Theft

by N. S. Köenings

  You know I’m always up at five to make the bread. For those first three days I made cramique, with raisins and lump sugar, which I save for special times, and I’d set the table fresh with cloths we got in Egypt. Damascene, they call it. And arrange the fruit jars in the center of the table: gooseberry, blackberry, and, my favorite, a clever marmalade I do with winter oranges from Spain. Then I’d pull the heavy curtains up so I could feel the light change. I love this place the best at dawn, when the sky gets keen with that strange blue that comes between the sunset and the night. I had an aunt who used to say that blue meant it was l’heure des loups, when wolves can see but people can’t. Though my eyes are pretty sharp, I tell you.

  I’d put coffee on the stove and sit down by the window in the dining room to wait. I myself like mon petit café at ten o’clock, with a novel on the patio, but coffee in the morning is a habit Gustave picked up in his travels, before he married me. And Petra liked her coffee, too, I found out on the first day. At first she got up early. And she did dress for breakfast, not like Americans we see in films who wear their bed clothes to the table. But she drank more coffee than Gustave ever does, three cups one after the other, like grenadine in August. From then on, I made sure there was enough for Gustave, too, when he came down at eight.

  After breakfast Petra would go off by herself. She didn’t think to ask me if I’d like to sit with her, or if I had a book that she could read. I suppose she didn’t show much interest in us. But it seemed all right at first. She’s just a child, I’d think, and she was raised abroad.

  We’d have a lunch at noon, and then a nap for Petra and Gustave while I sorted out the dishes and planned the next day’s meals. Chicons and veal on the first day, then quiche Lorraine, with mushrooms from the woods, which we still had for dinner on the third because I made enough to last. Reibekuchen with salami for our dinner on the second (because there was no need, I thought, for Petra to imagine we were fancy all the time), and on the third for lunch a filet de sole with asparagus besides, and for dessert a crème brûlée.

  Just the day before, the nuns had called from Liège to say that everything was set for the poor girl and they would put her on the train at seven in the morning. We could expect her here by lunchtime if she caught the omnibus, and earlier if the train was an express. But we ate the sole and les asperges, the three of us, alone. Gustave very wisely said, “She’ll get here when she gets here,” and there was nothing to be done. Petra said that now, yes, she would like to see those butterflies if Gustave was going to be free. He raised his eyebrows very high, as though he couldn’t see her well, and shut his mouth quite tightly, as though thinking. Then he held his elbow out so she would have something to hold, and they went up the stairs with Petra asking if he’d strolled the mountains with a net and caught them all himself. “No,” he said, with quite a throaty voice, I thought. “My beauties come to me.” She laughed. I stayed right there at the table with my crème brûlée. I do like a dessert.

  Later I went out to the patio and sat down with my novel. A story by Françoise Sagan, it was, in which a young Parisian girl fools her student-suitor with his worldly sailor uncle. It’s silly, but I even wondered, not seriously, you know, if Petra had a boy at home and now was upstairs eyeing Gustave and the butterflies as this girl in my book was doing with the uncle while the wife stitched napkins in the garden. It was a lovely afternoon with lemon-colored sunlight—cool enough to wear a wrap, and the geraniums in their pots were brilliant, shivering now and then, just giving up new flowers. I wondered where Thérèse was.

  As it turned out, it was Petra who came across her on her walk, which she took after Gustave had shown her all his frames. She went inside without my seeing her and called me from the dining room, through the open window. Once the three of us were in the house and I was settling my mind around the look of the new girl, Petra told me how it was. She’d gone into the woods, she said, and she was heading for the abbey when she saw a stranger on the path, struggling with a suitcase. “I asked where she was going, and, imagine, she was coming here!” Petra looked—although I didn’t like to think it—like a dog that’s found an old shoe in the grass, very happy, and her color was quite high. Strands of her thick hair were loose and springing like fresh parsley. That French was really flowing in her veins again, and hotly too, to look at her.

