Amandine (5 page)

“You don’t want her, yet you seek some blissful life for her, some good fay to suckle her, to love her as you would
. Were that possible.
Ah, dear Valeska, how strange a path takes your love. You have not been spared suffering in the past, and yet I fear that you, with your margrave’s will, now seek another occasion for it. Perhaps the greatest one yet.”

“What sufferance can compare with that which Antoni bequeathed me?”

“That of denying your child.”

“You will remember that she is not my child.”

“All the heavier your cross. You are taking Andzelika’s child from her.”

“And by doing that I am saving Andzelika. By removing the child, by
erasing
the child, I am saving Andzelika a life of degradation and shame. I’ll not have all of Krakow saying, ‘she is, after all, her father’s daughter.’ No scarlet letter for Andzelika, Józef. I’ll not have her sacrificed to her bastard, conceived with the brother of her father’s whore. That I shall not do. Daughter of an assassin suicide, Andzelika has lived since she was two years old with the legacy of her noble sire, kept her child’s fierce dignity amidst whispers and ridicule from everyone outside our family. And when she was older, from many who are part of it. What juicy, dripping flesh to chew on would Andzelika and her child be. I want it away. Far, far away, Józef. Carefully placed, then irrevocably lost to us.”

How long did we two stay silent then? The clicking of the nuncio’s boots up and down the corridor during the short intervals when his ravening ear was not pressed to the door
.

“There is a family in France. In the region of Champagne. Is that remote enough for you, my dear? Far enough away from Krakow is it? They are the family of my sister’s husband. Janka’s husband.”

“Tell me about them, Józef.”

“She was late in marrying, Janka was, late in finding her love
.

“Laurent Besson. They met in Prague, where she lived, barely eating, almost never keeping warm, so she might study violin, study her music and live and walk and be in the only place on earth where she said she was meant to live. Yes, in Prague. Laurent had come from Champagne on a pilgrimage with his church. Only for a few days. They met on the Charles Bridge. Of course, it would be the bridge. And, of course, it would be winter. It was dusk and, in her mother’s beaver coat, Janka played Prokofiev. People on their way home from work surrounded her, placed fir branches or small faggots of kindling at her feet. Janka would have a fire that evening. They left small cherry tarts and poppy-seed cakes, black bread, a wedge of good white cabbage, some part of whatever they were carrying home for
supper. Some even had a coin to drop onto the purple velvet of her open violin case. Laurent stood among the crowd. He unfastened a gold cross from around his neck, placed it in the case. When she finished playing all she knew of Prokofiev and then of Stravinsky, she took her bows, shook hands with her audience. Laurent stepped up to her, took her hand, and kissed it. ‘I am Laurent Bresson from Champagne. I am in love with you. Will you be my bride?’

“After looking at him for a long time, Janka bent to finish the business of closing up her performance. She stood up then, slung the violin case across her chest, took Laurent’s arm, said, ‘First you will take me to supper.’

“I trust he did indeed take her to supper that evening, since they married soon afterward. They lived on the farm in Champagne with who knows how many others in an already epic family. They birthed five daughters. Through the years Janka and I wrote to one another faithfully, her letters helping me to feel the place she’d always saved for me in her French life. Of course I traveled to Avise, to their small town, when I could, not letting more than a year or two pass between visits. And when I became ill that first time, Janka—a three-month-old daughter cradled in a red carpet bag strapped across her chest just as she once carried her violin—came back to Krakow, arranged herself and her baby in a maid’s room in the presbytery, and cared for me day and night. And when I’d gained my strength, she insisted that I travel back to France with her and little Magda, spend the summer in further recuperation. She convinced me easily. Nearly a year I stayed. I baptized Magda, performed a marriage or two, as I recall. Learned about grape growing and winemaking and how good it feels to work hard and eat well and sleep a child’s sleep. Surely I’d thought more than once about making it my permanent refuge
.

“It’s a good story, don’t you think, Valeska? Even with the uncomplicated protagonists. Not many intrigues, not much patrimony over which one of them might grind his teeth. Not a single murder that I can recall. And if there were betrayals, I never knew about them, save the ones of poaching wild rabbits or the rights to a certain chestnut grove. Or so I believed back then. In any case, my dear, I tell
you all this because of Magda’s daughter. Magda’s Solange. Just past seventeen, she’s come home some weeks ago after a novitiate year and one as a postulant at Beaune. Says she’s not meant to be a nun, that she would rather live and work on the farm with her family. Janka is now the clan’s old matriarch, and she would lovingly take in and care for your child. With the help of her daughter and her granddaughter. With the help of Magda and Solange. They would take her as their own.”

“What would you tell them? Would they take her knowing nothing about her?”

“They would need know only that she is without a home.”

“Had I forgotten there were such people, Józef, or is it that I never knew there were?” From a thin silver case in her purse, Valeska takes a cigarette and—as a man might—holds it between thumb and forefinger. The bishop pulls a long match from a box on the desk, strikes it once on the roughened patch of a marble ashtray, lights Valeska’s cigarette without rising from his chair. She does not thank him but says, “As much as you are offering, I want more, Józef. I want the child to be educated.”

“Children are educated very well in rural France, my dear.”

“No, no, I don’t intend her to be schooled at home or in a public lycée. A convent education, the niceties, the advantages of a fine Catholic boarding school, just as I had, as Andzelika had.”

“Valeska, Valeska, listen to yourself. Will you even choose the stuff of her dresses, dictate—from some stifled place behind the drapes—how she’ll arrange her hair? She is congenitally ill, mortally ill, yet you imagine her reading Virgil. Hold her to you or surrender her. You cannot do both. Not even you can do both.”

