FOUR KINGS: A Novel

by M. D. Elster

  We put him in, and said goodbye. By then there was no one to send for, and nothing else to be done; Rabbi Jacobs had fled Belgium along with so many of the others, having arranged for safe passage to England for himself and his family. My mother waited, expressionless, not saying anything, as I patched the loose soil over with moss, disappearing into the woods and delivering it handful by handful, until the grave was covered with a soft green blanket. When we returned to the cottage, she was all business; she began packing our bags immediately.

  “But where will we go?” I asked, my meager voice hardly louder than the doe that was lazily munching on the labors of our kitchen garden. Ordinarily my mother would chase the creature away, scaring it half to death by banging a wooden spoon against whatever pot or pan was handy. But that day she only gazed out the open window at the doe, a resigned look in her eye. Our choices were limited. England was out of our reach; America was incomprehensible.

  “Paris,” she said finally, with an air of certainty. “The stance against Germany is soft here in the Low Country, but France is allied with England, and the French will never let the Germans march into Paris. I can find work, and there will be a life for you, too, there. We will reinvent ourselves, live as two good little Catholic françaises — a widow and her daughter. But you will need to work on your accent, lest you give us away. Everyone knows: people who cross borders do so for a reason.”

  She was wrong, of course, about the Germans’ inability to march into Paris, but we could not know it at the time. My mother had only been to the City of Light once, as a little girl, during that glamorous era known as la Belle Époque. To her it was a city of civility and sophistication, full of beautiful things — far too many beautiful things to put in harm’s way; no one would ever dare bomb such a place. And this much, at least, proved to be true.

  Packing was a brief affair; we had little left. We loaded up the trap-cart, and then when we got to town, we turned around and sold the trap-cart and our draft horse, too. Now everything we owned could easily go with us on a train. It was the question of documents that weighed heaviest on both our minds; it was getting so that in those days you could not expect to board a train without them. Resourceful woman that she was, my mother was able to ferret out the name of a man able to manufacture such things, and sent a request and an offer of payment through a series of acquaintances. We arranged to meet him in a back booth inside a dark alehouse, me clutching my mother’s hand tightly under the table where no one could see. I was afraid, but she was not. She had that look of determination in her eye she sometimes got; it was a look, my father always said, that meant he was about to lose an argument.

  The man, I remember, was young but with teeth that were already beginning to show signs of rotting, he was working class, and looked about as poor as the rest of the factory-working patrons who surrounded him. When he pushed up his left sleeve, however, I saw he wore a gold watch. “Portable wealth,” he said, catching me looking at it. “I’ll tell you: You want to get your hands on some portable wealth, kid. In these times, it is the only kind of wealth there truly is.”

  It was sage advice, to be sure, but delivered at an awkward moment: I knew perfectly well that my mother had just handed over most of the portable wealth we were ever likely to see in one place. What little money we had left would be spent on our third-class train tickets — no wagon-lits for us — and to find the kind of modest, rodent-occupied room in a boarding house that was rented to its occupants by the week.

  We took a night train, the cheapest. It clacked away, trundling along on its tracks, speeding us away from my beloved Blue Forest. The electric glare of the stations we passed flashed in the small slice of window peeking out from below the drawn shade: a bright, alarming staccato of flashes that always disappeared again before our eyes had time to adjust. I imagined it was the witch who used to leave behind tiny piles of fairy bones, that she was shooting sparks after us, driving us out. She had finally won; the forest was now hers to fill with all her evil. I had just turned eight and understood I was getting too old to be making up such tales, even in my head — let alone believing them. But the nightmare was a strange comfort to me; in it, I found a sense of escape, and were it possible to go live in that nightmare, I would have, bizarre though that may sound. It was more interesting and far more absorbing than the mental picture I had of Nazis in uniforms, scribbling names on lists, clicking their heels. At least my world of nightmares had a certain amount of elegance to it, even if it was the elegance born of the uncanny.

