The Unruly Passions of Eugenie R. (44 page)

 

Hunger narrows vision, but finally the barriers of appetite fall. The body learns to fast, conserve, consume itself, and return with harrowing vigor. Once the New Year had passed, Parisians collectively understood that our days of food hoarding, the hovering shadows of suspicion of one another, would soon be done. Any day now, we would be under direct fire. The weeks of anticipation were more fatiguing than the moment itself; once on the brink, we straitened to the task. On every street, we took measurements between known gun positions determined by telescope or spyglass, and our front doors, as though we could predict the damage. Sandbags and pails were arranged and rearranged. Doors left unlocked, in case a passerby needed to take sudden shelter. A new camaraderie arose among us and it was something of a relief.

 

I had not seen Stephan since Noël. However, a cold and silent day early in January took me to his apartments across town, in the sixteenth arrondissement. In anticipation of the bombardment, the city-installed
ambulance
on the first floor of my own building was well-stocked with bandages, alcohol, and
charpie
—shredded linen infused with alcohol and carbolic acid. We had had for some time plenty of supplies but few wounded; in fact—Francisque was always looking for a stray colonel with some embedded shrapnel. I found Mitra alone; Stephan gone out to collect useless newspapers.

Mitra was stacking sandbags at the head and foot of Stephan's bed. He worked with care; each of the bags nearly as heavy as he was—but he placed them in such a way that they could not topple. Apparently he did not wish his master to be shelled in his sleep, a catastrophe that Stephan was convinced would befall him. Such a still, silent boy; always watching. But Mitra could speak and read French; once I had found him cross-legged, turban unwound and hair ruffled around his small ears, in front of my bookshelf, with
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

 

“Mitra.”

He came and stood, as he always did.

“You are so young to be away from home for such a long time, in a strange place with a war going on. Your mother and father must worry.”

Mitra did not touch meat at all and so did not miss it. Rice was now the capital's only available staple, and we French hesitated before it; however, the boy—among other startling accomplishments—cooked it over the fire with spices, roots, and dried leaves he had brought with him. From Mitra I learned that wheat was not essential, nor was meat; and milk and cheese could be done without. Once we invented a dish of rice, rum, cocoa, and cardamom that could have passed in better times. While the dried peas held on, Mitra made curried soups and griddle bread. Between the three of us, the siege had broken down certain barriers. Over the course of these strange evenings, lit by the dull flare of the cannonade, an affinity developed between the boy and myself.

Now he dropped to his haunches. He looked up, and there was a hint of confirmation in the clear planes of his face, despite his café au lait skin.
His eyes.
I slipped off the chair and dropped to the floor beside him. The boy looked at me steadily, and I took a deep breath. “You must miss your parents, though?”

Mitra's eyes darted involuntarily to the door; he dipped his chin and shook his head. “I do not miss him,” he said softly. He ducked his head again, this time more deeply.

“Your mother? Tell me about your mother, Mitra?”

The boy hesitated.
“Le dictionnaire?”

“But you speak French perfectly well.” The angles of his face rearranged.

“She teaches the Bengali language to English and French men who come,” Mitra said gently, and suddenly seemed older than his years. “In Chandannagar she is called ‘dictionary of the bed.' She does not know that I know that name.”

“Ah.”

“My mother says my blood runs from two different rivers, the Hooghly and the Seine, and that I will live the first half of my life as Bengali, the second half as French.”

I paused. “Maybe life was not meant to be lived by halves.”

“But I do not want to be French, ever,” said Mitra.

I would have asked why not, but perhaps we French were not at our best, just then. Maybe his words made sense.

“What do you want to be, then?”

“A writer of the Bengali language,” the boy said, without hesitation. “Like the name my mother gave me, after Dinabandhu Mitra. The great writer of
Nil Darpan.
”

“What is
Nil Darpan
?”

“A drama that shows others the unfairness of indigo.”

“I would like to read it, then. Is it available in France?”

“I will be the one to make it become available down at the bookselling place by the Seine. After I go to school.” Mitra looked at me steadily; I looked away.

