Julian (26 page)

Ninon brightened immediately, smiling and humming along when she could. I slipped upstairs and invited Fiona and Roger to join us.

“Right you are,” Fiona said. “The bairn’s asleep so I’ll leave our door open in case he stirs.”

We had a sort of party, what Ninon called a
fête de la musique
. At one point Rawlins stopped playing and took a swig of his beer.

“Time for the guest of honour to sing one,” he announced, his eyes on Ninon.

“I can’t,” she rasped.

“I can hear you just fine,” Rawlins insisted. “Anything you like. Just start in and I’ll pick up on it.”

To my surprise, Ninon gave it a shot. We could barely hear the words scraping from her throat. She was singing in French, and the tune sounded vaguely familiar. Rawlins played along softly, picking each note so as not to drown out her frail voice. He hummed. Then Fiona joined in.

And I recognized the song. It was “Frère Jacques,” a simple tune about a sleeping brother and church bells in the morning. Like a million little kids, I had picked it up at school. Ninon must have learned it too, back in her hometown in France. Recalling the words, I began to sing with her and Fiona and Rawlins.

I watched Ninon following Rawlins’s fingers on the strings. Then she looked my way, her green eyes bright as she sang.

It was enough to break your heart.

A couple of nights after the fête Ninon asked me to come and sit by her. “Bring my diary,” she whispered.

I did as she asked, sat by her bed, my knees against the mattress. She told me to turn to a blank page in the diary. She wanted me to write down her wishes for what to do “after,” and went on to dictate a short list of instructions.

“I know it will be hard. Will you do it for me?”

Unable to speak, I nodded.

Fiona had warned me how I’d know it was time.

“Her blood pressure will drop,” she had said, “and she’ll go into a deep sleep, almost like a coma. She won’t respond to your voice, but lots of people believe that the patient can feel your touch.”

“Okay,” I replied.

Since the day she had told me what she wanted me to do “after,” Ninon seemed to relax. She said she was ready. Her choices were all gone; there were no new challenges or dangers around the corner, no unanswered questions. We fell into a daily routine.

Ninon encouraged me to take my regular run, but I didn’t want to leave her for long. I’d walk up to the Danforth to do some shopping, or slip outside when she was sleeping and busy myself with pulling weeds and cultivating the flower beds. Eventually, I didn’t leave the apartment at all.

Most of the time Ninon dozed, and her periods of sleep grew longer and deeper. Her body seemed to waste away, to retreat into itself—her cheeks and eyes sunken, her arms thinner, her hair dry and without the lustre it once had. But her spirit, that sense of freedom and independence that had always defined her, was still there. Still there, but tired.

When she was awake we chatted a little, often returning to the same theme. We were orphans. We had struggled to
leave the past behind us, and we had pulled it off. We had found each other, if only for a short while.

We relived the few times we had had together—the art gallery, the French movie, lunch at the Chongqing Gardens, and especially the first trip to the harbour islands when we had slept the night through on the beach, with heat lightning trembling behind the clouds.

“I think we would have stayed together,” Ninon said.

“Me too.”

The next afternoon Ninon woke from a two-hour nap. I gave her some apple juice and as I held the glass to her lips she covered my hand with hers.

“
Julien
,” she whispered, her eyes on mine.

My heart shifted. No, I thought, not yet.

“Alright,” I said.

I refused to let myself think. I concentrated on the moment, the task at hand. I set the glass down and stood to shut off the glucose feed, then carefully slipped the needle from the back of Ninon’s hand.

“I’m going to leave the oxygen on, okay?”

Her voice was a breath. “Yes.”

I brought the blood pressure monitor to the bed and took a reading. Her pressure was falling.

“Do you want to listen to some music?” I asked.

She nodded, then said, “Make me look better.”

I brought the clock radio from the bedroom and set it on my reading table and tuned it to a classical music station. I helped Ninon into a fresh nightie, rinsed her face with a damp cloth and brushed her hair.

