Coming Up for Air

by Sarah Leipciger

  Toronto, 2018

  Three weeks after her fortieth birthday, Nora’s daughter is called in for surgery. Nora and Anouk arrive at the hospital just after 8 p.m. and Anouk signs the forms she needs to sign and her sputum is analysed for bugs. She’s fitted with a cannula, and then her transplant surgeon comes into the room and tells her it’s not going to happen tonight after all. The surgeon who removed the donor’s lungs has determined they’re not viable.

  One month later, another pair of lungs become available and they’re sweet as peaches, but Anouk is in the hospital, immobile with pulmonary infection. It’s hardly her daughter lying there in that bed, and there’s a chance she won’t ever be well enough again for transplant.

  But Anouk does recover enough to go home, and eight more weeks pass. Once again, the call comes, and Nora and Anouk are in a taxi bound for St Michael’s Hospital.

  ‘I don’t know if I can take this again,’ says Nora.

  They sit at either window in the back seat, looking out, but their arms are extended towards each other, fingers grasped loosely together. It’s January, just after 7 a.m. They have stopped at a red light. The city is peaceful. It’s dark and it’s stone frigid. The sky is the colour of copper and the streetlights cast a yellow glow on the ground, and in each of their halos can be seen a cascade of frozen crystals sifting to the earth. This is the consummate moment. If the surgery goes ahead today, Nora will either still have a daughter at the end of it or she won’t. This truth is as definitive and indivisible as each one of those goddamn snowflakes falling to the ground.

  The hospital is transforming from night to day when they arrive. The heavy main doors swing with people arriving to their shifts, but many of the corridors remain dark. As they pass through the main foyer, there is the grating squeak of a metal grille opening, revealing the coffee-shop counter. A stack of newspapers bound tightly with plastic waits in front of the still-closed stationery store. A young doctor in green scrubs and rubber shoes walks past thumbing her phone. All of these details are acute and frightening. Whatever happens, these are the last hours the world will feel exactly. Like this.

  There won’t be a lot of waiting. If this is going to work, the lungs need to be connected to Anouk’s blood supply within a few hours. This is the sort of language Nora uses, the language of medicine, of mechanics.

  The medical team won’t disclose how the donor died, only that the lungs were helicoptered into the Toronto Island airport. The donor will only have died hours ago and the lungs are probably here now. There won’t be a lot of waiting at all.

  Another metal chair by another tightly made bed in another room with lights that hum. Consent forms to receive blood, to receive the organ itself, have been signed already but they have to go through the rigmarole again. General risks of surgery. Possible bypass during the procedure and the risks of. Risks of being anaesthetized. Risk of stroke, of bleeding, of needing a transfusion. Anouk nods and nods and nods. They’re briefly left alone.

  ‘I think it’s happening this time,’ says Nora.

  Anouk is still nodding, like some kind of mechanical toy winding down. Nora checks her phone. Eleven messages from Mel.

  ‘What are you going to do for breakfast?’ Anouk asks.

  ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Did you remember your book?’

  Nora looks in her bag. No book. The clock on the wall has a white face with plain numbers and no second hand. ‘No more coughing,’ she says.

  ‘No more physio,’ says Anouk.

  ‘All that free time you’re going to have.’ Nora thinks she should say something else, something more significant than this chatter, something maternal. And then a nurse comes in, wheeling at her hip a trolley of instruments for inserting a cannula. She pulls a green curtain around the bed to separate Anouk from the other patients in the room. She tells Anouk that one of the specialists from the CF clinic phoned and sends her best wishes.

  The nurse offers Anouk a pill. ‘This is a mild sedative,’ she says, holding out a tiny paper cup, ‘to take the edge off. It’ll relax you. You don’t have to take it.’

  ‘I’ll take it,’ says Anouk.

  ‘Slip it under your tongue,’ says the nurse. ‘Just let it dissolve.’

  These are the last hours the world will feel exactly. Like this.

