by Susan Daitch
During the weeks that followed Auguste’s departure I walked to the rue de Lille looking for the German embassy, past Stendhal’s house burned by petroleuses during the Commune, and past the prints of the Commune (images of churned-up paving stones, smashed windows, firing squads, heaps of dead) sold in stacks on the quai Voltaire, but I couldn’t find the building that had been the beginning of the Ordinary Track. I was late for school, and I didn’t look very hard. I do believe Auguste really was involved in the trial, otherwise Lazare wouldn’t have refused to sell her a chipped cup. I looked in the churches where she left her papers, not so much because I expected to find a fragment someone forgot to sweep up decades ago, but because I wanted to be sure the churches were there. On another empty afternoon after school I would try to follow her steps. In the churches my eyes would take a few minutes to get used to the dim light. Hidden in portals or painted in chapel apses, long, thin, mutilated figures, some standing on the head of another, some beheaded altogether, made me uneasy. I looked at the floor but didn’t step on any cônes and would soon forget about them altogether.
That fall the older sister of one of my friends was sent away to the countryside. She came back with dark circles under her eyes, and she seemed to spend a lot of time moping around until her father got her a job in a café, I was told, in another part of the city. I didn’t see her again. Another friend began to travel by bicycle. She was very tall and had no trouble managing it. Few girls rode them, but I wanted one. Finally my mother got me a bicycle, and the freedom to travel fast and unfettered felt like flight. It had no brakes, and I had to put my foot down in order to stop. As I traveled through the city I might come to a standstill in front of small buildings, houses or structures too little for a city block crowded with taller apartment houses, but which hadn’t been torn down and perhaps wouldn’t be: parroquets, wedge-shaped angled structures fitted into corners, one-story boxes with or without sloping rooftops, solitary towers or marooned turrets resting illogically on the ground instead of above a castle. Between right-angled nests of modern flats I found isolated places that one or two people might inhabit entirely alone, like Alfred Jarry’s decrepit freight-car house on stilts. I wanted to live in one.
I turn the American music off and return to my post. Jean Auric knocks on my door to share a cup of coffee. He’s the oldest tenant, superannuated and alone, but knows little of the details of the Dreyfus affair. He only wants to ask that the newly empty room not be rented to Algerians. My grandmother, I tell him, was a petroleuse. She hated Napoléon III, burned buildings and was sent out of the country. My mother was born in Algiers, near the desert. He doesn’t believe me, and it’s true I sound as if I don’t really know what I’m talking about, I can barely keep my eyes open, but my mother was born in Algeria. I’m sure she was.
“See the photograph of her near where the keys hang?” Auric has never noticed it.
“Can’t you tell,” I ask him, “how much we look alike?” He finally nods, and acknowledges, it’s true, he’s sorry he never met her. He senses this isn’t a good time to talk to me, takes his paper and leaves the courtyard walking toward the street.
The building is so quiet I almost miss the Americans and their noise. With their records and English magazines of naked women, they took pleasure where they found it, then blundered on to the next titillation, I would guess.
To hell with the pleasure that fear corrupts, the Town Rat thought, eating amidst threats was no more than life as usual, and food should always be taken with the idea that it and one’s life might soon be snatched away. Some might agree that abuse is the normal scheme of things, if not a kind of spice. If it is a kind of odd-ball corruption, combining pleasure and fear, then this building is packed to the gills with Town Rats, and I’m their long-suffering queen wearing a garland of sponges round my head for a crown. They turn out to have a history of it. Auguste was the worst offender with her careful collections and well-nursed hatreds, not realizing that some people have no choice; their fates are sealed by forgers and confidence men and off they go to Devil’s Island or El Asnam.
It begins to rain, clearing the last streaks of soap and detergent from the courtyard, but an untapped lode of powdered soap that I hadn’t seen before blossoms into an explosion of bubbles. The children from the Mekong Delta tumble downstairs again, carrying small black umbrellas, pushing and chasing the foam in the rain. This spill is better than the last one, more spectacular, more ridiculous, and, although it is raining, the bubbles now reflect colors. From the stairs Auric yells at them and his distress is also directed at me in my rooms. They are making a mess, he shouts. The soap could be toxic. When their parents get home he will complain, he insists, but we ignore him. Between the rain and the confusion caused by a drunk American, the courtyard can be cleaned with no effort. I go out to join the children screaming with delight; the paving stones are slippery, and if one should trip I will catch her before she falls. I don’t shout with them, I only watch. It’s an uncorrupted pleasure, I think, and there are so few of these to be had.
Squirting Cameras and Rubber Noses
January 6, 1935
Principal Commissioner
Place Baudoyer Prefect of Police
Paris
Dear Sir,
After the recent death of my sister, Claire Francoeur, letters addressed to me were recovered that seem to indicate that a certain property was stolen from her a few days prior to her passing. Although she was not well and her judgment not always sound, her sudden death remains unexplained to my satisfaction. If the cause of death was accidental electrocution then the contusions on her neck could not have been self-inflicted. The bruises were disguised for her wake, but I saw them when I was called to identify the body. How did a new and heavy radio find its way upstairs and topple into her bath? I know the radio was kept in the salon like any other piece of formal furniture, and here one could listen to music or news as most people do. No one listens to the radio in a bathroom. Even if my sister had lugged the thing up to the bathroom, as far as I was told, the chair on which it was supposedly balanced was surely placed a safe distance from the water. The detective on the case explained to me how the dog knocked it into the bath, but his interpretation of events seems far fetched. I trust your office to look into such discrepancies, which signal, to me, that a truly wrongful death hides behind your conclusion of “accidental electrocution.”
