“He just doesn’t sound Canadian,” Lottie said.
“In the evening the old man came to my room,” composed Lottie, introducing the old man to Kevin without warning. “He stood in the doorway, with his battered face and his one eye, and said, ‘I am going to write a poem about Canada in honor of you and your friend Mademoiselle Vera. In which city is there a street called Saint-Jean-Louis?’ ”
“In the first place,” Lottie had said earnestly, “is there any such saint?”
“Could it be in Winnipeg?” the old man said.
“No, Quebec.” She recalled crooked streets, and one street where the houses were frozen and old; over the top of a stone wall had bloomed a cold spring tree.… But I was never in Quebec, she remembered next.
There was no transition from day to night. She heard him typing, like someone dropping china beads one by one. She coughed, and put the pillow over her face. If he comes in and talks about the poem again, she thought, it might make me homesick. If something made me homesick I might cry, and that could break the fever. If something could make me homesick, I would go home and not wait for someone to come and fetch me. But when she wanted to think of home, she thought of a church in Quebec, and a dark recess where the skull of General Montcalm, preserved by Ursuline nuns, and exposed by them, rested in a gold-and-glass cage. But I have never seen it – someone described it to me. It has nothing to do with home. Her eyes filled with tears, but not of homesickness.
A mounting litter of paper handkerchiefs and empty yogurt jars spilled out of the paper carton Vera had put beside Lottie’s bed. “À quoi bon?” said the hotel maid when Lottie asked her to empty the box. The maid was not obliged to clean a room unless the tenant went out. It was a rule. Bribed, she said she would see about the washbasin but nothing more.
Lottie wanted to give the old man something better than an imaginary street for his poem, but now the idea of a city she had not seen obscured her memory. “What, do you mean you were never there?” he might ask if she told him she had never been to Quebec. “It was a tremendous excursion,” she would have to say. “Nobody over here knows how far it was, or how much it would have cost,” and tears of self-pity followed the others.
Bonzo, the hotel dog, stole under the bed and tore to pieces a box of matches. Lottie had lost her voice. She whispered, “Bad dog!” and “You’ll make yourself very sick!” and on her hands and knees retrieved a slimy piece of wood. She had a high fever now. She knew it by the trouble she had getting back into bed – she could not judge its height – and she saw it reflected on the face of the nurse who had been summoned by Vera. The nurse, a peasant girl in a soiled head scarf, twin sister to the maid in appearance, told Lottie what her temperature was, in a disapproving voice. It was in centigrade and meant nothing.
“Ma voisine!” cried the old man, standing in the hall. “It is very warm outside, so warm that one can go out without a coat.”
“Good,” whispered Lottie. She heard him go out into the bitter day, perhaps without a coat.
She felt well enough to go on with her letter to Kevin: “My neighbor does exercises in the doorway to show me how spry he is. At the end of each one he hops up and stands at attention, giving just one small disciplined bound in place. He is like someone who has done these things for years in a row with other men – in a jail, or a military hospital, or a prison camp, or the Army, or a mental home. In any one, or two, or three …”
Lottie and the old man shared a view. At night they heard the iron chimes of the cathedral. At dawn they could see the pink spire briefly red. Inside the cathedral, Death struck the hours in Dr. Keller’s clock, and at noon Our Lord blessed in turn each of the Apostles. Every noon – or, rather, at half past twelve, for the clock was half an hour off – the betrayal was announced by a mechanical cock flapping stiff wings. One night the neighbor typed all night, and, talking loudly to himself, went to bed before six, the hour at which the whole clumsy performance of the clock – chariots, pagan deities, signs of the zodiac, days of the week, Christ and the Apostles, the betrayal – finished its round. Lottie understood that night and day were done for before time from home could overtake them. She was dislocated, perhaps forever, like the clock.
The nurse returned next day with a doctor, who said, “It is a little fever.”
“What kind?” Lottie asked. Her teeth were chattering. “What about my nosebleeds?”
“A little simple cough. You take yourself too seriously.” He wrote out a prescription for three kinds of remedy, which were all patent medicines. Two of the three Vera had already bought. Lottie composed for Kevin: “I imagined – because with a fever you don’t know where imagination begins and a dream leaves off – that my mad neighbor had to repaint the outside of the high school. I said, ‘Can’t the parishioners afford to hire someone?’ Isn’t it funny, my thinking it was a church?”
Her health improved; she got dressed and walked along the river, with Vera beside her. At the post office was a letter from Kevin, and for Vera a receipt from American Express in Rome for five hundred lire she had left as a deposit for forwarding her mail. This Vera misread as five hundred dollars she had received from home, and even when Lottie pointed out the error she continued to prattle on about what she was going to do with the money. She would take Lottie south! They would visit Al Wiczinski in Paris! Laughing, she picked up a glove someone had dropped on the pavement and put it in her pocket. Lottie was suddenly wildly angry about the glove, as if all the causes Vera had ever given for anger were pale compared with this particular offense. She walked back to the hotel, trembling with weakness and fury, and plotting some sort of obscure revenge.
