Crossing on the Paris (10 page)

The slow passage through British coastal waters and the stopover at Southampton had calmed the nerves and settled the stomachs of most of the steerage residents. Spirits were high at dinner—voices raised with frequent outbreaks of laughter—and nearly all the plates were so carefully swabbed with bread, the maids wondered whether they'd been used at all. Julie was feeling better, less nauseated and more energetic, and wasn't too disappointed when Mme. Tremblay informed them that they'd be serving an extra
dinner shift that evening to the Brits and Irishmen who'd boarded at Southampton.

Many of the new arrivals to steerage, as well as the ones who had boarded at Le Havre that morning, were planning on emigrating to the United States. There had been rumors in the press about the American government hardening its immigration laws, and passages were quickly being booked before any such reforms could take effect. Julie went down the long table, refilling the newcomers' glasses and bread baskets (how hungry they all were!) and listening to their excited banter.

“New York here we come!” toasted a group of young Irishmen with the house red.

“To fast cars and faster women!” cried one lad, who hadn't bothered to take off his wooly cap for dinner.

“My uncle Ned tells me there's a lot of construction work on skyscrapers,” said a pale, freckled-faced boy. “That's what I'm going to do.”

“What?” exclaimed a redhead. “Prancing around up there on those steel beams? One hundred, two hundred meters off the ground? Imagine if you fell!”

“Well, you'd have time to say three Hail Marys and an Our Father on the way down!” laughed the boy in the cap.

“I'm going to try and get work on the waterfront,” said the redhead. “Doing the same job we did back in Liverpool, but earning double—that's the important thing!”

“When we're
not
working is the important thing!” said the boy in the cap. “In New York, there's jazz clubs and boxing, horse races, and—”

“
And
no drink!” said the redhead with a frown.

“Oh, Uncle Ned says you can find drink!” said the pale boy. “In fact, he says you can find whatever you want!”

“Hey, miss!” the redhead called to Julie. “More wine over here!”

As Julie poured another round, she thought about New York.
Almost all the passengers in steerage were impatient to get there, to begin their new lives. Looking forward to seeing its stylish skyline from the ship, she hoped the crew would be given a few days to explore, before turning around and crossing the Atlantic again.

When the last of the Southampton arrivals finally left the dining area and drifted out into the common room, the mooring deck, or their cabins—four bunks to a room—the steerage help cleared the tables, then wiped them down. When the dining room was clean, Julie's first day had come to an end.

She went to the dormitory and took off her uniform. Julie brought it to her face and sniffed; her clothes had taken on the smell of stale sweat, hearty foods, ammonia, vomit, and the stench of the passengers themselves. Well, that about summarized her new job.

Putting on her bathrobe, she looked around the room. Although the women who worked in the upper classes—the hatcheck girls, nannies, cigarette girls, and so on—would still be up for hours, most of the steerage workers and laundresses were already in bed.

After moving her mother's lacework, carefully placing it under the pillow, Julie crawled into her bunk, feeling the engine's vibration. Over its drone, she could just hear the sounds of the women around her, the breathing and snores, the shifting and nestling, the odd murmur. Simone, in the bunk above hers, was making no noise at all, sleeping in absolute silence. Julie closed her eyes and tried to cool her neck with her clammy hands. The queasiness had returned when the
Paris
had regained the high seas; she was eager to recover her balance, to feel absolutely normal.

Suddenly, she was startled by something moving at the foot of her bed. She looked down, straining to see in the dim light, and discovered the shine of two little eyes: a mouse. There had been plenty of mice around her parents' house on the waterfront and, against her mother's wishes, she'd even tried to domesticate a few. She'd line
up bits of stale bread for them to eat, trying to coax them into a box, to make them into pets. Julie smiled at this one, wiggling her fingers to see whether it would come to her.

Watching it sitting on its haunches, moving its delicate hands, she was reminded of one of the letters her brother Loïc had sent from the front outside of Reims where he was stationed for nearly six months. He was the only one of her four brothers who had regularly written from the trenches and Julie was always fascinated to read about his life there: the inexplicable coziness of the dugout; the daisies, poppies, and cornflowers that grew wild in No Man's Land; what falling asleep in wet boots does to one's feet.

