These Good Hands

by Carol Bruneau

  Then he hit me with another invitation. The hausfrau was off visiting friends in Saint-Cloud. I know as well as you, curiosity kills the cat. I rode with him in a cab to rue de Bourgogne.

  It felt cheap and distasteful to enter his apartment, but even you couldn’t have resisted. The rooms were less opulent than I’d imagined, and showed a woman’s touch. The bric-a-brac! Trinkets and knick-knacks Maman would shun.

  A painting stood out, one in a cluster of bourgeois works. Done in a palette of muted pastels, it showed a mother tenderly cradling a child, and was signed by one of Monsieur’s pals.

  “Carrière, the Symbolist — know him? ‘Mère et Enfant,’” he said, so lightly it was sickening.

  I’m not as quick as you, but I immediately guessed what he was up to.

  In the habit of collecting others’ sentimental portraits, he wanted to outdo his friend. He needed something far superior to show as his own. His designs on my piece couldn’t have been clearer.

  “So, you hope to embarrass Carrière, ‘proving’ how much better you can do.”

  Our master of deceit, our clever chameleon, was appalled! “Mademoiselle. That is the last thing on my mind. If you’re wondering why I invited you, there’s something I should say. Rose and I are moving to the country. Which means I won’t always be near. But I’m always with you, certainly in my dreams — in the heaven of them.”

  Laughing in his face — “In the hell of mine” — I didn’t waste a second getting out of there.

  In the peace of my atelier, I wondered if his words weren’t an attempt to bully me. A fresh kind of manipulation, for he was set on getting his way.

  ***

  NOT A MONTH later his despicable friend from the government, the one who’d insulted my Waltz, turned up, apologizing for being out of touch and asking how things had progressed. It was “the maternal piece” he was after — the work I had underway when we first met. “By now I trust it’s completed?”

  “You, sir, can kiss my maternal arse.” You’ll be happy to know I shut the door on his fingers.

  With Monsieur’s meddling now a conspiracy, it was worse than folly to stay where he’d installed me — where my every move could be tracked — in my little place near La Folie. I crisscrossed Montparnasse in search of a new home, often circling L’Hôpital Sainte-Anne. Round and round its imprisoning wall I went, as lunatics peered out through its barred windows. Ghostly faces. Muffled screams. Never in my wildest imaginings did I dream that Monsieur’s evil would land me in a place far worse.

  Increasingly my all-nighters took me across the river, through the Marais’ shadowy maze, twisting streets and alleys as good as an enchanted wood for getting lost in. There, the most persistent followers could easily be given the slip. The Master couldn’t have tracked me with a search party. In the gaslight I admired Medusa’s shocked scream adorning that hôtel’s huge doors on the rue Vieille du Temple. Dodging drunks and loose dogs, I would peer through the windows of a foundry at rue Rambuteau and rue des Archives.

  One night a well-dressed man came out and, instead of telling me to move on, offered a drink. I declined till he held out the bottle and I saw what it was. Moët & Chandon. Like bubbling spring water from Épernay, in the countryside our parents had at last escaped to — this I knew through Paul. Several genteel sips loosened my tongue and quenched my thirst.

  In answer to my question, the stranger said the foundry was owned by a dealer named Blot, one of the few dealers in Paris whom Monsieur seldom favoured with his business. “So the Great One and his mistress are trading Paris to lie around the suburbs,” the fellow said, setting down the empty bottle.

  “Good for him.”

  And before my acquaintance could ask anything in return for his kindness, I hurried on. Much as I needed it, the soothing darkness could be daunting, but wasn’t so deep as to blot out signs. One, in a window not five blocks away on the rue de Turenne, said Studio to let, terms negotiable.

  Given the stranger’s way of speaking and what he knew, I wondered if he himself weren’t the dealer, Monsieur Eugène Blot — a person adept, it struck me, at fighting fire with fire.

  ***

  I FOUND SOME peace when I moved to the rue de Turenne. But I’m afraid it was short-lived.

