“But I need to figure it out somehow at some point.”
“Right now what you need is to get all the way better.”
Sarah rubs at her face, her eyes. “I should get back into bed.”
“Yeah, do that.”
She wants to sleep.
~
Sarah is at the window. She’s wearing her own clothes, jeans and a t-shirt. No penny in her pocket, nothing to turn, nothing to turn to. But it’s all right. She doesn’t need it. She’s watching clouds move purposefully across a grey sky, and it seems possible that it might snow in Paris. Not the snow of Winnipeg, of course, and not even the snow of Toronto, where Sarah will soon be heading, since she’s mostly healed, almost ready to leave. But it does look like snow, and Sarah pictures the profiles of the lions’ heads on the fountains at Place des Vosges thickened with a layer of snow that heightens rather than veils their features. Maybe Paris will become even more itself under snow. Another week, the doctors say, ten days at the most, and they’ll be ready to discharge her, let her go back into her life, whatever life she’s willing to try.
She feels a touch at her shoulder, Michael, then his lips light against her neck. Every gesture now feels like a gesture of apology. She’s tried to send him home, back to his work, which is waiting for him in Toronto. But he doesn’t want to leave until she does. Gail left for Winnipeg three weeks ago.
He asks her how she is, and she tells him better, always better. He’s brought and distributed a bag full of warm croissants and pains au chocolat for the nursing staff, a ritual now, he brings one almost every day, everyone has been so good to them. Mostly croissants, sometimes the perfect little tarts and other fancy pastries the pâtisseries sell.
“Michael,” she says.
“Yes?”
“I want to ask you something, you have to promise to answer, okay?”
His mouth tenses, then slowly relaxes. “Promise,” he says. “Go ahead.”
“If it had been me,” she says, looking out on the impossible Paris sky, “how would you feel?”
“What?”
“If it had been me,” Sarah says it again, “if I’d been lucky and wasn’t hurt, and if it were you who were hurt but still survived, how would you feel?” The sky readying itself.
“I can’t think about that. That’s not how it happened.”
“But I want you to tell me how you’d feel. If it were you sitting right here right now, in hospital, like me almost better. And if I had hardly been hurt at all. What would that feel like?”
He stands beside her at the window. “Looks like snow,” he says.
“It does. Michael, answer.”
He turns and touches her arm, runs his hand along the healed scars. Puts a hand gently on her belly where more scars have closed themselves. “I don’t know,” he says at last.
“You do. Imagine that I had lain there behind the counter without knowing who I was or where I was, without being of any help to you, so it was me and not you. Me standing here just fine, not having been through all this, all these weeks, months.”
“I’d like to imagine that.”
“All right then. So tell me, how would you feel?”
“If you’d been lucky and I’d been hurt?”
“Yes!”
Michael hurt and treated and recovering. Michael in the hospital bed, hurt so badly and then getting better, and Sarah almost untouched, Sarah watching over him, sleepless, worried, helping.
“I’d be happy,” he says at last. “Of course I’d be glad you weren’t hurt.”
“So why shouldn’t it be the same for me? Why can’t I feel like that for you, glad? Because I do. I am glad.”
“But that’s not right.”
“Why? Why isn’t it right? It isn’t wrong. It was up to me to save myself. Not you.”
He shakes his head. One snowflake coming down from the dark sky, then another.
“You didn’t have to save me, Michael. It wasn’t your job. It isn’t. I had to save myself. My life isn’t any less mine than yours is yours.”
He shakes his head again. “Was it your job to save Rachel? Rachel Bernstein is here twice a week with books, flowers, chocolates. She’d bring that dog with her if they’d let her. And every time she visits, she tells you how grateful she is. Why was that your instinct? Why wasn’t it mine?”
And it’s true she turns it over and over in her mind, the thing she did, the good thing. Her body thinking for her. At last doing something that was unequivocally good. But she doesn’t know why. “I don’t know. But I’m asking you to see how I feel.”
“I can’t. I can’t see it like that. I was supposed to put your life ahead of mine.”
“You didn’t have to. Look, I’m alive. I’m okay. I came through.”
~
Sarah’s asleep that night in the hospital room she’ll soon be leaving, a week, ten days at the most, but something wakes her, and it’s not the usual pain, dull now, occasional. It’s dark outside, but the bits of snow that drifted from the sky didn’t amount to anything, the city glistens damp out the window, not white. What woke her? Not one of her waking dreams, she doesn’t dream those now. Something else. She looks around the room and the stranger she keeps seeing, the young woman in uniform with the scar, one of the cleaners, she’s there, armed with a mop and pail. She’s standing in the dim doorway, looking at Sarah, her dark eyes serious. The woman Sarah’s seen in the mirror, at the doorway, in the halls, not always working, sometimes just standing, watching Sarah. And now she’s there at the threshold of the room in the middle of the night, an odd sort of stance, patient and anxious at the same time. This thin young woman in the night who still seems familiar. The face in the mirror.
Sarah closes her eyes, maybe she’s dreaming, but when she opens them again the woman is standing right beside her bed, her face intent, her hands clasped against her chest almost as if she were at prayer in some way.
