Marlena de Blasi

by Amandine (v5)

  “Because it is my duty to stay, sir. Staying here to watch over Amandine is what I promised to do.” She’s standing now, leaning toward him, perhaps beginning to weep.

  “I think it’s the watching over her that you promised to do. That is the duty you assumed all those years ago. A duty that you have executed splendidly and that I trust you would continue to execute splendidly in any other place. Hence I repeat my question: Why would you stay?”

  She moves in tight circles, turning her back to him, then facing him. “Wasn’t that the agreement? That she should be schooled here … and—?”

  “I suppose it was. But perhaps that agreement has outlived its original intent. Perhaps those who wished to ensure Amandine’s welfare would be the first to say that it is not here, not in this school, not anywhere about this place where her welfare is of particular and primary concern. You can’t change that, and neither can I. Knowing that we can’t change it makes us wise. And being wise, we should seek an alternative.”

  She backs up into her chair. “What are you saying, sir? Another convent?”

  “No. I’m saying that I believe you should be on your own. A family of two. You should make a home for Amandine, for yourself. You should marry someday, Solange. You’re beautiful and lovely and fine.”

  Awkward under his appraisal, she blushes, covers her face with her hands, looks up at him, her thoughts muddled.

  A sip of port, a broad smile, the amethystine veins of his nose in high relief in the candlelight, the bishop asks, “How would you even begin? Is that what you wonder? With my help. The Church has a wide embrace, my dear. I would help you to find work, good work. An apartment in Montpellier, a little house somewhere in a village. As you prefer. Or perhaps you would choose to go to your family. It’s for you to deliberate calmly and eventually to decide. I say ‘deliberate calmly and eventually decide’ with some reservation, though.”

  He looks hard at Solange, tilts the decanter over his glass again.

  “The war. My mother wrote to me of it. But that was a few weeks ago, before these, before the Germans … I mean, no one here talks much about—”

  “Hitler? Well, they should. I understand that Czechoslovakia and Poland seem the other side of the moon to you, yet they’re just up the way a bit and, depending upon who steps in this Hun jackal’s path, who turns the other way, depending upon the shape and force of it all, well, what I’m saying is that nothing can be the same for very long anywhere in Europe now that this has begun. It has begun, Solange. We’ve declared war on the boche. The die is cast. Improbable, unthinkable as it is, this blitzkrieg of theirs may just be beginning. What I’m trying to say is that, should the boche invade France, well … Should that happen, the south will be safer than the north, at least until … It will be safer here for a while.”

  He drinks down the port. Changes expression.

  “You know I’ve had her papers prepared, her identity card, her passport, all is ready. Amandine Gilberte Noiret de Crécy. I’ve taken the liberty to give her my name. And my mother’s as well. Gilberte, it’s quite beautiful, don’t you think? If I’d ever had a daughter, she would have been Gilberte Noiret de Crécy. And so Amandine will carry on. For my mother, for me. It’s all quite round, quite settled. ‘Amandine Gilberte Noiret de Crécy, born May 3, 1931, Montpellier, mother: unknown; father: unknown; a foundling awarded to the curia of Montpellier on the day of her birth.’ It’s as good a beginning as any of us have had.”

  “When she began at the school, I’d registered her as Jouffroi. I’d given her my name, but I don’t know if she ever had occasion to note it or to be called by it. And so Noiret de Crécy it shall be. Thank you, sir. Thank you.”

  “But having papers is not meant to be a reason to go from here. Surely should you decide to stay I admit that a certain truce will reign between the two of you and Paul. She’ll not change. Ma âme damnée. She, the spiritual mother of all these little birds, is herself a damned soul. Poor old bitter thing. No, she can’t change any more than we can, than anyone can. Still, I suspect some subtle reformation would take hold. The worst is past.”

  Solange stays quiet as though clicking through her intelligence, verifying what he says, all the while pushing away words like blitzkrieg, Hun, boche.

  “Yes, I think that, too. The worst is past. And yet what troubles Amandine, what shall continue to cause her suffering, is the incurable want of her mother. Of knowing something about her, of finding her. Can you help me with that? Help me to help her?”