“I should like to hear more about your mother someday. She gave you an interesting name.”

“Dinabandhu Mitra said, ‘A poor man's words bear fruit only after a lapse of years.' Please do not say anything about my plans.”

I pressed a finger to my lips.

“I have bandages and brandy and ship's biscuit for you. And then I shall be on my way and we will say nothing of this again.”

“You are going to the hospice?”

“Yes.”

My twice-weekly deliveries to the hospice had carried on in the face of all; now, those of us on this particular mission waited at the garden gate of an adjacent mansion, amid the shrubbery—and we were called (by anyone in on the secret) the “friends of the widow Chateaubriand” because the house had been his and was now occupied by his ancient widow. The
nourrices
who cared for the infants stayed on the hospice's first floor—the older children were above, and they watched for us. We could see their pale faces in the windows.

“Thank you, madame.” Mitra took a small allotment of what I had brought. “Give the rest to the children.”

“It is silent from the forts today, Mitra. The cannonade is quite intermittent.”

“Yes. I must finish the sandbags, madame.”

 

That night, Paris was soft and moonlit and starry, solemn and quiet, eerily so, lit by snow and stars. The only sound was shuffling footsteps, usually unheard beneath the city's clamor. The next day, January 5, the bombardment of Paris began. The first shells hit the rue Lalande and the rue d'Enfer, near the hospice and the widow's garden, where I had just delivered my package to the grateful hand of a starving nurse. Thus far, this emissary told me, not a child had been lost.

 

It went on for three weeks. Hundreds of shells every night, starting at about ten o'clock. The cannon were fired at such an angle from the Châtillon heights that the charges penetrated the heart of the capital, pounding the hospitals and churches, the Panthéon, les Invalides. The Odéon; orchids under glass at the Jardin des Plantes. In shop windows stood dusty
tricolores
and the merchandise of another era, but nothing but a tangle of iron and glass where the ceiling over them had been. What was once a glass-enclosed arcade was now open sky, clouds scudding, swept by careless January winds. Explosions everywhere. Fires.

A fiery mass of metal drops five paces away, and you run, forward or back, realizing foggily that the direction to safety is unknown, and nowhere. Vision narrows; streams with images. A well-dressed man stands motionless as stone in the Galerie de l'Horloge—pale as a root, jerked from the earth with glass shattered around him, covering his shoulders and lapels. Gasping through the smoke and grabbing my skirts up to save them from fires, ignoring all but the narrowest square doorframe into which to take the next step—an open door, a nod, a sip of water.

Amid all of it, during the days when the shelling was quiet I made my way to and from the hospice, situated in the target zone. On the Right Bank, we were still sheltered.

We citizens of Paris, whose world once appeared whole, saw it splintered to fragments while Wilhelm I of Prussia was crowned Kaiser of the Germans at Versailles. We gathered in cellars, filled more pails, stacked more sandbags, bound wounds with whatever fabric was to hand—the next action raggedly begun before the last was completed, a chaos of urgencies. At the rue du Mail we left the bath half-filled in case of fire, and between nursing shifts, Finette and I made a constant circuit up and down the stairs to watch from the roof.

Now, to our
ambulance
came a steady stream of the wounded, soldiers and civilians alike. Our cots and stretchers, provided by the city, were nearly filled. An English doctor had come through and taught us how to distinguish wounds from chassepot rifles from those made by shell fragments; how to wash an injury with dilute alcohol, to close its flaps and even to stitch them and dress the area in good-quality wadding called
charpie
. For a surface wound, we used a bandage with
charpie;
compressed it and applied linseed. We learned to distinguish between pyemia, septicemia, gangrene, necrosis, and frostbite. How to recognize the triage cases, which had to be sent to the larger tent hospitals run by the Americans, the Italians, the French, or the English. The doctor informed us that the amputees at all of these places were dying, and that the orderlies were drinking themselves to death.

