The Queen of the Night

by Alexander Chee

  To eat, I went to the Bois with Aristafeo and the Lords of the Lower Gardens, and watched them as they hunted for animals while I collected chestnuts for roasting later. Soon I also gathered the leaves, and sometimes pieces of bark, to make soup. I did this until the trees were all bare, stripped from root to just above where the tallest man could reach.

  The walking stick was for disciplining Gaston and Frédéric. Aristafeo let them range over the Bois, where as late as November they found rabbits and rats and sometimes a cat. We let them eat first, and then they would hunt for us.

  To be so hungry again, hungrier than I’d ever known as winter began, I felt with certainty that my death was coming for me; soon I’d be reunited with my family, called before the Lord; for all of my sins, my lies, my selfishness, and my lust, now I would finally be caught.

  And each time I arrived at this conclusion, I put it out of my head until it became a trail I walked regularly in my thoughts, from waking to the hunger, from the remembering to the forgetting.

  §

  To stay sane as best we could, we adopted a schedule to which we stuck regularly. He would wake first and start a fire for tea—coffee was no longer available. When I woke, the tea kept hunger at bay for a time, and we would then rehearse. I would do my warm-ups first, my Viardot-García scales, at the piano, and then he would do his own warm-ups and play, and then in the late morning we would rehearse together. We would break to hunt for our luncheon, and then we would return, and then I might read, or he would, with more tea to keep us from hunger, and then it would be time for whatever supper we could muster. Sometimes he taught me Spanish, and more and more we drank wine in place of tea, which also kept the hunger at bay and cast a lightly drowsy light in which it was easier to bear the day. But he never took a single visitor, he seemed to have no friends to speak of, and he did not seek out friends at their homes. We had no society except each other and the dogs. We made love still, but I no longer made a display of my body; it was too cold and I was too thin. I wanted his last memory of me to be one of a plumper breast, such as it had ever been.

  I no longer asked when we would leave.

  Time, for that matter, seemed to have stopped altogether, each day the same until some new shortage would occur, and soon after the streets would fill with hearses and coffins as whoever could not survive this newest famine died.

  One afternoon, after we returned to the Marais with a few thin rabbits the dogs caught for us and he had skinned them in the kitchen and I had stirred the fire back to life and set chestnuts to roast, he appeared in the kitchen’s door. He had asked if he should save the blood for blood sausage, which I did not know how to make, and this surprised him some. That is not the woman I am, I said, and he laughed.

  When the rabbits had finished stewing and the chestnuts were done, I left the kitchen to find him. He sat staring into a glass of red wine, and without looking up, he poured another for me.

  These rabbits I watched stew, they were rare, I knew it. I wished I knew how to make the blood sausage.

  Have you never seen him, then? Aristafeo asked me, and I knew without his saying who he meant.

  No, I said.

  Then the dogs’ work is done, he said.

  I nodded dumbly.

  There aren’t even rats anymore. The dogs will be taken from me soon, I think, he said. I would prefer they die at my hands.

  He had never once spoken this way of them. What do you say? he asked.

  I couldn’t say, I replied, and shrugged. I had never loved them, but I knew he had—I knew he did not say this lightly. I knew he had become proud of the way he’d never eaten them. But we risked becoming weaker than those who had eaten their dogs already and becoming prey to them.

  Game is better than carrion, he finally said. It is Christmas in a few days. I’ll do it before then.

  I laughed to think of dogs for Christmas.

  We’ll feast, he said, and pray for an end to the Siege. Though it has brought at least one gift.

  I watched him, expectant.

  Is it that the Siege has set you free, then? he said.

  It may be.

  It was good of the Germans to do this for you, then. He looked up at me and raised his glass. Cheers to them. From his pocket, he removed a gold ring with a large green stone, and then he went to his knee.

  This ring belonged to my mother, he said. A gift from her for my future bride. It is Roman, very ancient, in her family for generations.

  I took it from him and held it up, turning it over in my hand. The ring looked like something that had fallen out of one of the paintings in the Tuileries. It did not fit on any of my fingers, though, and it began to slide off. I held the hand up and examined the beautiful color of the stone in the light.

  Will you be my wife? he asked.

  If I was to be married, it would be like this. I drew my hand across his face so the ring grazed his cheek.

  Yes, I said. I was always yours, but, yes, I will be yours.

  §

  At the end of the third week, Paris was shelled for three days straight. Aristafeo’s house in the Marais was unhurt.

  Parisians, starving and bored by the long siege, had taken to watching the shells land as a sport, with picnics of only wine; while lacking for food, we did not lack for drink. We were told to keep buckets of water by the door in case of fire and to leave our doors unlocked in case a passerby required shelter from a shell.

  Occasionally, they exploded and there was terrible death, but then also came children anxious to collect the fragments, which they hoped to sell as souvenirs. To whom I did not know.

  I remember a woman who had died in the shelling. Her body stayed for nearly a week; no one dared or cared to move her. If you did not look closely, she seemed to be a peddler’s bundle. I thought to try to remove her, but I did not know where to bring her or whom to call on to remove her body.

