Marlena de Blasi

by Amandine (v5)

  “Don’t recall much else? Your baby? When you held her?”

  “I never did.”

  “Why?”

  “Janusz, please. If I thought anything about the baby during those first moments, those first days and nights, it was that it had been born dead and that they were all tiptoeing about trying to keep the truth from me. That’s what I thought. And so I let them. I made it easy for them. I asked nothing, welcomed injection after injection, trusted my mother to take care of things as she’d always taken care of them. Finally, one morning Mother came to sit by my bed and she told me that the baby had been born with a severe heart defect, that she was perilously ill and would likely not survive the next few days. I accepted the news, of course, and was almost cheered by it after having thought her already dead. But no, cheered is the wrong word. The truth is that I felt nothing. I mean nothing that might be termed ‘maternal.’ Mother’s maternalness overwhelmed any burgeoning instinct I might have felt in that direction. She was all the mother there was room for in our lives. The baby was not real to me. Only my shame was real. My shame and my hope, my belief that this boy would return to me. I can’t imagine this will make sense to you, but that’s all I felt. All that I remember feeling.

  “A few days later we went back to the villa. Mother told me that the baby would have to remain in the hospital for further care. I accepted that just as I had all the rest. A month passed, and it was the end of May I remember when Mother said we’d be returning to Krakow. Without the baby. At this point I was once again certain that the child had died, otherwise why would we be leaving it behind? And also not once during that last month did Mother, as far as I knew, visit the hospital where the baby supposedly was. Surely she never asked me to go there with her. I stayed quiet, dutiful, and we returned to Krakow.

  “It was in September that Mother announced she was returning to Germany to fetch the baby, that surgery had been arranged for her in a clinic in Switzerland. She explained that there was new hope for the child’s survival. Now, now that I know what she did subsequently, I think she was testing me that day, trying to determine my feelings about the baby. I think she was trying to decide. Should she surrender the baby or should she not? Yes, that’s what she must have been struggling with, because I’d never before seen my mother with the frightened look she wore then. The terror in her eyes. But of course I didn’t know what she meant to do or that I might have said something to deter her. I couldn’t have known.”

  “Known? No, you couldn’t have ‘known what she meant to do,’ but how many months had passed by then? Four? Five? Why didn’t you—?”

  “If you have not understood by all that I’ve told you up to now, Janusz, you will never understand. I am simply telling you what I think and what I recall. I do not tell it to gain your sympathy.”

  She wants him to cross the room, to take her in his arms again, but rather he walks to the long windows, opens them wider, lights a cigarette, one booted foot resting on the small wooden stool that Bajka uses when she cleans the glass. Holding the cigarette between his thumb and index finger, palm facing inward, he inhales deeply, the red ash the only light in the room. When he turns his head to the left to blow the smoke from the corner of his mouth, a river breeze chases it back upon him, making a lissome ghost of him, the husk of a dervish wheeling his way to the other side.

  “Lutèce. City of Light dark as a grave.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Lutèce. It’s what the Romans called this place. Paris without light is unthinkable.”

  “Are you finished with me now?”

  “Does now refer to this evening or to forever?”

  “Let’s begin with this evening.”

  “Is the princess fatigued with all this serious talk, is that it?”

  “Sarcasm doesn’t suit you, Janusz.”

  As though he hasn’t heard her, Janusz walks to the divan where Andzelika sits, bends to take her shoulders roughly in his hands. “Oh, yes, let’s speak of something else, my darling. Where would you like to dine this evening? By the way, where is your daughter dining this evening, Andzelika?”

  “How unjust.”

  “No. Just, it is. Just to the teeth, my princess.”

  “Are you saying it’s what I deserve?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “I feared you would behave badly, but I never thought you would be cruel. You know you can likely buy an annulment from the curia for this, Janusz. I’m certain the bishop will find just the right phrase in your defense, something like—”

  “Be quiet, Andzelika. Your story makes me neither love you less nor regret that I married you. In fact, it’s not even you I’m thinking of right now. It’s certainly not myself. I’m thinking about a little nine-year-old girl who is part of you and so is also part of me. No matter who else’s other blood is hers. It’s bad enough that your mother didn’t trust me, but that you didn’t startles me. I feel cheated not that you had a lover before me but that there is a part of you, that there is a child that you kept from me.”

  “A child that was kept from me, as well, you will recall. I couldn’t help what I did, Janusz, can’t you see that?”

  “No. Nor shall I ever. Sixteen is one thing, but nine years have passed also for you. If only you’d grown to be woman enough to have asked your mother a question or two. Or better, to have told me, so that, together, we might have asked the questions. But it doesn’t matter now.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “What matters is to find her.”

  “Then you’ll help me?”

  “I was hoping that you might help me.”

  Janusz sits then next to Andzelika, folds his arms across his chest. Both look straight ahead.