 

My hands were red with the blood of a soldier of the National Guard usually stationed at the Fort d'Aubervilliers, but who had not made it to work that day. Finette attending, I bound a gash in his leg with a piece of an old nightdress while he clenched his teeth around a strip of corset baleine. We were now short of bandages; but it was only a flesh wound and I could help him with that. I had learned my limits, and those of our tools. This one was within my capacities. He would survive. He was even joking with me through clenched teeth when I heard footsteps close behind me, and looked up.

“You don't have to start like I am a German shell come through the door.”

The man's trousers hung as though roped to his hips; he was hollow-eyed with siege pallor. He was passing by the rue du Mail and ducked inside. Pierre Chasseloup.

“Help me, then. This man needs to be lifted—over there, by the stairs.” Our ministrations proceeded, absurdly, under the feet of cherubs, the curling tree roots where bacchantes resided in an unchanging frieze of pleasure—but we were now accustomed to such juxtapositions. I washed my hands in a bowl of bloody water. The iron smell no longer made me gag. My guardsman seemed to be resting, and I said I would get him whatever could be managed—horse broth and brandy.

Chasseloup said, “Do you have any more of it? Last night I—I can't even say it. What I had to eat.”

“Come up, then. Take off your boots, they are full of
merde.
”

“There is no
merde.
Nothing is left to produce
merde.
”

Then I saw how weak he was, that I had to lead him by the arm to climb the stairs, to sit him down at the table by the window, on the silk-tufted chair. My provision shelf offered salted herring, pâté, dried apples, a rind of English Stilton. A few of Mitra's flatbreads, and cold green tea—a stewed bitter—from the morning pot.

“My God, it's Balthazar here. You are eating foie gras?”

“It is what you can get.”

“From where? For how
much?
”

“It was a gift. It's all they ate at Strasbourg.”

“It is not what most of us are eating. Coffee?”

“Yes, for the
ambulance,
but you can't drink coffee, not in the shape you're in. It will destroy your stomach. You can have my ration; I can't hold down horseflesh. Where is your blessed father?”

“Furious that I took a job with the Artist's Federation instead of the so-called Government of National Defense. Left me to rot. I've been sandbagging the Louvre.”

I set out some apple slices, cold tea. “Eat slowly. If you can keep it down, you can have something more. Now wait, while I see to my guardsman.”

 

Chasseloup was stretched out on the divan, asleep, when I returned, and when he woke, I fed him again and told him he could stay the night. By then I was tired too, and in no mood to go out and watch the bombardment, or even climb up to the roof. The past few nights it had become a gruesome entertainment; even a relief after the siege ennui, but now, one just desperately wanted it to end.
Perhaps it will never end. Perhaps—

Chasseloup said, “I wrote to Maillard with my plan to take
An Unknown Girl
out by balloon. I can get it done; I know how. But he has declined, said that the painting is perfectly safe and he must spend his time seeing to the security of living Parisians.” Chasseloup paused, almost out of breath. “The man is a cretin, he knows nothing about art . . . What is this I'm eating?”

“An Indian flatbread, with spices to purify the blood. Anyway, at Neuilly,
An
Unknown Girl
is practically under the protection of Prussian guns.” I knew where it was because Stephan had arranged to see it, just before the Great Sortie and before I had been ill. I did not know what he thought; when I saw him shortly afterward, he did not raise the topic, and I did not ask. Jolie had said that Stephan was not sentimental, but he had been sufficiently so to seek out Maillard and the picture. I didn't know what to make of it, really.

“You know where it is?”

“Don't get mad ideas, Chasseloup. I can't help you with Maillard. I've never met the man. And his carpets are probably worn out with the number of people marching to him for one favor or another.”

“He cares about his factories and his men, but I am a madman for trying to protect my own work—my legacy?”

A shell whined; it seemed unusually near and the explosion rattled our teacups in their saucers. Pierre and I both jumped and peered out of the window, where we could see nothing. It was peculiarly maddening to hear and know and even smell the smoke, but not be able to see what was happening; even though that meant that the damage was still a distance away. Disaster was highly localized and omnipresent all at once. Pierre raked his fingers across his scalp. His hair was noticeably thin, and gray.