The Painting (28 page)

Good, she says. If you’re a friend of Natalia’s, I’m sure you’ll be a welcome tenant.

The old woman heads back to her apartment to find an extra set of keys. As he listens to her footsteps recede, he opens the closet door. He steps back aghast. It takes a moment to realize it is only a dress. A light blue dress on a hanger. He holds it up to the light and the color enters a slit in his mind, taking him elsewhere, to the color of a summer sky, the ocean, to the blue wild-flowers—or are they tears?—in the painting. He must find her.

He hears the old woman returning. The cloth against his cheek is velvet. Natalia, he whispers. When he walked her outside, she stayed in his arms, as if she never wanted to leave, and he didn’t want to feel it, pulled far back from that embrace, but now, his body conjures it up, her cheek resting next to his, her warm breath on his neck, her hands pressed into his back. The
woman is almost at the apartment door, rattling the keys. He stuffs the dress inside his coat pocket.

N
ATALIA HAS BEEN GONE
over two weeks and Jorgen has begun to steal more regularly. Whenever Pierre goes out, Jorgen rifles through a box. He does it without thinking, with no sense of guilt. For why should he? He can’t stay here. Tonight, with Pierre at some party, he is rummaging through a box, shoving things into his bag, when he thinks he hears someone downstairs. It can’t be Pierre. He left hours ago.

Jorgen!

Jorgen freezes. It’s Pierre.

Jorgen!

He sets the bag down behind a box. If Pierre says he heard him in the storage room, he will say he had work to finish; and if he heard the tearing open of boxes? An extra inventory check. The carting of a bag into his room? Nonsense. He misheard. He was moving boxes around to make them easier to unload. Jorgen sets his teeth, tightens his shoulders, and walks down the stairs, the explanations bumping into each other.

Jorgen finds Pierre sitting alone at the kitchen table.

Come share a bottle of wine with me! Come, come sit down, says Pierre. I hate to drink alone. It’s a miserable thing. There’s no one interesting at the café. A bunch of bores whining about the war and I’m tired of it.

Pierre swirls the red wine in his glass, holding it out in front of him. Crumbs stick to the corners of his mouth. While most of Paris suffers, Pierre has managed to acquire a small potbelly.

Drink up, my man, says Pierre. Jorgen sits across from him and Pierre pours him a glass. Pierre tells him the first batch of pigeons are to be released at the end of the week. You’ll have to let go of some of your little friends. Oh, don’t be upset. That’ll teach you to become attached to the dirty creatures. To be attached to anything. Stick with being a shrewd businessman and you’ll be safe.

Some part of Jorgen envies Pierre, his peculiar freedom; it seems Jorgen once had this independence, free of attachments and obligations to people,
didn’t owe anything to anyone, but it seems long ago, so remote, maybe it wasn’t ever true.

You’ve never married? asks Jorgen.

Never married, never wanted to marry. I’ve never met a woman interesting enough or beautiful enough to warrant spending my entire life with her. In the end, marriage is, after all, an economic transaction. It is best to remain independent and unattached. He dabs his napkin to the corner of his mouth. More wine? asks Pierre, refilling his glass.

The hard rock in Jorgen’s stomach turns; no, he is not made for such freedom. Maybe once, but not anymore. He places his palms on the table, preparing to leave.

Pierre stares out the window. Don’t go. I’m just a little drunk right now. There is a particularly beautiful pigeon. Have you seen it? Its wings are a soft gray with a dab of purple on the edges. A light green ring around its neck. A lovely bird. Its eyes, a soft orange yellow. When you find it, don’t let that one go.

Jorgen feels some of his animosity toward Pierre dissipate. He’s never heard Pierre talk with such affection.

Put it to the side. Maybe in its own cage. Yes, build the lovely creature its own home.

They sit for a while in silence. Pierre pours more wine into Jorgen’s glass. Jorgen looks into the glow of the candlelight, watching the flame flicker and leap.

I don’t think Natalia is well, says Pierre, staring into his glass.

Jorgen abruptly sets down his glass. You’ve heard from her? What have you heard?

No, I’ve heard nothing.

