Akin

by Emma Donoghue

  Père Sonne made family life look a blast, Noah thought. Matisse and his daughter in their canoe. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald on the Prom, swinging their little girl between them. Un, deux, trois, soleil! (One, two, three, sunshine!) That’s what Margot and Marc used to chant, Noah remembered, each gripping one of his sticky paws through Central Park, and heaving him high on soleil. She’d been a good mother. But didn’t the children of monsters often believe that?

  Michael grinned at an image on the next page: a man in a tiny alley in the Old Town, clown legs braced horizontally between two buildings. At the top of the image, a housewife looked down on him from a high window as if to ask, what nonsense is this?

  “That’s one of the Marx Brothers—Harpo, maybe,” Noah told him.

  “Oh yeah, seen them on YouTube.”

  Noah checked the date: 1929. “A year later, my grandpa suddenly stopped photographing celebrities.”

  “How come? Had enough of their ego-tripping?”

  “Well, maybe, after fifty years…and he’d just been widowed, but that doesn’t explain it.” Max Harstad discussed the theory that the photographer’s mood had been darkened by the crash of the US stock market, but pointed out that France hadn’t really started feeling the effects till 1931. Noah put his finger on the woman at the window above Harpo. “Père Sonne got interested in the nobodies instead. Les riz. My mother had an old saying about les poivres et les riz—the rich were pepper because it used to be expensive, whereas the poor were plain old rice.”

  “Who’s she?” Michael tapped the next page: a lipsticked face looming in a mirror at a market stall in the Cours Saleya.

  “A cross-dresser.” Noah said, reading Max Harstad’s caption. “It’s in a 1930s series called ‘La Nuit,’ ‘The Night’.” Taken after dark, mostly during Carnival. Workingmen in false noses and head scarves, crammed together behind a fence like animals at the zoo. “Lots of street performers—look at this one-legged organ-grinder.” Rouged girls resting on benches, maybe an allusion to a Toulouse-Lautrec painting? It was hard not to take a voyeuristic pleasure in their limp curves, Noah found. A woman had her face down on a bar table while a baby sat up wide-eyed in the pram beside her.

  That one made Michael nod. “Good one. He’s not even crying yet but you’re like, ‘Uh-oh, any second now…’”

  Did Père Sonne ask permission of the subjects of these apparently candid shots? This wiry family in worn leotards, for instance, packing up their painted wagon.

  “That could be the same circus we’re going to,” Michael said.

  Noah had forgotten that half-promise. He touched his finger to the arc of bright canvas in the upper left corner of the picture. “See this bit of the big top?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Your eye—well, your brain—imagines the rest, the whole huge circle of the tent.” Noah traced the circumference past the edge of the page, across the snowy tablecloth. “That’s called the law of closure. Like closing a gap. The viewer fills in what they don’t see, what’s missing.” Noah was having trouble explaining this. He used to be a good lecturer, but his students had never been eleven. “Do you by any chance know the FedEx logo?”

  “The arrow. I never didn’t see the arrow,” Michael crowed. “But Cody couldn’t tell what I was talking about till I drew it for him.”

  Noah’s fish soup arrived just then with all its little accoutrements: a puddle of rouille, garlic croutons, grated Gruyère. Michael complained about how small his plate of pasta was, but tucked in.

  At the bus shelter, Noah squinted at the schedule.

  “So, the circus this afternoon, maybe? I saw the trucks, it’s really near our hotel.”

  “Well, I don’t know. There’s a bus we could take to a Roman arena,” Noah said as enticingly as he could.

  “An arena like for basketball?”

  “Ah…similar. Gladiator fights, that sort of thing.” What he really wanted to see up at Cimiez was the episcopal palace, but he’d have trouble selling that.

  “The arena, then the circus,” Michael decided.

  Their bus lurched in zigzags through the hills, slowly rising above Nice. It hung behind a knot of bicycles for a while, then overtook them. Now there was a very French sight, Noah thought: skinny men (and one woman) in lurid spandex bib shorts.

