Coming Up for Air Read online

  The class sat in a circle around the manikin and listened as the woman from St John Ambulance explained something called cardiopulmonary resuscitation. CPR. Cardio: relating to the heart. Pulmonary: of the lungs, or, the nature of the lungs. Resuscitation: to revive, especially from apparent death. She showed them how to check the victim for signs of breathing, to listen to the nose and mouth, to see if the chest was rising. She showed them how to tilt the head back with one hand on the forehead, to open the airway by lifting the chin, to check the mouth for food or debris. She showed them how to pinch the victim’s nose and make a tight seal – rescuer’s mouth around victim’s mouth.

  The class jittered.

  She showed them rescue breaths, two together, steady. She showed them chest compressions. Arms straight, the heel of one hand on the breastbone, the other hand on top for added support. Fingers laced.

  She asked for volunteers to practise on the manikin, and when Anouk raised her hand some of the kids groaned. Someone else said it wasn’t fair if she went first. Because of the germs.

  Mr Chester stood up in the middle of the circle, and held his palms up flat the way teachers did when they wanted everyone to shut the hell up and listen.

  ‘I know something about this manikin that you don’t,’ he said. ‘I have a story about where she came from. We’re all going to have a turn and we’re going to be kind to one another and afterwards, I’m going to tell you what I know.’

  Which he did. Back in the classroom while he handed out pin badges supplied by the woman from St John Ambulance. The badges were white, with red hearts on them.

  Later, at home, Anouk added the badge to her time capsule.

  16

  L’Inconnue

  Paris, 1898

  I quickly learned that Madame’s mood was much improved if she spent time outdoors, so I encouraged her to accompany me one Saturday, the week after my wrists were oiled and perfumed at La Samaritaine, to have lunch with Axelle. It took some convincing. Madame was not at first enamoured with the idea of spending her Saturday with a member of her late husband’s family, no matter how distant a cousin Axelle may have been. I suggested that, if Madame behaved herself, Axelle would bring a good report back to the family. Madame would shine.

  ‘What do you mean: if I behave myself?’ Madame asked.

  ‘If Madame will pardon my saying.’

  ‘Please, speak.’

  Worried I may have ventured too far, but too late to turn back: ‘Vous ne prenez pas de gants.’

  For a moment she was silent, then said, to my relief, ‘You’ve got me all wrong. I’m very careful in how I conduct myself with others; the problem lies with those who are so sensitive they need to be handled with kid gloves.’ She tried to hide her smile with a face of stone, but I could see that she was pleased.

  Having arranged to meet Axelle by the fountain in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Madame and I left the flat early and boarded an omnibus. We crossed the river at the Pont de Sully, under a sky that was low and heavy and somewhat threatening. Passing through La Sorbonne, we watched the students wandering the streets, gesticulating importantly and smoking their clay pipes. We disembarked on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, not far from the university, a five-minute walk from the entrance to the garden.

  In a note delivered to me earlier in the week, Axelle had directed me to wait at the head of the fountain, where a statue of a man depicted in bronze spied over a pair of marble lovers, and Madame and I waited there now, the air balmy and still. Close to where we sat, a cheapjack set up his table of novelties under the shade of the plane trees that lined the grotto. He spoke his trade quickly, one dark eye roving for the gendarme. Among other oddities, he was selling men’s ties which, he guaranteed, would not ride up.

  The cloud broke and the facade of the Palais du Luxembourg was momentarily a brilliant cream-white, its windows flashing, dramatic against the slate sky. After a few seconds, the sun retreated and the stone faded again to a soft, ashy grey.

  Axelle arrived several minutes late and, as we were all hungry, we went directly to a restaurant she and Madame both recommended, with a view of the gardens. Although rain was a possibility, we convinced Madame to sit outside because the air was fine and warm and there was the lovely aroma of late roses. We ordered omelettes with fresh herbs and cheese, a basket of bread and a small carafe of red wine. Our waiter suggested a bowl of fresh fruit and as I nodded yes, Madame grabbed my knee sharply under the table.

