The Fortress

by Danielle Trussoni

  Now, understanding what he went through, I felt admiration for him. How powerful his love had been, how strong his and my mother’s commitment, to weather the likes of a little terror like me. Although Andy had not been perfect, and he and I had our share of fights, we had come a long way together. As Andy and I talked about our troubled past and came to some understanding of the damage we’d done each other, I felt a strange shifting in my relationship to him. Twenty years after I’d left home, we were reconciling as adults. I was thirty-eight years old and twice married, but I had finally left behind the petulant girl who blamed her parents for her pain. Now I was a woman who wanted to make amends.

  Later, when he was back home in Wisconsin, Andy told me that his weeks at La Commanderie in April 2012 were some of the hardest of his life and that he left France feeling physically and psychologically traumatized. A large part of this, I imagine, was the way it dredged up memories of his divorce. But it also must have been difficult to watch me, who had always been such a fighter, taking such a beating. I had sunk into a state of stunned inaction. In the past I was anything but passive. For me, action—even the wrong action—was preferable to sitting around and waiting for a solution. But now, for these weeks of Easter vacation, I waited. I’d been blindsided. I hadn’t anticipated such a show of force. I was surrounded. It was Nikolai’s move.

  —

  IN THE FINAL week of Easter vacation, I couldn’t stand the waiting anymore. I had to get out of the house. Some mornings, I took solitary walks on the Roman road outside the village, walking along the flinty path to the Chapelle Saint-Nazaire, an ancient stone church with only a handful of narrow windows and an iron cross rising from the roof. I had never been inside the chapel—its medieval wooden door was always locked to visitors—but I imagined it dark and damp, filled with somber wooden chairs, a simple stone altar. One morning I woke before the sun rose, hiked to the chapel, and felt the first warmth of the day as I leaned against the stone wall. I tried the door, but it was locked, as usual. I felt the urge to pray, to ask the powers-that-be to help me. I remembered the pact I’d made in Maichin Dom, the vow I’d given to do my best for my family. It seemed so long ago, that promise. I had been trying to live up to it, to do what was right. I’d been given so much. We had come so far. I wondered if I could go back and ask for more. I needed clarity, just a brief moment when the clouds parted and I might see the way forward. I needed to understand that we would be fine, all of us, once we made it through this darkness.

  Some afternoons I got into the car and just drove anywhere, stopping in the nearby villages of Junas or Calvisson, where I would have a coffee and read the Midi Libre at a café. Other times I would drive into the hills around Aubais, up into the vineyards of Pic Saint-Loup, driving fast, windows open. One morning after yet another unsuccessful attempt to call Nico, I was so frustrated that I got into my car, drove to the train station in Nîmes, bought a ticket to Paris, and was in Hadrien’s bed by lunch. Andy promised to take care of Alex while I was away, and so I spent the night. I needed tenderness, a respite from worrying, someone to tell me that everything would be fine.

  I felt deeply happy with Hadrien, but this happiness was shot through with self-doubt. How could I possibly start something new with a man now, as my marriage was ending? Wasn’t it wrong to be happy in the middle of such a mess? I had left Sam and jumped into Nikolai’s arms. Now I was jumping into Hadrien’s bed, hoping his love could save me. I hadn’t had time to be alone, time to find out who I was without a man in my life. I was too needy, too dependent, not strong enough for a relationship. I didn’t want to use Hadrien’s love as a Band-Aid and then, when I’d healed, go back to being the same person. I wanted to make a radical break with my old self. I wanted that old self to burn away and a new self to rise from the ashes. And so, as I left on the train back to Aubais, I decided it best to wait to see Hadrien again. I wouldn’t escape to his bed until things were resolved at home. I would wait until I was whole again, ready and strong again, before coming back to Paris.

