The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (48 page)

“Who wants you?” Dino shouted, but he was in a cold sweat because of all Marie knew, and because she had never asked about the rings she gave them. Amalia was thinking, She is too ill to live alone. What if she dies? And the rings—she has said nothing about the rings. Why is she leaving me?

She looked around to see what they had done to Marie, but there was no hint of cruelty or want of gratitude in the room. Marie would never guess that Amalia had been to Madame Gisèle, saying, “How do you kill it—the buoyancy, the credulity, the blindness to everything harsh?”

“Marie,” Amalia would like to say, “will you admit that working and getting older and dying matter, and can’t be countered by the first hyacinth of the year?” But Marie went on packing. Amalia consoled herself: Marie’s mind had slipped. She was mad.

Marie straightened up from her packing and smiled. “Three people can’t live together. You and Dino will be better alone.”

“No, don’t leave us alone together,” Amalia cried. There must have been some confusion in the room at that moment, because nobody heard.

Last autumn one serious thing happened to Marie—she was in trouble with the police. She says that at the Préfecture—the place every émigré is afraid of—they shut her in a room one whole day. Had she been working without a permit? Did she change her address without reporting it? Could her passport be a forgery? Marie only says, “A policeman was rude to me, and I told him never to do it again.” Released in the evening, having been jeered at, sequestered, certainly insulted, she crossed the street and began to admire the flower market. She bought a bunch of ragged pink asters and spent the last money she had in her pocket (it seems that at the Préfecture she was made to pay a large fine) on coffee and cakes. She can describe every minute of her adventures after she left the Préfecture: how she bought the asters, with Amalia in mind, how she sat down at a white marble table in a tearoom, and the smoking coffee she admired in the white china cup, and the color the coffee was when the milk was poured in, and how good it was, how hot. She shares, in the telling, a
baba au rhum
. You can see the fork pressing on the very last crumb, and the paper-lace
napperon
on the plate. Now she chooses to walk along the Seine, between the ugly evening traffic and the stone parapet above the quay. She is walking miles the wrong way. She crosses a bridge she likes the look of, then another, and sees a clock. It is half past six. From the left of the wooden footbridge that joins Île Saint-Louis and the Ile de la Cité, she looks back and falls in love with the sight of Notre Dame; the scanty autumn foliage beneath it is bright gold. Everything is gold but the sky, which is mauve, and contains a new moon. She has spent all her money, and cannot wish on the new moon without a coin in her hand. She stops a passerby by touching him on the arm. Stiff with outrage, he refuses to let her hold even a one-centime piece so that she can wish. She has to wish on the moon without a coin, holding a second-class Métro ticket instead—all that her pocket now contains. She turns the ticket over as if it were silver, and wishes for something with all her heart.

Marie tells Dino and Amalia about it. It can only irritate them, but she hasn’t sense enough to keep it to herself. They are concerned about the police: “What happened? What did they say?”

“Nothing,” says Marie. “They gave me a card. I can stay in France another year.”

“Not a year; three months,” says Dino angrily. “It is three months and three months and three months …” She shows the card to him. It is the red card—she may stay a year. That is the beginning. Probably she can stay forever.

“They have made a mistake,” says Dino.

The police never make a mistake. She is an elderly refugee with a chronic illness and no money, and she has broken some rule and even lectured a policeman, they have shut her up a whole day, and yet they have given her this. Dino returns the card—he holds it as if it were crystal.

“If I were afraid of policemen,” says Marie, casually putting the object in her purse, “I wouldn’t have left Romania with a passport, and I wouldn’t be here with you now.”

They are gagged with shame at what they suspect about each other’s thoughts. Before she came, each of them hoped she would be arrested at some frontier and taken off the train. They never wanted her.

Amalia, from this moment, considers Marie a witch. What does she say to herself when she turns a Métro ticket over, staring at the new moon? Wishes have no power to correct the past—even credulous Marie must know it. Madame Gisèle says most women ask about their husbands, or other men. When Amalia goes to Madame Gisèle, it is to ask about Marie.

“I think I know your secret,” Madame Gisèle said once.

Amalia’s heart stopped. Which secret, which one?

“I don’t think you are telling me about a real person. Why do I never turn up the right cards or find out what she is thinking? For all I know, she is just someone you’ve invented, or it’s another way of talking about yourself. That has happened to me before.”

Amalia laughed, in her April coat with the neat collar. “Is that what you think? Marie is my old friend. You have seen her picture. I have centimeter-by-centimeter enlargements of her lungs.”

“If she had committed suicide and you were wondering why—I’ve had cases of that.”

“She never will. Marie will go on and on.”

“There is your answer—Marie will go on and on. I don’t know what you want from me. I can’t give you any answers. Go home, Amalia. Never come back here. Go away.”

Marie kill herself? You would have to smother Marie; put the whole map of Paris over her face and hold it tight.

Amalia rehearses for her next session with Madame Gisèle: “I want to show her the slums sometimes, show her my hands, my hair when it isn’t
dyed, show her what my life has been. It becomes a hysterical film speeded up.… You should see her going to work every morning. She can hardly put one crippled foot down after the other. She goes by two kiosks on her way to the Métro station and stops and reads the newspapers. She comes to dinner every Sunday, bringing a bottle of champagne and a box of pastry—her crooked finger under the pink bowknot on the box. She brings the first strawberries, the first melon in summer, the first lilacs; she smiles and tells about her work, her letters from the Americans; she says she went to the Opéra-Comique—she is fond of
Louise
—and she smiles and we see her teeth. She brings cigarettes for Dino. She has never asked for an account. Dino has it ready, but she has never asked. You would think something had been settled for Marie, sorted out a long time ago.”