  “I know very little. A friend, an old and dear friend, told me what he needed. And I did as he wished. It was the sort of affair about which one asks nothing. Do you understand?”

  “I think so. But this help you gave to your friend, I mean this arrangement to keep Amandine here, if I take her away, what about, about the funds that—”

  “The funds, yes. The curia was paid to take in Amandine. Generous, enormously generous funds were passed to the curia upon the child’s arrival here. Since then nothing has arrived from that source shall we call it. A question of misappropriation perhaps or, more likely, someone’s convenient forgetfulness about the promise of maintenance. It hardly matters.”

  “But my monthly stipend … the—”

  “As I’ve said, you’ve fulfilled your duty, Solange, as have I. I promised to see that the two of you were cared for, and I have. I shall always. It’s I who has seen to your checks. I, through the auspices of the curia’s plenteous accounts. As long as I live, Solange—and if there is even a whit of honor among my successor, long after I’m gone—you and the child shall be under my protection. No matter where you are. No matter where you go. Now I want a nap, so begone with you.”

  As though she has not heard his imperative she stays in her chair.

  “Why does Paul want to hurt Amandine, sir?”

  “Because Amandine is the child she wanted to be.”

  “What?”

  “In Paul’s strangely ordered mind, Amandine is fortunate, monstrously fortunate.”

  “A mortally ill infant abandoned by her parents she believes is monstrously fortunate? An orphan whose father figure dies while she sleeps in his arms when she’s not yet six years old, a …” On her feet again, Solange weeps openly.

  “Allow me to tell you Paul’s story. Her mother died during her birth. A hideously vain man, her father thought of his own comfort, his needs. Intending a certain efficiency, I suppose, he brought in one of his village paramours to care for this newborn Annick. Did you know that was her name, Solange? Yes, Paul’s real name is Annick. Interesting, isn’t it, that you gave your tiny ward a name beginning with A. Alors. As soon as it was clear to this village woman that the father of this infant had no intention to keep, let alone marry her, she ran off and, at less than a year old, Annick was left for days and nights tied to her crib, bread and whatever else the father could spare placed in her reach. He was the village doctor, Solange. Annick’s father was the village doctor, the young widower applauded for his sacrifices, his “managing” such a difficult life. Though other village women lined up in droves to aid him, the good doctor refused all save the ones he coveted and, of those, there were few who cared about the moaning, half-starved creature in the locked room down the hall.

  “Please, sir, I can’t bear to—”

  “Come now, does it shock you to hear of such savage behavior? In one guise or another it’s rather common, you know. Yes, while the doctor was off to visit his patients, he left his baby girl in the squalor of her own soil, her own vomit, her own hunger for however long it suited him. But whether he was absent or present, the baby was alone. He never held her. Do you understand what diabolical abuse it is to deny an infant the embrace for which it yearns?”

  This Fabrice says in a less belligerent voice. As though the words, the events they paint, have fatigued him. He bows his head, closes his eyes, and stays quiet until, nearly startling Solange, he snaps his head back to rest against the chair, fixes his gaze upon her,
continues.

  “But there was a person—a girl who must have been no more than seven or eight when Annick was born—who took it upon herself to care for the baby. She was one of five or six children of a poor village family, the eldest I think. Born handicapped—arrière mental, slow in comprehension and speech—she was a folkloric figure, the endearing village idiot. Another child left to her own devices, she wandered about the village and the countryside all day, sometimes returning to her home in the evening, often not. Sleeping under trees, stealing what she could from gardens and orchards, knocking on doors for succor when it rained or was cold. She got by. It wasn’t as though her mother was cruel but only distracted and broken with misery and the care of the younger children. It seems that when this little girl heard about the death of the doctor’s wife, about the baby, she somehow got the idea that it was she who must care for it. The doctor humored her, let her use the little thing as a kind of doll, a reward for doing his bidding. Feeding the animals and dragging coal up from the cellar, jobs he would have had to pay someone to do or do himself. When the girl had finished her work, she would run to the baby, wash it with her own spit rubbed on whatever cloth was at hand; she’d share her dubious and purloined food with it or try to nurse it as she’d seen her mother give her breast to her brothers and sisters. She would sing to it for hours, rocking it in her bony, filthy arms until both slept. She’d give it a good whack now and then, too, another lesson in child rearing learned at her mother’s knee. All in all, she did the baby less harm than good, you see, for she loved the thing. An instinctive love, I suppose. She knew no one else loved it, as she knew no one loved her. She set out to defend it, to save it and so save herself. Annick was the one mission in the little girl’s life. Still is.”

