Amandine (41 page)

Amandine turns round and round in front of the glass, runs about the halls and then out the main door and onto a veranda, letting the
wind make a sail of the coat’s fullness, laughing, skipping until she sees that Madame has come outside, is gesturing that she should stop. Amandine runs to where Madame de Bazin waits, falls into her arms.

“I knew you would love it, that it would be just right for you,” Madame tells her.

“Oh, I do love it, and it is just right, but I won’t wear it until Monsieur returns and
then
—”

“You know, it’s not necessary that you wear it ever. I just wanted you to have it. Perhaps someday I’ll tell you the story of—”

“The story of the coat?”

Kostancja de Bazin looks at Amandine, smoothes back the curls from her forehead, looks deeper into her eyes. She thinks,
There is such a pure beauty in her loneliness. Soon she will begin to hold it tight to her, to understand that her sort of solitude is not caused by loss nor can it be relieved by discovery. It’s there, the
zal,
always there. Most especially when she smiles
.

“Well, yes, of the coat but another story, too, or maybe it’s not a story so much as some thoughts that I’d like to tell you. Someday.”

A
ND THE SOMEDAYS PASSED. AND THE WEEKS AND MONTHS. THREE
years’ worth and more, though the
boche
never returned nor did Monsieur Catulle, nor did Kostancja de Bazin tell Amandine her story or her thoughts.

Isolde and Amandine lived much as they’d lived that first winter after Catulle had gone away and, each spring and summer, they went back to open up Monsieur Catulle’s house and planted the garden and helped the old men who worked the fields and they scrubbed and polished and washed the linens and the curtains, left them to dry in the sun. They never stopped talking about Monsieur as if he were in the next room or across the meadow, coming up the road, a tall, burly angel sauntering through the dusk.

Amandine went to the bridge each evening, crossed her arms over her chest, whispered to Solange how she loved her. Back in the rue Lepic, she studied and read, helped Isolde to cook. After supper, after baths in the old zinc tub, after prayers, after all, they would lie, holding
hands, in the little cupboard bed and tell one another they were living the life they were meant to live, and both of them knew it was true.

And on that day in May 1945 when villagers began screeching up and down the road and old men danced and young women wept and laughed with their heads thrown back before they wept again, on that day when the war was over, Isolde and Amandine began to worry about Monsieur, about Dominique and Pascal and Gilles in another way. You see, while the war raged, one could tell oneself that everything would change when it ended, and so now that it had, what was it that they would tell themselves?

Trains came from Paris and from other parts of the country more often, and men who’d been boys five years ago stepped down into the arms of women who’d been girls. And with as much of their hearts as they could put back together, they celebrated.

Amandine and Isolde put the house in order, planted the garden, washed the curtains, ironed the sheets. They waited. But it was on that day in May when the war ended that they stopped talking about Monsieur. Stopped altogether.

It is a Tuesday morning in September 1945 when Amandine opens the door from the dark hallway into the kitchen and finds him sitting there in his chair at the table with the white embroidered cloth, tearing bread into a bowl of wine. His face long and thin, his mustaches and beard as much white as brown, he looks up at her, squeezes his eyes as though the sight of her was too bright.

“Bonjour, monsieur.”

“Bonjour, Amandine.”

He stands to shake her offered hand, then touches her face. Something like the men who stepped from the trains, Catulle sees before him a young woman whom he’d left as a little girl. Amandine is fourteen years old. In a rose-colored dress above coltish legs, she is a long-stemmed flower. Her hair she’d never cut in all those years and, pulled tight off her face now, the thick black plait of it hangs to her waist, the
high, broad bones of her cheeks showing and her blue-black eyes, where had he seen those eyes? Like the eyes of a deer.

Isolde has the water heating for his bath, the soup on the burner for his lunch, Amandine goes to school and, like the others in the village, like the others all over Europe, they set about to cure the misery and begin the rescue that each one must do for himself.

Though Isolde had asked immediately as he walked through the door that first morning while she was setting the table and though he’d answered her, plain and simple—
no, no word—
that was all Catulle said about his children. And then, in November, the telegram—cryptic, glorious—Dominique will be arriving in Paris from England in four days’ time.

DO NOT MEET TRAIN. WILL FIND MY WAY HOME. WAIT FOR ME
.

