by Liza Wieland
Even when Sigrid asks a difficult question, the spell is not broken. Why do you travel? In English, please. She seems to know the answer might be complicated, or private.
To see the world, Elizabeth says, thinking of Clara. She’s not sure why, but she holds up her little wineglass, thinking it might be a symbol.
To drink the world? Sigrid says.
To see beauty and live near it. It’s what I’m supposed to do after college. To be free. To visit the old masters and the places they mastered.
You should be careful, Sigrid says. There is not really any such thing as free.
She leans closer, lowers her voice.
To master a place is . . . It does not always end in beauty. This is why we left Berlin. Women like us cannot have the life we want there.
I understand.
Even in Paris, a woman my age, unmarried. A German woman. My position here is not secure.
You should be married, Elizabeth says. Is that right?
Tomorrow, Sigrid says. I would like to see you again.
Yes.
We will have something even more French than this. A German woman is going to make you more French. That is unusual.
The next day, a drink in the late afternoon at Le Tournon. When Elizabeth arrives, there is already a whiskey waiting for her. Sigrid says very little, but she looks at Elizabeth as if she’s expecting an answer to something that is part question, part challenge. Sigrid has ordered huîtres gratinées. She speaks to the waiter in German, and he replies. He brings the oysters, and their conversation continues, as if Elizabeth were not present, even as he comes and goes and attends to others in the bar. There is a certain pretense of deferential service, but they are talking about something else, not huîtres or whiskey or even the weather. She hears vom Rath’s name repeated four times. Then the waiter hurries to the bar and returns with two glasses of champagne. After that, he disappears into the kitchen and does not come back.
Lovely, Elizabeth says. You seem to know the waiter.
He is also from Berlin. It is good to have people who will feed you.
Louise and I have been talking about that. We’d like to invite you and Ann and Marie. When Margaret is here.
You haven’t spoken of this Margaret before, Sigrid says.
She is a dear friend. She’s a wonderful painter. And a scholar. We lived together in college. Once we ran away together, but the police found us. She’s a very good cook.
I see. In that case, I will take you somewhere.
Up rue du Bac, and there is the river, stretching before them like a lazy afternoon. They stop on the Pont des Arts, gaze into the water ruffling like upturned petticoats, like the edges of the oysters.
Champagne makes Paris more like itself, Elizabeth says.
Sigrid says nothing, watching the river, watching Elizabeth. They continue past the east side of the Louvre, toward the stock exchange. On the street behind is Dehillerin, a shop for cooks. Louise has mentioned it.
It’s like a church, Sigrid says. She opens the door for Elizabeth.
Inside is quiet as a church or a library and full of men, studying cutlery, copper pans, gleaming silver molds, marble rolling pins, small tools used for intricate and arcane tasks like curling butter. Sigrid leads Elizabeth through the narrow aisles. Hundreds, maybe thousands of knives, pans for all sizes and shapes of tarts: spades, clubs, diamonds, hearts, animals, stars. Eiffel Towers, small, medium, and large.
A wooden staircase descends to a catacombs full of pots. The walls are cool stone. We might be under a castle or a church, Elizabeth whispers.
One might buy a saucepan two inches high, a metal pot shaped to hold a fifty-pound fish, or a kettle one could bathe in. Sigrid lifts a ladle large enough to scoop up a baby. All of these vessels sit waiting to be filled and emptied, again and again. What Elizabeth loves, though, is the lack of the clever, eye-catching display one sees in American department stores, as if these objects know they are singular and essential. When they are needed, they will be sent for or sought out. This is the luxury of assurance.
The men stay upstairs. Sometimes Sigrid and Elizabeth hear a murmured greeting when the front door opens, but mostly there is only the shuffle of feet, the distant clang or thud of utensils returned to their bins, not chosen. Sigrid stands very close. Elizabeth feels not so much the heat of Sigrid’s body or her breath, or even her own body, but rather the space between them, which seems to diminish incrementally. This sensation is at once painful and hilarious, the uncertainty, the men upstairs, here below the absolute dead silence of metal and crockery, the deep absence inside stockpots, the smooth grooves of ladles, the waiting sluice of sieves. All of which Elizabeth has been imagining as animated, and that is some of the hilarity, too.
