Akin

by Emma Donoghue

  But Michael was preoccupied with comparing the picture in his hand to the nearest palm tree. The next looked like a yew to Noah. Then a knobbly plane tree.

  “Come back,” he wailed. “It’s pointless, I’m sorry we came.” He was preparing an explanation for when the gendarmes roared up. A misunderstanding; a confused child. Did French municipal police carry guns? Ne tirez pas! Don’t shoot the kid!

  “It’s kind of like this one.” Examining, what was it, some kind of oak now, Michael held up the picture beside it. He pulled out his phone and photographed the base of the tree.

  “It’s been seventy-five years,” Noah called. “Think how much the roots would have grown in that time, or the tree could have fallen down long ago.”

  Michael’s face fell. “Then why are we here?”

  Because I need to weigh my mother’s soul. “Please!”

  A faint siren in the distance; an ambulance?

  Michael cantered over to the gates. Tucking the toe of his sneaker into a scroll of ironwork—

  “Don’t spear yourself,” Noah groaned.

  The boy was up and over in two seconds, and thudded down onto the sidewalk.

  Noah didn’t waste any breath rebuking him; he picked up the backpack, seized the sleeve of Michael’s jacket, and turned to go.

  The boy tugged his arm out of Noah’s grasp, but did follow him around the corner.

  Sitting on the bus coming back into the center of Nice, Noah compared his mother’s small print to the image on Michael’s phone. They were not dissimilar, these tangle-rooted trees, if you allowed for the passage of three-quarters of a century.

  “Could be, right?”

  “Could be.” Noah didn’t want to sound ungracious. The kid was doing everything he could to help this old man with a quest that wasn’t his own.

  “Hey, I nearly forgot. Shut your eyes.”

  Noah did. When he opened them again, he recoiled from the granite-eyed gaze of a soldier. The kid was wearing the replica Roman helmet. “Michael Young!”

  A giggle from behind the nosepiece. “Bitch was asking for it.”

  Noah couldn’t deny that, but—“She was suspicious, and you just confirmed her worst suspicions. You stole from a museum.” He was trying to remember whether there’d been CCTV cameras there.

  “It’s just plastic.” Michael drum-rolled his fingertips on the helmet.

  “What about all the other kids who won’t get to try it on now?”

  “Like they could give a shit.”

  “Listen to me. Trespass, theft, all in one day. You’ll end up”—Noah stopped himself from saying in prison—“in deep trouble if you carry on like this.”

  The boy’s face was set, behind the brassy cheek flaps; the lower lip jutted.

  “We’re taking back the helmet this minute. Well, first thing tomorrow, because I’m tired,” Noah corrected himself, unable to face the return trip right now, as the afternoon shadowed into evening.

  At the stop by the Galeries Lafayette with their displays of masked, pirouetting mannequins, Michael said he was starving. Noah found the nearest café with a takeout counter. Their shtick turned out to be that they formed your ice cream, petal by petal, into the shape of a rose.

  “More frilly shit.” Michael was already daubed with strawberry pink around the nose.

  Remembering the chemistry demonstration he’d promised the boy, Noah discreetly helped himself to a packet of salt, a plastic spoon, and three plastic cups from the side of the counter.

  The electronic sign said the next tram was due in four minutes. Noah leaned against a vaulted pillar and knuckled his hip to ease the muscle. He shut his eyes to rest them. When he opened them next, they focused on a marble plaque: PENDU ICI. “Hanged here,” he murmured, pointing at the plaque. “A farmer called Séraphin Torrin.” The name of an angel. “The Seventh of July: that was nearly the end of the war. The Nazis left him strung up here as a warning to his comrades.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Nope,” Noah said with a sorrowful satisfaction. “Before the end of August, the Resistance got tired of waiting for the Yankees and liberated the city themselves.”

  And what about Margot, had she found herself on the losing side of history? Could she possibly have regretted the ousting of the Germans?

  Don’t indict the woman without evidence, Joan reminded him.

  But if Margot had been loyal to France, why had she fled its shores the minute the war was over?

  Words chiseled in a little wreath below the marble plaque: “PASSANT, INCLINE-TOI, SOUVIENS-TOI. That means, ‘You who pass by, bow down, remember.’”

