Rue des Rosiers

by Rhea Tregebov

  “Abe, it’s Sarah. She’s calling from Paris.”

  Sarah can hear the rumble of her father’s voice in the background.

  “Am I calling you too early?”

  “No, of course not. We’re polishing off our French toast, Abe says it’s in your honour.” Pat sounds a little giddy, she’s suppressing a giggle. Things must be okay. “You’re in Paris! I can’t quite believe it! How are you?”

  “Wonderful. It’s so beautiful here.” Michael makes a kissy face at her through the glass. “Michael sends his love.”

  “Tell him thanks. But this must be an expensive call, it’s the middle of the day there.”

  “I just wanted to know how Rose is.”

  “She’s all right for now, Sarah. There’s no point worrying. She really is taking her meds. David is making sure she gets outside as much as she can. They even went for a bike ride to Assiniboine Park yesterday. Well, I don’t think they got all the way there, but it’s a start.”

  A start. But Rose has so far to go before she gets anywhere. Before she’s saved, safe.

  “So don’t worry, Honey, okay? You just enjoy your trip.”

  “I will, Mom. Listen, give her my love, will you?”

  “Of course. Of course, Sarah. Did you see Gail before you left?”

  Gail. Pat’s maternal radar must sense that something’s awry between Sarah and Gail. Gail left a message on the answering machine the day before Sarah left for Paris: Have a good trip. Send me a postcard. She tried to call back but Gail wasn’t in, so they still haven’t spoken. She left Toronto without seeing her sister. “Didn’t get a chance, Mom.”

  “Well, you can call her next time. She’ll pass on the news to us.”

  “Sure.”

  “You have fun, okay? Just have a good time.”

  “Okay. Give Dad my love.” The line clicks and goes silent.

  Michael’s waiting outside the booth. Sarah lets herself be pulled into his hug. Rose is all right. For now. One sister just starting to get better and the other angry with her. It makes her feel off balance, as if she can’t keep a steady course without a sister on each side for ballast. Sarah the border collie, who needs to keep everyone together. Gail the bulldog, who won’t ever let anything go. Or maybe it’s Sarah who’s the bulldog, the one who can never let the thread go too far or too loose without feeling herself slip.

  ~

  PLACE DES VOSGES

  she has to find her way without a map. From her last time in Paris, which was her first time in Paris, she remembers how the square held itself, made itself a world. Michael has had to check in at the office, which is all the way in La Défense, close to the construction site where his client’s skyscraper is being built. So she’s on her own. But she knows where she needs to go her first morning solo in Paris. She follows rue François Miron past the little shops she and Michael were examining yesterday, the pâtisseries, tabac, butcher shops. There’s a lonesome-looking man in bright green coveralls at the curb stroking his broom ineffectually against a trickle of water in the gutter, going through the motions. What good is a tired plastic broom against all that muck?

  At a pharmacy on the corner she stops to ask for directions and her hesitant French seems to work. The woman behind the counter listens carefully, oui, Mademoiselle, Place des Vosges est très proche. Pulls an envelope out of a drawer by the cash register and draws Sarah a little map. Au revoir, Mademoiselle. A little ways up, rue François Miron turns itself into rue Saint-Antoine. Sarah checks the clerk’s map, walks another short block and there it is, right where the sketched map said it would be, rue de Birague.

  It’s a narrow street that seems as if it were made just for her, ending in a fairy-tale castle façade whose roof is punctured by dormer windows. If there are chambres de bonne way up in those top storeys, there must be precious little light available through the tiny windows for the maids inside. Do people in Paris still have servants, not just cleaning ladies, but live-in servants? In this expensive neighbourhood bordering Place des Vosges, maybe they do. Maybe that’s how she could stay here, even after Michael leaves – find herself a job as a maid to some rich family. Bonne comes from “bonne à tout faire,” good at everything. An all-purpose servant. Isn’t that what she wants, to be good, at something?

  What’s good is this cool dark held in the archway opening through the castle-like façade. She moves into the solemn darkness of the arcade, the same red brick trimmed in pale yellow stone as the façade, each arched section repeating itself. Beyond it there’s the brilliant splash of green of the square itself. She steps from the shadowy quiet of the arcade into the bright quiet of the square.

