“You speak from experience, dear?” Notwithstanding Nightingale’s every principle, it can be very difficult on occasion not to respond in kind.
“Pull up a chair, take a load off,” Mademoiselle said, mimicking me. Yet her look, full of appeal, seemed sincere.
In spite of everything, I sat, fully aware of the error of sitting on the job. My ear was steadily cocked for sounds of Head in the corridor, because no part of a shift feels free of her watch. Laziness was not the least of the trespasses any one of us might be accused of. “It must be hard, giving up something — someone — fully formed,” the patient said, squinting at the light passing through the bars.
“Harder, I wonder, than giving up something, a child, that’s, ah, not had a chance to … thrive?” I felt compelled to raise, thinking of Sister Ursula and her touchy, towering contention that all life was precious, a gift from above. Sister had praised me, those years back: You’ve given your son that much.
A rustling just outside set me on my feet.
“I must check your legs,” I said loudly, and maybe a bit too brusquely tugged the sheet away from Mademoiselle’s shins. Her ankles were swollen, the skin tight and hot to the touch — a new development, as they’d been reasonably fine the day before. Such edema was a definite cause for alarm. “I don’t like the look of that,” I let slip. Rolling up her blanket, I wedged it under both heels, insisted she keep them elevated.
“I don’t know why you’re upset. They’re mine, not yours.” She eyed me with no more than suspicion now. “You should be more concerned with my request, Solange Poitier. If only you will help me to see my Maman once more, I’ll leave you in peace. You will write to my friend, then.” It was an order, not a request. “You’ll mail my letter too, of course. Hearing from you directly, she and all the rest will have to listen.”
Show little emotion. Be professional, not personal. But it was impossible to hold back a little laugh. “And who am I, Mademoiselle? I know next to nothing of your business.”
“You know all you need to, Miss Solange,” the patient sniffed, and let out a soft moan. “Why should I die so alone?”
Asking about it would be treading on eggshells, but regardless, where a patient’s well-being rests, no nurse worth her salt minds the odd incident of having egg on her face. “When did your maman pass away, exactly?”
I braced for the answer. Was it her actual mother and not a statue that the patient was missing — hearing, who knows, some voice from the grave? Squelching any doubts of her delusions would let me off the hook. Enough already about this foolish statue, in all likelihood a fiction. With any luck I could confirm that the mother’s still being alive, and the statue’s existence, were figments of her illness, and I’d be spared the ridiculous task of chasing down her demand.
Without the glimmer of a tear, Mademoiselle’s gaze was steady. “Years ago Maman died — almost too many to count,” she said, not missing a beat, “which is why her statue means everything to me.”
Of course.
***
A CHANGE OF scene is as good as a rest, Sister would say. Rather than amuse myself in my room after work this evening, I opted for a walk. When I cleared the gates it was already twilight, the night man shouting that he locked up at ten. That left little time for off-grounds recreation.
The village square was in darkness but for a light gleaming through the stained glass of Bon Repos. No sign of the old men or boules players, but a youngish couple strolled nearby, and along the gutter a couple of cars were parked. The café bustled, though, people spilling from it and crowding around the tables out front, their voices and the faint strains of a broadcast spicing up the air. Drawn to it, I walked closer, till shyness held me back. Leaving the hospital so infrequently makes me feel sometimes like an inmate carrying the whiff of sickness on my clothes. So I took a seat on an empty bench by the courtyard, content just to take in the air perfumed with more enticing things, cigarettes and beer.
Out of nowhere, a scuffling with muted but angry voices broke the quiet nearby. Two men in uniforms were hustling someone, an elderly priest in dark robes, through the church’s shadowy side door.
I shrank into the bench; if I’d had half a second I’d have scurried away, but regardless, it was as though, sitting still, I were invisible.
They roughed the priest up and pulled him toward one of the vehicles. His sharp protests rang out in the balminess, his heels scuffing the pale dirt. No one else seemed to notice, not the passing couple or the café-goers — not even when the priest was noisily wrestled into the rear of the car. The last I saw was his head slumped against the window as they screeched off.
