Home Truths (26 page)

“You’ve been away a long time,” Lottie said. “I could never stay away that long.”

“Who wants you to?”

The trouble with Vera was that she was indifferent. She had made Lottie come all the way to Colmar, with a complicated change of trains, and had tramped her up and down the rainy slopes on Christmas Eve, just so that she, Vera, would not feel lonely. Vera whistled with the radio, stopped, and said, “I had a little girl.”

“I don’t understand you. Oh, I’m sorry. I do.”

“She’s been adopted.”

Lottie said stiffly, “I’m sure she’s in a good home.”

“I dream she’s following me. In the dream I’m not like me. I look like Michèle Morgan. I dream I’m leading her through woods and holding branches so they won’t snap back in her face. She could be dead. When it’s raining like it was this afternoon, she could be outside, with nobody looking after her.”

The only protection Lottie had received until now in her native country was an implicit promise that no one would ever talk this way.

“The family were over here a couple of times. Nothing’s changed. They still say, ‘Why don’t you do something about your hair?’ They don’t seem to think I’ll ever come back, or want to. The doctor who looked after the adoption kept writing to them, ‘Il
faut lui trouver un bon mari.
’ Instead of doing that, they put me in a sort of convent school, and I nearly died. You don’t know how it was over here four, five years ago. Now they let me do what I like. I’ll find a
mari
if I feel like it. If I don’t, too bad for them.” Vera at this moment looked despairingly plain.

“It’s a sad sort of life for you, Vera. You’ve been on your own since you were what – seventeen?”

“You feeling sorry for me?”

Feeling sorry had not occurred to Lottie; she was astonished that Vera would think it possible. Feeling sorry would have meant she was not minding her own business. Vera had certainly been away a long time. Otherwise she would never have supposed such a thing.

T
he next morning at breakfast, in a coffee shop Vera liked because the
croissants
were stuffed with almond paste, Lottie gave Vera her Christmas present – a leather case that would hold a pack of Gauloises. Vera had nothing for Lottie. She turned the case over in her hand, as if wondering what the occasion was. Lottie, slightly embarrassed, picked up from the leather seat beside her a folded, harsh-looking tract. She spread it on the glass-topped table. It was cheaply printed. In German, it informed its finder that “in the mountains” a Separatist movement that seemed to have died had only been sleeping. Recent injustices had warmed it to life.

“I know all about this,” said Vera importantly, snatching it away. Her political eye looked for the printer, and she was triumphant pointing out that the name was absent, which proved that the tract was from a clandestine press.

“Of course,” said Lottie, puzzled. “Who else would print it? That’s what it’s about, a clandestine movement. What I don’t understand is, what do they want to separate from?”

“France, you dope,” said Vera.

“I know all that,” said Lottie, in her slowest voice. “I’m only trying to say that if there are people here who don’t want to belong to France, then my proposition doesn’t hold water. The idea is, these people are supposed to be loyal but still keep their national characteristics.”

“There aren’t many. Just a couple of nuts.”

“There mustn’t even be one.”

“It’s your own fault for inventing something and then trying to stick people in it.” Vera talked, or, rather, rambled on, until the arrival of hot chocolate and
croissants
, when she began to stuff her mouth. Lottie folded the tract with care. A few minutes later she was once more rattling around inside a bus, headed now for Kaysersberg. “Good place for Christmas,” Vera decreed, consulting but not sharing a green guidebook she kept in the pocket of her cape.

“You said Colmar was a good place for Christmas!” Lottie said. Vera took no notice of this.

Kaysersberg might have been chewed by rats. The passage of armies seven years ago still littered the streets. They walked away from here and over fields toward another town Vera said would be better. The sun was warm on Lottie’s back, and her mother’s Persian-lamb coat was a suit of armor. Beside the narrow road, vines tied to sticks seemed to be sliding uphill. It was a trick of the eye. Another illusion was the way the mountains moved: they rose and collapsed, soft-looking, green, purple, charcoal, deserting Lottie when she turned her head. All at once a vineyard fell away, and there for one minute, spread before her, was the plain of the Rhine, strung with glistening villages, and a church steeple here and there poking through the mist. Across the river were dark clouds or dark hills. She could not see where they joined the horizon or where they rose from the plain, So this was the place she loathed and craved, and never mentioned. It was the place where her mother and father had been born, and which they seemed unable to imagine, forgive, or describe.

