The Balcony

by Jane Delury

  “The snow is a sign,” he’d said to Charles as they walked into the schoolroom. “Today we go out.”

  By late morning, the men out felling trees in the forest had given up and returned to the mill, and the logs on the Seine barely moved through the scabs of ice. In the yard, the men slipped as they yanked on the leads of the plow horses, and inside, the sawdust on the floor had become a layer of mud. Émile looked down from the observation deck, waiting for a log to whir through the saw. For the past hour, from his office window, he’d watched the snow start up again, though lightly. Now he rang the closing bell.

  “Go home to your families,” he called down to the men. “I’ve seen children crossing the bridge. The master must have let them out early.”

  The men looked up at him, surprised. A few years before, when one of them had caught his sleeve in the saw, Émile ran down the stairs and, having sent for the doctor, hid the man’s severed hand in his coat pocket. For a while after, the men had lost some of their reserve with Émile, but now, again, they stood back as he passed by and murmured their thanks into their collars.

  Outside, he clenched his ankles to root his steps to the sidewalk. Snowflakes peppered the air, caught in his beard. A cluster of women, cocooned in shawls, were talking on a corner.

  “It must be half a meter,” one of them said, and then, “Bonjour, bonjour, Monsieur Vouette,” as Émile walked by.

  He tipped his hat, moving faster, off the sidewalk and into the road and the paths left by carriage wheels. The stone façades of the village glowed in the fresh light. Icicles dangled from the roof of the train station. Ice cataracted the ditches that bordered the road. When Émile was a boy, frozen puddles had meant that the river would freeze soon, and that he and his sisters could put on their skates. First, though, they had to wait on the shore for their father to measure the depth of the ice with his chisel, point out the shadowy patches to avoid, and remind them what to do if they heard cracking: Don’t panic. Keep skating, and the ice won’t know your true weight.

  Geneviève had the C-major scale now, or rather her hands did. The trick had been to look away from the notes. The movement of snow out the window had distracted her eyes from the page, releasing her fingers, which moved faster, left hand joining her right, spiders creeping at first, now more like sparrows flying. The window sashes fused with the glass. Beyond, the trees fused with the sky. The snowflakes turned and fell and twisted. Her fingers lifted, rested, pressed, and paused. The notes poured into the room, drowning the glossy furniture and rich carpets with a better beauty. Her hands had their own brain, their own memory. They had nothing to do with her. And they knew exactly what they were doing.

  In the old servants’ cottage, Charles waited as François disappeared into the fireplace, a crude hole cut into the stone wall. The first time François had done this, two weeks before, he’d wanted to see if he could get to the roof. Now, as then, his boots reappeared and he ducked back into the room with the Chassepot rifle, the weapon, Charles had learned from his encyclopedia, that had been issued to soldiers during the Franco-Prussian War. He and François had decided that it must have belonged to a servant of Monsieur Léger who had deserted that distant front.

  They walked out the back door of the cottage, past a room filled with coal. The muzzle of the rifle poked from under François’s coat. Over the past week, they’d cleaned the rust from the chamber and improvised a papier-mâché sabot from their father’s newspaper and the maid’s ironing starch. François got a lead bullet and a bag of gunpowder from one of his friends, who, unlike him, spent their weekends hunting in the forest. When they were smaller, their father said he didn’t believe in hunting, that he found it prehistoric. Wild animals aren’t healthy, he’d say. Better to eat the chickens and pigs that the cook bought at market. When François turned ten and asked for a rifle to shoot pinecones, their father said that he didn’t believe in boys carrying guns. “Il invente des raisons,” François told Charles. He’s making up reasons. “He must be a pacifist,” Charles said, and then he’d explained the term.

  Sometimes, when he fell asleep, Émile remembered the childhood in Paris that he’d invented for himself as if it were real. He saw the sickly mother in the small bed in the dingy corner in place of his own mother, who had been quick and loud. He smelled sewers rather than pine, heard the accent of the Alsatian grandmother who gave him his slight accent. The sisters he saw best because they had the same round cheeks and blond hair as his own sisters, but they played on streets rather than in the forest. His father still drank Schnapps; in sidewalk cafés, not in his armchair by the fire.

  The first time that he and Geneviève had walked together to the pond—the mill foreman and the mill owner’s daughter—she went first with her story. She told him about the heaviness of her father’s grief. “He has never reproached me,” she said. “Still, how could he not? I took away the person he most loved.” Her hand was tucked in Émile’s elbow, and he felt his heart pulse as they stood by the water. She told him about a memory she had of her mother smiling down at her through masses of curly hair. “It makes no sense,” she said. “She died only hours after I was born. I know it sounds silly. But you understand, don’t you? My father told me you lost both of your parents.”

  It was in that moment that Émile had been a true coward. He shouldn’t have nodded sadly. He shouldn’t have pretended to share her grief. He should have told her the truth about himself. He should have trusted her, as she trusted him. If he had, maybe right now he wouldn’t be looking at the side of her face, but into her eyes again. He’d come back into the dining room from washing his hands to find her alone at the long table, the coffeepot steaming, the boys gone.