The enclosed letters were never mailed to me. They were found in her desk while arrangements were being made to sell her house. When I made inquiries as to what might have become of my sister’s papers, her maid suggested to me that a man who had rented rooms from her was very keen on acquiring the documents. She also indicated that he came and went from the house with some frequency, only spending the night once or twice a week in spite of the high price he paid for the privilege of using them. She believed he had an apartment somewhere in the district of the Hotel de Ville in Paris, therefore I address the matter to you. It will become clear as you read these letters that this is the man you should seek. He is, at first, referred to by the name Fontaine, but if my sister could, even in part, be considered a reliable observer, he is, without question, a man who has an ardent interest in an unpleasant affair of many years ago. I needn’t name the incident which, I’m sure we would both agree, should have been laid permanently to rest. It should remain buried, earth packed over it with a spade because if forced out, I promise we will find ourselves struggling with an unspeakable embarrassment. With the acquisition of these papers, this Fontaine will be in a position to reveal evidence that would be very awkward for my family as well as your office and the institution of the army. I realize parts of my sister’s letters express doubts as to whether or not the documents in question ought to be left to me, but her will stated otherwise and indicated this bequest without condition. I can assure you just as unconditionally that we were always extremely close. I shall be in the city for a few weeks more before returning to my family in the south an
d hope to resolve this business to everyone’s satisfaction. I will be staying at the convent attached to Sainte-Anne-de-la-Maison-Blanche on the rue de Tolbiac. If there is anything I can do to expedite the recovery of my sister’s papers I await only your request to do so.
Yours sincerely,
Lille Charpin
July 1, 1934
Dear Lille,
It’s late afternoon, but I’m still in bed after a disrupted night and a bad morning. Shadows moving toward the eaves look like the long arms of frog princes who never really changed into anything else; in this house they are always frogs. Rooms downstairs are very quiet. What else do I imagine? Previously elusive representatives from my daydreams assemble themselves in haphazard sequence and then a pattern emerges, the tableau vivant begins to have significance. What is the motivation behind their sudden appearance? I’m looking for the figure in the carpet, outlines that will finally link pesky scenes so I can sit up in bed confident there is some meaning behind images of pens, spilt ink, and the sound of knocking on a thick door.
In my dream, light shines between its cracked panels, and although I know the doorknobs will be ice cold, it takes me a long time to reach one of them. Opening the door on the other side, what do I see? A huge bouquet of flowers with two small feet standing at the threshold; the delivery boy, made invisible by monstrous lilies and roses, moves toward me. I refuse to take the clusters off his hands. I send them back to wherever it is they came from. I don’t even want to know from whom or where this bunch was sent. When I return to my rooms, most available spaces are crammed with pens of all shapes and sizes; ink bottles replace washstands, hands and faces dipped in them emerge blue and blinded. I can hear you marking the margins of this letter: this part you’ll read out loud to your children, this part will be read through peals of laughter to a confidante if you have one, and to each you’ll cluck your tongue and somehow manage to get out the idea that such lines reveal how unhinged your sister has become. Call Charenton if they’re still minding hysterics, we’ll go hand in hand, but you’ll never collect my papers if you do. If I were to rewind the film and review all the scenarios of our past, you would point out, “My sister is a deranged syphilitic in the tertiary stages of the disease, not to be trusted now or ever.” I have no deadlines, nothing to rush toward, and the public humiliation and shame I’ve suffered needs to be put to rights. My half-waking thoughts produce associations that overlap each other like shingles. One touches its partner because a roof would not be functional otherwise, and like squares of slate these pictures have utilitarian logic but no psychological meaning. One just leads to the next.
Yours,
Claire
July 13, 1934
Dear Lille,
Last night I was awakened by a sound that would cause anyone living alone to turn rigid or sit up in bed: footsteps, soft at first and then more careless, tapping out what I thought might be a figure eight on the rug downstairs. I think it was long past midnight because the trains had stopped, and the sky wasn’t entirely black; perhaps it was close to dawn. Standing behind my bedroom door, open and near the steps, I heard a voice. It’s abandoned. We can take anything we like. The sentence was followed by a vaudevillian clunk. Watch out for that desk. We can come back for it later. They moved some furniture around, stacked plates, lifted paintings from the walls, making what I would later discover to be a large pile of my belongings, concentrated like a junkman’s pyramid in the middle of the kitchen floor. When I heard them leave and was absolutely certain the gate had slammed behind them, I went downstairs, only to freeze in the doorway, immobilized by the sight of extraordinary disarray. Stacks of misplaced objects teetered in hastily assembled minarets, and I stood there unable to prevent their slow-motion toppling. I sidestepped through a plenum of my possessions. Slowly I began to move small things: a tarnished frame, photographs of the family at Deauville, souvenirs from the 1900 Exposition, the pre-Revolutionary clock that I don’t think is really over fifty years old. I moved whatever I could into large closets with secure locks. If they don’t return tomorrow, I can use this opportunity to mark off my territory in this empty house, my private Maginot Line. You may worry that the interlopers knew what they were after, but I don’t think the thieves knew how to read. The foundation of my guesswork lay in the sound of their accents: the nocturnal intruders were chumps after long-gone family silver, a comforting thought. To an illiterate treasure hunter one box of dated letters is no better or worse than a bundle of kindling, overlooked, neglected old things. Le faisceau — bundle of sticks, kindling, carried by the Romans, the root, I’m told, of the word we whisper from time to time: fascism.
