Silent Bird (25 page)

“
It’s
you
,” I blurted. In English.

The boy squinted
at me as if searching for something he could not quite remember.

Up close he seemed very young, under fifteen.
He wore long shorts and a plain white T shirt. His skin, smudged pink by the sun, battled new acne.

“
Bonjour,
” he mumbled then glanced suspiciously at Uncle Charles, as if I might be that charming man’s new squeeze.

“This is Pilar, the
fiancée
of Jeannot. My son, Benoit.” Charles said.

Jeannot’s
cousin,
I thought. So
this—
this awful kid from my pictures—was Jeannot’s cousin? How could it be? What kind of luck was that?

Benoit stepped forward to
give me the ritual three-kiss-on-the-cheeks. I did manage to kiss him back. I guess at that point I was still numb. It’s really
him
, I kept thinking. Jeannot’s cousin, his blood! What will it mean for Jeannot, for me—for us as a couple?

Could my future in-law situation get any worse?

“I have seen you before,” the kid said, shifting from one foot to the other. He was almost bouncing on his toes—either restless or uneasy. Or both.

“
Actually I saw you the day I took this,” I said on impulse, and reached into my purse. The package of photos was right there, eager to come out. My hand remained steady as I fumbled to find the picture of Benoit in action.

She shamed the family
. They sent her away.

I
held up the picture in question.

Both
Uncle Charles and Benoit looked without moving. There was a taut silence.

“
And so?” demanded Charles, at last. “Who is the
bougnoule
?”

Towelhead?
He was calling the girl
towelhead
.

“Her name is Fatima,” I said coldly. “As I am sure you know.”

Benoit frowned. “Oh…you were in the street that day. With a camera. Now I remember!”

“What are you saying?” Charles asked me,
his voice rising. “What do you want with my son?”

I don’t want anythin
g, I thought.

I want to do what’s right.

“This little girl was walking down the street when
he
”—I nodded at Benoit—“yanked off her kerchief and stepped on it and made her cry. These other boys were laughing. I happened to get it on film.”

“You—what? Why?” Charles looked genuinely baffled. “What is your point? These are kids. They were having some fun.”

“‘Fun?’”

Benoit
said, “That
souillon
”—slut!—“was saying stuff to us too, you know. She is not as innocent as she looks.”

O
verhead a hawk swooped down for its kill. I watched the bird dive.

“Right after that,”
I continued, keeping my voice controlled before I yanked out Benoit’s scrawny Adam’s apple and shoved it down his throat, “this same little girl disappeared. Kidnapped. It was on the news.”

Benoit said nothing.
Uncle Charles simply glared.

Somewhere in the bac
k of my head I wondered why I was burning the last of my bridges with Jeannot. Why was I fighting this fight now, in his uncle’s house? So I disliked and distrusted most of the men in his family. Did I have to antagonize them, too?

Yes. I had to…defend that poor exiled girl. For a kid who couldn’t defend herself
. Hopefully Jeannot would understand.He was not like these other Courboi
s
misogynists
.
I fixed my gaze on Benoit. “Do
you
know what happened to that child?”

He did
n’t answer. His eyes bore into mine, challenging me to do something about this, to call a spade a spade.

If I could figure out
how
to call a spade a spade.

“What are you suggesting?” Charles said in a much lower voice: a
deadly low voice. “That my son had something to do with this? You come into our home and—”

Someone laughed
loudly in the distance. We all heard the clink of glass bottles and burble of radio music. Then footsteps approached, a pattering of bare feet, water dripping. And around the corner came the female I least wanted to see: Thérèse, in a polka-dot bikini.

S
he stopped short, her oiled lean body glistening in the sunlight. “Pilar? What are you doing here?”

She didn’t say “
When the hell are you going to leave us in peace
?” but the thought bubble hung above her head like unpicked fruit.

“
Hello,” I said in my most polite tone of voice. “Nice to see you too.”

Now
six pairs of wary, unfriendly eyes were staring my way. Too bad I
couldn’t
vomit on demand…

I turned back to Benoit. “
Do you or do you not have any idea what happened to that child? It’s a simple question.”

