Akin

by Emma Donoghue

  Noah cringed when a whole so-called family of elephants came in, with men somersaulting on their backs and a woman dangling from one soft gray mouth. The beasts seemed both strong and frail, desperate to please. Three of them were made to get up on tiny stools and dance to “Gangnam Style,” shaking their sagging bottoms. They seemed so old, and so appalled that it had come to this.

  The father figure of the troupe ordered the smallest boy to lie down on the sawdust for an elephant to step over. Noah couldn’t avoid thinking of Abraham preparing Isaac on the altar. The child quailed stagily and ran off; the man chased and caught him.

  “Shithead!” Michael pressed his small fists together.

  Noah thought of reassuring him, but there was no need because the crowd, incited by the ringmaster, began to chant “Le Papa, le Papa!”

  “They’re saying the dad should do it himself,” he told Michael.

  The boy nodded, rigid.

  With a show of bowing to the crowd’s will, the man threw himself down, supine. The elephant approached, and stroked the man’s sternum tenderly with one giant foot. (Noah had to remind himself that this wasn’t a sign of affection, just the result of hundreds of weary hours of training.) Groans of pleasurable terror went up all across the stands.

  “Jesus Christ!” Michael breathed the words.

  The man patted the elephant’s wrinkled leg…then she stepped forward, over him, and he was somehow up on top of her, waving in triumph, as the crowd applauded wildly.

  “Maybe they’re the ancestors of the crew in your grandpa’s picture,” Michael shouted in Noah’s ear.

  “You mean the descendants. Could be. Circus does run in families.” Like a disease.

  “Hey, I’ve got a joke,” Michael said on their way out.

  He was really just a little boy, Noah registered; eleven years old, cotton candy on his chin. “Oh yeah?”

  “What did the elephant say to the naked man?”

  “This is going to be smutty, isn’t it?”

  “You know the answer or not, dude?”

  Noah could just imagine, but he didn’t know exactly how it would be worded. “So what did the elephant say to the naked man?”

  Michael put on a shaky old lady voice: “It’s cute, but can you pick up peanuts with it?”

  Which made Noah laugh more than he had in some time.

  VII

  Nom de Guerre

  Noah lay in the dark, a patient, crazed prosecutor building a case against his own mother. Petit à petit, l’oiseau fait son nid; “little by little, the bird makes its nest.”

  The photos: at her death last year his sister Fernande had in her possession prints from wartime Nice that seemed unlikely to have come from anyone but Margot, including images of three Marcel Network members: Maurice Brener (Zazou), Odette Rosenstock (Sylvie), and Moussa Abadi (Marcel), none of them taken face-on. Also a close-up of the door of the hotel the Nazis had commandeered. Also—though this didn’t make the story any clearer—images of a small boy, a bell tower, a tree, children’s feet, a woman (MZ on the back), an empty street.

  The facts: Margot had sent her husband to New York in 1940, then two years later, her son; she’d stayed away a further two and a half years. She’d gone missing for three days in August 1944, and as soon as she’d buried her father, she’d left France and never gone back.

  It didn’t seem to add up to as much as Noah thought it would. He should be relieved; he’d rather not have to think these dreadful things of his mother. But every day he spent in Nice, he found himself more desperate to know for sure.

  He touched his fingers to the painted wall. Over three thousand Jewish detainees had passed through this hotel from September to July, which was an average of—he reckoned it in his head—about ten newcomers a night. Vacationers shivering in shorts, snatched off the beach; wet runaways fished out of the Var. The waiting, the wailing, the yanking of children away from mothers and fathers. The interrogations.

  Noah let himself look up “Nice Excelsior 1943–1944.” Some of those held here had poisoned themselves and their children, he learned, or jumped from the pretty windows. He found himself on a World War Two forum in which an American reminisced about a night concierge in 1983 who’d taken him into the basement to see the cells and the special room with the drain.

  Noah found himself picturing young Sainte Réparate as she swallowed the burning pitch. He couldn’t stop himself from tapping in, “Nazi torture.”