A shout erupted and the knot of people gathered outside the café grew, curses slicing through the lively hum. A man kicked something into the gutter and swore unrepeatable words against Pétain and his friends les fritz. Spotting me, he threw his hands in the air. He was a slight, surly individual. In the dimness of the streetlamps his face looked hollow, shadowed with several days’ beard, and despite the evening’s warmth he was wearing a leather jacket.
Sliding to my feet I tried to get away, but too late. A nurse’s duty doesn’t end with her shift.
“What did you see?” he shouted, as if I hadn’t the right to be there — or if I did, could explain, or should have intervened. What’s your business here? he might’ve demanded, his tone that hostile.
Shaken, I said I didn’t know, I had no idea.
“Maybe you need a drink?” the fellow mocked me. Did I appear so dizzy, so ignorant, ineffectual and easily thrown off? Then he asked if I was all right.
I could only shrug, blurting out a lame joke about the asylum: try leaving for an evening and look what one saw!
“You are a patient?” His expression beyond wry. “What is your connection?”
Somehow I found myself being steered into the café and to the bar. Charles de Gaulle blared on the radio, lamenting Moulin’s death but promising to free us all from the Nazi occupiers.
Our elbows bumping, the man motioned to the barkeep for drinks. I stole a look at him in the dingy brightness. His mouth had a winey tint; beside it a scar, perhaps an old laceration that hadn’t been treated properly, interrupted his stubble. Something about him — the way he stood there, sticking close beside me — summoned an over wound watch, a tightness that seemed to seize the room. Somebody plunked a watery café crème before me.
Abruptly, the broadcast was interrupted by music all too familiar, that scratchy enemy anthem, “Deutschland Über Alles.” The barman switched it off, and silence thickened over the room, each crowded table observing a sullen peace. Then someone at the back started to sing, quietly and slowly, the weak strains of another familiar song strengthening as another voice chimed in, then another cautious voice, then another. The fierce words — To arms, citizens. Form your battalions. March, march. Let impure blood water our furrows — made me think less of fighting than of lavender fields and a tiny canal irrigating them. Some of the voices sounded heavy, others rowdy with alcohol. A low, atonal hum came from my, ahem, companion’s throat.
Faster than I could down my café crème a glass of something yellow appeared: apple brandy, its donor said, knocking back what I suppose was whiskey. He leaned close enough that I could smell its distinct resemblance to rubbing alcohol. Murmuring about a Father Girard, he shook his head in disgust. “Do you see such madmen at your work, who’d bully a useless old priest? A priest,” he spat at its absurdity, “one of us they could snatch, just like that — but a priest! Shows how stupid they are.” He laughed. Sweat beaded his thinning hairline. “My name is Jules,” he said almost grudgingly, barely bothering to extend his hand.
Around us the singing swelled rather violently. One raw voice rose above the rest: Tremble, tyrants and traitors, the shame of all good men! There was something oddly, vacantly familiar about it and its owner sitting near the back. Spying me, he raised his glass, his uneasy smile nearly lost in the gloom. On the front of his jac
ket was a yellow star. It struck me that he was the thin, sharp-featured man who’d brought Mademoiselle’s clay, who collected the patients’ scraps. He was most certainly not a farmer. Too slight and genteel for that. Nor did he seem robust enough to do what Cook hinted at, which was feed and help hide others of his kind.
“Friend of yours?” said Jules, who gave his last name as the quite unlikely “Renard,” as if I cared one way or the other.
“Not really. I’ve seen him around the hospital, perhaps.” I left the yellow drink untouched — a small glass of red wine would’ve been harder to walk away from, though I imagined it staining my mouth like his even as it warmed my esophagus — and said goodnight.
***
I RAN MOST of the way back, sticking close by the canal. There was something reassuring about its engineered flow, the way it was so narrowly, uniformly enclosed; something comforting about its murky persistence, doing exactly what it was meant to so effortlessly.
“You’re early,” said the night man. Pity in his voice?
Hurrying to the dorm and to my room, I couldn’t stop thinking of the priest seized by the Milice: where was he now? On a train to the north, or, like Simone and the young men, bound for Marseille? Who knew where they would end up after that.