“Well, that’s Germany,” said Vera. “I’ll have to go over one of these days and get my passport stamped. They didn’t stamp it when I came in from Italy, and it has to be done every three months.”

Lottie wished she were looking at a picture and not a real place. She wished she were a child and could
pretend
it was a picture. “I’ll never go there!” she said.

They walked on and entered Riquewihr in a soft wash of mud that came over the tops of Vera’s shoes. “Three stars in the book,” said Vera, not even trying to be jaunty anymore. “God, what a tomb! You expect people here to come crawling out of their huts covered with moss and weeds.”

“But you’ve been here, Vera? You said you had been all over.”

“I haven’t been exactly here. I thought it would be nice for you for Christmas.”

Lottie considered briefly the preposterous thought that Vera had not been trying to wear her out but to entertain her. Suddenly, as if it were Lottie’s fault, Vera began to complain about the way streets had been in Winnipeg when Vera’s mother was a girl. Where Vera’s mother had lived, there hadn’t been any sidewalks; there were wooden planks. If Vera’s mother stepped off a plank, she was likely to lose her overshoe in the gumbo mud. In the good part of town, on Wellington Crescent, there were no pavements either, but for a different reason. When Ukrainian children were taken across the city on digestive airings, after Sunday lunch, to look at Wellington Crescent houses – when their parents had at last lost the Old Country habit of congregating in public parks and learned the New World custom of admiring the houses of people more
fortunate than they were – the children, wondering at the absence of sidewalks, were told that people here had always had carriages and then motorcars and had never needed to walk.

Vera was passionate over a past she knew nothing about. It was just her mother’s folklore. Vera’s mother, Lottie now learned, had washed in snow water. Vera herself could remember snow carried into the house and melted on the kitchen stove.

“Well, then, your father moved the whole family, I suppose,” said Lottie, remembering Winnipeg Culture Patterns with Dr. Keller.

“That’s right,” said Vera, without inflection. “To your part of town.”

Lottie had still not sent the Christmas cable to Kevin. Could she send it from here? It was early morning in Winnipeg – scarcely dawn.

L
ottie intended to set off for Strasbourg the instant Christmas was over, but Vera gained another day. In the morning they went to see a movie called
Das Herz Einer Frau
, subtitled
Ich Suche Eine Mutti
– an incredibly sad story about a laundress and her little boy. Lottie, exasperated, turned to say something but saw that Vera was wiping tears. Later, she and Vera boldly entered a police station, where Vera asked questions on Al’s behalf. Lottie sat staring at a sign:
“C’est
CHIC
de parler Français!” “Chic”
was in red.

It was plain that Vera’s plans had gone wrong; Al’s arrival should have coincided with Lottie’s going. Vera did not want to go off to Strasbourg in case he came here, and she did not want Lottie to desert her. She coaxed from Lottie one more
excursion, this time not far away. After a mercifully short bus trip, they walked under pines. In these woods, so tame, so gardened, that Lottie did not know what to call them, they stumbled on a ruin covered with moss and ivy. “It is part of the Maginot Line, I think,” said Vera.

Lottie, frantic with being where she did not want to be, turned from her and cried, “Is that what it is? The Maginot Line? No wonder they lost the war.”

“Is that what Dr. Keller taught you? Why do you think one piece is all of everything?”

“What else can you do?” said Lottie. The mist carried in her lungs since Paris darkened and filled her chest. “You don’t understand, Vera. I’m not strong physically. That’s what I meant that day on the train, when you said ‘weak, not frail.’ I
am
frail, and I have to do this thesis on my own. I have to choose my own books and work with people I’ve never met before. I’ve never used a strange library. You’ve made me walk a lot. I’ve got this very low blood pressure. One day my heart might just stop.”

“Yes, well, it was a mistake,” said Vera. She folded her arms under her cape and kicked at the Maginot Line instead of kicking herself, or Al, or Lottie.

T
he advantage of Strasbourg over any other place was that Lottie here had a warm room. In a hotel on the Quai des Bateliers, discovered by Vera, she unpacked the notes and files. She could see the spire of the cathedral, encased in scaffolding, rosy and buoyed up on plain air. Chimes and bells evenly
punctuated her days and nights. Every night, at a dark foggy hour, she heard strange tunes – tunes that seemed to be trying to escape from between two close parallel lines. The sound came from a shack full of Arabs, across from the hotel, on the bank of a canal. In the next room but one, Lottie had a neighbor, a man who typed. The empty room between them was a sounding box. She heard him talking to himself sometimes and walking about. His step was quick. Vera was also on this floor, at the end of a corridor papered with lettuce-sized roses. Her room gave onto nothing of interest, and her window sill was already a repository for bread, butter, dime-store knives, and old newspapers.

