The Selected Stories of Mavis Gallant (136 page)

In my terrible fright my mind caught on something incidental—that Magdalena had never owned anything else so coarse to the touch. She had never been a child, had never played with sand and mud. She had been set down in a large European city, smart hat tilted, rings swiveled so that she could pull her gloves on, knowing all there is about gold padlocks and keys. “Cosmopolitan,” an incendiary word now, flared in my mind. In the quiet train (no train is so still as one under search), its light seemed to seek out crude editorials, offensive cartoons, repulsive graffiti.

The peasants in uniform—they were two—slid open the compartment door. They asked no more than any frontier inspector, but the reply came under the heading of life and death. “Cosmopolitan” had flared like a star; it dissolved into a dirty little puddle. Its new, political meaning seeped into my brain and ran past my beliefs and convictions, and everything my parents stood for. I felt it inside my skull, and I wondered if it would ever evaporate.

One of the peasants spoke, and Magdalena smiled. She told me later that he had the accent said to have been Wagner’s. Seeing the open case, he plunged his hand under the silks and struck a hairbrush. He shut the lid and stared dumbly at the initials. The other one in the meanwhile frowned at our papers. Then the pair of them stumbled out.

Our fellow passengers looked away, as people do when someone with the wrong ticket is caught in first class. I put the case back on the rack and muttered an order. Magdalena obediently followed me out to the corridor. It may have looked as if we were just standing, smoking, but I was trying to find out how she, who had never owned anything ugly, had come into possession
of this thing. She told me about the Rue de Rivoli, and that she had thought the star would interest her friends in Cannes: They would be able to see how things were now up in Paris. If she had buried it next to her hairbrush, it would have seemed as though she had something to hide. She said she had nothing to hide; absolutely nothing.

I had been running with sweat; now I felt cold. I asked her if she was crazy. She took this for the anxious inquiry of a young man deeply in love. Her nature was sunny, and as good as gold. She laughed and told me she had been called different things but never crazy. She started to repeat some of them, and I kissed her to shut her up. The corridor was jammed with people lying sprawled or sitting on their luggage, and she sounded demented and foreign.

I wondered what she meant by “friends in Cannes.” To women of her sort, “friend” is often used as a vague substitute for “lover.” (Notice how soon after thinking “cosmopolitan” I thought “of her sort.”) She had mentioned the name of the people who were offering her shelter in Cannes; it was a French name but perhaps an alias. I had a right to know more. She was my wife. For the first and the last time I considered things in that particular way: After all, she
is
my wife. I was leaving the train at Marseilles, though my ticket read Cannes. From Marseilles, I would try to get to North Africa, then to England. Magdalena would sit the war out in an airy villa—the kind aliens can afford.

When I next said something—about getting back to our seats—my voice was too high. It still rises and thins when I feel under strain. (In the 1950s, when I was often heard over the radio, interviewing celebrated men about their early struggles and further ambitions, I would get about two letters a year from women saying they envied my mother.)

It was probably just as well that we were spending our last night among strangers. After our wedding we had almost ceased to be lovers. I had to keep the peace at home, and Magdalena to prepare to leave without showing haste. I thought she was tense and tired; but I appreciate now that Magdalena was never fatigued or wrought-up, and I can only guess she had to say good-bye to someone else. She sent the dogs away to Raymonde’s native town in Normandy, mentioning to the concierge that it was for the sake of their health and for a few days only. At the first sign of fright, of hurry, or of furniture removed to storage, the concierge might have been halfway to the police station to report on the tenant who had so many good friends, and whose voice sang a foreign tune.

In the compartment, I tried to finish the thoughts begun in the corridor. I had married her to do the right thing; that was established. Other men have behaved well in the past, and will continue to do so. It comforted me to know I was not the only one with a safe conscience. Thinking this in the darkened, swaying compartment meant that I was lucid and generous, and also something of a louse. I whispered to Magdalena, “What is bad behavior? What is the worst?” The question did not seem to astonish her. Our union was blessed, and she was my wife forevermore, and she could fall back on considerable jurisprudence from the ledgers of Heaven to prove it; but I was still the student who had brought his books to Quai Voltaire, who had looked up to make sure she was still in the room, and asked some question from beyond his experience. She took my hand and said the worst
she
remembered was the Viennese novelist who had taken some of her jewelry (she meant “stolen”) and pawned it and kept all the money.

We said good-bye in Marseilles, on the station platform. In the southern morning light her eyes were pale blue. There were armed men in uniform everywhere. She wore a white suit and a thin blouse and a white hat I had never seen before. She had taken a suitcase into the filthy toilet and emerged immaculate. I had the feeling that she could hardly wait to get back on the train and roll on to new adventures.

“And now I am down here, away from all my friends in Paris,” she had the gall to say, shading her eyes. It was a way of showing spirit, but I had never known anyone remotely like her, and I probably thought she should be tight-lipped. By “all my friends” she must have meant men who had said, “If you ever need help,” knowing she would never ask; who might have said, “Wasn’t it awful, tragic, about Magdalena?” if she had never been seen again.

She had left her luggage and jewelry untended in the compartment. I was glad to see she wore just her wedding ring; otherwise, she might have looked too actressy, and drawn attention. (I had no idea how actresses were supposed to look.) Sometimes she used an amber cigarette holder with a swirl of diamond dust like the tail of a comet. She must have sold it during the war; or perhaps lost it, or given it away.

“You look like a youth leader,” she said. I was Paris-pale, but healthy. My hair was clipped short. I might have been about to lead police and passengers in patriotic singsong. I was patriotic, but not as the new regime expected its young to be; I was on my way to be useful to General de Gaulle,
if he would have me. I saw myself floating over the map of France, harnessed to a dazzling parachute, with a gun under my arm.

