These Good Hands

by Carol Bruneau

  ***

  BLOT INSTALLED THIRTEEN of my pieces. Ever kind and generous, he fronted funds for the opening, for my proper attire. More flaming crimson to accentuate my face powdered a perfect white, one way of hiding my age. Alas, none of this compensated for my upstaging by a German — a German! Kitschy painters of sublime mountains and waterfalls! — whose sculpture sucked up to “the great” Monsieur’s.

  Hardly the show’s anchor, I was a tugboat towing a barge. Called away on business, our brother couldn’t come. The hoi polloi attended, though. Champagne flowed. The rich riff-raff, Monsieur’s circle, milled about ignoring me. Dripping with furs, ladies in lavender and mole-coloured silk dangled from the arms of men cowed by cows, ogling the German’s overripe nymphs. You’d think they’d never seen tits before! Such stagey sentimentality surrounding the swirling grace of my Waltz. And so like men — well, men like this — to see no farther than the eyes of their trouser-snakes. Even Paul, for all his piety, is guilty of this.

  The one exception, perhaps, is Blot. When the last of the air-kissers left, Blot, kind Blot, tried to put me in a cab. It was December, you see, and cold and raining, and in such rainy cold and darkness Paris cannot be crueller.

  I chose to walk, though, and walked and walked till the powder streaked from my face.

  After two weeks not a single piece of mine had sold. At such times, let me tell you, a thick white masque is useful, leaving just the eyes to bare your feelings. As usual, Criteur was right. I needed to mix and mingle with people who spoke with their pocketbooks, and to steer clear of tyre-kickers, those who gawked but never bought. He was good at plucking up my courage with his humour. Maybe he got it from you. But humour only goes so far.

  The crickets kept chirping, notice after notice in the papers linking my work with Monsieur’s, write-up after write-up calling me his pupil. Would I never graduate? The right circles orbited him like the Earth orbited the sun, and unless I did too, their favour couldn’t be curried.

  All this while he dumped more and more of his kitsch on the world, blinding the public to all efforts but his. He had them hoodwinked, all right. His reach was as noxious, no, deadly, as sewer gas.

  Fighting this battle, I listened to you. Think small, you said. On a child’s scale. A child’s level. All right, then. I would change my style, give the world what I thought it wanted. The intricate charm of tiny details. Small things, playful things, in a way. Table decorations. I worked these pieces in onyx and coloured marble, using little blocks I could afford. Not that they didn’t demand full attention. It takes an eternity of days, weeks, to work in such perspective. As exacting as doing surgery on a squirrel, or a mouse.

  Perhaps I had our Maman more in mind than you, as I carved a little woman dreaming by a hearth, lost in thought. A clutch of gossips, monkey faces all agog, sitting in the curl of a wave ready to swamp them.

  Blot showed the pieces in his gallery. Admiring them, the odd old bat would come up and say, “Someday I’m going to take up sculpting, or painting, or writing,” and I would say, “Yes, and I’ll build a tower twice Eiffel’s height,” which made Blot smile.

  Yet the crickets harangued: “Parlour ornaments! The pupil is making parlour ornaments!”

  “Answer them with what you do,” urged Blot, so curiously loyal. A gift unused becomes a torment, he said. Hope against hope, he succeeded in winning commissions for me, and even the nasty government agent was finally persuaded to make a purchase. Not of your piece, which was the one he had his eye on.

  Of course Blot wanted to know, “What is this work that Sylvestre’s so fixed on?”

  I shrugged off his question, sure that my break with Monsieur made Maman’s forgiveness forthcoming. It had to be — only a matter of time before she would see the foolishness of the rift between us and want it mended.

  It’s all about that, isn’t it? The elder forgiving the younger. Though in fairness, sometimes it must be the other way around.

  “Good things come to those who wait,” wrote Paul in a letter from China.

  But by then I was tired, so tired.

  My praticien nagged, “You’re letting your guard down! You’ll regret it! Just because Monsieur is out of sight doesn’t mean he’s out of your hair. Better be safe than sorry. Keep your eyes open. Don’t think his evil desists.”