  She’s here. Place des Vosges. The heart of the heart of Paris. So much light. The square is big, much bigger than she remembered it. It’s early Saturday morning, so in the strict geometry of the place with its circles and squares, its precision gardening, there’s almost no one. The square is a perfect square, a model of symmetry, the same arcade running along all four sides, paths in perfect diagonals across the inner square. Lines drawn to let people in, not just keep them out. A space that can belong, at least temporarily, to anyone passing through: cleaning ladies, maids, the men in their bright green uniforms sweeping the streets with their sad brooms. The young woman she saw from the taxi with the scar across her cheek. This elegant middle-aged woman crossing the square briskly with her shoulder purse and straw shopping basket.

  There are four identical fountains, one in each quadrant and their sound makes a pattern within the pattern of the garden’s design. Invisible birds in the thick trees raise a ruckus now and then. Visible pigeons coo, transecting the segmented areas of the garden, creating their own geometry of flight. Sarah hears a fuffle of wings right overhead. The lampposts are topped by ornate curlicues in wrought iron and an irreverent pigeon is fluffing its feathers and settling sedately on one of them. Intricate pigeon footprints stipple the fine sand of the path beside her.

  Across from her an old man is asleep on a bench, asleep or passed out, a crust of something congealed around his mouth, his trousers stained at the crotch and ravelled at the cuffs. There’s a gardener right beside him, carefully ignoring him, tidying the sand paths with a venerable-looking rake and broom, erasing the traces of the pigeons’ passage. The gardener is wearing blue coveralls; does that mean he’s a city employee? What do gardeners earn in Paris? What if Sarah had her own pair of blue overalls, if it were her wielding the rake and broom? Gardening is what she does, what she did. Her job.

  The job she doesn’t have any more. She has no job and she wouldn’t be able to find a job here, wouldn’t be the heroine of the fairy-tale castle, eating crusts in her chambre de bonne, her garret. When she goes back to Toronto, to her real life, it will be her raking sand or dirt or leaves. Once she finds herself a job, another loser job. But she doesn’t have to think about that now. She just got here. She feels for the penny in her pocket but finds nothing; the second time she’s forgotten it at the apartment. Nothing to turn in her fingers. Nothing to decide for her. Nothing to decide, for now.

  The old man asleep on the bench across from her stirs, his mouth working at some sentence. He licks his dry lips, eyes still fiercely closed. Sarah stretches, feeling the skin toasting on her forearms, the back of her neck. Nape of her neck, which Michael has such fondness for. And whose fondness she has such fondness for. Two nights with him now, two nights that she’s slept right through. She stretches again. Her hands startle her: they look clean, unused. The nails are almost grown in. The hands of the old man are dark with dirt. He yawns and she yawns back. Maybe she still is a bit jet-lagged.

  A breeze plays along the edges of the clipped trees above the bench. These poor trees, subject to the French compulsion for tidiness, artificiality. Some kind of linden, she thinks. Tilia of some sort. She’ll have to check in the pocket tree-guide she brought along with her. In Europe they call lindens lime trees. How long since they were trimmed? She can see slight irregularities, the tree
pushing against the limits the gardener wanted to impose. What the tree wants bumping up against what the gardener wants.

  Then she catches sight of something in the shade of the arcade, shields her eyes to see what it is beyond the wrought-iron spears of the fence. Little family groups, bunches of threes, fours, fives, walking solemnly along the arcade opposite her bench. There’s something both tranquil and determined about their pace, something about their promenade that’s familiar. A melody in Hebrew runs through her head: Lekhah dodi likrat kallah, p’nei Shabbat nekabelah.

  Let’s come, beloved, to greet the bride, and welcome the face of Sabbath. Something like that. She remembers her father humming the see-saw tune: it’s about the happiest song she can think of. She remembers how good she felt, how holy, those times they went to synagogue for Friday night services, Sarah with her beloved sisters and beloved father going to welcome the bride of Sabbath. That rightness, righteousness. There was a straight simple thick line dividing the right thing and the wrong. The good and the bad.

