THE ÉCOLE

a novel 

By Andrew Burward-Hoy

Edited by Virginia Burward-Hoy

Fourth Draft

CONTENTS

Dedication

PROLOGUE

Part One

Part Two

DEDICATION

 To my beloved family

PROLOGUE

 In the Middle Ages, before the practice of committing the mentally ill became law in the seventeenth century, it was standard orthodoxy for the people of a town or city to “hand over” the afflicted to sailors. They would collect these people on their ships and carry them either to another port, or find some other means of ridding themselves of their unwanted cargo. They would sail, up and down the waterways of Europe, collecting and depositing these souls. The practice created what would become the “ship of fools” so immortalised by the likes of artists and writers of the time.

The fool was part of the landscape of most Medieval towns—a fixture. As such, he embodied for the Medieval mind everything that was considered wrong with society. He was deemed as being marked or punished by God. So, in the literature and art of the time, the insane became the coat hanger on which to hang various projections and judgements. Held up as an odious example of what to avoid in one’s life. The madman’s fate was a reflection, a result, of the folly of his ways. He became the “other” that one must strive not to be like. According to the learned people of the time, the path towards not becoming the madman, was to follow the life of virtue spelled out in the Bible: the path of God.

The Ship of Fools, Das Narrenschiff, was the title to a poem of seven thousand lines published at the end of the fifteenth century by a professor named Sebastian Brant. He believed that the people of Germany were destined by divine fate to lead the Roman Catholic Church. Proof of which was found in the transfer of Holy Roman power to Maximilian the First, recipient of Brant’s support and inspiration. The poem was written, some believe, as a call to the German people to shed their evil ways, their vices, and prepare themselves for the mantle of divine predestination and leadership. It was an instant success. After its translation to Latin in 1497, other translations quickly spread throughout Europe, cementing the book’s reputation as a canonical work of European literature.

The name ship of fools has become such common-speak in the lexicon of many languages that it is embedded into the very fabric of our culture. In addition to Das Narrenschiff, other works became inspired by the theme. To this day, there is even a large monument inspired by Brant’s The Ship of Fools located in that most famous of German cities—Nuremberg. No connection between the author and Nuremberg exists. Brant was born in Strasbourg, and educated in Basil. He later returned to Strasbourg, where he remained for the rest of his life. A few decades after the trials of Nazi war criminals took place in Nuremburg, over half a century ago at the Palace of Justice, the large bronze sculpture was erected on the way to Lorenz Church, roughly two miles from the trials, in the city centre. Considering the macabre, beastly revelations (not to mention the black theatricality of the trials), how oddly appropriate that such a sculpture, with such a theme, should have been erected in such a city.

According to Foucault, after its publication in Latin, Das Narrenschiff eventually found its way to the Netherlands and more specifically, into the hands of a painter by the name of Hieronymus Bosch.

In a small room of the Richelieu wing of the Musée du Louvre, we can now appreciate the fruits of this hypothetical influence in a tall, modestly-sized painting set into a dark wood frame. Although a fragment of what is to be believed to be a (now lost) series of wood panels, one can, all things notwithstanding, appreciate one of Bosch’s chefs d’oeuvre. Entitled La nef des fous, it depicts in typical Boschan fashion, the happenings of an array of passengers of a small ship, navigating dark waters. 

Painted at a time of tremendous religious fervour, it would be wrong not to interpret the painting as a straightforward portrayal of the folly of the vices of sensuality, drunkenness, violence, stupidity, etcetera. Evidence of which can be witnessed to anyone who cares to follow an explanation of the painting by any of the myriad guides at the museum where it rests. Perhaps the painting is directly in league with Brant’s intentions to wake the people to the call of the divine: a finger pointing to the misguided members of the flock to get back in line. Considering the age’s obsession with the Apocalypse and the portent of folly (Man’s madness being an antecedent of the end), the painting must have been painted with the intention to shock. However, in light of Bosch’s other works, which are often nightmarish and disturbingly surreal, we are invited to apply a level of analysis that goes beyond a simple orthodox interpretation.

One of the things that is most striking, but not untimely, about the painting is the inclusion of the clergy. In the extreme foreground, a nun strums a lute (a symbol of lust), in song, next to a friar. Although borderline heretical attacks—either spoken, written, or painted—against the religious establishment were common (with painstaking counter offensives of heretical charges made by the Papacy), the painting bears a symbol that, even in fifteenth century Europe, stands out sharply. At the top of the mast made of a tree—a symbol of the tree of knowledge and of the Fall of Man—billows a standard upon which is emblazoned the crescent of Islam. The entire ship, including the members of the clergy, is asail under a Muslim banner—the ultimate heresy. Ignoring the despondency of the contemporary mind to this triviality, what must have been the reaction of the men and women of the day? Not much, I would guess. Many of them would have been illiterate—giving additional power to the image alone. What must the common man, on his way to sell his oxen perhaps, have thought of the image. Looking up, perhaps gazing through a window to Bosch’s studio as he passed, he would have seen him working night and day on an image of a ship filled with drunkards, commonfolk, and the clergy; all united under a banner of the most profane image of the time. With the Ottoman Empire in constant conflict with Western Europe, the crescent must have had the same power that the swastika does for our day, conjuring images of death, legions of armed men marching, unspeakable horrors. It was the antithesis of the cross for the medieval mind. Bosch’s painting, with such a symbol, was meant to shock. If so, what was he trying to say?

In addition to being a straightforward religious allegory, satirising the vices of a specific age aboard a directionless ship, is it not also a broad indictment of humanity as a whole? In the light of years—being a member of the twenty-first century—the painting seems prophetic if the this is the case: miscreant humanity, adrift on an oarless boat, upon blackened waters, with the Tree of Knowledge as its mast.

When looking at the painting, Bosch leaves a mark, a stylistic “signature” that differentiates his allegorical work from Brant’s (or the woodcuts of Dürer that accompany it for that matter). It adds the surrealistic touch that Bosch is known for: high above, nestled into the tree, is the unmistakable portrayal of Death himself. The grey visage of Death, or is it Satan? A pallid spectre, high above and deep within the plumage of the tree, waiting.   

PART ONE

1

   Nineteen-ninety-four. The sun had long since set, and it was a virulent chill that struck the body from above and filtered within. Brayden lay in the dirt, grabbing his stomach on his side, as he heard the sounds of shoes, heavy, as they scuffed the ground, making their way toward him. His instincts told him that the two had returned, and he thought for a moment to run, but it was too late: the footsteps had reached him. A hand placed itself under his armpit and pulled smartly.

  “Levez-vous, Monsieur Lamb,” the voice said. Brayden recognized the voice but it was out of context, which confused him. Once again to his feet, he lurched backwards, pulling himself away. He looked up to see the face of Professeur Didier. 

   Brayden lay both his hands on his knees, coughed hoarsely a few times and began to feel his legs tremble. Professeur Didier looked down the dark niche, in the direction that the two assailants had fled, and said, “You’re bleeding.”

   Brayden followed Professeur Didier’s stare and wiped his nose with his earthen left hand. He couldn’t feel his nose until the rough limestone remains on his sleeve scuffed his face. Looking down, he saw a gelatinous, gob of dark blood on his thumb and forefinger mixed with the white dust and clay from his hands. The lights were still on in the Charpentier Atelier, and he could see movement behind the frosted glass windows. He looked up at Professeur Didier, who said, “They left. Don’t worry.” Pausing, he continued, “You’re filthy.” His large hands wiped the dirt from Brayden’s sleeves and back. Didier caught the vague scent of something unpleasant from Brayden’s form.

   “Merci,” said Brayden.

   “Who did this to you? I heard the noise from over there.”

   Brayden didn’t say anything. There was a momentary silence before Professeur Didier said behind his heavy spectacles, “One would say that you are in need of a drink.”

   “Yes,” Brayden said.

   “Let’s go. Come with me,” Professeur Didier said under his breath, clapping Brayden’s shoulder vigorously.

    Professeur Didier opened the door with his key. The gold plate on the door said Département de Morphologie. And below, with long, erratic grooves scratched into the wood, Laissez toute espérance, Vous qui entrez! 

    With this warning the two walked into the dark corridor that preceded the office. A pungent smell of wax filled Brayden’s nostrils. As Professeur Didier turned on the light in the corridor, Brayden saw the door that led to the l

Lecture Hall and to his left, on the dingy counter that extended the entire length of the hall, the many wax, half-finished écorchés. They were of various sizes. The lack of precision to the muscles told Brayden that they had been done by the new first years at the École. They stood or sat rolled on one side, gruesome with their missing arms or legs—some finished but without heads— as small wads of brown and green wax littered the remaining space on the counter.  A large metal pot stood on top of a portable stove. Many of the écorchés were crude and disproportionate, but a few stood out among the others. A pang in Brayden’s nose brought him back to the present. Following the tall, coated back of Professeur Didier to the main office, Brayden took in once more, as the light illuminated the room, the macabre, austere ambience of the office. “Sit down,” Professeur Didier said.

   “There’s a serviette over there that you can use, and there’s a wash basin.” He pointed to one of the desks upon which lay folded a small, white cloth and further away, a porcelain sink. Professeur Didier took off his trench coat and threw it on a chair. Brayden washed his hands and face. Brayden grabbed the serviette and gingerly wiped his nose as he tilted his head up, to stop the bleeding. Some blood trickled down to the back of his throat, and his tongue picked up some of the coppery taste of blood as he swallowed. He walked over and returned to the seat that had been designated for him.

     Brayden had already obtained the unité de valeur for Morphology last year. His occasional presence in the morphology lectures had provoked accusations of eccentricity this year and, even worse for a nineteen-year-old American art student at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, anachronism. He had read somewhere that Hemingway once wrote, that the correct age for a young American man to visit France was twenty-six or seven. Apparently, Brayden felt at that moment to be the exception.

    He sat against the far wall, opposite the tall window that gave out to the night, as he started inspecting his teeth. Inching around the molars with his index finger, he couldn’t feel any that were out of place and, satisfied, sat for a moment to admire the room that he hadn’t seen since last year. His stomach still ached from the blows. He had always liked the morphology office. It hadn’t changed that much from what he could remember. He presently followed lectures in art theory and criticism but felt comforted to be back in the morphology office, despite the awkward circumstance. In a way, the office had the dishevelled, uncared-for grace that reminded him of his father’s garage, back in New Hampshire. The only smell that was different from that of the garage was the mouldy scent of paper from books. Many books. 

      Above the closet, where the Professeur had gone, was a shelf upon which stood in a round, yellowed glass case, the skeleton of an upright chimpanzee. Next to which, lower down and against a wall, a strange oblong femur—that was much larger than a human’s. It looked precariously close to tumbling over the edge on its resting place. Resting indiscriminately throughout the room, and standing on the variety of shelves that adorned the walls, were the oddest assortment of dried leaves and taxidermied remains of many small animals. Real human craniums of a variety of different races sat opposite him on the shelves next to the tens of dozens of anatomy books, in French and English, behind glass doors. A few old desks were strewn about the room, and a wood coat rack—that stood like a sort of scarecrow near the window—was adorned with coloured scarves, and various black, grey and red coats. Perhaps the only oddity that didn’t seem to fit the room, exactly, was the grey, German helmet that was squeezed between two large tomes in the back, away from the light, in the far corner of the office. Brayden had admired it last year, when he had the time to get a better look at it. On its side was emblazoned a black shield with two electric white S’s—signifying Schutzsstaffel. He had later ascertained this, from one of the assistant morphology professors, Girard. In particular, Brayden was told that it was a Waffen SS helmet, which of course meant nothing to him.  It was kept as a sort of relic, Brayden assumed, or maybe as a demonstration piece for the lectures. Perhaps the two S’s had some sort of morphological significance?

    As Didier rummaged through the back closet, Brayden reflected on the past year that cavorted like a haphazard wind through his throbbing, hurt head. He thought about Tatiana and Sébastien, and the beginning of the new school year. Memories that were filled with much promise and expectation, staunching his nose with his bloody fingers. What had happened tonight would bear fruit. He just wasn’t sure what kind.

   “There it is.” Didier exclaimed, as a broom fell in the closet, making a hollow clack sound.

   Brayden blinked his eyes a few times. In the back, sounds of papers being looked through and the sharp clink of glasses pulled together, broke the silence. 

   Removing himself from the closet, Didier walked to Brayden, pulled out a chair from the desk near him and sat down. In his hand he tightly gripped a rather dusty bottle of what appeared to be Jack Daniel’s Old Number Seven. From this, he forthwith loosened the cap, and poured the amber contents into a small shot glass.

   “And there you are, that should warm you up again quickly,” Didier said, passing the glass almost apologetically to Brayden, who took it and stole a sip. The liquid worked its way down his throat. And he could very quickly feel the dull warmth of the alcohol work its way through his insides. 

