A Hundred Suns

by Karin Tanabe

  Her childhood had not been an easy one. The trauma from that lingered. But mostly the nerves she had, the tics, stemmed from what happened in Switzerland. He could send me the file, he’d said, but he demanded the money first. I immediately sent a telegram to my sister in Paris, telling her that if she could deliver a specified sum to the investigator, I would pay her twice that amount. All she had to do was obtain it from Arnaud’s banker. The promised compensation was almost as much as her husband brought home in a year, so I knew she would say yes.

  It took over two months, but when it arrived, I read that file until it was nothing but creases and fingerprints. The doctor’s notes revealed that Jessie wanted to leave Paris. “A traumatic incident that brought up difficult memories from the past,” he had written, “made her suddenly sour on the city.” She was from then on “desperate for a change of scenery.” At the club, after Victor had praised his wife as some kind of latter-day goddess, rather than a simple farm girl who was lucky enough to be pretty, he’d told us he wouldn’t even be in Indochine if not for her. That it was she who’d suggested they come. I knew that no Michelin actually cared to see the realities of their plantations. It was far easier to ignore the atrocities from abroad. But Jessie’s desire to move made perfect sense. She didn’t want an adventure; she wanted an escape.

  Switzerland. It could have been a coincidence, of course. That’s what Jessie would be thinking. Trying to decide whether there really was a case of new mother’s depression in my family, wondering what type of person my mother was, what exactly she had endured, which clinics Alice had sought information about in Switzerland, wondering and wondering.

  But I wasn’t wondering about the kind of person she was anymore.

  Jessie Lesage wasn’t just going to be one of the wives swimming laps at the pool and developing an alcohol dependency; she was going to be involved with the plantations. Why else would she have been there when the police tossed Huynh Dinh’s body onto the street?

  It hadn’t seemed like she knew much about Michelin or her husband’s professional life when we spent the evening together at the Officers’ Club. Most women wouldn’t have cared about the details anyways, just what the profits could buy them, and I’d assumed she was one of those women. She was tightly wound, but open to having fun. Self-centered but, admittedly, also easy to like.

  That part bothered me the most. Easy to like. Because I had liked her when we dined together. I had enjoyed our time spying on the drunk minister, so peaceful with his flaccid penis out and his one perfectly polished shoe on. I had liked laughing together, clutching hands so we wouldn’t fall, watching our husbands, two of the most powerful men in Indochine, shooting billiards together. And I’d enjoyed watching her stand up to Caroline when she branded her as some American temptress.

  I was open to giving her the benefit of the doubt. She could, in fact, be a very separate entity from her husband. The woman whose dossier I had studied over the last several months had suffered difficult circumstances. Perhaps she was a misunderstood woman who wanted to get out of Paris, slightly cracked around the edges but decent at the core, unlike the family she had married into.

  But no. I was with her this morning, though she couldn’t see me, in an inconspicuous Peugeot with wheels that deflated too quickly—shoddy Michelin tires most likely—and rust on the hubcaps. I had been skulking around her neighborhood out of curiosity, wanting to learn more about her, when she’d flown out of the house looking nervous. I’d decided to follow her expensive car through the French corner of the city, staying a few feet back. When she headed to the local neighborhoods and driving became a challenge, I’d followed her under the shade of a conical straw hat that I purchased right off the head of a noodle vendor, staying behind a large, rowdy group of young people. She did not see me trailing her to Café Mat Troi. On foot, I was able to tuck myself away in an alley across the street, a favorite shortcut for the pousse-pousse drivers, which gave me a direct view of her. She could have seen me, too, if she had only thought to look my way, but she was obviously concentrating on something else.

  She’d stood up and screamed when she saw Huynh Dinh’s body dumped by his front door. It was the correct response considering what was in front of her, but it felt muted. The Michelins practically held a parade every time a communist was killed, especially one as powerful as Dinh, who was accused of distributing communist literature not only in Tonkin but also down on the rubber plantations, concentrating on Michelin’s. Jessie hadn’t celebrated, but something was off.

