Akin

by Emma Donoghue

  In the café, Michael played his Twenty Questions ball. He stretched in the chair, making the wicker creak.

  Reading the chalkboard menu, Noah smiled. “‘Un café,’ one coffee—‘sept euro,’ seven euros.”

  The boy didn’t look up but he asked, “For one cup, seriously?”

  “Listen to the next item. ‘Un café, s’il vous plaît’—that means ‘A coffee, please’—five euros.”

  “Huh?”

  Noah translated the third line. “And ‘Good morning, Madam, a coffee, please’ is only two euros.”

  Michael got it. “Like a fine for disrespect.”

  “More like a discount for good manners.”

  The woman finally came over, and Noah requested his coffee, and baguette and butter for Michael, as graciously as he could.

  “Merci,” Michael muttered, surrendering his menu. After she walked away, he whispered, “What’s she looking so sour for?”

  “That’s a neutral expression here. The French save their smiles for people they like. They call us hypocrites for grinning at strangers.”

  Michael nodded. “I get that. Every damn morning, our first-grade teacher was like, ‘Now who’s got a big smile for me?’”

  Noah’s mouth twitched. “Still, could be worse. When I first came to New York, my nanny—if I didn’t use my fork in what she considered the proper way, she’d bang my knuckles with it.”

  “Bitch! Did she expect you to smile too?”

  “No, Miss Sprule would probably have smacked me if I’d smiled. Different rules.”

  “Did you tell on her?”

  “Complain to my father, you mean? It never occurred to me. Kids generally didn’t.”

  “Then how come you’re pro-snitching now?” Michael asked.

  Noah stared. “Am I?”

  “You said I should have snitched on the dickheads that took my board.”

  Noah barely remembered how that conversation had concluded. This boy had a Velcro mind; details stuck to it. “Well, that was an actual crime.”

  “So’s whacking a kid with a fork.”

  “I see that now. But back then…kids were meant to be grateful. Maybe especially because it was wartime, and we were lucky enough to be in the States, with plenty of food, instead of Europe.”

  “Where other kids were getting gassed in ovens.”

  Noah blinked; nodded. He supposed it was good they still taught that much in school.

  His café crème arrived, with a tiny rectangular speculaas. He dipped the cookie in the coffee to awaken the spices. No Proustian moment, but it was tasty.

  Michael wriggled in the wicker chair, slathering his long cuts of baguette with butter.

  “Drink your water,” Noah reminded him.

  The boy sipped it like medicine.

  Now Noah couldn’t shake the thought of the gas chambers.

  He’d slept reasonably well last night. How could he have slept well in that room?

  Succumbing to a morbid impulse, he looked up “Nazis Excelsior Nice.”

  He couldn’t stop himself from clicking on one link after another. Adolf Eichmann’s top aide, SS Captain Alois Brunner, watched night after night from one of the hotel’s elegant second-story balconies as his men’s black Citröens and trucks pulled up, loaded with Jews. By September 1943 the cafés and hotels of Nice were full of refugees who’d fled to that cosmopolitan haven from all over Europe. The first harvest was easy, but to hunt down the rest, the Nazis relied more and more on informers.

  Margot. No, no, no. This was pure speculation, and tacky, frankly. Just because she’d had to—chose to—no, felt she’d had to—stay away from her little boy for two years, had he any right to accuse her of being an informer?

  Head reeling, Noah rested his eyes on Michael, who was spinning a euro coin on the polished table. Shouldn’t the kid have only fifty cents left? “So the bathroom lady didn’t charge you after all? Nice of her.”

  Michael snorted. “I didn’t go back, that’s wasting good money. Took a whiz behind a tree instead.”

  Well, Noah could hardly tell him, “Never pee outdoors,” when Frenchmen were so known for it that their cities always had a urinous waft. “I don’t think fifty euro cents is enough to buy you anything except a pee.” He pulled out his billfold. “You really should have an allowance for this week.” He slid ten euros across the table. “That’s about twelve US dollars. Not to be spent on extra Cokes, OK?”

  “’Kay.” Michael pocketed the note. “Thanks.”

  Noah got to his feet, leaving coins on the saucer for the waitress.

