Coming Up for Air Read online

  Praise for Coming Up for Air

  “Leipciger’s beautiful words are elegant, sharp, and bold, but what makes Coming Up for Air completely stunning is that it shows how people, living at different times and in faraway places, can breathe life into each other. The three lives run through the novel, flowing farther and faster until they converge in a powerful rush. The ending left me gasping.” — Claire Cameron, author of The Last Neanderthal and The Bear

  “Sarah Leipciger captures the nature of solitude and stillness in a way that no other writer does. The Mountain Can Wait was a wonder. Coming Up for Air expands her range even further, exploring that eerie shoreline where land and ocean meet, where breathing becomes drowning, and life teeters on the very edge.” — Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

  “An extraordinary three-century braid of air and water: the way we float, the way we drown, the way we surface again against the odds.” — Francis Spufford, author of Unapologetic

  “A beautiful and moving novel with an intriguing multi-point-of-view structure and an interesting and diverse cast of characters — a lady’s companion in Paris at the turn of the nineteenth century, a toymaker in Norway, and a mother caring for a daughter with cystic fibrosis. Sarah Leipciger weaves back and forth seamlessly — and suspensefully — among them. The prose is lovely, particularly the descriptions of nature, and the dialogue is punchy and spare. The ending is as unexpected as it is satisfying. A fine novel.” — Roberta Rich, author of The Midwife of Venice and A Trial in Venice

  “Spellbinding and beautifully written . . . an extraordinary novel. I can’t wait to read what Leipciger writes next.” — Carys Bray, author of When the Lights Go Out and A Song for Issy Bradley

  “Leipciger writes with great compassion and precision; her language is an exquisite mix of muscle and grace.”

  — Michèle Forbes, author of Edith & Oliver and Ghost Moth

  “Writing to sink into. Just stunning.” — Wyl Menmuir, author of The Many

  “An elegant, mesmerizing, elegiac novel that draws us in as surely as the rivers and seas that move through these pages draw the various characters to their fates.” — Cynthia Holz, author of Benevolence

  “Vivid and evocative . . . moving and intricate . . . A book about tragedy, love, and ultimately hope.” — Claire Fuller, author of Bitter Orange

  Coming Up for Air

  Sarah Leipciger

  Copyright © 2020 Sarah Leipciger

  Published in Canada in 2020 and the USA in 2020

  by House of Anansi Press Inc.

  www.houseofanansi.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Coming up for air / Sarah Leipciger.

  Names: Leipciger, Sarah, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190177659 |

  Canadiana (ebook) 20190177667 | isbn 9781487006501 (softcover) |

  isbn 9781487006518 (epub) | isbn 9781487006525 (Kindle)

  Classification: lcc PS8623.E4746 C65 2020 | ddc C813/.6—dc23

  Cover design: Jennifer Lum

  We acknowledge for their financial support of our publishing program the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Government of Canada.

  For Eve, for Ali and for Kieran

  ‘The thing about women from the river is that

  our currents are endless.’

  Terese Marie Mailhot, Heart Berries

  Prologue

  L’Inconnue (The Unknown Woman)

  Paris, France, 1899

  This is how I drowned. I stood beneath the arch of the Pont Alexandre III, on the Left Bank of the slick and meandering Seine. Moon-silver, cold. I took off my coat and boots, and folded my coat neatly, and laid it over my boots, which I lined up side by side with the tips pointing down to the water. I stood quietly for a few minutes, watching the surface of the river form soft little peaks that folded into themselves again and again and again.

  I took a step closer to the water so I could peer down its throat. But this was the gut of night, and even with the moonlight, the water was an opaque, bottomless thing. Not for the first time, I climbed into the underbelly of the bridge, and shuffled along the arch, hugging the pillars, towards the middle where the river was deeper. There was the smell of rust and cold steel and there was the smell of the river and there was a chance that, in this moment, things could have gone differently. A small sign from the world to tell me it would rather I stayed than left. The nasal call of some rook. A shooting star, a whistling boatman, a change in the wind. Nothing happened. So. I leaned forward, expelled my last breath, and let myself fall. The black water closed over my head like a toothless mouth.

  The cold was a shock, and so was the burden of my heavy clothes. I opened my eyes to oblivion. What I thought had been my last breath was not my last breath – I had been wrong about that. For a few seconds, I was as calm as music, but then my body pedalled and thrashed; it didn’t want to drown. This wasn’t a new-found desire, after all, to live. This was about air. Oxygen. And my lack of it. My lungs, each of my muscles, hung suspended, seized in pain. I kicked until my head broke the surface, and in that moment I saw the bridge passing above me. I sucked a breath of sweet air before I went under again and wheeled my arms, looking for something solid to hold as I was carried downriver. My suffocating limbs became blocks of stone.

