Rue des Rosiers

by Rhea Tregebov

  “She’s fast,” Michael tells Laura. “She’s very fast. She’d catch ’em.”

  “Uh-uh.” Laura’s shaking her head. “Not a good idea. Dangerous. Oh my gosh,” Laura says, looking at the clock in the pharmacy window across from them and sounding like she’s from Saskatoon, which she is. “Look at the time. We missed the last Métro.”

  The last Métro. Isn’t there a film with that name that came out not long ago, something with that beautiful French actress, that blondey-blonde, the blondest of blondes, Frenchest of Frenchies, Catherine Deneuve? Something about Jews in Paris during the war that Sarah was supposed to go see but didn’t? Jews in Paris. Jews in Paris. Death to the Jews in Paris.

  Something cramps in Sarah’s chest. The last Métro. They’ve missed the last Métro! Laura told them all about it, don’t miss the last Métro, she’d warned them, and now it’s Laura’s fault they’ve missed it and what will they do? Sarah’s very far from home and she’s trying to be someone else and they’ve gone and missed the last Métro. Sarah closes her eyes, for a moment sees her sisters’ sad faces as the last train in Paris pulls away. Rose and Gail, both of them gone.

  She opens her eyes. Michael has sat down beside her, and then Laura pushes her over a little bit and sits on her other side. “It’s too far to walk. For either of us. Any of us. None of us. We can’t walk,” Laura says, setting her shoes in Sarah’s lap.

  “We better find ourselves a couple of taxis,” Michael says. Laura’s apartment is in the opposite direction from theirs.

  “Taxis are rash,” Laura tells them. “Girls from Saskatoon don’t just go around taking taxis every which way.”

  “We know,” Michael says, “but in this case, I think you need to take a taxi. We’ll walk you to the stand. If Sarah can get up.”

  “I can get up.” She can always get up!

  “Okay, there, upsy-daisy.” And he holds out his hand and things tilt a bit again but then they right themselves.

  The three of them are quiet as they walk Laura to the stand, where a taxi is languidly waiting, the rumpled driver looking up in an irritated fashion from his newspaper when Michael raps on the window. Laura gives them each a smoochy kiss on the cheek before she gets in, smoochy and only one cheek each, she must have forgotten some of her French manners, and she’s giggling, waving a large elaborate wave as she closes the door, then opens it again to get her shoes, which Sarah for some reason has been holding.

  Now it’s just the two of them again. Nobody else at all on the street. Paris so quiet at this time of night. “I’m sure another taxi will be along soon,” Michael says.

  “I don’t want a taxi. I want to walk. I want us to walk.”

  “I think it’s a ways.”

  “Not that far. Forty minutes, maybe less. We’ll sober up.”

  “Bad idea. I don’t want to sober up.”

  “C’mon, Michael. It’ll be fun.”

  Michael takes her hand and soon they’ve found Boulevard Saint-Michel. Straight as an arrow pretty much all the way to the Seine, that’s what Michael says their Plan de Paris says. She looks up. Above the stores and banks and cafés are apartments, most of them dark, a few with the flickering blue light of a television coming through the window. The city’s so quiet, just the faint sound of a radio through another window. Hardly any traffic. They walk down the middle of the street till a taxi honks softly at them, then scramble, giggling, holding hands, for the sidewalk. Now and then they hear a baby crying, or the hushed sound of a TV. Light filtering through the shutters of a window, a smell of toast, someone making toast at 1:30 in the morning.

  The city only theirs.

  Laila

  I don’t like the faces on the buildings in this city, above the windows and doorways, their blank eyes. When I say this, Khalil, you laugh at me. You tell me that buildings don’t have faces, but they do. I’m the only one who notices, you say, I’m the only one crazy enough to mind. We’re at a café, you want an espresso, it costs less if we stand at the bar. As you count out your coins, counting each centime, I tell you I don’t want anything. The buildings have faces, not me. You’re looking at a newspaper on the stool beside you, Le Monde, which means The World. You’re reading in French about the world, the blood, the guns, how many are dying. A new alphabet here, a new way to read. I want to read this city the old way, right to left, the French would call it backwards, but to us it’s the only way it makes sense.