  With two fingers, her hand shaking, Anouk places the pill under her tongue. She closes her eyes, presses her lips together. The nurse begins to prepare Anouk’s hand for the cannula and there’s something, Nora knows it, something she should say that will help or guide or instruct, something like that, but all she can manage: ‘My baby. I love you.’

  Anouk

  The operating theatre smells like metal and antiseptic. It smells like rubber. Anouk wears a blue paper cap, and its elasticated hem is hot and itchy against her forehead and the paper smells like disinfectant. The ceiling seems very far away. She’s thinking of a poem she knows, can’t remember the name of the poet, she’s thinking of the words to a poem she knows where the poet is on the operating table and starts to hallucinate about the hairs on the anaesthetist’s arms, hairs that are thick, red and curly like little coppery ferns. He wants to reach up and touch the hairs because, he thinks, it may be the last thing he ever sees. But he’s afraid that if he does something like that, does something so irrational as to reach up and curl his fingers into the thick hair of the anaesthetist’s arms, and then survives, he’ll be laughed at later on. But very soon, he stops caring about whether or not people are going to laugh at him, and when he tries to reach up to touch the hairs, which have now become little jets of fire, he discovers that his arms have been strapped to the table.

  Anouk, drugged, lifts one limp wrist to ensure she has not been strapped to the table. A radio plays somewhere, jazz. A saxophone requires great physical effort, she thinks. The stretching of the cheeks, the trachea, the flexing of the tongue. The strength of the arms, the abdomen muscles and diaphragm. The lungs. The lungs. Her legs are lovely and warm and the smell of detergent, of sterilized metal, is also lovely and warm.

  The anaesthetist comes into view, and he’s speaking but she can’t concentrate on what he says. This is the person who will cast her away to sleep, who will do her breathing for her and then. This is the person who will bring her back. Now, he asks her to do something and she isn’t quite sure what he’s asked, but, seeing as her life is in his hands, she feels obliged to react in some way, to do some thing, so she sings.

  ‘Michael row the boat ashore, hallelujah. Michael row the boat ashore, hallelu-u-jah.’ This is the song the anaesthetist sings in the poem, and it’s the last thing the poet hears before he loses consciousness. ‘The River Jordan is muddy and cold, hallelujah.’

  The anaesthetist’s eyes crescent as if he’s smiling – he has no mouth – and he says something to someone standing on the other side of the bed. No, he’s speaking to her.

  ‘. . . going to sting. The propofol. It’s coming now. You’ll feel it burning but only for a short time.’

  She raises her hand, the cannulated hand, and as she does she sees a white liquid travelling up the plastic tube that is attached to her hand. It hurts a goddamn lot. And then a mask is placed over her nose and mouth. It smells like rubber.

  ‘Breathe deeply,’ says the anaesthetist. His voice is river silt. Move to capture it and it’s gone.

  Anouk tries to turn her head but she is drowning.

  44

  L’Inconnue

  Paris, 1903

  The original mask that depicted my dead face, having attracted no attention whatsoever, was packed away with the mould on a bottom shelf in the messy storage shack of the Mouleur Statuaire. The crate in which it was entombed gathered dust for four years amongst the detritus of broken and rejected statuary: half an angel’s wing, a bust of Montesquieu missing its nose, stacks of crumbled cornicing. The young mouleur eventually moved on
to another, more senior position in Reims, and forgot all about the death mask of the unknown woman.

  It was the girl who swept, the girl who’d been mistaken as simple-minded by the young mouleur, who eventually found the box and opened it. Seventeen by this time, her mind was riotous with schemes and ingenuity. One wet Sunday morning a few days after her discovery, while everyone else was either sleeping or at church, she let herself into the atelier and stole the crate – mask and mould together – and brought it home to show her mother, father and four brothers. While the spring rain misted the windows of their cramped loft apartment, she lovingly dusted the mask, turning it in her hands and explaining to her family the technique required to produce such a perfect, unblemished piece of plasterwork (the young mouleur would have been so proud had he known this, because praise, even from a girl cleaner of the lowest order, was, for him, like catnip). She lied, naturally, telling her parents it was going to be thrown out anyway, and that she had asked as a favour if she could take it home.