We had agreed not to stare at each other once we’d said good-bye. Magdalena kissed me and turned and pulled herself up the high steps of the train. I got a soft, bent book out of my canvas holdall and began to read something that spoke only to me. So the young think, and I was still that young: Poetry is meant for one reader only. Magdalena, gazing tenderly down from the compartment window, must have seen just the shape of the poem on the page. I turned away from the slant of morning sunlight—not away from her. When the train started to move, she reached down to me, but I was too far to touch. A small crucifix on a chain slipped free of her blouse. I stuck to our promise and never once raised my eyes. At the same time, I saw everything—the shade of her white hat brim aslant on her face, her hand with the wedding ring.

I put the star in my book, to mark the place: I figured that if I was caught I was done for anyway. When my adventures were over, I would show it to my children; I did not for a second see Magdalena as their mother. They were real children, not souls to be bargained. So it seems to me now. It shows how far into the future I thought you could safely carry a piece of the past. Long after the war, I found the star, still in the same book, and I offered to give it back to Magdalena, but she said she knew what it was like.

I
got to London by way of Marseilles and North Africa, having left Paris more than a year before. My aim was to join the Free French and General de Gaulle. I believed the weight of my presence could tip the scales of war, like one vote in a close election. There was no vanity in this. London was the peak of my hopes and desires. I could look back and see a tamed landscape. My past life dwindled and vanished in that long perspective. I was twenty-three.

In my canvas holdall I carried a tobacco pouch someone had given me, filled with thin reddish soil from Algeria. In those days earth from France and earth from Algeria meant the same thing. Only years later was I able to think, I must have been crazy. When you are young, your patriotism is like metaphysical frenzy. Later, it becomes one more aspect of personal crankiness.

Instead of a hero’s welcome I was given forms to fill out. These questionnaires left no room for postscripts, and so only a skeleton of myself could be drawn. I was Édouard B., born in Paris, father a schoolteacher (so was my mother, but I wasn’t asked), student of literature and philosophy, single, no dependents.

Some definitions seemed incomplete. For instance, I was not entirely single: Before leaving Paris I had married a Jewish-born actress, so as to give her the security of my name. As far as I knew, she was now safe and in Cannes. At the same time, I was not a married man. The marriage was an incident, gradually being rubbed out in the long perspective I’ve described. So I saw it; so I would insist. You have to remember the period, and France occupied, to imagine how one could think and behave. We always say
this—“Think of the times we had to live in”—when the past is dragged forward, all the life gone out of it, and left unbreathing at our feet.

Instead of sending me off to freeze on a parade ground, the Free French kept me in London. I took it to mean they wanted to school me in sabotage work and drop me into France. I did not know special parachute training might be needed. I thought you held your breath and jumped.

Two months later I lay in a hospital ward with a broken nose, broken left arm, and fractures in both legs. They had been trying to teach me to ride a motorbike, and on my first time out I skidded into a wall. The instructor came and sat by my bedside. He was about twice my age, a former policeman from Rouen. He said the Free French weren’t quite casting me off, but some of them wondered if I was meant for a fighting force in exile. I was a cerebral type, who needed the peace of an office job, with no equipment to smash—not even a typewriter. I asked if General de Gaulle had been informed about my accident.

“Is he a friend of yours?” said the instructor.

“I’ve seen him,” I said. “I saw him in Carlton Gardens. He came out the door and down some steps, and got into his car. I was carrying a lot of parcels, so I couldn’t salute. I don’t think he noticed. I hope not.”

There was a silence, during which the instructor stared at his watch. Presently, he inquired what I wanted to do with my life.

“I think I am a poet,” I said. “I can’t be sure.”

After that they sent me a regular hospital visitor, a volunteer. Juliette was her name. She was seventeen, from Bordeaux, the daughter of a colonel who had followed de Gaulle to London. She had a precise, particular way of speaking, with every syllable given full value and the consonants treated like little stones. It was not the native accent of Bordeaux, which anyone can imitate, or the everyday French of Paris I’d grown up with, but the tone, almost undefinable, of the French Protestant upper class. I had not heard it before, not consciously, and for the moment had no means of placing it. I thought she had picked up an affectation of some sort while learning English and had carried it over to French. She had, besides, the habit of thrusting into French conversation brief, joyous, and usually irrelevant remarks in English: “You don’t say!” “Oh, what a shame!” “How glad I am for you!” “How gorgeous!”

From behind a mask of splints and bandages I appraised her face, which was still childlike, rounded as if over a layer of cream. A beret kept slipping and sliding off her dark hair. “Oh, what a pity!” she remarked, pulling it
back on. She was dressed in the least becoming clothes I had ever seen on a young woman—a worn and drooping tunic, thick black stockings, and a navy sweater frayed at the cuffs. She had spent five months in an English girls’ school, she told me, and this was the remains of a uniform. She had nothing else to wear, nothing that fitted. Her mother was too busy to shop.

“Can’t you shop for yourself?”

“It’s not done,” she said. “I mean, we don’t do things that way.”

“Who is we?”—for she still puzzled me.

“Besides, I’ve got no money.” This seemed a sensible explanation. I wondered why she had bothered to make another. “My mother teaches English to French recruits. Actually, she doesn’t know much, but she can make them read traffic signs.”

“You mean, ‘Stop’?”

“Well, there are other things—’No Entry.’ ” She looked troubled, as if she were not succeeding in the tranquil, sleepy conversation that is supposed to keep a victim’s mind off his wounds.