  “N’est-ce pas merveilleux? At first I thought she must be wrong.” I don’t know what is marvelous in meeting with a plump girl who is sweating through the woods and finding out that she is going where you’ve come from when you know that she’s expected, but I will give Petra credit for at least being surprised that we would knowingly invite a girl like that to stay in our fine home, despite how it all ended. I’ll just tell you now that Thérèse was not at all as I’d imagined.

  What did I expect, you ask? Someone thinner, first of all. Worn by care, and shy, not well fed, but pure. Before she came I could already see myself scooping squares of butter from the loaf and slipping them into her soup while she looked the other way. Someone pale, whom I could fatten up. I’d thought she might be gaunt. The sisters wrote, back when I arranged the thing, that by the time she came to us she would have had the child and a good home be found for it already. They were particularly pleased about our place, the head sister had written, because “it will soothe Thérèse to recover in the country.” The letter had made much about the fact that just beyond our woods there is an abbey. “She will be close to God,” they said. Oh, it’s silly, perhaps. We ourselves don’t go to church, because Gustave won’t allow it. But I expected someone just a little saintly, someone who’d been wronged. Someone I could look over and think, as Gustave does when he contemplates his potsherds and the dullest of the moths, Her kind will inherit the earth.

  But there was not a saintly thing about her. Just as Petra did not look like her mother, Thérèse was nothing like I’d thought. She was like an abbot, not a saint, the kind of abbot in a Brueghel painting you can almost hear. A loud one, yelling about pigs, and belching in between. There was something oily, too, an unctuous glow about her nose and lips, a thickness to her. Her hair was dark and just as greasy, rather thin, and falling on her face so she was always peering through a fringe. Her eyes were very narrow, and blue like morning glories, which I do admit surprised me. She had heavy forearms and thick hands, with two rings on her big fingers, plastic, the kind with a false jewel glued on you find in bubbles at the newsstand.

  Welcome to Spa, Thérèse, I said, anyhow. Her dress was the color of blood oranges, very raw and sunny. It was far too small for her. She was quite a fat girl, really, soft and loosened in the middle, and it was clear she didn’t know at all how to make herself look smaller. Her waist was done up very tightly with a yellow plastic belt that was meant to match her dress. I thought, She looks like an actress in the vaudeville. But I remembered she had had a baby, and maybe that’s why she was fat, and perhaps that dress would fit her in another month or so. That’s right, I told myself she was too poor to buy herself loose clothes. I even felt that when she knew me better I could reach out to her forehead with my hand and rearrange her hair, tuck it back behind her ears so I could see her better.

  But then she spoke—with what a voice, I tell you, low and even like a man’s. “Madame,” she said. Nothing shy about her blue ones, sharp, they were, like mine. Petra was in the kitchen making tea, which she had never done before. Well, I sat down with Thérèse at the table and asked about her trip. We expected you at noon, I said. Honestly I didn’t mean to chide her, but she did take it that way.

  “Forgive me, I had things to do,” she said. She began to pluck the brambles from the sleeves of her bright dress. I watched her press them to the table in a line, and I thought that even with her crumpled socks Petra looked more saintly. This girl wore high heels—dancer shoes that matched the belt, with ankle straps that bit into her feet. I thought, No wonder she was sweating in the woods.

  Conversationally, I asked, “What things?” So
she could see I’d be her friend, I scooted closer to her, leaning forward in my chair. I smiled, I did. “Things.” She put her elbows on the table and started pulling at her cuffs. She crossed her legs and swung one heeled foot back and forth at me. What she said next to me with that low voice I still can’t quite believe. “Private things, if you have to know.” The look she gave me would have got a rise out of a man. I know I sat up tall. With those narrow eyes still on me, she scooped the brambles up into a pile, then brushed them all at once to scatter on the floor. Then she propped her chin up with her fist and gave me a thick smile. I knew then that she had tricked the sisters, and tricked me. She hadn’t come here to recover, and she hadn’t come to be near God. I didn’t like to think what private things she meant, but I had some good ideas.