“Do I know you?” Sarah asks.
The woman doesn’t answer, smiles a hesitant smile.
“Do I know you?” Sarah asks again, in French.
“No,” the woman says.
“I think I know you from somewhere.”
The woman touches her hand to her own cheek, the scar there.
“No,” the woman says, her voice soft. “You don’t. It’s all right. Go back to sleep.”
Laila
You think this is your story, don’t you? But it’s mine.
You think this is your story, Sarah.
I know your name, Sarah, I read it on your chart.
I know your name but you don’t know mine. Laila. It’s from the Arabic word for night. Someone once told me that it means the same in Hebrew. They’re in the same family, Hebrew and Arabic. Sister languages. A way we should understand each other, though Khalil said it was gibberish, Hebrew, a corrupt language, a language that was stolen from us.
I was here when they brought you in, I saw what the bullet, what the shrapnel did to you. You were taken apart and they’ve put you back together. You put yourself back together. You wanted to live.
You asked me in French if you knew me. You don’t. There’s just this little bit of my life touching yours, our lives bumping into each other, a brief collision. You’ll think of me this once and not again.
Even though you don’t know me, I’ll tell you my story. So far.
I never saw my country, the country my parents want me to know. I never saw my country because the Jews took it away. I was born in a country that wasn’t mine, I grew up there. That’s where my family is, the fresh smell of washing on the line, the cigarette smell of my father. My mother setting grapes on the table in a wooden bowl, cheese and bread on a white plate set on an embroidered cloth. It was in the country that wasn’t mine that my brother’s friend raped me and cut my cheek.
I want to tell you it wasn’t the Jews, it was my brother’s friend. It was him.
I came to Paris with a boy. It was here in Paris that I found out w
hat he loved: that clean gun in his arms.
And I cleaned, that’s what I did in Paris, that’s what I do. I cleaned for Mme Dupont and for Mme LeBlanc. Mme LeBlanc wanted to help. You work so hard, she told me, and you’re clever. Your French is getting better. You should have steady work, a better job. She told me all these things.
I’m still washing Paris clean of its sins, but Mme LeBlanc found me a job here at the hospital. Now I work eight hours a day, five days a week, every week. And twice a month they give me my paycheque in a white envelope. Nobody tucks bills into my pocket with their dirty clean hands. I live in a room that’s mine, a room that has a lock that I have the key to.
Mort aux juifs. It might as well have been me who wrote that. I’d never met a Jew. And I’d never met the man under the blanket I saw on the TV, his arm loose, the man whose face I didn’t see, the one the newscaster said died in Beirut. Can I not mourn him? Can I not hate you? I can’t, I will. I can’t, I won’t. I won’t hate you, don’t hate you, but not for your sake, for mine.
It might as well have been me who wrote mort aux juifs, because it was me who watched the boy write it, who was happy he wrote it. But it’s not him I’m telling my stories to now, not the boy who loves a gun. He’s gone, and I want him gone.
But I do want to tell you, I don’t think it was him.
There was a picture in the newspaper of the gun they used in the attentat. It doesn’t look like his. I know that gun and it wasn’t his. I want to tell you this. I don’t know what other business he has, but I don’t think it was him who hurt you.
I wish I could wish you well. I wish I could tell you assalamu alaikum. Peace be with you. But the war between us hasn’t ended. I don’t know if it will. I don’t know how long we have to be patient, how long we have to wait for justice.
This is my story, Sarah. So far. The Jews took my country. I live in a new one. And even if you think this is your story, it’s mine too. If the war between us ends, maybe we’ll both read our stories backwards, the right way, read them right to left.
~
Toronto
~
gift
1984
the room is empty, the whole apartment vacant, its white walls blanks now, so it’s only the shape of an apartment. Everything that was hers has been emptied out, so that the space has gone back into possibility. Her life in these rooms is done. And now after two years the apartment is about to be filled with someone else’s life. Sarah herself is about to be filled with someone else’s life. She goes to the living room window, puts her hand against the screen, the scars faded but still there. It’s August, the Japanese quince bush has long lost its flowers. The window’s open to a heavy Toronto day, the air thick with humidity. There’s hardly any breeze, but she can smell cut grass, someone has just mowed one of the miniature front lawns. She takes a breath, takes in the life she took back, the life that’s starting.
The movers have dismantled and removed the little city of cardboard boxes she constructed, its rampart walls and ziggurat heaps, what she owned condensed into beige squares and rectangles. The mop and pail, broom and dustpan are stacked by the door. She’s done her last cleanup here. The new place is bigger, room for the baby, which is due in December. Michael’s baby, theirs. For two years, she’s lived here with Michael, slept beside him. Slept beside him and not once has she dreamt the old terrible waking dreams.
So how is it that she’s here, in this empty, open space, this summer – the attack a winter she lived through, a fig tree buried in soil, a tree pollarded to its stump, pruned to its core.
When Sarah and Michael left Paris, Gail was waiting at the Toronto airport.
