It’s Gail beside her now. “Hey, Sarah, listen to me. The doctors are saying that you’re still fighting the infection, and this babbling, it’s from the delirium the infection is causing. What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. But I think maybe you can hear and understand me, so I’m going to keep talking to you. I want you to know I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
Gail is not going anywhere and Rose can’t be here, she can’t be here singing. Sarah has to figure it out. Two sisters. Three sisters now. “– and four and then two, six and four, eight now, and three, that must make twelve –”
“This counting you’re doing, that’s you trying to figure things out like this, put it all together, right?”
Nine then three, six makes eight now, plus five. Mene, mene. Michael and Pat and Laura and Gail and Rose. A dizzy circle of faces. Where is Abe? Did they take him away in his striped pajamas? Who’s missing? Is Sarah missing?
“You’re trying to keep track, keep things in balance, aren’t you? The way you always do? What did they call it in Hebrew school – a kheshbon, a reckoning?”
Four and then seven.
“Listen to me. I don’t care what they said in Hebrew school, you have to know, I told you before, that’s not how it works. It’s not how God works, if you’re thinking about God for some reason. And it’s not how the world works, how people work. I know I can be like that too, counting things up, taking sides all the time. But it’s not sums and subtraction, a line of numbers in one column to the right and another to the left so that what’s added to one column has to be subtracted from the other – it’s not that kind of ledger.”
Take away ten, plus three, makes twelve, then seven, six. Where did Michael go? Who can he be if he didn’t take care of her?
“Okay, Sarah. You rest now.” Gail touches her good hand.
Rat-a-tat-tat. Attentat. Sarah has to solve for those men with the grenade, with the guns, she has to add them up. What did they want that added up to so much more than the lives they took away? She can’t work it out. She has to.
She has to solve for Michael. And Rose. She’s been dreaming Rose. And Gail.
She has to sleep.
~
NI LE MAL, NI LE BIEN
a stranger. a thin young woman, someone who looks like her. Someone she doesn’t know, though something about her is familiar. Sarah blinks for a moment, that face in the mirror.
“So, what do you think?” Gail asks.
Sarah turns around. There’s a young woman in uniform leaving the room, one of the cleaners.
“Sarah? What d’you say?” Gail is holding the mirror for her.
She turns back to the reflection.
It’s not the stranger, it’s her own face, pale and still drawn, thinner even than usual, but her.
She looks at Gail. “Good. It looks good,” she says. Gail has helped her comb her hair. Michael and Gail managed to get her into the shower, she’s doing that well. She’s doing so well that Michael has gone back to their apartment, is actually catching up on some work. And now Sarah is sitting in a chair by the bed with freshly washed hair. Gail tries to get the part straight, then swears and puts the comb down.
“Don’t worry,” Sarah says. “It doesn’t matter.” She takes the mirror out of Gail’s hand, puts it into a drawer in the bedside table. “Did you see that woman?”
“Who?”
“One of the cleaners, I think.” A woman who looked like her, who looked familiar.
Gail shakes her head.
“So,” Sarah says, “you got to visit me in Paris.”
“I did.” Gail doesn’t smile. “Rose too. Her first time.”
“I can barely remember her being here, I thought I was dreaming.” But Rose wasn’t a fever dream, she was here, in Paris, for four days. She was here because they were afraid Sarah was going to die. Rose has gone back now, but she was here. And Laura was visiting Sarah at the hospital almost every day until they finally convinced her she was wearing herself out, working full time and spending evenings at the hospital. She needed to get back to her own life, her work. But she still comes two or three times a week, always bearing gifts, tidbits to tempt Sarah’s appetite, flowers, funny old-fashioned postcards from the bouquinistes near the Pont Marie. She and Michael conferring on what treats, what flowers Sarah will like best.
“David called yesterday, just checking in. You were asleep. He says Rose really does seem to be better these days.”
“Gail, I remember Rose reading me something, a poem maybe? Can that be right?”
“I think so. She was reading you all sorts of stuff. I think there was a poem. I’ll ask David the next time he calls.”
“Your two crazy sisters.”
“Huh? What do you mean? Being crazy didn’t get you here. It didn’t get you these scars.” Gail gingerly touches the rough scar on Sarah’s hand, runs light fingers over her belly.
That woman, the stranger, she had a scar on her left cheek. Something familiar. Sarah remembers the pale scars on Rose’s wrists, remembers seeing Rose’s hands in the fever dreams.
“No. But I’m remembering how nuts I was after the abortion.”
“You were a kid. A dumb scared kid. And on top of it, that creep dumped you.” Gail’s picked up her knitting, a green scarf now.
“I didn’t know you knitted.”
“Stress relief. I need to do something with my hands.”
It’s a simple pattern, knit, purl. “I don’t know, Gail.” There has to be a pattern, even for a simple scarf. “Maybe there’s something wrong with me, some flaw that made me weak, made me crack that easily.”