In the morning when Sylvie arrived she sat in a chair that threatened to disintegrate under her and cried into her fists. My first impression was one of incredulity, why, why bother about this minor tornado? Was she pantomiming her shock in order to appear sympathetic? No, the sobs were real. My loss had in some way become hers. Slowly she began to replace trivial objects, but I urged her to get a boy from down the road to move heavy furniture into the cellar, which can be locked. A little fellow arrived, moved the table, chairs, and the desk with a hundred small drawers and pigeonholes. Many of the drawers spilled their contents when maneuvered down the steep steps. I’ve left the debris, moatlike, lying on the floor beside a mattress near the stairs: lists, bills, lost buttons, stamps, bottles of ink, ribbon, scraps of paper. The rooms above are still crowded with furniture: bookshelves listing to the north, desilvered mirrors, and a torn-up sofa have remained in their places. By late afternoon, just when we were finishing, I had my bed moved into the attic and looked out a lunette into the street below. I felt wedged into a tight corner perch, but secure. I combed my hair, ringed my eyes with black pencil, painted my mouth red, so I looked like a woman from the kind of print you feel embarrassed by when it tumbles out of a book. Is it pornography? Look again. Maybe not. I felt sort of like a parody. Who was I waiting for? The burglars of Bastille Eve were no one I wanted to meet.
From the window I could see Sylvie and the boy standing in my yard, parts of it choked with plants, the edges bare, stomped-earth paths. Sylvie called up to me because the boy was waiting to be paid. I washed my face and went downstairs. There was no one to even imagine seducing. Even in the darkening court the boy dawdled, pulling at the dandelions and weeds.
“I can always find someone, even on the fourteenth, who can put bars over the windows and new locks on the doors,” the smart aleck offered. “You want people to know you live here, that this isn’t an empty house.”
“I won’t pay for frills.” I thought I sounded emphatic, while Sylvie shook her head and sent him on his way. As it grew dark she looked anxious and offered to spend the night in my house, but I encouraged her to go home after she served dinner, and I think she must have been relieved to be able to turn her back on my disorderly house and botched rearrangements.
Yet an hour after she left the boy returned with a blue-eyed dog borrowed from his uncle. Delphine could be rented for a few francs a day. He handed me leash, a chipped food bowl, and a bag of old bones, then disappeared into the night before I could insist that I wouldn’t pay for an animal I never asked for. Delphine ignored me and hid under the kitchen table, tail thumping the floor. I left the whole bag at her feet. The dog, barricaded by marrow bones, may never emerge again.
There are all kinds of chiselers and libel artists who could buy dinner based on information discovered in my penmanship. A scribbling kind of intruder would write books and articles; I worry about him. He might appear in the form of a solicitous young man with hair parted carefully down the middle. Quoting Charles Maurras, the royalist writer who hatched the scheme of “patriotic forgery,” to explain the actions of those who framed Dreyfus, he will stand nervously at the door. Sylvie, ignorant of the signification of these references, will show him in. He’ll smile, so happy to be here, feeling right at home with a fellow traveler, one with a record. To be sure we have an understandi
ng he’ll reveal his membership in Les Camelots du Roi, newsboys of the King, known for beating a professor at the Sorbonne whose opinions ran contrary to their own. Then, sitting comfortably on a broken chair, he’ll speak of the new pollutants, foreigners from Eastern Europe and Africa, les métèques, he’ll say. He’ll look disappointed when I tell him that the truth is I never cared. My alliance with the spy Esterhazy — what I did for him, I did for a lark. I wrote the letter about spying for the Germans because he asked me to. He told me how to sign it: Alfred, etcetera He took the paper away and that was that. I’d never heard of Dreyfus, I’ll say. No one had, and even later, I couldn’t care less. At the beginning of the case he was almost released for lack of evidence. The young man will look pinched. He’ll think, this can’t be so.
France d’abord, he’ll say, France comes first, as he kicks Delphine under the table for drooling on his ankles. Restoration of king and church, he’ll plead. I’ll show him the door, but the problem, or one problem, is that I’ve always been receptive to flattery and his childish face and faltering speech will have its charms. Masses of flowers will arrive. Thinking lightning can’t strike twice, I’ll accept. He couldn’t imagine I would fall for the same trick after the first debacle. Has he no sense of irony?