  Oh for God’s sake, Joan snapped, are you planning to keep yourself up till dawn?

  Ignoring the links to porn sites, he found some useful articles. The word torture turned out to mean twisting; a literal torsion, but also a wringing-out of the self. Torture was an unreliable way of getting information, apparently; it tended to elicit the false or irrelevant. The French Resistance had a code of trying not to spill until the third day, to give comrades time to escape, but in fact it seemed that few had spilled anything at all. Some found the pain inflamed their resolve. Some admitted they would probably have revealed names and addresses except that their captors, interested only in hurting them, had never asked. In those rare cases where a Resistance member had cracked, it was generally unclear if they’d done much harm, since what they’d said was out of date or known to their captors already.

  Noah puzzled over that. Should your betrayal be measured by the secrets you’d thought you were revealing, or by what the consequences had been? The same went for drunk drivers, he supposed; some wound up in prison for manslaughter and some happened not to hit anyone. It made his head spin, the randomness of it. Would Anubis accept that argument when weighing hearts against the Feather of Truth, he wondered—that morality had an element of what could only be described as luck?

  The dark seemed stifling now, the bedroom walls closing in.

  Techniques varied under the Occupation, he read, but two were particularly common. The Paris method, or baignoire, was usually inflicted on women, who were stripped naked, with their legs tied to a bar across a bathtub filled with icy water, and pushed in backward. Next the interrogators might add electric current. This was known as the gégène, slang for génératrice, a portable generator that had been used initially for mobile telephones on the battlefield. The French had pioneered this technique in Indochina in the ’30s, to interrogate Vietnamese nationalists. Alligator clips might be attached to hands, feet, ears, genitals. Often victims lashed out and dislocated their own tied limbs.

  “What’s up?”

  Noah blinked at Michael’s faint silhouette on the other bed.

  “You went like—” The kid hissed dramatically through his teeth.

  “Did I? Sorry. I’m looking up…upsetting things.”

  “Which things?”

  “Just stuff that happened in this hotel, in the war.”

  “Pulling fingernails out and shit?”

  Noah was meant to be making this boy feel safe. “It’s nothing you need to worry about, and it was all over a long time ago.”

  “I’ve seen, like, beheadings,” Michael assured him.

  He reeled. “But why?”

  “Isis, Boko Haram, they upload them.”

  What could the boy’s grandma have been thinking—no, that wasn’t fair. She’d been chronically ill, for one thing. And Noah was a hypocrite, because it wasn’t as if he had any idea which murky passages of the internet this boy moved through, or how to go about monitoring, let alone controlling it. He asked instead, “Why put such images in your head, though?”

  Silence crackled in the stuffy room.

  “Michael?”

  “If the world’s like that,” the boy muttered, “I’d rather be ready.”

  Noah had no answer.

  “But I have to admit, I need some eye bleach after.”

  “You rinse your eyes with bleach?”

  Michael let out a snort. “Eye bleach, dude. It’s pics of kitties and stuff, to wipe your mind after grossing yourself out.”

  What a curiousl
y prim notion; like a napkin to dab the lips. “That’s not how memory works. There’s nothing that can wipe horrifying information away.”

  “Cute kitties, though.”

  “Go back to sleep now,” Noah pleaded.

  “Nah, I’m up.”

  And so was the sun, Noah realized, a narrow beam knifing under the blind.

  Saturday morning. They were leaving in two days. Michael’s T-shirt said WINTER IS COMING, which seemed belated, in February.

  For breakfast they happened on a café where all the crockery was artistically askew: cups, juice glasses, bowls made to tilt sideways. Noah kept thinking he was going to spill something, but Michael found it funny.

  “Shit, I left my helmet at the hotel.” Michael licked his buttery fingers.

  “You mean the property of the people of France, temporarily stolen by an American, which will be returned later today.”

  Michael grinned. “That makes it sound even cooler. Can we go back to the hotel and get it?”

