Disturbed by Her Song Read online

  They brought her a plate of eggs, and she played with it, testing it as someone does who is perhaps searching for poison. When she laid down her fork, she looked around at last. And her watery grey-black eyes alighted on me.

  Rather than seem amazed, Madame Cora nodded, as if I were a somewhat inferior acquaintance of long-standing. I picked up my glass of wine, and went across to her table, hearing about me the dismayed murmurs of our fellow diners.

  “Oh, sit down, sit down,” she said impatiently. And down I sat. “What do you think is in this food?”

  “Eggs, I believe, Madame.”

  “Possibly. Useless, this cook. There was one here once, a fine cook. But that was before the war. He died in the trenches,” she added, with a frown of selfish annoyance. “Since then, none of them are any good.” She was such a little, wizened thing. On her hands there were no rings, not even one for wedlock. She dabbed her lips and pushed the dish away. “Do you want it?”

  “No thank you, Madame. I’ve already eaten.”

  “Who are you?” she said.

  “My name’s Esther, Madame.”

  “Est,” she said, as before. “From the East... How old are you?”

  “Twenty-eight.”

  “Pouf! You look only sixteen. A girl. If you’re so old, you should be married.”

  “If you say so.”

  “Don’t you like men?” I said nothing, only modestly lowered my eyes. Madame Cora went on, “I never did. Foul brutes. But there, I had no choice. I used to bribe him, my husband, bring him girls – it kept him away from me. Then, despite everything, I had a child. My God, my God, the agony. They gave it to me and crowed, ‘Look. A son.’ I hated it at once. It grew up to be the present Patron’s father, you see. Then there was this one, the Patron himself. I’ve brought them all women. It’s all they can think of, pushing themselves into some woman. Horrible, stupid. What can it all mean? The church says it’s our duty. But no, no, that was then. Surely that’s all changed by now.”

  Did she want an answer? She’d fixed her eyes on me, drawing mine up to meet them. “I’m afraid it hasn’t changed,” I said.

  “No. Of course not. Have you borne children?”

  “No,” I said

  “You’ve been lucky.”

  “Yes.”

  The Chief Waiter had reached her table again, and he said to her sternly, “Is this person pestering you, Madame?”

  “Pester? You are the one pesters me.” She flapped the clean ‘soiled’ napkin at him. “Be off! Where’s my fruit? I wished for fruit. The Patron shall hear how casually I’m treated here.” The Chief Waiter bowed and left us. Obviously he was accustomed to her ways. “I sent you to my grandson, didn’t I?” she asked me. When I nodded, she said, “I hope you’ll forgive that. I suppose he never gave you any sort of remuneration. No? That’s like him. They say he keeps a mistress in the rue Rassolin, but how can one credit that? Even so, he lavishes a lot of money somehow, and none here. This wretched place,” she waved her little wooden hand at the whole room, “it’s falling apart. Nothing spent on it for years. Do you know, today one of the bathrooms exploded? What a thing. The taps blew off under the pressure of the water. Then the water soaked into the passage and through into the rooms below. Thousands of francs will be needed. I tell you, little girl,” she said, conspiratorial, “one more good winter snow, and the whole crumbling edifice will collapse in rubble on the street.”

  I had the instant image of the hotel performing this very act. Clouds of dust and snow-spray rose into a black sky speckled with watching stars; bricks and pieces of iron bowled along the road.

  And suddenly, as if she saw this image too, she gave some of her sharp little barks of laughter.

  “Don’t think,” she said, “I’d be sorry. Not even if a ceiling dropped on my head. Oh, I hate it here,” she said. And as suddenly as the laughter, her eyes were luminous and nearly youthful with tears. I had the urge to take her wooden hand. I didn’t risk it. “I was young once,” she confided. “Do you believe me?”

  I said, “We were all young once, Madame.”

  “Pouf! You’re a baby still. Twenty-eight – what’s that? I was in my thirties, and still young. Oh yes. That was my time. Oh, the naughty things I did. He never knew, my son, and my husband was dead by then, thank God. Well, it wasn’t any of their business. I worked here for them both, their skivvy. But it had many benefits, that. I would get to meet all the guests, enter their rooms even, quite intimately. There was always some excuse. Yes, little one. You and I might have had some fun then.”