  ‘No, Monsieur,’ she said. She waited for him to leave before she said to me: ‘You must ask the price of fruit before they bring it to the table.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘They will charge you a king’s ransom for it.’

  Axelle brought her napkin to her mouth and pretended to wipe her lips.

  Before our food arrived, a man approached wearing a smart coat with tails and a white cravat. Without saying a word, he placed a single, glazed cashew, which was nestled sweetly in a white paper cup, on the table between our wine glasses. He gazed at the nut as if it were the most beautiful object in all the world, as if it were his own child, and implored us with a long, searching look from his sad eyes to agree. I reached for the nut, but Madame put her hand over the cup and shook her head.

  ‘No, thank you,’ she said, her small eyes on him.

  I glanced at Axelle, embarrassed, worried that Madame was ruining our day out. Axelle was glaring at Madame’s hand, which lay like a stone slab over the swaddled cashew. The man left the nut on our table and turned to the couple sitting next to us, and placed another paper cup between their wine glasses.

  ‘If you eat it,’ Madame whispered, ‘he won’t let us alone until we each purchase a whole bag of nuts. We mustn’t encourage the fellow.’

  ‘But Madame,’ said Axelle, ‘what if they’re delicious?’

  ‘Don’t be swindled. For these people it’s only a game. Look, he’s acting. It’s all just an act.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean the nuts aren’t tasty.’

  ‘Be my guest,’ said Madame, removing at last her hand from the paper cup. ‘If you don’t object to being manipulated.’

  Axelle sulked, and did not touch the nut. I wanted to tuck behind her ear a dark curl that had fallen next to her eye. But then she straightened up, squared her chin. ‘We are all actors, some of the time. We might not even realize we’re doing it – it’s in our nature. Don’t you agree?’ She looked at me.

  ‘I would agree that we present different faces to the world,’ I said, ‘depending on the situation.’

  ‘Depending on what one needs,’ said Axelle.

  ‘In any situation, you will find me to be the same person,’ said Madame. ‘This is a privilege reserved for the old.’

  ‘You’re not so old,’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, looking past me. ‘Here come the eggs.’

  The food was delicious. Axelle did most of the talking while we ate. Among other morsels of gossip, she told us about her directeur at the perfumery who was flagrantly running amok with a young haberdashery girl. ‘They barely try to hide it,’ she said.

  ‘At least it makes the day more interesting,’ said Madame, whose tongue had loosened considerably after two glasses of wine.

  Axelle also spoke about her wish to move from the perfumery to a different job, one which carried more prestige.

  ‘Have you heard about the models?’ she asked. ‘The girls who work for the clothing designers?’

  We hadn’t.

  ‘You can find a position at one of the couture houses,’ she said in a near whisper, leaning closer, protective of this information, ‘where your only task is to wear expensive garments all day and parade in front of women who have more money than sense, tempting them to buy what you’re wearing. You have to make them believe that they will look as beautiful as you do, even if they’re ugly. You have to make them imagine
what their lives could be so you twirl around, or sit in a chair by a window and pretend to write a letter, or, if you’re modelling an evening gown, you stand next to a painting or a bust or some other ornament and sip a glass of water that has been coloured to look like wine. You’re selling more than just the clothing, you see. It’s an act,’ she said, turning to Madame, ‘but it pays very well.’

  ‘It would be a far superior act if they permitted you to drink real wine,’ said Madame Debord.

  ‘How strange to be regarded in that way,’ I said. ‘To be observed. As an object in a dress. You’re far bolder than I.’

  ‘People have been observing me my whole life,’ said Axelle.

  The waiter came back then, carrying the bill on a small silver tray. Madame scrutinized it from bottom to top and quibbled over an unexplained five-centime charge.

  ‘La caissière,’ said the waiter, ‘is new. I apologize.’ He took the bill away and returned a few moments later with a corrected version.

  ‘You’ve got to be on top of them,’ Madame said, loudly enough for his benefit, while she pinched coins out of her purse.

  ‘Madame, do you trust no one?’ Axelle asked.