  Eventually my body gave up fighting and began to sink and, beyond my control, my throat drew water. Water and river silt entered my trachea, my lungs. Something popped deep inside my ear. I vomited and, with a violent rush, more water, silt and leaves filled the evacuated space inside me. At last, a tingling started in my fingertips. It was remote, pleasant. I opened my eyes (though they may have been open all along) and there was something pale and dead floating very close to my face. My hand. And then darkness surrounded me, like steam from a hot bath clouding a mirror, and a feeling grew too; it was as if I’d been handed the universe in a glass jar. All I had to do was open it. Just as my heart was pumping its last beats, I was hooked at the waistband by a pole and lifted on to the hard deck of a grain barge. And this is where I died.

  1

  L’Inconnue

  Before Paris

  I had been living in Paris for a year and a half before my death, having gained employment as a lady’s companion to an old friend of my grandmother’s, a Madame Cornélie Debord. Before receiving Madame Debord’s letter requesting I come to live with her in Paris, life for me, in my home of Clermont-Ferrand, had become empty, and I was adrift.

  My birth had been the death of my mother. In 1880, in Clermont-Ferrand, this was not a shock – it sometimes happened. Nonetheless, death due to childbirth was horrific. It was bloody, sweaty and exhausting, and happened either during labour or days later from blood loss or infection. My mother’s death was attended by three women: her older sister Huguette, the midwife, and my grandmother on my father’s side. Tante Huguette always held me responsible for her baby sister’s death but my grandmother did not, and this conflict was waged between them from the moment I took my first breath, and lasted for eleven years, ending only when my dear grandmother expelled her last.

  I grew up knowing things about my birth that I probably should not have. For example, Tante Huguette told me that after two days of labour without progression, my mother’s green eyes turned as black and flat a
s the eyes of a pigeon. She sweated and shat and vomited and bled until her body was dry. In the end, the midwife ripped me from my mother’s body by my feet and I entered the world ass-first, tearing my mother from flower to anus.

  Tante Huguette told me that when her pain was at its greatest, my mother begged them to kill us both. I believed this for most of my life.

  My father, who was an apprentice baker in the Compagnons and away in Nantes when I was born, came home for one week to meet me and mourn the death of my mother. The Compagnons, a guild of masters, a society of artisans – bakers, carpenters, shoemakers, plasterers, locksmiths – with secret ceremonies and rites of passage, had strict rules and he wasn’t able to stay longer. He had just begun his Tour de France, a five-year apprenticeship that would take him all over the country, and he didn’t see me again until I was almost two years old. Because he couldn’t afford to pay a wet nurse, I was fed for my first few months on goat’s milk or pap sucked through a knob of cork, looked after by a loving grandmother and begrudging aunt.

  * * *

  Those last seconds on the grain barge, moments from my life reeled through my mind. And they were condensed. They defied time.

  There I was, aged four, in a bed in a too-dark room. Shadows in the corners making the room smaller still. Calling, calling for Tante Huguette to come, to come. The good smells of stewed venison, of bread.

  There I was, aged six. My father home for a whole month to visit. Just us two, working together, performing magic in a ceramic bowl. Weighing scales dusted with flour and the smooth passage of a hand-warmed wooden spoon against the bowl’s edge, and then the kneading on a kitchen counter greased with oil. My father pinched a wad of dough from the mixture and showed me how to stretch it, without it breaking, to at least the length of my forearm to ensure the kneading was done. A slow rise, he said, before we knock it back, will give us the most delicious taste. Everything in the room, everything in the world, flour-white.

  There I was, aged seven, my unkempt hair snagging on branches as I picked my way through the forest behind our town, up the hill to a clearing where I could look down on the houses of Clermont and the volcanic-black cathedral at its centre, Notre-Dame de l’Assomption, where I could gain at least a little height on the hills that hemmed me in and dream of a place where the withering looks of my aunt couldn’t burn me. There I sat with my back against the trunk of a larch tree, picking bouquets of myrtille and saxifrage for my dead mother.

  And there I was aged twelve, during the first of two happy years (and the only years) when my father actually lived with us in Clermont-Ferrand until he, too, less than three years after my grandmother, also died. Pneumonia. Fluid in the lungs. There I was, waiting for him to finish his dawn shift at the boulangerie, an airless brick building at the back of one of the grand hotels. There I was, watching him and his two companions at their work, their faces wet from the relentless heat of the three ovens, their white aprons like long skirts. One whole wall taken up by the three brick ovens, topped with stacks and stacks of wood. Another wall taken up by trays and copper pans, and cloth-lined, woven baskets as barracks to armies of hot baguettes. Racks of shining implements, copper and steel sieves, spoons, funnels, graters and spatulas. All hung neatly from nails. There was my father, turning the bread with a long wooden paddle while it baked. And I. Sitting on an upturned bucket next to a water tap coming out of the wall, wetting my finger with the drip, drip falling from its mouth. One of the other fellows was knocking back dough on a wooden table under shelves stacked with white sacks of flour. His back and neck shone and when he looked my way over his shoulder, he kept his eyes on me while his arms pumped the dough. He winked. I immediately crossed my arms over my chest and looked directly at my father, who was bent towards the oven.

