Michael puffed out his breath.
Weak at the knees, Noah sat back down on the toilet lid. There was no hiding from this boy. “They’d have tortured my mother,” he said, very low. “Not just her knee, but…I think that’s why her left eye could only see shadows.”
“Shit,” Michael murmured.
Noah wouldn’t describe the half-drownings, the electrocutions; that was too much. And he didn’t want to make the child phobic about bathtubs.
“Did Nodaddy Ding know?”
“Good question.” Still shielding the Marcel Network, Margot had kept her mouth shut rather than defend herself against Madame Dupont’s suspicions, but surely Père Sonne would have coaxed the truth out of his battered daughter? Maybe it was that shock that had brought on his final illness. The agony of not having been able to protect his child.
Not that Margot would have let him protect her. Père Sonne had been so careful to keep out of the world’s mucky struggles, but after more than four decades of being his quiet helpmeet, his daughter had had no such qualms: she’d done what had to be done.
“I don’t know who she told, if anyone. And here’s something that’s really odd, Michael: when the Nazis let her go, Margot doesn’t seem to have gotten in touch with any of her friends in the network. They didn’t even hear that their ‘Marie Zabel’ had been arrested; she just went silent. So they had to assume she’d been sent to the camps.”
“Like, dead?”
“Exactly.”
“Huh.” Michael cracked his knuckles.
“It was all pretty crazy in the last days of the war, but still. Margot got over the worst of her injuries, her dad died, and then the first chance she got, she sailed to New York.” Surely she must have told Marc, at least, what she’d been through—if not when it happened, then months later, when she’d disembarked?
Those who survived torture said the worst scars were in the mind. Margot had been a loving wife and mother in New York, but how much effort had that required of her? All her lies of omission. “The photo of the hotel entrance.” Noah stepped past the boy to get it out of the envelope. “Maybe she went back to take this shot, once the Germans had left.”
“Like a souvenir?”
“I suppose.” To mark what had been done to her in one of these rooms, for three days and two nights. Such a nondescript image. A door from one reality into another. The gates of the underworld.
Had Margot told Fernande, at some point, when she’d entrusted her with the box of photos? Noah felt ridiculously hurt that neither of them had shared the painful history with him. Then again, maybe their mother hadn’t told a soul; left the photos in the bottom of a drawer, and the truth on the other side of the ocean.
“Hey. No offense, but…”
“What?”
Michael shifted from one foot to another. “You think maybe she squealed?”
Noah heard the verb literally: his mother, legs lashed to a bar, screaming and choking as the freezing bathwater filled her mouth. Then he got it. “Broke under torture, you mean?”
A reluctant shrug. “If she dropped out of sight, after… It doesn’t look good, dude.”
Noah swallowed bile. His mother’s silver story was tarnishing, corroding, as he tugged it into the light. Could that have been why Margot had kept her wartime work a lifelong secret, to hide a more terrible one—that she’d helplessly betrayed her comrades and the hidden children? “But that can’t be true. Almost all the kids survived, more than five hundred of them.” His voice came out angrily. “And the Marcel people too, wouldn’t they all have been rounded up if she’d given their names?” Most of them—Abadi and Brener and the various clerics—had never been arrested. Noah answered his own question: “Except of course this was in the last weeks of the war, so maybe the Nazis ran out of time.”
Noah sat on the edge of his bed and dropped his face into his hands. For Margot to have done so much, more than she’d ever have imagined was in her…and then to crack apart. After the war, had she been forced to live with the fact that only an accident of timing had saved her comrades from the destruction she’d unleashed? Had shame dogged Margot for half a century, till her death at the age of ninety-two?
Enough! Noah wished, irrationally, that he believed his mother was still out there, up there in the sky, looking down, listening; that he could tell her to stop blaming herself. He tried to picture the two of them meeting again, in Margot’s Catholic notion of heaven in the clouds, or what the Ancient Egyptians called the Field of Reeds. “Lord knows I would have broken,” he said now, “long before the second night.” Who was Noah to cast the first stone, or even a pebble?