  ‘No one,’ said Madame.

  * * *

  The following Saturday, I went alone to meet Axelle in the same part of the city, this time to visit a place that she had kept secret, but promised would be like nothing I’d seen before. We met in front of a confectioner’s on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and walked towards Rue du Bac, stopping on a corner to watch a man who was selling mechanical tin toys. He stood just in the alcove of a large wooden door, its central brass knob like the eye of a Cyclops, and at his feet, a circus of wind-up toys. Monkeys playing the drums, waddling ducks and a somersaulting clown – each of its swinging parts being slowly pulled over by its own momentum. The automatons, a dozen of them at least, ambled sleepily about the cheapjack’s feet, bumping into each other and into the stone walls of the doorway. When one strayed too far, he would pick it up gently, turn it the right way around, and place it back on the pavement.

  ‘How much?’ one onlooker asked.

  ‘Twenty-five sous,’ the cheapjack answered insouciantly, as if sale or no sale were nothing to him.

  ‘I’ll give you twenty.’

  ‘Impossible, Monsieur,’ the cheapjack said, without looking up from his toys. He scooped up a duck that had stopped moving and from his pocket procured a key, which he turned in a hole in the duck’s back before setting it back on the ground. With a small pat to the head, he sent the toy on its way.

  I loved this banter, this act, Madame would have called it, played out by two strangers who either didn’t know they were performing or didn’t care. Mocking frustration but clearly pleased, the onlooker took out a purse from his breast pocket, and paid the asking price for a bear that raised its arms again and again as if it were about to toss the red-and-white ball that balanced between its paws.

  * * *

  A few blocks down the Rue du Bac we came to our destination: Deyrolle’s, a taxidermist. Two floors of exotic animals and other curiosities. This was a place of high ceilings and large windows that let in the bright afternoon light. Creaky wooden floors and the dusty smell of talc. The narrow showrooms were full of people, of rustling skirts and the scuff of boots on worn wood, full of people quiet and awestruck at what they saw displayed on long tables and behind glass. Axelle had been correct; this place was indeed like nothing I’d seen before. This was time itself, seized, and I had been transported. There were animals I had heard of but never seen and hadn’t truly believed existed until now – all frozen in past-life’s pose. Their glass eyes stared into the future or they stared at nothing. The cheetah, pink flamingo, deer and leopard, each exhibit labelled in perfect black script on a small white card, the French and Latin names of the specimens and their places of origin. A snow-white peacock from India on a pedestal, its tail feathers falling to the ground. A blue-faced vulture from Chile, and a furry Australian possum perched on a gnarled fork of marbled wood. From the Americas, a beaver, a mink, a jackrabbit the size of a dog. There was a metallic-green hummingbird and a platypus. What an animal that was, the platypus, adapted to land and water both! There were rats as big as puppies, ostrich eggs cradled like jewels in nests of velvet, canaries of every colour imaginable. In one glass case, a bat, and next to it, the skeleton of a bat, its wing bones articulated like the veins of a leaf. I was enchanted. I paused to stare deeply into the pitch-black, perfectly round eyes of an owl. Axelle became enamoured with a tiny, white mouse no bigger than her thumb, its eyes glowing like little red coals. The larger animals – the enormous moose, the bear, the caribou, the kangaroo – were not behind glass and it was difficult to resist the urge to touch, to run my fingers through the coarse fur, or caress with my thumb the smooth tips of their hard, white teeth. I wanted to wrap my arms around the neck of the lioness, push my ear against her solid chest and listen to the beat of her heart.

  Up on a high shelf, perhaps only for the eyes of those with the wherewithal to look, a desiccated human head screamed silently from within a bell jar, its teeth crusted with brown plaque. Hairless, nose mostly gone, the left side of the head was crept over by a dusty web, something fibrous. The head looked as if it would crumble to dust if the bell jar were to be lifted.