  Out in the sunshine, he led the way past cheap luggage stores. The Vieille Ville—Old Nice—had to be south of here, but he was all turned around. Ah, there was a tunnel roofed with gold, steps leading down: could it be through there? He ducked into the tunnel and descended into a warren of lanes, the boy behind him.

  Noah stood staring around.

  “Are we lost?”

  “No, it’s just that this part of town—it used to stink. Garbage, rats.” The old slum still had its picturesque proportions, barely changed since the seventeenth century—shadowed alleyways with terraced houses almost touching four or five stories overhead. But now every gutter was clean enough to eat out of, low doors leading to leather or jewelry workshops, bikini boutiques. “They’ve polished it up so much, it’s more like a film set.”

  “This bit still stinks,” Michael said as they went around a corner.

  “Only because of that fancy cheese shop over there.” Grinning plaster cows of various sizes stood below the gracious capitals of FROMAGERIE, and weird-looking rounds of cheese filled the window: blackish, and red, and green. “France has more cheeses than days in the year. What’s your favorite cheese?”

  A shrug. “American.”

  “Shall we go in?” Noah suggested.

  “Pew.”

  “All right.” As they walked, he told the boy, “The French say ‘beurk’ when they’re disgusted. And ‘pan-pan’ for bang-bang, and ‘aïe-aïe-aïe’ for ouch.”

  “Freaky.”

  Noah tried to think of a few others. “Roosters go ‘cocorico’…” Something just out of reach, over the rim of his memory. A song? Chaque matinée, chaque matinée, cocorico, cocorico. Had that been her name, the cleaner’s child? How could a girl in the 1930s have been named Cocorico?

  No, Coco, that was it. Coco, the daughter of Madame Dupont—she must have been named for Chanel. But Noah remembered that he used to call her Cocorico for a joke. Would she by any chance still be alive, he wondered, and living in or near Nice?

  The tourists who were wandering in aimless appreciation through the Vieille Ville were clearly distinguishable from the inhabitants who had things to do: skinny kids, workmen, bowed old ladies filling their string bags with the day’s provisions. Michael blew five euros on a selfie stick from a gaunt young North African selling them out of a basket on his back.

  Noah didn’t mention his view that the selfie stick represented early twenty-first-century culture at its shoddy, narcissistic nadir.

  Michael struck a pose with another giant turd, then photographed himself mugging beside a theater poster that said Le Sexe pour les nuls—“Sex for Idiots”—over a picture of a half-peeled banana encased in black leather.

  “Why don’t you take a picture of something old and beautiful, for once?” Noah pointed at a decorated facade (Adam and Eve?) high over their heads.

  “Nah, my friends prefer funny.”

  “Let’s see what you’ve got so far?”

  After a moment, Michael held out his phone.

  Noah flicked through three blurred images in a row. “Why don’t you make sure they’re in focus, at least?”

  Michael shook his head at Noah’s stupidity.

  “So it’s uncool to be in focus?”

  “To look like you’re trying,” Michael corrected him.

  Noah reached a grotesque selfie the boy had clearly distorted afterward in a house-of-mirr
ors way. “You really want that image of you to be online forever?”

  Michael yanked the phone away. “It’ll disappear from their feeds as soon as they’ve seen it.”

  “Really?”

  “I guess they could do a screen grab, but nobody bothers except for sex pics.”

  “Great,” Noah said, sardonic. “These friends, I hope you actually know them? Do they go to your school?”

  “Jason used to, till his mom took him to Atlanta. The rest I know from hanging out in chat rooms. Eyes on the prize!”

  “What prize?”

  “We’re going to be streamers and make a million bucks.”

  “Streamers?”

  Michael broke it down into contemptuous syllables: “Peo-ple will pay to watch us gam-ing.”

  Noah postponed the question of whether that was a realistic career plan. “But are you friends in the real world?”

  With scorn: “It’s all real, dude.”

  Spotting a small sign that said OPÉRA, Noah said, “Oh, I grew up near here.”

  “In the slum?” Michael asked.

  “Well, no,” he admitted. “On a nice street, just outside the Old Town, near the sea.”

