Amandine (38 page)

The two walk to the small metal bridge from which old men and little boys fish. Isolde makes arrangements with one or two to trade part of a catch for cheese or, sometimes, for supper. The old men, especially, seem to prefer an invitation to supper, and this pleases Isolde and it pleases Amandine as well and they set off down the road talking about what they’ll cook and bake as though it was a grand dinner party they planned.

After a while Amandine begins to notice that every time a certain woman is in a shop or walks anywhere near them, even on the other side of the street, Isolde turns her shoulders inward, pretends to peer into some shop window, or drags Amandine into a café and orders a glass of water. Amandine observes, too, that whenever this happens, Isolde smoothes her hair, pats her topknot, takes a few anise seeds from her pocket and chews them nervously. Her lashes, which flutter like a fan, move in double time.

“Who is that woman?”

“Which one?”

“The one over there talking to the man with the dog. The pretty woman.”

“Pretty? She’s a lurid cow strung with pearls.”

Though Amandine laughs, she will not be deterred. “I think I know who she is. Dominique told me about her. She’s from another country, isn’t she? And she likes Monsieur Catulle.”

“Everyone likes Monsieur Catulle. And yes she’s from another country. Her name is Madame de Bazin.”

“Why does she make you so nervous?”

“She does no such thing. I just don’t like her and so I avoid her.”

“Oh.”

“That’s all,” Madame Isolde says, pinching anise seeds into her
mouth and chewing them with her front teeth. The lashes move in a blur.

When it’s five minutes before noon and Amandine hears Catulle opening the gate, she walks—she does not run—down the path to greet him. He bows to her, she nods her head, and, side by side, they go into the house to lunch. Amandine praises Isolde’s food, drinks the “single finger” of wine that Catulle pours for her, and after the meal, when Catulle goes to rest and she and Isolde have put the kitchen and dining room in order, they walk the hundred meters to Isolde’s little place above a café in the rue Lepic. A tiny kitchen with a stone sink and a two-burner gas plate, a sleeping room with a narrow cupboard bed, an open hearth, and a zinc bathing tub set up in the middle of the wooden floor, a bathroom painted chartreuse, which is down the hall and to which Isolde has the only key. The two lie in the cupboard bed. Sometimes they sleep a bit, but often they just stay quiet, rest. When they do talk, it’s about food. About what they shall fix that evening, the next day, about what they would fix if they only had…

Isolde talks about chicken poached in cream set over sautéed apples and onions splashed with Calvados. Though she has been twenty-five years in the Île-de-France, she—a born and bred Normande from Dieppe—is always spiritually hungry for her native cuisine. She speaks of buckwheat crepes—thin and delicate—rolled with applewood-smoked ham and Camembert, then gratinéed under a flame with good white Norman butter and more of the cheese. She longs for a stew of mussels—just harvested—poached in their own sea-salted liquors with cream and bay leaf and the buds of dried wild thyme rubbed between the fingertips.

“But I do like working with river fish, with whatever the boys and the old ones bring to me—carp, catfish, pike, once in a while a salmon lost from his school. I bone them, salt them, lay on branches of bay and thyme, and cover the whole mess with a plate weighted with a stone. In a few days … Ah. With a sauce of pounded mustard seed and cream … And what about the peas? Let’s make a soup tomorrow.
We’ll poach the pods with mint, and when they’re tender, we’ll pass them through the
mouli
and add the tender peas whole—poached for two or three minutes in sea-salted water—to the puree. A knob of butter if the rations are full, a fistful of crisp
lardons
, and fried bread.

“I can taste the mint. And the
lardons,”
Amandine tells her in a dreamy voice.

“It’s late for wild asparagus, but sometimes a few shoots come up near the river. An omelet—”

“I used to make stone soup when we slept in the woods. A potato and hard bread, wild herbs, and, if we had one, an egg stirred in. It was good, madame.”

“In September if you’ll find me some
chanterelles, morilles
, a handful of
trompettes de mort
, along with a few
noisettes
, I’ll make the most luscious …”

Neither speaks of her life before they knew one another, though Isolde inquires.

“There might come a moment when you want to tell me something, you know, something about you. Or about others. Should that happen, I want you to know that—”

“I do know.”

