The Twelve Rooms of the Nile (59 page)

On the day of departure, he gave a big gratuity to M. Bouvaret, who had helped twice with the luggage and generously drawn maps to sites in and around the city. His most painful farewell would be to Joseph, loyal, love-besotted Joseph. He would hold off until the last moment, when he and Max boarded the ship for Alexandria.

“Wait,” said the innkeeper, pocketing his baksheesh. “You must not depart yet.” He followed them out the door, helping again with their possessions.

Moments later, he returned, lugging a large tin pot.
“Y’allah,”
he said, urging them toward the street. “Now,
messieurs
, this is how friends say good-bye in the Orient.” Beaming, he pitched the potful of water at their feet.

“What?” exclaimed Gustave. He checked his valises. Not a drop had touched them or him despite the big splash.

Bouvaret clapped the pot.
“Revenez avant que cette eau ne sèche!”
he shouted. Come back before this water dries.

Once again, the dam broke and tears rolled over Gustave’s cheeks. He had to stifle himself. To be so easily moved was unnerving. First, the men at the treading and now a little water. A rainbow on a strand of hair. Or the memory of Trout holding her hat atop the dune while Max gathered moonlight into his lens. The whole evanescent display of life in all its depravity, all its glory. Because the water had been, above all,
glorious
as the sunlight sparked it. It had hung in the air like a liquid marquee announcing,
anointing
the moment with a homespun grandeur. Water from the Nile, no doubt. He wanted to embrace the innkeeper for the aptness and sweetness of the gesture, but the man had already turned toward the door.

31

THE TWELFTH ROOM

S
he recognized the birdsong—redstarts, thrushes, finches—that punctuated the cool air. Bordered with tall cedars and thick-boled pines, the grounds were orderly, with gravel paths and flower beds, not a profusion, but enough to acknowledge that beauty had a place among the poor and sick. Flowers, in good measure, promised a future, added hope, though a superabundance of blooms could deny suffering, enforce a rote cheerfulness. At home they often had just this obliterating, chastising effect: how dare you be ill or poor when the snapdragon and lily of the valley lift their perfumed throats and offer their silent bells to the wind? No, Kaiserswerth was a practical place, she saw that right away—and her true destination after eight months of wandering. For the first time in her life, she was on her own—no family, no chaperones or maid.

She did her best to put Egypt behind her. On a good day, it was as if she had never been there—never walked along the beach at Aboukir Bay, where Lord Nelson vanquished the French, or saw the ships left to rot, their hulls bleached and bitten like the bones of giant, mythical birds. A different Flo had struck up a conversation with a stranger thoughtlessly discharging a gun in public. Better not to remember any of it.

Here is what I most wish as I write this, my songbird—that I could be with you in Cairo
.

Her first impulse was to throw his letter away, but she relented and read it, then reread it, first to freshen her grief, and later for comfort on the long journey from Egypt to Prussia.

Please forgive me for the silence you have had to endure; I know that from silence, as from pain, one can make nothing. I have been ill in various degrees since we parted, often too ill to write. For days, I was quite delirious; I remember only Joseph bringing me tea and brandy with soft, tasteless bread
.

• • •

A trove of letters had accumulated in Cairo during the remainder of Flo’s Nile voyage—ten in all, five from Parthe. The voices of loved ones from a distance constituted the best sort of homecoming. They professed to miss her, and she believed them. But she was no longer the person they missed. After knowing Gustave, she realized that she was not the singular freak it had suited them to believe. There were other monsters. Even two made a group. Two made her almost . . . ordinary. Run-of-the-mill Flo.

After Cairo, the family scanted on letters. Parthe claimed to have posted letters addressed to Trieste, Poste Restante, and to Flo’s hotels in Dresden and Berlin. They never reached her, while Selina and Charles received packets without interruption. Was the blood mob punishing her in advance? Had they guessed her secret plan?

The trip to Greece was improvised and panoramic. They stitched a crazy quilt through the Mediterranean and Adriatic on a thread of bad weather, with delays for quarantine and diplomatic disturbances. Twice they set forth from Trieste and were refused entry at Grecian ports. Remarkably, it took thirteen days instead of three to steam from Alexandria to Corfu, and ten days from Corfu to Patras.
We are going to Greece by way of New York once the isthmus of Panama is cut through
, she wrote WEN in a rare moment of jocularity. At last,
they traversed the Gulf of Corinth and reached Athens, where the Bracebridges had a villa.