Michael was hungry, so they went out for lunch.
Noah had half a dozen oysters. He tried to savor each slowly; one with minced shallot, one with vinegar, one with lemon… “They don’t taste as tangy as they used to in my day.” Pollution, maybe? The warming of the oceans? And why did they have to be served with such arid rye bread?
“It must be your mouth that’s different.” Michael inserted bits of chicken nuggets through his helmet. “I guess most of your taste buds have retired by now.”
Noah considered the last oyster without appetite. It was a waste to leave it, but then the money was already spent. To force down an oyster, on the last day of his eightieth year, seemed absurd.
Michael got a free ice cream in a plastic penguin. He gouged at it with his spoon.
Noah failed to catch the waiter’s eye. He noticed a poster for an exhibition of photos by Cartier-Bresson—that famous shot of the man leaping over the puddle. “My grandpa knew that photographer.” Pointing. “The guy had this notion of the decisive moment—watch and wait until the split second when all the elements in the shot are in perfect balance, then press the shutter.”
“Why not just take a burst?”
“Film cost so much, remember? You had to want every shot.”
“That must have sucked.”
“Well, but pre-digital, maybe they paid more attention,” Noah argued. “Saw better.”
The kid shook his head. “Pre-Netflix, you all must have been bored out of your minds.” He switched to a different game on his phone; engine revs, brake screeches.
“Can you turn down the sound on that thing?” Noah turned around to see if other customers were looking irked.
“Nah.”
“Are you sure? Let me see.”
Michael gave him a withering glance. The game rampaged on.
“It’s very loud,” Noah said.
“Not as loud as that.” He jerked a thumb toward a speaker overhead.
True, the restaurant was blasting some particularly grating pop music in English. Noah went to find the waiter to ask for the bill.
As he and the boy were walking out of the café into the sunshine, three teenage girls passed on a single bicycle: one riding, one sitting on the back carrier, and one perched on the handlebars. Maybe that was what distracted Michael. “Shit!”
Noah looked back to find the boy with one sole turned up and an expression of wrath recognizable even through the helmet’s visor. “Stepped in something?”
Michael pawed at the ground with his foot like a stallion. He ran over to the curb to scrape his sneaker on it.
“Let’s find you some grass to rub it on.”
“This is an Air Jordan I got dogshit all over.”
The shoes his grandmother had paid for month after month, Noah remembered. “Bad luck. Want to go dip it in that fountain back there?”
“Are you kidding? They’re suede.”
“Well, then, just let it dry and the poop will flake off.”
Michael was shaking his head as he picked at the treads with—what was it?—a plastic straw from the gutter.
“Let’s find a bathroom and try warm, soapy water.”
“No water, dude, they’re suede!”
“We’ll fix this,” Noah assured him. He had a travel nailbrush he could sacrifice to the cause. “We’ll buy a spe
cial cleaning fluid.”
“My sneaker reeks, the dog must have been diseased.”
Noah let out his breath. “OK, do you want to go back to the hotel and change your shoes?”
“I don’t have any others,” Michael admitted.
How could Noah not have noticed that? “Then let’s pick you up something basic right away. What about…” There was a narrow store nearby festooned with beach umbrellas and lurid towels (lions, hot dogs, Johnny Depp for some reason). “Espadrilles?” Noah suggested, finding a rack of the canvas slip-ons. “What’s your size?”
Michael looked as if Noah had to be pulling his leg. “Are those made of straw?”
“The base is rope, actually. Classic French summer shoes.” Forty-five euros, Noah noted with shock.
“Not me, not in this lifetime.”
He pressed his lips together hard. “I’m sorry this store doesn’t meet your style needs, Michael. Would you rather go barefoot?”
“Hell yeah.”
Noah had walked into that one. “But then they won’t let you into any building.”
