***
“YOU NEVER TOLD me about your friend.” I nudged Mademoiselle, getting her to shift slightly so she’d be easier to turn. I half wished I’d hung on to the photograph from her file. “The lady who visited, a long time ago now. Someone snapped a picture. Maybe you don’t remember.”
She eyed me curiously, her look turning fierce. “Did she have white hair? An English lady? We studied together. When we were young. One of us was pretty. You’re right: I don’t want to remember her. A turncoat like the rest. Her husband the shutterbug, he was her accomplice. An informant, she was. Keeping the rodent up to date.”
I took extra care to be agreeable. “Right. The one behind your being here.”
She had clearly weakened overnight. Her skin had a pallor I didn’t like and she moaned while being moved.
“You never have told me how you came to be here.” I didn’t mean to pry; asking was a way of priming the pump, so to speak, in case she had anything to get off her chest. At this stage in a patient’s care it behooves us all to allow him or her to unburden. Keeping things bottled up diminishes the sum of a life, Sister always said. Should the brother’s upcoming visit be a final one, there might be things the patient needed to say in advance.
“You don’t want to know. They came one Monday morning, two policemen, and dragged me out the window. Don’t think I didn’t put up a fight. Not that it did any good.”
What Sister overlooked is that listening often entails hearing things one would rather not. While they tended to be true in Lyon, here they’re often to be taken with salt.
The poor woman winced as I dabbed as carefully as possible at the spreading sores on her backside.
“But they helped you to feel better, yes? The people at the hospital, after a while?”
Her eyes glittered. Her laugh erupted into a coughing fit, and she screwed her eyes and mouth tightly shut — oh dear, not another nosebleed? “You’re like the snow-headed doctor. ‘Fresh air, hot baths, decent food.’ You see that it worked. Better they’d tied me to a statue as big as one of Bourdelle’s awful ones and thrown me in the Seine.” She started to hum softly, some unrecognizable tune, as if to hum herself to sleep, then suddenly piped, “Does a cat know its kittens, do you think, once they’re grown up? This child of yours — the boy you had — would you know him if you saw him?”
“Your friend,” I said firmly, “the one who came to see you. Did she keep in touch?”
The patient’s eyes opened, the torment there replaced with tolerance, perhaps a degree of affection. With effort she rolled them in the direction of the table, a frail hand pointing to the drawer. “In there, Soitier Polange — almost finished. This work has saved me, you know. It’s the last time I’m writing to her, though. Another needs my attention. When my brother comes, give him the letter. He’ll know how to find her.”
I held my peace at that. “Your mother, did she visit?”
“What a friend you are, asking. To put your mind at ease, I’ll tell you: No. After they took me away I never saw my mother again.”
“Your statue” — it might’ve been a boulder rolling off my tongue — “I’ve asked him to bring it.” An open invitation to further provoke Head, if she was anywhere in the vicinity.
I asked Mademoiselle if she had received hydrotherapy. Not that I meant to cause trouble — no end to the ways of being irksome, even when surely I’ve exhausted them — and certainly not to upset her, but in the absence of certain records, how else was I to find out?
“Hydra — isn’t that a kind of monster? One with three heads?” Laughter sputtered from her, then her voice went tiny. “Even the monsters abandoned me. Everyone I loved, you see. Including my friend. She was jealous, that’s all.”
More pointless than ever to argue. “Well. If it pleases you to think.”
“It does indeed. She failed, Miss Polange. She had a husband and children and money, and squandered her gift. A squandered gift, as you know, is a gift thrown back at God.”
“Now, now, I doubt God would fret. A family’s a fine gift, the finest.” A change of subject, please. “Your other friend, Monsieur Criteur? The one you’ve written — didn’t you see him again?”
She covered her eyes. In her sigh I could almost picture nerves charging, cells oxygenating themselves.
“Do you have one clue, Nurse — how it is to see by touch, then have this talent ripped away?”
***
SISTER’S POSTCARD WAS waiting at the desk, delivered by the boy Admin had recently hired. Expressionless, checking her watch, Head slid the card towards me.