  —

  ANDY AND I drove Alex to school the day Easter vacation ended. We parked and then hunted around the playground, hoping to spot Nico among the children. When we saw that she wasn’t there, we went to the boulangerie on the square and bought croissants. I picked at mine, playing with the buttery layers of pastry, trying to figure out what to do next. This was the final moment. If Nico wasn’t in school today, the police would get involved.

  When we went back to La Commanderie, the gray Citroën was parked in the courtyard. I glared at the car, with its shiny silver paint and black-tinted windows, the transporter of doom and destruction that had taken my girl away. Andy gave me a nervous look—Better leave this matter to you—and walked to the terrace, where he was installing tiles. The courtyard was empty, and so I went into the house, looking for Nico. Instead I found Yana in the kitchen, a pale-skinned, black-eyed woman with a sharp nose and bright red lipstick. She looked exhausted but somehow fierce. She had made four trans-European trips for her son in three weeks and would probably make another four if he asked her.

  “Where’s Nico?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said tersely, and left the room, as if being near me were too much for her to bear.

  Nikolai stepped into the kitchen after she left. “What the fuck were the police doing here?”

  “Where’s Nico?” I asked, ignoring his question.

  “I dropped her at school,” he said. “And when I got home, I found a gendarme waiting for me at the front door.”

  Henri, I thought, my hero! Most likely he’d come to make sure Nico was back safe. “Henri was probably coming to see if you’d brought Nico back for school.”

  “Henri?” Nikolai said. “You know the gendarme’s name? What, are you sleeping with the whole police force now, too?” He was trembling with rage. “Do you know what that guy said to me? He told me that I shouldn’t have scared you and that he was going to be watching me to make sure I didn’t do anything like that again.”

  “He’s right,” I said. “You shouldn’t have scared me.”

  “Do you know how embarrassing this was for me? My mother answered the door to find the police asking for me. She thought I was going to be arrested. The neighbors saw me being questioned. How could you do that to me?”

  “How could I do this to you?” I said, astonished. I couldn’t believe that he had just put me through hell and now he was yelling at me for embarrassing him in front of the neighbors. “How could you do this to me? And not only to me but to our kids! What is this that you told Alex, that he could choose to live with you in Bulgaria? And that Nico had chosen you? How do you think that made him feel?”

  “I’m not going to lie to Alex. He has a right to know what’s happening.”

  “Telling him to choose between his parents is not what is happening. We are going to have joint custody of Alex and Nico, which means equal time with both of them. They are not going to lose their family because of this.”

  Suddenly the doorbell rang from the rue Droite. We looked at each other, and with an almost imperceptible shift, a habit born out of years of putting up a front, we donned our public faces and walked to the door together, becoming, for just a moment, a normal husband and wife opening the front door. Henri stood on the stoop, looking concerned.

  “Bonjour,” I said, stepping out from behind Nikolai.

  “Bonjour, madame,” he said, looking over my shoulder at Nikolai, who had shrunk into the background, trying to hide. “I came earlier and had a talk with your husband.”

  “He told me,” I said.

  “Have you seen your daughter yet?”

  “No,” I said. “My husband took her to school this morning. I think she’s fine.”

  “And you?” he said. Maybe he’d noticed how much weight I’d lost or how my hand trembled as I held the door. “Your husband is behaving? Are you safe here?”

  I glanced over my shoulder at Nikolai, who had backed away,
disappearing into the house. All his bluster vanished when confronted with authority.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”

  “You have my number,” he said, giving me a kind look. “You let me know if there are more problems with your husband.”

  As I said good-bye, Henri stepped up, into the foyer, and called out to Nikolai, who was hiding around the corner. “Au revoir, monsieur.”

  —

  I STOOD OUTSIDE Nico’s school waiting and, at exactly five o’clock, she bounded out and into my arms, her whole expression one of happiness. I had a vision of her as a toddler, holding out her arms for me to pick her up and carry her. She was eight years old, too big for me to carry, but I grabbed hold of her anyway and hugged her tight, burying my face in her hair, feeling her wiggly, excited self in my arms.

