Haunting Paris

by Mamta Chaudhry

  “At least he’s no longer in pain,” said Isabelle. Her face was impassive, but she clasped and unclasped her hands in her lap. Seeing her agitation, Sylvie reached out to touch her arm, but Isabelle’s stiffness rebuffed any acknowledgment of sympathy.

  They both looked up as a young man pushed a perambulator into the park. Coco slipped in behind him, his tail wagging in triumph as he sniffed the forbidden bushes and settled himself at their feet. The three of them watched the man as he circled the park, oblivious of their presence, looking in the dustbin, running his hand along the walls and benches. Despite the warm weather, he was wearing a hat and overcoat, and his wrists sticking out from the sleeves betrayed his desperate thinness. He picked up a cigarette butt from the ground and tossed it into the carriage. In sudden panic, Sylvie looked at the pram, but thankfully it showed no signs of a baby’s presence, only the shaming detritus of an adult life. Without once meeting their eyes, the man pushed open the gate and walked out again.

  “They’re everywhere now,” said Isabelle, “the homeless.”

  Sylvie nodded, waiting for her to reveal the reason for their meeting.

  “It’s not easy, what I wanted to discuss.”

  Alarmed by her tone, Sylvie said, “The children…Is something wrong?”

  “No, no, they’re fine. But it does concern them, after all.” Isabelle paused, her hands twisting nervously again. “I must confess I’ve been worrying about the will.”

  “But why? You know all the provisions, your lawyer approved them.”

  “Yes, but that was at Alexandra’s wedding, there might be a later one.”

  “No, absolutely not, it’s the same bequests.” Sylvie could not understand Isabelle’s sudden concern about money. Julien had been more than fair, and in addition to everything else, his pension would go to Isabelle as the “official” widow.

  Isabelle was looking at her closely. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She gestured down the street. “The house…”

  “It belongs to you and the children, of course.”

  Isabelle’s hands were suddenly still. “And the apartment?”

  Sylvie was taken aback. What did the apartment on quai d’Anjou have to do with Isabelle? “Charles and Alexandra will inherit it, but for now it’s unquestionably mine.”

  “What about the painting?”

  “Painting?” Sylvie stared at her in bewilderment. Isabelle must know Julien couldn’t bear to look at paintings, not since his sister died. “He mentioned a valuable painting, but that’s already yours, isn’t it?”

  “The Daubigny,” said Isabelle, smiling. “Yes, that’s mine, evidently. A wedding gift from my father.” She rose to her feet. Whatever she had come in pursuit of, she seemed satisfied and ready to leave.

  Despite herself, Sylvie felt the old yearning. As if reading something in her eyes, Isabelle’s own face softened. “Poor Sylvie,” she said.

  And Sylvie wept. This was all she had wanted from Isabelle, the faintest hint of forgiveness.

  “Poor child,” Isabelle said, putting her arm around Sylvie’s shoulder, and Sylvie leaned into the older woman’s embrace. “Are you disappointed you didn’t get it all? Everyone always said you were with him only for his money. Odile was sure you would become pregnant so that he could pay you off, as one does. But I knew even then that wouldn’t be enough, you wanted it all, didn’t you, my poor Sylvie?”

  Sylvie gasped with shock and tried to block her ears. But it was too late, the poisonous words spoken so pleasantly had already penetrated her bloodstream, and they coursed through her veins, insidious, corrosive.

  Half asleep in the sun, Coco pricked up his ears at the signals of distress emanating from Sylvie. But from whom was he to protect her? The malodorous man had already left, so he drew the only possible conclusion. Quick as a flash, he sprang to his feet and bit her attacker on the leg.

  “Coco!” Sylvie swatted him with the magazine and he fell back, yelping in surprise.

  “It’s nothing, the merest scratch,” said Isabelle, waving away Sylvie’s apologies as she dabbed the wound with a handkerchief.

  After their hasty exit, Sylvie scolded Coco. “No biting. Jamais.”

  He tucked his tail between his legs, his eyes liquid with hurt. She knelt down to pat him, but he crept away. “I’m sorry,” she said. All the way home, he walked on the opposite pavement, refusing to acknowledge her apologies. But once they were home, he came up and licked her hand with the perfect forgiveness to which humans can only aspire.

