The Balcony

by Jane Delury

  “Let’s go, Snowy,” Tintin says. “We are off on a mission.”

  They crash on an island with shaggy palms. A red-lipped, big-eyed islander named Ratatata teaches them to make a hut from palm fronds and to spear fish. Until Captain Haddock saves them, they live off the coconuts that Ratatata opens by smacking the shell against his forehead into perfect halves.

  “C’est facile, mes amis,” Ratatata says.

  Hélène closed the book and put it back in the box. Emmanuel had remembered correctly. She didn’t know what he meant about the drawings being racist, though.

  Outside, the nurse was helping Jacques along the brick path that ran past the vegetable garden that Jacques’s father had started and Jacques had extended to the forest’s shade. Several years back, he’d added a row of cherry trees for the grandchildren to pick. When the men from the village came to dig near the well, they found, buried in the dirt, an assortment of black market goods from the war: bars of swan-shaped soap disintegrated in their wrappings, rusted tins of pâté, bottles of putrid perfume and flat champagne. After Jacques’s stroke, Hélène hired the same men to pull up the plants in the vegetable garden—she couldn’t bear to do it—to prevent Jacques from going through the gate to eat the leaves and roots. The fence now closed off a rectangle of dirt. Everything that had been charming about the cottage when Hélène used to visit her in-laws had evaporated. And the manor up the drive was being rented out as a gîte rural for American and English tourists who drove too fast and played music at night and kept knocking on the door of the cottage for directions as if this were once again the house of servants.

  Adèle sat on the grass by the well, the coconut between her legs.

  “No luck, I’m afraid,” Hélène said. “Your papa says to give you a kiss. Have you come up with anything?”

  Adèle shook her head. Her eyes were full and heavy. The girl could be pretty if she melted off some of that weight.

  Hélène looked over at Jacques, who was waiting for the nurse to zip up his coat.

  “We could try your grandfather,” she said. Jacques’s memory, the doctor had explained, was like Gruyère cheese. That was why, sometimes, rarely, he would blink, as if clearing fog from his eyes, and smile at her.

  She and Adèle went over to Jacques. Hélène handed him the coconut.

  “We aren’t sure how to open this, darling.”

  Jacques looked at the coconut. He drew back his arms. Hélène thought for a moment that he might hit it against his own forehead, and, as in a fairy tale, the right side of his mouth would rise. He’d say her name in the calm, easy voice that used to irritate her. Instead, he swung the coconut between his legs and tossed it at the garden gate.

  “He thinks it’s a pétanque ball, perhaps,” the nurse said.

  “He didn’t play pétanque,” Hélène said.

  She hated the nurse suddenly: her breasts, her smile, her helpfulness, her accent, the way Jacques held on to her hand. The coconut had rolled into a gatepost, under the raspberry brambles. Adèle fished it out.

  “He could have broken it,” she said, as Jacques and the nurse started down the path toward the forest.

  “He wouldn’t have meant to,” Hélène said. Jacques stumbled and the nurse lifted his arm over her shoulders.

  “Is that Grandpa’s girlfriend?” Adèle asked.

  “I don’t know,” Hélène said. “And I don’t know how we will open that coconut.”

  “We could look it up,” Adèle said.

  She had to buy Adèle a second ice cream at the glacerie, but she told her to choose a sorbet this time. They sat at the same table. Adèle typed the words with her thumbs: How do you open a coconut? Hélène moved her chair closer so she could watch too. A tiny movie played—a black man sat on a beach with a coconut. He explained that the first thing one should do was to empty the water from the coconut to make opening it easier.

  “Water,” Hélène said. “We thought it was milk.”

  “These are the eyes,” the man said. He took a screwdriver and knocked the tip into the brown circles with a hammer. Then he drained the coconut into a bowl. He tapped the equator around the coconut, and it split into two perfect halves.

  “He makes it look so easy,” Hélène said.

  Back home, she went to the closet where Jacques had urinated that morning and took a screwdriver from the toolbox on the shelf.

  “I was your grandfather’s secretary, you know,” she told Adèle when she was back at the kitchen table. “I made his appointments. That’s how we met. And we stayed together all this time. Once, we delivered a baby together on the Métro.”