  Though I was desperate for cash — oh, to have sold a slipshod version of Maman et Enfant to the first bidder! — I was less willing than ever to part with the piece till its perfection was mine and its ideal patron secured. I know the Meddler was determined to give both of your faces his personal stamp, the soft yielding doormat loveliness he adored in us women. He was not above out-and-out sabotage, and his meddling exceeded his physical reach.

  I was saving it for Maman, a gift to mark our reunion. Futile, perhaps.

  I kept up my walking, in search of someone who looked like her, or who looked like you — because isn’t it said we each have a double, a doppelganger? And knowing Monsieur Blot had a gallery near the Madeleine, I took to wandering such glamorous areas, scurrying past the Opéra and once even ducking into the Café de la Paix.

  A mistake, a very bad mistake. Amid the yackety-yack and air-kissing of dolled-up ladies and the mincing men with them, a waiter demanded to know if I was meeting someone or had a reservation. He asked me to leave, but not before I heard one tart tell another, “Do you know Monsieur the great man hasn’t just one but four brats by her, the pitiful thing?”

  Do you know what it’s like to be gossiped about? To be made to feel like bruised fruit? Lies heaped on lies. And here I was being treated lower than some swarthy immigrant, some Algerian … Worse than a pack of dogs chasing me, this drove me to take up palette and brush. Though I rarely thought of my unborn girl now, at Criteur’s urging I set her down on canvas, if only to let her rest out of harm’s way. The sins of the mother bound and loosed, I painted her sleeping on death’s dusky shore, a flock of doves guarding her. Their wings’ flapping sufficient to drown out the father’s bluster.

  Such is the power of art — even painting, which concedes defeat to a world that’s flat.

  ***

  ONE NIGHT I spotted Monsieur’s son, the drunkard, asleep by the fountain at Place des Vosges. Just blocks from my place. Where a bad odour rises, you know its source can’t be far off. An omen, you see — a sign that Monsieur was exactly as he’d said he wouldn’t be: near.

  “Pose for me,” he had begged the final time. Without each other, he’d said, we were as good as a walnut cracked in two. One half without the other could never be as fine as the whole. As if, once, we had been of a single mind. As if, once, he had cared for symmetry, though he refused marriage’s balance and spared me the drudgery of a charlady’s life.But he continued to send money. A pittance, of course, just enough to keep his hooks dug in. Long after any love was buried — more rubble than the cribs of ancient ruins under the Île de la Cité — I seem fated to waltz with him, like it or not, beyond the grave and back!

  Sometimes it seems the hard clay under loam is being packed around me, its coldness seeping through my veins. As though he lies here too — the rankness of his scent, the scent of other women — and try as they might to keep our bodies from touching, my muscles fail. His breath turns me to onyx, no, coal.

  X

  21

  … AND FAMILY AFFAIRS COMING TO MY KNOWLEDGE …

  MONTDEVERGUES ASYLUM

  28 SEPTEMBER 1943

  02H10

  “A girl’s got to live,” I told myself in the woods. If not for the trees’ spookiness — the moon throwing more shadows than light, fungus in the branches resembling carrion nests — I might’ve laughed at myself. Better than being appalled, held back by usual caution and sense.

  Trust your gut, Sister would say. By now I had little doubt that Renard worked for the Maquis, though I suppose I’d suspected it all along. Was he hiding from the police? The Gestapo? Aiding the resistance, resisting Vichy and all its collaborators, balking at nothing to defend what he believed in, what many if not
most of us believed in — an end to the occupation, the rafles, the war? He kept one hand in his pocket as I caught up. Good God, concealing a gun, was my first thought. Somewhere above us a bird hooted. I could have lied, made some excuse other than the fact that in another hour the guard locked up. I could’ve said I was doing nights and due for work. Would that I had been! I could’ve turned back — how would he stop me?

  In the moonlight his face was grim and his hair a greasy thatch. He grabbed my wrist again, and for one truly awful moment I decided his wounded friend was a ruse. Did I look like the kind of woman he’d help himself to?

  Renard grinned in my face. “You’d make a fine maquisard, I think.” And instead of pulling me closer — those gums, I was thinking, that mouth — he brought the dorsum of my hand — think of where it had been, that hand, wiping and scouring — to his lips. Their scratchy warmth oozed to my palm and carpus.

