by Anne Nesbet
You noticed that sort of thing when you yourself spent whole recesses hunkering down in the shadows, feeling very American and out of place, and trying not to be conspicuous.
“Salut, Pauline!” said Valko, who had already cheerfully shaken hands with Cousin Louise and the well-dressed old man during the time Maya had been thinking about courtyards and recesses. Sometimes Valko’s embassy upbringing welled up in the most impressive ways. Now he was kissing the frowning girl’s cheeks—left side, right side, the traditional French pattern. The girl’s frown faded just a little.
“But I did not know you would be here, Valko,” said the girl in French. “You’ve gone nowhere for vacation?”
“No, no, never vacations for us,” said Valko with a smiling shrug, and to Maya he said, “This is the astonishing Pauline Vian. Have you two met yet?”
“Not yet,” said the astonishing Pauline Vian, her frown becoming a shade friendlier as she reached out to shake Maya’s hand. “You are the American girl. I am with Valko in many classes this year. Since he is actually quite clever.”
It was all Maya could do to keep from gaping. She was not used to people in any country anywhere who talked as bluntly as this tiny, frowning Pauline Vian.
“It was in the cafeteria at work,” said Maya’s father, beaming proudly. “I found myself eating at a table with the head of the lab, Monsieur Pham here, and it turns out he has a granddaughter almost your age, Maya, and at your very school, too. Can you imagine? So of course I thought of your birthday.”
No, she could not possibly be twelve or thirteen, not this tiny little girl with the amazing hair.
“What grade are you in, Pauline, dear?” asked Maya’s mother from her chair in the corner of the living room.
“Same as us, Mrs. Davidson,” said Valko. “You skipped a year, didn’t you, Pauline?”
“Two years,” said Pauline, and she added a crisp edge to her frown.
“Our little Pauline! Eleven years old, and the best student in the collège!”
So that was her grandfather. They did resemble each other just a little, around the eyes, though one was smiling as if pride might just burst right through his skin, and the other frowning just as hard.
“Physics, we think,” said the proud old man. “She can already work equations like you would not believe, this one. Although she would also be a fine historian, wouldn’t she? The talents of four continents, all combined in our Pauline!”
“But that’s of absolutely no consequence, all that physics and history,” said Pauline Vian, her frown so deep that whole textbooks could fall into it and never be seen again. “Since my vocation lies elsewhere.”
A perplexed silence fell over the room for a moment, while those who were not native speakers of French tried to figure out what this little girl and her grandfather had actually been arguing about (or, in some cases, what the word vocation was supposed to mean). It was not a very long silence, because Maya’s little brother, James, who was still only five and thus tended to produce loud noises when doing even quite ordinary things, went bounding over to Maya, one of his hands clutching something colorful and slightly grubby.
“Happy birthday, Maya! Can you open my present now? It’s a real present! Open my present!”
Enough people laughed to break the general spell, Maya’s father went into the kitchen to get some more glasses, and Maya sat down in the nearest chair to pay proper attention to the package James had just handed her.
“You didn’t have to get me a present, you know that,” said Maya.
James grinned at her.
“I found it,” he said. “I actually found it this very morning. It’s a really good present.”
He leaned against her chair while she took extra time with the wrapping paper, just so James could savor every second of it.
“Is it maybe a very large book or a helicopter?” she asked, and he laughed.
Actually she was thinking it might be a few mints or—well, something small. But she kept working away at the layers of crumpled paper and the tape, until something round and gleaming dropped into the palm of her hand.
“Oh, James,” said Maya, and then she was briefly speechless.
“Look, look. Do you see? It has a SALAMANDER on it! It’s a real present!”
A real present! In fact (she couldn’t help herself: she shivered), it was the very button she had thrown away, whenever that was. Yesterday morning. She had thrown it away, to show the gargoyles and the shadow and the Medusan stationery that they could not tell her she was bound to do anything. That she was free.
But here it had come back to her in the hands of her brother.
“Do you like it?”
“It’s . . . a beautiful button, James. Where did you find it?”
He put his mouth to her ear: “In the courtyard! By the trash cans!”
And giggled.
“And it’s not a button, anyway,” he added. “It’s lots specialer than that. It opens up, see?”
He took the button back from her and tapped some little latch on it that Maya had not seen before, and the top sprang open, like a locket.
“How strange!” said Maya. “Is it a watch, then?”
“Looks more like a compass,” said Valko, who had come to look over Maya’s shoulder. Maya remembered then, with a twinge of guilt, that she had never quite managed to mention it to Valko, this not-exactly-a-button that the ebony bird had spit out into her hands. “But the needle’s not pointing north. Maybe it’s malfunctioning.”
It didn’t want me to tell him, thought Maya. And felt trapped all over again, just putt-putt-putting her way down the clockwork path.
James, however, was beaming around at them all, happy his present was turning out to be so very interesting.
“There’s writing on it, too,” he said. “On the outside and the inside. It’s hard to read. Maybe it’s in code.”
Maya was already holding the nonbutton up to the light to see what the words were, scratched into the inside of the metal cover: forêt de Bière.
