Coming Up for Air

by Sarah Leipciger

  I remembered lying on the rug in front of the fireplace with my arms folded under my head, sucking a stolen sweet, staring at my grandmother’s paintings on the wall: a dry-docked fishing boat, a bunch of flowers, and the koie my grandfather built above the lake where you died, Bear.

  And then.

  I remembered her. I saw her face as clearly as the empty sky above me – every contour, every small blemish in the plaster. The round, youthful cheeks, smooth as buttermilk. The clumped eyelashes. The smile. I saw her and it was as if she saw me back, and it was as if she said: Well. Here you are, Pieter. At last.

  46

  Anouk

  Toronto, 2018

  Anouk has a strong urge to move her hand and thinks for a long time about doing so, but it feels as if it’s been replaced by a block of wood. She tries the other hand. It’s become wood too. That, or her hands have been bound to the sides of her body. There’s singing. Michael row the boat ashore, hallelujah. The River Jordan is. The River Jordan. The River. Is. It’s something. It’s bloody and old. Hallelu-u-jah.

  Forget moving one piddly hand. Instead, swim.

  She dives like a whale. She is fathoms-deep and placid. Salty. Briny. Body warm. Somewhere, a heart beats. This isn’t just water; this, whatever it is, this. Fluid can be inhaled. This fluid is more viscous than water and it fills Anouk’s nose, mouth, trachea, lungs. It breathes for her. Her blood flows rich and scarlet and is more saturated with oxygen than she’s ever known. She looks up towards the surface. There is a cloudy, marbled, out-of-focus world beyond where she is now. Voices are hush, hush, hushing. Or. That sound could be the wind in the trees. Or. It could be the sound of loamy waves rolling up a pebbly shore, losing momentum, and falling back into the milky bosom of a gentle sea.

  Anouk rolls and dives even deeper until she’s pulling herself along a muddy riverbed. She grapples with weeds, gets tangled and then is released. A long-whiskered, flat-headed catfish glides in and out of her peripheral vision. It’s the same colour as the riverbed and almost impossible to see, but she knows it’s there by the clouds of sand it blasts into the current with every flick of its tail fin. She propels herself along the river bottom by clutching at rocks and using them for momentum to drive herself forward, and she’s moving at such a clip that her clothes are slipping from her body and soon she’s naked, and the water is breath against her skin. It should be cold but it’s warm. Body-warm.

  Up ahead, a bend in the river and around the bend, a submerged tree. Its black, leafless branches flow with cottony green witch’s hair and frogspawn, soft river growth so abundant it’s as if the tree has lain here for a hundred years. There’s enough space between the prone trunk and the riverbed for Anouk to fit, so she shimmies under there, hugging the tree, and sees that on the underside of the trunk, a patch of bark has been stripped away and there are words etched into the bare wood.

  There’s a story here. Her body trembles with it.

  Hush, hush, hushing voices coming from beyond the surface of the river, from the diaphanous elsewhere. Someone is calling her name. A cool hand cups her forehead.

  But there’s a story here.

  She peers harder at the words scratched into the tree but can’t make them out.

  Her own voice in her head: Remember? Mr Chester’s class. CPR. Pinch the nose. Tilt the head. Breathe. Count. Repeat. A manikin lying on the floor in the school gymnasium and everyone is embarrassed because they have to blow into her mouth. No one wants to take a turn after Anouk because they don’t want to catch her germs. Remember? Mr Chester says: I know something you don’t know. Be kind and I’ll tell you a secret. He says: This is the face of a woman who drowned. He tells the story of a river and a woman with no name and a toymaker. Every manikin who has ever been made to teach people. How to breathe. How to save. Everyone knows this face. It’s always been her and it will always be. After the lesson they each receive a pin badge with a red heart on it.

  Anouk stares harder at the words etched into the wood. Maybe that’s what has been written there, the name of that manikin.

  Someone is calling her, Anouk, gently, but with persistence. Open your eyes, a voice tells her.

  The river is breathing for her.

  I give you my breath.

  Anouk, wake up and see. See how you can breathe.

  It’s not the name of the manikin etched in the wood. Anouk runs her fingers along the worn fissures, trying to read them like braille, afraid they’ll disappear. This is the name of the drowned woman, but she can’t make out what it says. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if she can’t read it now, because this is, at last. A story worth telling.