  Maybe that’s what Gail wants from her political orthodoxy, a sense of holiness: what’s good on this side, what’s bad on the other. Whose side are you on? The party line. Maybe it makes Gail feel safe. Maybe she let herself get angry with Sarah because it was safe; she didn’t dare be angry with Rose. I hate her. If Gail can’t let herself hate Rose, she’ll turn and try hating Sarah.

  That’s not fair; she doesn’t really hate Sarah. She’s just angry.

  Sarah moves towards the fence for a closer look at the tight little knots of family. The people in their Saturday finery eye her briefly, with an alert attention, then seem to recognize something in her face, relax. What is a Jew? Is her Jewishness in her face, is she recognizable to them? And if so, is that good? She can see words in Hebrew script beside the door. There’s a synagogue tucked into the building. Here. In Place des Vosges. Saturday morning Shabbat services. These families have a place where they know they have to be at a time that requires them. She watches the groups converging, congregating, going in. What would happen if she tried to go in – would they let her? She can go into any church in Paris, but a synagogue? And if they did let her in, she’s not sure she’d feel at home. The shammes here would be shushing the ladies in French, not English. Lekhah dodi likrat kallah, p’nei Shabbat nekabelah. What would the tune sound like if she heard it here? She stands at the edge of the grass, watching.

  Here in the heart of the heart of Paris, a synagogue. Paris can contain a synagogue and still be Paris. Some part of Sarah doesn’t want Paris to be adulterated with anything that isn’t Paris. It’s as if the two categories are contradictory: where there are berets there shall be no kippahs. But for these people, their synagogue in Place des Vosges is as much theirs as the Talmud Torah synagogue on Matheson Avenue in Winnipeg was hers.

  Can she say anything to Michael about all this when she gets home? She doesn’t know how far she got last time when she tried to explain the whole Jewess thing. She can try. Maybe there’s a new Michael, the Paris Michael, the Michael she can allow herself to sleep beside. So far. The Michael she’s sharing an apartment with. Until now what Michael wanted kept bumping up against what she wanted, against what he wanted her to be. And now maybe she can be more than one thing, maybe she wants something more.

  Laila

  I don’t know what you want me to be, Khalil. I don’t know what I am, what I’m doing here in Paris with you – no friends, no job, that room. It took so much work to get here, the long road that began with its tangles of paperwork, scrabble to find money for the fares. The day you finally packed your bag, your mother came into the room, tears but no sound, a blue dish towel twisting in her hands, the flag of that blue. Her one son going, almost gone. When I told my own mother I’d decided to go with you, she cried too, but she told me to go. Paris. A place she’s never seen. Any place away, distance from what happened. What am I to you, Khalil? You never said, come with me. Never said love. Didn’t say anything to me. But when I told you that everything was arranged, that I was coming too, above the black-and-white checked keffiyeh tied against your neck, the stubble of your beard, your mouth pulled itself tighter. Then you’re coming, Laila, you said. Good. Good. That one word, repeated.

  There hasn’t been much good here. No family, no work or no decent work, a room just bigger than our bed. This room that takes too much of our money, but who else would rent to us, a couple of dirty Arabs, not even married? This room I can’t get clean. No hot water. A smeared toilet we share with five, sometimes six other people, no seat, clogged half the time with other people’s shit. I don’t know why we left.

  I do know why I left. Why I went with you. Because it was you who took pity, you who bound the cut on my left cheek when you found me. It was you who took me to the clinic to have it stitched. They gave me drugs for shock. It was you who took me back to my parents’ house, who brought your mother’s cooking, shish taouk, lamb kofte, to our house when my mother wouldn’t cook, wouldn’t leave her room. That was kindness, or at least pity, even if it wasn’t love.

  And it was you who took me into your bed, what I was. A woman that another man had spoiled.

  You’re the one who saved me.

  So I followed you, I left. I left, I followed you. You said good, though there hasn’t been much good in this city that doesn’t want us.