You must serve as you see fit, Solange, its brief note read. A postscript wound around the margins, tiny script all but illegible. Your son was raised by people in Lyon. Not so long ago the wife contacted me. The husband was killed and the boy disappeared; she sought information to trace him. With great reluctance I told her about you, forgive me. One must not carry too much regret — good comes of the crosses we bear.
Head eyed me frostily, and I couldn’t help imagining the man in the Milice touching her cheek. “You’ll have Mademoiselle ready first thing, then,” she said. “The brother’s car arrives at ten. He has a driver and not too far to come, though far enough — two hundred kilometres!” As if this excused his absence. His negligence, really. “He’ll be in the visitors’ lounge. You invited him, he’s all yours.”
“When had he last seen her?” A casual question. I suspected never. Head’s reply, uncalled for: “Who’s testing whom? You think I don’t remember?” But then, to butter me up or perhaps to apologize, she said, “You couldn’t have got much sleep. And since things are under control — well, as much as we can hope — I don’t suppose it would hurt if you left a little early.”
***
A TREAT, A very rare one, to be spared doing supper — an even rarer treat to get off work while it was still light. I didn’t bother changing into civvies, and slipped the improvised pack under my cape. Waving to the gateman, I headed in a different direction from my usual one, waiting till he was out of sight before veering into the woods near the cemetery.
It was as I expected. No sign whatsoever of Renard or the boy, besides some charred stones, the stick he’d used as a poker lying there. As if I’d dreamed most of it. When dusk fell I tried to retrace our path, but having little sense of direction it seemed futile. Leaving the woods the way I’d come, I hurried past the gateman at his duty, and toward the village.
In the square, the leaves were pale rags against the purpling sky. They jigged and swirled, the mistral tearing them from the branches as it pushed me toward the café. The place was full of old men, and neither Renard nor his young friend were anywhere to be seen. The voice of de Gaulle, our saviour, our self-appointed Liberator, crackled over the airwaves. All the way from England, it sounded close enough to be next door. When his speech ended, that familiar tune came on, “Clair de Lune,” following me to the street and across to the square again, acting as Veronal might’ve: sedating, if not soothing, and unlike anything of this world.
The bench where I huddled, in so public a place, was hardly a spot for passing out — more to the point, to be seen passing out, even as tiredness wrapped itself around each muscle and nerve, a kind of person-eating weed. There was, however, the church, the Church of Bon Repos, which struck, strikes, a funny chord, if that’s not too irreverent. The repose, the consolation, of spit and polish. Stand up, sit down, kneel.
A stooped, solitary nun, her black habit melding with the gathering night, swished past and disappeared inside. Behind dark stained glass, lights flickered and leapt. I suppose it was the thought of candles, of flickering warmth, that made me go in. That and the need for quiet after de Gaulle’s rallying cries.
Ignoring me, the nun shuffled about dusting and straightening things, painstakingly tidying the pews. The only sounds were of the little straw chairs being scraped and jerked over scuffed stone, each squeak and squeal echoing sharply. She didn’t so much as look ove
r when I sat, reluctantly, laying down my small bundle on the adjacent seat.
Unlike the chapel, Bon Repos had no kneelers, and it was hard not to imagine arthritic knees pressed against dingy marble, stiff necks, white heads bent in prayer. Old people were the only ones who frequent these places with regularity. The elderly, the dying. Un bon repos of last resort. The silence put me in its pocket, shored itself around me, a soothing, echoing gulf of nothing. It comforted me.
The quality of light, however, left something to be desired if, for instance, I had wanted to read the battered hymnal on the seat ahead. The dimness around me was an obtuse reminder of light’s therapeutic value, particularly in sickrooms. What’s a nurse, really, but the opener of windows and shutters, waving in Mother Nature to do her work? So I told myself as the stained glass went from coloured to black and the darkness outside deepened.
By now the nun had progressed to the altar, slowly and methodically picking dead blooms from withered bouquets, arranging and rearranging what flowers remained in their vases and baskets. Impervious to me, she bowed, knelt and blessed herself before the blazing red light of the tabernacle — a red that made me think of bombings, infernos, blood, as well as some strange eye glaring down. Thinking this, I rose and slipped out.