The name of a forest. That didn’t make any of this any clearer.
“Well, thank you, James,” she said. “That’s really sweet of you, to give me a present.”
Inside Maya, it felt like a thin vein of ice had formed in her gut, though. She had wanted to be free!
Maya’s mother broke the spell by giving Maya a kiss and slipping her a little box of her own.
“Something very old, darling girl,” she said. “My mother gave this to me, when I was thirteen, and she had it from an aunt or great-aunt, who had no daughters of her own.”
A bracelet, quite simple and lovely, with one milky stone set in it.
“That’s an opal—can you see the colors hiding in it?” said Maya’s mother. “Our family stone, said my mother. More than one thing at once, you see: water, stone, and light, all mixed up together. Like a rainbow in the fog. Wear it, and be happy.”
She fastened it on Maya’s wrist, where the stone winked in the light, shy and mysterious. They watched it glimmer for a moment, Maya and her mother.
“Oh! And ‘it comes with a choice’—that’s what she said when she gave it to me.” And Maya’s mother gave a surprised little laugh. “Isn’t that funny? I’d forgotten that completely. It was so many years ago, you know.”
“Choice?” said Maya. “What choice?”
A light flickered for a moment deep in Maya’s mother’s eyes—an old fire made of more than one thing at once, and seen from far away. The hint of a light, and then it faded again.
“No, I can’t remember,” she said. “Memories can be pretty shy creatures, can’t they? Just the merest glimpse, and then they’re gone.”
On the other side of the room, Cousin Louise was talking very earnestly to Pauline Vian. And Maya’s father was just now coming in with the cake:
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you . . . !”
They sang it in English, they sang it in French; one of them even sang
bits of it in Bulgarian. And then they ate slices of Maya’s father’s excellent chocolate cake, while the various grown-ups made conversation with each other.
Meanwhile the astonishing Pauline Vian gave Maya long, appraising looks over her slice of cake.
“The adults, they want us to be friends,” she said finally, in her blunt stare of a voice. “Papi is full of great enthusiasm about it.”
“He is?” said Maya, figuring out only at the very last second that “Papi” must mean that well-dressed grandfather of hers.
“It’s all arrangé,” said Pauline with a shrug. “Because you do not have friends speaking French with you—”
“You apparently forget Maya’s charming, loyal friend Valko,” said Valko, leaning around Maya from the other side. He did not seem flustered by the astonishing Pauline at all, but that must be because he had gotten more or less used to her during all those advanced math and science classes they had together.
“But no,” said Pauline. “I am not forgetting you, Valko, but you speak English to Maya all the time, and so her French cannot improve, can it? Whereas I will not speak English to her at all, because for one thing, I know only ‘one, two, sree’ in English.”
“You’ll have to know more than that by the end of the year,” said Valko. English was part of the big final exam.
“Exactement,” said Pauline. “For preparing for the exams, Maya’s mother will teach me English; and in exchange I make Maya speak French. That is Papi’s plan.”
She set down her fork.
“But my plan is different!” she said, and for the first time a glint of something less frowny came into her eyes. “It is about the violin!”
For some reason—perhaps the remarkable shininess with which that one word, violin, stood out from everything else Pauline had said since entering the Davidsons’ apartment—everyone in that whole room fell silent all at once and looked at her.
“Do you play the violin, dear?” said Maya’s mother kindly.
“Yes, madame!” said Pauline Vian. She stood up when she said it, too, as if the very thought of the violin was something too elevating to discuss while seated at a table. “I play the violin! It is my true passion. And I know—I’ve heard—your cousin told me earlier—that you are an excellent violinist and could help me with my practice. Oh, madame, I hope you will.”
Maya’s mother’s pale face looked quite taken aback.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “It has been such a long time, Pauline. I’m afraid I hardly have the strength for it, these days. You must have a real teacher, don’t you?”
“I’ve done a great deal of research online,” said Pauline, her chin somewhat higher in the air. “I have read a number of books.”
“She is so busy, with her math and her science and her history,” said Pauline’s grandfather. For the first time, he looked distinctly uncomfortable. “And you know, madame, how children have these ideas, these passing enthusiasms.”
“Papi is unhappy because I will be a violinist, and not a physicist,” said Pauline. “Or even a historian. The talents of four continents, wasted. That’s what he always says.”
There was a slightly too loud whispering from the corner, while James asked his mother whether continents really have talents.
“No, they do not,” said Pauline, not pretending not to have overheard. She gave James a long, serious stare. “Papi means my various grandparents come from many different places in the world, and that that must be better than having grandparents who come from one single place in the world, but of course that is not necessarily true. Perhaps I myself will marry a penguin from Antarctica and have little chick-children with five continents in their background, but that will not make them better or worse than anyone else.”
Even when telling a joke (surely this was a joke?), Pauline did not crack a smile. Maya could not help being rather impressed.
But Pauline’s grandfather looked, if that was possible, even more uncomfortable than he had looked ten seconds before.
“They might be really good swimmers,” said James, filled with sudden enthusiasm for penguin/human offspring. “But they wouldn’t be able to fly. What’s in that black suitcase thing?”