  And, no word of a lie, a note ran in the papers that the Master had returned — was he bored with country life and hungry for the city? He’d found himself a mansion, formerly a convent, not far from the golden dome of Invalides — Napoleon’s tomb, how fitting. Soon, too soon, he had a show, and at Criteur’s urging, against every intuition, every ounce of my own better judgment, I went to see it.

  Better the devil you know than the one you don’t. I wasn’t afraid to face him.

  The Great One’s secretary, a tubercular-looking youth, let me in. Dressed in my finery, I stole across the foyer’s creaky parquet and was directed upstairs. I barely knew myself in the gilded mirrors, one above each of the green marble mantelpieces in three huge drafty rooms. Rooms filled with statues thrown up onto worktables, travesties all, but for my bronze bust of him.

  How I wish I could’ve fit it under my coat, or heaved it through a window!

  But this was just the warm-up to the ugliest riff on religion imaginable — the hideous proof of his thievery, all the more grotesque because it was beautiful. Alas, C, it was. Bathed in the pure light of the window, a sacrament made sacrilegious, it comprised two hands. Two right hands, my hands, carved of white marble, with a delicacy that I alone, in this time, in this place, could have wrought. Reaching upwards, they were poised as dancers, a cathedral’s stillness contained between them.

  How many ways, C, can the heart break? And broken, how is it ever repaired?

  The Ark of the Covenant, the entitled had entitled it. Boasting the length, depth and breadth of my betrayal, it proclaimed the extent of his deceit. A covenant exalting one at the ruin of another.

  You’d have gone down kicking and screaming, and thrown a tantrum fit to rattle windowpanes and shake dust from the ceilings above and below.

  I tried to control my distress.

  Milling about below, the secretary offered small talk. He said he was a poet — had our brother heard of him? And was I quite all right?

  “No, and no.”

  He trailed me to the threshold, held the door. Gathering my wits, I asked him to find his Master. “If you would be so kind, I wish to speak to Monsieur.”

  “He’s not here.” A lie, I’m quite certain.

  “You say your name is Rilke? Well. I’ll remember you to my brother.”

  The one and only thing I’ll say for maturity, C, is that it brings composure.

  ***

  I SAW MORE plainly Monsieur took any chance to steal my work — and in his grasping pursuit, what was to stop him from going farther? What was to stop him if my life got in the way? You didn’t have to warn me. I saw the threats, now, in shadows passing by the shutters. In strangers lurking outside in the street. My flat became my fortress. It wasn’t safe to go out. I barred windows and doors, blocking them with whatever furniture I hadn’t bartered for materials.

  Twice Sylvestre came knocking. I yelled till he went away, “Give me 10,000 francs. Twenty thousand! Then we’ll talk.” Our beautiful, unfinished Maman et Enfant was tucked safely in the wardrobe, or so I thought.

  Blot came by, shouting through the window, proposing more shows. You might have let him in. I wanted to, desperately, but couldn’t. “If Monsieur’s circle sees that one can slip inside, who knows but they’ll find a way, too,” I whispered to you, wherever you were, and to Blot, too, through the keyhole.

  Good man that he is, or was, he paid a small boy in the courtyard to bring me food. I heard him arranging it. The boy left bread on the doorstep, which I retrieved in the dark of night, heaving aside my heaviest work to open the door wide enough to thrust out my hand. Who knew but the evil one and his gang weren’t waiting with
an axe!

  Stepping outside was risking life and limb.

  You of all people cannot imagine the terror of being under such surveillance. Knowing your every move — each blink of an eye! — is being noted, recorded. You have no idea how fear reduces hunger to a twinge and makes the smell of cat pee pleasant. The smell of safety, it is, in the closeness of two small rooms. A queendom. If only my cats had been lions, or Dobermans. But never did I love them more, C. In your absence, in this house-arrest-for-myown-protection, they alone were solid company.

  Don’t be a stranger. Why don’t you visit? I wrote our brother, knowing perfectly well that he was far away and couldn’t.

  Finally, sick of waiting, sick of hanging on forever to our conciliatory piece, which, stored as it was, might any day crumble — victim of dryness, dampness, cramping and dirt, if the government agent didn’t seize it first — I wrote to Maman herself. A kindly note on a scrap of wallpaper, from a ready supply peeling from the walls. I mentioned none of my trials, said how I missed her, how her silence pained me. Circumstances meant I couldn’t get out — my cats needed me here at home — but I would be more than happy to entertain her.