The letter she had from Kevin began, “I’m fine. Sorry you aren’t feeling well.” She put it away with the Separatist tract found in the coffee shop. They were documents to be analyzed.
Vera said, “Listen, Lottie, I’m hard up for the moment. No, don’t look scared. I’ll just pawn something. If you’ve got anything you could lend me to pawn, that would be great.”
“Kevin,” Lottie thought she would write, “this morning I bundled all my trinkets into a scarf of Vera’s – Granny’s pearl and sapphire earrings I can’t wear because my ears aren’t pierced, and my cameo, which turned out to be worth nothing – and I went with Vera, who was whistling and singing and not worried at all. I had to leave my passport, because they said they were giving me a lot of money – fifteen thousand francs, which I handed to Vera, who took it as if it were a gift. She paid her hotel bill. In the afternoon, she forgot where the money came from and what it was for, and she invited me with a grand air to the Kléber, a big café like a railway station. We drank three thousand and fifty francs’ worth of kümmel. Vera also invited the mad party from down the hall. He said he could read English and had been reading the love letters of Mark Twain. The band wore red coats and played ‘L’Amour Est un Bouquet de Violettes.’ Everywhere you go, you hear that played. The waiters were reading newspapers; there were high ceilings and trays of beer and enormous pretzels. Vera sang with the band. I wonder if I shall ever get my passport back.”
Whatever Lottie’s fever had been, it had worn itself down to bouts of coughing. Her head was stuffed with felt. When she looked at her old notes or tried to read anything, her eyes shut of their own accord. Without her passport she could not collect her mail. Why had Vera not given up her own? Because, said Vera, astonished at the question, then she would not have been able to get her mail, and, as she was expecting money from home, she needed it.
Lottie began to be worried about money. She had spent more than ever planned for on medicines, on the doctor and nurse, on the Christmas holiday in Colmar, which now seemed wild, wine-drenched.
On a cold, foggy winter Saturday, when she could hope for nothing in the post, and could not shake off her cough or rid herself of her pallor, the newspapers finally mentioned an epidemic of grippe that was sweeping through Europe. The symptoms resembled those of pneumonia. The popular name for it was Vir
us X. There had been two new deaths in Clermont-Ferrand. “Why do they always tell about what happens in Clermont-Ferrand?” said Vera.
She had received three hundred dollars from home. Without making a particular point of it, or showing any gratitude, she returned the fifteen thousand francs. “What I never did understand,” she said, as if discussing ancient history, “was why you didn’t just take your own money and unpawn your stuff and get your passport back.”
Lottie could not make sense of that. The passport had been tied up by Vera, and only Vera could undo the knot.
Vera had also received a birthday box from her sister-in-law, the wife of Honest Stan. It contained aspirin, Life Savers, two cards of snap fasteners, colored ribbon, needles, thread, a bottle of vitamin pills, Band-Aids, and Ivory soap. One aspirin was missing in each tin. “She sends me old clothes sometimes,” said Vera, groping at the bottom of the box. “She’s from a good old United Empire Loyalist family, true-blue Tory, one-hundred-per-cent Anglo-Saxon taste in clothes.” Lottie felt obscurely offended, as if her own taste had been impugned. Kevin was probably Irish, but, being Protestant, he counted as English. Remembering that Vera was a nut who collected lost gloves, Lottie ranged herself and Kevin on the side of Honest Stan’s wife. “There,” said Vera, with satisfaction, and pulled out a summer frock of blue voile sprigged with roses. It had puffed sleeves and reached midway between Vera’s hip and knee. Vera opened the window, shook out the dress, and sent it off. The dress, picked up by the wind, rose and then floated down. The Arab music had begun – it accompanied a certain dark hour of the day – and Vera said the dress was dancing to it.
On Sunday, when the sky was full of bells, and the snow along the canals a blue that was nearly white, Lottie walked with Vera, believing that this was spring. Upon the water was the swift circle of a flight of birds. When the girls looked up from the reflection, the birds were white dots in the sky. Bridges, bare trees, and cobbles passed them, and Lottie, walking on a treadmill, was all at once drenched in sweat, and trembling, and had to lean on Vera’s arm. Put to bed, she lay limp, mute, her mouth dry, her hands burning. There was a new electric pain in her lungs. In her mind she wrote to Kevin, “My thesis is a mess. I haven’t done any work, and here it is past the middle of January. Most of the things Keller let me think weren’t true.…”
The firemen’s band marching beneath the window played a fat, German-sounding military air. She was like a wooden toy apart at the joints, scattered to the four corners of the room. Each of the pieces was marred. Yet by evening she was suddenly better. She got up again and walked with Vera in the cold, snowy night, dragging Bonzo on the end of a rope. She thought, but did not say, that it was the most beautiful night she had ever seen. She admired, in silence, the lamps in the brown canals and in the icy branches above. Suddenly Vera snatched Bonzo’s rope and, cape flying, ran like a streak. Vera could be perfectly happy with or without Al, probably with or without Lottie. The important thing was feeling free, and never being alone.
