Alphonsine stayed close to the bank where the current was slow but would still take her words downstream and pour them into the sea. She rested the oars across the gunwales and let the boat drift.
“I want to tell you about the hat shop. I couldn’t tell you with Maman coming upstairs all the time. She doesn’t know this. No one does.”
“Are you sure you want to tell me?”
“I have to.”
She had to know whether he was a man who could see beneath her actions to her reasons. She started with the easy things.
“The shop was near the barricade and the Arc de Triomphe. A musician lived in the flat opposite ours on the landing. He often played Schumann’s ‘Papillons’ for Louis, but during the Siege he only played French composers like Berlioz and Bizet. When the Krupp guns thundered so close, he countered with ‘La Marseillaise.’ That dear old man pounding the keys as hard as he could, sending l’esprit de corps to our men on the barricades. Everyone doing what he could. Everyone a soldier. Aux armes, citoyens!”
Auguste’s patient look made her trust him. But if he condemned her, she would never have the courage to tell anyone else, which meant she would never be known for what she was.
“Everyone a loyal soldier. Except me,” she said, holding on to the oars lying across her knees. His face hardened and made her worry.
“One morning I heard a scraping noise outside. It sounded like a cat, and a cat meant food. I crouched and flung open the door. A man fell onto my feet. He held his shoulder with one hand, his thigh with the other. Blood oozed between his fingers and soaked his uniform. A French uniform. His eyes pleaded. ‘S’il vous plaît, mademoiselle.’ Hardly louder than a breath, please. I told him I’d go get help and he burst out, ‘Nein! Non, s’il vous plaît. Non.’” This time I heard the German accent.
“A spy,” Auguste said. “Amazing that he came through the barrier. Maybe some Prussian comrade shot him by mistake trying to go back out.”
“I didn’t think about that. I only saw a human soul in pain. I only thought about whether Louis knew how to say s’il vous plaît in German. Was he at some woman’s doorstep in Trier or Sarrebruck?”
“Your way of looking at it, I suppose.”
“The man’s hand trembled and reached for mine. I said slowly, ‘You will not kill me, because you need me.’ He shoved a knife across the floor toward me and dragged himself into the shop, leaving a trail of blood on the entry. I was powerless to resist.”
“You didn’t call a gendarme?”
His voice carried a tone of judgment, already, and she’d hardly begun.
“I locked the door. He was bleeding onto the floor. I tied strips of a sheet above and below each wound and poured water into his mouth. I made a pallet for him in the stockroom and dragged him behind the door.”
Auguste scowled.
“Well? What if Louis lay injured beyond the Rhine? Wouldn’t I want some man’s wife to do the same for him? I was taught by the nuns at school to love my neighbor as myself. Breaking Christ’s command seemed a greater sin than helping the enemy.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“I couldn’t have you kiss me if you didn’t know me. When you told me about losing your friend, I thought you might understand. Maybe I was wrong.”
There. A huge disclosure. They were both waiting.
“Please. Go on.”
“Gendarmes could come around the corner any minute. I scrubbed the stoop and rubbed ashes from the fireplace into the stain. The man slipped into unconsciousness. If he died, what would I do with him? I had to keep him alive. I poured brandy down his throat and cut away his clothes.”
“All of them?” He gave her a steely-eyed glare.
She gave it right back. “Without any army’s uniform, he was just a man in pain. His shoulder was only grazed, but his thigh…Whatever it was went right through. The opening at the back of his thigh…” She shook her head, remembering, and made a circle of her hands to show the size. “I cleaned the wounds as well as I could.”
“No wonder you knew how.”
How did he mean that? She had to go on.
“I sewed them with silk hatter’s thread.”
He winced. Good. She wanted him to imagine what doing that was like before she asked the big question.
“Do you condemn me?”
Every second of silence in the boat alarmed her more.
“How can I? I wish there had been an Alphonsine for Bazille.”
She couldn’t say that when she was preparing to burn the man’s uniform, she’d noticed a round hole ringed by dried blood in the left chest piece of the jacket. The Prussian had no chest wound. She couldn’t tell Auguste how, on her knees in front of the fireplace, she had wept over the French soldier killed for a suit of clothes. He would think she was a hypocrite.
“Did he talk to you?” Auguste asked.
“He only said, ‘Merci. Merci.’”
As the boat drifted in the current, she saw Auguste glance at La Grenouillère. She didn’t want him to think of the time he painted there with Claude. She needed his full attention. There was so much more. She waited until they had floated past it, then dug an oar into the bank to stop the boat.
“When he was able, I helped him up the stairs. It would be safer there.”
“Did you feed him?”
“Of course I fed him. Was I just going to watch him die? I shared equally my sixty grams of horsemeat per day. There were rat hunts. The shooting of cab horses. The zoo in the Jardin des Plantes was depleted of everything that breathed. On the ninety-ninth day of the Siege, an advertisement for Christmas dinner at Café Tortoni listed consommé of elephant, stuffed donkey head, terrine of giraffe, roast haunch of wolf au vin rouge, bear cutlets in pepper sauce, and flanked tiger garnished with baby peas. I wondered where they got the peas.”