  “In these past twenty-two hours, since I’ve known that my baby might still be alive, I have begun to invent nostalgia for her. That sort of Russian nostalgia which one feels for a person even without having known him. Who was it who went out to look for his lover’s footprints in the snow even though he knew she had never walked there? Janusz, I have pictured her, imagined her in ten thousand ways. I almost fear going out into the world because I know that I shall ‘see’ her everywhere, in every little girl’s face. I shall stop children in the street, look into their eyes, run after any one of them who seems the least bit familiar to me. I will spend the rest of my life waiting for that thud of recognition which, more than likely, will not be recognition at all but the longing for it. I shall wander through parks, study the whirling of the carousel for a rider who might be mine. Is she the blond one? No, no, there she is, the dark one over there.”

  Andzelika weeps softly.

  “I must get back to the regiment. I promised to return in forty-eight hours. It’s nearly longer than that now since I left. Trains don’t run, roads don’t exist.”

  Janusz stands, looks at his wife. “I think I can arrange to get you back to Krakow, or will your colonel friend take care of that?”

  “Back to Krakow? Why? Isn’t it much too dangerous to—”

  “I would have thought that your desire to begin, to somehow begin the search for her would overtake any other consideration. Or do you prefer to sit here in all this gold-leafed grandeur to weep and to wait for her to find you?”

  Eyelids nearly closed, all the better to see this man whom she can’t quite recognize, Andzelika looks at Janusz. In the half-whispered whiskey voice she had as a little girl, she asks, “Do you always shoot at dead men, Janusz? Is that what noble cavaliers do? Do they twist their sabers into the hearts of them just for sport? Tell me, how does it feel, my love?”

  “Touché. But I repeat. Krakow is where you must begin. Besides, there is nothing, absolutely nothing left either here or there that lacks the shivery element of danger.”

  “Now that France has surrendered, there will be—”

  “Get yourself to Krakow and go through your mother’s things. Whatever she did, she didn’t do it alone. She must have left some trace, names in a bo
ok, letters. Who was in her pay back then?”

  “I don’t know. Toussaint, I guess.”

  “Who is Toussaint?”

  “He was her attorney, a disbarred advocate whom Mother retained for many purposes.”

  “Where is he? When was the last time you saw him?”

  “He was an expat French who lived in Krakow. He spoke Polish like a native, so he must have lived there for a long time. I don’t remember seeing him in recent years.”

  “Begin with him. Go to her confessor. She was very attached to the clergy at the Mariacki.”

  “Bishop Józef was her confessor from the time I was little. He was often a guest at the palace. He died years ago, though. I don’t know if she developed the same close relationship with anyone else there.”

  “Who were her maids? Talk to everyone who was and is still in the household. Talk to everyone, I tell you. She would have been less careful in her own home than she would have been with the extended family. With her friends.”

  “Do you think the baby was left in an orphanage?”

  “It’s possible. But that doesn’t seem to fit Valeska’s style. More likely a private home. I don’t know. Or a private school. A good Catholic boarding school in Switzerland.”

  “Boarding schools do not enroll infants.”

  “No, of course not. Wherever it was that she left her, surely Valeska left her granddaughter in good hands. The right hands. You know what I mean.”

  “The most likely thing is that Mother arranged adoption. To some minor royals who wouldn’t have minded one more child roaming about the manor. Something like that.”

  “If she was as ill as Valeska led you to believe, she may no longer be alive, Andzelika.”

  “I believe she is alive.”

  “Good. That will help me to believe it, too. But Valeska is dead, and the chances of my lasting out the war without some boche spilling my brains are close to nil. That will leave you to find her. To find our child.”

  Andzelika forces a laugh, tries to push it forth. The tears fall again as Janusz rises, appears as though he is preparing to leave.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Back to the regiment. I told you that.”

  “Not even a night’s rest?”

  “On the train, if there is one. You’ll understand why I can’t, why I can’t embrace you now? You do understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ja robi kochaja was. I do love you. Even more than I did when I arrived.”

  “I know.”

  Matka, what did you do with her? Where is she, Matka? Where are you, little girl?

  CHAPTER XXVI

  MAMAN. MAMAN, MAMAN, WHERE ARE YOU?

  In delirium, Amandine cries out for her mother. An old woman in the gray cotton dress of a lay sister, her mouth slack, sleeps in a chair across the room from the bed where she lies. The old woman opens her eyes to the child’s febrile whispers, rises, approaches the bed.

  Hush, child. Sleep is what you must do. Only sleep.

  Water. Please. Need water.

  No water for you. Nothing. Only sleep. Now hush or I shall have to tie that old stocking across your mouth again. And tie your wrists. You don’t want that, do you?

  Several days earlier, two of the convent girls began to exhibit alarming symptoms, unmistakable evidences of scarlet fever. A day later eleven girls and three convent sisters were symptomatic, and all of these were isolated in the infirmary. The fact that everyone in the convent and in the school had, to some degree, been exposed to the students and the sisters who had already contracted the fever caused Jean-Baptiste to set up a makeshift secondary isolation ward in rooms adjoining the infirmary. Here he swabbed and probed and listened and looked, and those showing mild or even suspect symptoms were quarantined. Solange was among them. The students and sisters who appeared without infection were confined to the dormitory.