Loïc once wrote about how, after weeks of rain, the trenches became so slippery that frogs and field mice fell in and couldn't get out. Hundreds of them were trapped in those deep muddy ditches and, at night, the men couldn't help walking on them, crushing them in their heavy boots. Julie felt her nose twitch and her throat contract—the early warning signs of tears—and slowly breathed out, refusing to cry her first night in the women's dormitory.

“Are you trapped in here, little one?” she asked the mouse in an unsteady whisper. It jumped off the bunk, zigzagged across the floor, and scurried away.

Julie thought that she too would get up and take a walk. Despite the number of tedious chores she'd performed throughout the day, she wasn't tired. All day she had longed to be on deck, in the sun, breathing fresh air. She leaned onto her elbow and looked toward Mme. Tremblay's bunk on the other side of the room. A slight form lay unmoving under a mass of blankets. Silently, Julie got out of her bed and, in the narrow floor space between the bunks, put on her civilian dress and jacket. She carried her shoes out of the dormitory, slid them on in the corridor, then began the climb upward. During the ascent, the air cooled and the noise of the engines became fainter.

On deck, she looked for the exact middle of the ship, where it
was reputed to move the least. She crept silently past couples kissing in the shadows and a few moonstruck strollers, and edged over to the rail. Wrapped in night air, she stood looking out, the ships' lights behind her. She caught faint strands from the orchestra playing in the first-class ballroom, and the musical hum, with its warbles and trills, of the impeccably dressed dancers and late-night diners, those passengers who undoubtedly found it difficult to remember they were at sea.

After only a minute or two—her face cocked to the sky, eyes shut, relishing the cool breeze—she felt better. Her mouth was no longer producing so much saliva, the tingling behind her ears had stopped. Slowly, she opened her eyes and looked up at the stars. From where she stood, in the middle of the ship, in the middle of the sea, they were infinite. From her kitchen windows in Le Havre, this ship had seemed vast beyond measure, but here, nestled between the enormity of the black ocean and the night sky, it was small, vulnerable even.

Looking up at the Milky Way, she thought again of Loïc. Her older brothers, Jean François, Émile, and Didier, had been between eight and twelve years older than them. After they'd become working men, those three had sometimes seemed more like boarders than brothers, always coming and going, usually present at meals, occasionally playful but often tired, aloof, uninterested in children's antics. Loïc, on the other hand, was almost her twin. As they were separated by only thirteen months, their parents and brothers had always referred to them collectively as “
les petits.
” Almost never called by their names, or individually for that matter, they were scolded, given orders, and embraced as one.

When her three older brothers enlisted in the Armée de Terre in 1914, they had their portrait made in their new uniforms, a photograph that later became thin from caresses and mottled with tears. Standing together with Émile, the tallest, in the center, they all sported standard-issue mustaches and new kepis, jauntily
perched on their heads. Although the photograph was sepia colored, Julie could still see the bright crimson trousers emerging from tailored blue coats. Having only before seen them wearing grimy coveralls for working or cheap suits for going out, she thought her brothers had never looked so handsome, so distinguished.

Hanging out the windows of the train, each one off to his own regiment, they brandished their lances and grinned with excitement as the crowd shouted, “To Berlin!” The townsfolk already looked at them as heroes. On the platform, their parents beamed with pride.

Julie lost a part of herself each time a big brother died at the front. At the fishmonger's or the bakery, she would find herself reliving her precious childhood memories—the storytelling, the horsey rides, the amateur magic tricks—and silently begin to cry, ignoring the shopkeepers' pitying looks. While Julie dissolved into grief, her parents, so absorbed in their own, distanced themselves from their youngest, retreating further with each official letter they received. Julie became nearly invisible to them as they turned quiet and cold, the hollowed shells of their prewar selves. Then Loïc, when he turned seventeen, announced that he was going to war as well.