His face reddened.
“No, how would I?” He glanced at his father. “I did not do anything, Papa. This is stupid! I do not know what she is talking about.”

He was lying.
I felt sure of it. And I hated liars.

So did Jeannot.
It was one of the things we had in common.

He once told me that even the kindest lie is a pretense that you are stuck with for the rest of your life. Lies erupt in your face, Jeannot stated confidently, citing a cute French fable about this foolish frog that aspired to being a cow.

The fable goes like this: I
n order to become a cow, the frog inflates himself more and more until one day he is big enough. Except then he blows up—like most of the creatures in Jeannot's stories, I realized, recalling the sheep.

As I looked at his slender cousin, his bloated uncle, his manipulative buddy from preschool, I thought:
How could Jeannot
not
know all this: that his father is an ass, his uncle a bigot, his cousin at the very least your common, garden-variety adolescent bully? For the moment we’d leave Thérèse out of the equation.

Where was Jeannot, anyway? Hiding? By now he had to know I was here.

“
What
is stupid?” Thérèse asked Benoit. “I do not understand. What is happening?”

No one paid her any attention.

“You dare to accuse my son?” Uncle Charles said. He’d stopped chewing his cud.

“
No, I am only asking.”

“Why?
What does that girl mean to you?”

“
All
little kids mean something!”

He
snorted. “You do not know what you are saying, Mademoiselle. You are confused, yes?”

“No.” Yes.

“We know this girl you talk about, yes. Her name is Fatima Bazzi. So what? They live at the end of those houses with the other Arab families. That is all we know.”

“
What
is
this?” Thérèse said more petulantly.

Her bikini
had an old-fashioned look: a pin-up, pushed-up getup from the 1950s. Except her flesh looked very modern, deeply tanned, arms displaying thick silver bracelets that I’d glimpsed on sale in the most chic Montpellier shops.

“You are obviously misinformed,” Uncle Charles said, staring hard into my eyes.

Thérèse’s bracelets emitted a silvery chorus as she crossed her arms. “I am surprised to see you after last night, Pilar,” she said. When Uncle Charles glanced at her, one eyebrow raised, she added, “She was very ill at the restaurant. She
vomited
on me.”

“
It’s a custom of Americans to vomit on people they don’t trust,” I said.

She gasped
. “Well! How
dare
you speak to me like this?”

“
I didn’t do anything to Fatima,” Benoit told no one in particular. “Maybe I teased her a little, but that is all.”

“Then do you know who did
? Who left her half-naked in a graveyard?”

“
That is
enough
.” Charles’ eyes could have chipped stone. “Listen to me, young lady. You do not know what it is like here. You come from a different world. The Arabs have been causing trouble in France for centuries. We used to fight them and drive them back to their own useless lands; now we invite them in, give them homes and jobs. It is not my son who needs to be afraid. If you try to cause any more trouble, if you say
anything
else inflammatory to Benoit—then you will be sorry. I promise you that.”

The
hawk cried overhead. On its way to the belfry or to eat another one of its cousins? Looking up, my head felt like it would split in two. The sunshine dizzied me.

“
Now
,” Uncle Charles went on in a calmer, deader voice. “Since you have already shown your face in Villefranche sur Lez and Jeannot must hear of it, I suggest you behave in a civilized fashion. You can manage that, yes?”

Our eyes met again, both hard, both cold. Yet he held out his arm again as if to escort me.

I recoiled.

More footsteps sounded. And into the fray marched not my fiancé, but his father…in another Speedo that would put Greek Gods to shame.

I looked away.

“What is going on here?” asked Monsieur Courbois. “Is there a problem?”

E
ight pairs of eyes zeroed in on the intruder. Me. Waiting for an explanation.

My voice trembled as I said I’d come to see Jeannot. No one answered. So then I started walking in the direction of the pool, sidestepping the three Courbois men and the pinup in the polka-dot bikini. I had gone only partway around the house when I realized I was being followed.

“Does my son know what ugly thing his lovely fiancée is doing now?” a voice said just behind me.

Jeannot’s father. I spun around, my heart hammering again.

