The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  It is only a kind of voice for a singer, I told him. A Fach. I explained what it meant.

  Falcons are what the Prussians use to kill our pigeons, he said, smiling ruefully. All our hopes of communicating with the world dead in their hungry mouths. But if you are a singer, you must sing for us before you leave.

  He described the Commune’s plans for a concert at the Tuileries with fifteen hundred performers. I said I would.

  Why do you believe he is still here? I asked.

  Eugène pointed above us to where the balloon would be. We have not flown the balloons because they are all shot down, he said. But what’s more, we lack the coal gas to fill them. Not even the Versaillais could launch such a thing. Of the people to fly a balloon from the Commune now, only a Prussian spy would have the gas for this flight. And worse still? Our flag flies from the Opera. He spat after he said this.

  He loves you, yes?

  Yes, I said.

  Is this his ring you wear at your neck?

  No, I said.

  Good, he said. I will see him die as you leave in his balloon.

  Eugène kissed me. I am off to attend a meeting at the Hôtel de Ville. We are to discuss food shortages, he said. But do not worry. We have little food, but because there are more desertions, we will not starve. You’re nearly ready, he said. Think on what you will sing for us before you leave.

  I stayed in the basket for some time. I imagined it lifting from the roof, the floor littered with mail. Letters from men and women about to die, letters from the already dead. I would fly at last. Perhaps I would go to my death, my body broken and the pieces strewn across the forests around the border with Germany or tossed into the sea. Or perhaps I would land in Belgium, a place no one knew me. I would land, survive, walk free into a new city, raise a family there, teach them to sing opera. My very own García family.

  I took the ring from my neck, slid it off its chain, tried it on my finger once again. The finger nearly took it. Another month of meals like the last and it might fit.

  Eugène’s question about the ring had directed me to my own feelings, quiet all this time—the owner of the ring had not come once, had not written. He seemed to have accepted my departure. I thought of him standing at the door to the Empress’s chamber. My ruby rose glinting there by her bracelets.

  The only death I feared was the one that kept me from him.

  I loved him still.

  §

  As I undressed slowly in front of the mirror that afternoon, a terrible truth became visible.

  My figure had returned but the color of my complexion had not. I was as white as the tree bark I’d eaten. Only my mouth, the aureoles of my breasts, my notch—only these had the faintest pink. I had undressed in some anticipation of preparing to undress entirely for Eugène. Aristafeo’s ring was a lurid green spark at my throat.

  I took a rouge pot up and then set it down and withdrew to my bedroom instead, in horror, climbing into the bed and pulling the curtains at the sides shut, as if that could help. I remembered a story Natalya had told me once, in Baden-Baden, of a story her grandmother told her. We were speaking of Amina, of her nightly walks through town, how she had terrified her neighbors in the night, and Natalya said, She was most likely a vila.

  Vila? I asked.

  Vilas are very pale, she said to me. One day they wake up all white like a good tooth, and she pulled her lip and pointed. My own grandmother explained it to me this way when she told me this, she said, laughing. She didn’t have one good tooth. She was trying to get me to behave, to be a good girl, and told me they were women who wasted their lives in selfishness, she said, made to care for the forest.

  If you hear them singing, you must run, Natalya had said. They sing so beautifully you will sit and listen forever until you die of hunger or grief, all your needs forgotten in listening to them. They can take the shapes of wolves, or swans, or . . . falcons.

  She gasped then. Perhaps you know this! Perhaps you are one. This is your secret, is it not? And she laughed finally, and I relented and began to smile.

  They are also equestriennes! They can ride horses without a saddle. Clearly, you are one. She told me if you charm them, you can get them to punish a man who broke his word. Will you punish a man for me? How can I charm you?

  The present must be very fine, I’d said to her. We are a fickle kind. But, of course, I loved her best, and said I would do anything she asked.

  How I missed her. I missed them all.

  A crack of thunder came from outside, shocking me. The thunder shook the mirrors in my room, rattling them against the wall so that I swept the curtain back to see a swift blaze of lightning go by the window, like the passing of a god.

  Rain fell next, hard, a torrent. I sat listening to it, my eyes closed. It had been so long since I’d heard thunder, I went to the windows and opened them then closed them, thinking to do better. I wanted to feel the rain on my skin.

  The building was empty—if a neighbor or the concierge remained here, there was no sign. The tenor had taken me to the roof to show me the view early in our time here, and so I remembered the way as I climbed it.

  I feared I would find him there, but there was nothing, not even the cats.

  The streets below were empty, there was no one to see me naked on the roof as I let my bedclothes flutter around me in the wind. Paris seemed entirely empty but full of blooms—the flowers had returned with the spring, and someone, most likely the Commune, had lined the Place de la Concorde with bouquets at the monuments. The effect was like that of flowers for a vast funeral. Paris for a tomb. The rain now come to wash it clean, as it cleaned all graves.