  She’s buoyant. She holds on to the tree but it’s slimy with algae, and whatever it is that’s pulling her to the surface is stronger than her. Upwards, pulled, she keeps her eyes on the tree, but as she moves away from it the water darkens, and soon the tree is just a shadow and then it’s gone.

  Anouk opens her eyes. Hard to focus. The room is yellow-dark, it must be night. Someone is doing something to her hand. From out of the dark a quiet voice: she’s awake.

  There’s something in her mouth, in her throat.

  ‘We’re going to try again, Okay? We’re going to get this tube out so you can breathe on your own. You’ve been fighting us all day.’

  She looks around the room and her eyes hurt. They feel rusty.

  ‘Your mom’s waiting down the hall. We’ll call her in as soon as this is done. Now. Give us a big cough.’

  Anouk coughs and there is a sliding. She wants to swallow so badly but can’t. The endotracheal tube is out and another tube is pressing on her tongue, suctioning. Someone else is wiping her mouth.

  ‘There. Done.’

  Throat sore, new lungs. Anouk opens her mouth, and, as if coming up from deep water, inhales.

  END

  Epilogue

  Camille Debord

  Une Caserne de Pompiers, Nice, France, 1967

  In a small community room at the local fire department, Camille Debord sits in a semicircle with ten other students, here to learn the latest method of artificial respiration that could, promises her family doctor, save her heart-sick husband were he to suffer cardiac arrest and stop breathing at home. Her and her husband’s lives have changed utterly since he was diagnosed, and Camille is not going to take this sitting down.

  The instructor looks like he should be in the army – probably he was. Wearing a soft-grey shirt and dark-blue slacks, he sits on the matted floor so that all the students can see what he’s doing to the manikin that lies next to him. The doll has been introduced as Resusci Anne and she looks like she could be sleeping, lying there stiffly with her arms at her sides. Her hair, her wig, is curly-soft and light brown, and she’s dressed respectfully in a white blouse and blue cardigan, and also wears loose-fitting slacks. She’s even got shoes, white tennis shoes. From where Camille sits, it’s difficult to get a good look at the manikin’s face.

  The instructor goes through the method step by step, demonstrating the precise way to tilt the head back in order to clear the airway, and how to achieve a tight seal around the mouth. It all looks a bit intimate. Camille is grateful the manikin is female. Once the demonstration is over, the instructor invites someone to volunteer to go first.

  ‘I will,’ says Camille, standing from her chair. Camille is the oldest person in the room by a good few decades.

  The other students watch as the old woman, petite and with an open face, makes her way to the centre of the mat and kneels down alongside the manikin. Her movements are mechanical and quick, like a bird. Like a swallow.

  She strokes a curl of hair off the manikin’s forehead. ‘Salut, Anne,’ she whispers. Now close up, Camille takes a moment to study the manikin’s face. It’s moon-round and soft, perfectly symmetrical, the high, round cheeks of a young girl. There’s a hint of life behind the closed eyelids. T
he mouth is open and there are holes in the nostrils.

  ‘Maintenant,’ says the instructor, ‘what’s the first thing we do?’

  Camille nudges the manikin’s shoulder and asks if she’s all right, trying to elicit a response that of course will never come. It feels a little ridiculous to be doing this, but it could save her husband’s life. It’s important. She continues. She puts her hand under the manikin’s neck and angles it so that her chin is raised. Path open. Airway cleared.

  Camille presses down on the manikin’s chin with one thumb, and squeezes the manikin’s nose shut with her other thumb and forefinger. She gently tilts the head back further so the mouth opens, draws breath from deep down in her diaphragm and leans forward. She closes her eyes, wraps her dry lips around the waiting mouth of the doll named Anne, and exhales. The doll’s chest rises with Camille’s own breath.

  Author’s Note

  This story is inspired by true events.

  The death mask of L’Inconnue de la Seine exists. Hundreds of copies once hung from hundreds of walls across Europe during the first half of the twentieth century. Nabokov really did write about L’Inconnue, and so did Rilke. Albert Camus compared her to the Mona Lisa. You can still purchase a copy of the mask from a dusty atelier in the southern suburbs of Paris.