  Petra came in with a tall pot of verveine and three good coffee cups, looking quite excited. I was too unsettled at the time to tell her that’s not how it’s done—there’s a cupboard full of lovely china meant for tea in the next room. Thérèse dropped five cubes of sugar in her cup and stirred her tea quite noisily, I thought. Petra sat across from me and beamed. Petra was behaving as though this girl were a queen—doing all she could to please her, at least that’s how it looked to me, right at the beginning. It wasn’t really a warm day, but I felt peculiar, let me say.

  Thérèse said in her deep voice, “The pony’s nice, though. Who would take the time to make a pony out of bushes?” They had passed the topiary, of course, on their way up to the house. I was about to answer her, thinking, at least she’s found something considerate to say, but I could see that she was saying it to Petra. Petra nodded smoothly—as though she’d lived with us for years—and said proudly, “That’s Gustave who did it.” She gave me that smile of hers and poured me out some tea. I was going to say something about the china. But I couldn’t. You understand me, don’t you? It would have been silly then to talk about the cups.

  Here’s what it was like in our house after the bawdy girl arrived: loud, dangerous, and strange. Gustave liked her! While I was telling myself all the time to feel good things about Petra, who couldn’t help where she’d been raised or looking so much like her father, Gustave, when he paid attention, behaved as though Thérèse was a something-polyxena. It must have come from that digging in the earth he does, which I’ve always thought unhealthful. “For buried treasures, ma jolie Celestine,” he’s often said to me, “you must put your hands in muck.” Well, that may be fine for broken pots, that muck. But it’s another thing for girls.

  Her lipstick! I would say to him. She came down to meals with her mouth the kind of red that looks like accidents there is no pleasure in recalling, red like a balloon. Her paint would mark my things: the forks she used, my crystal glasses, the napkins that we bought in Egypt. And no matter what we’re meant to think of napkins, that they’re for making stains on you’d rather not see on your clothes, I know whoever thinks so hasn’t washed white Damascene by hand. Once I asked her, not to make a fuss but I was curious, Do the sisters allow you girls to put on makeup out at the Maison? My voice was very cool, as though it weren’t important. “Am I at the sisters’ now, madame?” She looked right back at me and took such a bite of mashed potatoes I heard her teeth scrape on the spoon.

  All Gustave could say, weakly, absentminded, as though I were asking about curtains, was “She’s pretty, Celestine.” He’d look up from the clay bits he had set out on his desk and put his cold hand on mine. “We’ve had nothing bright in this house for so long!” I thought then that I do have three different shades of pink I do put on my lips if I am going into town. But when Thérèse put her shiny mouth on everything, it hit me that maybe Gustave’s never noticed. Not for a long time. She’s rude, I’d say. “No, no,” he’d say, as though he’d spent any time with her to judge. “She’s spirited, that’s all. C’est la joie de vivre.” Joy, is it? I would think.

  At dinner that first night the girl asked me straight out how much I’d bought my blouse for—the ruffled silk one I had made in Liège, you’ve seen it, light blue with long sleeves and those sweet golden clasps. Then she said, Why spend more than two, three hundred francs on something you were just going to take off. The way she looked at Petra then, it made me wonder what she thought one did exactly after taking off a blouse. And Petra! Petra’s sunken little cheeks looked so flushed to me just then, I nearly asked if my goddaughter, too, was taking up the face paint.

  Next Thérèse turned to Gustave and asked how much he thought our old house could be worth. “Expensive keeping this house up,” she ventured, talking with her mouth full. “You could make a great hotel here, really quelque chose, and bring some German tourists.” Germans! Thankfully, Gustave didn’t hear her right. He just looked at her over his glass of vin de table and let out a little “hmm.” He looked at her so much you’d think he’d never seen a girl.

  At breakfast she dropped jam across the tablecloth because she’d talk and shake her knife before the berries could get safely from the pot onto her toast. When she saw the coffee cups, she said, “Oh, moi j’bois du chocolat.” I brought her cocoa in a cup and, looking through her oily hair, she said, “Celeste, you don’t have any bowls?” It made me shiver, that, to hear her use my name.

  To top it off, she sang. I’d hear her from downstairs sometimes, bellowing up there. Not nice songs, either. Not “Les Cloches de la Vallée” or something like “La Vie en Rose,” that I could sing along to, but ditties she must have learned from sailors, or the father of that child the sisters said she’d had and given up. And there’d be Petra laughing up there, too. My goddaughter, chortling, learning the refrains. That was the very worst of it, I think, that she had Petra eating from her hand.

