Little

by Edward Carey

  We had so much time.

  We had no time at all.

  The cast kept changing.

  Afterward, when she was gone, I would lie down with Marta very stiffly in the straw and pretend there was only sawdust inside me. For days I didn’t care to be spoken to. I ate for my baby, not for myself. I could only face Edmond again if I kept his child. I hadn’t kept his mother. There was a life inside me, and so I went on.

  I began to speak to people again.

  We told each other our stories. Again and again. You always knew the true ones from the false ones, for the false ones changed at every telling. The true ones remained constant. What is a life? That is what we were left with: stories. They were our clothes.

  After one woman, the wife of an already executed deputy, had been called away, I heard another woman tell her story as her own the following night. The story thief was an actress from the Comédie-Française, arrested after she was heard quoting from a play about a king—not the beheaded locksmith, but some other king from long ago. It didn’t matter: a king was a king. She had listened to the story of the deputy’s wife, and now she repeated it, almost word for word, to two unsuspecting new ladies. We were furious. We called her a thief. But she just shook her head sadly. She was not a bad woman, she said. She merely wanted to collect all these stories, all that was left of these people, and to keep them safe in her prodigious memory. This was why she had become an actress, she saw now: so that she might tell other people’s tales, not the fictional people she had supposed but the real people of this one room, so that when they were dead they were not forgotten. Surely this meant it was her fate to survive, so that all the stories should be saved with her. But her name was called too, and her library left with her.

  After I had been there a month, I too began to recite the lives of those other people who had gone before—not as my own, but pointing them out to newcomers. Over there, in that corner, there used to be an Elodie, and this is her story; over there was a Madame Grenlin from Marseilles; there by the window all day was a Mademoiselle Cossé, see the marks she made there with her fingernails. There were marks all over the walls; the whole place was crowded with poignant little messages, the sole remaining evidence of a life. Sometimes the women screamed at me to shut up, but many so feared being forgotten that they would come and tell me their stories, then question me in detail about what I’d learned. I had to remember freckles and dimples and a set of chairs, the flowers in gardens, old men and young men, boys in wigs and stockings, girls who loved strawberries and women who had faith, young backs, journeys to relatives, games of cards, soft-boiled eggs, monies earned and little houses and our first wallpaper, babies being born and children lost and deceased parents, all of it, so many stories, favorite dogs, favorite horses, an old song, who saw the king when, jewelry and splendor, family heirlooms, poems, the fairy tales “Cendrillon” and “Perlimpinpin and Persinette,” my son at the guildhall. Remember, will you, Marie? Do you remember now? Have you got that? Who was my first cousin? Where did I meet Pierre? What is my coat of arms? The little scar by his eye. What a lot there was. Slow down, slow down, or I’ll lose it.

  There were too many stories to remember, I could not keep them all in. Little pieces from one story would get muddled up and appear somewhere else: Madame D.’s love of daffodils would be given to Mademoiselle P., whose great passion for a soldier named Augustin would surface in the confused biography of an elderly matron from the Faubourg San-Marcel, whose sister, her companion, would suddenly be found in the little history of a woman who sold refreshments at the Place de la Révolution during the executions.

  I began to fear those stories. They came to me when I slept. They pushed themselves into my dreams. They were bad for my baby. I was certain of it. I stopped listening to the tales. I no longer wished to hear about anyone else. There was only me, my baby, Edmond. I tried to keep myself myself.

  Now I have lost those stories; they come back to me in little pieces. At times my sleep is troubled by a great chorus of dead women, in various costumes, calling out their names and the names of the people they loved, their own little details. One woman told me she could never abide people who didn’t like the Brussels sprout. “Weak people, characterless people,” she said. One woman told me she had once danced with a bear at a country fair. The bear had been a tolerable dancer. A girl told me about an imaginary people and an imaginary island she’d made up herself, had drawn maps of and written laws for. Books’ worth of stories, they gave me.

  Within that almanac of loss, one story is told by so many still that it shall not be forgotten yet. At Carmes, two months after I arrived, came a Creole woman from Martinique who’d grown up on a slave plantation. Her husband had also been at Carmes, but his name had been listed already. She was born Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, but she went by Rose then.

  She was a solid woman. Slightly sullen, handsome but no astounding beauty, sloping shoulders, dark hair, thick eyebrows, large eyes and mouth, and the nose too, come to think of it, was not small either. Weeping was her usual state; later she would say she’d been brave, that she’d gone from woman to woman, comforting, but that was not how it was. She was terrified. Who could blame her? She sat with me and wept upon my shoulder.

  “I’ll tell you, mademoiselle,” she would begin. “I will not call you citizen, that’s done with for good and all. I shall tell you who it is I miss most. It is not my husband, though I’m sorry for him, but he wasn’t always fair, he wasn’t loyal. I’m sorry he died, but I cannot bring him back. It is not my son or daughter. I love them both with a mother’s love, but they are being looked after beyond the city walls. I had them apprenticed, for their protection—Hortense with a needlewoman, Eugène with a cabinetmaker. They are safe enough, but how changed will they be afterward? Who will they become? No, most of all, I shall tell you who I miss: it’s my pug dog. Nothing’s better than Fortune. I like to see him scratching his ears, shifting his bottom, sleeping, barking, catching his breath, sneezing. It’s Fortune I miss most, my darling pug.”

