Due Preparations for the Plague

by Janette Turner Hospital

  At other times, Genevieve had thought that he might have ties with some shadowy organization on the wrong (but not disreputable) side of the law, some kind of classy white-collar dubious borderline thing: the smuggling of art, perhaps. Or something more noble: the smuggling of manuscripts out of totalitarian countries. This thought had crossed her mind whenever she herself took on another assignment for Caritas, ferrying private letters out of regions where the postal service was closely monitored or where war interfered with it unduly. Mothers wrote to sons and daughters who had gotten away; husbands in the democratic West sent secret letters back through iron and bamboo curtains to wives and children; sweethearts separated by the horrible accidents of history sent burning promises back and forth. She never told anyone, not even Tristan, that she worked for Caritas. She thought of the work as personal and compassionate, not political, but too many small and ordinary lives behind too many dangerous barriers depended on secrecy. It was quite possible, after all, that Tristan was doing the same sort of thing.

  She also pondered his possible clandestine activities on those occasions—they sometimes seemed to her oddly frequent—when street photographers had taken photographs, not of Tristan and Genevieve solely, nor even centrally, but of street scenes, courtyards, sidewalk cafés, with Tristan and Genevieve in the frame. Probably this sort of thing happened constantly in Paris, a city where tourists outnumbered residents in summer, though it seemed to her to happen more frequently when she was with Tristan. And there was always an aura of the clandestine: she never knew if the reasons were rational or not.

  On the second day, after Tristan failed to appear, she made contact with Caritas and a meeting was arranged in the tropical greenhouse of the Jardin des Plantes. The Caritas woman handed her a copy of Le Monde. Between the obituaries and the sporting triumphs of les bleus, letters on thin onionskin paper were interleafed. Génie could detect no difference in texture between the paper of the letters and the pages of Le Monde.

  In the courtyard of the Sully, third day, she felt a chill. Still no Tristan. A note that said: May need to meet at airport.

  Airports are Génie’s natural turf, and she has a gift for making people disappear. She feels pain in her finger joints and in the soft creases of her arms. If she does not keep moving, her joints will stiffen and swell. She wanders to Place de la Bastille. By instinct, she walks the length of boulevard Henri IV to the Ile St. Louis and strolls along the Quai d’Anjou. She has a sense of being followed. She turns quickly and for an instant she thinks she sees Tristan in the shadowy curve of a bridge, but when she goes back there is only an old man with a newspaper, asleep.

  She continues along the Quai d’Anjou. Venerable trees dip their crowns toward the Seine and she is half hypnotized by reflections (theirs and hers). She pauses at a cast-iron mooring ring in the wall by the Pont Marie. She runs her fingers around it, then touches it lightly with her forehead, leaning there, almost like someone at prayer.

  She checks out of her hotel on Ile St. Louis and leaves her suitcase with the concierge for later. She decides, however, to take the wheeled carry-on with her because she plans to buy books, and books make her shoulder bag too heavy. She browses the bookstores and bouquinistes along the Seine. She buys with reckless delight. She decides to return to the Place des Vosges just in case. In the terrace café near Hôtel de Sully, she will sit over lunch with an early edition of Chrétien de Troyes and a glass of wine.

  She drags the little case down the rue de Birague and through the arched colonnade of Place des Vosges, and that is when the past, conjured up so intensely, breaks into song. She can hear “Caravan” on a tenor sax. She stops to listen. The young black musician must be American; the style is pure New Orleans. She is standing under the stone arcades, but what she is seeing is the moon through the window of the apartment she and Tristan once shared, and the nights when they would sit in the dark with wine and figs and a platter of Rosette de Lyon. They would listen to Duke Ellington.

  Surely Tristan is close by. She can sense him. She turns and studies the Place until she feels foolish. She nods at the musician and drops a few francs in his hat and leaves through the stone arcade. At Number 12, rue de Birague, she pauses, and then she sits for a time in the bistro at the corner of rue St. Antoine.

  She wants to be gone. May need to meet at airport. Maybe Tristan will be there, maybe not. Either way, what is the point of hanging around? Flight 64 does not leave for hours yet, but she has her return ticket in her purse.

  A passing tourist takes a photograph through the bistro door: of the scatter of small tables, of men with newspapers and espresso, of couples in love, of Genevieve. A pigeon lands on one of the bistro tables and pecks at a torn sachet of sugar. Something prickles along the back of Genevieve’s neck. She senses danger.

  The instinct, bred of much living and traveling alone, is so powerful that she decides not to return to her hotel for the suitcase since everything of consequence—and this includes a toothbrush and a change of underwear as well as the Caritas letters—is either in the large shoulder bag that she never sets down or in the carry-on. She decides to take the Roissybus. At the airport, she will sit over a cup of coffee and prepare her classes for next week.

  At Charles de Gaulle, she has a sense of being followed. She moves in a weather of anxiety. She no longer expects to see Tristan. She walks for miles, it seems like miles, along one of the underground tunnels. She cannot keep still. She walks all the way to one of the domestic terminals and back and then slides into a bistro booth.