  Adèle held the coconut between her knees. They took turns twisting the screwdriver into the eye of the coconut. The train had been stuck in a tunnel for a half hour already when the woman started to moan. Jacques had told the passengers at the back to please move to the front of the car. “You hold her legs,” he said to Hélène. “It will be fine,” he told the woman. “We’ve done this before. Two healthy boys. Listen to my count. Push when I tell you.” The woman’s knees shook. She cried and moaned.

  “That’s one,” Adèle said. She started on the other eye. The shell chipped under the blade. Hélène put her hands in her lap and watched.

  The truth is, Emmanuel, she would say, if that woman hadn’t cried out at the stop between Bonne Nouvelle and Saint-Ambroise, maybe your parents wouldn’t have stayed together. Maybe your mother, like Cécile, would have decided to flee, the mother you think you know so well that you don’t need to stay for her coffee and palmiers. But your father, Emmanuel, the way he stood up in that train and went to that woman. The way he knew I would follow. I saw him again for the first time that day. And that was enough.

  “Done,” Adèle said.

  “Keep it upright,” Hélène said. “Don’t let any spill out.”

  From the cupboard, she took two champagne glasses. The water sloshed down the sides of the coconut as she poured.

  “It doesn’t taste very good,” Adèle said after taking a sip.

  “No,” Hélène said. “It doesn’t.”

  Jacques and the nurse had returned from the walk. He leaned on her arm, shuffling down the hall. Hélène took another sip. She wondered if he had ever played pétanque. She wondered if he’d known the secret to opening a coconut once. She wondered, as he passed by the kitchen and saw that old woman and that plump girl, who he thought they were.

  Ants

  2009

  From the boat, Adèle watched the last passenger—an old man in a straw hat—make his way along the reef. He stopped and bent down, feet amputated by the ocean. Twice since he’d left the beach, he had slipped his hand into the water, pulled out a shell, and put it in the bag that hung from his shoulder. This one, a flash of sunlight in his palm, looked smaller than the others, the home of a tiny creature with legs like a spider or the gooey foot of a snail. He stood up and continued to wade toward the dock where the boat was moored, his face lost in the shadow of his hat. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry, although the islander, a long man with tattoos of turtles and spears on his chest, had waved to him twice and now straddled the bow, chewing betel nut and spitting the juice overboard.

  The boat, a motorized version of a pirogue canoe, shifted with the tide so that the islander looked as if he were balancing on a seesaw, and the passengers tilted into each other. On the bench across from Adèle, her father, Emmanuel, was rolling a cigarette, and her mother, Cécile, was talking to a Belgian woman who had a soft, round face fit for a boulangerie counter, and a Roquefort marbling of varicose veins on her legs. Or rather, the Belgian woman was talking to Cécile. She and her husband came to this resort every winter, she said, she to collapse on the beach and her husband to play golf and tennis. They found Tahiti to be the most beautiful former colony and the natives the friendliest. Had Cécile tried the spa? The guava facial was incroyable.

  “No,” Cécile said, “mais ça a l’air délicieux.”

  She was hum
oring the Belgian woman with her interested expression—eyes squinting, chin tilted—round face framed by her cropped hair above her bony ballerina torso. But Adèle knew what her mother was thinking: Quelle idiote. The Belgian couple—the only other people on this snorkeling excursion save the islander and the old man—wore Lacoste collared shirts, and shorts that went to their knees. They lived in Poitiers, “not in the city itself,” the woman had said. Their two children were grown now; the girl went to an école de commerce, and the boy was studying l’économie. The man called his wife “chérie.” He wore a gold necklace. She had a bright, eager laugh that shot out from her mouth and hit you in the face. They were deep bourgeois, the kind of people Adèle’s parents disdained, people who owned shops and voted UMP.

  “Are you excited to see the fish?” the Belgian woman said to Adèle. “They are supposed to be extraordinaires.”

  “Yes,” Adèle said. “Very.”

  She felt from the Belgian woman’s frozen smile that she’d answered the question incorrectly. When she was little, she could say anything as dull as “I’ll have the steak frites, please,” or “I’m in second year at school,” and adults would find her brilliant because she was big-eyed and plump and had freckles on the bridge of her nose. Then she stopped being little, and adults looked away or seemed to be indulging her by listening. Since she’d turned thirteen, risen a meter, and grown tiny humps on her chest, things had changed again. Men joked with her now, and women stood back a little. If Adèle had felt more comfortable with children, if she had more friends, she would not talk to adults at all.