   He had met and talked with Didier before, but never so almost, informally. Brayden sensed that he wasn’t the only one feeling slightly “mal à l’aise” by the circumstances; Monsieur Didier seemed to be lacking in comfort as well, as he sat awkwardly in the chair opposite him. He had passed Brayden many times in the hallways and they had exchanged bonjours, but there had always been something apprehensive in Didier’s stare that didn’t diminish as the time passed. 

   “I hope my nose isn’t broken,” Brayden said.

   “Let me have a look,” Didier knelt forward and touched the nose with detached cautiousness as his two hands inspected the bridge. He let out a breath and exclaimed, “I regret to inform you that you’re going to live.”

   Brayden raised his eyebrows, and Didier smiled and said, “It’s not broken.”

   Brayden took another sip of the whiskey and tilted his head back again.

   “I didn’t see the characters who did this to you,” Didier said.

   Brayden stared at him, not knowing if this was his attempt to absolve himself of any responsibility, or something else.

   “It was an unprovoked attack,” Brayden finally said, trying to see where the line of conversation was going to go. 

   “And how are you going to respond to this provocative…attack?” Didier said.

   Brayden put his head down and looked at him. He suspected that Didier was testing him—humouring him by reflecting his word, attack, back to him. With Didier’s words, Brayden wondered how long this rope was that had been momentarily thrown to him.

   “I’ll probably speak to the administration tomorrow.”

   Didier laughed and leaned back, “It would be better to call the Prefecture de Police.”

   Brayden back-peddled. “No. I don’t want any scandal. Besides, as you said, I’ll survive.” 

   “Obviously, it’s your choice, if you do nothing. Don’t you think that there might be other incidents?”

   “So, maybe you can do something,” Brayden said, losing patience.

   “As I told you, I didn’t see anything.”

    Brayden felt uncomfortable by this discussion, as he sat, head back. Lowering his head to a normal position, the room began to spin. Why was he being such a devil’s advocate? He must have at least seen them run, he thought.

   “I think it isn’t bleeding anymore,” Didier said.

   Brayden looked at the blood-soaked serviette and put it into his pants pocket. Glancing at the whiskey he had been given, he lifted the shot glass to take another sip.

   “So, do you always keep whiskey around, for Americans?” Brayden said.

   Didier paused. “No, I used to drink. You know, I kept it around…. and forgot about it…. I thought you might enjoy it.” 

   Brayden smirked slightly, more to himself than to anyone else. His head spun as a brief silence took hold of the room. Sensing Brayden’s displeasure with the direction of the conversation, Didier opened his mouth to speak, as he folded his arms over his chest.

   “You know,” he said, wiping one hand through his unruly white and grey hair, “I have often thought that the multinational situation at this École creates enormous cultural frictions,” He paused before resuming, “There are some students who mix well, but, for others, it is much more difficult,” he said raising his finger, “For example…” He stood and reached behind him, grabbing two skulls from the nearby shelf, and placed them abruptly on the desk. “Here are two skulls. They are both, more or less, the same. Do you see?” He turned them both to face Brayden, with their distinctive, toothy grins. Some of the teeth were gone but the fatal expressions remained, intact. The two bones were yellowed, dry with age, and Brayden could make out the distinctive frontal eminences and slender jawbones that could only mean that he was looking at the remains of two Caucasians.

     “If the two skulls are born, by chance, into the same province, they will have quarrels, maybe, even hate one another, maybe, but, they are united by the same customs, the same traditions, etcetera…But, if they are born to two completely different countries whose cultures seem foreign to one another, these two men might have found themselves at each other’s throats! Their countries will have a desire to raise arms against each other…They will have a desire to kill each other. After a bloody battle, these two men die, and nature begins to do what she does so well: she begins to rot their skin, rot their viscera, until, little by little, we are left with…this. Two skulls, united in death, that are, more or less…the same.” He sat back in his chair, “It’s paradoxical, isn’t it?”

    Brayden nodded, looking to Didier, and to the two skulls. In the light of Didier’s comments, they grinned mysteriously back at him as if they knew the answer to the riddle that the two pondered, and held it behind their decaying teeth, in silence. Brayden felt his head begin to settle down. He sensed his innate inquisitiveness rise in him. He paused before asking, “So, while they are still alive, what can possibly reconcile them?”

   Didier let out a breath, “I don’t know. Love, perhaps.” He leaned back against his chair, which let out a metallic wince. Brayden sat for a moment. He smiled. He didn’t know if it was the drink or the fight, but he couldn’t stop himself from smiling. He took a final draw, as he threw his head back. Didier looked at him. He had caught the smile that had crossed Brayden’s face. He glanced at the whiskey bottle, and pausing for a moment, he let out a groan that was more like a sigh, and picked up the two skulls, gingerly placing them back on the shelf and turned to Brayden, “You appear to be very tired.”   

   “Yes,” Brayden said.

   “So we’ll see each other a bit later on then. Go get some sleep,” Didier ordered, patting him on the back as he walked towards his coat. Brayden, too, got up and couldn’t help noticing that he felt as if he had just finished a rather important, albeit short, lecture. His reaction to Didier’s observations made him feel as if he had been somewhat offensive, so he turned to Didier as if to apologize for his behaving that way, but as he walked into the corridor, he turned and instead said, “Thank you for the whiskey.” 

   “…It was nothing, Monsieur Lamb,” Didier replied, with a hint of a smile, as he put his coat on, and walked toward the corridor, switched off the final light, and the two walked out into the cold night. 

     It was beginning to snow. Light and silent flakes were rapidly falling, and had begun to envelope the ground with their frothy growth. He walked to the Charpentier Atelier to get his coat, which was locked, but someone had placed it next to the door. Picking it up, he saw Didier’s large, coated silhouette walk briskly away into the darkness, and Brayden slipped his arms into the icy sleeves of his jacket. He let out a quick breath as he felt the frigid cold against his back. It was as if he had dived into frozen water; his body heat pulled out of him. 

    The École was submerged in a neglectful silence, illuminated only by a pair of rectangular, yellow, incandescent lights mounted high up on the central building, the Palais des Etudes. Flecks of snow danced, in the halo of the lights as they fell, like fireflies.

    He walked away from the Palais, as his shadow grew beneath him. Walking into the abandoned cobblestone court toward the bus stop, he could hear the dull, electronic hum of the lights diminish, above the din of the street outside.

*

    Thierry’s lips brushed the fine, blonde hairs on her neck. He felt her arms encircle him. The front doorbell rang.

   “Forget it,” he whispered into her ear. She responded with a moan. Thierry reached down to the beginnings of her black sweater and hoisted it up over her head, her hair tumbling down from it. The fiery blonde ends danced across her bare shoulders. Gently, he kissed the back of her jaw, moving his way down to her navel, where he inserted his tongue lightly but firmly. She gasped playfully. Again, the doorbell rang.

     “Maybe you should see who it is,” Katya said, her head facing the ceiling, her eyes closed in a languid state of excitement. Thierry stopped. He rolled off of her. She smiled, “Come back soon.”

    He groped through the darkened apartment, stumbling here and there, and pushed the button on the intercom.

   “Allo. Who is there?” He waited, and as he did, he glanced at the bed. Katya was rubbing her legs together, one hand between them. 

   Silence.

   “It’s nothing. Kids having some fun.” Thierry climbed on the bed again. Katya turned to him as he lay beside her, and he started caressing her stomach, he moved his fingers into her navel and she started to laugh.

   “That tickles!”

   “I have something that will tickle you even more.”

   “By all means…” she cooed. Thierry opened his mouth to hers and their two tongues played with each other. He unfastened Katya’s bra with one hand and he felt the sudden snap as the two elastics collapsed. He hoisted her bra off of her, assisted with one elegant hand of his partner and he then cupped her small breast and brought his mouth to meet her nipple. A light scratching could be heard at the front door. He ignored it, as his mouth enveloped her. He moved his way to her stomach, and down to her dark pants, undoing the button, and he caressed her. 

    The scratches once more crept into the apartment. 

    Thierry got up, and looked at the door. The shadows of two legs, thin, stood at the opening, where the floor met the bottom of the door. He moved slowly towards it, tilting his head slightly to the side, and squinting.

   “Who’s there!” Thierry reached the door and put the side of his head against it. He heard muffled, shallow breathing, as if a young girl had her face pressed against the other side of the door. Quick, shallow breathing. Angry, he undid the bolt and tried to open the door. It wouldn’t move. He put his weight into it and shook the doorknob back and forth as the entire door banged against the frame. A moment of silence, followed by a scream. Thierry quickly covered his ears. 

   “Katya! Help me open the door!” he said.

    Katya rose in the bed, turned her face and looked at him, her breasts shining in the low light from the window. “Come back to bed,” she said.

   The scream became more intense, piercing. Thierry heard the commotion of doors, opening, neighbours coming to find out what was going on. He heard a struggle on the other side of the door. Something heavy slammed against it. Another slam, and the door thumped violently as Thierry lurched backwards, falling down to the floor. A flowing morass of dark fluid rushed in from underneath the door.

    Gasping, Thierry rose in bed. A soft light filtered in through the windows. Breathing heavily, he looked to his side. Katya lay turned away from him, asleep. He brought his hands to his face, and felt the sweat. A dream. Through his fingers he saw a light shower of snowflakes passing the window outside. And the collecting of tender flakes in a small layer, at the base. He looked at the door, or where he knew it was, as it escaped the light from the window in Katya’s apartment. A light, from the apartment landing, created a strong horizontal sliver where the floor met the bottom of the door. No shadows, no legs. Thierry let out a protracted breath, as it dawned on him that he had stopped breathing a moment before. It had left only the fevered metronome of his heart, pumping in his ears, as he surveyed the room. Another nightmare. Looking around, he saw the familiar clothes scattered around the bed, the chair Katya had teased him with that lay next to them, the tasteful but spare furniture arranged, femininely, delicately, throughout the room, and the empty wine bottle on the floor. He looked again at Katya as she lay asleep, her breath regular and deep and her chest slowly rising and falling with each breath. Tranquil.

   Thierry’s mobile began to ring in his coat pocket on the floor. Katya rolled onto her back and began talking nonsense, in German, dream nonsense, before returning to her deep breathing seconds later.

    Thierry slipped from the warm duvet and left the bed. It had to be done carefully, as Katya’s leg had lain upon him. Naked, he walked into the kitchen. His body awoken to the falling temperature in the room and light-headed from the effects of the wine, Thierry began to feel the sharp nail marks on his back. Working around with his hand, probing with his fingers the slightly raised surface, he imagined that it was like reading brail. He imagined where her climax must have been by the higher ridges amongst the others. Overall, the wounds weren’t that deep. Reaching the kitchen sink, he poured water into a glass from a plastic cup and gulped. He thought the cup might have been pink, but as the light from this side of the apartment reflected the mauve winter sky, he couldn’t be sure. His rapid heartbeat began to subside, as he felt the cold liquid enter his stomach. Standing for a moment, as he tried to get his bearings, he glanced out the window from the kitchen at the snow-covered roofs. Paris under snow; it never ceased to charm him. As rare as it was, it always brought with it flashes of tree-lined muddy roads and the barren landscape of his youth: Valenciennes, near the border with Belgium. Unlike the blizzards he had been accustomed to as a boy, the snowfall out the window wasn’t a deep layer, only one to two hours old. 

   The light-headedness gave way suddenly to a sharp pain in his stomach. Bitterness followed as he felt it rise in him. Lurching forward, he threw up into the sink. He did it as quietly as he could. Waiting a moment, breathing, he expected Katya to come running into the kitchen, but the silence returned, and he realized he was safe. He stood, with his head in the sink, thinking about the woman in the other room.

    He had met Katya on his connecting flight from Morocco. She couldn’t have been more than twenty-two he thought. He spotted her before the flight even began as he entered the plane. She wore a small German flag on her lapel, which he thought was rather amusing, as he was on an Air France flight. They exchanged a few glances, as she passed out the drinks, and when she knelt down between the aisles to talk to some parents about their small baby, he had his chance. The plane was small, the aisles narrow. The parents passed the baby to the aisle seat. Thierry glanced over to his neighbour, Le Canard Enchainé across his lap as the latter had his head back, asleep. Thierry moved his leg from under the seat in front of him and slowly started to tap his foot to a slow beat. The side of his thigh moved up and down the side of Katya’s body, up and down as she coddled the infant next to her. She didn’t look at Thierry, but her face began to flush as she smiled at the infant. Several moments passed. A knowingly long time, until, just as suddenly as she had crouched down, she raised herself, complimented the parents once more on their child, and walked back to the end of the plane.

    Afterwards, when the flight had almost reached its terminus, he went to the back of the plane and talked with her. She wasn’t alone. There had been another flight attendant there, and so he kept the conversation light, and polite. But he spoke with her, enough to arouse her interest he thought. She was a German woman, with a small studio in Paris, not far from his. 