  When she was finally removed, I was almost as afraid as when she was there.

  I remember a man passed me on the street, moving with an eerie quiet. Only as he passed me did I notice he was covered in blood, smeared all across him. He carried against his chest a bundle soaked in blood and filthy. He had torn his sleeve to tie it up.

  I thought to ask if he needed help, but he did not ask for any. He moved quietly instead, intent. I did not exist to him. He was trying to go unnoticed, I think, or he had gone mad. I let him go by.

  His package, I had noticed, was the exact size and shape of someone’s head.

  When news of the armistice came, we were initially relieved for there were not even chestnuts now in the Bois, much less anything that fed on the chestnuts, and Aristafeo had pledged to me again that he could eat his dogs if needed.

  Many had been less scrupulous than he.

  You stood before a tree and had to decide what of it could be eaten and what used to heat your house.

  And yet, hungry as we were, we did not know the hunger to come.

  Six

  THE PRUSSIANS MARCHED into Paris in a parade after the armistice was signed—a parade that was among the conditions of the treaty, culminating with a coronation of the German Emperor at Versailles. From the papers, we knew the German Emperor had already been declared Emperor at Versailles—done to demoralize Paris—but now it seemed he wanted to sit there and have the crown dropped onto his head while surrounded by all those mirrors.

  First, however, we were to endure the soldiers at their victory feast in our midst.

  These well-fed German soldiers marched in orderly rows onto the Champs-élysées, and I looked to see if the tenor was among them. There was the possibility he had been conscripted; I knew from him that all German men were forced to enlist. But while many of the soldiers looked to have been the tenor’s brothers, I did not see him.

  Despite the talk of ambushing them or burning them with Greek fire, in the end our conquerors went unharmed, free to enjoy the bistros, newly stocked by the “Refurbishment,” as the return of food and dri
nk was called, and to drink to their content, even singing songs.

  Some were very good singers.

  Some became lost in the Bois de Boulogne and had to ask for directions from passersby.

  Aristafeo and I enjoyed the parade from a table at a café, seated with some bread and wine. We had been alone together so long, it had seemed as if we might be the only people left alive and, instead, here we were in a crowd. I was painfully aware on seeing the soldiers of how thin I was and noticed how they paid me no mind. I must look like a ghost, I thought, and was relieved there were at least no German women for Aristafeo to compare me to; the only beauties in sight were the soldiers.

  I was watching the filles en carte entertaining the Prussians in the café where we were. When the soldiers were gone, men pulled these women into the street, shouting at them, insulting them. They tore their clothes off and shouted at them some more as they sobbed, holding the shreds of their clothes over their dirty ribs in shame.

  Let’s go, I said to Aristafeo, as it began.

  I was shaken; it could as easily have been me. I wondered where it would end. They may as well have burned the tables where the soldiers sat, the bars where they drank, the streets where they walked, even Versailles.

  When the new government of the Third Republic demanded that all back rent and taxes owed from the time of the Siege were due to be paid within two days, only the butcher who had sold the meat from the animals of the zoo had anything with which to pay—the butcher and the coquettes. Most had nothing, unable to make a living for half the year.

  There was a revolt. The new government troops were evicted, their weapons confiscated, and the Commune of Paris was declared. And as costly as food was during even the Refurbishment, months later, as I waited out the Commune, I would think those prices bargains.

  §

  The moment to leave, between the armistice and the Commune, came and went with such suddenness that only after the Commune began did I understand we should have left then. Instead, Aristafeo and I continued as we had in his house in the Marais, living as husband and wife. I wore his ring on a leather strap at my throat, where it would not fall off. He played his piano and I sang, and we returned to drinking wine to stave off hunger once the shortages began again.

  There had still never been even one sign of the tenor, and perhaps it was all of the wine, or the hunger, but I came to believe at times that he’d been killed in the war and that I was, as Aristafeo had said, free at last. My curiosity to know the truth got the better of me, however, and one day in March I returned to the apartment on the avenue de l’Opéra to see what was there that I might take—and see if there was even one clue as to his existence.

  From the street there was no sign of looting, just closed shutters, and there was no sound when I slid the key in the door and turned it. I was greeted by the sight of muslin covers again on all of the furniture. Dust and soot feathered the floors. A man’s footprints made a path.

  I followed them. They led me into the music room, where, on the shrouded piano, sat a handkerchief tied over a letter. I opened it and read the letter.

  Comprimaria,

  I write knowing there is every chance you are dead and will never see this. Or that if you are alive, you are with your accompanist, and that either way you will never return. I write on the chance that you miss me and have come here, hoping to be forgiven for whatever has befallen you. We have been separated and returned to each other too many times before this for me to believe you are truly gone.

  If you do read this, and you would be reunited with me again, you must make arrangements to leave at once. The Commune will not last. I was, of course, called off to war and returned with the armistice, hoping to find some sign you had survived, but found nothing. I returned once more through enemy lines to find you again, and as I have not found you, I will leave you with an escape plan: There are mail balloons released from the roof of the Paris Opera. You must hide in one and leave by no later than the first week in April if you can. Do not warn the accompanist or anyone else—I will be unable to protect you then.