“Well, you didn’t stay cracked,” Gail says.
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe half-cracked?” The rhythm of Gail’s hands is soothing.
“Maybe.” Adding things up all the time, letting the penny decide.
“You’ll be fine.” The rhythm becomes fierce. “You’re getting better, and you’ll get home, and you’ll pick up the pieces.”
If she can. She’s not sure what pieces to pick up. “Poor Mom and Dad,” Sarah says, “two out of three kids crazy.”
“Hey, what about me? I’m crazy too. In my own special way.” Gail is grinning now. She sets down the knitting. “Ranting ideologues are their own kind of crazy.” She picks up the knitting, looks down. “You know I came because I love you. Cracked or half-cracked or whole.”
“Of course you do. You have to.” She has to. They have to love each other, that’s how it works. “I can’t believe Rose was well enough to come.”
“It was all right.” Gail puts the knitting aside. “She wanted to come. And Mom did a great job of bossing her around, making sure she took her meds, all that Mom stuff. You know, I think it did her good. Being needed. Helping out.”
Sarah shakes her head. “I don’t know how to put our big sister, the one who looks after us… I don’t know how to put that person together with the crazy person who tried to kill herself.”
“She still is that big sister. She came because you needed her.”
“I did. I needed her to be here.” With Rose, with Gail, she can slip back into herself, can be more than the partial self she has to be without them. But she let Rose down when Rose was so sick. You’re not here and I need you. “When she needed me I didn’t come.”
“You did come,” Gail says. “You went to Winnipeg. And you helped. Rose told me. See this?” She holds up her right hand.
“You’ve got the puzzle ring I gave her.”
“Yeah, she left it with me. She told me to give it to you, to wear till you get better. Here.” Gail is working it off her finger. “Here.”
“Careful. Keep it on your finger,” Sarah says, “you don’t want it falling apart.”
“I can put it back together,” Gail tells her.
“You figured it out?”
“Rose showed me.” She puts it carefully onto Sarah’s finger. “It’s too big on you. It used to fit, didn’t
it? I can put it on your middle finger.”
“You keep it. For now.”
Gail fits the ring back on her own finger. “That crap I said to you about not being a help, when we had the fight, the Chinese food, it wasn’t true. I was drunk. It was bullshit.”
Sarah nods. “Yeah. It was.” She’s watching Gail’s hands at rest for the moment. “I lost my lucky penny.”
“Huh? Oh, that penny you were always fiddling with?”
“Yeah. I had it during the attack and it’s gone.”
“Okay. It’s gone. We’ll get you another penny.” She looks at Sarah. “Listen, do you want to get back into bed, have a nap?”
“No, I’m okay for now.”
Sarah’s doing better. That’s what the doctors say: infection’s gone, fever’s gone, incisions are pretty much healed now. She’s out of the woods. It’s not just what the doctors say, it’s what her body is telling her. It was the abdominal injury that almost did her in, shrapnel from the grenade that, lucky for her, ricocheted off the counter before it got to her. Plus the bullet wound in her left arm, it was pretty straight-forward, through and through. The physio explained in her faulty English that Sarah could expect a full range of motion in the arm eventually, though she’d need months more of rehab at home. They are amazed at how fast she healed once the infection was licked. And the docs told her the small shrapnel bits, those dots and little lumps she can spot on her arm, her side, will keep emerging, probably over years. She needs to keep an eye on them, because they can migrate, but at that size they likely won’t do any harm.
“Okay. Good,” Gail says. “Listen, I finally got my hands on a proper dictionary and looked up attentat. You kept asking for a definition, even when you were babbling. Attempt is one definition. Criminal attempt. But attack is better, I think.”
Sarah shivers. Rat-a-tat-tat. Attentat. The light of that day. Someone kneeling.
“You cold? You want a blanket?” Gail gets up, reaches into the cupboard.
“No, I’m fine.”
“You don’t look so fine.”
“Atrocity,” Sarah says.
“What?”
“Atrocity would be a better definition.”
Now that Sarah is officially out of the woods, they’ve filled her in on what is known about the attack. Gail and Laura mostly, Michael and Pat can’t seem to stand to talk about it. It’s still anything but clear what happened, who is responsible. What is clear is that the killers meant to cause the maximum harm – they attacked the deli at one of the busiest times of day, used the grenade first and then the machine guns. They sprayed the street with machine-gun fire as they ran off. More people were injured in the street.
They still haven’t caught anyone, but since the first day after the attack, the French government has claimed that the Abu Nidal group, a pro-Iraqi Palestinian extremist faction, is responsible. The attackers used a special machine gun that was the same type Abu Nidal used in the London attack on the Israeli ambassador in June, and in an Abu Nidal attack against a Vienna synagogue a year ago August.