Maya’s mother followed James’s pointing finger, and her face lit up.
“You brought your violin, Pauline. How thoughtful of you.”
“So play us something, please!” said Maya’s father in his cheerful, funny-sounding French. “A party like this should have lots of music!”
Pauline apparently did not require a lot of encouragement when it came to performing on the violin. She was already across the room, taking the instrument out of its case and tightening the bow, while her grandfather took a few tight-lipped sips from his wineglass.
“There is something I have just started,” said Pauline, as she stood back up and tested the tuning of the strings. “It is not very like birthday music, I’m afraid. It is the beginning of a piece by the great French composer Saint-Saëns. His macabre dance.”
“The Danse macabre,” whispered Maya’s mother. She seemed to recognize the title.
“What’s a makabber?” asked James.
“Shh,” said Maya. “It means something good for Halloween.”
Then they really could not say anything at all, because Pauline had stopped messing with the violin pegs and was bringing her bow crashing down on the strings.
Makabber indeed! This had to be the most makabber thing Maya had ever heard.
She knew something was wrong even before the first notes came screeching out into the air. She had watched her mother play violin for many years, and she knew that your hand wasn’t supposed to look stiff like that and that the violin shouldn’t come shooting out from under your chin at that awkward angle. And then the sounds that Pauline’s poor violin was producing! Her amazing face got all scrunched up with concentration, and the noises emerging from that violin were as scrunched up as her face. For the first two or three seconds, Maya felt the horrible sensation of laughter bubbling in her chest, but then she looked again at the girl’s concentrated, passionate face, and that danger passed. You simply could not laugh at Pauline Vian.
But then Maya noticed something else: as the violin wailed and wobbled, the shadows were deepening in the corners of the room. She checked by looking away and looking back again, and it was really truly happening. Darkness was seeping out of the walls and puddling at the edges of the room. There was something dreadful about it, too, as if a tide were rising, a tide of bleakness, and they might just all drown in it eventually. A moment ago she had been about to laugh, and now fear was rising up in her instead. She looked around quickly, trying to judge from everyone else’s faces whether she was alone in losing her mind, but they all seemed to be feeling exactly what might be expected, under the circumstances: Pauline’s grandfather looking uncomfortable and discontented, Maya’s father politely amused, Cousin Louise sharp-eyed and inscrutable. Only Maya’s mother put a thin hand to her mouth and widened her eyes in what might be alarm or distress or something even worse than that.
That was enough to make Maya jump to her feet (not that she had much of a plan, just that awful, quick-rising alarm, and wanting to make the darkness back away).
But it was at that very moment that the dreadful makabber music broke off in the middle of a jangling run.
“I don’t yet know it all,” said Pauline into the flabbergasted silence that followed. “I just started.”
The silence might have snowballed unpleasantly, if it hadn’t been for James.
“Wow!” he said, plainly impressed. “That was SUPER Halloweeny!”
“Well, it does represent the Dance of the Dead,” said Pauline. “Death comes and plays his wild song, and leads them all dancing away.”
Maya shivered and stole another glance at her mother, from whose face the terrible sick-looking green was only just beginning to fade. The shadows had evaporated or soaked their way back into the walls or whatever shadows do when they
fade, but Maya felt like someone who had swallowed an ice cube’s worth of worry, whole.
“Physics!” said Pauline’s grandfather sadly into his glass. “She is so brilliant with equations. And her textual analysis—so profound.”
“Papi!” said Pauline, frowning again. “I started not so long ago, playing the violin. I can’t be any good, not yet. How could I possibly yet be any good?”
All the grown-ups relaxed right away. At least she knew she was awful—that was what Maya could see them thinking. Adults (the reasonably nice ones anyway) do hate having to say discouraging things to visiting children. It looked like in this case they might not have to.
“It takes ten thousand hours to be really, really good,” insisted Pauline. “They have done studies. Ten thousand hours to become an expert, a genius, a virtuoso. It cannot be done overnight.”
Maya’s mother gave Maya’s father the tiniest little nod, and as he began collecting plates in a cheerful, noisy way, the party’s attention flowed a little away from Pauline Vian and her violin. A few minutes later the enthusiastic, slightly plaintive voice of James rose up over the general hubbub:
“What I want to go see is a CASTLE!”
He was at the dining-room table, with Cousin Louise and Valko, all confabulating busily about something or other.
“Thoroughly possible,” Cousin Louise was assuring him. “Why not? Your father will find the map for us now—”
“Found!” said Maya’s father, coming in through the doorway with an armful of maps and guidebooks.
“An instructive outing,” Cousin Louise explained, having caught Maya’s eye. “With that nice young Pauline, whose French is so correcte. I have arranged it all with her grandfather.”
A map was being spread across the table.
“So how does a compass even work?” James asked, leaning over the map. There was a little metallic jangle as Maya’s button (or compass) slipped loose from his hands and hit the table. “Oops.”
“Wait, pick that thing up a moment,” said Valko. “I’ll fix the map so north is more or less north. Okay, there. Now we’ll see what it’s up to.”