What do you know?

I promised my father I’d look after her. Did I tell you already? Well, it bears repeating. A young servant of ours had relations with my father, gave birth to Natalia, and then was sent away. My father, the respectable man that he was, raised Natalia in a formal way. We are distantly related to Napoléon, you know. I know nearly everyone makes that claim, but in our case, it’s true. Did you hear of our family name before you came here?

No.

Well, no matter. My father hired a tutor who taught her to read at an early age and she read quite well, very precocious. We thought we had a chance of raising a proper lady. She had some rather uncouth parts. She loved to play the rough games with the boys. We had to drag her inside sometimes, her knees bloody and her frocks dirty. She had a disgustingly deep affinity for the peasants. I told you about the books. We probably only knew about half of what she did.

A group of soldiers in red coats pass by the window singing loudly, their arms linked, leading one another forward, helping one another stay on their feet.

Drunk fools, says Pierre. She was proposed to twice, and she turned them down. They were fairly rich men, too. She could have been dressed in silks and embroideries, lace and furs. She could have had that. I’ve said before she’s not a looker, but her eyes, yes, I’ll admit, her eyes, their intense glow. Stunning, really. Not the soft, motherly eyes in the style of our new painters, but the fierce eyes of an Athena or one of the Furies. Some men prefer such a look. You’ve noticed them, haven’t you?

He has; Jorgen recalls her eyes were the first thing he saw when he woke in the hospital from a fitful sleep. She was sitting at Edmond’s bedside, holding his hand. Jorgen must have made some sound upon waking, because she turned to him. Her eyes were bright robin’s-egg blue with startling clarity and a penetrating force. They seemed to take everything in at once, without flinching. He stared at her, quickly looked away, and curtly dismissed her physical beauty.

It’s not right, Pierre says, shaking his head.

What?

To put another human’s well-being before yours. That Englishman, Darwin, he’d say it’s all wrong. What kind of nature is that? It’s self-destructive, that’s what it is. Nothing is gained by such behavior. She acts unnaturally.

Jorgen sets down his glass. She probably doesn’t see it that way.

Pierre looks at Jorgen with a distraught gaze. Of course she doesn’t see it that way. That’s the problem. She’s never been well. And it’s only gotten worse.

Jorgen straightens in his chair. You could find her, couldn’t you? I’m sure you have connections.

Such an embarrassment. I can’t believe she’s joined the army. Damn foolish. I’m a damn fool for making that cursed promise to my father. How can I look after a loony like her?

You could bring her back, says Jorgen, his voice excited, and he scoots to the edge of his chair. If anyone could do it, you could. With your money and the people you know.

Pierre’s face slowly brightens. But if my father were alive today, I don’t think he’d want me to honor such a promise. No, not at all. Stripped of her senses, he’d say. No daughter of his would do such a thing. She’s become a half-wit. We have a family name to protect. The family name is the most important thing, and I believe those are the exact words he’d use, and yes, my business, which I won’t apologize for, it should be protected, too. A man has a right to make a good living. He tosses the napkin from his lap onto the table. I worked myself into a fit for nothing.

Pierre stands up, grinning, wavering, hitting his thighs against the edge of the table. He grabs his coat from the rack. Now I’ve wasted enough time on this rot, says Pierre. I feel fine. Such rot. All of it. The solution is obvious. I have no sister.

T
HE HOUSE IS SILENT
. Jorgen sits at the table and listens to the thumping of his heavy heart, hunting for her light footsteps, her singsong voice, but there is nothing.

He picks up his crutches and walks outside with a lantern. The pigeons call out and the night is still and empty. He lifts the blanket from one of the cages and there are the shiny eyes, alert and intense.

Hello, he says.

He searches for his favorite, the one with silver and peach tips on her wings. There she is, sitting in her nest.

Hello, pretty one, he says. He has named a couple of the birds. This one, Binie, because she was one of the first to come and perch on his finger.

He reaches into the cage and gently clasps his hands around the body of the bird. So light. He weighed her the other day. Almost half a kilogram.

