Eddie Signwriter

by Adam Schwartzman

The Refuge Clandestin was completed three months after Madame la Fleuriste first thought of transforming her cellar. Sometimes he would go down to work when business in the flower shop was slow, but most of the painting was done in the evenings after work, and on the weekends, when Bernadette could join him. Then they would take down the radio and open the air vents at the back, and the stairwell at the front, which brought a cool breeze flowing through the cellar, and she would keep him company—reading, or studying for her English for Foreigners course, or taking care of letters or bills, her papers spread out around her where she sat cross-legged on the floor.

  The patrons of the Refuge would collectively decide whose story would next be figured on the cellar wall, but they left it to the signwriter to interpret in images the stories that they painted in words. Sometimes people might drop by to see the progress of the work, but it was only Bernadette who would be there from start to finish.

  She loved to watch him paint, to see these pictures come out of this man who in his own life was so slow to show himself, and so awkward. Painting spared him speech. Whereas he stumbled with words, he could express himself articulately through a vocabulary of images she learned to interpret as the scenes slowly worked their way from the entrance to the Refuge, towards the vents at the back.

  “Why are there no people in this town you have drawn?” she would ask. “What does the smile on this lady’s face mean?” “Why is the bed floating on the sea?” “What are the crying people crying about?” And in his telling her she would know: the loneliness of empty space, the pocketed hands of loss; the meaning of clothes billowing on a washing line; women floating up into the trees; the gutted meat; the orange on an out-held hand; the slimmed eyes of desire that the clenched muscles of the mouth turn to cruelty, then shame.

  Into the stories of their friends he implanted his own. Bernadette learned to look for the characters hidden in a crowd, in the corner of a scene, who seemed just slightly out of place, or whose faces were rendered more real by an unexpected detail or gesture, and so hinted at a meaning beyond the paintings themselves. These were the aspects that she asked about. The lady with the outstretched arms, Bible in her hand. The man in the desert on the balcony of his house. The small man with his books. One man driving a taxi—his eyes, she noticed, closed. Another man, fat as a tub, walking, it seemed, through blossoms. And the two women who appeared more than once across different vignettes: in one domestic scene, setting a table together, the younger’s hand caught in midair by the elder’s; in another, as the heads of snakes intertwined; in another still, figured through the window of a building in the background—the younger, standing at a mirror, recognizable from the back by her braids, the elder in her reflection; and in their last appearance, as the cellar was close to completion, at the corner of an image: standing on the top of a misty hill, surrounded by trees, plants, birds, and animals, painted initially in sharp relief, but in the last moment of their creation, late on a Saturday afternoon that he and Bernadette had spent quietly together, obscured in a fine patina so as to be recognizable only in their shape.

  It was the sharp smell of the paint thinner that had made Bernadette look up from the magazine she’d been reading, sitting against the wall behind him, as he completed the image. He was standing in front of the mural in process, on a paint-stained sheet with which he protected the floor, his tins around his feet, his thumb hooked in the streaked back pocket of his jeans. In his other hand he held a piece of cloth which—getting up to see what he was doing—she saw he was dabbing on the image of the two women.

  Standing a step behind him she observed the previously sharp image begin to dissolve under the application of the paint thinner, the outlines undoing themselves as the two figures retreated behind a gauze of mist until they were hardly discernable.

  She put her hand on his elbow to let him know she was there.

  Feeling her presence beside him, he stopped.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “This,” she said, but did not say what, instead reaching out with her hand, tracing in the air above the space into which the figures had melted.

  He reached out himself, put his paint-covered hand over hers, and before she could guess his intention, gently forced her fingers onto the surface of the paint.

  She turned her eyes from his hand over hers, to look at him.

  She had expected there to be a playfulness in his expression, but there was not.

  She let out a small laugh.

  When he did not respond she pulled her hand from under his.