***
ALL THE WAY home it seemed the roadside woods were watching, though not the slightest flicker of movement came from them. I felt much the way one does when seeing the amputation of a foot to save a leg, and considered venturing in to leave the sterile pack on a rock or under a tree. If only you’d come in sooner.
A slim moon appeared above the mount of virgins. As opposed to a mount of Venus. Hardly a joke, summoning, as it does, bath days. P for pubes and psychoses. Wash out my mind and pen with carbolic soap and water, I’m telling myself as I write this. A nurse must be free at all times of dark and unclean thoughts.
And on that note, Dear Record of Professional Failings (Failure?), lights out.
24
NO PLACE FOR AN ARTIST
WHO CARES WHAT DAY, WHAT YEAR?
TO WHOM IT May Concern,
People can surprise us. I speak not just of you, C. Reappearing from wherever he’d hidden away — no questions asked, no explanations given — Criteur came to my aid. Brutal but true, he encouraged me.
“You’re on the front lines now.”
He expected me to track the evil one’s comings and goings. Useless to rely on gossip sheets — ppfftt, newspapers! — to keep abreast of the enemy, to keep ahead of him. “It means spying. What choice is there? Hasn’t the good Lord given you eyes, ears and feet?” I was supposed to fly to the wilds the Great One called home?
“Go by boat. You’re not so poor — yet — that you haven’t the fare.”
I was loath to travel a river tainted with Cléome’s blood — and seeing as Monsieur had tried to poison me, his tainted wine as proof, why wouldn’t he try to drown me? He would do anything, anything, to get his grasping hands on my work.
Out of coin, I wrote asking Paul could he, would he front me fifty francs? Which he did, with no hope of compensation. Perhaps I overstepped myself, now that he had a wife and children to pay for. “One comes to the Lord no other way but emptied,” he wrote back to me.
His visits had grown rare but when he came he came bearing gifts of money and food. “The humble of heart shall inherit the earth.” He never missed a chance to profess, press, his faith.
“Good, because I’m nothing but.” I elbowed him robustly, no longer a sylph, sylph-hood sent packing by potatoes and cheap brandy. Poverty’s diet. The doughy woman who peered back from my cloudy scrap of mirror was a stranger as pale as one afraid of the sun.
“You should get out more,” our brother nagged. Was he in cahoots with Criteur?
But, you see, C, my soul if not my heart had been robbed by an evil Perseus. The soul lives in the mind which lives in the head. His trophy. Yet I fancied myself a Marie Antoinette in better days, sculpting away in my velvet robe, hem gathering hairballs, not blood.
“Let your brother eat cake,” Criteur said, miffed that I balked at “our” plan, and doled out his advice, that it might be better to learn how to fail than succeed — that learning to fail is success. He stroked my Perseus’s thigh, beheld the statue’s sightless eyes, and conceded that Paul’s nagging was apt. “There’s no such thing as a poor loser,” he said. “You could take a train.”
Far be it for me to stoop so low. But stoop I did. How pride bows to self-preservation, my feline pride as testimony. How it felt hurrying under evening’s cover to Montparnasse station, riding the westbound milk run past the city’s edge.
Criteur was correct. Finding the Monster’s villa was no problem. It stood atop a bluff, naturally, the city’s lights twinkling beyond Saint-Cloud’s woodsy hills. We’d read all about it in the journalists’ rags. Perfect sense, its name: bien sûr, Brillante a haven for the Brilliant and His Art.
You think I’d lost my nerve? Dressed in shadows, I strolled its allée of chestnuts like an honoured guest, the first time under their snowy blooms. Vicious barking nearly turned me back, a baying like that of Anubis guarding Pharaoh’s tomb. Would that Criteur had come instead. But I darted fearlessly across lawns and out from under hedges. Quite deafening, the barking wasn’t that of one dog but a pack. I thought of Cléome. Without human meddling, feline wiles foil curs’ any old time.
The breeze scattered my scent, and the racket ceased. I burrowed through jasmine, braved a rose-bed wilderness till the moon paled behind the clouds. A light burned in a window, bright above the pricking thorns nurtured by her, the evil queen. Hardly so stupid or sick with purpose to forget that one twig cracking would set off the hellhounds, I waited. If she were there, the charlady would unchain and sic them on me: Find her scent, go for blood. The Master having rolled in both.