“Ready for the dance,” I said, making her smile.

I sat with her, checking her pressure every half-hour or so. It continued to fall.

“No more,” she said.

I put the machine away. At ten o’clock I turned out all the lights except the reading lamp. I turned my back on Ninon for a second to shut off the radio. I heard her say, “
Julien, je t’aime
.”

In a panic, I whipped around and bent over her. She was breathing deeply and evenly. I sat on the edge of the bed, gently rubbing her forearm. And then, without opening her eyes, she breathed, “I’m cold,” and rolled onto her side. I took off my jeans and T-shirt and got under the covers. I spooned up to Ninon to warm her, my arm around her waist, her head under my chin. I felt the faint rise and fall of her breathing. As the minutes passed the breaths she took grew shallower and further apart, as if she was gathering herself.

“
Maman. Papa. Julien
,” she whispered and drew in some air, hesitated, then let it go with a long sigh that told me she was gone.

M
Y PLANE BUMPED DOWN
in Marseille about ten-thirty in the morning. Under a blinding sun I found the car that had been left for me in the parking lot, courtesy of Bai’s contact, and fished the keys from under the seat. Up until now I had never driven a car without an instructor sitting beside me. Rattled by the strangeness of the place—the traffic, signs, even the design of the roads—I headed northwest, away from the coast of the Mediterranean and into the hills of Provence. I cruised through villages and small towns with shaded squares and narrow streets. With a range of mountains in the distance, the road followed the Durance River, then angled north. About mid-afternoon, eyes sandy with fatigue, I motored across a bridge into the town whose name I knew by heart. I found my hotel beside the river, where a dam formed a basin and the river split into streams, climbed the stairs to my room,
locked the door and shed my clothes. Thirteen hours or so after I’d left home I slipped into bed and fell into a deep sleep.

Early next morning, well rested, I was on the road again, heading upriver through countryside showing more shades of green than I could have imagined. I came to a small village, parked in the leafy central square by the river, and trudged along a pathway that led into steeply rising hills where a crumbling ruin clung to the top of a rocky crag. The valley narrowed to a wooded gorge, the hills sharpened into cliffs, the river broke up into a long shaded fall of tumbling streams—a confusion of boulders and fallen tree trunks, rocky shelves and steps coated with moss. The cool air was heavy with the odour of vegetation and water. Finally I came to the source of the Sorgue River, called Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, a bottomless translucent green pool enclosed on three sides by sheer walls of rock soaring skyward. My guidebook claimed it was one of the most abundant sources of water in the world.

I sat on a huge boulder, cocooned by the peaceful solitude. I had never been to a place where a river was being born right before my eyes.

After a while I made my way back to the car. A kid was fly fishing from the narrow bridge near the square, his rod held high, his line a gold thread in the sun, hanging in a graceful loop behind him. I motored slowly back toward the town. The car was a time machine, slipping like a breeze through the centuries, rolling past ancient stone houses and outbuildings and fields that had been tilled since before
Roman legions passed on their way to Spain or northern Gaul. And there was something more. As I passed slopes carpeted by olive groves, the thin leaves of the trees silvery grey against the sky, I realized what it was.

During the art gallery field trip when I had seen Ninon for the first time, with her jaunty beret and khaki greatcoat and clunky boots, I had learned that Van Gogh and other painters left northern Europe to paint in Provence. In Belgium and the Netherlands—and the place where I lived—the sun’s rays struck the earth at an angle, reducing their intensity. Here, the sunlight poured down into the landscape and flooded the wheat fields and vineyards and fruit groves, illuminating every single blossom and stone and blade of grass, so that the world was bright and clear.

And on that day when I’d commented to Ninon that the sky in Van Gogh’s painting of the yellow house couldn’t have been that blue, she had said, “Oh, in Provence the sky is exactly like that.”

And it was.