“Listen, Sarah, if you need cheering up, I have some good news for you,” Gail says. “You kept worrying about that older woman in the deli, the one you thought was a Holocaust survivor? Laura sweet-talked one of the doctors into looking into it for us. The docs found out who she was. And she survived. She was at another hospital but she might be out now. She was injured, but not badly.”
The woman survived. Again. The ledger balances this one time. Because you want your death to bear some relationship to your life and you want some sort of justice, or at least causality. Let the woman not die in an assault on Jews after she’s lived through the largest assault on Jews in their long sad history. And she didn’t. She’s alive.
And so is Sarah. And Rose. And Michael.
“The doctor said she kept talking about you, or at least it sounds like you, a thin young woman who threw herself on top of her, saved her. Do you remember anything about that? Do you remember doing something?”
There was something she could do. That she did. Her body twisted itself to cover the woman, her white silk blouse a banner in a strange wind. Sarah crouched over the woman, looking into her eyes. “Yeah. Maybe. I’m not sure. I think I may have tried to protect her just as the grenade was thrown, before I got hit. I can’t really remember.”
Gail nods. “You can’t expect to remember. Hey, maybe they’ll let her visit once you’re a bit better. You can piece it together with her. The nurses told me Mitterrand came to the hospital to see you and the other people who were injured here. I guess you don’t remember that either?”
Sarah shakes her head.
“You remember when you were still fighting the infection, you were delirious, talking in numbers?”
“I remember a little of it. I also remember you talking to me, saying something about how counting wouldn’t work, the world couldn’t be figured out with simple addition and subtraction.”
“I’m surprised you remember. You were so out of it, Sarah. You scared us so much.”
“But the medics, the doctors, they saved me.”
“No.” Gail is playing with the puzzle ring.
“What do you mean?”
“Nobody saved you. You saved yourself.” She pulls the ring off, puts it back on her finger. “You weren’t supposed to live. I don’t know if you knew that, that it was touch-and-go for so long. You weren’t supposed to live but you wanted to.”
“Like Rose.”
“Rose?” Gail is playing with the ring, slipping it up and down below the knuckle. “Does Rose want to live?”
“Yes! She does. She has to. Or at least, she does now.”
“Okay. Okay. And it sounds like you not only saved yourself, you saved that woman.”
The gaunt, animated woman, the banner of her silk blouse. Her little spaniel with the hints of grey in its white fur. “The dog wasn’t there,” Sarah says.
“What?”
“I saw that woman in the neighbourhood a couple of times before the deli and she always had a little dog with her. Floppy ears, white-and-grey coat.”
“Why are you fixated on the dog?”
“I think the dog’s okay.”
“Oh Jesus. When we get you two together you can ask her about the dog.”
“You remember calculus, Gail? You were so good at maths.”
“We were both good at maths. Rose was the one who couldn’t add two and two. Still can’t, as far as I know. Calculus. It’s been a while.”
“I’ve been thinking about what you said when I was babbling with the fever. About how if there are calculations that can be made to understand what our lives are, it has to be a different kind of mathematics, a higher mathematics. If we want the calculations to make sense.” Mene, mene.
“First floppy-eared dogs and now calculus. Are you sure you don’t want to lie down?”
“It’s okay. I’m okay. I’ve been thinking about this. Do you remember limits in calculus?”
Gail nods. “Yeah. Funny how clear it still is.”
“So,” Sarah looks up at Gail. “I figure now it’s better for me to think not just about numbers but about limits among people. About how hard it may be to understand that something that made perfect sense can stop making sense. At a critical point, a singular moment, everything goes haywire, the relationship blows up and it doesn’t make any sense any more.”
“Zero divided by zero, infinity divided by infinity.” Gail has stopped fiddling with the ring.
“Babel,” Sarah says. “Nonsense. But if you figure it out just right, weigh the loss on both sides, you can see past the nonsense and hold onto the value.”
“Yeah. But it’s not easy.”
“No. It isn’t. Look, what I’m trying to say – I’m not sure I understand what the limit is of the value of a human life. With the abortion, there was a life inside me that I stopped, a life I didn’t let start. And I still don’t know what the value of my life was against that poss
ible life. I can try a more complicated way of looking at things, some kind of proof, a higher math. But I’m not sure I know the value of my own life now. The abortion was a kind of subtraction, wasn’t it?” A woman’s right to choose. What’s Gail going to say now?
“Oh Christ, Sarah.”
“But there was a loss, wasn’t there?”
Gail looks up at her. “Yeah. Yeah, there was a loss. But you know it was also right.”
“I know. I know. It was –”
“And then you saved that woman –”
“Yeah. But it’s not as though that evens it out. And I still don’t know these limits, don’t know in some ways if I was right to value my own life like that. Or why I valued the woman in the deli’s life. And what about the killers, at the deli, how do they figure into everything? I want to work it out and I still can’t.”
“Listen, Mom will be here soon. She’ll flip out if she hears you like this, if you haven’t rested up. You don’t need to work all this stuff out. Not right now. Take it easy.”
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