  Still turning the envelope over in her hands, Sylvie wonders why Isabelle had asked about a painting if it already belongs to her. Is there another one that belongs to Julien? Or is Isabelle’s probing about testaments and bequests only a distraction, the real contest between them for the right to Julien’s remains? Not his bones, of course, which rest peacefully at the Cimetière de Passy, no, not the body, this is not a Greek tragedy after all, there has been no blood. Yet Sylvie cannot shake the fear that a great reckoning is still to come, that Isabelle is resolved on dispossessing her, as she had once felt herself dispossessed. Legally Isabelle cannot evict her, that much is certain. Then why is she filled with dread?

  Sylvie draws a deep breath, opens the folder, and flips through the checkbook register, which shows a regular sum withdrawn every month. She wouldn’t have given it a second thought if it weren’t for Isabelle. But now those constant payments over the course of decades seem suspicious. And if there was an innocent explanation, why hadn’t Julien told her?

  She stares at the initial M on the sealed envelope and, struck by an idea, picks up the phone. It rings for a long time, but there is no answer, and Sylvie hangs up, a little ashamed that it has taken her own concerns for her to call the Gouffroys. They have enough to bear these days, she should have inquired after Max sooner. M, she thinks, M for Max. Again she dials the number of Julien’s old colleague, and this time Sabine Gouffroy answers. She was just feeding Max, she says, it’s a daily struggle, the only way she can lure him to the table is by playing opera, and then he becomes engrossed in the singing and eats docilely enough. “After all these years with him, I’ve picked up a smattering of psychology myself,” Sabine says. “And how have you been, my dear?” She listens to Sylvie’s story of the envelope and then says slowly, “Julien was the first one to notice Max’s troubles, he knew my husband couldn’t connect two thoughts anymore, let alone two words, so he definitely wouldn’t leave a letter for him. But it might not be for anyone at all, maybe it’s only a keepsake. Why don’t you just look inside?”

  “I suppose I could.”

  “Don’t take this amiss, but you’re lucky Julien went the way he did, all his wits about him. Not like my poor Max. The funny thing is, he still looks the same, but I know it’s not Max at all, I’m living with a hollow man, a mere shell.”

  After they hang up, Sylvie stares unseeingly before her, trying to imagine what it would be like to have Julien still by her side, a mere shell, emptied out of everything except the faint murmur of the sea.

  With a sudden movement, she rips open the sealed envelope and draws out a photograph of a young girl, her eyes shining, her lips parted. A stranger, yet uncannily familiar. The dark hair, the eyes so much like Julien’s. Clara, killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and exhumed now by the merest chance.

  Sylvie glances briefly at the other papers in the envelope, a card with two lines of poetry, addressing Julien as cher ami and signed simply Marie; a scrap of Julien’s stationery scribbled with a street name—rue Elzévir—but with the number torn off; and on a blank sheet of paper the single word “Belleville.” The sight of his handwriting sends a shock through her, and she is deceived into believing that he is still somewhere in the apartment, in his study perhaps. “Julien!” she cries. Coco comes bounding into the room. She drops the papers and buri
es her face in his coat, his heart beating against hers in mute sympathy.

  Then her eyes fall again on Clara’s photograph lying at her feet. A sudden current of air lifts the deckled edge, and from that angle it looks as if her parted lips are about to speak. Sylvie feels the hair rise on the back of her neck. A strange trick of the light has brought out a resemblance which escaped her earlier: with the shadows partly obscuring her face, the dark-haired girl could be mistaken for Sylvie herself.

  I see a look on Sylvie’s face that terrifies me. In the aftermath of my death, she would lean out of the window or stare down at the river with the same look and I felt a desperate clutch of fear, fleeing from these streets in order to safeguard her from myself.

  But where could I hide in a city where sooner or later you cross paths unexpectedly with everyone you know? For me, the only safe distance is not spatial at all but temporal. In the distant past, I am rendered harmless; all who lived then are now on the same side of the great gulf and free from mortal danger. I can slip into and out of those lives with impunity, their ending already a fait accompli. If in the past other spirits have unwittingly harmed those they love, I shall remain entirely blameless, a mute witness, nothing more; it is only in the present that my apparition poses a threat to the living.