  Having no dog with her, it was not long before she took to calling me Pug. Small-nosed canine. What a joke that was, how she amused herself. She called out for me in the night. Inconsolable until I was with her, until she could pet me and stroke my hair. I didn’t mind. Sometimes she gave me food. I needed food.

  I even got to meet Fortune myself. Rose charmed one of the guards, and he arranged for Fortune to come to us for weekly visits. His arrival gave us back a little life. He was a jolly little fellow, devoted to his mistress, and we were all pleased to see him. Here was innocence again. Little harmless thing with a sad black face and worried eyes, as if he understood our plight. He did us such good. His little noises. His openness. His blamelessness. We were sad to see him pad off again, and hoped that we would live to see him next week. Let us last at least till then, we said.

  I was patted by Rose, my belly stroked by her. She did not help me with the mucking out, but she talked to me while I and the other women were about it. I suppose I fell in love with her a little. She in her turn fell for a military man imprisoned at Carmes, handsome, with an impressive saber scar. She spent a good deal of her time trying to look after herself, trying to keep herself pretty for the scarred man, whose name was Lazare Hoche. He was certain he wasn’t going to die by the guillotine, and his confidence was comforting to her. How she preened herself for him.

  I was older than her by two years, but did not seem it. I’ve outlived her too. She died of complications of abdication in 1814, aged not quite fifty-one. I thought she had more stamina than that. She provided much diversion to my last days in prison.

  On twenty-eighth July 1794, Tenth Thermidor, Year III, the door opened and the guard called out, “Anne Marie Grosholtz.” “I am pregnant,” I said. “Look at my belly,” I said. If they placed their hands down upon it, soon enough they’d feel a little kick. But they called my name again and s
aid I must go. Now, I supposed, even pregnant women were no longer safe. It doesn’t come as such a shock in the end, I thought. It is not so surprising. Why, after all, should I be spared? What makes me so significant? Baby, off we go, I shan’t leave you. I can’t leave you.

  I was taken upstairs to ground level again, the air so much thinner, my lungs shocked by the change. My hands filthy, my dress filthy, my hair filthy. I thought I’d been looking after myself; I supposed it didn’t much matter anyway. Holding my belly, apologizing to it. Up the stairs, out of the monastery entrance to a Parisian street, and there a National Guardsman said to me:

  “This way please, citizen.”

  “I am pregnant.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Do not worry.”

  “But I am worried, after all!”

  “You are not going to trial.”

  “No? Truly?”

  “No, citizen, not at all. Something else.”

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  The shattered jaw.

  I heard people on the Rue Saint-Honoré cheering, such holiday noise. What a sound! “It’s over!” I heard someone calling. “The Tyrant is no more!” “The Tyrant’s dead, and they’re rounding up all who were close to him!”

  They took me to a room near the Place de la Révolution. People were crowded around certain objects there, on tabletops. Objects like at the butcher’s. Only these would not be weighed and eaten.

  “Heads,” I said. “I do heads. I’m only called for at the end of people’s lives. Here’s heads.”

  “Yes,” they said.

  “Who’s this one?” I asked.

  “This,” they said, giving the tour, “is Couthon the cripple. The angle of his cut is like that because they had to do him sideways. He’d been trodden upon by the other people in the cart, trampled over.”

  “And here?” I asked.

  “This mess was called Augustin Robespierre, the brother. When he knew all was up for him, he threw himself from a high window onto a courtyard. Must have hurt. Shattered himself, but did not kill himself—no, we did that later on, little nick in his neck, you might see that there. Beside him is the neat one, Saint-Just. So clean next to the others.”

  “And here? Here?” I asked.

  “The Incorruptible himself.”

  There upon the table was the particular sphere of Maximilien Robespierre. That’s when I met Robespierre, never before. The mess upon the head was not merely from the trauma of the neck stump. This history of mine began, a country ago, with a jaw, a family property that had gone missing, misplaced by a backfiring cannon. Here, toward its end, was another shattered jaw. This one was not absent, it was still connected, this lower jaw hanging down from the upper, ripped by a bullet. Robespierre had tried to shoot himself and had missed, a suicide botched.

  I had not been released from prison as a special privilege to observe the day’s basketfuls. I must work. Plenty of plaster was ready. There was wax—ordinary candle wax, of the worst quality, but it was all they had—from hundreds of gathered-up candle stubs. I must make casts to be placed in the Convention. I did it.

  It took me two days.

  “Many people,” I said, “shall wish to see these heads. Many people will come to be sure he is dead. Don’t you think so? I think so. I’m certain of it. People will come for decades to see such things.”

  When my work was done, I asked them what would happen now.

  They told me I was free to go.

  Free to go where? I asked.

  Go home, they said. Why don’t you go home?

  “Home,” I whispered. “I hadn’t quite thought of that.”