  “Yeah yeah yeah, we’ve been remembering all week,” Michael said through a huge yawn. “Streetcar’s coming.”

  Have some respect. But Noah managed not to say it; pressed his lips against his teeth.

  As they walked from the tram stop, Michael got only the occasional glance from a passerby. They probably assumed his helmet was a Carnival costume.

  “Here we are.”

  “No, we’re still a few blocks from the hotel,” Noah told him.

  Michael gestured down a street to where a slice of big top was lit up in the dusk.

  Noah nearly dropped down on the sidewalk at the prospect. “Really, the circus, now?”

  “We had a deal.”

  “All right. If you let me have a nap first.”

  “Big baby!”

  “That’s how it is.” Noah checked the complicated website on his phone; almost two hours before the evening show. Yes, he’d have time to stretch out on starched sheets in his room…

  In their room. Being alone, his normal condition for the past decade, was forbidden to Noah this week.

  When he forced himself back to consciousness after just forty-five minutes in bed—the alarm on his phone like a barbed sliver of sound in his brain—Noah sat up and massaged his haggard face to get some muscle tone back.

  The camp bed was empty. He gulped—then registered the sound of the pipework. Michael was taking a shower without even being asked.

  There was a brief email from Vivienne. “Colette Estelle Lamarche née Dupont born Nice December 4, 1937, don’t suppose she could be your Coco? Here’s her number in case.”

  That was it, Colette, the cleaner’s little girl. Coco had just been her nickname.

  “Bless your cotton socks,” Noah wrote back to Vivienne.

  He dialed this Colette’s number and it went to voicemail, so he left an awkward don’t-know-if-you’ll-remember-me message, making sure to use the polite vous form.

  Michael came back out, dressed in the same pants and hoodie, and threw himself down. He turned the pages of what looked like a tiny scrapbook.

  “Are those photos?”

  A few seconds passed. Then he held it up. “Mom made it for me, for Christmas.”

  A four-by-six photo album, carefully covered in old denim. (Noah thought of that clog carved with infinite patience from an olive pit in a concentration camp.) Snaps of Michael as a baby, in the arms of a younger, more sparkling Amber; one in which he sat high on the shoulders of Victor, holding on to his father’s perfectly shaped ears.

  That maroon chip: could Victor really have been clean when he’d seen his son last? All the more of a tragic waste, then, when he’d injected heroin and fentanyl into the back of his knee.

  Averting his face now, Noah put a hand up to wipe his leaking eyes. None of it made any sense to him, neither his nephew’s lucky breaks nor his unlucky ones. Arrested with Amber, let go the next day; dead on a motel carpet three months later.

  “That’s Grandma.” Michael showed one of her clutching him tight.

  “This would be Cody?” Noah put his finger to a grinning face.

  Michael nodded. “Used to give me rides in his wheelchair.”

  There were recent-looking ones of Amber in her uniform, posed with her son on a stretch of almost convincing sand, or against a forest thick with trees. Unsmiling, Michael rode on a toy tru
ck with his knees sticking up. “Where was this?”

  “Children’s room at the prison. Shit’s always broken.”

  “And here?” Noah pointed to another photo in which Michael held his mother around the waist in what seemed like full-spectrum sunlight, against a brick wall.

  “That was last Family Day. Races and Sno-Kones,” Michael added appreciatively. “The click click let us out into the yard for that pic.”

  “The click click?”

  Michael put his right hand up by his eye and mimed pressing a button. “The guard that takes the photos. And the photos, too, they’re called click clicks, or flicks.”

  Noah couldn’t bear it: this little plasticated book of love.

  “Look at this one.” Michael flicked the pages till he reached a slightly blurred image of an M in the crook of a pale elbow. “Mom did that.”

  “Tattooed herself?” Noah was appalled.

  “With a needle and a ballpoint. M for Michael, see?”

  “That must have been painful.”

  A shrug. “It’s not all that.” The boy hesitated, then pushed up one sleeve and showed Noah his own inner arm.

  FOE, Noah read, inside a lopsided heart. “Who did this?” Trying not to let Michael hear his outrage.