  When he let go, I stumbled on a tree root. It would’ve been awkward, unseemly at that point to bolt — perhaps he’d think I was disappointed — so I fell in behind him, following a crooked path through the underbrush, at a safe distance of course.

  Soon the glow of a small fire — the embers of one, that is — broke the darkness at the edge of a clearing. Someone huddled beside it, a boy or a very young man — it was hard to tell exactly, the way he sank into himself, nursing on a flask while he slouched against some toppled stones, what appeared to be the remnants of a little wall.

  “How old is he?” I asked, having put from my mind whatever details Renard had divulged.

  “Sixteen, seventeen.”

  Peering up from his flask, the boy’s eyes roamed mine. Dark and fearful, their colour was indistinguishable. Something about his face seemed remotely familiar, enough that the feeling it gave me made it a little difficult to breathe. He’d been among the crowd that morning at the station, those young men being prodded and coerced with Gestapo rifles. My memory faltered. Was he the one

  I’d thought of, whose mother had behaved fit to be tied? Looking away, flinching, the boy let out a curse. He scanned the trees. Was he on the lookout for something? Who knows what was lurking. His alertness, his unease — what a strange thing, youth, its innocence so easily spent, squandered.

  Only then did I recognize that Renard had brought me, not exactly in a circle, but in a meandering loop that ended near the hospital’s cemetery. Through a scant border of trees, the field stretched seemingly forever under the chilly moonlight. Only a few of its stony mounds were marked with wooden crosses; most were left bare. I’d stumbled on it once during a walk and, struck by some of Head’s choicer wisdom — “Sometimes, Poitier, the body knows what the mind can’t, or refuses to” — had taken pains since to avoid it. Barren of names and dates, it has nothing to recommend it, nothing of interest beyond its occupants’ anonymity. As if they all died by their own hand.

  The boy’s eyes had an unpleasant sheen. A sign of fever? The metal flask clicked against his teeth.

  “He took a bullet. To his shoulder. Just a graze, the lucky little son of a bitch.” Renard sounded half gleeful yet shy, appealing to my know-how, or perhaps what he took as professional vanity. He was sweating rather heavily — perhaps he bordered panic. They say you can smell it on people. Up till now, in my experience it’s been true.

  All the more reason for proper bedside manners. They hadn’t failed me yet.

  “It’s all right. Now that I’m here, let’s have a look.”

  Glowering, the boy looked away as he peeled off his jacket and shirt, both crusty with blood. An odour wafted up of ammonia, the bodily variety — the sweetish, peaty smell of poverty, of unwashed clothing, of some hovel having served as bomb shelter or foxhole. It’s a smell that doesn’t leave you. I recognized it from doing home visits while studying a unit in public health.

  Renard stirred the fire’s coals with a stick and held it out, its burning tip providing the only light for an examination. Better than nothing, though it hardly helped matters.

  Sister’s words came back: By touch, Nurse, sometimes we see what otherwise might get missed. I don’t know why, but I felt clumsy and awkward touching him, probing his skin. It was like giving my first needle, or shaving my first surgical patient, or the first time I shouted “ten,” the code for an emergency in Lyon, a cardiac arrest.

  Predictably surrounded by contusions, the wound had suppurated, but as far as I could tell it was fairly superficial and showed no damage to the muscle. It was too late for sutures, and I said so, but with some antiseptic it would perhaps heal all right on its own. Still I felt oddly helpless.

  “I’ve nothing to clean it with. Without supplies there’s not much I can do.” I held my hands out, surrendering. The boy’s eyes followed them to my pockets, where I found a couple of centimes, which I pressed on Renard, instructing him to get his friend something to eat.

  The boy’s expression was more worrisome than his wound, his wary smile full of mistrust.

  “I’ll be back,” I promised against all good sense.

  Renard eyed me with surprise, even satisfaction. “My brother’s boy, a nephew, sort of. His father would thank you, if he could. Raised the kid as his own, him and his wife. Like their own little Moulin, a proper hero.” He smiled grimly. “They had some kind of arrangement. She wanted a kid, see. My brother’s wife, a Jew — she was.”

  “Where are they now, the parents?” It pained me to ask. Renard shook his head, gaping at me as if I were stupid, then gazed at the woods. “You might guess.”