On January 9th, a month to the day after her arrival in France, Lottie wrote her first long letter to Kevin. The postcards she had sent from Paris and Colmar said, “I am working hard,” which was not so, and “It is terribly cold,” and “I’m saving it up to tell you when I get back.” Her real letters to him were those she composed in her head and was too shy to write. She could imagine him listening to anything she had to tell him but not reading what she wrote. “I went to the opening of the European Assembly in a new prefab building that already looks like a shack, looks left over from the war,” she wrote, hoping that this would be a letter of such historical importance he would keep it in a folder. “A sign said that anyone showing approval
or
disapproval would be thrown out. There were hardly any visitors, and I did not have the feeling that history was being made. It was all dry and dull. I listened to the translators through the headphones, but it was more of a strain than just hearing an unknown language. Sort of English-English and bored French. M. Spaak was not there, because he had rheumatism (at least that’s what I understood)
and just when this was announced I felt the start of a chill and had to rush out and home in a cab. I was shaking so much in my fur coat that Vera was frightened. It’s not serious” – she felt her beginning going off the rails – “but I’ve got a chill and a fever and a bad cough and a pain in my chest and a sore throat. Vera has bought me some pills full of codeine. Vera believes in sweat. A dog that belongs to this hotel, name of Bonzo, came in to see me. I gave him a piece of stale bread and he took it under the bed, with his legs and tail sticking out flat. It suddenly occurred to me today that there is no such thing as sociology. When you are a sociologist, all you can do is teach more of the same, and every professor has his own idea about what it is. Vera says that if I were studying the integration of Indians, which never happened anyway, it would not be called sociology. Vera will take this out to mail.”

Lottie could eat nothing until the next day, when, mostly to pacify Vera, she picked at a helping of macaroni and gravy. Vera sat at Lottie’s clean table and proceeded to make a mess of it. She drank beer out of a bottle and, when she had drunk all she wanted, poured the rest in the washbasin. “Do you mind the smell?” she asked, too late, peering down. Vera was already on a first-name basis with the whole hotel, and particularly friendly with the man who typed. He was an elderly madman, who had only a week before been released from the mental ward of a military hospital.

“What do you type?” Vera had asked him.

“Poems,” he replied, looking at her with one eye. (The other was glass.)

Vera read aloud from
France-Soir
to Lottie, who disliked being read to. “Le
trentième anniversaire de la mort de Katherine Mansfield est célébré aujourd’hui à Avon.”

“They’ll see I got rid of that china rose,” said Vera, very pleased.

In the night, Lottie spat blood. It looked bright and pure, like a chip of jewel. She had coughed enough to rupture a small blood vessel. Out of childhood came recollections of monumental nosebleeds, and of the whole family worried. As if to confirm the memory, Vera came bustling in, for all the world like Lottie’s mother. She found Lottie lying across the bed with her head hanging back. She closed the window, then covered Lottie with the eiderdown. Lottie was irritated. “I need lots and lots of air,” she said. Being irritated brought on an attack of coughing and pain. Vera began opening and closing windows again.

Lottie wanted to write to Kevin. “My coldness to Vera frightens me. She came in again now and was sweet and kind, and I thought I would scream. She smelled of the bar downstairs in the hotel where she likes to hang out eating stale chips and talking to men. She sat on the bed and stroked my pillow saying, ‘Isn’t there anything I can do for you?’ She seems lost and lonely because Al hasn’t turned up. She offers all the kindness she can in exchange for something I don’t want to give because I can’t spare it. A grain of love? Maybe the Pole, Al, is hell. It is not my fault. I shrank into myself, cold, cold. We are all like that. So are you, Kevin. Finally I said, ‘Vera, would you mind awfully opening the window?’ and she aired the room (she likes doing that) and held her cape so as to protect me from the draft. She looked around for something else to do. ‘I’ll go and complain about that washbasin,’ she said. ‘Yes, do go,’ I said. I wanted to be left alone. She felt it, and went away looking as if she would never understand why.”