  “I told them to go enjoy the snow,” she said.

  Geneviève drank her coffee quickly, not bothering with sugar, willing Émile to do the same, to go back to the mill. If she practiced her scales for another week, she might try her first song. When she’d seen the boys come down the drive, early from school, she’d been looking at the sheet music for “Alouette.” Her mother had drawn a star next to the title. Geneviève knew the tune from the boys’ old music box. As she read the notes on the staff, she could hear them start to play. On her lap, her fingers moved. Then the boys had appeared and the music stopped. She’d taken off her pince-nez, put the primer and sheet music back into the seat, opened the parlor door, called to the housekeeper, became madame again, a mother again. She met the boys at the stairs, under the chandelier. They should take off their boots and warm their feet by the fire in the parlor, she told them. The housekeeper was getting them tisanes and blankets. And for lunch, the cook was making their favorite dessert.

  Charles sat next to François on a heap of stones near the frozen pond. The bare willow tree branches were anchored in ice. The clouds had gone, taking the snow.

  “They won’t be long,” François said, watching the sky. “They come by all the time.”

  “We’ll hear them before we see them,” Charles said.

  It was wasteful what they were doing—hunting for the sake of hunting. But it would be worth it. As winter became spring, there would be more secret excursions into the forest, more bullets, more talking low from their beds at night, more of this togetherness. Rabbits and boar. A deer, maybe.

  “Ils arrivent,” François said as the honking began. He raised the rifle.

  “Poachers,” Geneviève said when Émile went to the window.

  “No,” he said. “Not this late in the season.”

  He knew that sound like the sound of his own breathing. Not the high shirr of a hunting rifle; the sharp pop of bullet meant to rip apart flesh and shatter bone.

  “Où vas-tu,” Charles said as François laid down the rifle and stepped onto the ice. In the middle of the pond, the goose had stopped thumping its wings. The honking from above had faded. The flock moved back into its V, a gap at the end. “We said we’d leave it.”

  François took another step. “We’ll give it to th
e cook. Mother will be happy not to have to plan dinner.”

  “But then Father will know we went hunting,” Charles said, and then he realized that this had been François’s plan all along. “He won’t change his mind.”

  “Yes he will. You’ll see. He’ll have to let me shoot then.”

  “You should have told me,” Charles said. “I wouldn’t have come.”

  “Rentre, alors.” François slid toward the goose.

  Charles picked up the rifle and walked toward the trees. As he reached the trail, François called out his name.

  Out the back doors of the manor, through the blank sheet of the garden, Émile walked quickly, although the bolt of terror that ripped through his stomach at the sound of the shot had calmed to worry. He followed the trail of the boys’ footprints toward the forest gate. On the battlefield, there’d been no clear way between the corpses. That other boy’s face, the mirror image of Émile’s face, had appeared out of nowhere, loose with surprise, then with fear, then gone—a charred hole where there had been eyes, nose, mouth. Émile had run for the trees, the Chassepot banging against his leg, but he didn’t let go, keeping it with him in the barn where he hid that night and then in the traveling trunk a farmer gave him, along with a set of clothes. The rifle stayed with him, at the bottom of the trunk, as he traveled farther, working on barges that brought him to the Seine, and on to a job at the mill, leaving behind the boy he had been and the soldier that boy had become until he was, these years and kilometers later, a man without a coat, stumbling through the snow, looking for his sons.

  “It’s breaking up,” François called. Charles could see the web of cracks under his brother’s feet, could feel the bite of the water. He held his breath and didn’t blink. It seemed that one movement, one flutter in the universe, might be enough to make François go under.

  The trail turned toward the pond, and Émile saw Charles, the rifle in his arms. A tube of metal and a handle of wood. A thing, like a log or a pair of skis. And ridiculous even, the way Charles balanced it between his elbows, as Émile himself had done in the woods behind his house, the first time he hunted boar with his father, before he learned how to drop in the bullet and fill the chamber with powder, before he learned how to kill.

  Charles heard his father’s voice before he saw him. “Son.” His face was full of what could only be called joy that disappeared when he broke from the forest and had a full view of the pond. “Move,” he shouted to François. “I can’t,” François called. Or did he? When he thought back on this moment, Charles would only hear one thing clearly: “I’ll come get you. But you have to come toward me. You have to keep skating.”

  As evening fell, Geneviève stood on the balcony, wrapped in a shawl, watching the men break open the pond. Under their picks and axes, the white ice collapsed into the black water. They’d uncovered enough to slip in a fishing skiff. “You will remember something else about your father,” she’d told the boys as she held them in the snowy garden. “You don’t know what yet. But something else.” After she’d put them to bed and closed their shutters, she sent the servants home. She locked the parlor door from the hallway and dropped the key down the kitchen drain. Now, she took her hands from under the shawl and held them on the cold metal until they burned.