In the evening after supper, after Catulle pours some wine into the last spoonful of soup, raises the shallow bowl to his lips and drinks from it, after he cracks a few of the walnuts from the basket of them by the hearth and warms the kernels over the fire in a copper pan, after he pours out a small glass of marc and tips it down his throat and pinches up some of the leaves and weeds and whatever else it is he keeps in the tobacco tin next to the walnuts and tamps the stuff down into his pipe, lights it, sucks hard to keep it going, once the foul smoke spirals into a fine white cloud, he stands up, thanks Isolde and Amandine for his supper, goes to take his sweater from the rack by the garden door. Drying a dish or putting away the silver, Amandine watches him. In the same way she likes seeing the kitchen table set for three
when she comes to breakfast in the morning, she likes seeing the three sweaters on the rack. She likes that hers hangs on the lower peg between theirs. Her yellow one—the one with the little pearl buttons and the satin loops, the one that belonged to Solange and, before that, to Solange’s mother—her yellow sweater between Isolde’s white and his gray and brown tweed.

As he is putting on his sweater, that is the moment when she wants to ask if she might go with him. She knows it’s to the river he is headed, to the bridge at the edge of the village, the one with the high wooden walls that curve like the hump of a camel. She knows he will look down at the water and smoke his pipe and stay there till the light changes. From her window at the top of the house, she always goes to watch him down there on the bridge. Some evenings other men come to join him, and she sees them nodding their good evenings, lighting one another’s pipes if they are spent, shaking hands sometimes or patting one another on the shoulder. Mostly he’s alone there, though, and she wonders what he thinks about as he leans on the high wooden wall.

One night after she helps Isolde with the washing up, Amandine takes her yellow sweater from its peg and follows him.

He hears her before he sees her, hears her mincing steps on the wooden floor of the bridge, and he straightens up, turns to her, smiling, as though he’d been expecting her, which, of course, he had. Neither one needing to talk, they both look down at the river then. After a while, Catulle says, “I like the sound of the river beating on the stones, bent on the sea. I like how small I feel under the stars.”

“You feel small?”

He puts his spent pipe in his pocket, raises his chin toward the heavens. “Small in a good way, small against the greatness of all of this.”

“I like to bend backward so that I can see more of the sky. I bend farther and farther back until my head spins and I feel as though I am surrounded by the sky, like I’m inside it. Is that how it feels when you die?”

“It might be.”

“Not sure, though?”

“Not sure.”

“Why do you come here every evening?”

“I like to stay here and consider the day. I think about my children, and I guess I talk to them, ask them how they fare. Then I ask myself if I think to have done a good job with the day.”

“Did you today?”

“Do a good job with it? Fairly.”

“How can you tell?”

“You know how it feels when you’ve been very cold and then you come indoors to sit by the fire? If I have that feeling, then …”

“What if you don’t have that feeling? What if all you feel is the cold? Only cold. What if you can’t find the house with the fire?”

“I think of what I can do the next day so I might have the feeling then.”

“I’ve tried that, but sometimes I can’t think of what there is to do. What might make things feel less cold.”

Catulle relights his pipe, takes a while to get it going. He lowers his left arm from the ledge of the bridge then lets it hang loose by his side, his palm turned up. Noticing what he’s done, Amandine looks up at him, looks down at his hand; all the while Catulle keeps his eyes forward, the pipe stump between his teeth, the smoke swirling about him. When she puts her hand inside his, he curls his fingers around it, stays still. Smokes, looks ahead. After a while, Catulle can feel her hand unfold from a fist, feel her tiny fingers insisting between his. They talk awhile and then they walk back across the bridge, down the road past the café and the baker and the restaurants with the empty
guinguettes
stretched out over the water, past the shops and the other houses. They walk all the way home.

“S
HE’S WAVING TO YOU, MADAME ISOLDE. DON’T YOU SEE? SHE’S
just there by the baker.”

“Who?”

She knows very well who it is but, once again, Isolde will turn a blind eye to her rival. Or she would have if Madame Joubin hadn’t come up just then and detained her with news of a winter coat.
Red wool with a green velvet collar, which will be quite lovely for Mademoiselle Amandine. There’s a hat, too, a small Scottish cap in green velvet with a feather
.