  I took the long way, through circuitous streets. I didn’t want to hurry. I couldn’t be sure what was waiting for me there.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

  Little black list.

  I wish I were hollow. But I’m filled up. I wish I were hollow. Someone should tip me out. I must make a list. Set it all down. Bodies come and bodies go; you should not get too attached. While I was in prison, people went away. I must make a list.

  Picot, Charlotte, age sixty, an old, lost woman.

  It’s not finished, my list. I’m small. I’m a snail. No, I’m made of leather. I’m black and broken. I’m very small and very robust. I was making my list; I haven’t finished. There’s a man in the Bible called Job. He loses his family, and when that doesn’t crush him he’s covered in boils and beaten and smashed, but still he goes on. He probably doesn’t know why. I was writing down my list. It doesn’t always hurt so much anymore. My list. Do it then.

  I came home to half a house. Half had tumbled to the ground, the crutches had given way or been tugged free, bricks and timber in the dirt toppled like a house of playing cards. The Great Monkey House, ambition fallen. Two whole walls of bricks had collapsed, revealing the old rumpled wooden structure underneath. The flagstones had been pulled up and taken away; there was no longer any fencing, nor any bell that had belonged to Henri Picot. Once there was hope around this place; so many people had labored here; so many had attended. Once the greatest show on the boulevard, the greatest in Paris.

  I stood silent before it.

  “Edmond,” I whispered, “I’m home.”

  No, no answer.

  “Edmond.”

  None.

  What had happened while I was away? I learned it all later, from a record at the Préfecture du Département de la Seine. Fill in the pieces. Get it over.

  Those of our district, section leaders, National Guardsmen, old natives—André Valentin, I presume but can never prove—came upon the Great Monkey House. They had hated it for so long. They surrounded the house and they began to pull it down. It did not need much help. The crutches came away easily enough; the whole house yelped and moaned, as if all the monkeys were inside again. Section leaders wrecked high and low, every cupboard, every trunk, every drawer, every room, upstairs, downstairs, in and out, up and down. They went about our dolls’ house, breaking it, for they wanted to hurt our wax people. They hauled some out, danced drunkenly down the street with wax partners, then left them broken upon the ground. They pulled and upturned everything. But the plaster room was still safe. They did not know it existed. And higher yet?

  At the foot of the stairs I discovered the doll Edmond had made of me, collapsed in doll-hopelessness, legs bent impossibly back, skirt pulled up, a crack to one side of the head, a hand twisted behind as if for protection, as if it couldn’t bear to look.

  On I went. The attic, or what was left of it. Much of the roof had collapsed.

  As they searched on, drunk and furious, as they rummaged through the Great Monkey House, upstairs were still the many brothers and sisters Picot. Quiet, gentle folk. Suddenly bleak and bitter men were among them, knocking them down, pulling them about, laughing, such fun. Tugging on the beams. They started to throw the Picots out through the windows. Mannequins broken on the ground, toppling one after the other, the upstairs walls groaning, the timbers failing. And then a warm mannequin.

  “Shhh,” he said to the section leader. “I’m a shop doll.”

  The section leader stared at him.

  “Shhh,” he said. “I keep very quiet.”

  The section leader took a handful of sackcloth. The attic called out.

  “I’m made of wood and canvas and stitching. My head’s painted papier-mâché. I’m cloth. I’ve sawdust for guts.”

  The timbers were giving way.

  “Then this shan’t hurt you, shall it?”

  Did it happen like that? Was it, I wonder, his ears that gave him away? He could have been the pattern for a thousand more. He didn’t call out, I’m sure he didn’t. No, perhaps he did. Perhaps he called to them when they were downstairs: “My name is Edmond Henri Picot! Edmond Henri Picot! I do not forget!” Or perhaps in the end, by dint of concentration, he had turned completely in
to a shop doll. Broken brothers and broken sisters. And among all those bits and pieces, shattered limbs and heads, collapsed torsos, one that was heavier than the rest. Perhaps he never said a word, and they never knew it was a living person they were throwing from a high window—not until he struck the ground and they saw the red. My life spilled out of the house. And he could not be fixed again. I fill in the gaps. Was that how it happened? Or was it only that the attic, long distressed, had begun to fall apart, and Edmond, traumatized, had leaped?

  I was given the record at the Préfecture du Département de la Seine: Man fallen out of building, five foot five inches, one eighth. Name unknown. Edmond had practiced for disappearance all his life. Here it was, and here ended my private life.

  Picot, Edmond Henri, age thirty-nine, master of mannequins.

  The house was left a fraction of its size. All the property built upon the grounds of the chess café had collapsed. And my list. I haven’t finished my list. I have to do it.

  I went to the Salpêtrière Hospital. There, among crowded beds, my baby was born. But she did not make a sound. There was a rush inside me and I suddenly knew that I’d fallen in love. I’ve an object, I said, what a miracle. Little hands, and little legs, and little belly. The lips so thin and red. She had the Grosholtz chin, there it was again, but not the Waltner conk. In its place she had Edmond’s insubstantial nose. My dear daughter. She never had a chance. A little creature I made. Born without life. Stillborn. She didn’t move and they took her away from me.