  But today is a good day, today we claim our square foot of this city. We move through the streets and I feel I’m leaving a wake behind me, a trace of my being here that will keep. A change in the surface of things that people will hardly notice, they’ll just feel that something has gone by, they’ve gone by something. Me. I want some bit of my life to touch others’ lives, what I want bumping up against what they want, breaking the border between us. Breaking the border of where they think they’re living. Where they live in this city, I don’t exist. Or if I do, I’m a weed in a crack in the sidewalk, a moment’s puzzle, that scar on my left cheek, what the other boy did to me. But I don’t want to be nothing. I’ll be a seam in the fabric of their day, like the seam left in the water by a boat’s passage. A seam or a scar.

  Near the bridge over the Seine, Pont Marie, a woman’s voice says, Come here. Viens ici. A mother so clear with her daughter. Come here. Words in French I know. Come here. My mother would say that to me in our own language, calling me. She knew me, she knew where we were: home. But right now I can’t say I know where here is. What if there is no here? I don’t know what Paris is. I don’t know what it can be for someone with nothing, who is nothing.

  It’s night now, no one is here to see us. The city for this moment is ours. I watch you reach under the green metal railings of the fence with the spray can, stretching hard to put our words in their place. You’ll put the words in their place the way these people want to put us in our place. There it is, your dark scribble on the stone framing three sides of the Métro entrance. A scribble, indecipherable, like they think we are.

  ~

  MÉTRO

  sarah hasn’t taken more than two steps out of their apartment building when she feels lost, has to check her Plan de Paris, the stubby little blue booklet with detailed maps she’s tucked into her purse. She needs to make sure she’s got her bearings. No one can know this city without a map. Sure enough, there on the building at the corner is the little blue plaque with the street name that Michael told her about, the arrondissement number snug in the arc at the top. From Saint-Paul station, she can take the one line all the way to Concorde and then walk to the Madeleine. There’s a stop right at the Madeleine, but changing lines at the bigger stations usually means crossing through a labyrinth of turns and stairways to reach the correct platform down grim passages with low-arched ceilings. Abandon all hope. The first time she was here, with Reuben, she was really scared of the Métro. She’d never been on a subway before. She still is scared of it, a bit, and this is her first ride this visit. She has the penny in her palm, rubs her fingers across the surface. Canadian penny with its maple
leaf, its queen, here with her in Paris. Would a French centime bring her the same luck, different luck?

  Her mission is an excursion to Fauchon, the haute cuisine boutique in Paris, just across from the Madeleine. Sarah is looking for gifts, and Laura has promised, via Michael, that despite the intimidating fanciness, there are bargains to be found there. Sarah wants, needs, to buy gifts, for Rose, for Gail, for her parents, however slim her savings. Because gifts are a kind of bargain with the evil eye, kinahora. Gifts will magically ransom them, keep them from harm.

  She hasn’t gone far when she’s waylaid by a buttery, sugary, caramel smell that makes her realize she’s hungry, despite the croissant with crème fraîche and strawberry jam she had for breakfast – her hummingbird metabolism kicking into gear. The smell is coming from a tiny crêpe stand tucked into the crook of one of the buildings, barely enough room behind the griddle for the young man who’s working it. What’ll she have, oeuf et fromage or jambon et fromage? The penny says oeuf et fromage. Her mouth waters. She likes watching the young man perform for the customers. Each crêpe begins with three graceful swipes of batter with the squeegee over the circle of the griddle. Then the man takes a narrow spatula from its holster below the griddle, taps the crêpe to determine its consistency and – at what seems to be the exact moment it’s perfectly golden brown – flips it over. For the oeuf-fromage Sarah orders, he cracks the egg with the edge of the spatula, then quickly scrambles it on top of the crêpe with the spatula blade. He drops the right amount of grated cheese on with a scoop, spreads it, again with the blade, across what is now a semicircle of crêpe. Next he takes out a paper envelope from the waiting package of envelopes with a flourish, and with a quick graceful heft, deposits the crêpe, now a rough triangle, inside. There’s one final flourish as the finished crêpe gets a quick layer of aluminum foil and thin paper napkin. Et voilà! Her first crêpe.