  Quicker than the time she’d have needed to stop him, he grabbed her hand again, and this time smiling, slowly turned it over in his, to reveal the flecks of paint on her fingertips.

  “Tsk,” she said with half-feigned irritation, and wiped her fingers on his trousers.

  He bent forward to look at the detail of the wall. She bent forward too.

  “What?” she said.

  “Your fingerprints,” he replied, and stepped back, leaving her standing alone in front of the now complete mural.

  BERNADETTE

  BERNADETTE, after work, sits at the wood table in the apartment.

  It’s early evening. She’s drinking milk from a carton. The windows are open, through which she’s looking to the other side of the courtyard, to an identical set of windows, in which a woman is preparing food, and in the window adjacent a man is ironing a shirt.

  The soles of her feet are tired. She has them up on the cushion of the chair opposite, straight out. Her spine is right up against the seat back. She’s shaped like a hex key.

  A gecko scurries over the tiles. Above the eaves the television aerials are like the skeletons of winter trees.

  Bernadette observes the scene calmly.

  A radio plays old-fashioned songs from somewhere downstairs.

  The texture of the whole milk in her mouth makes her think of the small blue cloth she cleans her glasses with.

  Every now and then the elevator engine growls as the tenants return from work.

  The apartment is tidy at this time of day. The bed is folded away. The clothes are in the boxes on top of the cupboard and under the sink.

  She’s waiting for Kwasi to call to say he is coming back. Then she’ll start supper, cutting the courgettes she’s bought earlier in the day from the vegetable shop two doors down from the cheese shop where she works, and which are in a brown paper parcel on the chair beside her.

  Kwasi will be back within a quarter of an hour of his call.

  Before dinner he’ll leave to take a shower in the bathroom two doors down the corridor. When he returns they’ll have the food she’s cooked. Then she’ll watch the television while he washes up. Afterwards he’ll join her. Maybe they’ll make love. Or maybe they’ll go to sleep without making love.

  A normal evening. Like a hundred or so evenings past.

  Enough to keep a person happy for a lifetime.

  But when the telephone rings it isn’t Kwasi’s voice at all, though a familiar one nonetheless.

  Denis Owusu.

  “Back from the dead,” she says, and how long has it been?

  “Too, too long,” Denis says, laughing on the other end.

  And where is he now?

  In Lille, it turns out, to which he’d moved not long after the raid of the previous autumn, and where he’s now working in a small auto mechanic’s shop.

  “I’m flourishing here,” he tells her, “flourishing,” and that she and Kwasi should come to visit sometime soon—as of course they will, Bernadette tells him; and after the invitation is returned and accepted, and they exchange news and memories of times past, Bernadette tells Denis that Kwasi will be back later and asks whether she should pass on a message, and could she take Denis’s number.

  But Denis says no—he will be going out shortly. He’s called because somebody’s contacted him asking after Kwasi. He thought Kwasi should know.

  “What somebody?” Bernadette asks. She puts down the
carton.

  “One of Kwasi’s people,” Denis tells her, and that he’s just arrived.

  “Arrived where?”

  “Here, in Lille. He’s staying in a room in the city.”

  “How did he come to you?”

  Bernadette hears Denis exhale in a short sharp breath.

  “How?” she repeats.

  “The same way Kwasi did when he came.”

  “How was that?”

  “Ask Kwasi,” Denis says.

  “You tell me, Denis,” Bernadette says.

  “I cannot, Bernadette,” Denis says.

  For a moment there is silence.

  Bernadette knows. Denis is thinking that if Kwasi hasn’t told her it isn’t safe that he tell her. She understands, but it makes her feel hurt not to be trusted.

  And why hasn’t Kwasi told her? Because she hasn’t asked, she knows, that is all.

  But why does she always have to ask? Why can’t Kwasi just tell her things without her having to ask?

  Not that she doesn’t know more or less anyway—that Denis is in a smuggling ring, was Kwasi’s contact when first Kwasi arrived in France.