  Before she’d screamed, Jessie had looked at her watch. A quick, furtive glance seconds before the car carrying the policemen had pulled up. She had known about the body being dropped; perhaps the Michelins even had something to do with it. I’d watched in horror as she’d smiled at the first policeman. She had even waved, like he was an old friend. Jessie Lesage was not separate from the Michelin machine. She was helping to turn the crank.

  SEVEN

  Jessie

  September 9, 1933

  Confirm. That was what Victor had said when I told him about Switzerland. See Marcelle de Fabry again, straightaway, and confirm. One mention of Switzerland could be a coincidence. Two slips could not. But Marcelle didn’t seem like the type of woman who, if she had slipped, would do it again.

  Victor had apologized repeatedly for asking me to go to Café Mat Troi. He should not have sent me without having first met the policeman himself. He’d acted foolishly. He had since found out what the mix-up had been. The man he had communicated with, a policeman who was also paid by the company to help with certain arrangements, thought that it would be amusing for Victor to see what they did with overzealous communists in Tonkin. A bit of a fun surprise for the new Michelin in town, he thought. No one had been expecting me to go in his stead. The man, Thomas Brignac, apologized to Victor and sent over a very nice note, full of spelling errors, about how embarrassed he was.

  I told Victor I had stopped caring about that dead communist. I understood that the police couldn’t let men like that take over Indochine. It was Switzerland that was yet again my source of anguish.

  It was a month after Lucie was born that I was sent to Switzerland. I had an easy pregnancy, nine months of staying active and well, enjoying the kicks and grumbles of the baby who was quickly forming inside me and then wiggling so much I knew it was desperate to see the world. I had an uneventful labor, too. I was nervous, of course, alone in the delivery room with only my bloody bedsheets to grip and tear at when the contractions seized me, a pain so intense I had to look at myself in the mirror that hung near the bed every few hours to remind myself I was a woman and not an animal at the slaughter. But I had witnessed my mother giving birth to all my siblings. I knew I would survive the ordeal. And when they placed Lucie on me, a little white bonnet on her head, her tiny body wrapped up, her eyelashes barely grown in, I knew none of it mattered. I knew I would never be alone again. She was perfect. She had Victor’s dark hair under her tiny hat, a pile of it, dark blue eyes when she finally opened them, and a mouth that was like the first bud of a perfect pink rose. She was my Lucie. She would be Victor’s, too, but my body had made her. That meant she would always be mostly mine.

  We were very happy in the hospital, in our own little world, baby Lucie and I. Victor fell in love with her as soon as he entered the room, smelled her intoxicating baby scent, and heard her warbling cry. He would visit us all seven days that we were tucked away there. When we left, driven home by Victor himself, not trusting his chauffeur to it, I thought everything would be the same at home. Better even, as I was feeling stronger and more myself when we arrived. But our little blissful world was shattered the very next day.

  Victor’s mother, Agathe, came and stayed with us, even though she lived just a mile away. She was constantly present, taking Lucie away from me whenever she pleased and demanding that the baby be fed on a set schedule. When I wanted to sleep with Lucie in bed with me, she told me I was a fool. That I would crush t
he child and that she had to sleep not only in her bassinet but also in an entirely different room. My parents had done very little right, but because we were in a small house, we were always sleeping close to someone, piled up like puppies comforted by heartbeats. Lucie needed to hear my heartbeat; I knew she did.

  Despite Agathe’s threats, I would sneak into Lucie’s nursery when her nurse was asleep, lift her little body from her bassinet, and bring her back to bed with me to breastfeed. Soon that, too, was deemed disgusting by Victor’s mother. She forced bottles on Lucie, and I started to panic. Postpartum hysterics, Victor’s mother called my reaction. Fits. I heard her use those words constantly to Victor and to Lucie’s nurse. Then, one night, just after Lucie had turned a month old, I was consumed with a nervous energy that woke me up with a start. I went to Lucie’s room, sure that everyone was sleeping, picked her up, and brought her to my bed. I meant to keep her there for an hour at most, but I fell asleep, so soothed by her presence. Agathe caught me with Lucie in my bed the next morning, my arm draped over her body, which was tucked tight against my torso.

