t be hard for me to find your Compagnon hous
e. I could ask there for the handles?’ I removed my hand from his arm. ‘I only want this job done well. I have no desire to get you into trouble.’
He sniffed sharply, then looked up, alarmed. Madame Debord was standing in the doorway, watching us, watching me.
‘I wonder,’ she said, addressing me, ‘if we might go for a walk. I cannot stand the dust for another minute, and I think we can leave Monsieur here on his own.’
In the vestibule, as I helped Madame with her coat, I asked her if she wasn’t worried he might steal from us. She looked at me, with a respect no one had ever afforded me in all my life, and said, ‘No. Somehow I don’t think he will.’
When we returned a few hours later, Madame a little sleepy after a glass of wine in the charcuterie, I found that a small collection of francs and centimes had been left on the dusty kitchen counter, the money weighted in place by a triangular shard of porcelain.
* * *
That night, while Madame drank her liqueur in bed, we sat companionably in candlelight. She tucked in blankets and I in my dressing gown, darning a pair of stockings. The work soothed me, each pull of thread and tug of fabric, and the stitching fell into the rhythm of Madame’s breathing as she settled into sleep, and soon the job was done and I laid the stockings in my lap.
I watched snow fall outside the window in large, airy, moonlit bundles, snow that would not be there in the morning. I thought about how I had come to this place, how it passed that I now sat alone in this room with a woman who had been, essentially, a stranger. A woman who depended on me wholly and whom, I realized, I enjoyed looking after. I was good at it. And I wondered: how had I travelled so, so far from home? I thought about Tante Huguette, a woman who had been given no choice but to raise me and whose life was now, it seemed, tremendously improved without me in it.
Snow tumbled, rolled softly, only to melt once it hit the wet ground, and I thought about my father, bones in a pine box sunk in the earth next to a similar box containing the bones of my mother. Who was dead because of me.
My family – my father, my grandmother, my dispassionate aunt – had never been good at remembering their dead. I knew almost nothing of my mother’s parents or her parents’ parents. I knew very little of my father’s ancestry. My grandmother had a brother who’d been kicked in the head by a horse when he was six years old. I knew that the incident had left him blind, but I did not know his name.
Snow fell and I wondered: is it death when your heart stops beating? When you stop taking breath? Is it death when the rivers that run through your mind turn black? Is it death when the last living creature that feeds off your body has picked the bones dry? Or is it death, finally, when there is no one left alive who remembers you? It seemed not many generations needed to pass before one’s existence was completely forgotten. As if she had never been.
Madame had fallen asleep with her liqueur glass in her hand. I slipped it from her fingers and set it on the table, and blew out the candle. The wick glowed red, then faded, then disappeared and there was nothing left but the sweet smell of paraffin wax.
Madame spoke, a bodiless voice in the dark. ‘You won’t leave, will you?’
‘I’ll stay until you’re asleep.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’
I knew she was thinking about her babies. Her grief was there in the room with us – it always was. It came from a part of her that saw no light. I felt for her hand in the dark, took it in mine, and kissed it.
* * *
Neither Nicolas nor I said anything about the money, and I believed the matter was resolved. Soon enough the cabinets were ready to be mounted on the wall, complete with new hinges that I had purchased myself, forged by the metalworker who’d been recommended to me by the butcher. The handles, purchased from the same metalworker, would be delivered in a week’s time. Madame had given me the responsibility of choosing them myself, and what I’d selected was simple and elegant. Nicolas had been right: new cupboards needed new handles.
It was half a day’s work for Nicolas to put up the new cupboards and shelves, and I was glad to pay him and see him off, though he would be back the following week to fit the metal finishings. He was surly and greasy and arrogant and immature, and was as repelled by me as I was by him.
And then, Axelle. I hadn’t seen her since the cupboards came down and I was aching. I wrote to her and asked her to come but heard nothing back. I wrote every day for a week to no reply, and I looked for her at La Samaritaine. I was told she had left the perfume counter for another position. Finally, on a Friday while Madame slept, a knock at the door. I knew it was Axelle and, as soon as I opened the door, I kissed her. Her whole body was rigid. She pulled away.
‘Don’t be such an idiot,’ she whispered, her voice fierce, from the throat.
‘Madame is fast asleep.’
‘I don’t mean her. Anyone could see us.’
‘There’s no one here but us.’ I took hold of her hand and tried to pull her closer, but her body tensed like a cat.
‘I’m not staying,’ she said. ‘I’ve only come to tell you. Stop writing, and for goodness’ sake, don’t come looking for me.’