  “My friend Jason, last year, before he went to Atlanta. I had to make sure Grandma never saw it, she hates tats.”

  Noah was more concerned about infection than tastefulness. But the skin looked healthy enough now; no point in panicking retrospectively. “Is FOE supposed to declare, what, that you’re enemies with the whole world?”

  Michael considered him, head tilted. “You’re so ignorant, you disgrace me.”

  Every word Noah let out of his mouth came back to bite him on this so-called vacation. Michael would grow up to be an autodidact, or a holder of lifelong grudges, or both.

  “F dot O dot E dot,” the boy spelled out. “Family. Over. Everything.”

  “Ah.”

  “So when are we going to do this experiment?”

  Noah was lost. What was this whole week but an experiment, with the most uncertain of outcomes?

  “With the diaper.”

  “Oh. Yes.” He dragged himself up.

  Over the bathroom sink, with Michael watching, he ripped open the diaper’s dry-weave skin and reached for the plastic spoon. Then he handed it to Michael. “Dig out a spoonful of that powder.”

  Excited: “It’s going to blow up?”

  “Don’t you think if diapers were explosive we’d have heard about a few cases of vaporized babies by now?”

  Michael laughed. “Like tiny suicide bombers.”

  “Go ahead, scoop the stuff into one of the cups.”

  “Which one?”

  “They’re all the same.” When the boy had done that, Noah dropped the gored diaper into the trash and carried the three plastic cups into the bedroom. “Now. Ever played Cups and Balls?”

  “You know you sound like a chomo?”

  Noah kept forgetting to google the word. “What does that mean?”

  “Cho-mo, child molester.”

  “Ah.” Relieved to get it at last. “Anyway, maybe you know it as the Shell Game?”

  “Yeah, yeah. We play that one with bottle caps. Hide a bread clip under one…”

  “Right. So you sit over there.” Noah fetched the glass of water from his nightstand and poured it into the cup of powder. “Watch closely now.”

  “I see what you’re doing,” Michael warned him. “Can’t trick my eye.”

  “Keep watching, wise guy.” Noah made some cursory movements, swapping the cups around. “Where’s the water?”

  Michael pointed at the middle cup.

  “You sure?”

  “Hundred percent. Want to make this interesting?” The boy rubbed thumb and fingers together.

  “Financially? No. Scientifically, it’s interesting already.” Noah switched the cups on the left and right.

  “You suck at this. My friend Jason, you should see him play the shells.”

  Noah swapped the middle with the left. “Would you care for one more try?”

  “Nah, because boo-ya, I win.” Michael pointed at the cup on the left.

  “Your funeral.” Noah turned the cup upside down. Nothing spilled.

  The boy stared.

  “I thought you were a hundred percent sure the water was in this one?”

  “What the fuck?” Michael dived for it.

  Noah held it high, out of his reach.

  The kid snatched at the other two cups: dry. “Where’d the water go?”

  Noah put down the first cup so Michael could look into it. “It’s still there, just not liquid anymore. The stuff from the diaper is called sodium polyacrylate.”

  Michael probed the plumped-up gel with his finger. “Ew.”

  “Its molecules are shaped like telephone cords.” A dated example. “Spirals. When it bonds with water, all the little coils straighten out and form sandwiches—two chains of polymer on either side of each chain of water. So diapers can absorb up to three hundred times their weight. Try and squeeze a drop out?”

  Michael scooped the fat cylinder out of the cup, mashed the gel, crushed it.

  “Force won’t do it. You need salt to break the bond.” Noah offered him the tiny sachet.

  The boy sprinkled the salt on. They watched it puddle and release water across the table.

  Night, now. Just inside the alley beside the hotel, the beggar in the military cap was sorting through his things as Noah and Michael passed—swapping them according to some mysterious rationale among a dozen or so plastic bags. Perhaps their possessions gave street people the only sense they had of a place of residence, Noah thought.

  For a quick bite before the circus, he stopped at a crêperie counter and chose a buckwheat galette with ham and an egg.

  “Nutella,” Michael ordered.

  “Oh come on, this is your dinner. What about ham and cheese? Spinach? Chicken?”

  The kid shook his head, immovable.

