when alone have mostly been monosyllables: yes, there, oh, hold me, oh, yes, my God, oh, oh; oh yes, yes, right there, oh.
He knew she had had a stout sister named Elise who had died of Spanish influenza leaving behind a dress of cornflower blue; a husband named Luc who had an ornate and ridiculous mustache and had gone to a costume party as a concubine; a father who had died some years before—his portrait hung in the lodging-house parlor. Quite frankly, he did not want to know the year of this husband’s birth, his place of origin nor particulars about Simone’s mother’s social background, any facts that might enable him to create a smooth narrative of her life.
“I like the way things are between us now. When I feel I know everything essential about you and nothing superfluous.”
She fell silent and when he realized, belatedly, that his words had wounded her, he said, “Go on,” and stroked her hand affectionately.
“My father died when I was twelve years old. For a while I became very devout. I’d set penances for myself—walk with my head bent down, looking for jagged pebbles to put in my shoes. I went to Mass every day—the old crones, and me. They kept urging me to kneel on a prie-dieu but I liked—wanted—the sensation of the flagstone against my knees. And then there was the war—I became devoted to France—”
“Rather than to God?”
“I wasn’t devoted to God so much as to my father’s salvation. My mother’d say, ‘You’d better pray for him. He needs every single one of your prayers.’ But then, when France was invaded, it was so—concrete. I kept a map, with colored pins—black for Germany, red for France. At school, we were allowed to knit. For the soldiers at the front, as long as we used wooden needles and not steel ones. The clack of steel ones drowned out the teacher. One day, my teacher, Mme. LeDuc—I idolized her—held up my socks and said, ‘These are socks for deformed feet.’”
“I suppose that was the end of her as your idol.”
“Oh no. After that I loved her even more.”
When vexed by her pupils’ vast, collective stupidity, Mme. LeDuc slapped implements against her open palm—a ruler, the rod kept propped in the classroom corner. Sometimes she used these to rap knuckles, the tender spot where the shoulder and neck meet. Simone never felt the bite of the rod or the ruler, although she often imagined she did.
“Don’t weep when you are being reprimanded,” Mme. LeDuc said to her. “It’s like allowing a dog to see your fear. It’s true, I’m harder on you than I am on the other girls. You’re not hopeless.”
A trace of contempt is like a hint of bitterness in the mouth: the flesh of a veal roast can be insipid, unless dusted with tart hyssop.
“And then, Robert, who lived down the lane from us, returned from the front minus a leg. I brought him bunches of wildflowers and—even though food was so scarce then—turnips and beets and parsnips. I knitted one of my odd scarves for him. He must have already been falling in love with me then because he exclaimed over it so. He still wasn’t completely recovered: there was a suppurating wound on his flesh. After a while, it began to seem that—we were intended for one another.”
(Her mother had sighed and said, “Better a one-legged husband than no husband at all.”)
She looked Jacques fully in the face. “I was quite frightened of him. Physically. Not frightened that he might be aggressive with me—untoward, nothing like that. Frightened of the smell of him. His wound it—it stank—it was the smell of his masculinity too. The musty wet wool. As if the smell of the trenches could never be washed completely away from him. I was—Am I telling you too much?”
“No.” He saw that some day, if their liaison continued, he might grow bored by her prattle, but for now he was charmed by it.
“At the same time that I would be obsessed by the German advance, I would be haunted by the—thought of Robert’s absent leg. How could I think so much about something that wasn’t there?” She had heard that Jews bury an amputated limb. Was it true, therefore, that non-Jews do not bury their hacked-off body parts? In that case, where had Robert’s missing leg gone? Had it been tossed in a garbage tip? Incinerated? Had the amputated limbs been collected, tucked in the spaces between the shrouded bodies of the dead stacked like firewood in mass graves?
“It seemed to me—I feel so foolish saying this now—that when I could be kind to Robert, when I could hold his hand and tamp down that feeling of revulsion, then our side would be victorious in battle.”
Jacques took her hands in his. “When I lived in Madagascar, I really came to know the Malagasy people—I learned their language—I’m one of the few Europeans who’s fluent in it—”
This was the third time he had told her about his ability to speak the language of Madagascar. From that fact, she didn’t draw the conclusion that he was both vain and fragile, needing to trumpet his abilities. Instead she suspected he had so little regard for her that he forgot the conversations he had with her as soon as they were finished.
“Our colonial subjects are said to be primitive, superstitious, but it often seemed to me that they had a way of comprehending the world which we call irrational, but which might be better called non-rational. A Malagasy might believe that the hacked-off limb was walking about on its own, seeking to be reunited with its former body, that it haunted your mind because it saw you as a pathway to Robert’s flesh.”
Simone did not know how to respond to this, and, the silence making her uncomfortable, went on:
“One day—the back gate was unlatched, and he had his pants’ leg rolled up, his wooden leg on the ground next to him, his stump stretched out on the bench. The end of it was covered with raw flesh, and a few dark hairs, long and spindly. They made me think of the hairs on the chin of the Vietnamese greengrocer.”
“Just giving the fellow some air,” Robert had said, sounding fond of his errant, missing leg, as if it were an impish kid brother who was always getting himself in trouble, who had been sent out to buy some bread in the morning and returned after dark, empty-handed, penniless, abashed, full of promises to always be good in the future.
“Are you—worried about what your reaction will be to Joë?”
“I’m afraid—I suppose, I’m afraid that he will sense my—my fear.”
“He will. But he won’t try to hide his reaction to—what you are choosing to call fear. Which probably also contains within it repulsion, pity. As well as fascination. He will rather force you to—well, you’ll see…I must warn you. He’s not a man who wastes time, who has truck with small talk.”
“When you first met him,” she ventured, “were you put off by—”
“I was wounded at the front,” Jacques said. “A lucky wound, it got me out of the trenches but did no lasting damage. But I spent several months in a hospital. One gets used to a lot. In fact, one returns to ordinary life and finds one can’t help but stare at these strange creatures without missing limbs, with unbandaged eyes, ambling along the sidewalk without the slightest hesitation or halt.”