  The wind turned and the rain flensed me then, the cold spray shocking me. More lightning came, more thunder. I watched the bolts fly down and strike Paris and wished to be struck also. To be consumed by the storm. I wanted to run the silver rooftops of the city until I was taken up, and if I was a Vila now, watch as my arms turned to swan’s wings lifting into the sky. Wreathes of lightning for my crowns, and palaces of thunder, the size of mountains, mine to command. This would be how I would leave, and I would never return.

  Instead, I stood there until I was sure I, too, would die soon. And I did not wish to die just yet, not before I could sing for Aristafeo one more time.

  After that, I would welcome it.

  I had no intention of leaving, of surviving Eugène, you see, despite his plans. There was no life after this. Nothing I wanted would remain, certainly not me. If everything I loved was to die again, I would be sure death took me, too.

  §

  The next day I wrote to Aristafeo. I told him of the concert, of the need I had of an accompanist. Would he join me? I need you, I wrote. I sent it by the only post I knew I could trust, my own hand, sliding it under the door to his empty courtyard before I ran away.

  Eight

  ON THE DAY of the concert more flowers lined the streets than ever before, and by the late morning, the crowd was much larger than I had expected. I think everyone remaining in Paris had come. The Tuileries garden was full of picnics, wine, children—and it seemed as if my funereal feelings could only be wrong.

  Eugène had said I did not need to dress fine, and so I had not dressed fine. They will believe you are putting on airs if you do, he’d said. I sat happily in the grass, as I had as a child, listening to the performers until I was hungry.

  As there were many acts still to go before mine, I left and walked to the Marais, to Aristafeo’s house, to look for him. He had not written back. As the day of the concert approached, I prepared to sing a simpler song if I needed to accompany myself, but even as I made my way into his neighborhood, I still hoped he was on his way—that if I walked the route I was sure he would take I might find him. And I was intent on keeping that hope all the way to his door.

  The streets grew quieter the farther I got from the Tuileries until there was too much quiet. At first, I thought it was because all had gone to the concert. I knew it before I
turned the next corner, though, the silence of death, and so as I came to the corner of the street, I stopped.

  I saw first the terrible color in the street, mixed blood and wine running out of doors. Broken glass glinted like smashed ice everywhere inside the one café I knew to still be open and the nearby buildings. The doors had been shot to pieces, as had the wood, not broken as much as torn. The men in the café, the women, the children, all were dead, also torn, their expressions like masks dropped at the moment of death.

  I stood very still, afraid to move. The terrible flood of the broken red street.

  They were here in the city then, the Versaillais. The destruction was so recent, I could smell the burning food on the stove. The time the tenor had given me was indeed false. I could hear guns now in the distance, but a sound like a thousand guns, an impossible sound. A sound like the end of everything.

  We could not hear them over the concert.

  I pulled my skirt up and walked through the blood and wine into the café, past the smashed people on the floor, past the smashed mirrors and tables, the only sound the crack of the glass under my feet. I had moved on instinct away from the noise, out of the street, and this was the one open doorway. I stepped into the kitchen, the stove fire still burning, to find the chef on the floor, the pans smoking; and I pushed them to the side. There was a pail of sand for the fire and I threw it on. An unmarked wrapped ham sat where someone had taken it out. The Germans or the Versaillais, whoever had done this, they would not steal the food, I knew. They would have come well fed. The dead had no need for the food left behind and I didn’t know when I would be able to find such a thing again, so I put the ham in my bag and made my way through the shelves to leave by the kitchen entrance through the back.

  I stopped again by the door, as if there were something more to do, but I paused. If I stayed here among the dead, I would be safe.

  It was all undone, emptied into the street. I would not sing tonight, I would not get into the balloon, I would not escape.

  I continued, followed only by my own dark steps across the floor when I looked back. I went into the street to continue to the next and the next. The ham knocked against my back.

  I heard now the screams from the Tuileries and again the terrible noise of the guns. The guns they used on us that day were terrible things, the like had never been seen, able to shoot hundreds of bullets. This was the day we learned guns like this existed, shooting with this terrible speed.

  There were so many of us, and they needed to murder us in crowds.

  As I stared down the street at the people running from the concert, I saw a shape I knew.

  Aristafeo.

  I screamed his name in my voice made for crying out in terror. A harpy’s bark, the full force of my voice. I’d never once made a sound like that before, and it shocked me. Him as well, for he heard it and turned and ran toward me instead, and as he did, the people behind him fell, exploding into storms of blood and bone, their terrible cries cut short as their hearts burst or their mouths were shorn away.

  He was a fast runner, faster than I. He knew his streets well, and he pulled me along behind him.

  §

  We ran.

  We ran until the streets were quiet again, away from the fighting, and soon found ourselves at the Jardin des Plantes. Aristafeo made to enter, and I questioned him, and so he explained. The zoo animals had all been eaten or died. No one would search there. The soldiers would go through the wealthy homes around the palace first, even into the palace itself, looting for valuables or food or both, killing as they went. No one would bother to search an empty zoo.

  In we went. A few surviving monkeys still lived in the monkey cage. No Paris butcher had managed to defeat them. They shrieked defiance as we passed.

  §

  We did not speak of death. We did not speak of the secret chamber, the Empress’s bracelets, or my little gift. We did not speak of the strange guns of the Versaillais.