Dear Selina, determined that Flo love Greece as much as she did, insisted she wait for a sunny day to view the Acropolis. Yet even under blue skies Greece was a disappointment. Abu Simbel had evoked God for her, while the Parthenon deified man, its stone divinities poor facsimiles of the great philosophers and dramatists. Her hopelessness persisted.

Charles was ailing. Egypt, he claimed, had induced neuralgic headaches along with accumulations of phlegm and coughing spells. She applied leeches to his forearm with her customary care, glad for a task to divert her from dreaming and panic. He booked a reservation at Bad Pyrmont, in lower Saxony, for three weeks in the baths and vapor cave, first in salt, then in steel. On July 2 they departed for the north.

The meander through Europe was a revelation. Everywhere, from Vienna to Prague and on through Germany, tempers were flaring after the clashes of 1848. Berlin and Prague were in shambles, with soldiers garrisoned in civilian homes. The scent of gunpowder stung the air with the threat of armed confrontation. In every crowd, Flo saw flashes of steel and the dull glow of military braid, reminders of the fragile truce.

But O, her
désespoir
! The only way to fight it was by doing. Something. Anything. She visited galleries, churches, and museums. She walked and tended Charles. Sundays at unfamiliar churches anchored her, though expatriates latched on like hungry fleas.

In Prague she began to improve. The best distraction of all turned out to be hospitals. The Brothers of Mercy and Sisters of Mercy ran two exemplars of hygiene and compassion. Protestant establishments, they proved that women could serve like nuns outside a monastic order. In Berlin a trio of progressive institutions inspired her: the New Model Hospital; the Elizabeth Hospital; and most amazing, the Rauhe Haus, where delinquent boys apprenticed in the trades lived in cottages with deacons as a kind of family. The kindness wealthy Germans bestowed on their poorer brethren lifted her mood.

The second-best distraction was making Fanny squirm with letters that pretended to innocent motives. She pointedly described the new hospitals, contrasting them with one in Hamburg run in the English style by dissolute doctors and therefore full of bad women. From Berlin she lauded spinsters who had founded charities. With her private fortune, Mlle. de Sieveking had established a home for fallen daughters, and Mlle. de Bülow, an infants’ hospital and school for scrofulous children. Though the implication was clear, Flo spelled it out: if they were serious, WEN and Fanny could undertake genuine charity instead of hunt balls and poor-peopling. If Florence had funds,
she
certainly would.

She let drop that the women in Berlin were more liberated than their English sisters. Solitary fraus and fräuleins moved through the streets without risk to reputation. They shopped alone, spent afternoons reading in the free libraries, and attended evening concerts unescorted. “I have just turned thirty,” she wrote her mother, “the age Jesus was when he began his real work, and I hope to become useful in the world.” Though Fanny would be outraged, Flo knew she would not respond to these gibes.

While Charles recuperated in the spa, she and Selina sauntered arm in arm, companionable as ever. To Flo’s relief, Selina correctly construed Flo’s silence on the subject of Gustave as a large red KEEP AWAY sign. Otherwise Flo would have borne the untenable burden of defending the man just when she was trying to forget him.

She had less time to brood because her mind was working round the clock, absorbing information, formulating schemes she might undertake at home. Her Ragged School teaching, the work closest to the German mold, must certainly continue. But what of England’s major wasted resource—the indolent upper-class women who counted their lives in cross-stitch and bore children in a world teeming with orphans merely to keep occupied? What if they could make their way without footmen and chaperones, unencumbered by hooped and trained gowns too voluminous to pass through a gate or doorway? Fashion was nothing more than a pretty cage.

These women were bored, whether they knew it or not.

It rankled to think of how much suffering they could abate, were it respectable to do so. She began a tract called
Cassandra
, about the oppression of daughters.
The upper-class English family uses people. If it wants someone to sit every day in the drawing room, she must comply, even if she may be destined by God for science or education. This system dooms some minds to incurable infancy, others to silent misery
. In a renewed frenzy, she filled the pages of
Lavie
with daily notes and tirades:
July 20, Berlin: Suppose we were to see a number of men in the morning sitting around a table, looking at prints, doing worsted work, and reading little books. How we should laugh!