  “What do you mean, ‘still is’?”

  “That little girl was called Josette.”

  “Josette. Josette? This Jos—?”

  “The same.

  “Annick somehow survived and grew up and grew older, but even when she began to take care of herself, Josette stayed by her side. And though Annick must have surpassed Josette in intelligence by the time she was four or five, Josette thrived in her own way, her own time. With Annick’s help. When Annick went to school, she began lessons for Josette. Taught her to read and write, if in a particular fashion. Helped her to take care of her physical self, shared her clothes with her. And her food. Thus the wheel turned and Josette became Annick’s mission. After a while, having Josette underfoot no longer suited the doctor, and so he set different rules, banned Josette’s visits, sent her away rather roughly. Still, she came back. Less often, of course, but she always found a way to come back to Annick. When the doctor signed his daughter over to the Carmelites, Josette—refusing to be left behind—arrived that same night, bag and baggage, presenting herself to the abbess as a cleaning girl. She was taken in as a lay sister—the greater truth, as a slave—and took up her vigil over her beloved Annick. And they’ve both been here all these years.

  “It’s from Josette and some from Paul—Annick—herself that I’ve learned much of this but far more from the doctor. It must have been fifteen years ago when he came to the convent wanting to speak with his daughter. As men like he are wont to do, he’d waited for the occasion of his last earthly days to make the visit. She refused to see him. Philippe sent him on to me, and I became the repository for the things he’d wanted to tell Annick. How sorry he was, how he’d been a weak, lonely man, how he’d believed that little Annick—by the event of her birth—had murdered his wife. The wife whom he betrayed and beat and … I heard his confession, told him to go home to die, absolved by God if not by his daughter.”

  “I’m sorry for Annick, I mean for Paul. For Josette. Dismally sorry, sir. But what has it all to do with Amandine?”

  “Has the closing circle not occurred to you? Paul has avenged herself upon Amandine. The fresh white canvas of a newborn baby. It was too great a temptation for her. She would devour that infant. That infant who’d been left, abandoned, yes, but into such worthy hands. With such worthy trappings. That child who conquered a mortal illness, conquered Jean-Baptiste and Philippe, every last one of the convent sisters, you, of course, and meanest of all for Paul to suffer, she conquered me. All of us besotted with her. Some want the pain to end with them, some want to pass it on. It’s really that simple, my dear.”

  “I hardly find that simple. Was your telling me meant to raise my sympathy for Paul?”

  “Not at all. It was my answer to your question: ‘Why does Paul want to hurt Amandine?’”

  “You don’t know who her parents are, do you, sir?”

  “I do not.”

  “Can you help me to find out?”

  “Even if I thought that best, I know not where I should begin.”

  “With your friend.”

  “Long dead. He is long dead, as I believe is all trace of those who wished to forget her. Amandine is not the first child to have been so willfully, so determinedly lost.”

  “But you see, sir, she is lost not only to them but to everyone. To me. To herself. They did their work too well.”

  “So it would seem. But she’s wise and strong. She was made well. They gave her that. It will be enough. The child will come around. You’ll see. But this business about the war, it’s real, Solange. In one place or another, you and Amandine, like all the rest of us, must endure what the powers have in store for us. You must decide where it is you prefer to be: here with us, with your family, on your own somewhere. You’ve a good deal to think about. Yes?”

