A Woman, In Bed. Anne Finger
simply must return to the Vidals, their indulgent papas gave in, overruling the wives’ protestations that this year they had hoped to go to the mountains.
Simone’s life had not been all flirtation and romance. She eviscerated and plucked chickens after Elise had chopped off their heads. Afterwards she’d find pin feathers stuck to her face, flecks of chicken blood. At dinner, she and her sister each took a wing, their mother the back, leaving the breasts and thighs for the boarders. There were linens to be changed, pots to be scoured, greengrocers and fishmongers to be haggled with. Dishes to be washed, passageways to be swept. At the end of the evening, a lodger was sure to appear in the just-cleaned kitchen and say, “I do get a bit peckish at bedtime and was wondering if I might poke about in the icebox.”
After the war, her mother read aloud to Simone the statistics about the dearth of marriageable men, thrusting under her daughter’s nose the bar graph in the newspaper: the topmost line representing the number of able-bodied men of marriageable age, and the line underneath—five times as long—the number of women. Simone was to understand that she was one of the infinitesimal black dots which made up the lower line, each point a single, love-starved woman.
“There simply aren’t enough men left. They say for a while at least, we’ll become like primitives and one man will have many wives. I suppose the church will have to go through some folderol and allow it. …”
Her mother turned the most casual of conversations into a dirge—a one-woman Greek chorus—staring into the middle distance, gazing at a future in which crow’s feet would appear at the corners of Simone’s eyes, her winsome laugh grow brittle, and the dewy virgin would become the desiccated spinster, until at long last Simone’s hymen would be broken, not with a thrust from her lawfully wedded husband’s member but in her grave by the relentless mouths of worms and voles, maggots and slugs hatching in her womb.
Like a prince in a fairy tale, Luc Henri Clermont had appeared in his cream-colored linen suit, clicking his heels and doffing his hat.
When Simone, great with child, was sent from the miasmas of Turkey to lie-in safely at home, Mme. Vidal understood the balance between the two of them had shifted, given that she was now assisted financially by her son-in-law. Simone, a matron, could hardly be expected to bewitch as she once had. Still, she might have made a bit of an effort to rouse herself from her sullenness, so when the woman from Rouen asked, “How much longer will this wind last?” Simone, instead of merely staring out the window at the clouds scudding across the sky, could have said, “Oh, after these winds have been through, the sky is so clear—I would swear when you stand on the bluff you can see the coast of Africa!” or “If it’s windy tomorrow we’ll put on a play! It will be such fun!” Mme. Vidal shot her daughter glances: Come now, no one enjoys a grouchy hostess. And do quit picking at your food.
Simone was even hungrier than she had been earlier, but while struggling to hook the waistband of her skirt she’d made a promise to herself to get her figure back. She was a keeper of vows, especially ones made to the god of vanity.
Colonel Addams beat the edge of his spoon against his wine glass, and in the startled silence that followed, declared: “Je porte un toast à Mme. Vidal, une femme estimable, et à cette excellente maison!”
Jacques whispered to Albert, “What are we drinking to?” Albert shrugged, clinked his glass against Jacques’, and downed a good slug of wine. The Alsatian birdwatcher resumed her monologue: “…the sound of the ortolan is rather like this,” and made a series of chirps and clicks. “Yes, you’re right,” she continued, as if someone had responded, “it isn’t particularly melodious, almost insect-like, in fact—” while the mother from Lyon issued a series of sotto voce reprimands to her children, and the retired British major asked Jacques, in his idiosyncratic French, where he was from. Simone, in order to prevent the possibility of Jacques saying—as another guest once had—What language is he speaking? exclaimed, “Yes, do tell us where you are from!”
“Nîmes.” The headache which Jacques had planned to plead had now arrived.
“Hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo. Do you hear the difference? It’s subtle,” the Alsatian birdwatcher said. “Let me repeat…”
Albert, embarrassed by his friend’s monosyllabic response, added: “My friend lives in Paris. And before that, Madagascar.”
“Ah,” the mother from Rouen asked, “what were you doing in Palestine?”
“Palestine?”
“I believe, dear,” her husband corrected, “that you are thinking of Damascus. Madagascar is—some place else.”
“An island,” Albert put in, “off the coast of Africa.”
Jacques eyed the curve of Simone’s breasts, smaller than they had been this afternoon. She must be breastfeeding. His wife, Sala, a doctor, had of course gone with bottle-feeding. He imagined the mouth of her infant sucking at her breast and, feeling himself become aroused, inched his chair closer to the table.
In Istanbul, the Prussian blue that formed the backdrop of Luc’s blueprints of the trestle bridges that would span the canyons and crevasses, the tunnels that would bore through mountains, stained his fingers, despite his scrub brush. (He cared for his body as he did for his polished wood and brass engineering tools, which he buffed with a chamois cloth before returning to their leather cases.) He would touch her with his tinted hands, leaving a stroke of blue on the edge of her jaw, a smudge circling her breast like a faint tattoo. A deep blue, almost a bruise, where he had thrust his fingers inside of her, worked the heel of his palm back and forth. She would forego her customary bath, wanting to keep the traces of his lovemaking on her skin.
One day, Luc had come home and seen a pile of Turkish books higgledy-piggledy on the floor next to her chair on the verandah. His wife told him she had engaged a young poet of their mutual acquaintance to tutor her in the Turkish language.
At dinner that night he said: “Ni devus lerni Esperanton. Ĝi estas malŝparado de tempo por lerni turkan.” Simone laughed.
His dignity wounded, he brought his linen napkin to his mouth, wiped his mustache and lips.
“I’m sorry. What did you say?”
“I spoke in Esperanto.” He stopped himself from saying my dear. “The universal language. We should learn it, speak it to our children when that time comes. It is a waste of time to learn Turkish.”
“The letters are so beautiful. My favorite are kaf and çim.” She stroked the shape of the letters in the air.
He knew at that moment his wife would not be faithful to him. It was not the tutor he feared being cuckolded by—the man’s tastes did not tend in that direction—but by a gerund.
Despite knowing that truth, he plowed on: the Turks themselves were abandoning the Arabic alphabet, changing to the Roman, part of shedding their Ottoman past, becoming modern, just as they intended to scrub the language clean of words that had been borrowed from Arabia and Persia. (Beware the gifts foreigners leave at your gate, even if these are only Arabic words for pus and wisdom, the Farsi words for enemy and footloose.)
The poet told her there was no word for être and avoir, “to be” and “to have” in Turkish. “How do you say, ‘I am…’, ‘I have…’? she asked. “Ah,” he said, “we do not say such things as crudely, that is, as directly, as you Europeans—I mean, you Western Europeans—do.” She wanted to dive into this language, to swim in its waters thick with silt, in that sea of the past and shame and languor, to allow a tiny bit of the foul water to seep into her mouth.
The company—save for the birdwatcher