  “If he doesn’t hurry up, we might never leave for the island to see those extraordinary fish.” Cécile looked out at the old man. The Belgian woman drew back on the bench. Cécile had repeated “extraordinaires” with a high, mocking intonation. She knew how to pull people in and then cast them aside. Despite saying that she was interested in differences, she grew bored easily in the conversations she struck up with the man at the épicerie or with Adèle’s teachers. It had been a revelation to Adèle to see that her mother acted this way. More and more, lately, she had these sudden ideas that sprouted in her brain and kept growing until she felt her head would explode. It was, she knew, part of growing up. And she didn’t like it. She didn’t see what good could come from knowing the flaws in her parents’ characters and in their relationship. It wasn’t normal to live together and then live apart and then live together again. It wasn’t normal to have boyfriends and girlfriends, as the “friends” her parents referred to were. All this might be Cécile and Emmanuel’s way of doing things, but it was not normal, although Adèle wasn’t sure what normal was, exactly.

  “Here,” Emmanuel said to Cécile. “Smoke. It’ll relax you.”

  “Do I not seem relaxed?” She took the cigarette. “How could a person not be relaxed in a place like this?”

  She had started to criticize the resort as soon as they got out of the airport bus, when a woman in a grass skirt hung hibiscus leis around their necks and welcomed them to paradise.

  “Yes, of course,” Cécile said as they rolled their suitcases along the path to their room, past a pool shaped like a lima bean. “In paradise, brown people serve white people.”

  “S’il te plaît,” Emmanuel said. “We said we’d try.”

  “You said we’d try.”

  Adèle had slowed her pace to fall behind them. There they went again. When she was younger, she would put her ear to the door of her bedroom to grab at words and try to make sense of what they were saying. She didn’t anymore. It was always the same fight, anyway. Something about money, or Cécile being harsh, or Emmanuel being controlling. Nothing ever changed. Six months ago, Adèle’s grandfather, Jacques, had died. Cécile and Emmanuel had been living separately for years, but at the funeral in Benneville, Cécile stroked Emmanuel’s ponytail as he cried, and a few weeks later she moved back in. For a while, things were calm, even pleasant, and then the fighting restarted. When Emmanuel got his inheritance, he said that they should spend it on a vacation together. Cécile had been enthusiastic until she wasn’t.

  “Mind rolling me one too?” the Belgian man asked.

  “Tu vas fumer?” his wife said.

  He shrugged. “When in Rome.”

  Cécile cupped her hand around the cigarette to light it and then handed it to the Belgian man. Emmanuel rolled her another one. Adèle turned back around to watch the old man, who had almost reached the boat. That morning, as her parents had fought in the room, she’d wandered outside. Clouds cocooned the mountain above, a dormant volcano set in glossy jungle. The resort stretched along the cliff in a pattern of wooden houses with thatched roofs and porches, to a main building decorated with tapa cloth and ceremonial fly whisks, past the pool, tennis courts, and, oddly, a chapel. The air was swampy, steamy, and sweet. The coconut trees that sprouted from the grass were a disappointment. The resort cut down the nuts so they wouldn’t fall on the heads of the guests. Adèle yanked a banana from a tree and sent it spinning like a boomerang over the edge of the cliff. It was then that she saw the old man on the reef. He walked bent over, face down, as if he were reading the coral.

  She was reminded of her grandfather Jacques, before his stroke. He would take her out mushrooming when she visited Benneville. She held the basket and he walked like that, stooped over, shuffling through the oak leaves and needles. This is a chanterelle, he would say. This is a cèpe. This one is poisonous—you can tell from the tightness of the gills. He let her cut the stalks and put the mushrooms in the basket. Her grandfather Jacques was gentle and sweet, and then he was dead, even though he was still alive. A month after his funeral, Adèle had taken the train to Benneville by herself to visit her grandmother Hélène, who met her at the station dressed for church, her leather handbag on her arm. “I thought we would visit your grandfather,” she said, after kissing Adèle on the cheeks. It was the season of the Fête du Muguet so, once they’d put Adèle’s suitcase in the car, they bought a bouquet of lilies of the valley from a stand in the square and walked to the cemetery. Grandfather Jacques’s grave, a square of dirt when Adèle last saw it, now had a marble slab and a headstone.