    When the cups and food were collected, she passed him a folded piece of paper, entwined in her fingers, as she collected the empty cup of coffee that lay on his tray. He raised his cup to meet her hand, grabbing the note with his two fingers. He smiled, and she moved on. He opened the note. Naturally, it was her number. Ca y est.

    Thierry moved back into the studio, and sat in the chair next to the bed. As he looked at her, he felt a heaviness. What had started as a fevered embrace had reached its apogee a few hours ago and he now sat, the desire to be away from her overwhelming him. He shifted his weight across from her and found that, for the first time since he had seen her on the plane, he now had the chance to study her body, in detail. The relative detachment he felt from her gave him the feeling of a doctor, a surgeon, as he looked at her pale body, under the light from the window. Despite most of her body being under the white duvet, his warm recollection of the previous few hours mixed with what he could see of her made him appreciate that she wasn’t quite as he had pictured her on the plane. At the time, her bright grey-green eyes and the slimness of her delicate frame under the tight black flight attendant’s uniform had astonished him by its prototypical shape, but her body was actually quite, unique. Her breasts were rather small, he thought, with slender arms and an elegant, long neck. As a matter of fact, her entire upper body was delicately thin, almost frail. It caused a slight disproportion between her upper and lower body, which was fuller. She had the lower body of a Teutonic farm girl: strong, with wide hips, through which to pass strong children. It made her upper body slight in comparison. This contradiction between her upper and lower body unnerved him. It was as though her being was in a fight with itself: the upper body light, charming, adolescent; the lower brooding, mature, expectant. What’s more, the small scar over her pubis he had noticed was, alarming, making him wonder.

     His thoughts suddenly became a thick mixture of the two women that he had been intimate with only in the space of one day; intellectual intimacy with one, and sexual with the other—jumbled and confused. The other woman was Agnès. He put his head into his hands. He began to feel the beginnings of the hangover that would surely haunt him the next day. Nothing that couldn’t easily be remedied by another drink he surmised.

       He pondered again, about climbing into Katya’s arms, feeling the heat from her torso, escaping to her warm body as he had done with so many other women, at so many other times. The desire to pass a hung-over morning with her, as the sun filtered through the curtains. He wanted it, but a frost enveloped his heart, at that moment, like the fallen leaves outside, under the snow, or like the frost that coated his face and hair since returning from Rwanda. The drink had induced a thaw, but it was now apparent that it was short lived. Hibernating, as it had been with Agnès the day before yesterday, he now felt that he was cast into the role of an irresolute, knowing what was expected of him but somehow being incapable of making the necessary choice. It was a shadow that followed him like a cart behind a horse, straining the reins of his mind as he struggled and writhed in an attempt to choose; the momentum or the relâche, or maybe it was just still too much for him right now.

     Thierry rose from the chair, and collected the clothes from around the bed, quietly. He dressed. Moving to the door, he unlocked the bolt. He opened it. He walked into the hallway. He closed the door impatiently but silently behind him, as it made a low, groaning creak, before clicking shut.

2

    The snow was collecting on his shoulders, and on his head. Brayden waited for ten minutes, but the bus didn’t arrive, and so, giving up, he started the long walk home. Grabbing his upper arms, he rubbed them forcefully as he marched. No wind. He continued up Rue Bonaparte, and turned right onto Quai Malaquais. Moments later—as he reached the Petit Pont—he spotted one of the serpentine, low hulled bateaux mouches that habitually snailed the length of the Seine throughout the day. A wet fog had gripped the city as the snow fell, and it made the bright lights on its bridge glow through a strange, toxic vapour, hitting him like a thunderstruck on the side of the face. 

    The ferry cast its doppelgänger into the reflective water as it approached, which awoke slowly as it did, reluctantly, twisting and growing to life. The ferry’s darker image in the water danced the electric blues of sleeping rivers around the world, in disturbed fragments. Brayden saw a dark shape far off in the distance, and he heard a disturbing splash. It competed with the growing rumble of the ship’s engines. Brayden held his hand up to see beyond the lights, from the ferry, but they were too bright, and he continued walking.

    The bateau mouche crept closer, paralleling Brayden as he reached the bridge, and it was almost empty that evening—the cold and snow shower having chased the less courageous tourists away. A few passengers hovered by the windows however, from the inside, as the lights that ringed the ferry’s bridge illuminated the walls of the six-storied limestone buildings along the river with an obnoxious fervour. He wondered what they were looking at. The thought of a photocopy machine scanner came to Brayden’s head. With its white, piercing lights—shocking the limestone façades. 

    The boat came closer to him. With its eventide rumbling, it overwhelmed him, and passed beneath the stone bridge he crossed. The river and buildings momentarily sunk into inky blackness. The leviathan crept out of the mouth of the Petit Pont, on the other side, and its beam erupted once more onto the encrusted facades of the Notre-Dame Cathedral. He observed the minutiae of the Church’s details as he approached it from Rue du Cloitre Notre Dame. As he did, perhaps due to the drink, or more likely because of the fight, he began thinking about his first days of the new academic year. 

     He passed the enclosed yard of the Cathedral—filled with the work of the masons, slowly rebuilding and carving copies of the deteriorating figures, melted and disfigured by acid rain. Walking beside the Saints, the partially ébauched figures, and the gargoyles, with their hideous tongues, his imagination wandered to the niches of recent memory. Memories, turning and twisting the ensemble of granite and limestone he was looking at, into a large, writhing, mass of living flesh. He no longer became conscious of his frigid walk home, nor the walking, as mechanically as he was, or the Cathedral, and he submitted to the images and thoughts that had already overtaken his mind. 

    It hurled and vaulted against itself, this mass of skin, hair, and legs, as it overtook the street he had seen it on. It jostled and moved at its own juvenescent, self-perpetuating rhythm. The young men and women yelled and screamed, in turn, with the occasional insult thrown out—certain passers-by couldn’t restrain their hands from wandering. The mass made its way towards Brayden and Sébastien, as they stood off to the side of an intersection, on Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

  Appearing first, as a rather inconspicuous kaleidoscope of colours, the wave of carnality quickly washed over the street. Here and there, the mass began to divide and overtake the darkly-dressed street denizens, until it finally erupted in pubic splendour before the two young men at the intersection. The sound of running bare feet, laughter, and screams crescendoed. 

   “Ouaii!! Look at that one!” Sébastien pointed.

   “Which one?” Brayden asked.

   “The one right next to the guy with the huge testicles.”

   “You mean the brunette over there?”

   “Yeah, look at her, she’s delicious!”

   “She’s not bad, her breasts are rather small though, aren’t they?”

   “Yes, but look at how it jiggles!” Sébastien laughed as his body vibrated wildly.

   “There are too many of them! That one has nice legs.”

   “Are you only looking at the legs, you poor idiot!” A middle-aged bystander laughed.

   “Here comes another right now,” Sébastien pointed.

   “Attention!” A blonde-haired girl rang out, as she darted between the three voyeurs. Brayden felt her breasts give way to his jacket as she moved between the two of them. Her body was warm. She ran by, pausing just long enough for Sébastien to grope her behind.

   “Casses-toi, salaud!!” She said bitterly, before this melted into a white-toothed smile. Throwing herself into a run, she was followed by two naked male students, in pursuit.

     It was September, and the architecture students at the École des Beaux Arts were beginning their annual bacchanalian run down Saint-Germain-des-Prés. It culminated in a dash into a café near the École. As the parade of stripped bodies passed, revealing no more than shaking asses, Sébastien breathed a sigh.

   Brayden said, “Who was that?”

   “Who? Oh, her. I can’t remember her name. Jean-Marc told me she’s a transfer student from Romania,” Sébastien said, looking in the direction the naked students had fled to.

    “With blonde hair.”

    “Yes. Strange, isn’t it,” Sebastien said. “Someone said her name was Thérèse, or something like that. She looks like she could be half-German, with a nose like that.”     

   “I didn’t know the Nazis got that far,” Brayden said.

   “What? Don’t be stupid. Her mother is probably German. I mean she could be half-botte, but who knows?....Why don’t you ask her? Maybe she’s a rape victim. Your type.” 

   “She’s really beautiful, don’t you think?” Brayden continued.

   “Oui. Elle l’a où il faut,” Sébastien said prosaically.

   “She has it where it counts?” Brayden translated.

   “Oui.”

   “What does casse-toi mean?”

   Sébastien became impatient, snickered and said, in his thick English, as he turned to pat Brayden on the shoulder, “Eet meens she dos not love me! C’mon let’s go get a drink.”

   Sébastien walked off, having already moved on to the next titillation. Brayden, however, lingered, for a moment, looking beyond him, into the recent memory of the warm flesh against his jacket, and over to the last traces of the spectacle he had just seen, disappearing down the side street that led to the Café des Artistes.

   “C’mon!” Sébastien said, motioning for him to follow, and Brayden turned to join his friend.

   Unlocking the door to his flat, Brayden walked in.

   “My God. What happened to you!” Tatiana said as she saw his face. He switched on the light in the hallway.

   His face had become lightly bruised and swollen around the left cheek and the remnants of his bloody nose darkened the skin to a deep red.

   “It’s nothing. I had a sort of,” He looked for the right word, “...battle with some students.” He was looking for the word “to fight”, but out of fatigue, he couldn’t find it.

   “Who did this to you?” she said, as she went to grab a moist tissue from the bathroom and returned quickly to wipe his nose.

   “It was Álvaro,” he said, moving his head away from the tissue. “By the way, did you receive the message, on the machine? from your father? He said something about his company helicopter, in Germany? I’m not sure, his accent was very thick.”

   “Álvaro?” she said. She stopped. wiping his nose, she stood for a moment with her arms crossed. She stood there, absorbed, wide-eyed, and then she stared at the floor.

   “What,” Brayden said. 

   She was lost for a moment before registering the remark. She shook her head as if to rouse herself, before saying, “Nothing, I forgot to study for a class.” She smiled apologetically at him, stopped, and left again to walk to the bathroom, and flushed the tissue.

   Brayden stood in the doorway for a moment before saying, almost, or maybe completely for the sake of sympathy, “I’m going to call the administration tomorrow, to tell them what happened.”

   “No! You shouldn’t do that! At least, that won’t do any good.” He heard her say from the bathroom, as he heard the toilet flush.

   She continued, as she walked back into the room, “No. What you should do is speak to him tomorrow morning and tell him that you’re sorry for what happened, yesterday. After all, it’s better to be diplomatic. Don’t you think? Did you hit him?”

   “Diplomatic. I tried, but he was too quick.”

   “So, he was the one who started it?” She walked to some books and opened one.

   “More or less. He and Criquet made a sort of joke out of me. I became angry, and…well, there it is,” He replied, showing her his face, with a gesture.

    Silently, looking astonished, she stood up for an instant, before replying, “Well, tell him that you are sorry for having tried to hit him, and that…” 

   “What? No. That’s ridiculous,” He said, throwing his hands in the air as he moved to the bed to lie down. Lifting his head from the pillow he said, “It’s him! Not me who started this crap. I’m not going to excuse myself, at least, not to him anyway.” He threw his head back down to the pillow; Tatiana backed herself into the chair next to her, and sat in silence.

   “Why does he make himself out to be so macho?” Tatiana said, quietly, looking at the floor. Brayden watched her, as she threw her head back slightly, looking at the door, and simultaneously at him, as she skirted a few strands of her flame-blonde hair behind her ear. 

*

   Tatiana nudged Brayden. He turned on his side. She nudged him again, and he heard the phone ring this time. He threw the covers off of himself and walked over to the phone.

   “Allo?”……..Oui. That’s me……..oui……………that shouldn’t be a problem. I can be there in about an hour. Is that alright?................OK. Good. Good-bye.” He hung up the phone. Tatiana asked who it was.

    Brayden looked at her and said, “It was the École. They want to talk to me.”

   Tatiana looked at him for a moment—her hair like straw in front of her face— before succumbing to the force of gravity, and putting her head back down on the pillow. Brayden picked up a pen on the table next to the phone and flicked it in and out a few times.

   “It’s probably nothing,” she said after a silence, her voice muffled by the pillow. But Brayden wasn’t so sure, and he felt slightly, uneasy, that Tatiana was brushing what was so obviously something more than nothing, off. 

   Tatiana picked her head up off the pillow again, quickly, as she had just remembered something and said, “There was a message for you yesterday, from a friend.”   

   “Who?”

   “Thierry.”

   “He’s not a friend, he’s more of an…acquaintance.”

   “Boff,” she responded, before crashing her head once more onto the down pillow. He took several steps to the kitchenette and put some water into the saucepan for coffee. He turned to his left and took a long look at himself in the mirror. A light, yellow bruise with tinges of red, almost like marbled, red stone, shone forth brilliantly on his cheek near his nose. The nose itself had fortunately calmed down, as it wasn’t as swollen as it had been the night before. 