Despite the displacements of travel, time passed rapidly. The German trains were efficient, with private sitting rooms in addition to sleeping cars in first class. Best of all, she dreamed less. Somewhere north of the Alps, the anticipation of Kaiserswerth began to outweigh her sadness.

Max was sure I’d recover, and ordered the
cange
to Beni Hasan, but the winds had curled up in their caves. Every day we were becalmed he ranted
.

But no, it is foolish to delay what I wish to say with journalistic ramblings
.

Let me begin again
.

Three weeks by herself. No maid to launder or lay out clothes, dress her hair, or keep her calendar. Her own labor, she saw immediately, was the price of freedom, which was fitting, as Kaiserswerth was an experiment in communalism, with identical privations for all.

What did Kaiserswerth not grapple with? Infants, orphans, troubled adolescents, the old, the ill, the criminal, the homeless, the
hopeless
. Pastor Fliedner and his wife, whom she was asked to call “Mother,” were the epitome of methodical devotion. Familiar to them through Baron Bunsen and her own enthusiastic letters, she
was welcomed as one of their own. Language was no problem: she spoke German, but wrote notes in French, which they read with ease.

Did she wish to be treated like a visitor or a probationer? A probationer, she said. She roomed in the dormitory, expecting austerity, but finding instead utilitarian plenitude: simple furniture, latchhooked rugs, kerosene lamps, and books. Books everywhere—medical texts, proposals for legal reform, reports from the Kaiserswerth colonies abroad. Manuals on teaching the deaf and blind and reforming delinquents.
Accouchement for Midwives
.

With Pastor Fliedner’s approval, she decided to write a pamphlet about the deaconesses for an English audience. If she penned it anonymously, WEN would print and distribute it.

First, I want to tell you something that only one other human being, my dear friend Louis Bouilhet, knows. (If you ever saw him, you would be struck by our resemblance. We are doppelgängers of each other. This was our first bond, not enough to sustain a friendship, but later, a constant emblem of our shared love of literature and writing.)

It was to Bouilhet I confided when I was nineteen that I was considering castrating myself. No doubt, you will find this idea
engoué,
if not horrific. Surely you must be thinking, “Why is he telling me this? And why has he broken his word to me?” Bear with me, Rossignol
.

You see, I am an epileptic, though my family won’t admit it. They treat it as a dark secret, like a murder among the ancestors. I thought if I gave up gratification, I might be free of seizures. The idea appealed to me for another reason—the purity of renouncing the pleasures of the body. If I had done it, I believe I would have become a religious man and—dare I say it?—in that regard rather like you
.

The probationers numbered one hundred and twenty, most studying to become deaconesses, a smaller number, nurses, like Flo. Nursing
was a decent profession at Kaiserwerth, with standards of deportment and actual techniques to master. The hospital’s one hundred beds were always full. She learned all manner of care—bandaging, applying tinctures, the treatment for burns, for suppurating infections, for whatever wounds a body could sustain and survive. A man’s horse had crushed him; an aged deaconess was dying of tuberculosis; a child had almost frozen to death in a pond. A doctor from the village prescribed the protocol, and the nurses and probationers carried it out.

Real work, every day. She was so occupied and met so many people that her brief notes in
Lavie
did little more than track the blur of activity.
Walked the bad eyes and the bad chest along the Rhine. An itchy family was admitted. Poison oak?
Each morning she awoke eager for the day’s accomplishments.

Not that we are so different in other ways. Everyone thinks that only women are hysterics, while I believe that men are, too. Myself, for example! Often, for no reason at all, my heart beats like a tribal drum. I become emotional over trifles. Sometimes I begin to choke, or odd pains shoot through the back of my head. Other times I am in a state of exaltation. As for boils, I could write a book about the way they come and go like demons battling for my soul. In this intensity of feeling, we are, I know, alike. (Not that you suffer from boils!) Everything troubles and agitates me. A zephyr to others is the harsh north wind to me. I have become more
vache,
more beastly and yet more sensitive, more capable of torment. (Does this sound familiar?) Also, it goes without saying that the characters I create, such as Saint Anthony, drive me crazy. I live inside them and they in me. I suffered every agony Anthony did, but mine were self-imposed. Do you see this, dear Rossignol—that the same bells call out to us?