  Right after the ornate Opera House, Noah turned a corner; he’d remembered the name but he’d had to look up the street number in Max Harstad’s index. “When my grandmother died, Père Sonne and Margot moved down from the hills, into town, and rented the whole third floor of this building.” He pointed up at the faded pink walls, and scanned the top windows as if his mother might smile down from one.

  Had she never considered starting wedded life with Marc on their own, rather than cheek by jowl with Père Sonne? Both his parents probably could have been artists themselves, it struck Noah now. But they’d strayed off that path for different reasons (her father, his lost hand) and never found their way back. What had Margot’s regrets been, Noah wondered now, and what had she done with them?

  Not that. Not a mouche. He refused to believe it. That would mean Margot’s life from her forties to her nineties had been one long cover-up.

  He read the tiny plaques by the doorbells. 3IÈME KHOURY AISHAH MASSO-KINÉSITHÉRAPIE.

  “Who lives there now?” Michael wanted to know.

  “The third floor’s the office of some kind of massage person.”

  “Really?” The boy craned up.

  Noah guessed his misunderstanding. “Medical massage, like physiotherapy.”

  “Oh. Are we going in?”

  Noah hadn’t thought to try. “They’re probably on a long French lunch break.” But he pressed the bell once, for the heck of it.

  Michael pecked at the wall with his selfie stick till a bit of plaster crumbled off.

  “Stop that.” Noah turned away, mounting shallow marble steps in the deep shadow between two ancient tenements.

  Rounding a corner, he and Michael almost trod on the heels of three soldiers with machine guns patrolling the empty alley. “What are these motherfuckers doing here?” Michael asked, in a voice that wasn’t low enough.

  Noah grabbed him by the elbow and hustled him back down the steps. He thought of trigger-happy police shooting kids.

  “That’s so fake.”

  “What is?” Bewildered.

  With his selfie stick, Michael pointed to shuttered windows painted on a blank cement wall.

  “Trompe l’oeil, remember that phrase?”

  “Hasn’t tricked my eye,” the boy boasted. Again, a second later, “Fake!”

  Noah squinted against the hard light. “Actually, I think those windows are real.”

  “The bits underneath, though.”

  Yes, the elaborate moldings were painted—and recently, by the looks of it. “You’re right, but they’re not necessarily trying to fool us.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “It’s an homage. A sort of shout-out to the ancestors. Architects around here have been using trompe l’oeil for centuries, so when house painters do it today, it’s a little wink at the past.”

  “Hey look, more Segways.”

  A tour was rolling out of a doorway. Noah read the sign: “Twenty euros for thirty minutes.”

  “What a rip-off.”

  “You think?” The boy wasn’t used to Upper West Side prices. “You’re paying for the guide’s time and expertise, as well as the use of the machine,” Noah pointed out.

  “For that money, I’d want eight hot babes carrying me around town.”

  Noah grinned at that image.

  Next door was a papeterie, a purveyor of fine stationery, which claimed to be By Appointment to Her Majesty Queen Victoria. Hadn’t Père Sonne captured Victoria on one of her holidays here, in her donkey carriage? It seemed as if everybody-who-was-anybody had come through Nice sooner or later; no wonder the photographer hadn’t needed to leave. The city was a playground, a stage set, a still point in a turning world.

  Oh, oh, that aroma—how it took Noah back three-quarters of a century. Socca! There it was, squares of thin gold that a woman was digging out of her dish, the diameter of a truck wheel. But it was nearly noon, and Noah needed to have his lunch sitting down, and he was determined not to miss the right slot for a meal as he had yesterday. So he turned away from the socca cart. Through an alley that was barely wider than his arm span, he found his way onto a shopping street and went along sniffing out appetizing scents.

  “Gross!” Michael was eye to eye with a whole spitted pig.

  “Well, where do you think your bacon comes from? Want a slice?”

  “It’s got a face, dude.”

  That made Noah think of Alice in Wonderland; didn’t she find it impossible to eat anything she’d been introduced to? The pig was indeed dazzlingly gross, a spectrum of shades from pink to orange. A blackened string like a prisoner’s chain bound it, sunken and burned right in.

  Michael took a close-up through the greasy glass.