    He turned on the faucet and waited for it to heat. As he did this, the saucepan had started to boil, and he scooped some heaping teaspoons from the coffee tin into some small, porcelain bowls. Adding the water, which melted the granules instantly, and the smell of fresh dried coffee filling his nostrils, he thought about what he was going to say to the director of the school…if anything. 

     He could always lie, and it would be best if he could, he thought. Best to just let the whole thing go. If he points any fingers to Álvaro and Criquet, there’d be no end to it. Thinking now of Álvaro made him tense. He had always known there was animosity between them but he hadn’t suspected he would stoop to something like this. Brayden asked himself, as he stirred the two cups, how he could have been so stupid to fall for it. 

     Brayden glanced out the narrow window, at the white rooftops. The sun was fighting to burn off the clouds, which gave it a sour illumination, and it hovered and cast its bitter fruit down Rue Saint-Antoine in slivers of hazy yellow. He had attacked a student with a stick. Surely, under the circumstances, there might be a measure of understanding on the part of the school as to why he did what he did. If they ask, he will have to tell them, he concluded. Yes, he would have to. He opened the small fridge beneath the sink and pulled out the milk. Adding it to the coffee, he stirred, and as he did, he added the sugar. Taking a sip, the sweetened drink stung the inside of his mouth, announcing new wounds he had not yet thought about. He then turned to his shaving bar and lathered it with his brush on his skin. It was warm, and it soothed the pain in his mouth as he began to slice the short hairs on is cheek with the metal razor.

   “Don’t forget to meet me tonight,” Tatiana said, imperatively, as she walked into the kitchenette, and helped herself to the coffee. Taking a sip, she wiped her eyes and yawned.

   “You’ve made up your mind then? About Romania?” Brayden said, between strokes of his razor, looking at her in the mirror, which had fogged at the bottom.

   “There was never any question. I have to go see him. He’s expecting me.”

  Brayden angrily dislodged the whiskers and foam from his razor by tapping them into the sink. The metal made a piercing sound against the porcelain this early in the morning.

   “Oh, don’t be that way. I’m coming back to you after break. Don’t be so possessive. It makes me sick.”

   “You’re not the only one who’s sick,” He paused, then added, “Just because you’re older than I am doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”

   Tatiana avoided his gaze. Brayden pulled the black, rubber plug under the soiled, hot water. The whiskers held to the rim of the sink as the water descended slowly. Wiping his face with the dirty towel that now had small traces of blood from his face, on the rack over the toilet, he walked to the main room. He threw on his coat.

   “So, you’ll be there?” she said.

   Brayden paused and looked at the floor. He couldn’t quite make out if the floor was linoleum or some other building material. He had been wondering about it for months. “Yeah. Yeah,” He said, and groaned, and then he opened the door and half-slammed it behind him. As he walked down the staircase, he knew that he didn’t have to go back upstairs to know that Tatiana had a smile on her face.

3

    Arriving at the school, Brayden strode through the corridors and up the stairs to the administrative offices. He was about to knock, when the door opened, and the art history professor, Monsieur d’Aubigne walked out. D’Aubigne passed him, papers in hand, pushing his glasses closer to his brow, in his usual way, as he finished talking to the receptionist inside. Brayden waited for them to finish before walking in.

   “Bonjour. I’m here to see the Director. My name is Brayden Lamb.” She looked at him and finally registered what he had said.

   “Ah, well, you’ll have to wait. The Director stepped out for a few moments. Why don’t you go sit down over there?”

   Brayden took the seat she had pointed to, in front of the large desk, far against the wall. The receptionist sat down and started shuffling through her paperwork, occasionally glancing at him.

   “You have quite a shiner there,” she said.

   “I’m sorry. I have what?” he said.

   “You  have  quite  a  bruise  on  your  face,” she replied through her teeth, in English, annunciating every syllable, as she leaned toward him, over her desk.

   “Ah.” he said, pointing to his face, “It’s not that bad.” Brayden smiled. Unfortunately, the overture to talk didn’t quite work on the hard face across from him, and she looked down through her glasses for a moment, and then resumed her work. 

   Brayden took the time during the wait to admire the large, grey and black abstract painting that hung on the wall behind the receptionist in the Louis Seize room. He hated it, but didn’t quite admit it to himself. A moment later, the door opened, and the Director entered, followed by Álvaro, with his characteristic, full-mouth and shaved scalp, and shot a condescending look at Brayden. He had a reddened abrasion along the side of his head. Brayden did his best to conceal any self-congratulatory smirk, as he rose from his chair, and he thought to himself, I hope it hurts.

   “Follow me, please,” the Director said, motioning with her hand. Following her, Brayden entered her office and sat down. Álvaro sat next to Brayden and immediately nudged the chair an inch or two away. It was done, brazenly, and Brayden interpreted the gesture as a quick means to ally himself with the Director in some sort of feigned act of righteous contempt.

   “It has been brought to my attention,” she finally said, looking at Álvaro, “…that there was an incident at the Charpentier Atelier last night. Monsieur Charpentier has been away from Paris for the past few weeks, as I’m sure you know, and has been notified.” She paused and resumed talking more quickly this time. “His lack of presence in the atelier is no excuse to behave like a couple of idiots.” She paused again, and with it her speech slowed once more. “Does what you see around you strike you as being a sort of…playground? Perhaps a sort of Disneyland?” she said, looking at Brayden. “With little tyre swings, and hoops, for you to jump through? Do you see little children playing here at this institution?” She leaned back. “Monsieur Charpentier has instructed me that you, Monsieur Silva, are to be transferred to another sculpting studio, and you, Monsieur Lamb, are going to be closely watched. Remember that you are both guests at this École. It would only take one phone call from me, and you would both have your student visas taken. Do I make myself understood?......Now, I am not interested in pointing fingers,” she said, showing her palms to them, as if to extinguish any complaints, “If it were not for the reporting of this embarrassment by the morphology director, I would have had you both kicked out of here.” She cast a stern look at Álvaro, and then at Brayden. “If I ever hear of you two being seen together again, you will both be dismissed from this École. Do I make myself clear?” Brayden and Alvaro nodded.

   Finally, as she leaned back in her leather chair, she said, spasmodically, as if some unknown insect had stung her in an unmentionable place, “Good, now get out of here before I change my mind!”

Álvaro almost smiled, as he got up off the chair and walked out. Brayden followed, but before he reached the door that was half-closed by Álvaro, the Director stopped him. He turned.

“You are not in Kansas anymore Monsieur Lamb,” she said, and it was spoken with a certain gravity, which made Brayden think that it was a sort of warning.

“Yes, I’m beginning to appreciate that fact,” he said. The Director held back a smile and told him that he could go, and he walked out.

*

     Thierry had hailed a cab on the main street near Katya’s apartment building and climbed in. It was late, and the cab driver, he had assumed, was an Algerian, from his profile and the small image of the prophet Mohammed that had been placed next to the rate counter. It had been late and no one would have probably complained at that hour. “Sixth Arrondissement.”

    Thierry lifted the lid to his phone and checked the message he’d received. It wasn’t from Agnès, as he had assumed. An official from Le Monde had called him to make arrangements to meet and discuss his lecture for the Association des Photographs Françaises. It was Antoine, his contact from the newspaper. He hadn’t recalled telling him about the lecture. He hadn’t even agreed to it yet. 

    Thierry thought of this now, as he sat opposite Agnès in the small café that they had often frequented together before his trip to Rwanda. He sat broodingly, café au lait in hand.

     Thierry and Agnès had parted ways yesterday morning—before his tryst with Katya. Agnès wondered where Thierry’s mind had been, when they had been together the day before, and Thierry was not quite sure why he had contacted her now. As the conversation had turned to his trip to Rwanda, a shadow crept over his face and cast an embarrassing calm over their early afternoon breakfast. He occasionally darted glances at her. “Did you not want to see me?” She had asked in a reserved tone, to which he had simply said, “I don’t know.”

    Years ago, Thierry had met Agnès while at University and a friendship had blossomed between them. At first sexual, Thierry’s infidelities forced them apart, until a casual meeting at a dinner party three years beforehand threw them together again. As a friend and confidant, he would have done anything for her. Though the friendship was platonic, he knew, as he supposed he had always known, that she secretly longed for the commitment that he, up to this point, had been unwilling to give. However, the relationship remained balanced, so long as Thierry made no advances toward her. When the time was right, he knew, as she did, that she would be the one who would initiate things once again. 

   “What do you think they want from you?” Agnès said, leaning forward on the table.

   “I’m not exactly sure….” Thierry responded after a pause, stealing a sip before continuing, “But I can guess.”

   Agnès leaned back in her chair, “Censoring.”

  “Perhaps. I’m not aware of any interests they would have in the lecture, apart from that.”

   Agnès said, “Well you will have to fight it.” Thierry smiled at this, and thought of all the times that he had talked to Agnès about her demonstrations on the streets for human rights and myriad other “causes célèbres”. He had even participated, once or twice. Being in advertising, she took to the streets whenever she could. It was a revolt against her profession—or perhaps a better word would have been an apology. It was a profession that prided itself on being provocative, at the expense of, soulfulness, so going to the streets allowed her to sleep better at night he was sure. He didn’t judge her for it; he had a strange respect for her that bordered on idolatry. But it made him see her as a sort of privileged adolescent that he had to protect from corruptibility. At that moment, he thought of Siddhartha Gautama—of all people—locked away in his palace, eager to escape and attack the origins of suffering. Agnès with her forays to the streets was reminiscent of the young prince, with the exception that she returned to her palace every morning in an attempt to bring this altruism to the dry offices of her advertising studio: an attempt to bring the fight to the Establishment. She had succeeded a few times—attacking indirectly the automobile industry for contributing to global warming, the unwanted genetic manipulation of food—and other such examples. But it was always veiled, always esoteric. It was an esotericism that would have gone over the heads of the passers-by, looking briefly at the ads in the metro before climbing to and from work every day. In addition, these gains had cost her power at work. Over the last few years, she had slowly moved out of the circles of real power, her activism having opened her to attacks from competitors as being a sort of militant “crackpot.” Perhaps it was this spirit of revolt, this image of her as a privileged revolutionary that had made him desire to enter photojournalism so many years ago. He really wasn’t sure.

   “There’s nothing I can do.” Thierry said.

   “But that’s absurd,” she said, crossing her arms. “You’re a journalist. You have a right to fight for the truth. An obligation,” she said, pointing down to the table. It was true. But this fight for the truth was predicated on the condition that the message, the truth, did not contradict the truth that the government wanted the people to hear. Thierry had come to understand this, Agnès less so. She continued, antagonized by his silence, “It was a genocide, Thierry, if what you’ve been saying is true. Think of everything you’ve been through. Think of how this could harm the integrity of your profession?”

    Thierry thought of all the other journalists he had talked to, and the articles he had read since returning. “This is all true, Agnès. But I also have an obligation to think of the future of my job. Take yourself for example: you have often told me that there are severe limits on your ability to be political in your profession. You yourself have even suffered because of it. The discourse in advertising, the paradigm, is established to a great extent by the French government. No doubt, this has much to do with the fact that the government has an enormous investment in what gets communicated in advertising. Likewise, in my field, the government has certain interests in what is told to the public, and what is not. I am a photographer, that’s my job. I’m not in a position to interfere with the newspaper who employs me, simply to feel better about myself.”

   “There is a difference between interests and investments, Thierry. A free press is essential to any open discourse in a society. Naturally, the press reflects the paradigm of its people, but who decides what the paradigm will be? If it is not challenged to some degree, it ceases to be information. It becomes propaganda. Your comparison with advertising is inaccurate.”

   Thierry sat in silence. To this, Agnès crossed her arms and stared. “Sometimes I feel that I have never known you,” she said looking to another table. He looked down at the café in his hands. The stubbled growth on his chin mixed and distorted with the reflection. She suddenly softened in her eyes and continued, extending her hand to his, “What are you not telling me, about what happened to you over there?”

   Thierry felt the slightest pain from Katya’s nails in his back, as he shifted in his chair awkwardly, and looked away.

   Agnès continued, “Why don’t you join me in Camembert for Christmas? We can talk more about it then. My father would be interested to hear about all of this.”

   “I don’t know, Agnès. Give me some time to think about it would you?”

  Agnès felt rebuffed, and looked away. After a moment, she got up off of her chair and started to leave. She stood next to Thierry. Suddenly reaching down to his hand and looking into his eyes, she said politely, “Please come.”

*

   The clay studio where Brayden wandered to afterwards was due to open any moment now. An eight-and-a-half by eleven piece of white paper was affixed to one of the doors: “Durand-Fournier Atelier de Modelage”. Twenty minutes ago, Brayden had followed a few students to where he now sat, staring at a pair of grey, wood doors. He had wandered over to this side of the École to see if he could find a free spot in the small atelier. It was located on the fourth floor, right next to the Service de Scolarité, overlooking a grassy courtyard—the Hôtel de Chimay, directly across from Tatiana’s architecture studio. 