  Nudging Michael, he held A Life’s Work open and showed him an action shot of newsboys in shirtsleeves dashing by with bundles of papers. “There’s a sort of rule in photography that moving subjects should go left to right, the direction we read in, but you notice my grandpa broke it here?”

  “By mistake?”

  Noah shook his head. “I think he wanted to shock the eye—like, ‘Whoa, those boys are going to knock me over!’” Another picture, of dockworkers dwarfed by the gigantic barrels they were rolling off a ship. A scrawny woman with a thickened right arm working an olive mill. These overworked subjects had paused in their trades to pose with gravitas for Père Sonne, and in return he’d done them the courtesy of framing them like saints or scholars in a fresco: with respect, but no sentimentality.

  Here was an enigmatic fisherman regarding the viewer through his net. “That’s genius,” Michael said. “Like, is he the fish, is it him that’s trapped?”

  “Ooh, you’re getting deep now,” Noah told him, only a little mockingly. “Do you notice how there’s often an odd man out in the group? Like this one brick-carrier who’s stopped to sneak a cigarette.” Which made Noah itch for one.

  “This little girl’s bored out of her skull.” Michael pointed to a shot of a family in procession behind a coffin.

  “Exactly.” The collective, and its discontents. The children in the series titled “Les Gens” were a force of anarchy erupting from the shadows of their slum: squeezed into huge pipes, peeking down from balconies, splashing in foul puddles.

  “He called this series ‘Les Gens,’ another pun—it means ‘The People,’” Noah explained, “but it sounds a little bit like légendes, legends—as if ordinary working people were superheroes.”

  “With secret powers?”

  “Well…the power to keep going at hard jobs for not enough pay.” Noah couldn’t shake the image of Amber welding for twenty cents an hour. Did she focus all her rage into that small flame? Was it her sentence she was burning away, a moment at a time?

  Now the bus passed a sign about a colloquium on Nice in 1918. With uniquely French grandiloquence, it said LE SOUVENIR EST UN HONNEUR. OUBLIER SERAIT UNE HONTE. “It’s an honor to remember, and it would be shameful to forget,” he translated for Michael’s benefit.

  “An honor to remember what?”

  “The dead. It’s a conference to mark a hundred years since the end of World War One.”

  Michael frowned, thinking that through. “Not much honor for you, though.”

  Noah gave the boy a look.

  “Remembering your mom, I mean. If it turns out she was snitching to the Nazis.”

  A woman sitting nearby stared.

  Noah asked, “Keep your voice down, would you?”

  “’Kay.”

  Noah leaned his mouth on his knuckles.

  After a few seconds, the boy whispered: “No offense, dude.”

  “None taken. I don’t know if snitch is quite the right word for it,” Noah murmured, troubled by the parallel. “See, your no-snitching code…it’s really important to tell the police if you have information about a crime in your neighborhood.”

  The boy’s mouth twisted.

  “That’s different from the terrible thing Margot may have done, sneaking off to betray her own people to the invaders. If she really did that…that’s unforgivable,” Noah said heavily. “But cops are not the same as Nazis.”

  One eyebrow went up. “Tell that to the black kids at my school.”

  “I take that point, but—”

  “What about Michael Brown Junior? Or Tamir Rice, he was fucking twelve when they gunned him down.”

  “OK, OK.” Noah noticed on
the electronic sign that they’d just missed their bus stop, so he lurched to his feet.

  The suburb of Cimiez was all quiet green and shade. “See, the Romans had no interest in lying around on the beach,” he told the boy, “so they settled up here in the hills where it was cooler.”

  A vast, dark red house across the park turned out to be the Musée Matisse, but Michael said he wasn’t looking at any art today.

  “All right, the Archaeological Museum, then.”

  “The arena, with the gladiators.”

  “The arena’s part of the museum, and I meant there were gladiators, a couple of thousand years ago.”

  In a wounded voice: “You said gladiators.”

  “Michael! You could not have believed there’d be actual live gladiators.”

  The kid smirked, dropping the act.