  I looked at her narrowly. Now her eyes were sly.

  I said, “I’m sure we’d have got on famously.”

  “Famously! Oh you English. Yes, I can hear that you are, all right, even through your French which is so exactly fluent.”

  Unwisely no doubt I assured her, “In fact, Madame, I’m a Jewess.”

  “A Jewess. Well then. The Jews are not so popular now, are they.”

  “If they ever were,” I said.

  “An arrogant race,” she said. “And yes, you’re an arrogant little thing. Of course you’re a Jewess. But I had a lover once, a Jewess.”

  There. It was out. She had consorted, not so much with a pariah ethnic race, but with her own, that of women.

  Her tears, which had dematerialized, shone out in her eyes again, and I thought she would reminisce now over past love. But she said again, pathetically, stoically and hopelessly, “How I hate it here.” And she didn’t mean, I saw, only the hotel. It was the world she hated, and what she had become in it. Here meant also her flesh.

  Just then a waiter, attended by his Chief, came to the table with a long dish of offal-stuffed sausages.

  “No!” snapped Madame Cora. “Take it away. I will have fruit.”

  “Madame – it’s winter. There are only the apple tarts and the pears in syrup.”

  “Bring me the pears. They will be disgusting, but it’s all I can expect, now.”

  The two waiters went away, bearing the sausages before them.

  It wasn’t that she bored me. But the pressure of her sorrows (like water on the riven tap), was very great, even overwhelming. Any plan I’d had, gradually to lead her to the elusive subject of the woman I called Suzanne, had drained from me as she spoke of her life. What was this momentary spark to that bleak digression? And anyway, did I really care? ‘Suzanne’ perhaps had only been another of my means to kill time at the hotel. In addition, I had begun to be alarmed someone might soon summon me again to Madame Ghoule, who would then demand, since I could afford to buy myself brandy, and had dined in the restaurant, that after all I pay over all my accrued money towards the repair of the water-damage. It seemed, did it not, so much more ruinous than I’d thought.

  Because of all this, I was shifting mentally, thinking up a polite reason to leave Madame Cora, and so make my escape from the hotel. And in that way, I almost missed the next abrupt change in her eyes.

  When I defined what was happening, I was caught a moment longer, staring. It was as if a sort of glittering shutter fell through her eyes, first opening them wide as windows, and then closing them fast behind itself, so only that steely, glittering façade was left behind.

  She sat bolt upright, her chin on her hand, these metallic and non-human eyes fixed on something behind me.

  I turned round.

  And all across the dining area, I saw a slim woman dressed in elongated black that was not a uniform, a large black hat with a silvery feather in it perched on her dark hair. She was in the process of walking out of the room. And yet – I hadn’t seen her in the restaurant until that second. (Had she perhaps entered behind my back, while the old woman and I were talking?) Whatever else, I knew her at once. It was She from the corridor. Not Henriette de Vallier, but Black Eyed Susan.

  “Pardon me, Madame—” I stuttered, rising, throwing back my chair. Madame Cora’s face seemed to dress itself in a kind of leer. She found my urgency funny, of course. She knew
precisely what I was at.

  In the doorway I brushed hastily past Jean, who was coming in with a tray of drinks. He cursed me, but I scarcely noticed.

  Black Eyed Susan – Suzanne des Yeux Noires – was crossing the lobby, going under the yellow electric lamp, exiting into the blowy crystal vistas of the night.

  As I too dashed out on the pavement, I was glad the snow was long gone. For already she was far ahead of me, walking swiftly in her little high-heels, that gave at each step a flash of ankle in a clock-patterned stocking. The wind blew her hat-plume to a ripple like a sea-wave in storm.

  I could smell the unborn spring, acid as new wine, tossed by the wind. I could smell a hint of musk and violet – as unlike the scent of Madame de Vallier, or the Patron’s hair oil, as any perfume could be that came from the same flower.