  But then I saw Paris for the first time from the train window, lit up at night as though bejeweled, and forgot, for a moment, my heartbreak. Here was a city that knew how to wear an evening gown, and she wore it well. I admired the wide avenues and imperial bridges, the hotels that glittered in stone and brass, their revolving doors flashing as the glass panes turned. I pressed my nose against the train window to better see the cafés that warmed the streets with the welcome glow of a hearth in wintertime.

  The accommodations we found, of course, were not in nearly so glamorous a quarter, and the condition of the pension house was significantly more pungent and foul than I had truly expected. But small and dreary as our room was, we were on a top floor, and from a little window built into the gabled eaves — the room was a pigonnier, as I believe some Parisians call it, nicknamed after the days when peasants used to keep such everyday urban fowl in gabled alcoves — and from our window in this room then, we could look out over the varied sea of rooftops that is, in my opinion, the true definition of Paris. I fell asleep that first night mere seconds after having shut my eyes, weary from travel and dizzy from the increased amount of busyness Paris offered. I had never been in a city so large or grand, so cultivated, or in so much of a hurry.

  The next day my mother found work as a chambermaid in one of Paris’s many hotels, and I found myself with considerably less to do during those long hours when she traveled across town to make up beds and scrub floors. We had not decided what ought to be done about my schooling; for one thing, there was still the matter of my accent. After all, I was half-Flemish and raised in the woods; I still had a foreign regional accent by Parisian standards and I certainly would not blend into the schoolyard without a few jibes and questions. It was the questions that my mother did not want. So my mother begged me to be patient and took to buying cheap books from the bouquinistes who daily set up shop along the banks of the Seine, bringing a random assortment of titles home to me. I read and played in our little attic-room during the day. I amused myself with the books she brought home, and on days when I was feeling particularly homesick, I read the ones I’d smuggled out of our home in the woods.

  I had been permitted to bring only two: One of the most choice illustrated anatomy volumes my father had bought me (which, my mother cautioned, I must be prepared to part with if necessary, for it was worth a decent sum of petty cash), and my treasured book of dark fairytales, written in Flemish. The expression on my mother’s face told me she wanted to make me leave this book behind, along with the Flemish language in general. Ironically, when King Leopold III bent the knee and the Third Reich proposed to occupy Belgium, Hitler suggested Germany give the Flemish preferential treatment. The Dutch were, after all, the long-lost cousins to Germans. The Flemish language and culture were superior to their Francophone counterparts in Belgium, he argued. Not the other way around, as everyone had always supposed.

  “Hah. That preferential treatment would not have extended to us,” my mother scoffed, reminding me we were more than just Flemish. “Please believe me… it is better to leave Belgium behind us altogether, ma petite, than to have to answer some bureaucrat’s questions and find ourselves shipped off to the work camps. We must have a fresh start!”

  At the time, this sounded dramatic to me. But many years later, I read somewhere that not very long after we left, over 25,000 Jews were rounded up in Belgium and put on trains to Auschwitz, and I was very grateful not to be among that
number. We had left before the bureaucratic questioning that could condemn us truly began in earnest, and now my mother was hell-bent on starting over, on hiding in plain sight in France. Her maiden name, “Laurent,” was both Francophone and very common. One could reinvent easily, with a name like that. It did not betray us, but my father’s name did. With heavy hearts, we erased everything to do with it.

  My father… I sorely missed my father, the wound hadn’t begun to heal yet, and my mother knew it. It was for this reason she said nothing and bit her tongue when I dug my heels in and insisted on keeping my book of Flemish fairytales, clutching it to my chest like a much younger child, eschewing my dignity so I might keep this precious prize. She used to read it to me during long winter nights back in the cottage when I couldn’t sleep. She let me keep it, but in Paris, she never read it to me. I don’t think this was because she didn’t love me, or loved me any less than she had back home in the woods. I think she thought it would make my future malformed somehow, that to maximize my chance for survival and success, I needed to leave the past — all of it — behind.