   Rubbing his eyes to focus them, he guessed that it was almost quarter to nine, and already the day was beginning to take its toll. He sat in a wooden chair on the fourth floor of the building he was in, along with three others. He yawned. The students he had followed, stood, leaning against the balustrade, gesticulating and talking. He didn’t know what about exactly—he had abandoned eavesdropping—his French was quite awful, even now. They stood with their thick scarves wrapped around their necks, under elegant thin jackets, the young man of the group describing something to the two women, who chirped, like birds, in agreement. Delicate and beautiful. They spoke too quickly for him, and Brayden’s mind soon drifted. 

  In addition to Brayden and the other three who talked, other students began to amass, slowly, trudging up the groaning staircase to his left. 

    The grey and damp third-floor wood corridor creaked and moaned under the chair that he was on, as the late December morning chill gave way to a dense tepidity. This part of the building could easily become thick with heat, despite the cold mornings. The numerous old water heaters in the basement leaked the balmy air even up to the fourth floor.  As the temperature dropped outside, the studios within, here, became increasingly popular. 

  “Salut.” A muffled female voice drifted up from downstairs. It had an optimistic intonation for the dismal surroundings, Brayden thought, as some of the students talked with enthusiasm, while others looked about, half-awake, and silent. He wasn’t sure what time it was now. He thought to ask one of them, but changed his mind, remembering the abrasions on his face and sitting as he was in relative peace, before the students’ mad rush to grab any available space in the lit atelier. Besides, his hands throbbed, from whacking the hammer and chisel all week; the metal hammer he had bought at the sculpting supply store across from Pere Lachaise was a bit too large for him, or his hand was too small. 

    Monsieur Durand wasn’t coming in this morning, Brayden assumed. He never knew for sure, but because it was getting late, he felt safe in the prediction. Durand was the younger of the two teachers of the clay-modelling studio, and as it was a Monday, it was his turn to run the class. Unlike his counterpart, Fournier—a septuagenarian who was extremely dishevelled, long-bearded, clay-covered, and reeked of tobacco—Durand was just the opposite: more to the point, mumbled less, and spoke more sharply than Fournier. Despite these differences in style however, Fournier was the darling—particularly among the female students—with his frequent trips to Pere Lachaise Cemetery and other Parisian burial grounds to admire the gravestones, bas-reliefs, and tombs—not to mention the obligatory stop at the local café for “un coup” afterwards. He wore an anachronistic dark-brown, three-piece suit—complete with gold pocket watch and breast coat—and he had a large, Rodinesque beard that contained small bits of pipe tobacco with wine stains. Fournier’s eccentricities didn’t mask his love for the students, which was obvious, as he appeared regularly, and often. Even when he wasn’t expected to be in the atelier, Brayden would sometimes find him talking outside by the sculpture garden or in the cafeteria with others. Brayden had to admit that he too preferred Fournier if for no other reason than that he tended to like Brayden’s work more than Durand did, seemingly. As Brayden had never seen the two together, he wondered if they even liked each other, as they seemed so dissimilar. 

    Brayden came to, and leaned upright in his chair again. He heard the slowly creaking wood door below at the entrance to the building, the sharp sound of jingling keys, the muffled voices accompanied by the studio monitor Adèle walking up the stairs, greeting the students as she came. Adèle was the monitor, and had been for most of the year. Brayden asked himself if it wasn’t too late to duck outside. He wasn’t sure how Adèle would treat him, so soon after the fight yesterday. She looked at him, as her face appeared over the staircase. Nothing, Brayden thought. Impenetrable. He couldn’t ascertain one way or the other what she was thinking. Sébastien and Adèle were an item. Two first years. Brayden remembered the awkward circumstances of their meeting, in September, at the beginning of the new school year:

  Fresh into the academic year, Brayden held to his tactic of keeping to himself—for the most part—but the situation soon changed. It had worked the first year, this withdrawal from others, despite accusations of misanthropy and being an effeminate puceau. Brayden took this taciturnity because of his youth. He understood that an American in a foreign school was one thing, but to have been accepted at such a young age was another. The two new first years infused the hallways and ateliers with their exuberance and, despite himself, Brayden too found that he was increasingly drawn to this flame of creativity—Sébastien and Adèle. They were more his age, too. He understood them, he thought. He had felt that same rush of Promethean adrenaline upon his acceptance to the École, in the beginning. 

   Some of these students, had however, taken a cautious liking to Brayden, despite his floweriness. Many of them had never met or associated with an American on such close terms before, let alone a purported prodigy. Their contact had been reduced to watching translated television programs on TF1, or observing with curious detachment the multi-coloured army that invaded their cities en masse during the Summers: The Americans.

  Was he a prodigy? Brayden certainly believed this, about himself, at least when he was in the United States. His comparative youth, compared to other students his age, also confirmed this. He often thought that, as opposed to anything else, the secret to his creativity was this: he never fully accepted himself as being quite a prodigy. That’s what others did, of course. If he had started thinking of himself in such terms, he’d go soft, on this he was certain. Sir Galahad oft came to mind. He needed to at least humour the possibility that all the teachers who called him such a thing might in fact be wrong, and they indeed might have been.

   Despite the accolades from former teachers that helped Brayden gain acceptance to this school, this haute école, over a year ago, his reluctance to accept his “prodiginess” almost immediately struck the other students, as being a bit, off. It was a haute école. “Pas bien dans la peau” was what he was sure was said. Mumblings in the corners of rooms.

    Sébastien and Adéle both seemed reluctant but curious about this stranger, in their midst. They had heard that he was talented, and he was so oddly the same age that they were, despite being a year ahead. Brayden understood that a complete withdrawal on his part from the other students wouldn’t help his French, which, was no doubt perceived by others. The French were so intuitive in this regard, as if possessing sensors that Brayden had never been born with. It made him feel even more like a child, even more so, than when he was with Tatiana. Needless to say, because of youthful analogousness rather than any sort of gregariousness, Sébastien and Brayden began to mix with each other. 

    Brayden had, prior to all, stumbled upon Adéle and Sébastien while wandering through the Convent Cloister near the school’s entrance. Brayden had come, early one morning, to study the many plaster casts that were enshrined there. It was around this time that Brayden had found the plaster bust of Dante, and, eager to find inspiration for the work to come, had walked into the Chapel at around seven in the morning to study it.

      The École used to have a vast collection of plaster casts made directly from original Greek, Roman, and Renaissance originals. They used to be housed in the Palais des Etudes, having been brought to the École in the seventeenth-century by the Prix-de-Rome winner, esteemed court painter, and co-founder of the École, Nicolas Poussin. The plaster copies had been crowded into the small, narrow, Cloister at the turn of the century, Brayden assumed, as he had not seen any photos of the sculptures in the Palais beyond the Twenties. The naked Pagan statues stood or sat, huddled in small groups, as if escaping from the cold—taken in by the goodwill of this narrow Christian Shrine—in a humbling reversal of fortune. 

   As Brayden approached the Chapel that morning so seemingly long ago, through the central stone and black-iron, gated entrance to L’énsba, he looked up, to see the two limestone busts of the École’s founders, Pierre Paul Puget and Nicolas Poussin greet him. They crowned the entrance, like two, stern-faced lions. And lions they were. Beyond, stood the towering Beaux-Arts styled Palais des Etudes. He just barely made out the shape of Boris, distant, the Russian, sitting on the steps of the Palais, drinking his habitual coffee. The older Russian student was always at the École early, unlike even the French. Brayden walked past the entrance, turned towards the tall Chapel, that buttressed up against the Cour du Murier, and he walked towards it: the tall, and intricately carved Romanesque facade glowing rose and orange-hued, amidst the rising, yellow sun.

   Walking past the entrance, an enormous work of Michelangelo greeted him, as Brayden’s steps resounded lightly but crisply on the grey and mottled, blue floor. It was empty, save for a single darkened figure that drew on paper in the centre, near the back. Brayden stood and stared at the partially ébauched, plaster Slave in the corner, before his restlessness drove him deeper into the Chapel. Brayden paused to admire a large, Greek pugilist. He heard a clearing of a throat. Brayden turned. Scarcely illuminated by the light blue that shone from one of the narrow windows, the man looked intently, at Brayden, with pencils stashed in his long, black hair. 

   “Excuse me, but do you mind stepping to your right, a few feet.” The student squinted his left eye, and mimicked physically pushing Brayden off to the side, with his hand.

   “Oh. Sorry about that,” Brayden said, stepping sideways. Brayden looked in the direction that the young man had been staring towards, intently, and saw that the man’s eyes were transfixed by a small Venus, on a shelf, behind another plaster, Michelangelo Slave. Brayden walked behind the man and had a look at the drawing. It was terrible. Even more obnoxious was a sweet, earthy smell that lingered in the air around him, that was strangely familiar and yet foreign… Without drawing attention to himself, Brayden drew in a long breath, through his nostrils. With a slight flinch, he identified it: intermingling with the student’s foul body odour was the scent of a woman’s sex.

   “That’s very nice.” 

   “Do you think so? It’s just a study.” The man said with a closed smile. He continued drawing. “You’re new here. I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” The student said in a half whisper.

   “I’m a second year, but it’s true I haven’t met you before. I’m Brayden.” He extended his hand to him.

   “Shh! Keep your voice down,” the student replied without taking Brayden’s hand, looking at the entrance to the Chapel as he did. Continuing he said, “Ahh! Yes. You’re the American who pretends to be a Canadian? I’ve heard about you.” He smiled, lasciviously, “My name’s Sébastien,” he said, coolly, extending his hand. Brayden shook it and was surprised by its warmth, despite the cool air in the Chapel. 

   Brayden said, “Your accent is very different. Where are you from?”

   “Marrakesh. …Do you know where that is?” Sébastien said, looking down his nose at Brayden.

   Brayden said, “Ah. No, actually, I don’t.”

   “I’m joking with you. Marseille! I come from Marseille. It’s in the south.” Sébastien laughed.   

   “There you are!” A woman’s voice, echoed from the entrance to the Chapel. A woman dressed in light, tight-fitting jeans with a white coat and blonde hair came towards the two.

    Sébastien smiled and grabbed Brayden’s sleeve, “Quick! Hide.” Brayden looked around him, as she quickly gained on the two. “Too late.” Sébastien said quietly.  

  “So! you thought you could lay low in the Chapel, did you!?”

  “Adéle, this is Brayden. Brayden, Adéle.” Sébastien said.

   Brayden looked at her, and said, “Yes, We met a few days ago. I believe you were in the painting atelier of Monsieur Benoit. I saw you.” Brayden had made the circuit of the ateliers at the École, near the beginning of the school year, before gaining acceptance to the Charpentier Atelier.

   “Yes,” she said, then looked to Sébastien. “Sébastien, I’m not going to be with you if you keep doing this. I tried calling you last night many, many times. If you want to hang out with that putain Sandrine…” She stopped, and sniffed a few times. “What is that?” She said. Sébastien looked around himself, on the floor, up at the ceiling, to Brayden, scornfully, as Brayden had dropped something. 

   “What is that!” Sébastien said. She said again, “Sébastien!” and she took a few more sniffs with her rabbit nose, before hitting Sébastien with her knuckles. She quickly turned and walked away, crying. The Chapel reverberated with her muffled sobs, the Pagan statues looking on, in embarrassed silence.   

  “You might want to say something to her don’t you think?” Brayden said as he watched Adéle walk out.

   “Aahh-ah-ah-ah!” Sébastien suddenly screamed, with his hands vibrating erratically in front of his face, imitating a baby. “It’s nothing. She’ll get over it. Trust me…So tell me? How do you like the École?” Shifting his position, in his chair, to better take in what Brayden was about to say, Sébastien waited. Brayden laughed. He didn’t know if he should hit him or admire him. 

    After a brief introduction, Sébastien described Marseille to him in colourful, half-understood passages of eloquence, and then he talked about herding sheep in the backcountry of Marseille. Priding himself on being a former shepherd, Brayden thought it was a plausible lie from the student, if it was one. Sebastien did look very lamb-like. Perhaps a better word would have been faun-like, having traded goat legs and panpipe for sculpting tools, and pad and paper. He even dressed as an imagined shepherd would have, Brayden thought: always with a backpack of sorts slung over his shoulder, heavy dark shoes, and wearing large, tan and green winter jackets with baggy corduroy trousers. Complimenting Sébastien’s unshaven face were long curls of black hair, at first, and later, in the year—as it advanced—completely shorn to the scalp, which accentuated his large, full nose and lips that curled easily into a dirty, wry smile. Many did indeed laugh at him at that point, Brayden mused. In addition, his being at the École was a complete mystery. He didn’t have a shred of talent—at least none that Brayden could perceive. Sébastien, on one occasion in the months to come, had even constructed an ambitious, large maquette of different coloured clays, which writhed and contorted like a marbled turd, before finally collapsing a few days later. He seemed to drift into ubiquity after that, appearing everywhere, and nowhere, and often near the cafe, near the Palais, throughout the École’s scholastic year.