  And there I was aged thirteen, sitting on a bench in the Jardin Lecoq with the girl I thought I would love for ever, Emmanuelle. I had promised her a cream bun from the boulangerie, but when we went to beg some, my father had sent us away empty-handed and I was embarrassed. So I told her to wait for me on the bench. There I was, crossing an empty market square and slipping between the chestnut trees that lined its edge. I crept down a small street behind the orthodox church and was pleased to find what I had been looking for, the old woman who sold little squares of bergamot in paper bags. Each year she hid herself away in the cold months and wouldn’t be seen again until the smell of lavender and thyme filled our streets, until the hills were purple and blue and white with wildflowers. And there she was, sitting in a chair next to her little folding table, the table lined with small brown bags of bergamot sweets. Asleep. This was not the first time I had stolen from her.

  And so there we sat, Emmanuelle and I, sharing the stolen bag of sweets, sucking each lemony amber square, daring each other not to chew, until they were reduced to sticky dots in the middle of our tongues.

  And there I was, aged fourteen, standing over my dead father where he remained in his bed. Tante Huguette was there, or she was not there. She was in and out of the room, and for the most part we ignored each other and I pretended not to hear her when she told the priest that the child – I – was the weight she was cursed to bear. This was just after dawn, in winter, and I was trembling in a nightdress and shawl. Dead a few hours, but he had been gone for days, lost in delirium, drowning within his body and asking for my mother.

  His eyes would not shut after death, so I weighted the lids down with two coins. I sat by my papa’s side and carefully studied his face, every pore and hair and wrinkle, trying to make an impression that might last because I knew he would soon be gone, kept in a crypt until the ground was soft enough for digging, and my only record of this face would be from memory. His cheeks and the sockets of his eyes had become sunken in; I wondered what it was in life that kept them so plump because now, only hours after death, its absence was obvious. He was missing a good many teeth. I put my hands on either side of his cheeks and held them there. A long and winding tweep emitted from his backside, like something falling.

  Later, I washed him, all of him except for the parts he wouldn’t have wanted me to see, and covered him with a crisp white sheet, pulled only to the shoulders. On his knuckles and strong arms, on the insides of his wrists, the shiny white scars of a dozen oven burns, evidence of who he had been.

  And there I was, aged nineteen. Tante Huguette standing in the salon clutching Madame Debord’s letter. Always neat and starched, Tante Huguette. Not a hair out of place.

  ‘She says the girl she currently employs is to be wed. She needs someone as soon as possible.’ Her eyes scrolled down the letter. ‘She’ll post the train fare as soon as she receives your acceptance.’

  ‘My acceptance?’

  ‘The money your father left is nearly gone. Your grandmother’s money too, spent. There is little opportunity for you here.’

  ‘But this is home.’

  ‘You should find Paris to be very agreeable.’ She looked out of the window.

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How will you manage? Without me here?’

  There was Tante Huguette, raising her chin, pursing her lips. ‘I’ll manage. I can rent out your room; it will help.’

  * * *

  And there I was on a train, the enormous, gleaming bulk and steel and steam of it bearing me forth to the unknown, the unknowable. Bearing me forth to you.

  2

  Pieter

  Åkrehamn, Karmøy Island, Norway, 1921

  I used to spend the summers with my grandparents on Karmøy Island. I was salt. I was sea. I spent these languid days swimming at the beach, though the North Sea, as my grandfather would have said, was as cold as a witch’s tit. I splashed and kicked and dove to the white sandy bottom where the world under the surface of the water was untold, unknowable and ever-shifting.

  Each time I swam, when I first leapt into the sea, the col
d reached into my chest with two hands and squeezed my lungs, and I was forced to bellow as if I were a musical instrument. The temperature got my blood pumping and my skin tingling. When the sun shone and there was no wind, the water was a marbling of blue and topaz and emerald, but when the wind was up and the weather rough, the surface of the water swelled and folded and galloped, and the colour changed to steel, to fighting green. And on these rough days, the sea sprayed foam against the beach boulders, which resembled the rumps of sleeping elephants.

  I could hold my breath underwater for over a minute.

  I could dive down several metres before my inner ears pulsed and ticked.

  After swimming, I would climb to the top of my favourite boulder, hot and rough as animal hide under my feet, and dry off in the sun. My hair dried briny and brittle and crusty with salt.

  After swimming, I was fiercely hungry. I wanted to eat everything in sight.

  My grandfather was a fisherman, and was usually gone before I woke up in the mornings. He was very tall and thin, and had thick black, wiry hair that sprouted from his head as if the salt-strong wind had sculpted it that way. He often smelled of fish innards, and told stories of gales and ice and the moon rising over the sea like a distant fire in the dark. In his pocket, he carried a sharp knife, which he used to carve off bites of chewing tobacco from a plug he kept in a tin. It was he who taught me that the sea was never too cold for a swim.

  My grandmother: she was something else. Long, tangled hair the colour of sea foam that she wore wavy and loose over her shoulders and down her back. Eyes like crescent moons when she smiled. Her skin had been toughened by a lifetime of North Sea wind. She lost two babies in childbirth, my father being her only child who lived, and her skin had been toughened by that, too.