Amalia thinks they might forgive Marie if she insulted them—if she stamped her foot, called them liars and cheats. She could have their respect that way. Failing respect, she might still have their pity. “Weep,” they would tell her. “Admit you are no luckier than we are, that every move was a mistake, that you are one of the dead. Be one of us, and be loved.” Once Marie said, “You should have had children, Amalia. Émigrés need them; otherwise they die of suffocation.” She thinks they need a repository for their hopes and dreams. What about her own? “Make a wish,” Marie will say, as if there was still something to wish for. They ought to do it: put their faces so close they cannot see each other’s eyes and say, “We wish—we wish—but first we must know what Marie has wished for us.”

O
pening a window in Willi’s room to clear the room of cigarette smoke, Ernst observes that the afternoon sky has not changed since he last glanced at it a day or two ago. It is a thick winter blanket, white and gray. Nothing moves. The black cobbles down in the courtyard give up a design of wet light. More light behind the windows now, and the curtains become glassy and clear. The life behind them is implicit in its privacy. Forms are poised at stove and table, before mirrors, insolently unconcerned with Ernst. His neighbors on this court in the Rue de Lille in Paris do not care if he peers at them, and he, in turn, may never be openly watched. Nevertheless, he never switches on the table lamp, dim though it is, without fastening Willi’s cretonne curtains together with a safety pin. He feels so conspicuous in his new civilian clothes, idling the whole day, that it would not astonish him if some civic-minded and diligent informer had already been in touch with the police.

On a January afternoon, Ernst the civilian wears a nylon shirt, a suede tie, a blazer with plastic buttons, and cuffless trousers so tapered and short that when he sits down they slide to his calf. His brown military boots—unsuccessfully camouflaged for civilian life with black Kiwi—make him seem anchored. These are French clothes, and, all but the boots, look as if they had been run up quickly and economically by a little girl. Willi, who borrowed the clothes for Ernst, was unable to find shoes his size, but is pleased, on the whole, with the results of his scrounging. It is understood (by Willi) that when Ernst is back in Germany and earning money, he will either pay for the shirt, tie, blazer, and trousers or else return them by parcel post. Ernst will do neither. He has already forgotten the clothes were borrowed in
Willi’s name. He will forget he lived in Willi’s room. If he does remember, if a climate one day brings back a January in Paris, he will simply weep. His debts and obligations dissolve in his tears. Ernst’s warm tears, his good health, and his poor memory are what keep him afloat.

In an inside pocket of the borrowed jacket are the papers that show he is not a deserter. His separation from the Foreign Legion is legal. For reasons not plain this afternoon, his life is an endless leave without the hope and the dread of return to the barracks. He is now like any man who has begged for a divorce and was shocked when it was granted. The document has it that he is Ernst Zimmermann, born in 1927, in Mainz. If he were to lose that paper, he would not expect any normal policeman to accept his word of honor. He is not likely to forget his own name, but he could, if cornered, forget the connection between an uncertified name and himself. Fortunately, his identification is given substance by a round purple stamp on which one can read
“Préfecture de Police.”
Clipped to the certificate is a second-class railway ticket to Stuttgart, where useful Willi has a brother-in-law in the building trade. Willi has written that Ernst is out of the Legion, and needs a job, and is not a deserter. The brother-in-law is rich enough to be jovial; he answers that even if Ernst is a deserter he will take him on. This letter perplexes Ernst. What use are papers if the first person you deal with as a civilian does not ask to see even copies of them? What is Ernst, if his papers mean nothing? He knows his name and his category (ex-Legionnaire) but not much more. He does not know if he is German or Austrian. His mother was Austrian and his stepfather was German. He was born before Austria became Germany, but when he was taken prisoner by the Americans in April 1945, Austria and Germany were one. Austrians are not allowed to join the Foreign Legion. If he were Austrian now and tried to live in Austria, he might be in serious trouble. Was he German or Austrian in September 1945, when he became a Legionnaire because the food was better on their side of the prison camp? His mother
is
Austrian, but he has chosen the stepfather; he is German. He looks at the railway posters with which Willi has decorated the room, and in a resolution that must bear a date (January 28, 1963) he decides, My Country. A new patriotism, drained from the Legion, flows over a field of daffodils, the casino at Baden-Baden, a gingerbread house, part of the harbor at Hamburg, and a couple of seagulls.

Actually, there may be misstatements in his papers. Only his mother, if she is still living, and still cares, could make the essential corrections. He was really born in the Voralberg in 1929. When he joined the Legion, he said
he was eighteen, for there were advantages in both error and accuracy then; prisoners under eighteen received double food rations, but prisoners who joined the Foreign Legion thought it was the fastest way home. Ernst is either thirty-four or thirty-six. He pledged his loyalty to official papers years ago—to officers, to the Legion, to stamped and formally attested facts. It is an attested fact that he was born in Mainz. Mainz is a place he passed through once, in a locked freight car, when he was being transported to France with a convoy of prisoners. He does not know why the Americans who took him prisoner in Germany sent him to France. Willi says to this day that the Americans sold their prisoners at one thousand five hundred francs a head, but Ernst finds such suppositions taxing. During one of the long, inexplicable halts on the mysterious voyage, where arrival and traveling were equally dreaded, another lad in man’s uniform, standing crushed against Ernst, said, “We’re in Mainz.” “Well?” “Mainz is finished. There’s nothing left.” “How do you know? We can’t see out,” said Ernst. “There is nothing left anywhere for us,” said the boy. “My father says this is the Apocalypse.” What an idiot, Ernst felt; but later on, when he was asked where he came from, he said, without hesitating, and without remembering why, “Mainz.”