  Such is the life of a prisoner, practice for later, I guess.

  If only the police could’ve been called to help. But it was useless, useless, seeking their aid. With everyone in his thrall, Monsieur had these other authorities under his thumb too.

  When Maman did not reply, I glimpsed the fullness of it: Monsieur had bamboozled her too. All but Papa and our brother were swayed by the lies he spread to turn Paris against me, and the world. And you.

  Besides my cats, the sounds of the river beyond my shutters kept me company. When spring’s restless glimmer crept through the slats, I heard Debussy in thawing notes, ice melting in the gutters. Then summer’s hazy bird-tones, and fall’s rustling ones. But all too soon winter came creaking back, hunger holding me in its grip.

  And then the river betrayed me.

  I knew something was afoot when the shearing roar of barges ceased and a rushing, shushing noise replaced it, forcing me to peek outside. Sludgy water geysered and roiled from grates, rubbing the bridges’ underbellies, one vast swollen surface boiling over the embankment and shortening trees. Apocalyptic, it was. A flood with the power to tear my island from its footings and sweep it downstream, like the château in my old dream being washed away in a tangle of lilies.

  Another tribulation sent to plague me: the work of Monsieur? It was tempting to think so. The smell of shit was the only sign of anyone else alive, living. The lights died, left me to huddle in darkness, the days and nights a dingy stream mimicking the floodwaters. Higher and higher they crept, till they lapped at the doorsill. When the water slid in and pooled round my bed, stranding me there, the cats clawed their way to the top of the wardrobe, where, inside, our precious, faceless mother-and-child was only barely spared its reach. I waded through the mess to retrieve it, a rigid spectre wrapped in its rug. Brought it into my bed — and none too soon.

  There came the shouts of paddlers, the sound of knocking oars, laughter. Fists pounded the door and hideous shouts poured in. “Open up! We need to take you to safety!”

  We know of the evil that follows disasters. Looting, pillaging. Criminals robbing the stricken. Monsieur’s powers fell short of visiting catastrophe on a city. But there was no catastrophe he wouldn’t exploit to his benefit. Doubtless the rescuers were Monsieur’s thugs, probably aided by Sylvestre, come to rob me. My only possessions worth stealing were my works.

  Alone, friendless, I hid under the covers, playing dead, with your statue in my arms. Have patience, our brother once said. And so I did. Eventually the thugs went away, and the waters receded.

  Criteur appeared. He mentioned the folly of living in dread, said I was foolish to think I could keep on resisting. There remained only one way to keep thieves from my work. “‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’” he mimicked Paul. “Too bad it’s come to this. But you must take matters into your own hands. What recourse have you? If God the father could destroy his son.”

  His shrug left me baffled, then, frankly, aghast. But he was right. So much for my brilliant career. Our brilliant career.

  “Brilliant, yes,” he agreed, “but on whose terms?” Testing me, always testing me — the way you did and keep doing. “Nature’s way,” he called it: the creator creates, the destroyer destroys. “The power’s in her hands, or should be.”

  Did I hear you somewhere, cheering?

  ***

  PAUL APPEARED, TO drive the point home. He’d been posted to Frankfurt, considerably closer than China. His visit was a complete surprise, and only his dogged knocking verified his identity. I greeted him with bouquets of kisses, but he didn’t seem pleased to see me, and avoided my eyes as if I were someone other than myself.

  “Look at you, how fat you’ve grown,” he said, out of sorts. “Your dress, your hair. Mon Dieu.” His criticisms could’ve been Maman’s. Did he mean to be cruel and insulting? His eyes were blank as he swatted Baudelaire from the table. He glanced about, maybe in search of the broken mirror I’d discarded, no longer needing it after Perseus. “Can you not see yourself? You can’t afford soap?”

  To soothe him I tried to stroke his forehead, his ebbing hair. He caught my hand, gripped it too tightly.