The other birds stir. He sets her down on the bottom of the cage and holds seeds in the palm of his hand. She snaps them up, one at a time, a brush of a beak against his palm.

He climbs the stairs to his room, finds the seaman’s journal, and lies on his cot.
Picture
, writes the seaman,
in Japanese means threads meet in picture
.

He reaches for the painting. As the birds settle in, and the city sinks into another night, he sees them, the threads linking everything, the threads of the rice fields below, the threads of the horse’s mane and tail, the farmer’s straw hat, of white clouds twined into blue sky, of the tree bark and the imagined tangled roots underneath, the long grass, swaying and weaving, the wild-flower stems, and there, the threads of her long dress, of his long dress, his long fingers on her back, his black hair.

This is what he should have shown Natalia, the threads that leave nothing out, her fingers digging into his back. He should have shown her the threads reaching beyond their fleshy limits and into his heart, the threads from her to him.

I
N THE MORNING
, Jorgen is jarred awake by knocking at the front door. From his second-floor window, he leans out and sees the cap of a National Guardsman. The young man looks up and asks him if he is the master of the house. The man’s solemn face is scrubbed clean. It can’t be. He wants to hide so the guard will go away, and he wants to know, he must know the news. Jorgen tries to assess the young guard’s expression for the contents of the letter in his hand, but the guard, who must have delivered thousands of these notices, gives nothing away. Jorgen hurries downstairs and flings open the front door.

What? What is it? asks Jorgen.

Are you Pierre Blanc?

Yes, of course. What is it?

The guard nods and hands him a thin blue letter.

He frantically turns it over and over. What is this?

The guard points to the address.

A letter from Natalia. It’s addressed to Jorgen in care of Pierre.

Thank you, says Jorgen, feeling his pounding heart.

The guard nods and leaves.

Jorgen closes the door. He presses the letter to his chest, then rips it open.

Dear Jorgen
,

The women now have proper uniforms, but inferior muskets, which have such a short range. The men say the women will be in less danger of causing accidents, but I am determined to find them better rifles. My rifle is envied by all, and I must thank you all over again for such a generous, valuable gift. I sleep with it; it’s never out of my sight for fear of it being stolen
.

I’m fine, except for some chills and a recurring cold from the weather. Everywhere I go, dead soldiers are splayed on the ground, as if they had fallen out of the sky
.

The other day, I watched from a high tree branch a small parade in the town of Gravelotte, a feast in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Despite the Prussian soldiers who lay on the outskirts of this town, the townspeople marched down the center of their small village with plates of food—cooked squash, a slaughtered sheep, and steaming-hot meat pies—and at the front of the procession was a statue of the Virgin Mary dressed in white, her head covered in a veil. They congregated in the town square at tables adorned in white cloth and dined under the evening stars. You probably think I was deeply moved by the festival, but as I was about to climb down from the tree, I spotted a Prussian soldier prowling around the edge of town. I pointed him out to another soldier, who shot him
.

Excuse my handwriting. My first letter, the rain destroyed. This one was rushed. I am wondering if I might trouble you to ask my brother to send money. I’m sorry to burden you with this request, but provisions are very low, and as you can imagine, there is a teeming black market for goods, but at a steep price. If you could convince Pierre to send along a bit of money, I’d be most grateful, and if this war ever ends and I return, I promise to pay him back. Make sure you tell him that. Please send it in care of the 160th battalion
.

Natalia

G
ENERAL
T
ROCHU REFUSED
to let Natalia and the other women fight, so before he could pack them up and send them back to Paris, they splintered off and wandered for days in the woods. Eventually they found their way to the 160th battalion, which had lost a third of its soldiers in a recent skirmish. General Bazaine welcomed them. They’ve been marching for a week, and Natalia isn’t sure where they are going. They seem to be heading in the direction of Metz, though the information is so scattered and unverifiable, no one knows for sure.

When the pale light of dawn comes, Natalia wipes the crust from her eyes, and there is the drab gray of a tent. Her back is so stiff from the hard ground, she can barely pull her knees to her chest. One of the women is still asleep beside her. Natalia tries to move silently out of her sleeping bag, but the woman snaps open her eyes.