   While Brayden had drifted off, now, in front of the clay modelling studio, in the wait for Fournier, the hallway had filled with about twelve students: sitting, leaning against the balustrade, and those who talked in low voices on the uppermost stairs. Everyone fell mutually silent as Adèle unlocked the door, and the students flooded in. Brayden got up off his chair, and made ready to begin. 

  The studio was small and cramped. A familiar heavy, earth smell greeted Brayden as he stepped past the doorway. Walking into the narrow antechamber that preceded, he heard a female student cry out from the main atelier; her sculpture had been tipped over. Brayden surveyed the antechamber as he walked. It was the same as before: numerous, covered, high benches with rotting, old armature wire and chunks of dried clay that hung down, looking like dried, whole potatoes. In the corners, wooden bases were stacked for armatures, and various clamps for bending metal. Other tools were strewn about. As Brayden walked through, he looked over the numerous abandoned armatures, asking himself if he should grab one, should his clay-covered beginning be lost within. A small window revealing the mottled blue sky leaked in, anointing the disorder, and he continued to the main atelier.

   Spotting his stand, Brayden walked toward it, sliding between two students. He had fabricated this most recent armature three weeks before, and now began to unwrap the plastic, which covered the wet clay, and it revealed its uneven surface to him. The clay had dried in places, but was still, gratefully, workable. He looked to where some students were talking, at the other side of the room. The woman who had had the misfortune of having her sculpture knocked down was unusually happy—the damage wasn’t that extensive, as her good fortune proved that day. Suddenly, Brayden cursed himself. He had left his tools in the Charpentier Atelier last night. He realized that he had been walking around, all morning, feeling as if something was amiss, without realizing that he didn’t yet have his tools with him. They must still be back in his bag, near the Carving Grounds in front of the Charpentier, he said to himself. He asked Adèle if she could spare some tools, to which she said, she could, and she passed two to Brayden. They were bent and old, but they would do perfectly well.

   The model arrived. A large man with a handlebar moustache walked in and began to survey the room, as if to make sure that it measured up to his expectations. Satisfied, he walked to the rotating model platform, and sat in the chair that was placed there, waiting for the monitor to request that he begin. He was new. As he was different from the model two weeks ago, Brayden lamented that he would have to change the sex of his clay work from that of a woman to that of a man, and Brayden started ripping off the half-dried chunks of breast and thigh with the nonchalance of someone accustomed to such things. 

   Brayden looked around. The atelier was overcrowded. Though lit, it resembled the antechamber in that respect, with numerous sculpture stands and shelves, with armatures crammed in as well, shrinking the walking space in the main tomb. Works in progress covered in light blue and black plastic bags, in the decorated atelier, fastened, some, with tape, and others stood, on most of the stands. Tanned and dust-covered, Greek bas-relief copies, excellently made, rested on the silent walls and shelves as they had done for decades, now, as Brayden worked quietly the clay. One of which, an enormous, dirt-covered plaster copy, of Greek men on horseback—from the Parthenon Frieze no less—adorned the entire left-side wall, with a magnificence all its own, under the early morning sun as the students worked.

   A slanted, north-light window illuminated the blue, cold, sky above, into the room, as the model finally disrobed.  Adéle had nodded to the model just moments before, and he had taken off his shirt and pajama-like bottoms, climbing heroically and with alarming self-consciousness, onto the stand in the middle of the atelier. He removed the chair, and added a wooden block. The students began to quiet down—particularly the women. As he finished removing his underpants, the model stepped onto the wood block placed on the model’s stand, suggestively, the window above, casting in time a square prism of light to the wall, and then to the wood planked floor beneath. It glowed, filling the space, made all the brighter by the soft layers of dried, thin clay particles that covered everything in the space, like down. The room seemed inappropriately hibernal in a way, Brayden thought as he worked, which made the naked model look as though he was standing in the middle of a frozen meat locker. The model had assumed a heroic standing pose this day, with one arm up, and the other behind like a discus thrower as the class had begun. It was an ambitious pose, not without its share of folly; holding one arm up for three hours required a level of insanity that the model obviously didn’t lack, despite his rugged build and evidently tired muscles. Minutes later, the model was at rest, for several moments.

   Taking advantage, Brayden walked to the vat at the other side of the space and started helping himself to more wet chunks of clay. As he paced back to his side of the room, he saw in the corner, in black paint, Vivre les Peintres Moustachés inscribed on the wall, in a small niche, with brush. He had seen it many times before. This benign mark of French rebelliousness, and others like it, were what Brayden had not quite become accustomed to, throughout the École. They adorned the occasional walls and crevices on the grounds and walled spaces of the École. The graffiti appeared and disappeared, throughout the school year. A silent struggle, between rebelliousness and order, like the clandestine wrestlings of two antagonistic lovers, day and night.  The model resumed.

  Brayden worked the dark clay between his fingers for a time and he started applying it to the armature once more. Every ten minutes of the thirty-minute pose, Adèle rotated the platform a quarter turn, and the students likewise rotated their armatures. As ten-thirty was overcome, and wandered into the noon-time, the sculptures began to take on the appearance of the model, like a dozen Biblical Adams, emerging from the dust. 

   It went on interminably, and Brayden breathed a sigh of relief half-way through. It was eleven forty-five, and nothing was as yet rotten in the state of Denmark. His thoughts were short-lived however. As the eleven o’clock hour approached, Álvaro walked in, stinking of wine, as the small Alsatian Criquet followed, closely behind. The students worked and ignored them, as they passed, nonchalantly, from stand to stand. Seeing that he was unwanted, Álvaro made to leave, until he smoothly approached Brayden. Brayden looked at him, with Álvaro’s abrasion trailing awkwardly down the left side of his face.

   “Not bad. Not bad.” Alvaro said, “You should be proud of yourself! It looks like a sort of Bugs Bunny, or maybe a Mickey Mouse.” Álvaro contorted his body, mimicking the character with mouth agape. Brayden turned and opened his mouth, to reply.

  “Would you like two pistolets, so that we can resolve this in a more gentlemanly manner?” A strong voice came from behind. Brayden turned to see Fournier, in the doorway. He finally arrived, to make his remarks on the day’s work. He walked to where Brayden and Álvaro were standing, and said, “Athos! Lower your sword, dear boy. And you d’Artagnan, continue your work.” The students around the atelier laughed.

  Álvaro looked at Brayden, taking two steps back, before turning and walking out followed quickly by Criquet.

  Fournier made his rounds, going over to the many sculptures in the room. He started talking about a sculpture by David d’Angers that he had recently seen, and a Carpeaux, he ducked and dodged comments about Rodin, and as Brayden was intent on his sculpture, he lost the gist of what Fournier was saying, as it reached twelve forty-five.

  The class ended, peacefully, and Brayden amassed his tools, which lay around the armature stand he was working on, and gave them back to Adèle. She said she’d like to speak with him, at the Charpentier Atelier after lunch, and Brayden agreed. He had a feeling this was coming.

  Brayden left, to retrieve his tools from the Charpentier Atelier, and as he walked past the Morphology Department, he thought he’d knock and see if Didier was in. He still felt embarrassed from the night before, and thought it would pay to at least say thank you.

   The evening snow shower had left a fresh blanket on the ground outside the Morphology Office. Knocking on the door, Brayden shivered as he felt his stomach convulse slightly from hunger, and he stamped his feet a few times to shake off the chill. He waited. Brayden noticed that the inscription carved into the door had been lightly sandpapered out, and now stood as an orange blotch of bare wood against the grey, painted door. He knocked again, and just as he did, the door opened, and Monsieur Didier motioned for him to come in. Brayden followed him back into the office and Didier resumed talking on the phone. Brayden noticed one of the books from the shelves, that had been opened and lay on one of the desks. It was The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. He leafed through the book lightly, with one hand, as Didier finished his conversation.

   “Oui….Oui...Yes, I understand, completely. The documents will be sent to you, forthwith. Non…..,” he laughed carefully, “That, I don’t know about. Very good. Au revoir.”

   Hanging up the telephone, Didier turned to Brayden and said he had, unfortunately, to leave him.

   “Sorry to disturb you, Monsieur Didier. I just wanted to thank you for—”

   “Oh. You mean, speaking to the Director? As a matter of fact, my intentions weren’t altogether selfless.” He looked at Brayden, as he finished putting his coat on. Continuing, he said more severely, “As a matter of fact Brayden, there is a small favour that I would like to ask of you. Do you have a few minutes?”

   “Yes. Go ahead.”

   Pausing a moment, Didier then approached him. He cast a penetrating gaze at Brayden as if sizing him up for the first time, which in a sense he was. 

   “As you have probably heard around the École, the Morphology Department is in a bit of a quandary, with the new direction this year. You’ve heard about the Mediatèque Departement? Computers, Monitors, etcetera, yes? I am in the process of writing an essay, to submit to the Ministère de la Culture to explain the continued need for this morphology department, in the future. Compris? Now…I have invited the Director and certain officials for a closed-door demonstration of the workings of the Morphology Department in the Amphithéâtre. I would like to ask you, if you wouldn’t mind demonstrating, for them…”

   Brayden stared blankly, for a moment, as he raced to translate what he was hearing. Didier continued, “You won’t be alone. There are two other students who will be assisting in this regard. I understand, of course, that you have already obtained your unité de valeur, in this department. Naturally. What I ask, I ask as a favour, from one of the stronger students who has benefited from this department. Philippe had been chosen before you, but, helas, he has damaged his hand, last week…and….of course,…you understand. I will give you access to the office and its many books to prepare yourself for the demonstration.”   

   “No, no. That’s fine.” Brayden said.

   “So, you won’t do it?” Didier said, questioned.

   “No. I mean, yes. I would be very happy to do it.”

   “Good…as we are approaching the Christmas break, I won’t expect you to show up until then. So, if you will excuse me now, I’m a bit late, so I will see you after the break.” He motioned for Brayden to leave through the front door. Outside, they paused briefly, standing in the snow to shake hands.

   “By the way, Monsieur Lamb, I would be grateful if you would keep these details that we discussed to ourselves.” As he said this, he leaned in towards Brayden as if to emphasize this desire. They parted. Didier walked off, briskly, treading on the thin snow, and Brayden walked out of the École, beyond the front gates, to get a sandwich.

4

      Brayden reached the Carving Grounds to the Charpentier Atelier at about ten-to-two, but stopped short, partly to look at his work, in the outdoor area, and partly because he could hear the angry voice of Monsieur Charpentier within. He must have made the trip back to Paris after all, Brayden concluded. 

   The mood of the outdoor area was characteristically sombre and quiet. An abandoned stone quarry was how Brayden thought it felt at moments like these. It was the area that had tested and bested many a student, past and present. No more than two or perhaps three students could be found working at once, on a good day. It hadn’t beaten Brayden yet, but there was still time. 

   The white bust of Dante Brayden had hewn, stared reproachfully back at him as he gazed at it. There was a certain tragic vacancy in the eyes that was not so apparent in the original. It embarrassed him.

   Out of the corner of his eye, Brayden saw a gentleman, advance, down the alleyway to visit the atelier, his long beige coat flowing behind him as he walked. Charpentier had frequent guests, and as he was no doubt in the atelier this afternoon, Brayden assumed this well-dressed man must be a client. 

   Stopping before reaching the doors to the studio, the man looked at Brayden, and walked towards the Dante slowly. He had walked as if he was in a rush, only pausing as if to briefly inspect the sculpture. He was tall, with closely cropped hair groomed back against the cranium and with olive skin. Looking over it, and briefly under it, he then looked at Brayden.

   “Yours?” he said.

   “Yes. It’s not finished.”

   “Superb….You’ve been working on it a long time?”

   “About five months.”

   “Be careful; the nose is perfect. If you continue to carve it, you may chip it off, and then it’s cooked.” He looked at Brayden, mischievously.

   “I’ll be careful. Thank you.” Brayden said. The gentleman continued looking at the sculpture and then turned to Brayden.

   “Your Dante resembles you, in the eyes.”

   Blushing, Brayden exclaimed,” I wasn’t aware of that, I—“

   “No. No. It’s nothing. It doesn’t make the sculpture better or worse. It is a common phenomenon.” Pausing, the gentleman opened his breast coat.

   “Here…,” he said, taking a card out of a gold business card case. “When you finish your studies, give me a call. I have a studio just outside of Paris. Your work is good.” And with a steady gaze, he passed the card to Brayden. “Ask for Bob.”