“And you?” he asked. “How were you doing?”
“I avoided looking in the mirror.”
“You were beginning to care for him?”
She didn’t tell him that when the explosions rattled the windows, her arm shot out for his hand, and his ready grasp on her wrist stopped her trembling. Nor did she say that all the tender caring she would have given to Louis, if he had come home wounded, she lavished on this man. In some moments, she had pretended he was Louis.
“There were times of closeness.” The only answer she wanted to give.
“He tried to walk a few steps. I could tell he wanted to be gone. I put a set of Louis’s clothes and a pair of his old shoes by the man’s bed. His soldier’s boots would have given him away.”
“Didn’t you think of how you would explain when Louis noticed them missing?”
Of course she had, even in nightmares. “One risk led to another.”
Just like now, a risk. But she had to know if Auguste could give her what she needed, not just forgiveness for betraying France, but understanding.
“I asked him to teach me a word in German. I held up a book and pointed to one word and then another. ‘Word. Allemand. Deutsch.’ He shook his head. I held up one finger. ‘One. Ein word.’
“‘Nein gutt…Deutsch…vous,’ he said.
“I boiled a beaver top hat and we drank the broth together. The fine ones were rubbed with mutton suet for firmness. Then he whispered, ‘Liebe.’
“‘Liebe,’ I repeated, not romantically as we would say amour, or Je t’adore, but as a recognition of a universal need.”
Her dry lips stuck together a fraction of a second when she made the b sound in the German word for love.
“Once, as I bent over him to rinse his shoulder wound and put on a clean bandage, he struggled to raise up in bed on his elbows, even with his injured shoulder. His mouth was so close I could feel his breath. His eyes took on the look I’d come to recognize as gratitude and yearning. Just think of what he might have been feeling, with his life so precarious.”
Here was the moment, whether to tell all, or crumple. The stone of anxiety that had lodged in her chest for ten years swelled into something roused and frightful. If he wanted to, Auguste could make it melt. One word could free her, or crush her.
“I said I’ve kissed no one for a decade. I did not say I’ve kissed no one since Louis.”
“Did you kiss him?”
He waited without moving, rare for him.
“What was a kiss since I’d already saved him? Already betrayed Louis, and France. Yes, Auguste. I breathed my life into him. I allowed him to thank me in that way.”
Auguste’s cheek twitched violently. It made her think that he needed her to say that nothing else happened between them.
“He was gone in the morning. He had straightened the daybed, military style, and had left a medal on the pillow. Heiliger Christophorus, it said. Saint Christopher, I assumed.”
How quickly, that morning, she had hurried down rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré to the church of La Madeleine. Bodies of French soldiers and citizens had been piled four deep in the portico. She covered her nose with her handkerchief and went inside. Amid the din of screams and moans, the nuns calling for more bandages, the stench of rotting flesh and feces, she squeezed her way past rows of wounded men on cots, to get to the small painting and offertory of Sainte Rita, Advocate of Desperate Causes, and said the prayer. You, the saint of the impossible, give me the courage to hope. Tell me how to love more. She’d lit two candles. Neither one was for her.
“I knew that Louis would know, but I could not, would not take back what I’d done. And Louis didn’t come home.”
“Leaving the man to die would not have brought Louis home.”
“I know.” She put her hand in the water, washing it cool and clean. The awkwardness of the silence made her say, “See? X equals y equals z. Hat shop, soldier, sadness.”
“You are a poet. Une Symboliste.”
Was that all he would give her? That she was a poet? Not that she was a humanitarian or even a compassionate person? Not that he understood? He was as silent as a dumb brute.
She yanked one steering cord out of his hand to turn the boat around, and dug in the oars. Her rage exploded in each hard stroke.
“So, Alsace and Lorraine were to be joined to Bavaria.” Words tumbled out in a hot flood. “Did they have to learn to breathe differently as Bavarians? Weep differently? Die differently? Did Bavarians make love differently? Does it make a difference whether we say amour or liebe? Every French person would say yes, including you, Auguste, but when Bismarck’s legions marched triumphantly under our Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Élysées a month after the surrender, what was I doing while Parisians all around me were hissing? Looking for my Prussian in the ranks.”
She was practically yelling at him. “And then the Communards. We hadn’t had enough dying, we had to kill each other. That’s la vie moderne. Your painting is celebrating modern life? Just think what we’re doing in our modern life. Tossing live babies in trapeze acts to make us forget.”
“Take a breath, Alphonsine.”
She gave him a chance to say something, but he didn’t.
“Isn’t there anything more to you than a brush? You don’t see me, do you? You with the vision to see hundreds of colors, you see only a carrot. Maybe Guy and Edgar are right about you and your pretty rose-colored world.”