can see the coast of Africa!” or “If it’s windy tomorrow we’ll put on a play! It will be such fun!” Mme. Vidal shot her daughter glances: Come now, no one enjoys a grouchy hostess. And do quit picking at your food.
Simone was even hungrier than she had been earlier, but while struggling to hook the waistband of her skirt she’d made a promise to herself to get her figure back. She was a keeper of vows, especially ones made to the god of vanity.
Colonel Addams beat the edge of his spoon against his wine glass, and in the startled silence that followed, declared: “Je porte un toast à Mme. Vidal, une femme estimable, et à cette excellente maison!”
Jacques whispered to Albert, “What are we drinking to?” Albert shrugged, clinked his glass against Jacques’, and downed a good slug of wine. The Alsatian birdwatcher resumed her monologue: “…the sound of the ortolan is rather like this,” and made a series of chirps and clicks. “Yes, you’re right,” she continued, as if someone had responded, “it isn’t particularly melodious, almost insect-like, in fact—” while the mother from Lyon issued a series of sotto voce reprimands to her children, and the retired British major asked Jacques, in his idiosyncratic French, where he was from. Simone, in order to prevent the possibility of Jacques saying—as another guest once had—What language is he speaking? exclaimed, “Yes, do tell us where you are from!”
“Nîmes.” The headache which Jacques had planned to plead had now arrived.
“Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. Do you hear the difference? It’s subtle,” the Alsatian birdwatcher said. “Let me repeat…”
Albert, embarrassed by his friend’s monosyllabic response, added: “My friend lives in Paris. And before that, Madagascar.”
“Ah,” the mother from Rouen asked, “what were you doing in Palestine?”
“Palestine?”
“I believe, dear,” her husband corrected, “that you are thinking of Damascus. Madagascar is—some place else.”
“An island,” Albert put in, “off the coast of Africa.”
Jacques eyed the curve of Simone’s breasts, smaller than they had been this afternoon. She must be breastfeeding. His wife, Sala, a doctor, had of course gone with bottle-feeding. He imagined the mouth of her infant sucking at her breast and, feeling himself become aroused, inched his chair closer to the table.
In Istanbul, the Prussian blue that formed the backdrop of Luc’s blueprints of the trestle bridges that would span the canyons and crevasses, the tunnels that would bore through mountains, stained his fingers, despite his scrub brush. (He cared for his body as he did for his polished wood and brass engineering tools, which he buffed with a chamois cloth before returning to their leather cases.) He would touch her with his tinted hands, leaving a stroke of blue on the edge of her jaw, a smudge circling her breast like a faint tattoo. A deep blue, almost a bruise, where he had thrust his fingers inside of her, worked the heel of his palm back and forth. She would forego her customary bath, wanting to keep the traces of his lovemaking on her skin.
One day, Luc had come home and seen a pile of Turkish books higgledy-piggledy on the floor next to her chair on the verandah. His wife told him she had engaged a young poet of their mutual acquaintance to tutor her in the Turkish language.
At dinner that night he said: “Ni devus lerni Esperanton. Ĝi estas malŝparado de tempo por lerni turkan.” Simone laughed.
His dignity wounded, he brought his linen napkin to his mouth, wiped his mustache and lips.
“I’m sorry. What did you say?”
“I spoke in Esperanto.” He stopped himself from saying my dear. “The universal language. We should learn it, speak it to our children when that time comes. It is a waste of time to learn Turkish.”
“The letters are so beautiful. My favorite are kaf and çim.” She stroked the shape of the letters in the air.
He knew at that moment his wife would not be faithful to him. It was not the tutor he feared being cuckolded by—the man’s tastes did not tend in that direction—but by a gerund.
Despite knowing that truth, he plowed on: the Turks themselves were abandoning the Arabic alphabet, changing to the Roman, part of shedding their Ottoman past, becoming modern, just as they intended to scrub the language clean of words that had been borrowed from Arabia and Persia. (Beware the gifts foreigners leave at your gate, even if these are only Arabic words for pus and wisdom, the Farsi words for enemy and footloose.)
The poet told her there was no word for être and avoir, “to be” and “to have” in Turkish. “How do you say, ‘I am…’, ‘I have…’? she asked. “Ah,” he said, “we do not say such things as crudely, that is, as directly, as you Europeans—I mean, you Western Europeans—do.” She wanted to dive into this language, to swim in its waters thick with silt, in that sea of the past and shame and languor, to allow a tiny bit of the foul water to seep into her mouth.
The company—save for the birdwatcher who retired early, since she left the house before dawn, carrying bread, a hunk of cheese wrapped up in a cloth, a thermos of blackstrap molasses and hot water, and Mme. Vidal, who napped with Marcel in Simone’s room—adjourned to the parlor after dinner, sorting itself onto the various settees and armchairs.
“I’m afraid,” Jacques said to Simone, “I must take my leave—”
The look that passed over her face, in the seconds before she regained her composure, was one of desolation.
Seeing it, Jacques added, “—despite your charming company…I’ve a terrible headache.”
“Ah, yes, yes, no doubt from the scirocco.”
The lady from Rouen offered aspirin, which Jacques declined, saying he needed to just lie down and give his eyes a rest.
Simone drove off her sense of abandonment by becoming gay to the point of freneticism. She sang, only slightly off-key, an arabesque she’d learned in Turkey, which brought a round of applause from the assembled guests. Simone cranked up the victrola and Caruso sang an aria from Pagliacci. “A miracle!” the father from Lyon declared. “It’s as if he were right here in the room with us!” although when Caruso reached the phrase una smorfia il singhiozzo, his voice began to deepen and slow, and Simone rushed to turn the crank again.
The daughter from Rouen, sensing that her mother had taken a dislike to Simone, shifted from her position on the couch next to her parents to a footstool next to Simone, from which position she could gaze upwards as she said, “Tell us all about Constantinople.”
Simone wove the words scimitar, pasha, fez, Blue Mosque, harem, Nubians, odalisque, minaret, casbah, opulent into her conversation, the words with which Luc had seduced her. “And do you know the title the Ottoman sultan took for himself?…Let me see if I can remember it all,” and she held up her left index finger: “The Emperor of Emperors, Sole Arbiter of the World’s