    “England. How did she manage …”

Sitting at the worktable peeling carrots and chewing anise seeds, Isolde pushes aside the chintz curtain that separates it from the kitchen. She swallows, says, “Let’s all go to Paris, we must be there …”

Catulle looks at her. “Yes, of course we will, but she doesn’t say—”

“We’ll meet every train arriving from the north on Friday, we’ll wait for every train, every last train—”

“And what if she finds her way here while we’re waiting for her there?”

“Then you go. Take Amandine and go to Paris and I’ll stay here—”

“Yes, perhaps that’s …”

Amandine has been watching one, then the other, silently listening.

“Shall we go to Paris to fetch Dominique on Friday?” Catulle asks her in a tone he might use to ask who will take tomorrow morning’s eggs.

Miming his reserve, “Yes, monsieur. We shall go to Paris to fetch Dominique on Friday.”

That same evening, when they walk to the bridge, Amandine is quiet while Catulle, his own reticence unbound, gushes forth nostalgia, tests the sound of dreams.

“Ah my darling girl, your big sister is coming home. My beautiful daughter, she’s safe and she’s coming back to us and …”

Catulle looks at her then, sees the rift in her cheer.

“What is it, my girl? Tell me.”

“I guess it’s, well, I can’t help but think about Madame Jouffroi. You know. Her
beautiful daughter
. Solange is not going home. I want to go to Madame Jouffroi. I want …”

“In time, in time …”

“It’s not so much that I want to go for myself. At least not as I thought I did all those years ago. But just because I’m, you know, I’m
better
now, that I
feel
better, well it doesn’t mean that I don’t miss Solange. Oh, monsieur, why aren’t they both coming home, why isn’t everyone coming home, why …”

“Please forgive me my … I hadn’t thought about …”

“No, no, it’s only that because Solange can’t go back to her mother, I must. Don’t you see that? I can tell her about Solange, about our life in the convent, about our journey. I can tell her my memories. Solange can’t tell her but I can. Sometimes I think it was my fault that Solange died. If she hadn’t come to the convent to take care of me, if she had stayed at home, if—”

“I’d noticed how lovely you are becoming, but I hadn’t noticed your conceit.”

“What?”

“Do you think you are so powerful? Powerful enough to have caused the death of Solange?”

“It’s not powerful that I feel but—”

“Guilty, is it?”

“Something like guilt.”

“You did not cause the death of Solange any more than you caused your parents to—”

“I used to think that must have been my fault. And my fault that Philippe died and that the abbess was cruel and the convent girls, too. When I was little I did think that way, but this is—”

“It’s quite the same thing. Don’t mistake this feeling of yours for something less. Now, look at me, answer me. Let me show you something of my own fear. Is it because you’d like to go to live with Madame Jouffroi that you wish to find her?”

“No. No, I want to find her for the reason I’ve already told you. I must find her for Solange. But there is another one. Another reason. Maybe she or Grand-mère Janka will tell me something. About who it was, about the lady who left my necklace with them. I don’t think I ever showed it to you, but it’s all I have that might have come from my mother, my family. It’s all I have.”

“Long ago I promised that when the war was over I would help you to find Madame Jouffroi, and so I shall. Meanwhile, please try to believe me when I tell you that all our lives are made of some epic search. Mostly we search for a thing or a person or feel a longing, unnamed, and what happens while we’re searching, while we’re longing, is that we lose the life we already have. Neither the beauty nor the pain of your life can depend upon your finding your mother, Amandine. I confirm what I told you all those years ago—”

“It’s she who must find you
. I remember.”

“I dearly hope that you can go to Madame Jouffroi so that you can say the things you desire to say to her, spend time with her as you wish. But I, Madame Isolde and I, and Dominique, and someday, with the help of God, Pascal and Gilles, we would—”

“Like me to stay with you.”

“Yes. We would like that.”

“Have you decided which one of them you’re going to marry?”

“Which one what?”

“Isn’t it time that you chose?”

“Ah, Madame Isolde and Madame de Bazin. I believe that all three of us are past our game. I’ve decided to wait for you. That is if either Pascal or Gilles doesn’t beat me to it. How enchanted they shall be with you.”

T
HOUGH THE WAR HAS BEEN OVER FOR NEARLY SEVEN MONTHS, THE
distinction among first-, second-, and third-class cars often still falls into confusion. Passengers take seats or compartments as they find them. Amandine and Catulle sit in an undesignated car, which they chose because it is the least crowded. Though they breakfasted well and their journey will be less than two hours—local stops and inevitable delays calculated—Isolde, in the same zinc pail she carries to Amandine at school, has packed a
goûter
for them. They sit now, unwrapping it.