  Every time I saw Sylvie at Pont Marie gazing fixedly at the water, my threat to her seemed frighteningly real. A strong current of agitation swept me into another century as Sylvie’s features deliquesced into Delphine’s, leaning over the same bridge staring at her reflection in the river.

  Delphine! She has been dead for a hundred years, yet I see her face clearly, the inquisitive gleam in her eye, the knowing smile on her lips. Delphine often gets her ear twisted for listening at doors, for riffling through the patronne’s papers, but she is incorrigible. In the courtyard behind the laundry, washerwomen string their clotheslines from the chestnut trees; the day is fine and the sheets will dry faster outside than by the stove. Delphine pesters them for stories about the washerwomen’s ball, asks who will be crowned this year’s laundress queen. They laugh and gossip, glad to rest their aching backs and their chapped hands for a moment.

  The mutilated veteran leans out of his window to ogle the girls with their skirts lifted and tucked around their waists to keep them dry. Life is sweet now, he thinks, looking at their plump limbs, not like it was barely twenty years ago, the city under siege by the Prussians and everyone starving, the poor people eating rats and cats, the rich their beloved racehorses, even the elephants from the zoo weren’t spared, what were their names again, oh, yes, Castor and Pollux, well, his memory is still sharp, even though he’s only half a man now, the rest blown away by a Prussian rifle, for all the good it did, Bismarck snatched Alsace-Lorraine all the same, and five billion francs’ indemnity on top! The veteran goes to the Place de la Concorde every year with a wreath for the statue of Strasbourg still covered in black crêpe, but you can’t go on mourning forever, and by God, look at those girls, with bottoms round and sweet as melons.

  One of the girls starts singing “Plaisir d’amour,” and the others join in the chorus. The patronne seated behind her cash box shakes her head, amour, amour, that’s all these girls think about, but she goes back to counting her receipts and lets them stay out in the courtyard a little longer.

  The widow Cornu’s establishment is reminiscent of the laundries of yesteryear, a true lavanderie, redolent of lavender. Modern lavoirs have sprung up all over the city now that the floating bateaux-lavoirs are being phased out, but the fine ladies of the quarter fear what all the steam and chemicals will do to their heirlooms and send their monogrammed linen and lace to Madame Cornu’s, where laundresses still wash the old-fashioned way, their arms up to the elbows in suds, using only the best soap from Marseilles and a special paste of Madame’s own devising instead of the corrosive eau de javel to bleach out stains. The widow’s reputation is impeccable, and you can be certain Madame Cornu’s girls don’t wear their customers’ dresses, or worse yet, rent them out. Their laundry comes back immaculate, the clothes scented with lavender, the linen with orris root.

  From six in the morning to eight in the evening, Delphine is wanted everywhere at once, by Clémence at the washboard, Henriette at the ironing table, Madame Cornu at the caisse, and she flies around the laundry, adding wood to the stove, measuring out soap for the tub, scraping beeswax into the starch so the iron glides smoothly over the men’s shirts and ladies’ muslins. She can total the accounts quicker than the patronne, and it is Delphine who suggests they should charge extra for garniture. Madame nods approvingly, hers is a laverie de luxe, after all, not a wash house for men with only one shirt who have to wait on the premises while it’s washed and dried. Delphine is right, from tomorrow she will charge an additional thirty centimes for frills and lace, it’s a small return for the charity she has shown the foundling left on her doorstep. Clémence winks at Henriette, some charity, feeding her on scraps and letting her sleep in the laundry. But what can you expect, the patronne cast off her own daughter, and people say Delphine is the love child of that disgraced girl whom nobody has heard from since.

  On mild days, the old soldier limps into the courtyard, and Madame rises from behind the caisse as a mark of respect to the veteran with his mutilated limbs and scarred face. She offers him a glass of wine and they discuss General Boulanger’s prospects for the presidency, agreeing he’s the only one with the guts to wrest Lorraine and Alsace back from Bismarck’s filthy hands. They look up as the postman comes into the courtyard and before the mutilé can ask, he shakes his head, no letter for the soldier.