  Agathe was outraged. “You’re suffocating her!” she’d screeched, waking us both up as she ran into the room. She tried to grab the baby, but I wouldn’t let her go. In the struggle, I lost my grip on Lucie and she fell to the floor. Victor insisted on calling the doctor, and the next day, Agathe took Lucie away from me.

  With Lucie’s doctor’s word to support her, and my husband in agreement, it was decided that I was a danger to the baby and needed treatment, the best available. I was to be sent to the Prangins Clinic in Switzerland, a mental health facility near Lake Geneva. I was to stay for an undecided length of time, and Lucie was not to go with me.

  On the morning Victor and I left, I was hysterical on the way to the station, as they hadn’t even let me see Lucie, kiss her good-bye. I remained inconsolable on the train, barely staying in my seat, constantly pacing the length of the car. Victor tried to stop me, embarrassed by my behavior, my tears, but after an hour, he gave up and let me grieve.

  He fell asleep when we were nearing Lyon, and I watched him rest peacefully for a few minutes. But when his face changed into an expression that reminded me of Lucie, I threw myself over him, crying and pounding his chest. “Who has the baby now, Victor? Who is feeding her?” I yelled, my breasts still producing milk as I cried.

  On that endless journey, everything smelled like Lucie. Every woman suddenly looked the way I imagined Lucie would grown up. I didn’t have a picture of her to take with me. I had nothing of her but my changed body, which, just a month after the birth, was still recovering.

  When I arrived at the clinic, they dressed me in a shapeless blue gown and gave me a sunny room with windows that didn’t open. The doctors who tended to me, drugging me, said many women felt sadness after they delivered a child and became mothers. They asked if I felt as if I were losing a part of myself. Did I want to end my life? The baby’s life? No, I did not want to end our lives; I wanted to end Victor’s mother’s life. I wanted to take my baby and hide with her, away from the Michelins and their money, their bourgeois rigidity and rules. I had grown up with nothing, but that also meant that I had grown up with few strictures besides raising my siblings as if I were their mother and helping to put food on the table. I got as far as I did through honed instinct, not by following the decrees of someone else. But the Lesages did not operate in that fashion. They told me which women to befriend, where to dine, which activities to take part in. Tennis was an acceptable sport for me. Shooting, something I’d excelled in from my youth in the countryside, was certainly not. Work was out of the question. If I had to do something with my days, I could volunteer with orphans. Most of the time I understood their advice. I had infiltrated their world, and I genuinely didn’t want to disturb it. But I would not be told how to care for my child.

  I never wanted to see Agathe’s pinched face again. I wanted to live far away from her. And if Victor was strong enough to choose us over his family, then he could come, too.

  In Switzerland I stared at a bare white wall and cried for two weeks. I spoke to the specialists, I submitted my tired body to their ridiculous examinations, and I begged to go home.

  No, I was told by my doctor. No, I was told by the chief of the hospital. I was nowhere near well enough. I would have to stay longer, perhaps a month more.

  That was when everything went wrong.

  According to a report they sent Victor and Agathe, I attacked the chief of the clinic in a way that only their most deranged patients dared. I managed to break two of his fingers and scratch his cornea before they were able to restrain me.

  I don’t remember any of the confrontation. I barely recollect that doctor’s face. All I remember thinking was that they didn’t care that a baby had been torn from its mother at the most critical time in its life—and that the chief of the clinic must have very brittle bones.