  Charles saw the men return from the forest through the shutters he’d opened at the sound of scraping snow. They pulled a fishing skiff, and inside was his father. After he and François had looked in the hole in the ice, before they ran back to the manor, François took the rifle from Charles and dropped it into the pond. Only years later did Charles understand why François got rid of the rifle, when he was at university in Lyon and one night, as he walked along the Saône, the puzzle came together. “You knew, didn’t you,” he asked François when he next saw him, “that Papa was the deserter?” They were sitting in a café across from the Gare du Nord, waiting to ship out to the front. But François only shrugged and lit another cigarette. “Maman was right,” he said. “I don’t remember much of anything from back then. It’s like it happened to someone else.”

  Two years later, in the trenches of Verdun, Charles crawled under the barbwire, through the sulfurous mud, to one of his men, who was screaming for help. He hooked his arm around the man’s neck and dragged him back to the trench under fire from the Germans. His men spoke of this moment years later, to their wives and mistresses and sons, to fellow veterans on the Fête de l’Armistice. They described the terror in Charles’s face as he clawed his way toward the sky. They tried to explain how they felt when the wounded man dropped into the trench several eternal minutes later, followed by Charles. Many of them said that they’d survived the war because of this rescue, because of the hope it gave them, because of this proof of what some called the human spirit and others called courage. The Croix de Guerre that Charles received hung in the thin hallway of his apartment in Strasbourg, and the few people who visited thought that this quiet academic had a streak of bravado and arrogance, unaware that the medal had little to do with that night in the trenches and everything to do with an afternoon when Charles stood on the shore of a frozen pond and watched his father rush toward his brother. And although François, killed in the Second Battle of the Marne four months before the armistice, never learned about his brother’s act, Charles knew that if he had survived he would have understood.

  Tintin in the Antilles

  2006

  This,” Adèle said. She presented the coconut to Hélène like a decapitated head. They were standing in the exotic fruits section of the hypermarché, next to clusters of bananas and a pyre of mandarins. Hélène had said that her granddaughter must choose a fruit for dessert tonight, since she’d had an ice cream already. She thought Adèle would pick bananas that she could flambé with rum, or pears that she might poach and serve on a raft of crème anglaise.

  “I’ve never cooked a coconut,” she said.

  “You told me I could choose anything.”

  Though ten, Adèle had the boxy neck and drop to her chin of a middle-aged woman. Her body, dressed in black leggings and a black sweater and black leather flats, was as compact and formless as a button mushroom stump.

  “Bon, alors.” Hélène took the coconut to the weighing station. “You’ll have to hold it tight or it will roll to the floor and then I’ll have to pay for the crack in the tile.”

  As Adèle anchored the coconut on the scale, Hélène tried to find the picture on the computer screen, tapping past nectarines and turnips. A line formed behind, and she heard the restrained sighs, the shuffle of feet, the irritated patience that passed as kindness now that she was old. She touched the back arrow. The screen jumped to potatoes and yams and onions—red, green, sweet, pickling, Spanish, shallots; how could the world contain so many onions?

  “Perhaps it’s with the bananas,” she said to Adèle.

  “My arms are getting tired,” Adèle replied.

  Now she was in the lettuces. Mâche. Endive. Frisée. She pressed the arrow. This was how Jacques felt all the time. Earlier, in the cottage, before the nurse arrived, Hélène had turned her back for only a moment to pin up her hair in the armoire mirror, and he’d disappeared. She found him downstairs in the coat closet. Pajama bottoms around his ankles, he was urinating into a rubber boot. She touched the arrow again.

  “I believe they are sold by the piece, madame,” a man’s voice said from behind. “You will find nothing there.”

  “We never see these,” the cashier said when Hélène gave him the coconut. It cost seven euros.

  “A fortune.” Hélène sighed as she handed the bag to Adèle. “But the little one wants to try it.”

  Adèle’s visit, only four hours in, had soured the moment she arrived in the back seat of her father’s Citroën. First, Hélène had slipped up and, after hugging Adèle in front of the cottage, said, “Mais qu’elle est grosse!” instead of “Mais qu’elle est grande!” and Emmanuel had said to Adèle, “Don’t listen to your grandmother. Your uncle
and I never did.”

  Adèle smiled back at him, that same sharp, quick smile that sliced into her cheeks like a knife in pastry dough.

  “Have you had her thyroid checked?” Hélène asked Emmanuel as Adèle brought her bag upstairs to the guestroom. “You know what your brother says about us all having been irradiated by the Russians.”

  “It isn’t her thyroid.” Emmanuel lit a cigarette. “It’s pastries. Don’t talk to her about it. That’s how you mess girls up.”

  Hélène had said nothing and brought him an ashtray, but how could a child balloon like that in only a year? The last time Hélène and Jacques visited Emmanuel and his family in Paris, Adèle had only one chin.

  Then Emmanuel couldn’t stay for the coffee and the palmiers that Hélène had baked especially for him. He wanted to get back to the city before the noon traffic clogged the périphérique. He didn’t even go upstairs to see Jacques, even though Hélène told him that his father was in the bedroom with the nurse.

  “He doesn’t know who I am anyway,” he said.

  He kissed Hélène on the cheeks, kissed Adèle, lit another cigarette, and said he’d be back in two days.