“Hallo! Julie Vernet!”

Julie swung around, alarmed, wondering who could be calling her, who knew her name. Would she be reprimanded for being out on deck at night? Was she allowed to wear normal clothes on board? A big man walked out of the shadows and, as he walked toward her, she recognized him as the Russian she'd met before the ship quit port, the man whose hat she'd caught.

“It's Nikolai, isn't it?” she said, laughing in relief. “You scared me for a minute. I thought I might be in trouble for being up on decks.”

“Don't worry about trouble with me around,” he said with a wink.

He stood next to her and looked up at the stars, bright in the chill of a cloudless sky. Beside him, she felt like a small child. Alongside her tiny hands, his massive fingers tapped carelessly on the rails, a ragtime piano. Above his wrist she saw a blue tattoo of four or five intercrossed lines. She tried to make it out; was it a secret symbol, a tool, an upside-down cross? She had the fleeting notion that it must have had something to do with the war, that here was another former soldier who had fought and lived.

Often, Julie found herself resenting men who had survived the war. She knew it was irrational, but she couldn't help but wonder why they had been spared while her brothers had not. Tonight, however, she was grateful that the friendly man at her side was a survivor. Immediately feeling silly, she looked away from Nikolai's wrist and up to the sky.

“Ah, I love coming up on deck at night. It's so calm and beautiful.” Nikolai turned to her. Although he wasn't touching her, he was so close, she could feel his body heat in the cool night air. “And I'm so glad you're out. I was hoping I'd run into you again.”

“Oh, well, here I am,” she said, looking down with a shy smile. She paused a moment, struggling to find something to say. “Tell me, then, how was it down in the engine room today?”

“Hot!” He laughed. “And noisy! And you, how was your first day on duty?”

“Not too good, I'm afraid,” she sighed. “I've been seasick all day.”

She regretted it as soon as she'd said it. What an unappealing image! She certainly didn't want him to picture her green-faced and hovering over the toilet. Thankfully, however, he looked genuinely concerned.

“Oh no,” he uttered. “I'm sorry to hear that. Is this your first time out?”

“Yes, the
Paris
and I are both on our maiden voyage.” She smiled, daring to look him in the eyes. He smiled down at her from
his great height, then leaned his elbows on the rails so that their arms touched.

“Listen, I have some ginger tea in my kit that I make when the seas get rough,” he said, lowering his voice and making their conversation intimate. “It really helps. I'd be happy to give you some.”

“Thank you,” she said. “That would be lovely! I've been hoping for a miracle cure.”

“You must not be used to the sea at all. Where are you from? Alsace? Auvergne?”

“Far from it! In fact, you were in my hometown this morning. I'm from Le Havre. And you?” she asked, sneaking her fingers up to comb her hair. “Where are you from, Nikolai?”

“St. Petersburg. Petrograd, they call it now. But my family left after the revolution in 1917. We eventually made it to Paris.”

“It must have been very difficult, leaving Russia during the war,” Julie said quietly.

They stood in silence for a few moments, looking out on the water, his arm still radiating warmth next to hers. Julie couldn't help but wonder what he was thinking. Did he find her attractive? Did her birthmark not bother him? She was rather glad he was standing to her left.

“Ah, you can hear the music,” Nikolai said, propelling her from her thoughts; indeed, the orchestra was playing a waltz in the ballroom. “In Russia, there was always music. We're always singing . . . in the poorhouse, in prisons, even at war!” He smiled sadly, then turned to look into her eyes. “You have a musical beauty, you know,” he said in a low voice. “You are so small, so delicate, yet you have captivated me, like a little tune that won't stop playing in my mind.”

No one had ever paid Julie such a compliment. She wondered whether he was joking (or had he been drinking?), but he seemed perfectly sincere. She had never had a suitor before and didn't know what to say, how to act.

“You must have many admirers in Le Havre,” Nikolai added, then reached out and put his hand on hers, folding both her hands in his one.

“N-n-no,” she stuttered, feeling the color rise to her cheeks. “I wouldn't say that.”