They stand this way for forty seconds, maybe sixty. A minute is a long time in the world of cooking things (Elizabeth will say this later, thinking of Dehillerin’s cellar rooms). The feeling is pleasant: stillness, silence, rapt attention. Pleasant but not enough.
It is not clear who has stepped closer, but the back of Elizabeth’s right hand brushes Sigrid’s left wrist, the knob of bone. Neither steps away. Elizabeth becomes aware that she is holding her breath, and she tries to exhale without moving. Sigrid’s right hand, she observes, is on the rim of a yellow ceramic dish, for gratinées, oval, but really shaped like a large eye, the interior white, as if the pupil and iris had been removed, a blind eye. Sigrid’s hand is open, flat on the rim, as if she is keeping the dish from rising off the shelf, as if she were trying to prevent its inevitable levitation.
They hear a footfall above, breath and presence at the top of the stairs. Vom Rath, Sigrid says slowly. I have more work at the embassy this evening.
Aren’t you afraid to go there?
The safest place to hide from an angry person is just under his nose.
All right, Elizabeth says. She places her hand over Sigrid’s, then beside it, lifts the gratin dish.
Yes, Sigrid says. This is what you need. Maybe you will write something about it.
Upstairs, at the counter, the clerk speaks to Elizabeth in English, asking where she lives in the United States.
How did you know I was American?
The clerk glances at Sigrid but then gives a tiny shrug.
Is there an address to ship? he says
Elizabeth tells him no, she intends to make a gratin here in Paris, very soon.
Use only the best cheese, he says, and he gives her the address of a shop nearby. Tell them I sent you. Show the dish.
He signs a card: Émile.
Elizabeth thanks him in French, but Émile is resolute, replying in slow, measured English, as if she might not even speak her own language.
Outside, Sigrid waves for a taxi, then grasps Elizabeth’s shoulders and turns her toward rue Montorgueil, the cheese shop.
Don’t forget. Émile said the best.
She steps into the taxi, directs the driver. The taxi waits for an opening in traffic. Sigrid stares straight ahead. At the very last moment, she turns, smiles up at Elizabeth, presses her fingertips to the window glass.
All right, all right for now. Rue Montorgueil shines with the commerce of nourishment. The round cheeses in the shop window glow buttery yellow and orange, suns and planets caught just this minute in the act of revolving away.
Elizabeth can’t help thinking of the two of them together, in Sigrid’s apartment in Saint-Denis. Not at Clara’s. She tries to concentrate on the light in Sigrid’s bedroom, only that, but then the light fades, as it does every day out in the world, and she’s left with the bodies, the whole scene in her mind becomes flesh and shadow, except for Sigrid’s blue eyes and red mouth, moving from Elizabeth’s throat to her collarbone to her breasts, lower. After that, it’s not that Elizabeth’s imagination fails, it’s that her vision goes dark, as if in a swoon, and she’s left with sensation, heat, gentle pressure, fingertips, pulsing from the inside out, voices murmuring beneath the shadows, commanding, pleading.
Ich würde sie gern ficken. Worte machen viel aus. The words are important. The words make all the difference.
ANAPHORA
1937
On rue de l’Odéon, there is the famous bookshop, its front window crowded and crowing with the works of Irish writers. Elizabeth has been avoiding the place. It seems so awful to waltz in and present oneself out of the blue, but just as bad to be discovered having not done so.
All right, Elizabeth, Hallie says. I’ll take care of it.
Of course I know you, Sylvia Beach says. I have an advance copy of your poem in Life and Letters. It’s very good. “He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.” I admire that. Such a beautiful scan. And “He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky.” Actually, I’ve thought that for years but never put it into words.
* * *
Sylvia invites Elizabeth to see Giraudoux’s play about the Trojan War, which, she explains, some people think is really about Mussolini.