  Though there are three words that are mine, even in this foreign language, foreign alphabet. Mort aux juifs. That’s what we have to say. What we said.

  You sip your espresso, read the newspaper on its stool. I don’t say anything. I want to tell you about the city I’ve seen underneath the city, the hatches in the sidewalk that open under people’s feet. But I don’t. I want to tell you about how the workers go down there, lower themselves into the mouth of that other city to keep the city above working, its electricity, phone lines, water, sewage. I don’t tell you because you’re not in the mood to listen.

  If you’d listen, Khalil, my friend, I’d tell you how every morning Paris is washed clean of its sins. If you looked down some morning when you were walking, you would see the sewer floodgates open and water rinse through the gutters. The openings are called bouches de lavage, mouths for washing. I’m learning these words. And stuffed against those mouths are pitiful pieces of rolled carpet, filthy, water-logged. They’re useful in some way, I don’t know how.

  The water gives itself to the gutters and a battalion of men come by with their imitation witches’ brooms made of plastic twigs, and they stroke at what they find, debris. This army brushes at what the city doesn’t want, what has been spent, lost, discarded. They sweep it away so it doesn’t offend the ones on top, the ones the city belongs to.

  You’re finished your espresso and I’ve finished the nothing I have and we leave, turn the corner onto a bigger street, the museum there in all its finery, the Louvre. Louvre, I know its name. I know all about it. A jail for beautiful things. In the gutter here across from the museum I see a crumple of pale feathers, a silvery glint playing off them only now and then, light caught. Something crushed, its body splayed so that at first I don’t know what it is and then I do: pigeon. Another item for my collection. I have a collection in my head, Khalil, a catalogue; I’m keeping track. Gutter treasures. The pigeon, and the bundled corpses of carpet at every sewer mouth. What else? Candy wrappers, beer cans, empty cigarette packages. And things that are worth something, a five centime coin, a cigarette butt.

  Every morning Paris is washed clean, all that good water wasted because the city still stinks. I’d know this place with my eyes closed: diesel exhaust and dog shit, human piss. Garbage gone putrid. Though I have to remind myself there are other smells too: through the vent from a hotel laundry the scent of cotton sheets, fresh smell I remember of washing on the line, sheets pinned against the sky. My mother’s hands with the wooden clothes pegs, pinning our clean sheets against the sky. And there’s the flowery smell of detergent from buckets of water the concierges throw onto the sidewalks in front of their buildings, making a show of cleaning. When my mother cleans it’s not a show, our house is clean, our house holds us safe.

  I know what they’re up to, the concierges. Making a show of clean. Because it’s not just them and it’s not just the army of men with twig brooms who clean the city, it’s me. I’ve made myself useful. I have work now, washing Paris. That’s what I’m doing here, I know that now: washing myself clean with work, wasting myself.

  It’s because of my mother that I finished high school. And she wanted more for me. She would set aside the dress or cushion she was working on, she’d look up and tell me she would do it, find a way for me to go to college too. My father too, that’s what my father wanted for me. For both of his children. The blue of his cigarette smoke curling against the white walls in our living room. Curling behind the newspaper he read, the newspaper that would tell him everything. He’d watch TV too, try to cat
ch the news, watch in the shop window, or at his cousin’s, as if knowing the news did anything for him, for us. He would have sent me to college. If he could have.

  10,000 dead. That’s what the French newspaper you needed to read told you, Khalil. 10,000 wasted, or less, or more. The newspaper says a reliable accounting isn’t possible because of the chaos of war, the devastation of neighbourhoods and refugee camps, the haste with which bodies were buried in mass graves, the absence of impartial agencies gathering statistics. There may be extreme exaggeration on both sides.

  And if only 1,000 died?

  One is too many.