  Instead, we lay together in the back chamber of the lions’ cage. It was larger and cleaner than the elephants’, and fit us, lions being of an approximate size.

  Tell me a story, he said finally. Anything. Tell me the story of your escapes. I want to hear everything you have escaped from.

  I told him of my family’s death, my time in the cirque, and how I had tried and failed to get to Lucerne. Of the Majeurs-Plaisirs and learning to beat men as if they were horses, as if I were racing them to their satisfactions. I told him of the secret of the scratched looking glass, of the long chamber for spying on the secrets of men, of learning to sing my first aria, “Regnava nel silenzio” from Lucia.

  This is quite a beautiful aria, he said. Will you sing it for me?

  Softly, I sang it as he lay against my chest, his hands tangled in my hair.

  I told him still more—of my escape from prison into the convent, and my service to the Empress and the Comtesse; of my capture at Compiègne and my performance as a doll; of my being made to return to the tenor and my study at Baden-Baden.

  As I came to the end of my stories, Aristafeo had fallen asleep. In the dark I saw again the tenor as he sat up in the box of the illusion theater with his look of intent surprise, ignoring the angry Euphrosyne. I wondered when he had decided it was time for me to die along with the rest. If he had decided this earlier, say, before he vanished. Or if it was later, when he knew I was with Aristafeo.

  Or earlier, when he had taken me back from the Comtesse.

  All his little notes, the dance of it all. And then it didn’t matter; he didn’t matter. He couldn’t matter, not now.

  §

  When we became hungry, I remembered the ham, and we cut off a piece each and ate.

  Our shoes were black with blood.

  Night had fallen but there was still light from the fires. We climbed to the top of the zoo to see where the fires were and if we should leave, and so from the roof, we watched as Paris burned.

  §

  In the morning we woke to find the neighborhood had been barricaded and occupied by the Commune, but still no one had searched the institutes and the zoo. Periodically, we heard the screams of fighting, and then, after two days, an enormous explosion rocked the palace.

  We cannot stay, Aristafeo said to me, as the noise ended.

  We stay until there’s no ham, I said. And then we leave.

  §

  Our monkey neighbors awakened us. Their screams of defiance, I guessed, meant new visitors.

  I shook Aristafeo awake, my hand over his mouth so he wouldn’t say a word.

  As the soldiers shot at the monkeys, we left, slipping into the nearest of the greenhouses. We made our way through the silent rows of plants under the vast pleated glass-and-metal roof until we were in the street. We went first to the Luxembourg Gardens, thinking to hide there next, but instead we found the fountains and gardens full of thousands of bodies, all Communards, newly dead. The grass was soaked in their blood. So many had died, the Versaillais likely needed more room for the dead, and so this was why they had turned their attention to the zoo.

  We did not dare speak and fled silently until we reached the Seine, pausing only when we were down under one of the bridges.

  What are we to do here? I asked him, as he waved at me to go no farther.

  Aristafeo smiled at me then.

  Why are you smiling? I asked.

  What can you not escape? he asked.

  Paris, I nearly said, and then Fate, and then the tenor—in the end I said none of these for back then I took more seriously the idea I might curse myself. Instead, I said what a lover would say.

  I hope it’s you.

  It was then I saw it, the most beautiful horse I’d ever seen, up on the quai. It had gotten loose somehow, or the rider had died, it didn’t matter—and no one had shot it yet for steaks and pies. It was most likely the mount of some dead Versaillais—the only well-fed horses in Paris were coming into the city with them.

  A handsome stallion, pale g
ray-white and fierce, it had its bridle but not its saddle.

  I snatched some grass by my feet and walked slowly toward him, holding it out. He whinnied and backed up some before coming a little closer, testing me. So I stood stock-still, hand out, waiting.

  You, too, I said to Aristafeo, anxious that he help. If we were to ride the horse together, it would need calming from us both. But I could not see him, for he was behind me, slipping his elbow around my throat.

  Even you, I thought, before the blackness came over me.

  §

  I woke with my own bag over my head, in darkness. The smell of the ham thick in my face. We were riding the horse; I was in his arms in front of him, my face against the horse’s neck.

  Paris still smelled of burning and worse. The banks of the Seine were littered with the dead, I could tell.

  We rode for an uncertain distance, an instant and an eon, and then he had me off of the horse, on his shoulder, climbing stairs and more stairs, until he opened a door and I felt wind.

  Are you awake or did I kill you? he asked. I could hear him making some preparations.

  Still here, I said faintly.

  I must confess something, he said. Of your tenor friend.

  I waited.

  He paid me to bring you to the roof of the opera that night, he said. I was to be his agent.

  It doesn’t matter, I said. Why did you agree?

  How could I not want you safe? he said. Who else could it be?

  But you would have stayed and died, I said.

  He was silent to this.

  Nothing can happen to you, I said.

  You were never going to belong to me, he said. Except here.

  No, I said. No. I don’t want this, I don’t want this.

  They are killing the women, he said. I don’t know why, but the Seine was full of women.

  Now it was I who could say nothing.