  The woman at the ticket counter seemed irritated to have her espresso and magazine-reading disturbed. She asked where they were from, for statistical purposes.

  To spite her assumptions, Noah said France.

  He could tell she didn’t believe him. Whether she was suspicious of Americans, or children, or both, she kept a beady eye on the pair of them.

  In the museum’s barnlike and almost entirely empty first room, Noah showed the boy coins, ivory-handled knives, even hands-on replicas—the puzzle pieces of an ancient amphora you could try to fit together. Michael slapped a reproduction helmet on his head (dull gold, with cheek flaps and a little point on top) and roamed around touching everything, spinning a marble head of Antonia on its stand, taking selfies with a mask of Silenus. “Shit, I forgot my selfie stick in the hotel.”

  “Bad luck.” Noah had slid it under the bed before the boy woke up.

  The woman from the desk clearly knew enough English to catch the word shit. She click-clacked on her stilettos through the cavernous space, scowling at Michael, and reminded Noah that children were to be supervised at all times by their…responsible adults.

  Noah told her he quite understood.

  “Ce n’est pas un jouet,” she barked at Michael, tapping her head.

  “She says the helmet’s not a toy.”

  The boy was at the pretend-you’re-an-archaeologist table, scooping and brushing red sand too vigorously, so it puffed into the air.

  The woman hovered in the entrance. Perhaps the young man should take the helmet off now, she suggested, and put it back on the stand for the next visitor?

  Noah’s temper flared. He pointed out that there were currently no other visitors.

  “Attention!” she shot at Michael, who was getting some sand on the floor.

  “Watch it,” Noah told him.

  “My bad,” Michael said glibly.

  Noah got him to put back the helmet before they went into the next room, where they sat through a video about life in ancient Cemenelum, full of creepily identical CGI soldiers.

  It was a relief to step out into the ruins of the town. Founded in the first century, Cemenelum had been the same size as Pompeii, Noah read, with a temple to Mars, a market square, and a vast bath complex. He walked to the center of the ruined white amphitheater and raised his voice. “Five thousand Romans would sit on these tiers and watch Christians get torn apart by lions.”

  The boy called back: “Nothing much going on here today, though.”

  “Oh come on, Michael, even you have to admit this is pretty cool.”

  The kid clambered onto an arch that was a single stone thick and snapped a picture of himself in a heroic pose.

  As they wandered around the vast diggings, Noah found a row of Roman toilet holes in a bench. “See, you’d sit there beside total strangers, and take turns wiping with the same sponge-on-a-stick.”

  “Ew!” Michael climbed over the warning string for a closer look.

  “Get back here.”

  “Just one pic, sitting on the Roman crapper.”

  “No! You’ll dislodge something.”

  “It survived a few million centuries, I don’t think my skinny ass is going to break it.”

  “Get back here this minute.”

  Indoors again, in the little gift shop, Michael flipped through a volume with translucent pages showing how Nice had looked at hundred-year intervals since the Greeks. Noah wondered whether the kid’s interest would dissipate if Noah actually bought it for him.

  The woman came scuttling out from behind her counter again to say that the books were not to be read before purchase.

  Noah’s teeth clamped together so hard, his jaw ached. “Come on, let’s pee before we go, if her ladyship doesn’t object to that.”

  He came out of the stall afterward to find Michael gone, and for a moment he panicked.

  But there was the boy outside the museum with his backpack, studying a sticker someone had put slightly askew on a lamppost. “What’s this about kebabs?”

  Burqas, kebabs, mosquées—assez! “It’s an anti-Muslim thing: no more burqas, kebabs, or mosques.”

  “Kebabs? Who doesn’t like kebabs?”

  “Idiots,” Noah sighed.

  “Are we going back down to the sea now?”

  “Yeah,” hedging, “but by a different bus so I can have a look at a garden near here.”

  “A garden?” Disgustedly. “Can we get it over with real fast?”

  “Really fast,” Noah told him. “It’s an adverb.”

  “It’s a pain in the ass is what it is.”