  So I read it to myself. It was a comfort during the colder seasons in particular. I read it to myself when the rain drizzled down hard on the roof. I read it to myself when the snowflakes floated, thick and fat, swirling and dancing in the icy breeze, muting the entire city’s color and sound with its cottony whiteness.

  “Why do you love that childish book so much?” my mother asked me one day, stroking my hair and kicking a toe at the book as it lay on the mattress we shared. “What’s your favorite story in there?”

  “The one about the fox,” I said. The book’s description of the fox reminded me of a similar, real-life specimen I had known back in the Blue Forest. I had glimpsed the prettiest male fox watching me, one day in the woods. We mirrored each other for some minutes, and he came back the very next day, as well as countless days thereafter. He would follow me at a distance as I played by the brook in the forest, his furry face betraying a sort of naked curiosity about my activities. He was the closest thing I ever had to a playmate.

  “Oh, but the one about the fox is gruesome!” she exclaimed. Her tone was slightly disdainful. “How can you possibly like that one?”

  I began to tell her: The fox, after all, was not merely an animal wandering in the woods. He was a fairytale fox, a landed gentleman; he lived in a splendid castle. I tried to explain that there were wonderful riches and exotic, extravagant lands in that story — more than in all the others, or so it seemed to me. I described the fox’s luxurious palace, hoping to pique her curiosity. Perhaps she would read it aloud to us both.

  But she was not listening. Far off in the distance, from somewhere outside our open window, an eerie, rhythmic sound drifted in. It was the sound of thousands of storm troopers’ boots striking the pavement in dogmatic unison. It was the Germans, and it was the end of my childhood. She would not fall in love with my fairy-story about the fox, not tonight, not ever. The Germans had come to Paris.

  When I closed my eyes that night, I only feigned a blissful, childlike unconscious state for my mother’s sake, for the truth is, I never truly slept.

  CHAPTER 6.

  Dawn arrives, and I come to the very logical and sure conclusion that I have suffered a nightmare. The fox wasn’t real, I tell myself. I likely never even left my bed. When one finds oneself in the kind of strange, unsettling circumstances as I presently find myself, it is only natural, after all, to have a few unusual, vivid dreams. I don’t expect to see the fox again, and I certainly don’t expect to find the key in the morning.

  But after I rise, when I run my hand under the mattress — a simple gesture born of idle curiosity — there it is.

  My fingers hit upon the hard shape of something cold and brass and I let out a gasp. In the light of day, I can make out the details on the bow of the key more clearly. It is stamped with a compass rose, and indeed, I see the embellishments that caught my eye the night before: The four suits of the playing card deck. My brain swims for a moment, trying to make sense of the key’s existence.

  I shake myself. Quickly, before any of the other girls notice me staring at my newfound treasure, I transfer the key to my cardigan pocket, and from there, deliver it to a safe spot within my footlocker. I slip it inside a sock, roll the sock up with its mate, and fold the pair into a tidy ball. Not even the nurses will be inclined to check there, I hope.

  In the cafeteria, while eating my oatmeal and listening to the other girls sing and hum and prattle nonsense, I see Nurse Kitching. She makes a beeline straight for me.

  “You’re to have a visitor today,” she says.

  “The lawyer,” I murmur in an automatic voice, trying to anticipate the identity of my guest. Nurse Kitching shakes her head.

  “No,” she says. “That will be tomorrow. Today your stepfather’s fiancée is coming.” She glances at her watch. Her red mouth puckers and she bites her lip as she makes the calculation. “She ought to be here in a little less than an hour and a half.”

  I feel a cold prickle of sweat on the back of my neck; a shiver runs down my arms. Nurse Kitching does not seem to detect my alarm. She smiles, indifferent and relaxed.

  “She’ll be glad to see you’re on the mend. And I’m sure it will feel good to see a familiar face, won’t it?”

  I don’t answer this. I have an abstract picture of my stepfather’s fiancée in my head — that strange, ominous flash I had while sitting in Dr. Waters’s office — but try as I might, I cannot recall the details of her appearance. I wonder if I will know her when I see her. I am acutely aware that the whole interaction may prove extremely awkward. “What…” I hesitate, “What do I call her?”