Only one letter was waiting at the post office when Lottie turned up, passport in hand. Kevin wrote, “A funny-looking girl called Rose Perry has been around this winter. Some friend of yours introduces us saying we have a lot in common because she is a sociologist, like you, and also High Anglican, though I don’t know why that gives us something in common. She’s around thirty, red hair, funny-looking – I already said that. She’s from England, either taking some other degree or just picking up material on the white-collar class in the prairie provinces for her own fun. Now, why couldn’t you have done just that and never left home? Rose says the integration idea isn’t new. She’s been having a hungry winter. Her scholarship isn’t a hell of a lot, and it’s in pounds, not dollars. We’ve had her over to the house.”
He likes her, and I know why, Lottie thought. Because she is English. His family will look after her, feed her, find her a place to stay. If I were having a hungry winter, I would be the immigrants’ child who hadn’t made it. I wouldn’t dare have a hungry winter.
The sun shone – a pale sunlight, the first of 1953. Vera climbed up the spire of the cathedral while Lottie waited below – two hundred-odd steps of winding stone to a snowy platform where pigeons hopped on the ledge, and where eighteenth-century tourists had carved the record of their climb. Up there, Vera heard the piercing screams of a schoolyard full of children. She went up a smaller and older-seeming spiral to the very top, above the cathedral bells, which she could see through windows carved in stone. Ice formed on the soles of her shoes. She was mystically moved, she declared, by the appearance of the bells, which seemed to hang over infinite space.
Walking in Vera’s shadow, Lottie thought, I should never have seen her after that trip to Fontainebleau.
The days were lighter and longer. The rivers and canals became bottle green, and the delicate trees beside them were detached from fog. Vera and Lottie went often to the Grande Taverne de Kléber. When Lottie had enough kümmel to drink, Vera made sense. On one brilliantly sunny day, two girls came into the Kléber laughing the indomitable laughter of girls proving they can be friends, and Lottie said, “Look, Vera, that is like you and me.” Presently they got up and changed cafés, moving by this means four streets nearer the hotel. The table here was covered with someone’s cigarette ash – someone who had been here for a long time. There was in the air, with the smell of beer and fresh coffee, a substance made up of old conversations. The windows were black and streaked with melted snow. Each rivulet reflected the neon inside.
“Let’s go over to Germany,” Vera said for the second time. “It’s nothing – just another bus ride. Maybe a train this time. All I have to do is get my passport stamped and come right back. It’s just like crossing a road.”
“Not for me it isn’t.”
Falling asleep that night, Lottie heard, pounding outside her window, a steam-driven machine the Arab workers had somehow got their hands on but could not operate. They sounded as if they were cursing each other. The sounds of Strasbourg were hard and ugly sometimes: trains and traffic, and in the night drunken people shouting the thick dialect.
“Lottie, wake up,” Vera said.
Lottie thought she was in a café and that the waitress had said, “If you fall asleep here, I shall call the police.” The room was full of white snow light, and Lottie was still clothed, under the eiderdown. Someone had taken off her shoes. She saw a bunch of anemones, red and blue, in a glass on the edge of the hopelessly plugged washbasin. “The nut next door brought us each a bunch of them,” said Vera. She was bright and dressed, wearing tangerine lipstick that made her mouth twice as big as it should have been. “You know what time it is? One o’clock. Boy, do you look terrible! Al’s just called from Paris. I wonder who paid for that? I thought he was calling because it’s my twenty-first birthday, but he’s just lonely. He wants me to come. I said, ‘Why are we always doing something for your good? You’ve already left me stranded in Alsace.’ I don’t think he ever intended to come. He said, ‘You know I need you, but I leave it up to you.’ It’s this moral-pressure business. Would it work with you?”
“Yes,” said Lottie. She lay with her eyes open, imagining Strasbourg empty. How would she go alone to the post office?
“I hate letting him down. He’s been through a lot.”
“Then go.”
“I don’t think I should leave you. You look worse than when you had Virus X.”
“We’ll go out and drink to your birthday,” Lottie said. “I’ll look better then.”
Walking again, crossing rivers and canals, they saw a man in a canoe. The water was green and thick and still. Along the banks the trees seemed bedded out, like the pansies in the graveyard. How rough and shaggy woods at home seemed now! Nothing there was ever dry underfoot until high summer, and then in a short time the ground was boggy again.
“I always felt I had less right to be Canadian than you, even though we’ve been there longer,” Vera said. “I’ve never understood that co
ldness. I know you aren’t English, but it’s all the same. You can be a piece of ice when you want to. When you walked into the restaurant that day in Paris, I felt cold to the bone.”
The canoe moved without a sound.
In a brasserie opposite the cathedral, where they celebrated Vera’s coming of age, smoke lay midway between floor and ceiling, a motionless layer of blue. “I only want one thing for my birthday and there it is,” said Vera, pointing to a player piano. Rolls were fed to the piano (“Poet and Peasant,” the overture to “William Tell,” “Vienna Blood”) and not only did the piano keys rise and fall but the circle of violins, upside down, as if reflected, revolved and ground out spirited melodies. Two little lamps with spangled shades decorated the instrument, which the waitress said was German and very old. That reminded Lottie, and she said, “I’ll go with you tomorrow, if you want to, to get your passport stamped.”
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