Akin

by Emma Donoghue

  Zip it, he told her. You’re just a verbal algorithm.

  Joan wasn’t abashed. What are any of us but chemical algorithms, when we’re alive? Oxygen and hydrogen, stiffened by carbon. Some nitrogen, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, sulfur, sodium, chlorine, magnesium…molecules forming their lovely equations, temporarily following the rules for how to make a human.

  Noah was packing socks into shoes when Michael came out of the bathroom.

  “The chambermaids,” the boy reminded him.

  “Thanks for remembering.” He tucked a twenty-euro note under the clock radio. “I’d better give you a regular allowance once we’re back in New York.”

  Seconds passed.

  Noah kept packing. I can do this, Joan. At least, maybe I can. Very possibly. Worth a try. Isn’t an experiment always worth making?

  “Regular like how?” Michael asked.

  He still didn’t turn his head; this seemed easier without eye contact. “Well, it looks as if you might be staying with me for a while longer. Your aunt—Rosa left me a message—it turns out your aunt Grace can’t look after you right now.”

  No answer.

  Panic, Noah wondered? Grief? The final death of hope?

  “She and her girls have moved in with a new boyfriend, and I’m afraid there just isn’t room, for the time being.”

  “’Kay.”

  Was Michael unsurprised because his aunt was generally not to be counted on? Or because he expected all plans to fall through?

  “So I’ll be staying in your apartment?”

  “That’s right,” Noah told him.

  “How’ll I get to school?”

  “By subway.” He thought of the hour and seven minutes Google estimated it would take. Would Michael be allowed to stay in that school if he was living in Manhattan? “Or maybe you could switch to a different one.” He’d ask Vivienne’s advice. What better woman to instruct him on how a child could endure the impossible?

  “Who says I want a different school?”

  “Suit yourself. It’s mostly a distance issue.” Noah folded a shirt. “I suppose I could—we could think about moving, if you prefer.” The words squeezed out of his tight throat. “Closer to where your grandma’s was.”

  Michael said nothing.

  It struck Noah for the first time that he could sell the Manhattan apartment. It wasn’t as if he really cared about it anymore. And—a further shock, when he formulated this question—who but Michael would he be leaving it to, anyway?

  “We’d visit your mother every week or two,” he added. “Your Uncle Cody, as well. I could, ah, take you to your choir on Sundays.”

  Michael screwed up his nose.

  Was he doubting Noah’s promises?

  “Do I have to?”

  “Fine, no choir.”

  “How much allowance?”

  “As I said, TBD.”

  “And ‘a while longer,’ how long are we talking about?”

  “I really can’t say.” That came out too stiff.

  The boy’s mouth tightened. “So if it all goes south, like if I break your fancy-pants lounger, are you going to call Rosa and send my ass back?”

  “Why, are you planning to break my lounger?”

  A shrug. “Shit happens.”

  “Indeed it does. But all I meant by ‘a while longer’ was that your aunt’s circumstances might change.” Or a new lawyer might get Amber out early, though Noah mustn’t tantalize the boy with that slim possibility. “Also, let’s be realistic: old men shouldn’t make promises.”

  “Because you should be twenty years dead already.”

  Noah smiled.

  Michael corrected himself: “Twenty-one years, as of today.”

  “Better pack up now.”

  Noah quarantined his soiled, salvaged fedora in a plastic bag at the bottom of his carry-on; he’d have to see what a specialty dry cleaner could make of it. Whether he wore the hat again or not, he would hold on to it. Someday he’d pass it on to Michael along with Marc’s bionic hand. Such random objects, freighted with meanings; the stuff of dream analysis. The boy might fail or refuse to treasure them; sell them, mislay them, throw them away. All right. The matter—all matters—would be out of Noah’s hands. Which made him feel rather less sad than relieved.

  They still had a little time to kill. Browsing on Noah’s tablet, Michael beckoned him over. “Here, it’s your day.”

  Old black-and-white footage; it turned out to be an experimental silent short about Nice from 1930. Rich people were shown in a paradise of restaurants and balls while workers pruned their palm trees and scrubbed dogshit off the pavements. Carnation-pickers labored in the hills, and tourists tossed the same blooms in the Bataille des Fleurs… But the director couldn’t help relishing the beauty even as he denounced it, Noah noticed: a tiny plane landed on the glittering sea, and the elegant sails of a ship glided through the frame.

  He caught himself looking for his mother as the camera pushed through the crowds on the Prom; searching for a thirty-year-old Margot Personnet in every cloche-hatted chatterer or paper-reader. Crossed legs in ladylike stockings, bobbing to the unheard tune of a busker’s violin; could that possibly be her? 1930, so two more years before she’d marry Marc Selvaggio; eight more before she’d have a baby boy; more than a decade before she’d remake herself into Marie Zabel, to do the most important job of her life. Yes, even more important than being his mother.