After lunch I left the hotel on foot, crossed the footbridge over the basin and followed the river a little way before turning into a lane barely wide enough to admit a car. Three- and four-storey shuttered stone buildings on each side formed a shaded canyon. I passed through Place de la Liberté, where a semicircle of shops, bakeries and a café faced the portals of a nine-hundred-year-old church. Plane trees shaded the cobblestones and the outdoor tables at the Café de France, where Ninon’s father had once worked.

I pulled a map from my pocket. None of the lanes or alleys of this old original part of town followed a straight line—which made sense, in a way, since the village was encircled by the river and seamed by a network of clear shallow streams, some narrow enough to jump across, a few running right under the buildings. On the wider branches, huge iron water wheels at least four metres in diameter revolved slowly, their broad plank paddles and ancient frames green with moss, the water raining down from them in sheets. They had once powered small factories and mills. Now, disconnected, they rotated majestically on their axles with the flow of the Sorgue, like gears in a clock with no hands.

On the quai Frédéric Mistral I found the stone building where Ninon and her parents had lived and where her mother had kept her seamstress shop on the ground floor. The windows were covered by shutters painted yellow and blue. Downstream, within view of the windows, a water wheel revolved. I checked my watch against the position of the sun, then headed to my hotel.

I slept late the next morning. I had lots of time. When I came downstairs the patio tables on the river basin were already busy, the mid-morning sun bright and strong and sparkling on the water. I ate a couple of croissants, pulling them to bits with my fingertips, washing them down with café au lait, and watched the trout glide back and forth over the river’s gravel bottom.

When the sun approached the right spot in the sky, I went to my room and pulled clothes from my backpack,
replacing them with Ninon’s funeral urn. I slung the pack onto my shoulders and headed into the village. Liberation Square lay striped and dappled with sunlight and the patio tables were full at the Café de France. I followed rue Pasteur to the quai Clovis Hughes, turned downstream, passing Ninon’s home, and took the footbridge across the river. Along a short distance, a small landing allowed access to the water. A couple of ducks basked in the shade of the bank, heads tucked under their wings. I set down my backpack and took off my shoes. The ducks squawked their disapproval and plopped into the water and drifted downriver on the current.

I sat on the cement slab of the landing, swung my legs around and slipped into the icy river, sucking in my breath from the shock. I turned and removed the globe-shaped brass urn from the backpack and, clutching it tightly under one arm, felt my way along the gravel bottom, my free arm stretched wide for balance. The stones poked hard and cold under my stockinged feet, the relentless current dammed up against my legs.

I crept slowly into the flow, step by awkward step, my thighs quivering from the strain, until I was directly upstream from the water wheel. It revolved casually, its planks streaked with moss, the water hissing and showering like a million diamonds from the rising rust-coloured spokes and blades.

I heard a shout. Risked a glance toward the quay, where a small crowd had gathered. An old man in a jacket and necktie gesticulated with his cane. Others called out warnings, pointing at the water wheel. They wanted me to know that if I lost my balance and fell into the river I’d be swept under the wheel. But with the hot sun on my back, the
fresh odour of the water in my nostrils, the aching cold on my skin, I held strong. And I felt a surge of happiness because I was able to do this last thing for the girl I loved. I had brought her home.

It was time. I braced my feet and legs and carefully unscrewed the top of the urn, dropping it into the river. Then, holding the urn firmly with both hands, I tipped it and gently shook Ninon’s ashes into the Sorgue. Her dust ribboned away on the surface of the water, wavering and undulating as if alive, borne downriver to the turning wheel where one after another the broad blades caught her ashes and lifted them up, higher and higher, into the bluest of all the blue skies in the world.

For generous sharing of their expertise, my sister, Carole Lashbrook, and Tony Gelmen; for reading the manuscript and offering ideas, my children, Dylan, Megan and Brendan Bell.

Thanks as always to my editor at Doubleday Canada, Amy Black, for her support, her insight and her patience.

And for everything, my soulmate, my first reader and helper, my inspiration and guide, Ting-xing Ye.