  ‘C’est morbide,’ said the mother, crossing herself. ‘I don’t want it here.’

  ‘There are no such things as favours,’ said the father.

  ‘I’ll keep it next to my bed,’ said one of the brothers.

  ‘I bet you will,’ said another.

  ‘I’m selling it,’ said the girl who swept.

  Because when she had first seen it, she sensed an opportunity. She saw a face that would, with its laconic smile, transcend time and fact. Smooth as cream, a face on to which anyone could paint anything they wanted. It was pretty but not too pretty. Innocent but also wise. The girl who swept was a person whose instincts were sharp. She was someone who knew. The girl had toiled under rag and broom for years, looking up at the pale and the serious, the death masks of Napoleon, Dante, Voltaire, Goethe, etc., and here, finally, was somebody else who, to put it simply, knew.

  The girl who swept used a wooden trolley, also pilfered from the mouleur statuaire (and which also closely resembled the wheeled platform used by that foul-mouthed vagabond with no legs), to transport the crate from model shop to model shop. At her first stop she told the keeper that the face depicted by the mask belonged to a poor, innocent shop girl who had fallen in love with a philandering rentier. The rentier, in turn, had assured her he had the connections necessary to catapult her dream career as a (and the girl who swept stumbled on this detail, as the story had taken an unexpected twist; she hadn’t understood until that moment the whimsical nature of story to spontaneously awaken in this way, to live and to breathe. She quickly settled on singer as there’d been a playbill advertising a concert plastered on the wall outside the model shop). The rentier, she continued, had the connections necessary to catapult her dream career as a singer. When the innocent girl fell too much in love, according to the girl who swept, the rentier bolted out of Paris like a whipped horse, leaving no forwarding address, and the heartsick songbird threw her wretched self into the river. The girl who swept didn’t think I would object to this fiction. She had seen it in my dead face: transcendence.

  When asked the name of the innocent drowned woman, the girl replied that the incident had occurred several years before, and that the identity of the victim had been – another flourish of poetry here – lost, left at the bottom of the river. ‘All the more intrigue, Monsieur,’ she added, holding the mask aloft and stroking the waves of plaster hair lovingly with her rough, callused thumb.

  With every shop she visited, the story was edited in small and unimportant ways. The dead woman was an orphan. Her lover an absinthe-addicted revolutionary. Or she was a model for a semi-famous painter; she was a Parisienne grisette. A milliner’s assistant. A seamstress. It didn’t matter. What mattered were the parts of the story that were unknowable. This, the girl knew, was the strongest selling point. This and the inarguable presence of the river, tumbling and spilling through the heart of the city, through the heart of the story. Rippler of breath. Catcher of light. Taker of lives.

  She finally sold the mask and mould to a model shop not far from Madame Debord’s flat, the owner in agreement that indeed, there was something intriguing about the unknown woman. The girl who swept was paid an amount that was equal to what she earned over several weeks of sweeping floors and scraping dried plaster off wooden spatulas and bowls. She walked out of the shop clapping dust off her hands and feeling wholly satisfied. She would hand the money over to her mother, minus the amount needed to buy herself her first-ever, grown-up hat.

  * * *

  The mask was hung in the centre of the model-shop window by a delicate piece of twine, and labelled with the placard L’Inconnue de la Seine, The Unknown Woman of the Seine, and was ignored for several weeks. The proprietor was about to move it to the back of his shop when along came a moderately successful Romanian artist, who had been living and painting street scenes in the Latin Quarter for several years. He purchased the mask and hung it on the wall of his studio, and, from that point on, every street scene he painted included a woman with my face – so small it was undetectable to anyone but him, yet still. The model-shop proprietor cast another mask and sold it within a week to the manager of the Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques, who hung it in one of his dressing rooms. The next to purchase the mask was a poet, a woman, and after that, another painter. It followed that the mask became very fashionable for artists and intellectuals in Paris, which led, as these things always did, to it gaining the attention of the bourgeoisie. Twenty years after my death, the mask, reproduced en masse, hung over the stone mantelpieces of textile manufacturers and factory owners, alcohol agents and landlords, and then regular, working-class people too, not just in France but also Germany, Italy, England, Norway. The story, by then as generic as the lower-quality plaster used to spin out the hundreds of reproductions, had been boiled down to the obvious main points: peasant woman impregnated by a man who outclassed her. River. Identity unknown. Somewhere along the line, interestingly, a new element had been added. Apparently, some said, the mask had originally been commissioned by a lonely pathologist working in the city morgue who empathized with the innocence and beauty of the drowned woman and fell instantly in love. Close to the truth, yet still, not the truth. The girl who swept (who, by the time she died in 1965, was running her own, very successful theatre company in New York City, and who still kept her first-ever, grown-up hat in a box in a closet in a ground-floor apartment on Bleecker Street) would have appreciated that embellishment, and been vexed that she hadn’t thought of it herself.