  And who would Noah have been if he’d been a father, he found himself wondering? Softer than he was now, harder? Whatever he might manage to be to Michael Young, it was too late for faux-fatherhood; Noah wouldn’t even constitute a formative influence. But any port in a storm. Actually, no, Noah was more like a passeur hurrying a child to the border, to entrust him to stronger arms. Just don’t break anything.

  Now the camera was moving though the murky slum of the Vieille Ville, the odd sheet flapping from a washing line like a flag of surrender, and boys were playing something rapid and warlike with their hands. Memory stirred. “La Mourre,” Noah said, the phrase suddenly striking him as sounding like l’amour, love. “That’s what we called it. You had to guess what everyone’s fingers would add up to.”

  “Oh yeah—Odds and Evens.”

  “You play it?” He was charmed by the notion of the game’s survival.

  “Nah, it’s for kids,” Michael said with contempt. “These days, at school, we’re all about Ballgazing.”

  “All about what?”

  “You make a circle”—Michael put his thumb and index finger together in the OK sign—“and hold it low, like below your waist. If you catch anyone looking at the circle, you say ‘Ballgazer!’ and whack him on the arm.”

  “That’s the most ridiculous excuse for hitting someone I ever heard.”

  Michael shrugged. “He shouldn’t be looking at your junk.”

  “But you’re trying to get him to do exactly that!” Noah didn’t point out how homoerotic the whole thing sounded, too.

  “That’s the game, dude.”

  The footage had run out without Noah’s noticing. He googled the director. Jean Vigo, who turned out to have shot À Propos de Nice on scraps of film filched from his employer, before he’d died of TB at twenty-nine. Here was his work, still flickering away online, eighty years after his death.

  What would be left of Noah in eighty years? Not even that much. Only any individual’s short, incalculable tally.

  Waiting for the taxi outside the Excelsior, he wouldn’t turn his head to give the hotel’s doors one last look.

  He was only two puffs into his cigarette when it hit him that he’d have to give up the goddamn things. The facts were clear: if he was taking on this temporary guardianship for the foreseeable future, the least he could do was stay upright and functional. He had skin in the game now. (Which reminded him of the raggedy mole on his forearm; all right, he’d have the thing cut out, just in case.) If in the next year or two Noah happened to be felled by natural causes, he
wouldn’t blame himself. But if it was by one of the innumerable problems that could be blamed on lifestyle factors such as smoking up to seven cigarettes a day? Then he’d feel like a criminal fool for having accepted this challenge, but loused it up for want of a little self-discipline. Like ballsing up an experiment by knocking over a beaker, or bleaching a whole roll of shots by leaning against the light switch.

  “Why are you looking so sour?” Michael wanted to know.

  “That was my last cigarette.” Rash to boast before Noah had achieved even a single day off nicotine, but saying it aloud committed him; he’d be too ashamed to go back on his word now.

  “I’ll believe that when I see it.”

  “Oh, you’ll see it,” Noah answered in an equally menacing voice.

  This taxi had to be theirs.

  “Par le tunnel ou la Prom, Monsieur?” the driver asked as they climbed in.

  By the Prom, please. Taxis here cost so much, Noah decided to think of the ride as a tour with a private chauffeur, and pretended this was Grace Kelly beside him rather than a kid picking wax out of his ear.

  “An unaffected smile is permitted.” At seventy-nine it was imperative to be a realist, but at eighty it was time to be an optimist. The cab rolled along the Promenade des Anglais, where generation after generation of the frail had strolled, faces up to the sun in hope of lasting just a little longer. One more sip of this improbable phenomenon: life.

  While they were stalled in traffic, Noah began to fret about what awaited him—them—in New York. Decisions, disruptions. You’re going to have to help me with the boy.

  Joan laughed a little. Hadn’t she helped him with everything else life had thrown at them? Even her cancer, her old adversary, their only home-wrecker. We had almost forty years. Put another way, not quite forty. Not enough, never enough. But still.

  “Fake,” Michael muttered. “Total fake.”

  Noah craned to see out the window. In a city with many murals of palm trees, this one was smarter: it showed a man up a ladder, painting three palm trees. “No, that did trick your eye, actually. One of those trees is real.”

  “No way!”

  “The palm on the left, it’s growing in front of the wall.”

  Michael looked out the back of the taxi in chagrin.

  They drove on, past the children’s hospital. This was the stretch driven by the terrorist in the white truck, Noah remembered. Strange, how all killing fields eventually took on a benign look, especially on a sunny morning when teenagers were walking along licking ice cream.

  Beside him, Michael was playing Twenty Questions now. “‘Can you lie on it?’” he muttered. “No. ‘Do you use it at work?’ Maybe.”

  Nothing in the seat back for Noah to read except that glossy magazine, Plaisirs d’Azur. One article claimed the Bay of Angels was named for the requin-ange once so populous there, a small member of the shark family with rear fins that looked slightly like wings. But Noah preferred the story of the angels blowing Sainte Réparate’s raft across the Mediterranean. Not able to perform anything as impressive as resurrection, only to keep the gulls from pecking out the girl’s dead eyes, because angels were no more powerful in their sorrow than mortal mourners.