  “Call her? What do you mean?”

  “How do I refer to her?”

  Nurse Kitching frowns. “Hmm. Well, what do you ordinarily call her?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Hmm. I was under the impression that Dr. Waters said your memory loss did not extend to forgetting people entirely, only certain events.”

  “I remember my father and mother,” I say, “And my stepfather, of course.”

  “Well,” Nurse Kitching sighs, “Let us hope that seeing your stepmother — sorry, that is, your soon-to-be stepmother, I suppose — jogs your memory. Perhaps you called her by her given name: Colette. Does that ring a bell?”

  Colette, I turn the name over in my mind. Yes, I do recall that name. I recall seeing it on a marquee of sorts — is that possible?

  After breakfast I spend an hour with Dr. Waters, staring again at the shrunken head dangling behind his desk as he begins probing my mind with further questions. I sense he is making a kind of intangible map of my brain, rendering it from my words; determining all those points where the illuminated path goes dark or tumbles off a sudden cliff. He makes me do quite a lot of talking. The idea is to recall as much as I can, right up to the night of the shooting, but there are significant holes in my memories — sporadic blank spots going back weeks, months, even years earlier — and I can see impatience written in the furrows of Dr. Waters’s brow. Do I remember the night of the hurricane… do I remember the night of the hurricane… the question repeats itself in my mind until the very words themselves fall apart and none of it means anything. I cannot help but think, How on earth does one forget a hurricane?

  “I’m sorry,” I say when I see an angry, frustrated expression appear on his face. “Are you worried I’ll be absolutely useless in the trial?”

  Dr. Waters’s lips whiten and disappear as his mouth twists into a stubborn line. “No,” he says. “I’ve staked my reputation on this, and I refuse to let that happen.” He shakes his head resolutely. “I said it before and I’ll say it again: Even if we have to take aggressive measures with our treatment… I will make sure you are well enough to testify, Anaïs.”

  My first official hour of treatment with Dr. Waters draws to a close. He says he would continue the session longer but w
e would be interrupted by my stepfather’s fiancée — Colette — who will arrive soon for our scheduled visit. After her visit, I am to have a light lunch, and then spend the remainder of the afternoon continuing on with more treatment in Dr. Waters’s office. I am told no other patient is receiving quite so much attention; everywhere I walk in the asylum, I hear the nurses whispering about the impending trial.

  Nurse Kitching is in charge of facilitating my visit with Colette. She brushes my hair and plaits it in a tidy braid that hangs straight down my back. Then she brings out the wheelchair once again.

  “I don’t need it,” I say, but she insists, and wheels me down the long and winding corridors of the hospital, through a door, and out into a courtyard in the center. It is strange to be outdoors. It is sunny, but also extremely wet and steamy; the kind of Southern, swampy weather that often precedes a tremendous thunderstorm. I feel the humid air coat my skin the second we roll into the courtyard, the weight of the fabric of my hospital gown grows instantly heavier with dampness — I could probably wring it out and get a few drops.

  The courtyard is not unpleasant, albeit slightly Gothic and sinister, even under the blare of the midday sun. Like the courtyards that populate the French Quarter, it is a green, ivy-strewn oasis centered around a fountain clogged with lily pads. Near the top of the fountain a blind cupid shoots a single arrow, the crisp features of his youthful face blurred and eroded over the years by a steady trickle of water. The windows that surround the courtyard are framed by ivy and covered with bars — the bars a reminder that we are, after all, in an asylum for the mentally ill. I tilt my head straight up, peering into the cloudless blue sky, and see four gables towering over the courtyard, each crowned with a different gargoyle. If my calculations are correct, we are near the center of the asylum, the building is laid out from this middle point like a cross, and the four walls must represent the four different wings: north, south, east, and west. Of course, I haven’t visited all four wings; I hope I’ll never have to.