HORSE

Snorting, jerking its head, tilted hooves clicking
on stones. Skin rippling, twitching off flies.
Its ears prick and pin back signalling
something else, something alive.

EVERYTHING IS BRIGHT and then there is nothing, only darkness even with eyes wide open. It causes me to collapse and fall. This time onto the sidewalk, knee split open, blood on the pavement. I see a physician, not one I know but one a stranger has led me to. A cold stethoscope, the prick of a needle. He asks me a series of questions, including the date. I know enough to know that this is what they ask people who are undone.

I have been to Lev’s studio. Tacita took me straight there when I would not return to Mme. Tissaud’s. There must be clues. I will take anything. I will gather up his work, all that weight of paint, and bury it in a field until he is released. I will read every book on his shelf. I will learn Russian. I will lie down on the floor with the paint and dirt and papers that I will guard until his return. But when we get there, arranged through the landlord, money has been exchanged, its beautiful squalor has been wiped away. No drying racks. No art. No letters. With no trace at all of Lev in particular. The only thing that is left is the bed, his desk, and his empty easel in the corner.

I want to stay here. It is the only way I know how to be close to him. I remain for days without leaving the room. His easel watches me like a dog. It is airless and I find only tins of sardines and bottles of alcohol. I am continually sick. When I feel anything, I feel it in my stomach. My skin is chalky and damp and feels like the skin of someone else. I am paralyzed. My mind sloshes, eyes sliding around the room calculating the dimensions of my own captivity. But I cannot bear it. They have already erased Lev’s presence here, even for me. It is cleaner, tidier, their having gone through his things. It reminds me only of the absences. Of what cannot be changed. Eventually, out of hunger or despair I’m not sure which, I wander out into the bright, a night moth skittering toward light.

So when he comes out with it, I can scarcely breathe. The doctor’s proclamation a stunning broadcast without mercy. My chest is suddenly weighted under a pile of bricks. I remember nothing except the overwhelming instinct to flee. But there is nowhere to go when it is your own body that has betrayed you.

I used to tell women there were three options, his voice deep and authoritarian. But now there is really only one. He clears his throat and needlessly shuffles papers in front of him. There is an ashtray made from a large pink seashell containing cigarette butts beside his lamp.

As you may know, one has been made punishable by death, the other, another throat clear, difficult in these times.

I will later hear that the laundress who helps dozens of desperate women will be sent to the guillotine for her actions. La faiseuse d’anges, they call her. Angel maker.

A middle-aged man in shirtsleeves who decorates his weekends with dinner parties and tennis lawns, whose framed university degrees look down on me from behind his head, delivers these words like little blows. As though they do not gut.

I cannot listen a moment longer. I leave, forgetting one glove, a blight on his tidy desk with its glinting pens angled in their granite holder, like bones stripped of meat. I think of what the doctor said. Vous n’avez pas de chance. You don’t have luck.

I didn’t pay, I realize. The doctor. The francs still folded in my coat pocket. His cologne draconian, still, impossibly, on my coat, blocks away from his office.

In the streets women stand in doorways muttering. Like me, they might live on fifty centimes a day, though dinner parties can contain lavish things bought on the black market. Most of the food is shipped to Germany. They have started handing out ration cards, soon people will grow hungry. The city is meant to look normal. The women still knit, the click of their needles in the gardens of the Palais Royal. What compels them to knit? What are they thinking? No one wears anything handknit here. The cafés are full, though two-thirds of the city fled in a slow-moving wave of panic. Mme. Tissaud says it is impossible to get leather for her books anymore. It all goes to their army boots, she says. They have hung their flag at the Arc de Triomphe and have concerts of Wagner in the Tuileries and have imposed a curfew that starts at nine o’clock. At night the streets are eerily empty of cars and people. The electric lights are no longer reliable at night. I can hear Mme. Tissaud striking match after match. There is almost no birdsong since they began dumping gasoline in the Seine estuary, wiping out most of the birds. Still, there are black bicycles and young couples holding hands. The city smells of chestnuts warmed by sunshine. Se débrouiller.

Unconsciously I have walked, with no memory, to Lev’s street, Rue Jacob, like a homing pigeon. The wind is so strong, as if at sea. I have no idea where to go. Just seeing the handscrawled Sept-Bis sends the pain of missing Lev through me like a blade. I don’t know whose handwriting it is. I have never noticed it before. It looks like the school-taught cursive of every French child with its hooded letters, capitals with curving tails. Lev’s landlord’s maybe. A man who reluctantly accepts artwork for rent. He is a pale, almost tubercular man of little imagination. The sort of man who determines whether he should eat by looking at his watch.

The window above is still full of sun, mid-afternoon warm, the steep coil of stairs behind the thick wooden door that does not open. I have left it, so it is now locked to me. But still this building, even without him inhabiting it, continues to have authority over me. His studio. The vast space of it. All the tubes of paint squeezed onto palettes. All the pots of paint now grown over with skins.

A woman named Joséphine would be bent over in her dull labour, washing the small black and white hexagons of tile in the front hall. Though she is a hunchback, she has the look of someone who was once beautiful. At some point, Lev said, she had married a titled person but now she was reduced to cleaning houses. Reduced. The landlord’s word, not Lev’s. I once spoke to her and she said she found cleaning satisfying. She did not need to answer to anyone. Left alone as she scrubbed the grooves that gently dipped in the middle of the wooden risers. Dust, she had said to Lev, is people. It’s just everyone who once was here.

In the midst of fear there is still shape. She cleans. The landlord owns. The stores sell, though much less now.

The rip and crack of the laundry that hangs by a wooden stick from an upper window sounds like flags snapping. And I think, How violent flags are. Maybe it is the Russian woman who claims to be Polish. She says it is safer. The sound reminds me of Lev saying listen to nothing but the sound of your own heart beating when there is the nuptial flight of turtledoves high and circling, the whipcrack of their downward-flicked wings against the grey sky. These small miracles, he says. They make treachery bearable.

How quickly the unthinkable becomes normal. The people of this city have been so hungry they once did something so egregious, now commonplace—they ate their own horses. Something they keep up, even when the plenty comes back. They then dined on zoo animals, including a beloved pair of elephants. Though the line was drawn at monkeys. No matter the level of desperation, this makes even the creationists uneasy.

I have a moment of calm. Like a cool wind, it blows through me. Lev saying when he was born his father caught him in his own hands in the middle of the night. His mother had to wait until his father had delivered the horse and two cows first. He had to use an axe on the iced-over door to empty the contents of the enamel bowl into the splintering cold. The only time his mother was truly warm in that high house full of cracks was when she was giving birth.

There are uniformed men who surface here and there, like extras in a play. They drink coffee, watch ballets, wind their watches. Paris looks much the same despite the darkness rippling underneath. I see them posing in front of the Tour Eiffel. Perhaps they occupy it in this manner because, like everybody else, they just want to enjoy Paris.

I wear my hair the same way, plaited, though messily. I consider where to walk. Playing this role, the one where is everything is fine.

Tacita says, Be careful. If you practise hard enough, you can forget who you are.

Before I know what I’m doing I’ve thrown a rock through the window of the woman’s apartment with the laundry. The one who pretends to be Polish. I need to hear something break. A delicate web in the glass. There is shouting. I must get out of here. For a moment I’ve lost my French. This pain is stunningly clear. Like the cold that only people from the north know. It isn’t about being numb, it is about being knocked awake. Stinging skin, a trickle from the skull, down the spine. The kind of cold that means you have to keep moving or you die.