  The Versaillaise government has struck a deal with our side to retake Paris, and when this happens, all of the Communards will be killed. There can be no mercy. I had hoped to take you myself; this was my single chance to return once the Commune began.

  When you decide on the date you will leave, take an advertisement in the London Times, addressed to one André Lavertujon, and with the date on which you will leave, the numbers only, in a row. Underneath this letter are some francs for you to pay for it. In this way I will know to expect you. Show this handkerchief with my family crest to the mail agent, who is an agent of ours and knows to watch for you—that will admit you to the balloon. Tie it then to the riggings.

  I love you, my Falcon. Come to me if you are alive; I will protect you.

  I remain,

  Your comprimario

  His footprints led throughout the rest of apartment, and I followed them—to the closets, where my clothes still hung; the empty larder; the empty servants’ rooms. He had searched for me in case I hid here. As I went, I looked for any food I could find and found nothing. There was at least the gin I’d missed, and I took it, with two of the most sensible dresses.

  Before this, when he said he loved me, it meant nothing to me. Now I knew love. Had he never? His belief that he loved me, this was the belief of a madman. How could he? I wondered. How could he still want me? I thought of Euphrosyne’s assurance the day he bought my contract, that he would tire of me. If I ever saw her again, I told myself I would have to tell her, no, he never tired of me, not once. All those days we thought we wanted a constant lover. What I would give for him to be a lover who would tire of me.

  I had been a fool to stay, and now we would die.

  §

  As I returned to Aristafeo’s house, I passed a doorway I had only ever seen closed. Today the doors were open.

  The courtyard was empty and the wings to either side seemed abandoned. A bronze plaque still sat atop the center of the door. MAISON EUGÈNE NAPOLéON, FONDéE EN 1856, PAR SA MAJESTé L’IMPéRATRICE.

  A charity, apparently, named in honor of her son, the Prince.

  I walked to the door and then did not go in.

  Instead, I walked back to the street, to where I’d turned the wrong way, and went to Aristafeo’s house.

  The back wall was shared, it was clear.

  She was never here, he’d said.

  All of the ways I’d imagined the Empress kept him—in that secret dungeon below Compiègne, in some gilded cage, on a leash—I had not imagined anything like this, an office that she would visit regularly so as to look like a woman of good works and then to pass through the back wall into his house. Or he, through the wall to her.

  Aristafeo hidden just under the surface of her life.

  This house, it was an Empress’s théâtre du désir. As clearly as if Odile herself had set it up for Eugénie.

  I found Aristafeo in a remarkably good mood, at his piano. I showed him first the letter from the tenor and then the handkerchief.

  He read the letter through and grimaced at the end.

  Do you think he is having you watched?

  Perhaps he was always having me watched, I said, as I walked to the back wall where it adjoined the building behind. It would not be a servant’s door, it seemed to me. Or would it? Perhaps it would be disguised as one. Or it would require some secret switch, some ordinary item, which, when moved, would unlatch it.

  How to feel, then? I wondered. It seemed he had lied to me about her being there, this was clear; but the reason was not, not entirely, except I knew well you only lied to keep a secret if it mattered.

  Was this why we could never leave? Was there some vigil she had required of him, or someone else had required for her, some invisible hand that kept him here, like my own? Or was the vigil all his own?

  §

  That night I woke from my sleep and left his bed. I went downs
tairs.

  Along the back wall were his study, a butler’s kitchen, and a dusty, empty butler’s quarters. I traced out the butler’s room then the kitchen to no avail. His study seemed likely to be also possibly protected in some way; he had by no means confided in me despite our time together.

  It was a handsome study, fit for a gentleman, I thought with some pride.

  After some reluctance, I lifted books from shelves, picked up lamps and candelabra. I was as quiet as I could be.

  I stood at last before the musket and the sword in the middle of the wall. I had never seen him take either down or clean them, not once in the time I’d been there.

  I reached out and lifted the musket up.

  The mechanisms of the door opened smoothly with almost no noise at all. So quiet, in fact, the loudest noise was my gasp.

  Her scent, which I remembered, was still in these rooms. The door opened into a windowless suite with a bedchamber, a salle de bain, and a sitting room. In the bedroom was a handsomely appointed bed done in her red and gold, gold candlesticks, an armoire, no doubt where she could hang her dress. On opening it, I saw one of her dressing gowns. I wondered how many times I had sent a dress up for her before she had come here to visit her charity for the afternoon.

  I saw him undressing her, dressing her again, and remembered how well he undressed me; he had practice. As many times as I had tied her corset, his hands had often undone my work.

  I sat down on the bed.

  The rubies and diamonds in the two bracelets on the side table glowed softly in the light of my taper. They lay one on top of the other. Two of the stones in the one had been pried out. I remembered them from Compiègne when they were whole. They were gifts from the Princess Metternich. The Empress had often held her arm out, admiring them before setting off to dinner.