  “‘Can it fit in an envelope?’ No,” Michael told the ball. “‘Could you balance it on one finger?’ Yes. ‘Could it exist in outer space?’ How the fuck should I know?”

  Noah would probably need a policy on Michael’s language now; a program of bribery, maybe. Also screen time, and diet. These questions were waiting for them, the minute they got off the plane.

  But really all Noah was attempting to do was fill a gap; throw his ungainly self down so the kid could cross over this abyss. Weren’t all of us bridges for each other, one way or another? Just a few years, fingers crossed, till Amber got out of prison. It wasn’t a matter of Noah planting any olive trees, at this point, just watering one sapling, attempting to shield it from hard winds.

  And then it struck him that it was really the other way around. This boy was saving Noah. Rescuing him from the trap of habit, the bleak tedium of counting down the years of his retirement. Michael was the little ark, crazily bobbing, in which one lucky old man could go voyaging.

  “‘Did it exist a hundred years ago?’ Maybe,” the boy said, pressing buttons.

  Noah got out his mother’s envelope of pictures, a history in fragments. Margot had averted her face from her own lens, but jotted MZ on the back of the print to record who she’d been. Likewise, her comrades. The bell tower to mark the spot where she’d been charged with her task. The doomed children carrying their cases, and one smiling one. The tree whose roots had held secrets. The hotel where perhaps she’d broken and spilled them. (Would Noah ever know for sure?)

  The only picture that still baffled him was the street scene with the bicycle, the parked car, the seagull. What had Noah missed? An empty street. Nothing was going on here. A moment in between; a gap in time.

  Unless that was the whole point? Perhaps before or even during those chaotic years of occupation, Margot had caught a split second when nothing had been happening. How unbearably sweet she must have found this ordinariness, afterward. Cars drove, people promenaded, leaves blew. One of those moments that didn’t usually make it into the record; a respite from history. No tanks rumbling by, no soldiers marching, no feet fleeing, no truck accelerating, no pavement exploding, no blood. Undisturbed brick, stone, air. A chance to catch your breath.

  “‘Could you break it?’ Hell yes,” Michael told his machine.

  Noah was unlikely to find any more hard evidence about his mother’s war. He supposed it was always that way with the dead; they slid away before we knew enough to ask them the right questions. All we could do was remember them, as much as we could remember of them, whether it was accurate or not. Walk the same streets that they’d walked; take our turn.

  Michael let out a yawn and let his head roll on the back of their seat till it almost rested—no, did rest, tentatively—on Noah’s shoulder.

  Noah tipped his own head that way till it leaned lightly on Michael’s warm one. He shut his eyes and said, Merci, merci, mille mercis.

  One of the unnamed children hidden around Nice by Yvonne Dandoy Rocques (1912–2002) working with Bishop Paul Rémond, donated by her to the Yad Vashem Archive Collection, M 31.2/6954

  Acknowledgments

  Père Sonne and his family are my invention, though I’ve drawn on the careers and work of many European photographers. Margot is in small part my homage to Marguerite Matisse Duthuit, daughter, model, and right-hand woman to the painter; the story of her extraordinary war was first pieced together by Hilary Spurling in Matisse the Master.

  The real Marcel Network managed to save 527 children from the camps by hiding them in and around Nice from 1943 to 1945; just two were captured and sent to their deaths in Auschwitz. For the rest of their lives, the surviving members of the network preferred not to speak publicly about what they’d done.

  I’ve been lucky enough to spend two separate years in Nice (2011–12 and 2015–16) and I’m grateful to everyone who has enriched my understanding of this lovely city. Thanks to my mother-in-law, Claude Gillard, for stories of your France, and for reading the novel in draft (as did my friend Zoë Sinel). To my father, Denis Donoghue, a professor for six decades, who combines a tireless mind with a soft heart. And to my beloved Roulstons—Finn, Una, and Chris—for all the inspiration you’ve given me on both sides of the Atlantic. Finally thanks to my dear friend for thirty years, image maker Margaret Lonergan, who created Margot’s photographs.

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  About the Author

  Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish emigrant twice over: she spent eight years in Cambridge completing a PhD in eighteenth-century literature before moving to London, Ontario, where she lives with her French
partner and their two children. She writes for page, stage, and screen (Oscar- and Golden Globe–nominated for Room), and her other novels include The Wonder, Frog Music, Life Mask, Landing, The Sealed Letter, Slammerkin, and (for young readers) The Lotterys series. Her fascination with Nice developed during the two years her family spent in that city.

  Also by Emma Donoghue

  The Wonder

  Frog Music

  Astray

  Room

  The Sealed Letter

  Landing

  Touchy Subjects

  Life Mask

  The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits

  Slammerkin

  Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins

  Hood

  Stir-Fry