  A good deal to think about, yes, Fabrice. Revelations, counsel, mandates, affirmations all delivered blithely before the fire, his unquiet guzzlings of port, his confident, unfaltering voice. His loyalty to his friend, to this brother bishop, his pact with him to guide the path of this child. His embrace of me as the figure chosen to mother her. His preparedness to help us. To stay, to leave, he puts no conditions but trusts me to say which. I dare believe if he were younger, he would have said, “Let’s go,” and would be starting off with us; yes, it’s almost as though he wants us to leave here in his name. To do what he didn’t do. To do what Paul never did.

  I shall write again to Maman. If she says we should come home, then we shall. Yes, that’s it, that shall be the point of decision, Maman’s word. From all she’s said already, I have no fear for her wanting us but only for what more she might consider about this war. How did Fabrice put it? “depending upon who steps in this Hun jackal’s path, who turns the other way, depending upon the shape and force of it all, well, what I’m saying is that nothing can be the same for very long anywhere in Europe now that this has begun. It has begun, Solange.”

  Maman will tell me if the time is right now. If it seems right to her. But what will Amandine say and think and feel if I tell her that we are leaving? The new school year has just begun, and she is more at ease. The worst is past, Fabrice said it himself. I hesitate because it’s I who am fearful. Especially at the prospect of setting up as “a family of two.” Without the help of the sisters, could I take care of her? Is that why I want to take her to Avise? To Maman and Grand-mère, to Blanchette and Chloe? Would I be trying to reconstruct the convent? The shared work. Another tribe of women to love Amandine, to pet her. Fabrice trusts me. I sought his counsel, and he gave it. Now I must try to trust myself. Still, for better, for worse, this is the only home she has ever known. And I remember her fierce response when she was younger and I broached the idea of our visiting Avise. Would she feel the same way now? What is best for you, Amandine? God, make haste to help me.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  KRAKOW FELL IN FIVE DAYS. MORE A GENUFLECTION THAN A FALL. The grand old medieval dame. The date was September 6, 1939. Five dementing days after nearly two million German troops stormed Polish borders from the north and from the west in tanks and planes, in trucks, on foot, all of them bent on obliterating the Polish army and, more, the Polish soul. But that had been tried before. Historical partitions
and redrawings of borders, every nation that touched upon Polish land came to have its way with her, carving her up, bleeding her, trying to smother her Polishness, calling her Prussia or Germany or Russia or Austria. Invasions, dominions, police states, persecutions, puppet governments, change a border, change a name, still we are Poland. You see it wasn’t the Polish military machine—ragged, deficient—that terrified the Germans in 1939, nor was it the fierce daring of the bravehearts—the only army in all of Europe who fought from the first day to the final day of that war. No, not the military machine but the moral machine. Polish loyalty thrived not in the name of a heinous butcher but in the name of the Poles’ own humanity. Yes, it was their Polishness, that inexorable Polishness, which rankled the Führer’s boys.

  Unlike Warsaw, unlike Lwów, unlike the towns and villages along the pitiless way of the blitzkrieg, the blood and bones and bricks of Krakow suffered little. Less. No fire, no ravage, no slaughter ornamented the intrusion into what the Germans considered a city of their own. Unser Krakau. The Countess Czartoryska was there.

  Forty-three now and perhaps more beautiful than she was on that day in Montpellier in 1931 when she brought her daughter’s five-month-old baby—consigned it irrevocably—to the convent of St.-Hilaire. Life for the Countess Czartoryska had proceeded much as she’d desired. Privileges, duties, pace, rhythm, tone, marcel waves, sable jackets, and Chanel trousers. Schiaparelli gowns and canary diamonds. The theater, the opera, a window table at Jama Januszika each morning at eleven for raspberry pastries and the exchange of darting glances with a silver-bearded cellist from the Krakow Philharmonic. Sojourns to the family estates for hunt parties and balls, firelit picnics in the Carpathian foothills laid by caravans of servants porting silver and linen and provisions, readied to await the arrival in luxury automobiles of nobles wrapped in good Scots cashmere. A month in Paris, a few weeks at Baden, a long-standing love affair with an inconsiderable Slav prince. Life for Countess Czartoryska—as it did for all the women of her set—drifted along much as it had for the aristocracy since the sixteenth century.