Upswept, faded blond hair, pale skin taut across the wide bones of her face, darkish eyes that might be blue in sunlight, a small mouth with an upper lip that seems to slant—like a triangle—from a single point to join the full, pouting lower one, Kostancja de Bazin is more sinuous than plump. Black silk dress, faille pumps with high slender heels. Not a single pearl about her, pear-shaped diamonds drop from Kostancja de Bazin’s ears and another one, hung from an almost invisible chain, sinks into the hollow of her throat. A newspaper cone of
purple tulips in her hand, she stands quietly behind Isolde, smiling at Amandine and waiting for Madame Joubin to finish her story.

“Ah, madame, you are well enough I see, but who is this dear little creature?”

“Madame de Bazin, may I present Amandine Noiret de Crécy.”

“I would have thought as much. Beautiful
and
aristocratic.”

Amandine curtsies as she has been taught to do. Says,
“Enchanté, madame.”

Also as she has been taught to do, she looks directly into the eyes of Madame de Bazin, answers her questions.

“How old are you, Mademoiselle Amandine?”

“I am ten, madame.”

“And do you, by chance, play a musical instrument?”

“In the convent, I studied the pianoforte.”

“Wonderful, wonderful, and your preferred composers?”

“I don’t know very many of them, madame, except Beethoven and Brahms. Just before I left the convent I’d begun to practice my first Chopin Étude. Opus ten, number two. My right hand is weaker than my left and my
maestro
said this this would strengthen it, but I—”

At the mention of Chopin, Isolde rolls her eyes, folds her lower lip in upon itself, and shifts from foot to foot. “Amandine, we must be going, still some commissions and—”

“Chopin. Frédéric Chopin is my compatriot, you know, and he, too, lived much of his life in France but, as we Poles do not matter where we live, he remained true to his blood.”

She bends down toward Amandine’s upturned face, speaks more softly. “I shall play the Nocturnes for you someday soon, my dear. All of them.”

“Madame de Bazin, we must wish you a good day and be on our way. Amandine?”

“Au revoir, mademoiselle, au revoir, madame. À bientôt.’

“Not if I can help it.
À bientôt
. Why did you have to say ‘Chopin’? Now she’ll never let you be.”

“What’s wrong with Chopin?”

“Absolutely nothing, according to her. Obsessed. Obsessed with
him. She speaks of him as though he’s her darling older brother. She organizes music appreciation classes for the villagers and musicales in which people are invited to play piano or violin or cello, but the truth is, it’s she who plays the whole program, Chopin, Chopin, Chopin, and only when the audience is exhausted does she call up the others to perform.”

“I would like to hear her play. Actually, I would like to play again. If there was time, I mean. When I’ve finished helping you in the afternoons, might I go to her so that I could practice? It’s been a year since—”

“I’m sorry, Amandine. I wasn’t thinking of you but of myself. Of course you may go to Madame de Bazin to practice. I’m certain she would be quite thrilled to instruct you. We must talk to Monsieur, of course, but …”

Kostancja de Bazin, born and raised in Poland, married an older Frenchman, a rather celebrated violinist of his time who died when Kostancja was not yet twenty. A series of love affairs—most often with her piano teachers—kept her in Paris until, after visiting the village one Sunday afternoon soon after the Great War had ended, she met and weeks later married the local squire. Alas, he, too, passed on before their first anniversary. This history of the swift and violent demises of her husbands earned for Madame de Bazin the title
l’Empoisonneuse
. Some thought she did it with mushrooms, most believed the men died willingly in her boudoir. Thus, having inherited—from this second valiant—the grandest house in the village, a château, really, its furnishings worth a ransom, its lands vast by local standards, Kostancja de Bazin settled into country life with her maids and her peasants and her pianoforte. While still in her widow’s weeds, she’d set her darkish eyes on Catulle la Fontaine. After a slow simmer of a seduction that had endured nearly twenty years, Madame de Bazin—war or no war—would now seize upon this child, this Amandine, perhaps not unlike Isolde had done, as a means to unite herself to him. Amandine, wise as she was, understood this.