To focus, I opened my medical dictionary and tried doing a spot quiz. What better place to start than with the As? Eyes closed, walking my finger over the text, I picked words blindly, mining my memory for their meanings. Athalposis: inability to perceive warmth. Ataraxia: perfect peace or calmness of mind. It was more productive than drinking warm milk, if I’d had any, until my finger landed on Ataxophobia: the morbid dread of disorder. Which sent me flipping back two pages, to one I’d skimmed. Astraphobia: a morbid fear of the sky. Nazi Stukas came to mind, dropping bombs, carpeting not just the north with them but everywhere.
Thou shalt not kill, the sisters preach, as does the rest of the Church — except, they say, when killing is just. Fine. But who, then, is qualified to decide just or unjust?
An effective nurse does not brood, but focuses energies on easing others’ sufferings. Nothing for it but to switch tasks, to pick up my pen again and apply it — not quite yet to this insufferable progress report, but to the bit of good writing paper from Lyon I’d squirrelled away. You never know when you’ll need decent paper for certain correspondence. I had thought, briefly, of using the graph paper I’d “pinched,” Cadieu’s blessing notwithstanding, but somehow it just didn’t seem right to use it to contact a family member.
Despite how nervous this whole business made me, I knew the address, had it wired into my brain. A nurse does not sidestep her duties or postpone what can be accomplished today. I would be direct and to the point. On my very next trip to the village I’d mail it, along with Mademoiselle’s letter to her friend. Ignore the fact that doing so would be tossing it to the wind, seeing which side up it landed. A caring nurse places patients’ interests above hers.
Dear Monsieur, I began, apologizing if my query seemed in any way presumptuous, out of step or downright silly. Writing on behalf of your sister, I am given to understand that you might know the whereabouts of some work — yes, a word broad enough to cover numerous possibilities — with which your sister wishes to be reacquainted. It is a piece — that, too, just vague enough; the brother surely was able, one hopes, to guess what is meant! — about which she expresses some attachment, and wishes to see before much longer. She has indicated that said object is in your possession. If so, please return at your earliest convenience. If not the case, please notify me, care of Monsieur Directeur, of any location where said item might be found. Sincerely, Solange Poitier, RN.
There. For the record, the least effort is better than no effort at all.
***
OUR ANTHEM’S BLOODINESS echoes back even as I undertake the chore of getting all of this down. An annoying chore at the end of a long day, I’d give my eye teeth to have a radio, with a station playing only music, thanks, to lighten the exercise. But then I mightn’t get down to it at all. No matter how devoted one may be, it’s awfully easy to get distracted.
I must say, though it’s become something of a habit — a habit borne of what, I’m not sure.
I4
LUNATIC ASYLUM
AUTUMN? YEAR?
OH, C —
If I could’ve brought you there! Sleeping under the stars, in the moon-shadow of leaves, you’d have thought you’d died and gone to Villeneuve. That is, except for the stink of tanneries and dyeshops, the filthy trickle of the Bièvre nearby.
On its edge, on the fringes of a ruined vineyard, was a lovenest Monsieur had arranged. Back in ’88, I believe it was — such a grand year. Monsieur said that La Folie Neubourg, once the home of Sand the writer and her sickly composer, had also sheltered Robespierre and even Napoleon’s doctor. Glory days past, its rooms brimmed with neglect, its façade a tumble of headless statues and prying wisteria. The smell of wet wool and a dead-animal stench drifted through its rooms, depending on which way the wind blew.
The perfect place to work! I fell in love with it. It was, of course, haunted. How could it not be, having housed figures who’d suffered such reversals of luck, and when its neighbourhood, Boulevard d’Italie, a bit on the seamy side, swarmed with others down on theirs?
But you’d have loved its banisters and balustrades! “It’s beautiful — I am beautiful,” I shouted from its crumbling staircase, not to flaunt myself or mock Monsieur’s scalping of Baudelaire’s line to title his work, but to enjoy its echo. Our Monsieur struggled to think up his own names, you see. As Maman struggled with me.
***
IN THE WAKE of our sister’s getting married off, I pitied the family poet, Paul, who was left to deal with Maman by himself. If you had come to visit, rest assured, she’d have accused me of bringing you to a slum. “Why would anyone frequent that part of town?”