  Now I was running. Dare I call out? What would I call? Suzanne! Suzanne! Wait just one instant—

  But Cora had told me anyway, Suzanne wasn’t her name.

  At the street’s corner, under a lamp, she turned, my quarry. She looked back at me, or I thought she did. All across the distance, in the web of light, her two space-black eyes, gleaming like frost on a steely surface. Then she was around the corner.

  I ran to it, and reached it in seconds. But she had disappeared.

  I patrolled up and down the street a while, looking in at doorways, up at windows, lighted or un, once into a lively café.

  She must live, or visit, in this street. Perhaps I should knock on doors? I didn’t knock. I wandered only up and down, until a man came out of the café and offered me a drink, and I had to tell him I was waiting for my friend. “He hasn’t turned up, has he?” said the man, triumphant. “Why not give me a try?” But I told him I feared my friend was ill and I must go to him, and hurried away back to the hotel.

  Even from outside I saw some fresh kind of uproar was going on, the lobby full of muddled figures and someone shouting for something, I couldn’t make out what.

  I entered, and stood at the edge of the crowd, and Jean thrust out of it, pasty-faced, and slouched past me, though the street door and away up the street. Also I heard the telephone being used, clacking like a pair of knitting needles, and Madame Ghoule’s guttural, “No, he must come. At once, if you please. This is Madame Ghoule at La Reine. Please make haste.”

  And then the entire unintelligibly chattery crowd was falling silent, and down the stairs, and into the crowd, parting it like the Red Sea, came the Patron, greasy grey, his spectacles in his hand, and looking ashamed, as if caught out in some particularly socially-unacceptable crime.

  “Make way, it’s the Patron.” “Let him by, poor fellow.”

  He went on into the restaurant. And the crowd stole after him, Madame Ghoule lunging among them, crying out now in a clarion tone, “The doctor’s on his way, but his car has broken down. He’ll have to walk.”

  In the big room though, the crowd, composed only of a scurry of waiters, a selection of guests and customers from the bar, spread itself, and showed its essential thinness. A couple of people were still seated at their tables, they too looking more embarrassed and depressed than anything. Altogether it was a badly attended show, the audience not large enough, nor moved enough, to honor the tragedy.

  Which tragedy then? Oh, that of Madame Cora, who, sitting at her table with her chin propped on her hard little hand, and her eyes wide open, had died in their midst without a sound.

  No one had noticed, it seemed, until the Chief Waiter brought her the pears in syrup.

  She must have finished that very moment I got up to run after the phantasmal Suzanne. What I’d seen occur in Cora’s eyes was then after all truly an opening, and a closing. But the almost sneering amusement on her face had only been death.

  It seemed she hadn’t suffered. A massive apoplexy, the doctor assured everyone. Congratulating, very nearly, the indifferent Cora on such a textbook exodus. It would have been too quick for pain, he said. This I believed. Nor had she wanted to stay. If the ceiling had fallen on her, she said...Well. It had.

  I packed my bags that night, unmolested, and left. I was only astounded to meet Jasmine the chambermaid in a corridor, who said to me fiercely, “Fancy going with a slut like that Sylvie. I’d have liked to be your friend. And I can keep my trap shut about things.”

  Surprises everywhere.

  I took the train to the city, and found a room. As I was always doing. At least in this lodging I was allowed to make a fire, and the landlady offered hot coffee and bread in the mornings.

  Of course, I had completely given up my search for, my pursuit of, Black Eyed Susan.

  Perhaps I should invent an epilogue, in which I disclose that, before leaving the hotel, I’d found an old photograph of Madame Cora, and seen at once, with a shock so terrific I staggered, that she was the exact double of my ‘Suzanne.’

  And demonstrably therefore had been ‘Suzanne’ in her youth. Hadn’t she said, Madame Cora, that she longed for her youth, and her female lovers? Hadn’t she said that ‘Suzanne’ was never known by that name?

  Maybe it was her ghost I saw, that is, the premonition of the ghost of Cora’s past, or even her spatial spirit, finally eluding the hotel and the world and the old wizened body, clad in what Cora thought her own perfect form and age, about thirty, dark and sensuous, carnal in her black of mourning for a husband, in that expedient, safely deceased; ready for more adventures in some other place.