  Noah picked a little bistro simply because its chalk menu offered testicules de mouton panés. “Crispy fried sheep’s balls.”

  “Order them,” Michael begged.

  “Sorry, not in the mood. And not for tête de veau avec langue either—that’s calf’s head with tongue.”

  Michael gagged.

  At their table, Noah dithered over the menu: tripe, a terrine of foie gras, rabbit in its sauce (he loved that French idiom, as if each dish rightly had one and only one proper sauce). “You know rabbits can have several hundred great-grandchildren in one year?”

  “Nightmare,” Michael said.

  Did they feel a glow of dynastic pride, Noah wondered, or had they no idea that these younger bunnies were anything to them—just more competitors for the limited grazing?

  Michael rejected everything Noah suggested he might like, and there was no kids’ menu here. (Nor credit-card payment nor even phone bookings, he noticed from the chalkboard; it was the bistro that time forgot.) “Aha,” Noah said as he turned the card over, “Pizza Margherita.”

  “I don’t want any margherita.”

  “That’s just the name for a cheese pizza here.”

  “’Kay.” Michael wanted Noah to order the escargots à l’ail, “just so’s I can watch.”

  But Noah wasn’t in the mood for snails. “They’re intersexed, you know.”

  “What, now?”

  “Snails. They each have a tiny penis and vagina right by the head.”

  Michael’s eyes narrowed. “You know a lot of stuff, but most of it’s sick.”

  “Fair comment.” Noah finally picked loup entier cuit à la plancha, monkfish cooked on a plank. Though after the proprietor had gone into the kitchen, he realized he’d confused the words—lotte was monkfish, loup was sea bass.

  Since you can’t taste the difference, Joan asked, what does it matter?

  “Why does everyone touch that thing on their way out?”

  Noah looked where Michael was pointing. It was a little hunched man in bas-relief. “He’s called Gobbo,” he said, the word floating
up from his childhood. “You rub his hump for good luck.”

  “Huh.”

  The pizza arrived startlingly fast, seared with black from the woodfired oven. It smelled so good, Noah somewhat regretted ordering the fish.

  Michael glowered. “I knew there’d be goddamn margherita.”

  “Those are just basil leaves, for a garnish.” Noah lifted one off with his fork.

  “I don’t eat fucking garnish.” Michael gouged them out and flicked them onto Noah’s plate.

  Noah wished Joan was alive. (Well, what else was new?) Not that she’d necessarily have known what to do with Michael, but at least the challenge would have been shared, even halved. What merciless fate had decreed that Noah turn eighty in this brat’s company?

  He ate the basil. So the boy’s moody this week, he told himself. Hasn’t he good reasons? “Is your pizza acceptable, otherwise?”

  “Too flat, and they kind of burned it,” Michael said, mouth full.

  On their way out, Michael doubled back to rub the hunchback. “Now you.”

  “I thought we agreed I’ve had enough luck in my lifetime.”

  “Do it!”

  So Noah did.

  Out in the sunshine, they got ice cream from Fenocchio, the gelateria that claimed to have more than a hundred flavors. After a brief reprise of their argument about waffle cones, Michael settled for a regular cone of Oreo (a suspiciously American-sounding flavor), whereas Noah chose olive, simply because he’d never find it anywhere else. Several licks in, he decided that there was a good reason ice cream was rarely flavored with olives, but he couldn’t face getting in line again.

  “Like your mom’s photo.” Smeared brown and white around the mouth, Michael nodded at something behind Noah.

  Noah tried to swivel around, and his chair’s silver feet squealed on the stone slab. “What? Where?”

  Michael used his selfie stick as a pointer. “Same shape, except it’s portrait not landscape.”

  Noah’s eyes searched the square, the tourists, the lone violinist, the capoeira performers vaulting over each other as they did in Central Park. Only when he finally tilted his face high enough did he spot the neoclassical bell tower in warm pastels rearing up against the sky and recognize the pattern from Margot’s photo: dash, circle, dash. It wasn’t a box or a tomb at all; he’d been looking at the image the wrong way, horizontally, when it was actually a vertical tower. The dashes were narrow-cut windows, and the circle was a decoration between them. “Why on earth would my mother have taken a close-up of that?”