  “You see how it matches your great-grandparents’ and your great-uncle Guy’s headstones exactly,” her grandmother Hélène said. She pointed at a bare spot of grass near the wall that encircled the cemetery. “And I’ll go over there when it’s my turn. It’s as close as I can get.” She laid the bouquet of muguet on the slab. “I’d like chrysanthemums on mine, please. The pom-pom kind. You’ll remember that, won’t you?”

  “D’accord,” Adèle said. She was growing sick to her stomach at the thought of her grandfather Jacques under that slab and wanted to go. But her grandmother snapped open the purse she’d set by her feet and took out a bag of Haribo marshmallow bears. “Ton bonbon préféré,” she said. “I made a special trip to the tabac for these.” She opened the bag and held it out for Adèle. “Eat one before they melt in this heat.”

  Adèle didn’t want a marshmallow bear—she liked the gummies—plus she wanted to get away from the grave and out of the cemetery. But she took a bear and bit off its head. Her grandmother Hélène seemed satisfied. They stood there for a moment, looking at the headstone, the marshmallow suffocating Adèle’s tongue, and then Hélène said, “I’ve learned something about your grandfather Jacques. I’ll tell your parents and uncle at Christmas, when everyone is together. But I wanted you to know first. Because you are my favorite. And knowing first is one of the advantages of being the favorite.” She took a small, quick breath. “At your grandfather’s funeral,” she said, “before we all left the church for the meal, a man named Marcel came up to me. You wouldn’t know him. He was the village butcher for years and years. He said that he wanted to tell me something about your grandfather and asked that I come visit him in his nursing home. So, last week, I did. We sat in the garden. He’s old as a prune but sharp as a pencil.” Hélène touched Adèle’s shoulder. “You should fi
nish that before it gets all over your hands.” Adèle put the rest of the bear in her mouth.

  “Your great-grandfather Henri,” Hélène continued, “as you know, was in the resistance in Benneville during the war. Well, more than in the resistance. He was the resistance. He and Marcel. They organized everything.” One night, she went on, not long after the German occupation, Henri came to the back door of the boucherie and told Marcel that the nuns at the convent up the road from Benneville had been denounced to the Gestapo for hiding refugees. There would be a raid on the convent the next morning. Henri and Marcel went through the forest to the convent. They led the families hiding there to the Seine, where another man took them into his fishing boat, covered them with a tarp, and floated them to safety. Henri and Marcel urged the nuns to escape down the Seine too, but they refused to leave. “There was a newborn baby at the convent that they’d been caring for,” Hélène said, “the child of an unwed mother. According to Marcel, your great-grandfather Henri took that baby home. Your great-grandmother was eight months pregnant with your uncle, Guy, at the time. So when Guy was born, the boys were only six weeks apart, close enough to be taken for fraternal twins.” Hélène looked down at Adèle. “Do you understand?”

  “Yes,” Adèle said. “Grandfather Jacques’s mother and father weren’t his mother and father.”

  “Exactly.” Hélène took a handkerchief from the sleeve of her blouse and gave it to Adèle. Adèle wiped the invisible chocolate from her fingers.

  “The nuns were arrested the next morning and taken away. So all these years, nobody knew this story except for your great-grandparents and Marcel, who promised to keep quiet. Your great-grandparents didn’t want Jacques to feel that he wasn’t truly part of the family, or for him to be gossiped about. He’d have been called a bastard back then. He still would be today by some. Not everyone is as comfortable as your parents with children being born out of wedlock, you know.” Hélène held out her hand for the handkerchief, then folded it back into her sleeve. “I suppose when I tell everyone, your mother will find this all very ironic. And your father. Well, who knows what he’ll think. I can never predict. The only thing I’m sure of is that I will have done something wrong. If I were to tell them now, they’d say I should have waited for them to finish grieving. When I tell them at Christmas, they’ll say I should have told them now.” She sighed. “What do you think?”