  “Nico!”

  “Mama!”

  “I missed you,” I said, kissing her.

  “Me, too!”

  “You were gone so long. How was your trip?”

  “Awesome!” she said, pulling away and hoisting her backpack over her shoulder. For Nico, nothing bad had happened. She’d been on vacation, simple as that. She had no idea what her father had done or what I’d been through. She had no idea that she was at the center of a strategic standoff. She was exactly the same little girl she’d been before she left—all confidence and energy—and I wondered why I’d thought the trip would have changed her, why I’d assumed that she would understand my pain and fear, as if they could be telepathically communicated to her. Thankfully, they weren’t.

  I took her by the hand, and we walked toward the car. At Chocolaterie Courtin we bought a sack of orangettes and shared them.

  “What did you do on your trip?”

  “We had McDonald’s like ten times!” she said. “And Daddy bought me so many presents in Venice—my favorite is a glass merry-go-round! It is so cool, with all the horses made of different-colored glass. I’m scared to break it, though. It was expensive!”

  “It sounds great,” I said, calculating the cost of their trip, a good part of which was paid from our joint checking account. He was acting on his threat: If we didn’t come to an agreement soon, he would spend everything we had. “You’ll have to show it to me.”

  “It’s at Grandma’s house in Bulgaria. She’s going to keep it until I come back. But my other presents are here.”

  “Other presents? What else is there?” The trip had been a full-on attempt to buy Nico’s loyalty with fancy hotels and meals in restaurants and Murano glass merry-go-rounds.

  “A jewelry box and a princess dress and some pretty shoes and…”

  I stopped listening as she listed the gifts her father had bought her, holding back the impulse to inform her that this was one big buy-off. Her father was making her believe that every day with him would be a shower of ribbons and bows. He was giving her exactly what every little girl wants: a fairy tale she could believe in.

  I squeezed her hand in mine. “Sweetie, we need to talk about some things.”

  “About Daddy?” Nico said.

  “About Daddy and me. Do you know what is happening between us?”

  Nico looked up at me with her huge eyes. “Daddy said that we’re not going to live together anymore.”

  “Well,” I said, keeping my tone of voice even, “your dad and I aren’t going to live together anymore. But you and your brother are going to be together.”

  Nico looked at me a long moment, as if gathering her thoughts. “I told Daddy I would live with him.”

  “Whoever you live with, you’re going to see both of us, and Alex, all the time. The only difference is that you’ll change houses. Sometimes you’ll be with your dad and sometimes with me. It means you’ll have two bedrooms with twice as much stuff.” I smiled at Nico, hoping that she could see the situation from that angle. Not a choice between her mom and dad, not a reduction but an expansion.

  “But Daddy says he’s leaving France.”

  “That’s not for certain.”

  “Daddy said that if I go with him, we’ll have a huge apartment just for us and I’ll have my own room with a big bed and a TV on the wall that is just for me! And we’ll have a puppy, a pug like Fly, but we won’t name him Fly. And we’ll live across from the Lycée Français, where there is a patisserie.”

  She said “patisserie” with a perfect French accent, like a native, and I felt a shiver of awe at how she had grown to be so different from me in the years we’d been in Aubais. She was so…French.

  “Did your dad tell you all those things?”

  She nodded, looking worried, as if I might spoil her good fortune.

  “Whatever happens, everything is going to be fine,” I said, not knowing if I said it for Nico’s benefit or for my own. “Don’t worry, okay?”

  As I said this, her spine relaxed, a subtle muscular release, as if she’d been balancing a very heavy basket on the top of her head. Don’t worry. She needed to hear those words, just like I did. “Daddy told me not to worry, too,” she said at last.

  “Well, he was right. There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll take care of everything.”

  And yet worry was eating me. The thought of living without her was too much to bear. My family—this constellation we’d formed together, these fixed relationships born of gravity—had become the basic structure of my existence. With its demise we would spin off into a new order, form new constellations, perhaps brighter, more stable, better than the original. It was the nature of time. It was the nature of family. But this death, this rebirth, was not something I was ready for just yet.