  “Are you so unhappy, mon petit? Your life is full, yet you have time to fuss and primp?” How to explain that letting go was my shield, my cross, my sword — armour and armament against interlopers? “How do you know this isn’t my penance? For dancing with the devil?” Laughing, I attempted a pirouette. “I wear them, you see? The sins of his kisses, his touch.” It was a concession to Paul’s rightness, purely to amuse him.

  Yet he seemed incensed. “You live like an animal. How can you stand yourself?” In a trembling voice he accused me of self-sabotage — a term that conjures intrigue, showing how deeply he’d fallen, too deep for his own good, into the diplomatic corps. “No wonder Maman refuses to come. Seeing how you’ve let yourself go.”

  “Not for a lack of eating, you think? Hugeness of body, hugeness of name, what difference.” He’d wounded me, mentioning Maman this way, and I quietly suggested he leave.

  He mocked my “devotion to filth.”

  “Think of it as a reverse baptism, mon petit. Rather than washing away sins I’m accumulating them. Layers of protection.”

  But his words had torn a strip off, if not torn away the top one. Was I called to be a snake shedding its skin, losing innards along with it? The only proof that I wasn’t loosed from Medusa’s coiffure were the dusty footprints I made across the floor after he left, when I thought I heard you knocking.

  Ever yours. X

  25

  WITH LOYALTY WILL I ENDEAVOUR TO AID THE PHYSICIAN …

  MONTDEVERGUES ASYLUM

  30 SEPTEMBER 1943

  04H20

  Good god, once again I’m wide awake. The nonsense that takes over the mind in the dark! I am or should be grateful it’s just in the wee hours these ideas come knocking. How’s a sane person to treat and dispose of them? A Report on Obsessive Speculative Thinking, to be burned at first light? Worth a try, maybe.

  Speculation #1: Once upon a time, a baby boy was adopted by Jews, a lovely young Hasidic couple. No debate over circumcision, but they fought over a name — David? Micah? Aaron? — and finally picked Moses. The child liked to tug on the husband’s beard and sideburns. When he cried, though the wife had no milk she held him to her breast anyway.

  Speculation #2: When the boy started school, he learned the Hebrew alphabet. He grew up preferring numbers to letters.

  Speculation #3: A huge, happy family with many cousins, aunts and uncles attended his bar mitzvah. The rite of passage made for a good party.

  Speculation #4: When he was snatched from his desk at school, the boy’s eyes looked very much like mine when I was sixteen. Unlike me, he was told he was useful for things more important than studying and w
as loaded into a cattle car with his classmates. A complete dead end, this line of thinking. Here’s a better one, perhaps.

  Speculation #5: The boy died hours after birth and was buried in a tiny coffin, forget-me-nots growing on his grave. A tidier ending, far less troubling. Though it doesn’t hurt to imagine things, does it, as long as one keeps both feet on the ground?

  Speculation #6: The boy was raised by a wealthy Parisian couple with three other sons and three daughters, say — enough siblings that he always had company — and was loved and schooled as their own. He excelled in mathematics and science, and aced the Sorbonne’s entrance exams, where he planned to study medicine or law or engineering. His brilliant future was assured, until he was shot at in the street and put on a train — a Gentile, his foreskin intact, at least, but —

  Speculation #7: A handsome, strapping young man, the boy kissed his mother goodbye at the train station — with more affection than I kissed the nuns, but this goes without saying — and promised to send a telegram the instant his ship docked in North America. An unsinkable ship protected by a convoy of unsinkable ships, as far the mother knew. If not for writing all of this down, my head would explode, especially with the day ahead promising to be a little out of the ordinary. As if I need it. The distance from speculation to wishful thinking isn’t always wide enough.

  Speculation #8: A healthy sixteen-year-old heart pumps welloxygenated blood with optimal hemoglobin. The perfectly balanced functioning of a healthy, inquisitive brain exudes intelligence — and a natural, perhaps inescapable question, which arises repeatedly, of whether or not its owner is wellloved, well-schooled, well on the road to whatever brilliant future imaginable. Because something is missing, something as important, say, as a cardiac valve faulty since infancy and creating a kind of hole, no matter what nuns, peace-loving Jews, or rich Parisians have or haven’t told him about the person who conceived and gave birth to him.