  With so many of the sisters unable to execute their house duties, aid was solicited from among the villagers, the metaires, even from other religious houses nearby, people to cook and clean and help with the running and fetching. But St.-Hilaire was not the only place where the scarlet fever was registered. Public offices, hospitals, prisons, orphanages—its reach was epidemic. At the earliest moment in the drama, Jean-Baptiste had telephoned the provincial public health offices.

  Yes, Doctor, of course help will be sent to St.-Hilaire, just as soon as possible, sir. The waiting list, however, you understand. Priorities, sir. If it’s drugs you need, however, those can be sent.… I see. Well, all right then, Doctor. We’ll advise you of the first staff availability.

  It had been for Amandine that Jean-Baptiste had requested nursing care from the public health offices. It was she who most troubled him. An attack of scarlet fever would be far more threatening to her than to a person without her congenital weaknesses, even weaknesses restored to a tenuous equilibrium. She would be safest if isolated from both the infirmary patients and those in secondary isolation.

  Jean-Baptiste consulted Mater Paul about where Amandine might be kept, telling her that physical distance from the infirmary and the adjunct ward would be necessary to keep her from exposure to those who would be caretaking the others.

  “Philippe’s old rooms,” said Paul. “They’re in the extreme opposite wing of the building, so we could assign one person to see to her needs and there would be no reason for anyone else to even pass nearby.”

  “Yes, yes, that’s the right place for her. But who is to care for her? If it weren’t for her accident, she could do for herself and would only need someone to check her temperature and pulse several times a day and throughout the night, bring her meals. Give her a hand with bathing, perhaps. Essentially just keep vigilant, but with—”

  “Ah, yes. Her injury. Graceless little fool that she is. Trying to pirouette in someone else’s ballet shoes.”

  “You forgive her nothing, do you, Mater? Soon you’ll be saying it was she who brought down the fever upon your house.”

  Paul pulls her eternal handkerchief from beneath her sleeve, pats her upper lip. Chooses to keep silent.

  “The ankle was far less swollen last evening, but the ligaments are badly torn. She must rest, keep the leg elevated, and the ankle compression must be removed every three or four hours for twenty minutes or so and then rebandaged. We’ll need someone who—”

  “Josette. She is strong, can lift the child with ease, and, once shown a procedure, she will perform it with precision. Yes, Josette. I can personally attest to her competence. I’ll call her in right away.”

  “Actually, I’d prefer to meet with her.”

  “But you’ve been exposed and will therefore expose Josette. If you’re not concerned about that, why, I’ll take on the duty of caring for Amandine myself.”

  “You’ve quite enough to do I would think—”

  “Baptiste, don’t you trust me to care properly for the child?”

  Baptiste’s smile is brief. Perhaps insincere. He says, “Why not someone from the farms, someone who’s come up to help from the hamlet?”

  “But how do we know who among them has or has not been exposed? At least Josette keeps herself in a kind of isolation most of the time anyway.”

  “You’re right, of course. I’ll write instructions. Josette can read, can’t she?”

  “Some. But I shall review it all with her. Here, sit down and I shall go along to alert Josette.”

  Paul is indeed diligent in clarifying the instructions for Josette. In a larger, clearer hand, she rewrites Jean-Baptiste’s notes in a leather-bound book, which she knows will please Josette, help her to feel the distinction of her role as nurse.

  “Though Cook will be given a list of appropriate meals for Amandine, Josette, you must be certain that the food sent to her concurs with your list. Look here now. She must be fed small, frequent meals composed of

  white rice

  potato puree

  stewed fruits

  poached eggs

>   raw egg beaten with a touch of sugar and a few drops of coffee

  blancmange

  petit gervais

  poached marrow on lightly buttered toast

  the juice of an orange diluted with mineral water

  “It is important that she take in a minimum of eight large glasses of cool water each day in addition to unlimited quantities of weak tea. Do you understand, Josette?”

  In the leather-bound book, Paul has drawn columns for days of the week, hours of the day, categories of information to note. She instructs Josette to enter into the book, no matter how primitively, everything that the child eats and drinks as well as her pulse and temperature.

  “And here are the warning signs you must watch for, Josette.

  a flushing of the face, even a mild one

  a rash on any part of her body

  chills

  fever

  headache

  vomiting

  rapid pulse

  a whitened tongue

  “Do you understand each of these? Amandine is very verbal, to say the least, and she will certainly alert you should she feel discomfort.”

  Josette is peevish under Paul’s fastidious delivery.

  Has Paul forgotten how I, Josette, cared for her all those years ago? How I kept many a vigil with the child Annick in my arms when she was burning with fever or blue with cough? While her doctor father roved about the village, it was I who treated little Annick with herbal remedies, rubbing her chest with the poultices my mother would make of olive oil and white willow or slippery elm for my brothers and sisters. I would cover her thin, wheezing breast with a rag warmed by the fire. The most important part of the cure was my rocking her in my arms then, and the lullabies. And here, now, all this fuss over what to do for Amandine.