   Just as soon as he had stopped to see the sculpture, the gentleman turned, said good-bye politely, in English, and walked continued to the atelier door. Brayden looked at the eyes of his Dante. Not seeing, or not wanting to see the similarity that had been just brought to his attention, he threw the comments off of him, and told himself that it was due in part to the solidity of the eyeballs (in the typical Roman fashion), or was due to imperfections of the limestone. There was an elusive intensity in the original sculpture that escaped him, and he felt that the gentleman had confirmed this, however. Brayden looked at the card.

Chevalier-Leveque Studio

33 03 10 73

87280 Limoges

LA FRANCE

   It had embossed type, with a gold border around the edges of the card. Looking at his sculpture, again, he cocked his head, from side to side as if trying to see it anew, as this gentleman just had.

   Taking a cigarette from his pack on the stand behind him, he let slip the card into his empty pocket. Removing his lighter, he looked around him to see if the exchange had been by chance overheard. His eyes fell upon Sandrine, near the front of the atelier who looked at him, and she earnestly walked back inside.

   After finishing his cigarette, and hearing Charpentier screaming from inside, he tugged on the door to the large room and walked in. Sandrine sat with a few others, talking quietly at the table to the right, submerged in a niche; they had stopped what they had been saying when Brayden opened the door, before resuming once again quietly. She looked at Paul, across the table, and brushed the top of her hand against the underside of her jaw. It was a gesture that meant “chiant”. A gesture that meant, an “irritant.” They were gesticulations Brayden had gotten used to in France, but he didn’t like to be called “a pain in the ass” to his face.

   Monsieur Charpentier stood looking angrily into the clay vat, standing next to the gentleman that Brayden had spoken to just outside. Monsieur Charpentier spoke so rapidly that Brayden couldn’t discern a single word he said, except for, “where is it?” which he kept repeating. Because of the body language though, Brayden understood everything. Charpentier’s beak nose looked Brayden’s way and flushed.

“…And as for you. You get out of here right now!” Charpentier said waving his walking stick with its gold mount in the air as if to forcibly puncture Brayden with it. He turned to the gentleman in the long coat and said, “Do you see what these students get up to when I’m gone!? Oh la-la-la-la-la!!” The gentleman tried to control his laughter, as he covered his mouth, and said something that Brayden couldn’t catch, with so many people mumbling at once.

    Adèle came to Brayden.

   “Salut,” she said. “Would you like to talk outside for a moment?” she whispered as she walked, passing him as she did so.

    Brayden nodded his head and walked outside behind her.

   “Eh, Listen. I’m afraid that I can only invite you for an evening over the Christmas break.”

   “Oh really? Is it because of what happened?”

   “Ah, non, well, non, it’s nothing. Charpentier is very angry right now, but he will calm down. Besides, you didn’t do anything. I most likely will be in Lille for only a few days myself. If you don’t want to go, I understand. Do you still want to go?”

   “Yes, but I don’t want to inconvenience you. It’s really not a problem if I stay here, in Paris.”

   “No, no, it’s not an inconvenience. Better to spend an evening than nothing at all, don’t you think?” She smiled furtively, looking towards the atelier entrance.

   “Well, yes,” he said.

   “Fine then. I will call you tonight and give you directions, how to get there. You have to go to the Gare du Nord. You know where that is, yes?”

   “Yeah. Yeah. I know where it is,” Brayden said, slightly irritated, and Adèle walked to a nearby stone carving stand. She asked him for his number, and he slipped a receipt from a café out of his pocket and scratched down his number for her, against the stand that sat next to a large, oval abstract work. She asked him if it hurt, the wounds. He replied, Yes. Adele then turned and Brayden followed her inside. 

   “What did I just say!?” Charpentier exclaimed, seeing Brayden walk in.

   “I’m sorry, sir. I need my tools,” Brayden said.

   Charpentier looked slightly deflated and began yelling at Philippe next to him. Brayden looked around for his courier bag that he had left there the day before. It had been placed somewhere.

   “Has anyone seen my bag?” he said.

   Paul pointed at the cupboard without saying a word. Walking to it again, Brayden opened the door and his bag came tumbling down. It hit his foot with a metallic thud. That was the hammer, he thought. He winced with a cry, and leaned over to pick it up. Slinging the leather bag over his shoulder, he walked towards the door. Brayden paused to look behind him, and then walked out.

   Leaving the École, he took a detour, south down Rue Bonaparte towards Saint-Germaine-des-Près. There was a bookstore at the corner, specializing in paperbacks, gifts, and more to the point, art books. He passed through the glass doors and found the philosophy section. Browsing through the letters, he came to the M and his eyes finally settled onto Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne. It was an abridged version, but it was attractive, with a portrait of the Renaissance philosopher on the cover. He always had loved French paperbacks, with their unobtrusive advertising, reducing the covers to a simple piece of art and black type on a white or beige field. He took the book, walked to the clerk—who stood at the table in the centre of the large room—and placed the book down on the counter. The clerk asked for the money, and Brayden opened his wallet, passing a fifty-franc note. The clerk eyed him, and asked him if he wanted a plastic bag. Saying he didn’t, Brayden placed the book into one of the sleeves of his leather bag, and walked out through the glass doors.

   He spent the rest of the afternoon in the Café des Artistes, looking at the book over a cold espresso.  He didn’t have much money with him so he contented himself with the single café. The book was arranged in chapter headings that reflected a particular subject. His eyes fell upon “Of Solitude” and he leafed to the corresponding page. Much of the French was too advanced for him but there was a quote by Horace that introduced the essay, which read:

Why should we move to find

Countries and climates of another kind?

What exile leaves himself behind?

   Brayden asked himself what the final line meant, with his mediocre French, as he felt his cheek lightly; it stung, irritated by the touch. Continuing, he read the text that followed, understanding it, in part, before finally grasping it upon a second reading:

If a man does not first unburden his soul of the load that weighs upon it, movement will cause it to be crushed still more, as in a ship the cargo is less cumbersome when it is settled. You do a sick man more harm than good by moving him. You imbed the malady by disturbing it, as stakes penetrate deeper and grow firmer when you budge them and shake them. Wherefore it is not enough to have gotten away from the crowd, it is not enough to move; we must get away from the gregarious instincts that are inside of us, we must sequester ourselves and repossess ourselves.

    Intrigued, Brayden read on, as the sun slowly traversed the narrow street outside. The beams of divine light, cut and truncated by the angular window frames to the café, slowly wandered the length of the room, as he read, occasionally glancing upward to mark the progress of it—like measuring the time from a sundial—and to sip his increasingly frozen espresso. 

    He was finally awoken to his surroundings when he remembered that he was due to meet Tatiana in a few minutes, on La Rive Droite. Glancing at the clock above the bar, he closed the book, put a five-franc piece on the counter, and opened the heavy wood door to leave. He was met by the final, dying sun, which shone viciously bright, just above the Palais des Etudes, like a saddened, faraway beacon in the late winter fore-dusk. The light was so intense that the building was an ephemeral ghost of its former self, blurred and black, and frayed at the edges. He found the entrance to the Metro and descended, as the sharp heat from within enclosed like a reluctant shroud, his body.

    Tatiana greeted him in front of the café. They had met there once before, when they had just met, many months hence. Tatiana was particularly drawn to the hard, black enamel and dark interior, and the furnishings reminded her of the work of Le Corbusier, which pleased her immensely. She tried to kiss him, but he repelled her advance. They went in and sat down, and were greeted almost immediately by a tall waiter.

  “Vous desirez?”

   Tatiana looked up. “Pour moi, un café s’il vous plait.” 

   “I’ll take a martini,” Brayden said.

   The two of them sat and looked at each other. There was a look of malicious satisfaction in her face, beyond the strong eyeliner that etched her grey eyes forward, startlingly, as she said almost mockingly, with the sort of dissimulation that perpetually repelled and attracted Brayden to her.     “You know I love you, Brayden.”

   Brayden looked at her not knowing if he should believe her, or scold her. Deciding on the latter, he said, “You don’t leave the person you love to go spend time with someone else.”

   “Oh my God, you’re so American.” She looked away, out the window. “You just don’t understand. He loves me. I have to see him. It would be cruel if I just left him like that. That’s nul.” Nul, was a word that made Brayden cringe, often used by the French. It meant worthless, nothing.

  “It’s also nul to do what you’re doing. Don’t you think I have feelings?”

   “Of course..,” She smiled, “But remember, we are seeing each other en cachette.”

   “What does en cachette mean?”

   “It means,” She looked slightly off to the side before looking at him, with a small grin, “…that we are intimate.”

   “Exactly. Tatiana. I care about you. I don’t want you to see your old boyfriend. Please don’t go. It would mean—“

   “Voici le café, et…le martini,” The waiter interrupted, placing the two drinks down.

   After he left, Brayden continued, in a whisper, “It would mean so much to me if you would stay here, with me, in Paris. We can sleep in, eat butter croissants together in bed…and—”

   “Oh, you’re really adorable, Brayden. So adorable, Brayden. We can do all those things when I get back. I will be back.” She looked at him, with a sideways glance as she slid her leg against his, under the table. He didn’t believe her. But then, he thought, of course, she’ll be back.  Her hair attracted the faintest glimmerings of shallow fingers of sunlight, from the window nearby.

    He grinned, stupidly, as he looked down at the table. She smiled the grin at him. It was a grin of perfect white teeth, which served as a mask, and blinded Brayden with its brilliance. It was the smile she threw at him when she knew she was winning him over; the same one he had seen on that bright day, in September, on the street with Sébastien. Like the coup-de-grace of a verbal rapier match, always, it would finally shine forth when she was ready to deal the mortal blow, his heart. He believed her, but he hated himself. He raised the martini glass to his lips and drank. The martini was ice cold and he downed it, swiftly. She’ll be back.

5

    The lectures that Brayden most commonly attended were those of art history, in the afternoons. And directly across, in the evenings, were the lectures on human anatomy by Didier. The morphology classes seemed one of the last vestiges of the old École, and Brayden found them riveting, if for no other reason than that the ambience allowed him to imagine that he was in some way, connected, to this archaic past, now present in the future, and not the stranger that he was, in the present. In addition, lectures about the inner workings of the human body seemed infinitely more tangible, to Brayden, than the others he followed. Was it a surprise to him that his grandfather was a navy doctor? It was a shame, as his reluctance to contribute to the almost standard art theory conversations drove another wedge between him and his colleagues.

   He walked down the darkened alley where he had been lying on the ground just the night before. The limestone and marble dust looked disturbed where his body had lain, in the dust, as it had the night before clung to his clothes. 

    Architecture students hovered in front of the remaining stone carvers on the Grounds—the lecture hall opposite Didier’s was devoted to their particular cause célèbre this evening. Out of curiosity, the well-dressed students cocked their heads this way and that, stepping back to say something quietly, to their group. But largely, this was as an attempt to intimidate the more brazen, unkempt carvers who were unconcerned by the growing chill to leave. The noise from the carving could be heard, from within, and was loud, and penetrating. The ploy began to work, however, as one carver, then the last, began to gather her tools and walk inside to the adjoining atelier. Still possessed by her holy muse, she slammed the large wood door loudly behind her. One of the architects let out a smirk of satisfaction. “Quelle orgeuil,” was heard.

    Beacons of rectangular, artificial, orange light glowed through windows as Brayden walked towards the stone steps to ascend. The light had just started to bath the white, newly abandoned sculptures in the Carving Grounds at that liminal hour when the last remnants of day are in futile fight with the night. The collected, darkly clad figures that loitered outside had submerged into a morass of black clothes and facial scruff as night awoke, illuminated only by the occasional drag on a cigarette, which exhibited only briefly, a face or hem of clothing roasted in a heated red, ashen glow. 

    The indistinguishable mass suddenly began to move, and started, filing up the stairs together. Brayden walked with them, or was pulled with them, like someone overtaken by a mob he mused, and entered the adjoining hallway—opposite the architecture, and art history lecture hall. From the entrances at the top of the stone steps, limestone and granite gave way—as the students passed through the doors—to dark-wood trim, and stairs, on either side of the tall-ceilinged, immense room. Emerging into the back of the hall from the right, he listened to his, and others’, shoes make the hard creak as the ancient wood gave slightly, with the steps. All of this, of course, opened onto a large stage at the front, at the lowered base of the hall, and the elongated, scientific desk with enormous, towering blackboards beyond. He sat down amongst the middle rows this night. Slowly, the hall began to fill like a reluctant, tired congregation. 

    The tall frame of Monsieur Didier arrived, from the door that led to his office, to the left side of the lecture hall near the titanic blackboards. Dressed in his characteristic, semi-wrinkled collared shirt, rolled to the elbows, and slacks, he composed himself in a manner that aroused the very real suspicion that he was nearing the end of his tenure as head of the Department of Morphology. Brayden had noticed it for some time. 