“Hush, Józef. Why must you always speak like a priest? Like a good priest. What about Montpellier?”

“What about it? You are mad if you’re thinking to send her where Andzelika herself was schooled.”

“Why? Andzelika’s, mine, our names will never be spoken. Through your connections with the curia there, you shall ask a favor. A paid-for favor. Your wish is to place an infant in the care of the
good Carmelites there. You’ll say that the infant’s identity and place of birth are to remain unrevealed, that, in exchange for a certain donation, the infant and its nurse are to be given refuge in the convent under the auspices of the curia. Something like that. You could accomplish all that quite easily, Józef. I know you could.”

“And who is to be the child’s nurse?”

“Why your Solange, of course. Don’t you see? If what you’ve told me is true, Solange would be devoted to the infant, and if this devotion were to be carried out within the very convent where Andzelika herself was so content for six years … Was it six? Yes, aged six through twelve she was, and how she cried when I insisted that she transfer to the Carmelites in Krakow. A selfish move on my part because I’d missed her so. I’d only sent her away because I believed that if she stayed far from our ‘society,’ if she remained distant from people who knew about our ‘misfortunes,’ then we, she and I could pretend to retrieve her childhood. Unstained, unburdened. Yes, with Solange as her nurse and the curia her protectorate, that’s how I shall walk away from the child.”

“Do you truly think that no one among the good Carmelites of Montpellier will remember you? Or will you simply send the child by messenger?”

“The abbess in Andzelika’s time was a virago called Paul. Do you know her?”

“Not personally. I know of her. Know that she has been the bishop’s champion and servant since his ordination. And before that I would guess. A lifetime of collaboration, shall we say.”

“So then you are acquainted with this bishop at Montpellier?”

“More than that. Fabrice is his name. Our ecclesiastical paths have been crossing since we were very young men. We’ve always admired one another. But this Paul, this Carmelite abbess, surely you met with her during Andzelika’s residence.”

“Actually I never did. I never once visited Andzelika at the convent. All that was during the epoch of my ‘mourning.’ I traveled very little. It was my sister and her husband—Yolanda and Casimir—who performed the parental duties as far as the school was concerned
.
They accompanied little Andzelika there, brought her home twice a year for visits, went to fetch her when I could no longer abide her absence. Yes, it’s this Paul to whom I’ll take the child. And if Solange, your Solange, could be installed there to care for her until she is of school age, perhaps take on the role of guardian after that … until she was grown, until she married or—”

“Uproot a French farm girl who has just run away from convent life, you will bid her reenter another order—what is it, a thousand kilometers distant from her home?—so she may devote herself to your responsibilities—”

“As a lay sister, Józef, as a lay sister. With a lay sister’s rights and freedoms. I would make it worth her while. I would help the family, too.”

“How deeply dyed is that margravine in you, Valeska. My telling you the story of Janka and Laurent, of their family, it was meant to demonstrate the otherness of them. They cannot be bought.”

“Everyone knows that everyone else has a price. It wants cunning to divine the price and a greater cunning to offer it so that the one being bought saves face. The Carmelites shall be even more pliant than your Janka and her kin. A check-strewn path through the curia. Yes, I’m certain that you,—that I—could place the child at Montpellier.”

W
HO COULDN’T LOVE YOU? WHOEVER YOU ARE. PERHAPS I LOVED YOU
even before today, perhaps I’ve loved you from that moment, that first moment when Grand-mère told me about a child without a home. Surrounded as I was by all my family, I was a child without a home. I began to think about you, about what you’d be like, how it would feel to hold you. Who are you, from where do you come? And what shall I tell you when you begin to ask those questions of me? I shall tell you what Paul has told me, that you were left as a newborn, an unidentified newborn, at the doors of the convent, your date of birth estimated, your parentage unknown. You were registered, then, as a ward of the curia. All of it true, of course. As far as I know
.

Women are often left alone to bear their children. Was that how it was with your mother? And if it was? So be it. You were hers. Why did she leave you, Amandine? Was she sick, was she poor? It should be she who holds you now rather than I. Sweet child, I am sorry for you that I am not she. And if not she, why is it I who holds you? Why
was I invited here? I still don’t know. The woman with the eyes like a deer, the woman who came to the farm late last spring? Was it she? Is she your mother? Even though Grand-mère said she was not, I wonder
.

That afternoon. How I wish I could recall more of it. More of her. Everyone gone to school or to the fields; there was no one in the house when she came, no one save Grand-mère, me, and the little ones napping up in the attic rooms. Grand-mère said I must stay in the kitchen. At all costs, I must stay in the kitchen. “Prepare tea, but don’t bring it out until I come to knock on the kitchen door. Don’t come into the parlor,” she warned
.

The wind shuddered the window where I stood wiping the mist from one small pane with the elbow of my sweater, lightning flashed in the dull yellow sky, and I saw her totter daintily up the road wearing a man’s coat and pretty shoes, pointed shoes with double straps and high heels. I strained to see her face, but she was looking down, her kerchief pulled low so that only her mouth showed. Red lips. Pointed shoes. They spoke in Polish, she and Grand-mère. Grand-mère Janka spoke in Polish with the lady, and not a word of French did I hear from behind the kitchen door, the tea tray in my hands. So quiet were they then I’d thought the lady had gone, and so, putting down the tray, I slowly slid the tongue from the lock on the kitchen door, opened it a crack, and there they sat still, the lady in the man’s coat and the pointed shoes and Grand-mère in shawls and pearls. Grand-mère turned to me, smiled. “Solange, please bring the tea.”