  And there was more. In a back room, we discovered a gallery of wooden cabinets, their many drawers shallow and wide and easily pulled open to reveal trays of insects, perfectly preserved and held in place with fine metal pins. Butterflies of silvery blue and green, grasshoppers, termites, moths and dragonflies. Bees, wasps, scorpions and aphids. It was almost too much. Slick pincered beetles covered in intricate armour, dried larvae husks, a hairy tarantula bigger than my fist.

  Looping her arm around mine, Axelle said something peculiar about female spiders.

  ‘Pardon?’ I said, turning to her. I had been distracted by a cabinet that displayed a series of ammonite fossils; small, shiny coils of ancient sea creatures, embedded in rough ears of rock. But then Axelle’s arm twisted with mine, and I quickly forgot about the fossils.

  ‘There is a type of female spider,’ she said. ‘She kills her male companions after the act of mating.’

  ‘C’est vrai?’

  ‘Yes. I think they eat them too.’

  ‘How awful.’

  We carried on to the back of the room where a small man sat at a worktable, his left eye greatly magnified by a round glass strapped to his head. He was bent over his work, arranging the iridescent wings of a giant butterfly, lost in this task.

  Axelle pulled me to lean against the wall and put her mouth to my ear. ‘He lives with his mother,’ she whispered. ‘He’s been obsessed with insects since he was a boy. He used to collect spiders from under his bed and would keep them in clay jars, feeding them house flies and ants. But they always died.’ She looked at me, her shoulders shaking with silent laughter. ‘He’s been in love once but she wouldn’t marry him. Too many dead moths and crickets in jars.’

  I played along. ‘His father wanted him to train to do something clerical. Something sensible with money, with numbers.’

  ‘His father ran off with another woman. Mademoiselle Scarabée.’ Axelle snorted, slapped her hand over her mouth.

  The poor man looked at us, one eyebrow arched, his left eye swimming behind glass.

  We left Deyrolle’s feeling very wicked, and as I still had some time before Madame expected me home, and as the weather was lovely and mild, we decided to walk along the river. I didn’t want to say goodbye yet, nor, I thought, did she. Crossing under the Pont Alexandre III, we stopped to watch a group of titis scampering over the iron girders like a pack of squirrels in the trees. Under the young boys’ feet, the Seine flowed, and the September light that shone through the iron struts and arches penetrated the water, and the water was green and inviting.

  One boy, who
couldn’t have been older than five or six, leapt athletically from one girder to the next, using the strength in his legs to maintain his balance and stop himself from tumbling into the river. Barefoot, he scrambled to the top of a pillar, using the large rivets as grips, and, hidden in shadows in the upper arches of the bridge, piped to his friends, ‘Regardez-moi!’ His voice echoed and the other boys, swinging and hanging upside down from their knees, hollered their appreciation, encouraged him to go higher. A deeper voice, likely an older brother, told him he was an ass.

  I imagined dropping my skirts and my hat and shawl, right there on the path. Unlacing my tight boots and tossing them into the water and climbing into the guts of that great bridge, just like those boys, and hanging upside down until my temples throbbed.

  ‘Street rats,’ Axelle said, and pulled me by my hand.

  ‘It looks fun,’ I said, allowing her to drag me, watching the boys from over my shoulder. Though I hadn’t so much as undone a single button, I was out of breath.

  ‘You’re a strange one,’ Axelle said. We were out in the sun again, standing under the chestnut trees that formed a neat line all the way to the centre of the city. Axelle pressed her thumb into the palm of my hand while a woman passed close by, pushing a grizzling infant in a pram. My heart thumped regardezmoiregardezmoi.

  ‘Nothing about you seems to fit,’ Axelle said and held my arms out, examining me like a seamstress would. ‘You are a collection of surprises.’

  ‘I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.’

  ‘Nor am I,’ she said, and smiled.

  17

  Nora

  Ottawa River, 1987

  Nora dreamt she was falling and woke from this dream a little after dawn with the half-formed notion that the sensation of falling in sleep was actually the memory of being born. Or of dying. That total loss of control, that endless inhalation without the response of the exhale. She turned to face the window and through the gap in the curtains could see the first snow coming down, a universe of minuscule cogs, free-falling.