“Fine by me.”
He was backed into a corner. “You’re worshipping a brand. I bet Michael Jordan doesn’t design your Nikes, he just puts his name on the box.”
“What the fuck do you know about sneakers?”
They were just tired of each other, Noah told himself; of being together morning, noon, and night. Vacationing together was a strain even on the best of relationships, and he and this kid had spent almost a week at close quarters. “Look, try these on”—he flapped a pair of espadrilles in their crinkly plastic wrapper—“and I’ll do my best to clean your stinky Jordans later.”
Michael gave him the finger and stomped away.
By five forty-five the dusk was darkening, and the warmth of the day had thickened. Noah and Michael were stuck in the security line for the Corso outside Place Masséna. Michael wiped sweat off his cheeks under the metallic flaps of his helmet. “Just looking in bags, what does that do?” he demanded. “They need to pat us all down and walk us through a metal detector for guns and clips and knives.”
“Voice down, or talk about something harmless.”
“Bunnies, kitties, sweetie pie!” Dropping the falsetto: “No, but seriously, dude, anything can be a weapon. A really sharp pencil, if you drive it in behind someone’s eyebrow…”
“Zip it.”
Michael did.
“Now,” Noah said, “what’s our plan if we bump into the lady from the museum and she takes one look at you in the helmet and shouts, Stop, thief?”
“Run.”
At last their section of the line was allowed through, and Noah—peering at the fine print on their tickets—found their places high in the hard-seat tribunes. Because of the bass thump of the music, the announcer’s over-amped declamations, and occasional shrieks from the audience, his head was pounding already. Every now and then a boom made him jump, as a confetti cannon sprayed multicolored paper over the crowd.
“Bienvenu au Corso Illuminé,” caroled the man with the loudspeaker, welcoming everyone to the Corso. The hired dancers—one in every aisle—were trying to work the crowd up into a frenzy. The announcer kept repeating that the eyes of the world’s media were on Nice tonight, so if they didn’t want to bring shame on the glorious, historic tradition of Carnival, they should make some noise!
It seemed a curiously self-conscious form of festivity, to Noah: to dance and scream just because the TV cameras might be turned your way. But some excitable members of the audience were roused to start squirting cans of foam into the air.
“Can I get some of that Silly String?”
“I don’t know. Do you have any of your allowance left?”
“You’re cold, dude.”
Now that he’d made his point, Noah felt a little bad. The Silly String was environmentally unfriendly, but a genuinely cheap thrill; all the pleasures of polymers in a can. He produced a ten-euro note. “And say s’il vous plaît and merci, remember?” he called after the boy vanishing into the crowd.
Michael came back with three cans of Silly String. “Five euros for one, ten for three—that’s seriously good value.”
“I meant one.”
“You never said.” Michael shot a test streak into the air; it rose in an arc and fell in what Noah had to admit was a most satisfying way.
“You’ll have noticed that it’s a liquid that turns into a solid as the solvent evaporates in—”
Michael pressed his finger hard against Noah’s lips. “Nope, you’re not educating me tonight.”
Noah subsided.
“Il ne reste que cinq minutes,” the announcer warned: only five minutes to wait. The dancers in the aisles were coordinating the crowds in doing the wave, now; even Noah heaved to his feet when it was their section’s turn. Bang! Confetti showered the multitude, and the response was a mass screech. Noah took off his fedora and brushed paper dots off it. Would it be safer in his lap? Or under the seat? Could he rest it on the back of his heels so it didn’t touch the dirty boards? But then he might forget and tread on it, or it could fall down under the bleachers. Noah wished he had something to cover it with; a plastic bag or a newspaper, even.
“Historians can tell what people used to throw at Carnival by what the city laws have banned over the centuries,” he said to the side of Michael’s helmet.
“Like what?”
“Oh, do you want to know, now, or would that be too educational?”
“Get on with it,” Michael told him.
“Plaster, flour, beans, eggs, oranges…”
“That shit must have hurt.”