  ~

  JEU DE PAUME

  Jeu de Paume, Jeu de Paume. Sarah can still hear Michael sing-songing the words. She’s almost there, at the Jeu de Paume, an art gallery at the foot of the Tuileries Garden, where she’ll meet up with Laura. Visiting art galleries is what you do when you go to a city like Paris, but Sarah hadn’t even heard of the Jeu de Paume until Laura suggested the visit. Laura wants some time with just the two of them, and so does Sarah; time to get to know each other. The bars Sarah passes are hectic with their lunch-time traffic, corner cafés where each table is an island of conversation, each couple wound into their own tight intimacy. The back of a thin young woman watching a man finish his newspaper, his espresso – why isn’t she having anything? At their breakfast this morning, another breakfast together, over his café au lait, his cigarette, Michael was declaring that the French had ever so kindly designed those three syllables, Jeu de Paume, specifically for the comfort and enjoyment of English speakers. The easiest words in the French language for an English speaker to pronounce. The word Tuileries, on the other hand, had been invented just as deliberately to make the English sound ridiculous. So he claimed. Twee-leh-ree. It isn’t easy, remembering that the l is an l, not a y, getting the r sound right, silencing the s at the end.

  Another breakfast with Michael. Another night she’s been able to sleep beside him.

  She’s past the Louvre, almost at the end of the unpronounceable Tuileries. Before she hits the chaotic traffic at Place de La Concorde, she has to cross from the shade of the arcades on the north side of rue de Rivoli, with their mix of designer boutiques and kitschy souvenir joints choked with gewgaws, to the heat and light of the south side. Maybe it’s the stink and racket of the traffic, or the bleak stone wall guarding the museum, but there’s something barren about this corner. Sarah hurries up the stone steps behind the Métro entrance. The museum is a long rectangular box with four large dour columns at the entrance. Laura says it used to be a handball court: word for word, jeu de paume means game of palm. As Sarah heads for the doors, a clutch of scruffy kids comes up, talking away in fragments of French and some other language she doesn’t recognize. S’il vous plaît, Mademoiselle, if it pleases you, Miss. It doesn’t please her at all, in fact she’s good and irritated as they crowd around her, coming close but not actually touching her. One is holding a frayed piece of cardboard. He’s taller than Sarah, though he looks to be only about 12 or 13, his face dull with dirt, lean. He comes right up to her, Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle, shoves the cardboard against her arm, the one holding her purse. She pushes past him and he flinches, stumbles back, drops the cardboard, then stoops to pick it up. Sarah pulls her purse closer, goes into the museum. Little jerks. Such a stupid, inept attempt at picking her pocket. She checks for her wallet, then touches the penny in her pocket. Still there. What would they have done with a dull Canadian penny? She looks back and sees they’ve moved on to another target, a well-dressed American couple who are also pushing by them as if they were some kind of debris. She was pretty brusque herself; she doesn’t like kids ganging up on her like that, especially the tall boy.

  A few minutes later, Laura hurries into the quiet lobby, scanning for Sarah, the smile rising to Laura’s face when she spots her. “There you are. Hey, did you make it okay through the gauntlet at the door? I usually try to give people something if they’re panhandling, but that pack of kids is intimidating. Did you check your wallet?” Sarah nods. “Will you let me treat you to the tickets? This once?” She sees Sarah hesitate. “Hey, this is a foreign country. Yer money’s no good here.”

  “Thanks, Laura.”

  Laura comes back from the ticket counter frowning.

  “Were the tickets more expensive than you thought?”

  “No, no. The cashier was rude.”

  “Rude? Why?”

  “Why?” Laura laughs. “Sarah, you’re a clever girl. I think you can figure it out.”

  “I’m sorry…”

  “Actually it doesn’t happen as much here as it does at home. Here, if I’m soignée enough, I’ll often as not get a free pass, despite my complexion.” She looks up. “Don’t worry. Let’s not waste our time. I only have an hour and a half for lunch.”

  “Did you eat already?”

  “Um, well, I usually skip lunch once or twice a week. Helps me keep an eye on my figure.”