  Noah couldn’t face the kid wearing the helmet around town all day; what if they ran into the museum’s custodian, out doing her shopping? “Too far.”

  “At least I found my selfie stick.” The boy telescoped it in and out. “Want to try?”

  “Sure,” Noah made himself say.

  Michael showed him how to slot his phone into the holder at the end of the rod. “Hey, do one with the cup, it’ll look freaky.”

  Gamely, Noah held the diagonal cup to his lips and extended the selfie stick.

  “Bend your head the other way,” Michael ordered. “One eyebrow up.”

  Noah tried.

  “The other eyebrow, dude.”

  “I don’t think I can move them separately.”

  “Bet your mom could, if she could lick her own nose.”

  Noah nodded. “She was an excellent winker, too.”

  When the two of them examined the shot, Noah said, “I look like something out of a ghost train.”

  Michael nodded in approval.

  The flower market in the Cours Saleya had been transformed into a marché aux puces today. “It’s called a flea market, because they sell old things that might have fleas living in them.”

  “Gross!”

  “Though everything here seems pretty clean.” The prices suggested there was little chance of anyone snapping up an overlooked bargain, either. Not that Noah cared; he was so bemused by the variety that it didn’t occur to him to try to buy anything. He could make no judgment on this jumble of linen napkins, carpets, wicker handbags, ceramic owls, fur hats, theatrical necklaces in rubber or aluminum, decorative gourds pierced to make lampshades, holy cards (a mawkish one of a little girl offering her teddy bear to the crucified Christ)… Noah enjoyed picking through a basket of those blotchily painted figurines you baked into cakes for the Fête des Rois in January—fèves, that was the word—but he didn’t want to own any. He handled a bronze nineteenth-century letter opener that had a stylized feather on one end and a chicken claw on the other. When he saw the tiny price tag (€195) he flinched and returned the thing to its spot.

  Michael hung back. Did this count as a fancy store, Noah wondered? He beckoned the kid closer, showing him tiny collectible cars and a mug of Tintin on his motorcycle with his terrier Milou riding in a basket on the back. Michael was more entertained by vintage tech, Noah found: a rotary phone with a separate earpiece labeled c. 1900, a Speed Graphic camera with its bulky bellows… “Père Sonne used one of these until the ’30s,” he told the boy. “My mother would have had to change the cut-film holder for him after every shot, with her hands inside a bag to keep the light out.” He thought of Margot’s stamina; her patience. If she’d had some engrossing career of her own, instead of serving her father’s, would she have been less likely to succumb to whoever had recruited her, if it was true that she’d been recruited?

  “Touchez pas, Monsieur!” The stall owner snapped at Noah to take his hands off the camera’s brittle leather.

  Noah had inherited a few of his pépère’s smaller cameras, and he’d passed them on to Victor one by one because the adolescent had claimed to be fascinated by shooting on film. Only years later had Noah come to the conclusion that Victor had scammed him, selling each camera the moment he’d gotten his hands on it. But now, eyes on his plausible nephew’s son, his ribs seemed to creak with the hurt of it all. If Noah could dial the years back, he’d surrender anything Victor asked for. We spend most of our lives holding on to objects, he thought, and finally they fall from our cold dead hands and those who tidy up after us have the worry of what to do with all this stuff.

  Michael was leaning so far over a knife stall that Noah thought he might fall into it. Noah stood beside him, admiring a huge, ornate, nineteenth-century knife and fork for serving fish.

  “Nice,” the boy murmured, stroking the filigree handle of a small dagger.

  Noah gestured at a fanned-out display of antique pocketknives. “We all carried these in my day. I mean, the boys, and some of the tougher girls. Used to play something called Nerve.” He mimed stabbing between his spread fingers.

  Michael’s face lit up. “Yeah, yeah, The Knife Game.”

  “Is that what you call it?”

  “Or Stabscotch, or Five-Finger Fillet.”