When the truth about our luncheon guests had surfaced, she lit into me: “How dare you bring those creatures into my house — and knowingly? That man, your fine Monsieur and his mistress! Eating off my mother’s plates, her carrying on like my long lost friend — and them not even properly married!” On and on she raved, accusing me of ruining her reputation and our family’s, entertaining such rabble in “our great-uncle’s rectory”! As if she cared about priestly piety. Had her face been terracotta, it would’ve cracked. Her voice did, gasping for air. “And you, I see what you’re capable of! But it’s worse, isn’t it. Much worse. Your deception. The things you’ve been doing with him. I’ve heard. Don’t think you can hide it. Don’t think for a second you’ve pulled the wool over my eyes.”
I braced for a hard slap, but she did not touch me. Out of my mouth came a rush of self-defence, about pieces I’d shown in the Champ de Mars, journalists’ praise. “Just the beginning, Maman! Be patient. My best is yet to come.”
She regarded me with a dry calm, a blanched look about her eyes and mouth. “You have no business calling me Maman. No daughter of mine would behave like such a tart.”
You’re hearing it first; you’re the first I’ve told about this. Smoothing away her wrinkles, Maman’s icy dryness left me no recourse: “If you’re so in love with your art, my girl, sleep with it. Let him keep you.”
***
I TRIED NOT to think of Monsieur’s I-am-Beautiful Woman, raised in her man’s eager arms, as I arranged my tools and unpacked my work. You could say Maman drove me to it, C, to exchanging the crisp, ironed sheets of our family’s flat for the mussed, smelly ones at La Folie. Monsieur and I revelled in twin gods — love and art — all day long in its musty rooms. From morning to dusk the hôtel’s sprites oversaw each chiselled mark. Unfettered, we celebrated our collaborations with kisses and vinegary wine, among the most rudimentary furnishings.
But at night, after drifting off in his arms, I would wake to find his place empty.
Dante’s lovers, Paolo and Francesca, suffered eternal torments for their illicit love. So Monsie
ur enjoyed recounting: “Imagine, your greatest desire being thwarted. Another version of hell!”
But why the fixation on storybook passion, I grilled him. As if ours wasn’t equally potent, whether hidden or revealed.
Watching light play on the water-stained ceiling, Monsieur scratched his beard, sat up. “Don’t you see the truth in this beautiful pair’s tragedy?”
“What about us? We have a few tales to tell.”
“Oh, my dear, it’s old stories people want.”
“People? Like Rose?” My voice was fawning. I wound a strand of his beard round my finger. “Your government friends? Your friends in the Salon? Look at you. You’re your own story. Today, Paris’s gift from God. Tomorrow, the world’s?”
“I won’t argue with you.” I could see the anger twisting there. “Don’t forget your promises!”
As if on cue, we were interrupted by a noise, a fumbling below. Rats in the walls? Some beggar seeking refuge? A homeless drunk? The neighbourhood teemed with them sleeping on sidewalks, bare soles tattooed with filth. The street was full of hovels where vagrants drank, the Bièvre one big urinal.
Shouts rose, violent shouts, a thumping to shake the dampness. Stumbling into his clothes and out to the landing, Monsieur shouted to someone downstairs, his words impatient and rote. When he returned to root through his wallet, I tiptoed out wrapped in the sheet. Peering up from the foyer was a man-boy in tatters.
Impossible, dear C, to guess the age of those who call the streets home.
The fellow’s leer was obscene. “Papa?”
Monsieur’s look was that of his most indignant, squirming damned. Without a word he sent a handful of coins skittering over the chipped, checkered marble. The fellow scrambled to retrieve them, his grin made ugly by its familiarity — the shadowy echoes of a face I knew.
Sweeping past me, Monsieur said God’s curse had made him a father.
With a slurring laugh the fellow staggered off, leaving behind a scrap of paper that had fallen from his coat. A line drawing of birds in a tree. “Don’t worry,” said Monsieur, casting it into the stove, an act of shocking efficiency. “He only comes when he’s looking for money, our Auguste.”
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