And now, two years later, as Sarah looks out through the screen, the dense Toronto air, she still isn’t sure whether Michael has forgiven himself. Despite the baby they decided on, the pearl that’s forming from that seed of grit between them. Despite the way their lives have gained momentum as they change course, Michael’s work, hers.
They’ll have their own garden in the new place. Sarah won’t plant a fig tree, she doesn’t want anything forced. Before she decides on what to plant, she’ll need to understand the yard, its light, its soil, what is possible. To learn her own terroir.
Her hand with its scars, the dots of shrapnel rising like memory to its surface, rests against the screen. But soon she’ll go out into the yard, wade through the thick air to look it over one last time.
And one day she’ll go back to Paris, because it’s the city that took her apart and put her back together. She’ll watch their daughter, a small and defiant child, eat her first Parisian croissant on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, she’ll watch her at the Luxembourg Gardens, afraid to ride the ponies but content to be pulled along behind them in the little cart. Sarah will go back to a changed Paris, a Paris where a glass pyramid has landed suddenly in the centre of the courtyard of the Louvre; where the Impressionist collection has left the Jeu de Paume and been translated to the new Musée d’Orsay; where striped barber poles stand impudently in the cour d’honneur at the Palais-Royal. A Paris Sarah will at first refute, the Paris that is an accumulation of times rather than a place out of time, that can contain as many overlapping layers of time as is necessary: the roundups of the Vélodrome d’Hiver and the medieval ghetto, the Terror of the guillotine and the terror of 1982, which Sarah survived.
She won’t tremble as she walks up rue François Miron, where the doorway to her favourite pâtisserie is still flanked by portraits of a dainty male sower and female reaper, each posing within the delicate gilt scrolls of their painted frames. She won’t tremble as she walks the quick blocks up rue Ferdinand Duval, past Bazar Miriam. She’ll stop where the street ends, at that nondescript triangle, the arbitrary intersection of irregular streets which is not a place at all. Which is the place where the light changed, a shift in time, a hiccup. She’ll stand steady in the place where something splashed into the room and the light was sharp. Because it was here that her body decided to save another woman who deserved more of life. But here also stood the sad man in green scrubs, his hands asking a question that couldn’t be answered, that hasn’t been answered yet.
She won’t understand.
Her daughter will begin to cry, a wail that will trail behind them as they pull her away from what happened there. A long howl.
Sarah will come back and come back, with Michael and by herself, she will come from a life that is strangely rich, one she didn’t expect to have in those brief and narrow days. She will come back to Paris as an excursion from this changed life, a visit tucked into the interstices of her work, Michael’s work. She’ll come back and show off first their daughter and then their son to Laura. She’ll come back with Gail and then with Rose, with her nieces and nephews, Gail and Rose’s children, with Pat and Abe. She’ll come back to read the plaque set into the façade, which reads in French ‘Anti-Semitic Attack’ and gives the names of the dead, calls them ‘victims of terrorism.’ An attack with certain victims but with no certainty, because there is a continuing vital doubt about who was to blame. Justice is confused.
She will come back to the city that undid her, that took her apart and where she put herself together. But Sarah will not be in Paris when, as 2015 begins, in the wake of the murder of twelve people on staff at a Paris satirical magazine, a gunman will enter a kosher supermarket in the suburbs of Paris, and he will take hostages, helter-skelter, and kill four of them before French security troops free the rest. She will watch these images dribble and spill onto the screen of her TV and her computer, and time will be held briefly as she watches a blonde woman, freed, throw herself into the arms of a policeman helmeted in black, cloaked in black like a messenger of Hades, a man who is in fact, for the woman, an angel not of death but of life. She will not be there in fall of the same year, when a nightclub, a stadium, cafés are the targets, and she will watch briefly the surveillance video in one café, where five are killed by a gunman who looks, on the video, like a blur, like a white
ghost. Five are killed at the café, but not the server who hides behind the bar where the camera has just shown her shrugging in conversation with a co-worker, where she has been polishing glasses. She is not killed and the woman who was sitting at a sidewalk table who runs to shelter with her is not killed. Behind the bar they hold one another like sisters, they hold hands, these strangers, and the server strokes the woman’s head, it’s all right, it’s all right.
Sarah will come back in a mild and sunny fall with her grown son, who will be angry because no one is reading the words on the plaque, the tourists with their gleeful shopping bags, the street with its signs in Hebrew, its Kosher Pizza and Authentic Falafel, the butchers with their kosher foie gras, the stores with their 350€ handbags. None of the passersby will read the plaque and none will know what happened here just as no one can know all that happened in this place in the many days before, the many days after the attack. On the street Sarah and her son will hear people speaking in French, German, English, Hebrew, Spanish, Yiddish, Japanese. A young man in full Chassidic garb, black hat with thick beard, tzit-tzit fringes dangling below his jacket, will go up and down the street, accosting tourists: You Jewish? he will ask in English. You Jewish? In English, in French. A question he will ask boldly on a public street. And yes. Yes, Sarah will answer in her head.
What is a Jew? How would Prof. Koenig answer the man?
Rue des Rosiers Page 25