  Or maybe the woman I saw, for see her – scented her – I definitely did, if only twice, was another secret mistress of the unusual Patron. Or even some figment of my own winter madness, which Cora recognized as such, knowing that any woman like Esther must be strange in other ways.

  I think of her sometimes – of them both. Black Eyed Susan, vanishing into thin air at two turning points, a corridor, a street corner. Madame Cora vanishing also into thin air, leaving only her husk behind her leering in victory at her last laugh.

  The Kiss

  Esther Garber

  One evening in the provinces, the great actress known as Lalage emerged from a brightly-lit stage door on to the street.

  As usual she was treated, as already she had been in the theatre, to a round of tumultuous applause. The venue, the Théâtre des Arches, seldom boasted such stars. But Lalage, of course, by this era, was just beginning to fade a little from her glittering status.

  Still beautiful, stately, dressed in slimming black with purple trimmings and mauve gloves, she gazed around her at the admirers, all well-dressed men, who clapped and cheered her. She had that perfect look, part modest astonishment, and part empiric aloofness. She was irresistible.

  The men surged forward. They doffed their top-hats, and bowed to her, begging to kiss her hands.

  Lalage, and her two bodyguards (tough burly fellows hired by Lalage herself), permitted this.

  “Come, come, monsieur,” she joked now and then, “you will kiss my hand quite away.”

  “Would I could carry you away, madame. I suppose supper would be—”

  “Out of the question? I’m afraid it would.”

  This scene, like those of the play – a new work by Strindberg, thought fairly shocking – had been repeated over and over in its performance every night. Tonight the play itself had closed however, and Lalage would be borne off by train to the next engagement, which was, she had thankfully remarked, in Paris.

  The crowd of male worshippers was drawing back now. Though several, having touched her gloves, lingered at the edges of the light against the backdrop of the darkly lamplit town. They discussed her beauty, even murmured, some of them – the most, or least, observant – on her still-tantalizing maturity, when seen close up.

  At this moment a small slight figure came slipping out of the shadows.

  Everyone, it seemed, turned in surprise. Here there had been only men, and Lalage, the single woman. But the slight figure was also that of a female. She was poorly and nondescriptly dressed, though clean and not unattractive.
In her hands she held a book.

  The men, amused, or only fatigued, drew mockingly aside to let her by.

  Straight to Lalage the girl went.

  “Madame,” said the girl in a clear and quite ordinary voice, “madame, I have watched your every performance. I have been transported. May I beg now one extreme favor of you?”

  Lalage raised her brows.

  “Which is?”

  The girl opened the book. It was a copy of the very play the actress had been performing.

  “I ask...” said the girl. She was in a curiously-controlled rigor of passion – but this was not immediately obvious. Perhaps Lalage definitely saw it.

  “Ask what?” prompted Lalage.

  “Ask if you will—” the girl again faltered.

  “You wish me to sign the title page?”

  “No – no, madame. Not at all. I wish you to kiss the title page.”

  There was a murmur all around. The great crowd of men, assembled like silky black crows in their bourgeois evening finery, were held between ridicule and disapproval. “Good God,” they said to each other, “she wants Lalage to kiss that – book—”

  But Lalage laughed. “What a strange request.”

  “It would mean so much to me,” said the girl.

  Looking up into the eyes of Lalage, the girl turned high her lamp of shining desire. Now Lalage could not fail to see it.

  Lalage said, “I wear lip-rouge. I’ll ruin the paper.”

  “I know you wear lip-rouge, madame. That is why I want so badly for your kiss to be imprinted there.” Softly, but not so softly some others did not hear, the girl confided, “Another mouth than yours, madame, will be applied to that rose-red kiss, over and over. I promise you that. And though it can, naturally, mean nothing to you, to the one who kisses your kiss, it will mean very much.”

  Lalage found herself, to her startlement, outgunned, as if by some other greater actor. Generous in her way, Lalage was more taken by this than offended. (It would be ten more years before, her looks and her youth all gone, Lalage would learn how to be bitterly envious.)