But I was not so lucky. Even after they were gone, the wounded remained with me. They followed me to my wardrobe. They trailed me to the basin. They watched me in the mirror.
That day, I did not leave my rooms. Never before had they seemed so confining. If before I had felt surrounded, now I was trapped, and nowhere I looked—even as I opened the shutters and gazed upon the capital and the surrounding hills of Lyonville—did I see a way out. I thought about writing to Madame, but what was there to say? Whereas in the past I had gotten through difficult periods just by thinking about her possible return, in our current situation the notion had become so absurd that it moved me to anger. I could not bear the thought of her seeing what had happened.
I sat a long time at my desk, drawing aimless circles on the page.
It was the smell that finally roused me, sometime before nightfall, a smell so common and yet—given our circumstances—so unusual: onion and garlic frying in oil.
It was the smell of dinner.
There was no one in the hall when I peeked my head out the door, and no one on the stairway as I peered over the banister and no one in the lobby when I got to the bottom. I heard nothing coming from the library or the club room. A vast emptiness lurked behind the closed ballroom door. But as I made my way down the corridor to the south wing, I began to hear a murmur coming from within the restaurant.
From the doorway I saw that every table was full, and for a moment I imagined a dark sea of tuxedoes and gowns and Madame standing beside a table in conversation while Georges swept by with a tray of silver serving dishes. I almost expected to find a maître d’ waiting to greet me.
But no one looked up when I came in. The men were hunched over their bowls, like pigs at a trough. They had not bothered with tablecloths or napkins. Everywhere I looked, cups rested in rings of water on the naked wood. They had brought in extra chairs, six men squeezing together around a table built for four. Near the verandah a man in a buttoned shirt from which the sleeves had been ripped reclined in a wing chair, a tarnished spoon balanced on one of the arms.
In the back corner, the kitchen doors shot open and a tall rolling cart emerged. At its helm limped an old woman whose green T-shirt struggled to withstand the pull of her tremendous breasts. With every one of the woman’s steps, the cart jerked forward in sudden, graceless bursts, like a car in a fit of stalling. With each jerk, the enormous pot balanced on top slid closer and closer to the edge.
At a table near the entrance, the old woman came to a stop and the man seated closest to her held up his bowl. Rising to her toes, the woman managed to dunk her arm into the pot and pull out an immense ladle, inside of which something wet and lumpy quivered. She filled his bowl with a single dripping scoop, snailing a trail of greasy blots that led back to the pot.
For each of his dinner companions she did the same.
A young man at the next table called out as she went by. “You forgot me. Come on,” he whimpered as she moved on without stopping. “Just a spoonful. Give me a bean. I’ll settle for a single bean.”
“If you want to eat like two men,” the old woman rasped, not bothering to look at him, “you should work like two men.”
Circles of laughter rose up from the neighboring tables like startled crows, and the young man got to his feet with a self-effacing sigh. He was a broad-shouldered boy of perhaps eighteen, strong and full of energy.
As he approached the doorway the young man fixed me with a sneer. “What are you looking at?”
“I thought you were someone else,” I said. Though they shared no similarities other than an approximate age, I had allowed myself for just a moment to believe he was Hector. Observing the malice afflicting his face, I realized what a mistake I had made.
Without warning, the boy’s shoulder slammed into mine. Only the wall at my back kept me from falling.
When I looked up again, the old woman with the cart was standing in front of me. I thought at first that she had come to help.
“Well,” she said, already losing patience, “what are you waiting for?”
She gestured with the still-dripping ladle toward the chair the young man had just vacated.
There were five other men at the table, and several of them looked up with curiosity as I sat down, almost as if they recognized me and were surprised to find me here. They could tell by my suit that I was not like them, and as far as I was concerned, that was all they needed to know.
“Where’s your bowl?” the woman asked, hovering gloomily above me. Globs of what I now realized was rice slid helplessly down the sides of the ladle and back into the pot, like prisoners dragged along by their chains.
I looked around at the dishes spread out in front of the other men. Dented tin and a few hollow gourds.
“My bowl?” I said, deciding I had no choice but to play along. “I must not have brought it.”
Turning away brusquely, she lowered the ladle back into the pot. It seemed I would not be eating after all. I was uncertain whether to be disappointed or relieved.
“You can use mine.”
Before I even knew who had spoken, a thin metal vessel was pressed into my hands, still warm on the outside from being held. The inside had been scraped clean.
“Go ahead.”
I looked up to thank him, meeting a dead, milky eye.
“You can use this too.” He wiped a spoon on his elbow and handed it over.
The woman looked down upon this transaction with dull disapproval. “Next time you’d better remember to bring your own.”
“I will.” I would have agreed to anything just to bring the encounter to a close.
Grudgingly she dipped the ladle back into the pot. In the bowl, the red of the beans and the white of the rice converged in a murky, gray mass.
“How are you, monsieur?” said the man to my left. The scar on his chin twitched as he chewed, as if it were doing the talking for him.
I committed to only the briefest of glances. “Well, thank you.”