  And neither she, nor I, nor Laurent Tardieu, nor the young mouleur would ever have expected that the mask would become muse to so many. And the words that were used to describe this inconnue de la Seine? Well. She was often portrayed as pure and innocent (no). Jilted (perhaps). Seductress (if only). She was compared to the river-borne Ophelia and moved the pens of Anaïs Nin and Vladimir Nabokov. Nabokov, like the rest of them, assumed I had been seduced and let down by a man. Suggested that maybe this man was a womanizer, or some kind of drunken artiste. He called L’Inconnue the palest and sweetest of all. He accused her of having frail shoulders. An English novelist wrote a bit of schmaltz about a poet locking himself away with the mask and losing everything because of his devotion to it. The melancholic poet referred to the mask as le Silencieux.

  The silenced.

  Ha.

  45

  Pieter

  Stavanger, 1960

  On a saturday evening in early August, I drove out of town to the beach at Orrestranda, where you used to paddle in the shallows and eat the sand. I changed into my swimming costume in the back of the car, and left my shoes stacked together over my folded clothes. Barefoot, with a towel slung across my shoulders, I took the sandy trail from the parking lot and climbed over the grassy dunes to the beach. Children played there, hurdling the small waves, and the dark heads of swimmers bobbed further out. Without breaking stride, I dropped my towel to the sand and walked into the wat
er and kept moving forward until I was past the breaking waves and standing chest-deep. I fanned my arms along the surface of the water and let the swell rock me back and forth, sometimes lifting my feet off the seabed. My Bear. How many times had I done this? How much was the sea part of me? I was salt. I was sea. Water had been my element since I was a boy, staying with my grandparents on Karmøy in that house of white clapboard with a red roof, a house that was now occupied by strangers.

  I floated on my back and let myself be blinded by sky. Nothing up there but more nothing, and when you stare at nothing for too long, you start to see things.

  My grandmother kept dogs and cats. The cats always seemed to hang with bulging pink teats, with kittens. The dogs were usually ill or deformed. Rhubarb, strawberries and blackberries grew wild in my grandmother’s garden, and once I ate so many blackberries my faeces looked like pie filling. My grandfather: the fisherman who told mariners’ tales and other tales too, stories that I could never really be sure came from his own experience or fantasy or what – on this the old man was ambiguous.

  Hundreds of metres up from where I floated, a gull coasted in from the right side of my vision, passed, then seconds later, circled back again from the left. I shivered. I hadn’t thought about my grandparents’ house in a very long time: the blackened kettle on the stove, the top drawer in the kitchen that contained balls of string, pencil nubs, candles and errant nuts and bolts, ledger pads and tobacco tins full of wooden buttons. Treasure for a young boy. I remembered how I nearly burned the house down, and I remembered the wallpaper that lined the stairway, a diamond pattern of soft, yellow blossoms. I remembered listening to the radio and eating home-pickled onions out of a jar, and the wind blasting my bedroom window, where on the sill I kept my collection of stones and shells and other ocean-worn rubbish. I remembered the heavy, cut-glass sweets dish on the low table in the front room. It was impossible, after nicking a sweet, to replace the lid silently, the ring of crystal infinitely loud and lingering in that small house.