  “So what does this man want, who’s calling after Kwasi?” Bernadette asks.

  “To find him,” Denis tells her. “I have only spoken to the man once—on the telephone. I told him I didn’t know where Kwasi is. He asked me to find out. I said I would try.”

  Bernadette looks out the window. The sun is below the roofline. The woman who’s been preparing a meal is sitting with a child, eating at her table. The man in the next apartment is finished ironing his shirt and sits in a chair against a wall, covered in the uneven light of a television.

  Bernadette’s thoughts begin to drift.

  She thinks to herself that if Denis had not called she would right now be chopping courgettes. She can see herself in her own mind. That person cutting courgettes, just on the other side of this conversation.

  “So what to do?” Denis asks her.

  She thinks about it for a moment, then tells him that she’ll speak to Kwasi, and could Denis tell this new arrival that he is still looking for Kwasi.

  Denis says that he can.

  She thanks him.

  He tells her there’s nothing to thank him for. He says that he’ll wait for their call.

  Bernadette puts down the phone.

  It’s now night. The soft shadows cast by the outside light lie across the furniture. She gets up and turns the light on. The room goes white.

  Probably Kwasi has tried to ring, it occurs to Bernadette, standing at the light switch beside the door.

  And if he has?

  Then nothing. Either he will be back in a few moments, or he’s going to be late.

  Except now that time isn’t going to go on forever it does matter.

  She picks up the telephone and dials the shop.

  Madame answers. Kwasi is still there, Madame tells Bernadette, they are working late. Does Bernadette want to speak to Kwasi?

  No, no, Bernadette doesn’t need to. Madame need only tell Kwasi that she called. She’ll be expecting him late.

  Madame tells her all right.

  But it isn’t all right.

  Bernadette puts the courgettes away. She puts away the carton of milk. She can taste it somewhere in her throat. She’s drunk too fast. It wants to come out. She tastes acid.

  She gets her keys, and closes the door behind her, and descends the flights of stairs to reach the back entrance.

  She steps out onto the road that leads off Avenue Victor Hugo. A thin two-story home has survived the grand apartment blocks, hemmed in between the tall façades. It has a crude stone wall to protect it from the street, grown with ivy. She comes out onto the avenue. The tires of the cars over the cobblestones sound like bubble wrap.

  All the shops are closing for the night. Across the road the patisserie is still open. She goes in. The cakes and confectionery under the glass counter shine like polished stone. She buys three, and a baguette.

  Next door in the alimentaire she picks up a bottle of wine and some tomatoes on the vine and some fruit and some Président cheese, all wrapped up in gold foil like a moon lander. From behind her, as she walks down the pavement towards the florist she hears the owner bring down the chain-mail grill.

  She makes her way down the road. The headlights of the cars come past, yellow like the bottom of beer glasses.

  The door of the florist is closed, the front foyer dark, although she can see the lights are on in the back of the shop. She raps on the door twice.

  Madame comes walking out of the light in a white apron. She’s carrying a reel of ribbon in one hand and a scissors in the other. She opens the door with a key hung on a hook inside of the frame.

  Her apron is stained with green smudges. She smells of sap and perfume.

  There are strands of hair coming loose around her face, going off in strange angles like tall yellow grass that’s been walked through.

  She greets Bernadette, her face that was pinched with curiosity as she approached the door, now uncrumpling in welcome.

  She sees the bags of food and the cakes wrapped in their white paper. “Food, wine, tonight we make a party,” she half says, half shouts back into the bowels of the shop, where Kwasi must be.

  “It’s just to feed the workers,” Bernadette says.

  She follows Madame into the room where Madame and Kwasi have been at work, at the large table they’ve pulled into the middle of the room, with thick wooden legs and a marble top that’s an uneven milky gray colour. There are flowers everywhere, strewn over the work surfaces, in buckets on the floor, and vases all around the room in which they’ve putting together what seems like twenty, maybe thirty identical arrangements.