  “I seem to remember the biggest risk was that the knife would fold up and slice the hand you were holding it with.”

  “There’s this YouTuber does it supersonically fast…” Michael launched into a jingle about the knife going chop chop chop.

  “Probably best to practice with a blunt pencil,” Noah suggested. “We had a version where you threw your knife near your feet, or the other boy’s feet. If you got it a few inches in, he—”

  Michael interrupted. “Into his foot?”

  “Into the ground,” Noah said, scandalized. “The loser had to pull it out of the ground with his teeth. Mumblety-peg, we called that.” He retrieved the word with satisfaction, like some dust-coated heirloom.

  “That’d be so banned now,” Michael lamented.

  “All the fun stuff is.”

  “Snowballs! I got sent to the Mindfulness room for throwing one goddamn snowball.”

  “What’s the Mindfulness room?”

  “New name for detention.”

  Noah’s eyes rolled back in his head. “What next—will they ban walking in case you fall down?” Maybe it was because there was so little schools could do to shield kids from the real threats: drive-by crossfire, pedophiles, opioids…

  He caught a whiff of socca and hurried across the market to the woman dishing it out. “You must try this, Michael,” he called. “It’s, ah, a local thing, a salty pancake.” Probably best not to mention that it was made of ground chickpeas. Noah asked the woman for two portions—one without pepper, for the kid. It amused him to notice Sans gluten / No gluten scrawled on her sign; for the Yanks, presumably, because since when did the French try to avoid gluten?

  His Proustian moment at last, the hot, greasy taste in his throat. “Good, am I right?”

  “It tastes funny,” Michael mumbled, but kept eating. “Do you think the massage woman’s in today?”

  Yes, they were right by the Opera House. The French insisted on their time off, more than other nationalities, but then Saturday might be the most popular day for people needing physiotherapy. “Why, would you like to see inside my old apartment?”

  “I don’t care,” Michael said crushingly.

  Noah decided it was worth a try, and led the way down the narrow street. This time when he rang the bell beside KHOURY AISHAH, there was a buzz and he heard the front door unlock.

  They climbed the stairs, Noah’s hip speaking to him. Tourism was such an odd mixture of the tiring and the hedonistic.

  In an elegant head scarf, Madame Khoury welcomed them in accented but impeccable French and said they must indeed look around since they’d come all the way from New York. She was only updating files and didn’t mind being interrupted. She knew
his grandfather’s work, of course, and what a shame this place hadn’t been preserved as a memorial.

  Noah peered around in hopes of finding the drainpipe from the photo. Of course the floor plan was quite altered. He remembered their living room, how the piano had stood by the sea-facing windows—that had been cut into two treatment rooms—but as for the rest, he couldn’t even decide where the bedroom he’d shared with his parents had been. Linoleum on the floor, that was the only detail he recalled.

  Dr. Khoury’s practice in Damascus—she’d been an orthopedic surgeon there, but was having trouble getting her qualifications accepted in France—had been obliterated by a bomb. But she could still shut her eyes and walk through it.

  Well, Dr. Khoury was so much younger than Noah, he pointed out. And he’d left when he was only four.

  “What kind of stuff did you play with back then?” Michael asked him.

  “Oh, lead soldiers, a catapult, Meccano trains…Monopoly.”

  “I freaking hate Monopoly. Goes on forever and the bank always screws you.”

  Noah nodded, opening a door to what turned out to be a supply closet. “I think the darkroom may have been here. La chambre noire,” he told Dr. Khoury.

  She clapped her hands with pleasure.

  Trays, shelves, stains on the walls: all gone now, but Noah could picture them. “No windows, because developing has to be done in a total blackout,” he explained to Michael. “Margot would open the cassette in the dark, pull out the film”—he mimed it—“tear off the end, roll it onto the reel—that was the trickiest part. Then she’d put it in the tank, fit the cover on, and shake it gently, for the right number of minutes, before she pegged the photos up on a washing line to dry.” Maman, who were you?