When I made it to the window, the scene within was a bit of a shock. The room was austere but for a gnarled jade on the dining table, a miniature Greek torso on a plinth. The plant’s pot was rimed with mould like the rind of a ripe brie. My belly rumbled, hollow under my thumping heart.
The hausfrau sat at her sewing, a teacup beside her. A more forlorn face I hadn’t seen, until I came here. But it was her age, not her general grimness, that struck me. The exact opposite of you, she was an old, old woman, stooped and wasted. In her housedress, she looked worse than mutton dressed as lamb — she was mutton fit for the abattoir. Perhaps the evil one hadn’t lied calling her sickly. Not that she aroused pity. Who pities anyone who’s let the devil use her up?
The devil, on this occasion, was nowhere in sight, so I hastened back to the safe haven of Île Saint-Louis.
A few more forays into his suburb revealed little worth seeing, nothing worth getting mauled by dogs or squandering what centimes I had on train fare, until my last visit, when a sight for sore eyes met mine. The antique couple, the hausfrau and her rat, were enjoying each other’s company. The length of their bare table separated them, no more than a bowl of gruel at either end, the hausfrau shivering in her shawl. Even at a distance she looked ghostly, her sunken lips addressing him. He shoved away his bowl and lifted a small terrier into his lap, stroked it. His queen coughing into a hankie till he yelled at her to stop.
It was then she turned to the window. I ducked, but not fast enough.
Her whole face was a muttonly grimace, her bald eyes staring.
I tripped free of her bushes, the thorns ripping at me painfully, but nothing near as bad as being in his clutches.
They were made for each other, these two.
“Make your bed with a dog, Monsieur. Have fun lying in it!” I sang out, and chortled all the way home to my cats.
***
NOT LONG AFTER, I had visitors: a writer known to our brother (another of the Master’s cricket-shills?) and a man I didn’t recognize at first. Neither of them would I let in. Only the stranger lingered, allowing me a decent look at his face through the shutters. A lucky thing, too. It wa
s the fellow who’d treated me to champagne in the darkness of the Marais. He called out his name; sure enough it was Eugène Blot. And yes, besides owning the foundry, he had a gallery in the Grands Boulevards, right across from the Madeleine. A church that looks more like a stock exchange, but who am I to criticize?
You won’t believe it. I didn’t, at first. He was looking for works for a show. Would I consider his space?
“What’s in it for you?” I shouted out.
Blot was pleasantly handsome, neither handsome nor ugly enough to be a rogue or a liar. His broad, high forehead was the opposite of Monsieur’s low one, and he was slender, courteous, unassuming. His manner eased my fears enough that I unbolted the door to size him up, and his gentle eyes convinced me to let him in. Taking care not to touch anything, he admired my pieces, promising to have a few of them cast. Most important of all, he put his money where his mouth was, and paid up front for two small statues — enough to cover several months’ rent! I’d have sent him packing otherwise. We know not just our enemies but our saviours by their actions.
Blot’s only fault, I believe to this day, was that he’d made Monsieur’s acquaintance. Who wasn’t tainted by it? When he brought me to his gallery I glimpsed myself in the window. A forty-year-old debutante, a fat Cinderella in tattered clothes. You, C, couldn’t have been more remote, or removed. But my work would redeem me, redeem us. The other pieces on display would be worthwhile company, exquisite little statues set on polished stands, the room positively alive with swishing palms in pretty pots, and bamboo. So Blot too hankered after the Orient, sharing the passion I shared with our brother, if vicariously.
Suspended from the ceiling were tiny sculpted angels, porcelainwhite. They danced a little in the draft rustling the palms. “Seek out signs of goodness, signs of light,” our brother had said, after one pilgrimage or another — a trip, I think, to Lourdes. “Expect the best and tides will swing in your favour.” Angels, if you know a thing about the Bible — why we have Paul — are monstrous, scary things. Did pretty, sweet ones measure up? Were they the sign I needed, C, to somehow “qualify”?
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