  Sarah would pass out if she missed a meal. She made herself a fat cheese sandwich, baguette and brie slathered with butter, and ate it on the way here.

  Are the kids she pushed through hungry, is that why they were swarming her? Or is it all an act? That tall boy was skinny, his cheekbones sharp, like a fox’s. And that flinch that moved across his face when she pushed past him.

  “You skinny little thing, I guess you can eat whatever you want.” Laura pretends to glare at Sarah. “It’s hard to like you, Kid.” She takes a floor plan from the ticket desk. “Despite the rude ticket-taker, this is my favourite museum, all Impressionists.”

  “My mom used to have a book of reproductions: Degas, Cézanne, Monet,” Sarah tells her, thumbing through the postcards by the ticket desk. “I remember stretching out on the living room floor when I was a little kid, poring over them.” The eternal winter sunlight painting a patch of brightness on the yellow carpet. “There were all those still lifes and ballerinas and jockeys, of course, but it was the nudes that I wanted to look at most.” All women, of course, and women painted by men. Gail would no doubt speechify about the male gaze, how it objectifies women, but the women in those paintings seemed somehow to own themselves. They were just ordinary women, a little plump or a little thin, unselfconsciously clipping their toenails or combing their hair, their faces almost always obscured. A painting of a heavy woman, the broad landscape of her back, the soft arcs of the folds of belly below the equal arc of breast, serenely scratching her back, at ease. “I remember my sister Rose explaining that if it was art, it was all right for ladies to be naked.” What will she do if she doesn’t have Rose to spell out the world for her? She does, she will have Rose, always. Every day out of hospital is a promise that Rose will be all right, no matter how long it takes.

  Laura touches Sarah’s arm. “You’re still worried about her, aren’t you?”

  “I can’t stop. Not that it does any good.”

  They move into the first gallery. Sarah stations herself in front of a Renoir, takes her time watching the crowd. People don’t seem to stop for long. They’ll pause at a painting, say, Degas, or Renoir, and then nod, satisfied, and move on. They have the right word, they know the name, so they’ve tamed what they’re seeing, know what they’re looking at – art. It was Rose who taught Sarah the one thing she knew about art: you stand close and then far. When you stand close, you see bits and pieces. When you stand far, you can see the whole thing.

  In the next room there’s a painting by Monet of the front of the cathedral at Rouen, bits of white and blue and yellow and even some red making up the stone façade. Were there pickpockets, panhandlers in front of the cathedral? Beggars, that’s a more honest noun. Beggars in front of the Jeu de Paume, maybe beggars in front of the cathedral at Rouen. Did Monet see them but choose not to paint them? There are no people in the picture, none she can see, but is she looking hard enough? This painting pulls her in, makes her want to look at it as long as she can, until she sees past the names of things. Sarah s
ets her hand against her throat, testing for Michael’s necklace, that it’s still there, still invisible below the collar of her shirt. Then on instinct back to her pocket, checking for the penny. Sometimes it’s hard not to look away. Making herself look in Prof. Koenig’s class, trying to will starved, saved figures back into their own lives. Looking for a way to save herself.

  She holds her gaze until the dab of white she’s looking at in the Rouen cathedral isn’t a dab of paint any more. It’s not a bit of stone either. It’s the light of the day caught; the moment it was seen. The painting goes into her, colours and the patterns they make moving through her body. The world made of light, not just things and the words for them. Someone taps her on the shoulder and she startles. It’s Laura. “Earth to Sarah.”

  Sarah looks out the window of the gallery, startled to find the city there, Paris, because the painting has taken her someplace else.

  This is what she’s been doing with her days in Paris, days with nothing to do but what she wants to do – looking at things until they seep right into her. Until she’s more.

  “C’mon,” Laura says, “onwards and upwards. Let’s have a look at the next gallery before I lose you to another Monet.”

  The first thing Sarah sees when they move on to the next room is a Cézanne her parents have in the living room of the house on Rupertsland, a framed reproduction of a still life of apples and oranges. But this is the real thing.

  Laura comes up behind her. “You like Cézanne?”