“I hear you have been rude to my brother and nephew,” he said. “So I ask you: W
hat else is it you want, young lady? Can you tell me that?”

“I want to find Jeannot,” I said, backing away.

He took a step closer. A few fallen flower petals shuffled out of his way. His voice became softer: a hiss.

“
I know what you are like, you see, what people like you have
always
been like. You do not fool me or the rest of my family,
Mademoiselle
, and I am afraid that includes Jeannot.”

Stunned, I couldn’t speak.

Then I found my tongue. “Which ‘people’ are you talking about? Americans? Jews? Or foreigners of any kind?”

He paused.
Then a shrug. “What is America after all, but a land of undesirables? You are used to your country being filled with people cast off from their own kind. Perhaps, to you, this is normal. How can you understand that the Courbois family has lived in Villefranche sur Lez for generations?
Hundreds
of years! Longer than your United States has existed. Oh, the intruders change here, but not the results. Since you mention Jews, I will tell you this. My grandparents did not appreciate the Jews taking over their businesses, their interests and reputations. Then the Nazis came and—” another shrug “—it took some time, but we got rid of the Nazis, too. Now the Arabs arrive by the dozens looking for cheap places to live. They are a worse lot than the Jews, to be frank about it. Dirty and ignorant and still living in the Middle Ages. At least the Jews were educated. I will give them that. The Arabs, they reproduce like rats. They will outnumber the French in no time.”

A great wall of anger rose inside me.
I felt blind and invincible—a strange combination.

“
Is that why you don’t care that an innocent child got hurt?” I asked quietly. “Because she was a foreigner, an Arab? Thank God Jeannot isn’t like you. He is kind and—”

“Tais
toi!”

The
command worked, even in French. I shut up.

His face had gone an unhealthy
tomato red. In two steps he reached me and extended a working man’s scarred, veined paw.

But I moved
even faster, again toward the pool.

Just then
Madame Courbois darted around the corner, nearly bumping into me. She wore a sundress, her hair up, hand clutching a spatula dripping oil. It was only then that I smelled the barbequed meat, that I noticed a pillar of smoke rising over the roof.

“Mademoiselle,” she said curiously. Her face carefully neutral, she
moved forward to kiss me then stopped again. Her startled eyes took in the circle of animosity gathering on the flagstone path. “What is this? Is everything all right?”

More scurrying footsteps, lighter ones, and the twins I’d al
ready met clamored in. Carole and her boyfriend Henri followed close behind. Carole also wore a bikini and shook water off her long blond hair. To my relief, Henri had had the decency to wrap a towel around his waist.

“
Oh, hello!” Carole cried warmly. But she stopped in her tracks, too.

The twins smiled.
Then they glanced around at the other faces and stopped.

I felt like the sacrifice in a Roman arena.
Keeping my gaze pinned on Carole and her freckle-faced children, I said, “Nice to see you.”
You have no idea how nice!

No one answered.
Insects hummed in the heat like the whine of an air conditioner.

“Where is Jeannot?” I managed to ask
. “I came to see him.”

“He went to the shower,” Carole said. “Is there a problem?”

“
Oui
,” said Uncle Charles.

“
Oui
,” said Thérèse.

“
Non
,” said Madame Courbois, looking terribly anxious, like her party was about to be ruined. “We were about to invite Pilar to join us.” She offered me a tentative smile. “Jeannot will be out in a minute.”

One of the twins said
, “We are making barbequed chicken and horsemeat! Do you eat horsemeat in America?”

Just the idea of dining on horsemeat
à
table
with this family should have been enough to make me up-chuck my coffee, too. Strangely, though, the nausea really had disappeared. “Thank you, but I can’t stay,” I said.

“
Too bad,” Carole said.

“
Why is everybody mad?” the other twin asked, the one with the missing front tooth.

“
Please, come to the pool,” Madame Courbois said gracefully. “Do you swim? The water is very warm.”

“
No thank you,” I said. Though I did follow her back along the path toward the pool. Sweat was trickling down my brow and down the back of my arms, but I didn’t even look to see who else was tagging along.