  Noah thought of buying Michael a savory one, and seeing if the boy would eat it if he had no other options. But why match wills with an opponent so stubborn, unless the issue was life-or-death? “Alors, Nutella, s’il vous plaît,” he said to the man behind the counter.

  At the circus ticket booth, Noah was startled by the prices: wasn’t this traditionally a shabby kind of entertainment? He rejected the premium charms of the tribunes de privilège and the tribunes d’honneur. When he asked for two seats in the tribunes populaires, the man made a sour face and offered his opinion that, being at the very back, Monsieur and the boy wouldn’t see much…

  Noah agreed to the tribunes d’honneur; he knew he was being upsold, but there wasn’t much point in going at all if the view was going to be that bad.

  A young nincompoop in a bright red uniform led them to their seats, for a tip.

  Tinny, distorted, hectic tunes. “I think the music might have been live, in my day. Or maybe from a gramophone?”

  “What’s that smell?”

  “Big-cat urine.”

  That made Michael hoot.

  As soon as the show began, Noah realized it was going to be god-awful. Had old-style animal circuses always been like this, and had he simply been easier to impress at three or four? Or maybe he was remembering a circus in New York when he was older. He had a sense of bouncing in Margot’s lap. Had Fernande been with them, or not born yet? He’d gotten barbe-à-papa in Margot’s hair, Noah remembered now, and she hadn’t even lost her temper. A good mother, by any measure. But even if that was true, how to set that against what she’d done in the war?

  Might have done, he told himself. There was no hard evidence.

  These horses seemed cowed; the dogs, creepily eager. The tigers, when they finally emerged in their wheeled cage, were limp and mangy. How humiliating for kings of the jungle to be forced to stand over each other, bridge-style, or roll on their backs like kittens.

  But Mich
ael fizzed with elation at each entrance.

  The human acts were easier for Noah to bear. One juggler spun five huge metal bowls at once; another danced in a spinning maze of hula hoops. An acrobat played at being caught inside a sort of spider’s web. A man and woman climbed and wound themselves up a rope to the top of the tent, then suddenly let go and hurtled almost to the floor, making Noah’s pulse thump. Beside him, Michael let out a wild yip.

  At least half the performers were black, which Noah hadn’t expected of a French circus, and there were dancers from Eastern Europe who somehow caught and threw laser beams. An old-school clown drove into the ring in a miniature car, then came back in on a deconstructed bike that had its back wheel connected to its front only by a loose chain. Michael seemed particularly fascinated by a skinny contortionist who bent backward and walked his legs around in a circle, past his own face, and finished by somehow feeding his whole body (belly first) through a metal tube; Noah had to look away.

  At the intermission the kid begged for a glow stick, a rattle, a souvenir top hat.

  “Pick one, or a snack if you’d rather.”

  “OK, cotton candy. At least my helmet was free.” Michael knuckle-drummed on it.

  Noah enjoyed watching the girl in spangles and tights tease up the sugar fluff from the whirling cauldron onto her stick. “The French call it barbe-à-papa, dad’s beard. Hey, don’t make your helmet sticky.”

  Michael lifted it off before taking a huge bite of the pink stuff. “Vic had a beard for a while. Mom showed me a pic on her phone.”

  Noah’s vision suddenly blurred with tears. Victor’s perfect face, in all its disguises.

  The music was rising; the speakers screeched with feedback, and a deep voice in Italian-accented French asked patrons to be so good as to take their seats.

  The second half began with a complicated act involving motorcyclists (two brothers and a sister, the master of ceremonies claimed) in a ball-shaped cage. Lots of revving and suspenseful bass before they began to spin terrifyingly…but Noah soon saw how reliably each rider stayed on their particular track. It was a matter of trusting geometry.

  The next performance was a quick-change act, as old as vaudeville. It began as a conventional fox-trot, then the woman’s outfit changed, and then the man’s, and then both of theirs again. Michael let out a groan of delighted protest. Mostly the pair changed behind hastily whisked tablecloths, or in elasticized tubes they pulled up around each other, but for the last change the man threw a fistful of confetti over the woman, and her skimpy lingerie somehow transformed into a full-length white evening gown.