  This bus took only five minutes. As Noah followed his satellite map down one flowery avenue and along another, he told Michael what he’d looked up this morning. “The Marcel Network—”

  “The couple on the bench, and the dude who wasn’t your mom’s boyfriend?”

  He nodded. “They had to change all these Jewish kids’ names to Christian-sounding ones so the Nazis wouldn’t arrest them, right?” Noah had come across a partial list of the Marcel children in a database. Born from 1927 to 1942, hundreds of -steins, -manns, -blums, -baums, -ovitches. No R.J.s, though; no Js at all, not among the real surnames or the false. He’d skimmed the stories; nothing heartwarming about them. Moussa Abadi had felt guilty for the rest of his life about drilling his fellow Jews in the ersatz identities that were their only hope of survival, after they’d been entrusted to him by weeping parents who in many cases they would never see again. “But imagine if you forgot your real name and date of birth, and when the war was over you couldn’t remember who you really were, or find…any of your family who were left?”

  “I’d remember.” Michael’s voice was stern.

  “Well, some of them were just toddlers. So Abadi and Rosenstock, what they did was, they wrote down all the kids’ true facts, made three identical cards for each, with photographs, fingerprints, addresses, relations, the whole works.”

  “Why three?”

  “Safer, I suppose, because if there was just one it might get lost.”

  “But riskier because more cards the Nazis might find.”

  “You’re a smart cookie, Michael.”

  The boy shrugged off the compliment.

  The paradox was that these cards had endangered the entire Marcel Network, hiders and hidden alike. But then, it wasn’t fair to save a child’s life at the cost of stripping him of who he was. “Rosenstock and Abadi kept their own set tucked between books in their friend the bishop’s library, that’s just over there.” He nodded at the stately building coming up on the left. “They buried a second copy in his garden, and sent a third off to the International Red Cross.” How much they’d gambled, these imperfect heroes. What could have possessed Margot to wish, no, to do them harm?

  Noah’s hip was throbbing as they got off the bus and walked along the wall topped with decorative fencing. Here were the gates, but they wouldn’t open, even when he shook them. He checked the entrance hours listed for the diocesan office—yes, Friday 2:30 to 4:30—then noticed a slip of paper taped at the bottom: Fermé exceptionellement. “Damn it. Shut today, doesn’t say why.”

  “What
did you want to see, anyway?” Michael asked.

  “Just where they did their secret work, these Marcel people.” Noah pressed his forehead to the bars. A lush garden, with lofty trees. No sign of light in the building. “I had a notion that just maybe this picture was taken here.” He pulled out his mother’s envelope and found the image of the tangled roots.

  “Your mom was spying on trees?”

  Noah managed a smile; that did sound ridiculous. “I don’t know, possibly marking the spot where the third set of cards was buried?”

  “Like pirate treasure.” Michael seized the photo. Then shrugged off his backpack. “Give me a boost.”

  “What? Why? There’s nothing to see now.”

  “Come on,” the boy ordered.

  So Noah laced his fingers and let Michael step into them. Pressing down on Noah’s shoulders, even his head, the boy clambered up and then leaped onto the wall.

  “Hang on, I just meant for you to get a better view. Get down before you fall.”

  “I’m not going to fall.” Michael held onto the short spikes and swung his butt from side to side like a triumphant chimp.

  “It’s too high.”

  “This isn’t high.”

  “Remember how you broke your collarbone?”

  “It wasn’t from falling. Those eighth-grade dickwads threw me into a dumpster.”

  Noah stared up at him.

  The boy lifted one leg over the fence.

  “Michael! What are you doing?”

  “Going to look for your tree.”

  “Come back down right now.”

  But the boy had already dropped onto the grass below, with a thump.

  “There’ll be security cameras, a burglar alarm!” Noah couldn’t hear anything from the episcopal palace itself, but sensors might have triggered a call to the emergency services. Up on his toes, he craned through the bars.

  Michael walked away, throwing over his shoulder: “It’s not like I’m breaking in.”

  “You already have!”

  “It’s only a freaking garden.”

  “The police could be on their way already. And what if you can’t climb back up?”