  “Bear with me,” I said, words no different maybe from Sister’s Wait on the Lord or We’ll see.

  ***

  IF I HURRIED, I might make it through the gates in time to fetch the requisite supplies. I slipped past the gateman with easily fifteen minutes to spare. With any luck at all, Night would be napping, and sure enough, she was snoring away in the near dark, sitting up at the desk but otherwise dead to the world. Getting past her was no problem, though I did encounter something unusual. The door to the supplies room was ajar, which of course made getting inside that much quicker.

  The autoclave needed emptying and tweezers and bandage scissors were in extremely short supply. A quick search turned up not a single clean pair, which was odd but not completely unusual. When things get hectic on the wards at night there’s no one to pick up the slack; one felt, feels, a certain amount of sympathy for Night, who does her best, or claims to.

  Aware of the clock’s ticking, I was forced to pillage a sterile pack for its instruments as well as adhesive tape and gauze. The large bottle of rubbing alcohol on the shelf was almost empty. Rather than searching for a smaller container to take the remainder in, I found a vial of potassium permanganate, a worthwhile antiseptic in a pinch, and wrapped everything in a clean hand towel which fit nicely under my sweater. Of course I’d take the cost of these items out of my pay, “for furnishing first aid to the dorm,” perhaps, and at the first opportunity settle with Secretary.

  The snoring out at the desk ceased. There was the sound of a little commotion, the rustle of Night getting up from her chair — and then, oh my nerves, the sound of her screaming. I dropped the supplies as if they were scalding. I was no longer thinking of excuses, there were no excuses, not for my being there.

  But Night didn’t ask. Her screams were hard to distinguish from those of the various guests’ who, awakened, may never go back to sleep. She was kneeling at the utility closet — normally empty — where something red was spilled on the floor. Nazi red, was all I could think, the red of those flags we keep seeing everywhere, red with black in the shape of an amputee spider —

  Then I saw inside the closet. Saw the pooling blood, and the patient — blessed God, a girl we’d all thought was doing so well, the one with the funny sayings about living — slumped there. Both her carpal regions were sliced open.

  ***

  NEEDLESS TO SAY I only got out of there now.

  Nobody asked what I’d been doing on the floor af
ter my shift. Head, summoned from her room, even commended me for being there and promptly calling the orderlies to remove the body.

  Now that I’ve finally got this all down on paper, I’m going to take a good long soak; but before that, a drink of the wine that the orderlies, good as they were, left on the desk for us. Night has sworn off all alcohol, or so she said, pushing the bottle at me. So here it is on my dresser. I have to be up in a few hours but don’t care.

  My improvised sterile pack is here too — a lot of good it will do now. In the chaos of Head storming onto the floor in her nightdress, I didn’t know what else to do but slip it under my waistband. It escaped her notice — I suppose I’ve got so thin it hardly looked like padding.

  “You,” she said. “I suppose we can give you a half-hour’s grace to sleep in. Don’t worry if you’re a minute or two late coming back in the morning.”

  It is more than a little alarming, though, how one small slip, one transgression — one tiny breaching of rules — leads to another, and another. It is a slippery slope. So, despite the hour, I will not take Head up on her concession, and make every effort to be there on time.

  22

  A PLACE FOR LUNATICS

  WHEN AND WHERE —

  DEAR C,

  Do you give a shit where I am? Where I’ve been? There’s someplace you’d rather hear of? Try this. A stone-and-mortar paradise, Île Saint-Louis. Like a squat little fortress in the middle of the Seine, strands of river for a moat. Forget lily pads and the Loire, forget the rue de Turenne — this was the best place left to manage my affairs when affairs with Monsieur turned dangerous. The cobbled shade of Quai de Bourbon, piss in the gutters. A shuttered flat with two rooms at street level, by the seedy embankment. This was my château, in the heart of Paris. Cheap rent, the river’s rushing all the music a woman needed. And cats, a pride of them. Two scraggly toms, Cléome and Josephine, and a batch of kittens named after poets (a nod to Paul), Rimbaud, Rossetti, Baudelaire, Verlaine … Sentinels. All mine.