  Kwasi is busy cutting stems of lemon leaf, which he’s tried to pile up beside him but which are spilling out over the table. He hasn’t heard Madame call out, and so is surprised himself to see Bernadette. He bends down as she comes around to kiss him hello, his hands around her waist, still holding lemon leaves, as she gets up on her tiptoes to reach his face.

  She laughs with the effort.

  She tells him she thought he might be hungry.

  He asks her what she’s brought.

  “What I could find,” Bernadette says.

  Madame is delighted. “Excellent, excellent,” Madame says upon removing each item from the plastic bag, clearing space for each among the flowers. Her face is flushed. Mottled spots show through the pale skin under the powder.

  She comes to the wine, then goes off to get glasses.

  Bernadette is now walking round the room, looking at the half-finished arrangements. She can see this is going to take all night.

  She says, “This is a lot of flowers.”

  Kwasi watches her.

  She admires some of the finished arrangements.

  She says, “Is it for a wedding or a funeral?”

  “A wedding,” Kwasi says.

  Bernadette nods.

  He says, “Somebody is getting married.”

  Bernadette wrinkles her face.

  Kwasi laughs.

  Madame comes in.

  “Somebody is getting married,” Bernadette says.

  Kwasi laughs at the private joke—a short exclamation from the bottom of the lungs. He catches Bernadette’s eye.

  He’s cutting lemon leaves again.

  Madame has picked up the wine bottle and has it between her legs and is trying to get the cork out with a rusty corkscrew.

  Bernadette asks if she can help.

  Madame tells her she’s got it.

  “With the work,” Bernadette says.

  The cork comes out with a jolt. Madame spills wine over her apron.

  She laughs. “First you can help us eat,” she says. She pours out three glasses in coffee mugs. “And drink,” she adds.

  Kwasi puts down his plants and comes over. Madame gets out the bread and starts cutting the tomatoes with the open blade of a pair of shear
s.

  She hands round pieces of bread and tomato and cheese to Kwasi and Bernadette.

  Then they have the fruit and afterwards the cakes. Madame grinds coffee beans from a jar with the hand grinder she keeps in the kitchen, and boils up some coffee.

  When she comes back Bernadette is trimming palm fronds and freesias.

  Madame puts on the radio. They work through uninterrupted classics of the sixties, a call-in dedication show, adverts, the eleven p.m. news, more uninterrupted classics.

  They work until just short of two a.m. When they are finished there are thirty-three identical arrangements in glass vases set in rows on the floor, like ranks of pawns.

  The flowers have to go at seven in the morning. Three men will come with a delivery van. The wedding is in a private house in Neuilly. Madame will not get much more than a few hours’ sleep, she says, but it’s fine. It was fun. Wasn’t it fun?

  It was fun, Bernadette tells her. She squeezes Madame’s hand.

  “It was,” she says.

  Madame looks exhausted. The skin under her eyes is loose like an empty water pouch.

  They gather up the cut stems and the discarded flowers, the stray leaves and ribbon threads in sheets of newspaper.

  Madame tells them they should sleep there tonight if they’d like, in light of the lateness of the hour.

  Bernadette doesn’t say anything. She waits for Kwasi.

  “No,” he says, “it’s good. But thanks. It’s a short walk home.”

  “Very well,” Madame says.

  Kwasi and Bernadette head out into the night.

  It’s chilly now. There are no cars on the street. The shadows of branches sway in the light cast by the shopfronts and the street lights.

  They hold hands.

  Bernadette asks him if he’s all right.

  He says that he is. He feels fine.

  “Why did you come?” he asks a block later.

  She says, “I missed you.”

  He squeezes her hand, and laughs the short laugh he did earlier in the shop.

  He doesn’t press her any further.

  She says, “I love you, Kwasi.”

  These are not words they have ever used before, but they don’t feel foreign or difficult at all.