A Woman, In Bed. Anne Finger
grow bored by her prattle, but for now he was charmed by it.
“At the same time that I would be obsessed by the German advance, I would be haunted by the—thought of Robert’s absent leg. How could I think so much about something that wasn’t there?” She had heard that Jews bury an amputated limb. Was it true, therefore, that non-Jews do not bury their hacked-off body parts? In that case, where had Robert’s missing leg gone? Had it been tossed in a garbage tip? Incinerated? Had the amputated limbs been collected, tucked in the spaces between the shrouded bodies of the dead stacked like firewood in mass graves?
“It seemed to me—I feel so foolish saying this now—that when I could be kind to Robert, when I could hold his hand and tamp down that feeling of revulsion, then our side would be victorious in battle.”
Jacques took her hands in his. “When I lived in Madagascar, I really came to know the Malagasy people—I learned their language—I’m one of the few Europeans who’s fluent in it—”
This was the third time he had told her about his ability to speak the language of Madagascar. From that fact, she didn’t draw the conclusion that he was both vain and fragile, needing to trumpet his abilities. Instead she suspected he had so little regard for her that he forgot the conversations he had with her as soon as they were finished.
“Our colonial subjects are said to be primitive, superstitious, but it often seemed to me that they had a way of comprehending the world which we call irrational, but which might be better called non-rational. A Malagasy might believe that the hacked-off limb was walking about on its own, seeking to be reunited with its former body, that it haunted your mind because it saw you as a pathway to Robert’s flesh.”
Simone did not know how to respond to this, and, the silence making her uncomfortable, went on:
“One day—the back gate was unlatched, and he had his pants’ leg rolled up, his wooden leg on the ground next to him, his stump stretched out on the bench. The end of it was covered with raw flesh, and a few dark hairs, long and spindly. They made me think of the hairs on the chin of the Vietnamese greengrocer.”
“Just giving the fellow some air,” Robert had said, sounding fond of his errant, missing leg, as if it were an impish kid brother who was always getting himself in trouble, who had been sent out to buy some bread in the morning and returned after dark, empty-handed, penniless, abashed, full of promises to always be good in the future.
“Are you—worried about what your reaction will be to Joë?”
“I’m afraid—I suppose, I’m afraid that he will sense my—my fear.”
“He will. But he won’t try to hide his reaction to—what you are choosing to call fear. Which probably also contains within it repulsion, pity. As well as fascination. He will rather force you to—well, you’ll see…I must warn you. He’s not a man who wastes time, who has truck with small talk.”
“When you first met him,” she ventured, “were you put off by—”
“I was wounded at the front,” Jacques said. “A lucky wound, it got me out of the trenches but did no lasting damage. But I spent several months in a hospital. One gets used to a lot. In fact, one returns to ordinary life and finds one can’t help but stare at these strange creatures without missing limbs, with unbandaged eyes, ambling along the sidewalk without the slightest hesitation or halt.”
He dozed for a while, and when he awoke, he said: “Do you know that I’m Egyptian?”
“I thought you were from Nîmes.”
“I was born in Nîmes. The town was settled originally by the Roman legions that had taken Egypt from Antony and Cleopatra. When we go there, we will walk through the ancient part of the town, see the city’s coat of arms, which shows a crocodile leashed to a palm tree, representing the founders’ capture of Egypt.”
When we go there, when we go there.
“Caesar Augustus…” Jacques said, and then interrupted himself while he lit a cigarette. She reached up and took it from between his lips, took a drag, returned it to him.
“Caesar Augustus, no fool he, knew that having overthrown one great empire, those legions might take it into their heads to overthrow another—to wit, his own. But of course he did not want it said that he didn’t treat his loyal soldiers well—so he granted them tracts of land, but in the far-off south of Gaul. These demobilized soldiers of Augustus brought with them a colony of Egyptian slaves, whose descendants intermarried with the local population, with the sons and daughters of the Romans. The researches of Friar Mendel have let us know that ancestry does not mix smoothly, a pureed soup, but rather in discrete clumps. Even now, nearly two millennia later, a child will sometimes be born with half-almond eyes and olive skin. I was such a child. I warn you—I have an ancient nature, cold and pitiless—exacting.”
“I’ve been warned.” She smiled. (Years later, he would say, “I told you, very early on, about my Egyptian nature. You mustn’t wail: you knew what you were getting into.”)
The train dropped them off in mid-afternoon. A few porters and taxi-drivers managed to rouse themselves to implore their business. Jacques shook them off, and they set out, their hands clasped, walking along the narrow streets, the flat planes of ancient houses and churches looming above them. The houses were shuttered, the occasional muffled cry of a cooped-up child issuing forth from behind the stone walls. Their footsteps sounded against the cobblestones: the echoes of their footsteps. The heavy mid-day meal had been eaten. The pots and pans and plates and saucers had been washed and were now set on racks to dry in the still afternoon air. Tubs of mucky water festered, waiting to be dumped in the back garden, while the inhabitants of these houses drowsed on divans and daybeds.
As their elongated shadows walked ahead of them, she rocketed out of time, saw this walled city as a ruin, when humanity itself would have ceased to exist, when these stone walls, these cobblestoned streets, might be observed by the eye of a rook, perched atop the wreckage of one of the turrets above them.
The servant who opened the door, inclined her head and said, “Mme. Melville, Monsieur.” Simone fought to keep a grin from her face.
“Did you tell them we were married?” Simone whispered, as they were climbing the uneven flight of stairs towards Joë’s redoubt.
Jacques shrugged: “People make assumptions.”
“Wouldn’t it be more practical for him to have a room on the ground floor?” She regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth: practical, I sound like a peasant, not like the lover of an intellectual.
The smell of beeswax candles, the scent given off by the polished mahogany of his bedstead, the bookcases, the musty odor of antique Oriental carpets—later, Joë would tell her that the most threadbare of them had been brought back from the Seventh Crusade by an ancestor, but she wouldn’t know whether he was telling the truth or one of his delightful stories. His room seemed less a sickroom than a grotto within a church. (Simone had always been drawn to those alcoves tucked away within the majesty of cathedrals, half-hidden places safe from the masculine pomp and business of the popes and archbishops, where it was possible to imagine Mary squatting and straining to expel the holy infant in a shed which smelt of cow farts and damp hay.) Joë sat upon his bed as if it were a throne, thick blinds drawn against the afternoon light. A single kerosene lamp on the bed table illuminated the magnificent dome of his forehead. The shape of his head surprised her: she’d made a picture of him in which he was elongated, a gaunt Donatello.
“Ah, Simone! You must come to me, yes, closer, closer, I can’t come to you—closer, closer, yes, there’s only a single chair, let Jacques have that, you come sit right here