A man sitting across the table greeted me with an enormous grin. He had a broad, flat face and square, yellow teeth resembling kernels of corn. “This must be a strange sight for you.”
“Pardon?”
“Not your usual clientele,” said Corn Teeth with a chuckle.
I did not care for his overly familiar tone, and I could not imagine what grounds he might have for thinking he could condescend to me. “Have we met before?”
The other men at the table glanced at each other with lowered gazes, as if surprised and embarrassed by the question. Corn Teeth leaned back in his chair. “I don’t believe we’ve ever spoken, but—”
“I didn’t think so,” I said curtly.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt your meal,” he said with exaggerated deference, sharing an outraged look with one of his neighbors. With a grating shriek, he pushed out his chair. Everyone else but the dead-eyed man who had lent me his bowl did the same.
As they cursed toward the exit, flinging glances at me over their shoulders. I considered thanking them for so kindly leaving me in peace.
“Good, isn’t it?” Dead Eye snuggled his head on the table, staring longingly at his bowl.
“Here,” I said, shoving it toward him. “You have it.”
He immediately perked up. “Really?”
“I’ve lost my appetite.”
“If you insist,” he said, wiping the spoon on his elbow.
* * *
Every night, the fighting seemed to pick up where it had left off the night before. Each morning began with the same procession of the living and the wounded. Somehow, no matter what happened, no matter how many men he lost, Dragon Guy’s army never seemed to get any smaller. If anything, it grew.
Along the paths between the outbuildings, pigs and chickens roamed. There was always something underfoot. Until now, I had not realized how many children had accompanied their parents here. The grounds began to feel less like an army encampment than like a small city. One day I disc
overed a group of children chasing each other through the yard beside the casino. There were twenty or so boys and girls, in ages ranging from about six to twelve, all of them perfectly oblivious to what was going on around them. That was their privilege, as children, but I could not conceive of how Dragon Guy could be so reckless as to assemble a playground in the middle of a battlefield.
I felt drawn to the children, although I could not say why. Perhaps it was simply that I sensed they were the only ones here, other than me, who had no particular place in Dragon Guy’s plans. Their caretaker was a young woman with a round, soft face and a delicately pointed chin perched below her mouth like a tiny ebony knob on a jewelry box—features not so much pretty as they were doll-like. Unlike most of the other women here, she looked remarkably unravaged. But the thing that most distinctly set her apart from the others was that she was without question the only person here, besides me, for whom a book was something other than fuel for a fire.
The first day I came upon them, the young woman was sitting on the casino steps, a small hardbound volume balanced upon her tightly clenched knees. Whenever she turned a page, she paused to glance up at the children. It seemed to me to be with genuine fondness that she raised her eyes—and her plump arm to deflect the light—to make sure that all was still well. I was curious to know what the book was, but from where I was standing—among the trees along the path—there was no way I could read the spine.
A long time passed before I heard her speak. “Come, children, come,” she said, kind but firm as she stood up and brushed at the back of her dress. It was blue with a faded pattern of irises across the waistline. “It’s time to resume your lessons.”
She stood aside on the steps until the last one had gone inside. Then she closed her book, as if she were folding a delicate handkerchief, and went in after them.
Standing out of sight in the entryway, I listened to her lead them, letter by letter, through the alphabet. It was the only thing they accomplished that afternoon, but in the end each of them could recite it without making a single mistake. This was the most heartening thing I had seen in a long time. And yet how could it not also be bitter, reminding me of those lost afternoons in my office with Hector, watching him study the pages of his book and shape his mouth into words?
I decided this was to be my comfort, that there was at least one responsible person among Dragon Guy’s ranks, one person committed to something good in the midst of all of this destruction. And, perhaps, one person who might be willing to help me make them leave.
* * *
Following Dragon Guy’s occupation of the manor house, nothing changed for Mona. She remained locked in her kitchen. The dust on the paving stones outside the door showed where numerous sets of feet had stood, trying and failing to gain entrance.
“It’s me,” I said one afternoon as I knocked softly, not wanting anyone passing by to overhear. “Open up.”
“Mona.” I knocked more loudly. “It’s just me.”
I could hear not even the slightest movement inside.
“Go ahead,” I said, “ask me whatever you wish.” When still there came no response, I began listing the names of the villas. Usually she cut me off midway through, but this time I had to struggle to get all forty-four.
“That’s all of them, Mona.” I knocked again. “This is enough. Let me in.” I pounded on the door with my fist. “What’s it going to take to convince you?”
“Nothing,” she whispered hoarsely through the crack. “There’s nothing you can say to make me open that door.”
That night at dinner I found an empty chair at a table with four other men. Once again I caught the not-so-subtle elbowing and whispering. It was as if a man in a suit were the most exotic creature they had ever seen.
“Good evening,” one of them said as I sat down.
I nodded without looking to see who had spoken, hoping to make it clear I had not come here for conversation.
“She works at the laundry,” one of the younger men was saying. He was thin and frail, with sunken eyes streaked with yellow. There was nothing healthy about him.