Men love war, Sylvia says. They think it solves everything. And Frenchmen cannot forget how Germany has dishonored them throughout history.
Frenchmen have a particularly aggressive temper, I’ve noticed. We’ve learned to steer clear of them in the street.
How can you tell which ones are the Frenchmen?
Gauloises, Elizabeth says. They’re either smoking them or they smell like them. Like someone’s eccentric great-uncle.
Sylvia appears surprised, stopped in her tracks. Elizabeth has noticed this happens when someone is talking seriously and she makes a joke. Or a funny observation. She is trying not to do this so much, at least not with strangers. Talk about the play, she tells herself. You can do that. Pretend you’re in school talking to Miss Peebles.
I love Helen, Elizabeth says. I love how she visualizes in color what will happen and what she sees in black and white will not happen.
I do, too, Sylvia says. Helen has no intentions. Only images.
I understand that, Elizabeth says.
But it means that beauty can be used to mask the ugliness of war.
Not beauty, Elizabeth says. I think beauty is too pure to mask anything.
I don’t know, Sylvia says. Beauty and purity seem like antique terms nowadays. Ideas for children. The world is getting so ugly.
Elizabeth feels a kind of hollowness in her chest. What if I am still a child? she wonders. What if I’m stuck there, always admiring childish things, beset by childish ideas?
I like children, Elizabeth says, somewhat defensively (she hates that tone). They’re so helpless and good.
If we keep acting like children, Sylvia says, and then she pauses. This war is coming. Only children can’t see it. Mussolini’s in Ethiopia. What do you think Axis means? Do you think Germany and Italy will sit still there in the middle of Europe and be content to deal with their Jews and enlarge their borders a few miles here and there? They won’t. These Nazis have already committed terrible crimes. They love power and order. They’re cruel. They’re just getting started. And they hate children.
And so Elizabeth begins to hear it, too, below everything. The gathering war. It is so often the shallow breathing of metal: the steep sides of warships, the chambers of rifles, empty shell of helmet, packed shell of bullet. The swastika, a headless spider, legs whirling and buzzing so fast they appear to be still. If there were ever a quiet moment in Paris, you could hear all this noise. You say Versailles, and most of the people in the room think you mean the treaty violation to the east and not the house of excess to the west. Conversation takes the shape of denial. The list of what one must deny grows longer every day.
A man at a party in the Latin Quarter says drunkenly that the poets should be very nervous.
Why is that? Elizabeth asks. I know a few poets in America.
Well, they had better stay there, the man says.
A tall woman with the face of a sweet horse takes his arm. Elizabeth realizes this is Ann, Sigrid’s guardian. I understand the führer reads Goethe, she says. And Ibsen.
I dream almost every night about tanks, Elizabeth hears herself say.
She takes another sip from her glass, as does the drunken man. She imagines that their two heads dipping into their wide martini glasses must look like the courting doves outside her window.
How frightening, the man says.
Sometimes, Elizabeth continues, in my dreams, I’m standing next to a plaster wall full of bullet holes. Do you ever think that gunfire in the movies is a sort of amplified and stretched-out version of doves cooing?
Ann and the drunken man seem to hold their glasses more tightly. They stare. Someone new comes into the room, a beautiful woman, a film star, and there is sudden applause for her.
Doves? Ann says at last, choking on the word so that it sounds like ducks.
And Wagner libretti, another woman says. Hitler also reads those. They are his favorite.
Elizabeth realizes this woman is German also. She may, by who knows what circumstances, be quite familiar with the führer’s reading list.
Louise steps in at this moment. Please save me, Elizabeth begs with her eyes.
Elizabeth, Louise says. I see you’ve found Ann. From the sailboat in Douarnenez
Certainly, Ann says. She was just making a stupendous metaphor about doves.
Now, Elizabeth, Louise says. Not here. This is a party.
I don’t know about that, the drunken man says. It’s more like a train platform packed with nervous, foolish people who can’t see what’s coming.