  She sips coffee and makes notes for the coming classes at NYU, three total-immersion weeks with South Korean businessmen. The men are to be flown in by a US corporation. Some of them will come bearing letters that have passed from hand to hand, along secret and dangerous routes, from citizens of North Korea to relatives in other parts of the world. No one is willing to consign these precious letters to regular postal services, certainly not in North Korea, but not in the United States either, no matter what assurances are given. Genevieve will send the letters farther along their way and will give others in return. The letters are on onionskin paper, and the South Koreans will hide them in various ingenious ways—sometimes sandwiched between two book pages, glued together—in order to pass them on, via certain bribable conduits at the border, into North Korea. Genevieve, finding it difficult to concentrate, prepares her lessons for the forthcoming week.

  Still hours to boarding time.

  She watches a family at the next table: a mother with a fretful baby, a little girl in a blue coat, the father deep in conversation with some younger woman who has apparently come to see them off. Genevieve feels an ache like a bruise at her wrists. She wants to reach for the baby and for the little girl clambering all over her father. Absentmindedly, the father sets the girl down. “Put your paper cup in the garbage,” he tells her, pointing.

  The little girl contemplates her paper cup. Passing Genevieve’s table, she says solemnly: “We’re going home. In New York we have to change planes, and then we’re going to Atlanta.”

  “We must be on the same flight,” Genevieve says. “What’s your name?”

  “Samantha,” the little girl says. “What’s yours?”

  “I’m Genevieve.”

  “Sam,” her father says. “Stop bothering the lady. We’re going through security now. Come on.”

  Genevieve feels restless. She does not know how long she walks or where she is walking. She stops to caress silk scarves in a small boutique. When she is asked to step aside by two men in uniform, her first thought is: So. Someone knows about the letters. She knows the Caritas offices in Paris have been raided. She wonders if Caritas is considered subversive by the French government or, more likely, by some right-wing group, by one of the ultra-nationalist vigilante cells. She also wonders if she is about to be approached as a potential courier of something rather more dangerous than the letters.

  Her second thought is: Does this have anything to do with Tristan? O
r is it Tristan who is monitoring me?

  And then he materializes from the thought. “C’est toi, Tristan,” she says, sadly. “I might have known.” He was always guarded, she thinks. Always. “Four keepers with weapons, Tristan,” she says flippantly, gesturing at his armed escort and her own. “Don’t you think that’s a bit excessive?”

  “Génie.” He lifts one hand to her cheek and their fingers brush. A tic pulls at her mouth. She turns slightly away, but he leans forward impulsively and kisses her full on the lips. “I heard someone playing ‘Caravan’ in the Place des Vosges,” he murmurs, too low for the policemen to hear, “and I saw you there, but I didn’t trust my own ears and eyes.”

  She stares at him. “Is this your game, Tristan, or theirs?”

  “You must come with us, madame,” a policeman says.

  “Are you stalking me, Tristan?”

  “What?”

  She says significantly, “I’m writing a piece on the stained glass in the Sainte Chapelle.” She watches his face. “For the Wandering Earthling,” she says.

  “Madame.”

  She turns to the policeman and makes a coquettish gesture, very Gallic. “An old flame, monsieur.” She makes a rueful moue with her lips. “Two minutes, after all these years?”

  “Two minutes, madame.”

  “You stopped at Number 12, rue de Birague,” Tristan says. “I watched you.”

  “You watched me.” She keeps her voice neutral.

  “I followed you.” He smiles wryly. “But you’re very good at disappearing. Why are you here?”

  “You should know.”

  “I mean, what brought you to Paris?”

  Whose code are we using? she wonders. For whose benefit? Who is translating?

  “Madame,” the policeman says. “I must insist.”

  “Off to the conciergerie,” she says lightly.

  “What do you mean?” Tristan wants to know. “What’s happening?”

  She pauses and turns back to look at him. Is he innocent? Is he simply a consummate actor? She feels an immeasurable sadness.

  “I have no idea what’s going on,” he says. “Do you?”

  3. Code Name: S

  Genevieve thinks of the letters in her carry-on baggage, some of them interleafed between the pages of Le Monde, others hidden between the pages of books. They are family letters containing news of a grandfather’s death and a cousin’s wedding. Another is full of a yearning sadness being passed to a husband in Ohio from a wife who is still inside Iran, a village wife, a wife who sends news of growing sons whenever she can. Genevieve’s Caritas contact in New York had told her: it’s short notice, but if you’re going to Paris, we have letters to get into Algeria, and one to Iran. And our contact in Paris can give you others in return. Genevieve imagines the fantastic arabesques of the routes these letters have traveled, tracing them across the curved forehead of the French policeman—he has such bushy brows—and over his right ear and down the arm that is searching her capacious shoulder bag and the carry-on case. If he finds the letters, then a handful of families used to expecting the worst will go on as usual, waiting, waiting, waiting for word, living on a memory of hope and on the raw nub of energy that comes from the sheer refusal to give up. Genevieve does not think she has anything to be afraid of beyond frustration and delay. There is nothing seditious in what she does, except perhaps for the fact that somewhere along the line, at those points where forbidden borders are crossed, bribery and collusion are involved. Presumably. But that is not her affair. She knows nothing about how that part is done.