  The mask – or rather, the unknown woman who (may have) drowned in the Seine in 1890-something and whose absence defines its contours – has a knack for getting people’s attention.

  Something else: there was a Norwegian toymaker called Asmund Laerdal. In the 1950s, Laerdal was a successful manufacturer with an advanced knowledge of soft plastics who designed a lifelike play doll named Anne. He also designed toy cars, and imitation wounds for the Norwegian Civil Defence.

  True: Asmund Laerdal had a son named Tore. When Tore was two years old, he nearly drowned. Laerdal saved his son’s life before he knew anything about artificial respiration. Tore Laerdal still lives in Norway.

  In 1958, Asmund Laerdal was introduced to a research team made up of Peter Safar, an anaesthesiologist, and the physician James Elam. Safar and Elam were conducting studies on the efficacy of mouth-to-mouth cardiopulmonary resuscitation in the US, in Baltimore. They needed a manikin to continue their research, and to use as a training aid to teach CPR to the general public.

  Asmund Laerdal, adept with the necessary materials and branded with the memory of what he nearly lost to the water, designed the life-saving manikin using the deathmask of L’Inconnue de la Seine for her face. He called her Resusci Anne and since her inception in 1960, this face has not changed. Hundreds of millions of people have wrapped their lips snugly around hers, given her their breath. Perhaps, so have you.

  Everything else in this book: invention.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you Clare Alexander, my secret weapon, and all of you at Aitken Alexander.

  Thank you to my editors Alice Youell and Michelle MacAleese, for your faith and enthusiasm, and thank you to the wonderful teams at Doubleday UK and House of Anansi. Thank you especially to Sarah MacLachlan, Marianne Velmans, Claire Gatzen, Vivien Thompson, Alison Barrow and Antonia Whitton.

  With all my heart, thank you Jo Willacy, Alison Brockway and Libby Anderson for allowing me into your unique world. I hope I got it right, or at least as close as possible to right.

  Thank you so very much to Loic Boinet, Isabelle Gaultier and everyone at Atelier Lorenzi. Thank you also to Josephine Duval and Virginie Borsa.

  For explaining the medical bits and your patience in doing so, thank you to Anna Bendzsak, Stephen Tsui, Alexandra Lamond and James Napier.

  Thank you to my petits choux, Stevie Anouk Lindell and Camille Avarello Stone.

  Thank you to the readers, and to the writers, who graciously shone their bright light into the corners I couldn’t see: Merrill Brescia and Colleen Anderson, Joanna Quinn and Peggy Riley.

  And thank you Théo Gazeu, for the French. À la folie.

  Bibliography

  In writing Coming Up for Air, I relied very much on the insights and richness gleaned from several resources, particularly:

  Death in Paris: Records of the Basse-Geôle de la Seine, Richard Cobb (Oxford University Press, 1978)

  Fighting With Crib Gloves: My Battle with Cystic Fibrosis, Richard Keane (Tate Publishing, 2014)

  History of Childbirth: Fertility, Pregnancy and Birth in Early Modern Europe, Jacques Gélis (Polity Press, 1991)

  How Have I Cheated Death? A Short and Merry Life with Cystic Fibrosis, Tim Wotton (Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd, 2014)

  In Paris: A Handbook for Visitors to Paris in the Year 1900, Katherine and Gilbert Macquoid, 1900

  My Parisian Year: A Woman’s Point of View, Maude Annesley (Mills & Boon Ltd, 1912)

  Stiff, Mary Roach (Penguin Books, 2003)

  Undying Faces: A Collection of Death Masks, Ernst Berkard (Hogarth Press, 1929)

  SARAH LEIPCIGER is the author of the acclaimed novel The Mountain Can Wait. She won THIS Magazine’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt and her stories have been shortlisted for the Asham Award, the Bridport Prize, the Fish Prize, and the PRISM International Short Fiction Contest. She holds a B.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Victoria and an M.A. in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths University, and she is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Creative Writing, also at Goldsmiths. Born in Canada, she now lives in London, U.K., with her three children, where she teaches creative writing in prisons.

  house of anansi press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi’s commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada’s pre-eminent independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage, Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011 Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year”.