“Blinded a few paraders, I’d imagine. The richer ones rented metal-mesh face guards. If you came without some kind of mask—that was seen as killing the buzz, see?—you’d get flogged with a stocking filled with flour.”
“Ow!” Michael laughed. “Sounds like they wasted tons of food.”
“That was part of the fun. Like eating way too much at Thanksgiving.”
When the floats finally began to file one by one into the floodlit plaza, the crowd went berserk, filling the air with strings of foam from their cans. Michael was on his second can already, nodding along to the tinny pop music. Would Silly String stain clothing, Noah wondered? Already he’d found a tangled line strewn across his fedora, and hurried to lift it off. Like spider web, the stuff could be scrunched up to almost nothing.
The effigies were huger than Noah had imagined from photos; spectacular. There were dozens of people pushing them along, dancing inside them, operating mysterious mechanisms to create weird or lewd movements on a gigantic scale. Noah recognized Macron, Trump, Kim Jong Un. “They’re made of papier-mâché,” he roared at Michael. “Can you imagine all the layers you’d have to paste on?” This year’s theme was space, which meant a lot of shiny surfaces, and ranks of dancers in rocket costumes moving in zombie-like synchronicity. Despite the futuristic references, this bacchanal felt ancient to Noah.
A wet glop fell on the shoulder of his jacket.
Michael turned his head to the man behind them, who was wearing bobbing antennae. “Shake it, or it doesn’t spray right.”
“He may not speak English,” Noah reminded him, swabbing at his jacket with a handkerchief.
“Shake it, dude!” Michael repeated, demonstrating with his own can for the man’s benefit; he shot a dry squiggle into the air.
The insect man gave him a thumbs-up and sprayed his can, but he hadn’t shaken it. The stuff spat all around him, and an awful ejaculation landed on Noah’s fedora.
Noah let out a groan. Twisting around, he brandished the hat at the insect man, who only giggled, his antennae wobbling. “Idiot!” Noah swabbed at the fedora. But the pale blue slime was spreading across the felt, soaking into it.
“You’re making it worse,” Michael told him.
Noah inflated with rage. “Two world wars this hat has survived, and it has to get trashed on my watch.”
Noah wanted to slap the kid.
“Or maybe buy yourself some shitty rope one?”
Noah didn’t trust himself to answer that.
Another wave, then; all around them the crowd leaped up and sank down. More extraordinary effigies wheeled into view, followed by hundreds of performers in purple, gold, red. But Noah couldn’t get back into the Carnival spirit; he found he’d fallen through a lightless chink somewhere. Everything looked soiled to him, ersatz, pointless.
When the parade was over and the crowd was dispersing from the stands, Michael clicked his fingers at Noah. “Gimme another ten.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Euros. I want three more cans before the guy goes,” nodding at a Silly String seller packing up.
“You’ve got to be kidding.” Noah walked over to an almost-full garbage can and pushed the wrecked fedora down into it.
Deep in Michael’s pocket, the machine honked its faux-sympathetic horn: wah wah!
Noah whipped around and stared.
All trace of humor had left the face of the small, helmeted centurion. “You’re mean.”
“And you’re a savage.”
Michael’s machine released a contemptuous belch.
“Give me that thing.” Noah strode over, hand outstretched.
“Like hell I will.”
“This instant.”
The imaginary gun was cocked and fired, cocked and fired, cocked and fired.
“Michael!” Out of the corner of his eye Noah could see a few tourists twitch. “Not that sound.” This was how mass panics started and people ended up trampled.
Again: cock, fire.
Noah was on Michael, trying to dig the hateful device out of his pocket.
Michael fought hard. “Get your hands off me!” He bent Noah’s finger back.
But Noah got hold of the sound machine and threw it to the ground so hard that it emitted a mad laugh. He stamped on it; applied his full weight until the orange plastic corners popped and the thing was in pieces on the ground.
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