Chapter 1
RETURNING HOME
Wars are never fought only in the field. Especially when looked at from a distance with the knowing eyes of an adult — eyes that confuse black smoke fires with the glow of bonfires, in order to reassure children. As we passed through the French countryside during the slow stages of our return trip across the continent, protected by the gentle hills and the dense layers of trees, we could imagine that everything we had heard in the announcements on the radio was false. But that was not the case, and we all knew it. We had fled far away, Papa, Mama, and I. But now we were returning.
Newspaper boys who couldn’t themselves read fanned the darkened pages of the papers loudly, and the names that I heard — Le Mans, Saint-Quentin, Lisaine — flew through my head like swallows. I had chosen to take in nothing about the war, because I knew that if I merely began to ask about what was happening to my city — to Paris — I might go crazy with grief. Or, even worse, I would ask to go back to the home we had left six months before.
Actually, an entire winter had passed since we took the ferry from Calais to Dover. From there we had gone to London on one of those amazing trains that the English were famous for. According to my father, the ferry on the outbound trip would signal the beginning of our new life. A drastic break — like the stroke of a knife — between what had taken place before and what would happen there, in England, far from the war that kept disturbing Paris.
During the months we had spent across the English Channel in London, the French had lost all they could lose — a war and much of their dignity. Again, this was according to my father, who was not actually French, although he had always lived in Paris. He was Prussian, like the victors of the war, and this put him in a strange light in the eyes of all those who had been his friends. His major business contacts, too, although even during the war, this had not kept him from working. My father worked in the iron business. And while he never admitted to me that iron from the Adler steelworks was used to produce muskets and cannonballs, I did think that from a certain point of view, Papa had not minded the war so much.
“Now is a time of great turmoil,” he used to say to me when I was little, ruffling my hair. “Who knows if a better world will arise from it than the one we live in, my daughter?”
And with these words, “my daughter,” I felt Papa’s hand shake slightly — so slightly that it took me many years and adventures before I remembered that detail — a detail that’s meaning is crystal clear to me now as I write.
“My daughter,” my father used to say, before the war broke out and changed everything. The rich became poor, and rebels became statesmen. Soldiers became deserters, and deserters pretended to have fought to defend our flag. A flag that had been overwhelmed by the tumultuous events of those months, I discovered, much like so many other things.
“It seems as though France’s flag no longer exists,” Papa said one day during our return trip, reading the news. The flag was that of the Revolution: blue, white, and red.
“No? Well, what have they done with it?” my mother asked, shut into the safest corner of the carriage, her voice faint.
My father did not answer her, or if he did I did not hear, because I was studying the countryside gently rolling outside my window.
Another stroke of the knife, I was thinking — crossing the English Channel a second time, but this time in reverse, from Dover to Calais.
And London, smoky London, had disappeared into the gray.
* * *
Our return trip was not pleasant. And not just due to the condition of my mother’s health.
I kept remembering how badly Mr. Horatio Nelson had suffered on the ferry after we’d left France the previous autumn. Later on, our family butler told me about a nasty experience he’d had many years before onboard a ship. When he was serving as an ordinary seaman, he was accused of having murdered a passenger and throwing her into the sea. Then, when the ship had landed in London, Scotland Yard had arrested him unjustly.
Now, during our return crossing from England to France, Mr. Nelson stood on the main deck, sniffing the air. Like a huge statue, he stood immobile, his gaze set toward the south, as if that way he could catch a glimpse of the glint of steel and the gunpowder exploding in the salty haze.
My father stayed in the cabin the whole time, watching over Mama. Pale as a tallow candle, she had disappeared into her bed, greatly weakened by consumption. The British doctors — and even the one whom my father had brought in from Vienna — were sure of the illness she was suffering from.
“A serious lung infection,” they had said.
And that was that.
My father had looked at me with that deeply sympathetic expression I had already seen on his face at other times. Seeing it then again was the real reason I had not asked him if he had ever manufactured weapons, as well as train tracks and wheels.
“If even the Austrian doctor said so, my daughter, it must be true,” he had whispered to me.
Papa had hoped to the bitter end that this was not the case. That my mother just had pneumonia or a particularly severe case of the flu, but nothing more. He comforted her, saying that spring would be coming soon, that this horrible London winter would be lifted by the blossoming cherry trees and the linden tree pollen in Hyde Park. But it did little good.
My mother’s hands had grown increasingly pale, her pained bouts of coughing more pronounced, and her faint, scarce pulse ever weaker.
Tentacles of silence had spread through our Aldford Street apartment, broken only by the ticking of the pendulum and the clash of the Limoges dishes as Papa and I dined, barely exchanging a word.
“Do you still see your friend?” he’d asked me almost every evening, forgetting that my reply was always the same.
My friend was Sherlock Holmes, and yes, I had seen him regularly until my mother’s sudden illness, which had reduced the frequency of our meetings.
“Are you still quite fond of each other?” Papa had asked.
Yes, we were. But something much more complicated was hidden beneath my father’s question. Papa was thinking of moving again, of leaving London. And in that awkward way only men can do, he was trying to figure out how much the news would upset me.
Leaving London when we had scarcely arrived. It would not have upset me, if Papa had only asked me directly.
But he never did.
He only told me the date we would be leaving — just as the linden tree pollen would arrive, but without waiting for spring.
So we were returning to France, but not to Paris, because news from the capital didn’t sound at all reassuring. Papa revealed the existence of a country estate in the town of Evreux, about a hundred kilometers west of Paris. It was there that we were headed in our carriage. And it was the hills of Evreux that I was examining out my window.
I pressed my knees between my hands, as if I had taken hold of something firm — a thought, an idea, or a sense of gloom. I forced myself to look at neither my father, his face as dark as a stormy sky, nor my mother across from him, pale as a ghost.
How had my mother’s lungs become damaged like this? I wondered.
During one of the breaks on the long return trip, I asked Mr. Nelson what he knew about my mother’s illness. Our butler simply shook his head.
“It’s not what you think, Miss Irene,” Mr. Nelson explained to me. “Your mother’s illness is due to the city air. The chimney stacks and the unhealthy smog from the factories that fill London. Your mother has very delicate lungs, and that air is like poison for her.”
Indeed, it was true. There were days when it seemed there was a screen of suspended dust — of dense, suffocating soot. I remembered how the sudden rain pelting down had covered my clothes with rivulets like dark tears. My mother suffered badly from this, and it was only aggravated by her severe homesickness for France and French ways.
“Is that why we didn’t go to live in the English countryside, somewhere like Bath or Oxford?” I asked Mr. Nelson.
I knew I should ask my father, but talking to him had become difficult. The happy, gentle man of a few months earlier — who had hugged me and spun me around in pirouettes — had hidden his feelings behind a closed curtain without warning, like a theater that had suddenly shut down.
“Your father thought returning to France would do your mother more good than any other cure,” Mr. Nelson replied. “And I believe he was right.”
I believed so, too, despite the chaos unfolding in our home country.
And so, on March 6, 1871, we returned.