  And I remembered the medicine, of course. I could practically still taste it. They wanted to turn me into a near corpse with no worries and barely a heartbeat. I took what they wanted me to the first time, and then never again. I silently threw it up in a plastic bowl every time they administered it, then dumped it in the toilet when I was allowed to go. I had to at least hold on to my sense of self.

  After the incident with the chief, I was restrained and forced to take extremely strong barbiturates, which numbed me and made me fall asleep for days. When I finally woke up, I was no longer permitted to go anywhere alone. I was restrained, tied to my bed like a murderous criminal. I was released only to use the bathroom, and that had to be done in the presence of two female nurses. I wanted very much to break their fingers, too. It was in that state that I realized I had to change, or at least pretend to change, or I would never see Lucie again.

  My crying ceased. I admitted that I was wrong to have taken the baby into bed with me. That I should have released her into Agathe’s loving arms that morning. That a woman who had borne four children of her own, three of them girls, knew better than I did. They all knew better than I did, I said.

  Two weeks later, they released me to Victor, who took me home. I never slept with Lucie again. At least, not until she was nearly five years old and could sneak into my bed on her own. When she did, I pulled her tight against me, our bodies curved together as they were the night everything went wrong. For the rest of my life, I knew, I would be trying to get back that month in Switzerland, loving Lucie with all my heart, always trying to make up our lost days.

  When I came back to the house in Paris, tiny baby Lucie was smiling. I held her and laughed with delight while Victor and his mother watched me, examining me for signs of mania. I could never again give them a reason to send me away. But that night, alone in the bathtub, all the world’s tears fell into the water. Lucie had changed. Not only could she smile, but she now looked more like me. Her eyes had darkened and even though her hair was black, she reminded me a bit of the girls in my family. Especially my youngest sister, Eleanor, the one I missed the most.

  I told Victor a month after I returned to Paris, to our marital home, that I was completely cured. Switzerland was a distant memory. But the truth was that it had pushed me off center and I was quite sure I was never going to come back, not without help. My powers of renewal were lost. I never showed any signs of nerves in front of Victor, terrified that I’d end up restrained to another hospital bed. But I had to break sometimes. I’d learned that after Virginia.

  I started consulting a doctor, once a week, far in the Eighteenth Arrondissement, and with him, I cried. I talked about the waves of anxiety that would come over me if I smelled a baby or saw a child fall in the park—and, sometimes, for no reason at all. I talked about the fear I still had of losing my child, and my mind along with her. And I spoke about Virginia. The memories that still punched at me, and all the things I had kept from Victor. That I would always keep from Victor. I spoke about my worries, my secrets, to no one but him. I was very thankful for the outlet
. Knowing that I had a private ear every week, I was able to find myself again. But Victor could never know about the doctor, about how much I needed his counsel, and he could certainly never know about certain pages of my life from before I met him.

  In the seven years since Switzerland, Victor and I had talked about having more children, but I refused to while we still lived in Paris, just around the bend from his mother. If we go to Clermont-Ferrand, or somewhere even farther, I had told Victor, maybe I’ll be ready then.

  It had taken months, but one day he walked into our living room in Paris, sat on the floor, and apologized. He understood, he said. He understood how his mother had contributed to my weakened mental state. He gave me the emerald Boucheron ring and promised to try to keep his family out of our private lives. He begged me not to lose myself to emotion again. He said that my state had terrified him. He admitted that he’d only seen one person in a similar condition—his father, right before he left the family. “They said it was mania,” he disclosed. “I call it selfishness, but perhaps it was mania. All I know is that it terrified me. And then I had a new baby and a wife in the same condition. I’m sorry I sent you away, but I panicked. I don’t want you to be my father. I want you to be you. Adventurous but balanced. Supportive. And in love with me.” I’d looked at him, a man who had given me everything I had, including my child, swiveled the ring around on my finger, and nodded. Yes, I was that person, and something like Switzerland would never happen again. I was completely in control of my emotions, I assured him, a sunny smile on my face. As for loving and supporting him, that part was easy.