  Maybe Nico detected something different in the way I’d touched her, some bit of desperation that she’d never felt before, because she pulled away and said, “Are you crying, Mama?”

  “No, baby,” I said, forcing myself to smile. I kissed her and pulled her close for a long moment. She was back, and she was not hurt, and that’s all that mattered. “I’m just so glad you’re home.”

  The Fortress

  Andy left in early May, and we were alone in our ruined paradise.

  Although it was beautiful outside, and the courtyard was alive with flowers and birdsong, a toxic energy seeped through the house, filling the rooms with a poisonous tension. We didn’t know how to behave, now that we were enemies. And so we avoided each other. When I walked into a room, he turned on his heel and walked out. When he walked up the stairs, I closed myself in the bedroom to wait until he’d passed by. Sometimes this cat-and-mouse game became elaborate: I would sneak out a back door, or hide in a closet to avoid him. La Commanderie was big, but not big enough for the two of us.

  If we ended up in the same room at the same time, we fought. When Andy was there with us, Nikolai had avoided fighting with me. He hated the idea of people witnessing our feud. But now we argued all the time. We fought about something his lawyer had said, or about something I’d said to Nico, or about something he or I had done years before that needed to be addressed right then and there.

  My emotions shifted by the minute. One day I would feel bitter: All those worthless, wasted years. All that effort to be happy together. What was the point of this marriage? Another day I would feel guilt: Look what I’ve done. I’ve hurt everyone. I’ve ruined everything. Then I was the victim: This is all his doing. He’s ruined my life, and he’s ruined the kids’ lives, too. Then I was angry, raging about the man who threatened to take the things I most cherished—children, friends, home. And in moments of clarity, I became remorseful, mourning the loss of my family, remembering the times Nikolai and I had been partners, when we’d been on the same side. In those moments I would feel complete and unmitigated sadness. All our shared memories, our love for Alex and Nico, the time spent with his family and with my family, our professional ups and downs—all of these experiences were ours. We had lived them together. And although I wanted the whole horrible mess of our marriage to be over and done with, part of me wanted the whole horrible mess to rever
se itself, to rewind. I wanted go back to the beginning and live it all again. I wanted to be free of him, but I wanted to keep him, too.

  This contradiction was at the heart of everything I did and everything I thought in those weeks. I couldn’t accept the idea of losing my family, and so I continued onward as if I weren’t. I didn’t call the lawyer that Hadrien had recommended, and I didn’t make plans to move out of La Commanderie. We were splitting up, but nothing, nothing, was going to change.

  I didn’t realize how cracked this line of thinking seemed until my friend Gretta, a German woman who lived in a house off the rue Droite, stopped by one afternoon. She was married to a talented chef named Jules, who had made many dinners for Nikolai and me at their home. I invited Gretta to sit down at the outdoor table, in the shadow of the micocoulier tree. She lifted her infant son from a carrier on her chest and set him on the flagstones, letting him crawl after the cats, who regarded him with the same wariness they reserved for Fly. Gretta had a daughter Nico’s age, and the girls played together after school and on the weekends. We’d become close in the past year, and I was sure that Nikolai had stopped by their place to tell Gretta and Jules about our problems.

  When I returned with two cups of coffee, I noticed Gretta looking over the table, her brow furrowed. The table was littered with ashtrays and empty wine bottles, the remnants of Nikolai’s evenings of drinking and chess playing. Lord had become a regular visitor, and the two of them were going through the wine cellar, drinking off the best bottles, cleaning out whatever Nikolai had not taken with him on his Easter trip.

  I began to clean off the table. “Nikolai must have had friends over,” I said.

  Gretta stopped me. “Listen,” she said. “I have something to tell you, and you will probably not be very happy to hear it, but it is important that someone tell you what’s happening.”