  After the laundry closes for the night, Delphine sweeps the soap scum from the gutter and gathers up the newspapers. Boulanger, Boulanger, his name is on every lip, he’s stoking people up with his talk of revenge, trying to ride that popular wave right into the Élysée Palace, especially now that the decorations scandal has forced President Grévy to resign, though he swears up and down he had no idea his son-in-law was selling the Legion of Honor for cash. That makes her laugh, but still she is awed by the power of public revelations, how they can bring down the president of the republic, might yet hustle the nation back to war. She throws the journals into the stove, but the warmth lasts only an instant, it’s paper after all, not wood. As she shivers under her thin blanket, she thinks of poor old scarface waiting hopefully for a letter, when everyone knows his son won’t waste a stamp on him.

  But one day a letter does come. The postman, the washerwomen, and Madame herself wait expectantly in the courtyard as the veteran hobbles in with his shirt undone, rips open the envelope, and kisses the letter, wetting it with tears. Delphine observes his scarred features and feels a flare of intuition. She picks up the crumpled envelope and blurts out, “But, Monsieur, your son is in Marseille and this was posted in Paris.” And everyone recoils at the words, but it is from Delphine they turn away, not the pathetic old father who writes to himself to cover up for his son’s neglect.

  The other girls are uneasy now in Delphine’s presence; there’s something sinister in her ability to ferret out secrets. Not just the ordinary secrets of the lavanderie, mind you, where people’s dirty linen is aired in public: a christening gown that follows too soon after a bridal veil; the viscount’s embroidered handkerchiefs sent in by a lady other than his wife. The girls recall certain indiscretions of their own—an affair, an abortion, a disease of a private nature—for which Madame would dismiss them on the spot, look what she did to her own daughter. To avoid those moments of unguarded friendship when secrets are bound to slip out, Henriette no longer curls Delphine’s hair, Clémence no longer brightens her drab gown with ribbons, Véronique and Mado stop taking her to admire the window displays at Au Bon Marché, or to mock Monsieur Eiffel’s monstrous tower going up for the exposition next year.

  Left out by the other girls, Delphine retreats into grandiose fantasies. She has heard the rumors about her
birth, and she dreams of a deathbed reconciliation between Madame and the cast-off daughter, of being restored to her rightful place, of sitting at the caisse like the patronne. She redoubles her attentions to Madame, anticipating her wishes even before the words are out of her mouth, a tisane when she is feeling poorly, a glass of mulled wine when she has a cold. But perhaps Delphine’s too-lively interest in the widow’s health alarms her, for one day Madame’s niece and her husband show up with their young son. The husband looks over the premises and the laundresses’ charms with a proprietary air. His dissipated face is handsome still, and staring at it, Delphine feels the old flare of intuition. This is the man who seduced Madame’s daughter right under her nose, and it’s amazing that others don’t notice what is so evident to Delphine, the resemblance to herself in the high forehead, in the large brown eyes, in the curve of his lips. The son sees her sitting by herself in a corner, and wants to know who she is. Oh, the foundling, his father says indifferently, she’s nobody.

  This time, Delphine hugs her new secret close to her chest. Lying on her cot at night, she wonders what will happen if she drops a word in Madame’s ear about her niece’s precious husband. But will she believe the nobody? She falls asleep and dreams that her mother has come back to claim her inheritance. “Delphine,” she whispers, “Delphine,” and Delphine reaches out her arms. She is somebody now, and everywhere she goes people whisper her name. Then she wakes to find herself alone, with only rats scurrying across the floor, attracted to the bucket of starch.

  The next day I see Delphine strolling across the bridge and feel a pang of uneasiness. What is she doing out during working hours, has the patronne dismissed her? I draw closer as she stops to study her reflection in the river, the water wrinkling her smooth face which time will wrinkle all too soon. Ah, life is pleasant and youth is sweet, I think benevolently, dance at the laundresses’ ball, ma petite, dance while you can. Lulled by the late-autumn sunlight and my own goodwill, I suspect nothing, not even when she glances mischievously over her shoulder and clambers up on the parapet. And then, to my horror, she disappears from view. I reach out to save her, a gesture both reflexive and futile. But she is playing a dangerous game, only crouching in a niche below. She cries out in triumph as a reflection appears beside hers, like a carp swimming up from the murk.