‘What?’
A creak on the stairs made us both freeze and we stared at one another, waiting for someone to come up. I listened for another moment, sure I could hear someone breathing. Axelle began to turn away, to leave.
‘You can’t just—’
‘It’s happening, chérie. The position I’ve wanted all this time. Modelling the dresses. I can’t go running around playing these little-girl games anymore. Everything is different now.’
‘It was never a game.’
She stared at me with a look that was shattering and horrendous and foul: pity. She shook my hand and turned, descended two or three steps, and stopped. Looked up at me over her shoulder. Half her face was concealed by the lilac ribbon that draped from her hat, the same shade of lilac I had once seen woven into the seams of her chemise. ‘I won’t forget you,’ she said, and then she turned the corner of the stairs and was gone. I stood, holding on to the door frame, for a lot longer than any person should.
24
Pieter
The Koie, 1955
Bear, for your fourth birthday, we packed you and your sister into the car with blankets and pillows and boxes of food, with beach balls and paddles, fishing nets and poles, and we drove out of the city on the motorway that followed the river of Bjerkreim. You’d been on this drive before, but this was the first time you were old enough to appreciate what you were seeing out of the window; forest and lush summer farms, the deep gorge. I always loved this drive along the river; it was never boring. Sometimes the riverbed was so wide that the water ran smooth and still. In other places, where the land closed in on the river like a vice, the water surged and kicked and frothed.
We stopped at a rest spot on the side of the motorway for lunch, and, after we ate, we found a path through a cluster of trees that led to a small beach. Not really a beach, more a spit of coarse sand. The water here was deep and iron-red. It moved quickly, was ripped in a pattern of sharp ridges of white water. Your mother spread out a blanket and I lay on my back, rested my head on my arms. I closed my eyes and felt the hands of the sun settle on my face. I was just about to tip into sleep when you landed on my chest, forcing the breath out of me. You climbed me like a lion cub, pulling my nose and ears, your elbow in my face, your knee in my stomach. You travelled over my face and there was the tang of urine. I shrugged you off on to the sand.
‘Bear,’ I said, ‘did you have an accident?’
You sat up, sand in your hair, trying to hide the wet patch between your legs. ‘No,’ you said.
‘You did, I can smell it. Merete,’ I said to your mother. ‘He’s pissed himself.’
‘So take off his trousers,’ she said. She was also lying on her back, holding a book up with one straight arm.
‘You can wash him in the river.’
‘Can you not do it?’ I asked.
To this, I got no reply. I made a big deal of sighing and puffing, and picked you up by the waist and carried you over my shoulder like a sack of flour to the water’s edge. Tilda had already made her way over to a low-hanging suspension bridge that crossed the river twenty or so metres upstream, and was halfway across, bouncing, the bridge rippling under her. As soon as you saw this, you tried to abscond, but I caught you by the waistband of your trousers.
‘Come here, you rascal,’ I said. You squirmed in my arms and began to cry, reaching your arms towards your sister, as if she could rescue you. I pulled off your shoes and socks, stuffed the socks carefully in the shoes, and placed them neatly side by side on the sand. This distracted you enough that I could pull off your wet trousers and underpants. You immediately covered your bits with both hands.
‘Since when are you shy, Little Bear?’ I asked, dousing your clothes in the cold water. I scooped a palmful of the pebbly sand to scrub the gusset of your trousers. ‘Nobody’s interested in your fishing tackle,’ I said.
You looked at me doubtfully, and I scooped up more water to wash between your legs. You wouldn’t let me though, and so I left it. ‘Suit yourself,’ I said.
‘Pappa!’ you squealed. Your modesty no longer important, you pointed with both hands at the river. You were jumping up and down. ‘Look at the fish!’
I turned quickly to look, but of course, the fish you had seen was already gone. The jumping fish gives you one chance only. As does the shooting star. Or the baby kicking inside the womb. I stood staring at the moving water, hoping the fish would surface again, and when I looked back at you, you had gone up the beach towards the bridge. I watched you scramble up the bank and stand at the end of the bridge. I watched your sister run to the far side and I watched you try to follow her. But you fell, the motion of the bridge too much for your short legs. Tilda ran back to you and instead of helping you up, jumped with knees bent so that you bounced like a doll. I watched you two, your sister laughing and you crying and frustrated, and I knew I should go to you but you were both too beautiful and strange with the sun shining on you and the river surging past, not more than three metres below. I didn’t want the moment to end.
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