  The last time I’d seen Petra she was no bigger than a bread loaf and she was swaddled up in white. It was me who held her while the priest splashed water on that powdered baby head. I’ll witness this new child come waking to the world, I said to Hermann and Sylvie. I’ll care for her if anything should happen. I shudder now to think it. Long life to Hermann and to Sylvie, I say each time I pour out a cassis, if I catch myself in time: À la bonne votre, I say. L’chaim! Is that not what the Jews say? Though I did try to be nice to her, I did. I offered to go with her to the topiary several times. She’d only glimpsed the pony after all, at least that’s what I thought, and it does take some time to see how fine, how delicate, those beasts are. I myself like on hot days to take shade under the camel. We could walk among the beasts, I said. But each time I asked Petra, she said, “Not yet, not yet,” measuring her answer like salt into a spoon. “I want to wait until I can’t bear not to go.” Whatever that could mean. I was hurt, that’s the truth. But I kept trying with her.

  I never let her do the dishes, and I insisted that she leave the tablecloth for me. I like to brush the crumbs together first, then shake the cloth outside—for birds, you see—and Petra wouldn’t have, I know, thought of such a thing. But I did everything I could. I made sure that she had coffee, food enough to eat. I filled the cold box with roast beef for her and two kinds of Edam. I did more than my part, and it’s a shame that Petra couldn’t see it.

  I barely saw them after breakfast. They would disappear upstairs, and I’d hear nothing from them until noon. Sometimes I’d see them walking through the kitchen, coming from outside, when I didn’t know they’d gone. No, I’d spend whole mornings in the house, thinking they were in the library, finding things to read, or napping, only to discover they’d been playing in the woods. How did they get out? Unsettling, it was. Sometimes it made me wonder if I knew where I myself had been.

  Well, I was feeling strange already, but it’s the topiary did it, that first Friday morning. That’s when I knew for certain the whole thing was a mistake. I had come in from the patio and picked up Gustave’s demitasse and saucer from the table. The day was green, we had a dim and chalky sky, and it was definitely damp. I was standing at the sink, as I often do, looking out the window just above the taps. From the kitchen windo
w I can see a nice expanse of chamomile, which, when it’s pale outside, all looks very soft. When the wind blows it’s got quite a smell, like a steeping cup of tea. Just beyond it I can see as far as Gustave’s bushes.

  The sweetest one is certainly the pony. Gustave read up on breeds before he did it, and this little bush is now a perfect Shetland, feasting on the grass. From the kitchen I could see it, and the egret, too, although it’s smaller, and that big old bucking horse. Gustave is proud of that one, which took seven years to build. And, like the Shetland, it’s a special breed. A Lipizzaner, if you want to know, with flaring hoofs and hairy ankles, up on its rear legs.

  Well, at first I thought I’d seen a bird. We do get gulls out here, though we’re far out from the sea. A flash of white, it was. But then it passed again and I thought it was a flag. But could that be? I put down the cup I had been washing—a fluted one, gold-rimmed, which I used for Petra’s coffee—and took some steps outside and got out my wolf eyes.

  The white thing was no kind of bird or flag at all, but Thérèse’s very blouse afloat above her head. She was running back and forth between the Shetland and the horse, skipping now and then—just like a horse would, I dare say. Of course she didn’t have the blouse on anymore, and she was bouncing, you know what I mean. I could hear her yelling, too, or laughing.

  There’s no cover among flowers. But a standing person is much more quickly seen than one who matches the horizon. When I got a little farther down the hill, I crouched down. I did then as soldiers do. I got out of my shoes and tucked my feet under my skirt. I rolled my sleeves back and got down on my elbows. It was a hot day, remember, despite how gray it was, and I felt very damp. I could feel some nettles on my legs—that itch!—but a person will put up with pain if there’s something dreadful happening. Tell me, I thought, this time out loud—as though the flowers could have helped me—that she’s out there alone.