The young man beside him scratched his bicep, running his fingernails over a deformed tattoo—a bird, I thought, but the color appeared to have run, making it look like a bloated chicken. His smile was gummy and warm. “What’s her name?”
“They call her Lulu.”
The smiling young man smiled even more brightly. “Lulu the laundress.”
“I think I know her,” said a man sitting across the table. His black, scraggly beard hung crookedly from his chin, like some sort of moss from a tree. “She’s small and light skinned.”
“No,” said the skinny young man. “She’s dark and almost as tall as me.”
The smiling young man clapped his skinny friend on the back, laughing joyously. “Ah, she sounds like a beauty—a beauty!”
The skinny young man looked around the table self-consciously, as if afraid he were being mocked. “She is.”
“Yes,” said Moss Beard. “Too beautiful for you. What a girl like that needs is a mature man—one that knows how to take care of her.”
The skinny boy puffed up his chest to little apparent effect. “I’ve been with plenty of girls.”
“Of course you have,” said the fourth man at the table. He gave the young man a grotesque, squishy wink. As that half of his face folded in on itself, I noticed he was missing most of his left ear.
The smiling young man put his hand on his friend’s shoulder and squeezed it enthusiastically. “Have you talked to her?”
“Yes.”
“What did you say?”
The three men watched expectantly as the skinny young man pushed the spoon idly around his bowl, as if he were setting the hands of a clock.
“Well?” the smiling young man said, nodding encouragement.
The skinny young man sighed. “She was carrying a basket of clothes—”
“And?” Moss Beard and One Ear shouted simultaneously.
“—and she dropped a shirt, and I brought it to her.” The young man paused to look at his friend, who nodded for him to continue.
“What did you say?”
“I said, ‘You dropped this.’ ”
Moss Beard leaned forward, combing his fingers through his gray whiskers. “And what did she say?”
“She said—” The skinny young man paused to look at us. “She said, ‘Thanks.’ But it was how she said it,” he added.
The two older men were already laughing. “ ‘Thanks,’ ” One Ear lisped, lewdly licking his lips.
At last the old lady with the cart limped to the table, mercifully halting the crudeness before it could degenerate any further.
“Where’s your bowl?”
I turned around, and she saw my face.
“You again!”
“I must have lost it,” I said, daring to hope for another act of mercy.
“What do you mean, you ‘must have lost it’?” The ladle fell back into the pot with a suck and a gurgle. “You don’t even know? Is eating that small a matter to you? If you lost your pants, would you go wandering around naked until someone pointed it out to you? Or is it your plan to show up here every meal expecting someone else to take care of you? You’ve got too much to do to keep track of your own bowl, but you expect everyone else to be looking out for you?”
“There are extras in the kitchen,” I said. “There are hundreds of bowls and plates—”
“That’s how it is with you?” She folded her arms across her chest. “No reason for you to worry—there’s always an extra lying around.”
I began to get up. “I could show you where they are.”
“Oh, no you don’t.” She dragged the ladle out of the pot, threatening to thump me on the chest. I tilted back down into the chair.
“Myriam!” she shouted. “Myriam!”
Almost instantly the doors to the kitchen in the far corner of the room sprang open and an immense figure appeared there, glancin
g around the dining room with pronounced displeasure. Over her significant torso Myriam wore one of Jean’s old aprons, streaked with stains of every conceivable color. Never had Jean appeared in the dining room wearing one, and not even in the kitchen would he have worn anything so filthy. Myriam looked as though she had come fresh from a slaughter.
The cart woman waved her ladle, finally catching Myriam’s eye. “Our prince here has lost his bowl, and he wants us to give him a new one.”
Without a word—or even a discernible expression—Myriam pushed her way back into the kitchen, and before the doors had stilled she had returned. In her enormous hand, pinched between her meaty thumb and index finger, she held a bone-white china bowl twined with an inlay of gold leaf. It was a lovely pattern, selected by Madame herself, but it had not been designed to be tossed around like a tin cup, and I was not convinced it was going to survive the trip across the room.
Myriam wove around the tables and errant chairs. She did not slow as she reached the table, and I gasped as I saw the bowl leave her hand. When I opened my eyes, it was there in front of me on the table, rocking in a circle like a spun penny. After another half turn it finally came to a rest.
“Here you go, sweetheart.”
I let my breath go.
The cart lady dealt me my slop and limped away.
“At the rate you’re going,” Moss Beard said, turning from me to the skinny young man, “the only way you’ll get into her drawers is if you trip on them in the street.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Each afternoon, the older children gathered at the tennis courts, two dozen teenage boys in undersize T-shirts wearing the solemn faces of old men. On any given day there were three or four instructors, young men themselves, who all grew beards to make themselves look older. They fashioned lumpy enemy soldiers out of tablecloths and old clothes stuffed with grass. It was difficult to see how the clothes cast aside for this purpose were any worse than what most of these men wore themselves. The boys learned to beat the dummies with sticks and fists. But whenever the instructors’ attention was elsewhere the boys turned to pushing and hitting each other, an exercise they appeared to enjoy a great deal more. Somehow the instructors never seemed to notice.
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