In three days, Louise says, Elizabeth will have her poems published in America. Isn’t that right, Elizabeth?
Groups of people have paused in their conversations at exactly the same moment, and the words fill in a coincidental silence, and so news of Elizabeth’s publication rings like an announcement made to the entire party. Guests seem to stand at attention, regimental. Elizabeth notices that most of the women have chosen to wear olive green skirts and jackets, or gray or blue. She finds this terrifying. The intelligentsia of Paris stand at the ready, an army. The men, of course, wear their usual dark suits. The men are always ready for battle, spoiling for a fight. This battalion of guests turns toward Elizabeth and smiles, delighted to celebrate.
Like an engine that sputters and catches, conversation starts again.
Borders are always the problem, a man standing behind Elizabeth says. He is some kind of British, but not, she doesn’t think, posh London.
For you, of course, a woman says, the silvery notes of her laughter ascending, a pianist paying scales. Glissando, that’s the word.
You live on an island, Ann says to him, speaking over Elizabeth’s head.
And we like it that way these days, the man says.
If I were you, Ann says, I wouldn’t be so selbstgefällig. She pauses, and her smile fades.
The word is chilling, even though almost no one who hears it knows exactly what it means. The way Ann says it is both a warning and a plea. Get your silly heads out of the sand. All the drab-colored women look as if they might never be happy again.
Louise, Elizabeth discovers, has an abiding interest in brothels. She calls it my curious philanthropy: she wants to befriend the women—girls, really. No one except Elizabeth seems to think this is strange. Louise says it’s a bit like social work, the rather unconventional sort her mother raised her to do.
She arranges an introduction to Mademoiselle Indira, the dusky-skinned proprietress of a house near the Opéra. She invites Louise and Elizabeth for tea. When they step out of the apartment building, Clara is standing on the edge of the sidewalk, as if she has been waiting for them.
Oh, she says. I was just coming in, but it’s not important.
You can go up anyway, Louise says. Christine is there.
Nothing urgent, Clara says.
The pause there on rue de Vaugirard is awkward. Louise pushes up the sleeve of her jacket and checks her watch. Clara stares at Elizabeth as if she wants her to receive a telepathic message
.
I don’t want to make you late, Clara says finally. I’ll just walk along with you for a bit if that’s all right. Are you comfortable in the apartment? Are you finding your way around Paris, Miss Bishop?
I am, thank you, Elizabeth says.
Elizabeth sees clearly, as if the word is inked across Clara’s forehead. Clara is lonely.
Louise seems to understand this, too—this is the best of Louise, her empathy—and she links her arm through Clara’s.
Maybe you’d like to join us, Madame Countess. We’re on an unusual mission.
Louise explains. As Clara listens, her expression moves through abrupt changes: disbelief and distaste soften to sympathy and interest.
Mademoiselle Indira speaks eleven languages, Louise says. She can say hello, bonjour, guten Morgen, ciao, hej, hola, olà, goedendag. She is the mother to her young ladies.
Indeed, Clara says. She won’t mind that I’ve tagged along?
On the contrary, Louise says.
Elizabeth wonders what contrary Louise will provide.
Perhaps she’ll take me for an advocate, Clara says.
A protector, Louse offers.
I would be that, of course, Clara says. A protector of girls. I would like to take on that role.
If Mademoiselle Indira is surprised to see Clara with Louise and Elizabeth, she doesn’t let on. She takes their coats and leads them into the parlor, where nine girls, almost all of them appearing younger than twenty, sit, dressed as if they are about to leave for church, in a palette of pastels, white gloves, hats with veils, identical pearl necklaces. The girls say hello, one at a time. Mademoiselle (not Madame, she tells them pointedly) Indira pours tea into painted china cups, each a different floral design, so that it seems each girl is clutching a small bouquet. For a few minutes, everyone is quiet inside a steamy cloud of bergamot and mint.
I believe I know your son, Comtesse, Mademoiselle Indira says. She smiles as if she’s given Clara an expensive gift.