  “You are Australian, mademoiselle.”

  Genevieve smiles.

  “The Australians are troublemakers,” he says. “They have made terrorist attacks on French ships in the South Pacific.”

  “With due respect, monsieur,” Genevieve says, “the Australians were unarmed and on inflatable boats, and the French ships carried nuclear warheads.” She knows this is not a wise answer. She knows it would be better to keep silent, but keeping discreetly silent has never been to the taste of Australians in general, or of Genevieve in particular. “And was it not French officers,” she asks politely, “who were tried and convicted of blowing up a Greenpeace vessel and killing civilians?”

  “You are a member of Greenpeace, mademoiselle?”

  “No, I’m not. But to kill nonviolent protesters—”

  “Politics interest you, it seems.”

  “No more than average, I think.”

  “You travel a great deal.”

  “I’m a travel writer and I teach English as a second language at institutes around the world. I spend most of my life on the road.”

  “Yet you stayed in Paris for two years.”

  Genevieve combs her fingers through her hair. The gesture is one of studied composure, though her fingers are trembling a little because this suggestion of close surveillance disturbs her. Then she remembers the carte de séjour and her passport stamp. Naturally they know she has lived here. This is routine security stuff. “Not quite two years,” she says. “And I still moved about, I still had travel assignments. But yes.”

  “Why was that?”

  “Why did I continue to travel?”

  “Why did you live in France?”

  She says simply, “I was in love with a Frenchman.”

  “Ah yes. The publisher. The one who works in Intelligence with a little trafficking on the side.”

  A nerve flutters near Genevieve’s right eye. “That’s what writers and publishers do,” she says flippantly. “They work in intelligence and traffic in ideas.” She is afraid a twitching at the corner of her mouth will become visible. Her right foot taps out, of its own volition, a soft kettledrum roll.

  “That is not the kind of Intelligence we mean, mademoiselle.”

  Genevieve is following the movement of the gendarme’s hand within her shoulder bag. He pulls out Le Monde without unfolding it; he does not notice that it is yesterday’s paper. He pulls out books one by one and fans the pages with one hand. A sound resembling the regular thump of a bass drum is beating in Genevieve’s ears and getting faster. One by one, the books are put back, Le Monde is put back, the makeup case and travel toiletries are put back, the underwear is held up for examination, the predictable smirk is exchanged, her bra and panties are returned to the bag, and the tab is snapped shut.

  “Your lover is involved in espionage,” the policeman says.

  So, Genevieve thinks. It is confirmed.

  Nevertheless, she raises startled eyebrows. “For the French government, monsieur?”

  The policeman frowns. “We know you came to Paris to see your lover.”

  “My former lover,” she corrects. “But we haven’t been in touch with each other for years. I don’t even have his address. It was a big surprise to bump into him just now.” She speaks passionately, wrapped in the luxury of truth.

  “Why do you use the code name of Geneva?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “We must ask you, mademoiselle, to wait here until boarding time,” the policeman says.

  “What is the problem?” she asks.

  “We are not at liberty to tell you, mademoiselle. Someone will return to escort you to your gate at the appropriate time.”

  They lock the door when they leave.

  Waiting time has no boundary.

  When she hears the lock click, Genevieve floats free of the small room, eight feet by nine, and finds herself in the bookstore near the Place de la Bastille again, six years? seven? nearly eight years back. The store has more used books than new. It is as full of junk as of unexpected treasures and she loves to do this—chiner, the French say—to poke about for literary finds, rare first editions, oddities. She is browsing through the journal of a nineteenth century traveler in Australia—a French traveler—and suddenly laughs out loud.

  In the homestead of a cattle farmer—he calls himself a pastoralist (un grand agriculteur) and owns 100,000 hectares, a w
ealthy man—I was given what I can only call a slab of beef (un vrai pavé de bœuf) that would more fittingly have been a main course in hell. I do not know if it is the heat and drought that have destroyed the capacity for taste in this country, or whether the ancestors of these pastoralists—being English, and therefore at a disadvantage in matters of taste, and being, furthermore, from the lowest levels of English society (many having arrived in chains)—have passed on a congenital incapacity for gustatory discrimination. The meat had been thrown into an open fire and left until charred. I suggested to my host that if the meat were to be steeped in red wine and herbs for twenty-four hours, and then braised with garlic and morels, it would be greatly improved. He replied: “We could throw in half a dozen frogs, if you like,” a response which astonished and mystified me. No, I replied. I would not like. That is a very strange idea. One should not mix white meat with dark.

  “C’est tellement drôle, ce livre?” a male voice asks, and she swivels to see a man reading over her shoulder.

  “To me it is,” she says. “To an Australian. Hilarious.” She shows him the book.

  “You are Australian? I have never met an Australian.”

  “We are extremely rare,” she tells him solemnly. “Like unicorns. We eat kangaroos and drink wine made from eucalyptus leaves. It tastes like cleaning fluid.”