His streaked white and grey hair swept back gracefully over his head under the warm lights. A handsome man, Didier set some hardbound books down on the desk in front of him. Looking up through his black-rimmed glasses, he paused, to reorient his wristwatch. He avoided eye contact and sighed heavily before the lectures, as of late. He was indeed growing very weary of constantly motivating the lethargic students. Glancing at the half-empty auditorium, Didier looked at his watch, again, uncomfortably, and said, almost inaudibly, “Let’s wait a few more minutes.”

    It was surely no surprise, this lack of enthusiasm, as the subject was a daunting affair—to even the most ardent student. Brayden understood that if it were not for the necessary unité de valeur, students would have preferred to put a bullet in the brain, perhaps, than to endure the explanations of the inner workings of the deep flexor muscles of the medial aspect of the forearm. 

    But Brayden found himself returning. He wasn’t sure if this made him a bore. Yes, probably it did. To view the human body as scientific and organic instead of purely formula and technique, a trifling that needed to be obtained, like a lolly, but it was, rather, an opportunity that one could not throw away so carelessly.

    On the occasions when Didier was inspired, he was a man possessed by a sort of demon, drawing from memory monumental écorchés onto the double panelled blackboards reaching ten feet, or higher. There was on any given occasion, a pectoralis major five feet across, or a rectus femoris five to eight feet long. A pattern brought about by endless imaginative repetition gave him a surprisingly rich repertoire of poses from which to build the grotesque, multi-coloured chalk statues. They were, and tended to be, horrific, due to their size, and astounding in their scientific detail. But the students, spoiled for the most part, only saw the grim sketches of a madman Brayden surmised, perhaps inappropriately so, and Brayden failed to understand what, if any, connection existed, between what they were learning and how they could apply it to their work. As Postmodernism had been and was the predominant ethos at the École, it set the morphology department—with its necessary ties to ghastly naturalism—into the embarrassing role of an anachronistic play, à la Théâtre du Grand-Guignol. However, even if there was some reluctance at first, then, as the lecture progressed, the students generally became attuned to the humorously macabre. Like a body becoming acclimated to a cold pond, the unmistakable terror of scientific truth would take hold, and intrinsically warmed the mind. The French, not at all strangers to the scientific, would, in turn, like most nights, succumb to the wonder of it. The wonder of the Human, and the Animal.

   Didier cleaned the boards with a moist cloth as the last remaining students, four or three, quietly came in and sat down. Turning to face the students once more, he exclaimed, “Let’s begin.” Walking to his small box of coloured chalk, he extracted a small white brick, mounted his stepladder and began to draw a rudimentary arch around the outside of the blackboard. Tonight’s lecture was on the muscles of the face, it became clear, as he bent his arm around like the hand of a clock to create a large oval—the cranium. Following this, the sockets of the eyes, the strong bones of the zygoma and the mandible were added to the immense, chalk sketch.

   As Brayden knew from previous lectures, the details of the bones, such as the individual ribs or thorax, would go amiss unless it was the primary focus of the evening's lecture. Upon completion of this in white chalk, the human skull, layer upon layer of blood-red chalk was built up, with successive layers of coloured chalk, to form the complex and sinuous, multi-formed inner muscles. This was followed by accurate tendinous attachments, highlighted in white or yellow chalk.

   Differentiation of the muscles was outlined by black, rich charcoal, lines, as a means to make the individual muscles painfully clear. This method, more like performance than actual teaching, was a system that he had found useful for grabbing the attention at the end of a workday when most students were weary and covered with limestone dust or paint smears. Despite the dishevelled appearance of the audience, very few—no doubt due to Didier’s eagerness to chastise them—would exit for a cigarette break. It had begun…

    Didier drew the first few strands of a muscle on the side of the cranium. “Since we are in the middle of the term, we are going to cover tonight…the cranium, its muscles, and tendinous attachments…before we pursue the superficial muscles and forms of the superior and inferior members.” He said, with fatigue in his voice, but quickly regaining the panache that he was accustomed to using in his melodious but harsh way.

   “The thing that is most important to remember…” he said, stepping down from the ladder slowly, stopping and looking down for a moment, before lifting his eyes, “…is that we have the face that we create.” There was a silence, awkward. He held his hands in front of him, rigidly, clenching the air. Several strands of his white hair fell in front of his face, behind his glasses. A few chuckles resounded, next to Brayden. Didier swept them back into place. 

   “What I want to say by that, is, during the course of our lives, we have a genuine choice…regarding our face. If we lead a life always to the foolish pleasures that surround us, or if, on the contrary, we decide to live a life protected and guarded against its disturbances, its shocks, it’s absolutely clear that the traumas of life dictate what will happen, to the face.” The room stared at him as he continued, “If we choose to live a life full of smoking, drinking, eating,” he said, as he threw his hand out to the class numerous times, “…the destructions of our tender feelings and of our minds…we see the results, in our expressions, our eyes,  our muscles…that begin to extinguish, the suppleness and the youth of our face. It’s obvious!”

    Since Didier now had ripped the attention of his at moments lacklustre student body, he began the tedious work, now, of explaining the muscles, and their inalterable link, to the invariable: the bones. Abandoning his philosophical introduction, he breathed a sigh and began.  He started drawing a large, fan shaped muscle on the side of the cranium with a hot, red chalk.

   Brayden’s eyes began to wander throughout the lecture hall as he surveyed the crowd. They settled on a young woman near the front row. He had never seen her before. She wore her brown hair in a bun fastened with a pencil, with thin, fine hairs, that collected at the nape of her neck. Marvelous! Her head inclined slightly down. She tilted her lovely, long neck slightly, to the left and slightly to the right, as if trying to see what she was doing with a fresh eye. Brayden knew; he often did this himself. He shifted his position slightly to see what held her attention. A drawing. As an opening appeared between the two heads in front of him, he looked intently, focusing his eyes. 

   “…So the action of this particular muscle is to lift the mandible up,” Didier continued, “the inferior fibres of which also pull the jaw back. It is a muscle that is, in addition to the Masseter, vital, to the action of chewing and the mastication of food, as we will see in the slides at the end of this demonstration.” She sat, with pen in hand, and was drawing what appeared to be a likeness of Monsieur Didier himself in black ink. What a scrumptious little flower. Yes, she was, he thought. Although he was sitting several seats behind her, he could still make out the strong chin and glasses set over the wide forehead that made the likeness certain. Brayden laughed to himself. It was good! She turned after a moment, and looked around her, before finally raising her gaze as if woken from a dream, up to Professeur Didier. Following her line of sight, Brayden too looked at Monsieur Didier as he continued his lecture. He had finished drawing in the temporalis muscle now, which resided in the temporal fossa, on the side of the cranium. It was a muscle responsible for adding the all-important, good health implying volume, to the side of the cranium---sunken in the ill, and elderly.

    Continuing slowly, Professeur Didier mounted the stepladder begrudgingly, and drew in succession, the Frontalis, the Orbicularis Oris, and the dense, populated muscles of the mouth.

   “The entire ensemble of these muscles, serve, not only to act, upon the face during moments of concentration, excitement, fear…but are also fundamental to the expressions that we take for granted. If the predominant disposition of an individual is to frown, the muscles, reacting to this, will begin to take on the wrinkles and depressions associated with this expression. It’s obvious. This occurs to such an extent that even in comparative happiness, the face, will still show the signs of this wear. On the contrary, if the face is governed by emotions of happiness, this too will make its mark on the face, with wrinkles, over a considerably long time, at the eyes and mouth, where the face naturally contorts into a smile. You see! We actually, in a certain sense, through our deepest emotional fabric, create the face that we have and are to have in our futures.”

    He paused, briefly, to see if any of what he had just said was sinking into the minds of his utterly fecund. Waiting for a moment, with extended hand, he suddenly exclaimed, “So, we will continue this discussion with the slides…. Jean-Marc. If you please.” Pulling down the white slide screen mounted above the chalkboards, Didier glanced at his watch.

   Moving towards the back of the lecture hall, the lights in the hall extinguished and, as the many pairs of eyes in the room quickly adjusted to the darkness, Didier worked slowly to the upper, posterior rung of the hall, and illuminated the slide projector. It rose to life with a warm hum, as the antique, aging fan motor faintly hummed.

   An enormous black and white image of an African bushman filled the screen. He stood next to a dry, knotted tree, and was ornamented with a variety of native necklaces and beads. Strongly lit, he looked to be a sort of shepherd, as the horns of zebus peeked over the sides of the frame, near the bottom.

   “Here we see the magnificent face of a man who has known the elements a whole life entire.” As the class gazed at the image, a bright scarlet dot, a laser pen, appeared and arbitrarily danced about over the surface, before settling on a mark on the jaw.

   “We can see by this dark depression here, that the man is, in the process of flexing his temporalis muscle. You see? The entire length of which can be seen…here…,” The small red dot travelled smoothly the length of a very narrow, hollow area. The fluorescent marker rose diagonally to the side of the bushman’s head. “Of particular interest in this photo is to also notice, if you will, the difference in cranial structure between this photo, and the following one. Viola. A Caucasian woman. “Notice the extraordinary prominence of the frontal eminence with its smooth uninterrupted grace, as it travels over the top of the cranium and over to the back. Look well at the difference in shape of this, in comparison to this..” As he said this, the sound of a mechanical turning over was heard, of the projector followed by a click, as the next frame advanced. The screen was white again, briefly, before another image, this time of an Asian man, in profile, filled the screen. Sepia, he was bent in prayer, with both wrinkled hands raised to his lips. He held what appeared to be a dark circle of rosary beads between his hands. It was an indoor photo that was illuminated by a few candles, in small lamps, on a pedestal in the extreme foreground. Ornate thangka paintings hung on the wall, behind the altar, dimly illuminated by the light. His dark, leathery skin hung from his face with pronounced cheekbones. “This is a photograph of a man from the region of Hovsgol in the North-West of Mongolia. The strong Asian eyes and flattened nose could quite possibly mean that he is a mixture of the Mongols and the other Asian races in the south. Now, in comparison with the previous photo, we can see, particularly in this profile, the obviousness of the wrinkles of the frontalis muscle, of course, you see…here, that appear perpendicular to the fibres of the muscle. The laser dot erupted in places on the projected photo. “The hint of the Zygomaticus Major..here...,” he said, moving the iridescent red dot where appropriate, “…And, as I mentioned, in the previous photo, we can see the difference in the cranium, here, at the back of the head…,” Didier circumnavigated the top of the head with his laser stylus. “Now, contrary to popular belief, the reason why the occipital region is so flattened here has to do with conditioning over centuries and centuries my friends. The ancient Mongols, part of the family of Tartars, Laplanders, Esquimaux and Hottentots, used to carry heavy rucksacks affixed to their heads by a strap. Over eons, and eons, and eons, do you understand? this traditional means of transport had a tendency to favour those with a flattened cranium and became a distinctive mark on the people from this region, by consequence. Another example of the face and cranium conforming to the conditioning, over centuries, to the burdens placed on them. Time. Farther down in the south, for example, in Tibet, this flattening of the cranium at the back can be seen in many of the inhabitants of this region as well. This being derivative of the Mongol armies that at one time occupied the Himalayan plateau and brought with them this unique evolutionary adaptation. It is important, in light of these differences in cranial structure, not, to infer by them, any sort of advocation of the use of the infamous “facial angle” or craniometric techniques that have been used to argue the intellectual superiority of one race over another. This was extremely popular with the Eugenics movement in the United States and elsewhere during the thirties before being embraced with euphoria by Nazi Germany…a short while later. No, the horrific results of which we are all, I hope, too well aware. Aren’t we? No, these differences highlight the natural variation that the face and cranium can take, not only between races but also within families, and individuals. They are a cause for celebration, in the remarkable diversity, the differences between,  that exist everywhere, do you understand, in the natural world… ”

    And as Didier said this, he advanced to the next frame, and again to another, and another, and then again another. He took the lecture crowd on a black and white tour of the Globe, using the topic of subcutaneous musculature, osseous differences, and bone, to also discuss the remarkable morphological differences between the peoples of the planet we know as Earth. The slides, Brayden knew, had been fabricated with the help of the Musée de l’Homme, at the Place du Trocadéro—the first place The Führer visited, after his conquest of the vast majority of France, in 1941.

     Looking again, at the woman in front, who he had seen drawing the small portrait, the turning over of the light from the projector screen illuminated the front of her face and he felt an impulse, a surge of excitement. At every new instance of light, he saw her anew: slightly different, at each illumination of cool, bright light. He thought briefly of old silent films, of how elegant her profile was. As if feeling the attention on her, she glanced to her side and their eyes joined, but, just as soon as they did, the two became consumed again by the momentary darkness, and she lost interest.

   “…Now, the last frame I have included here, to demonstrate another effect of conditioning on the face, and cranium..” The machine was silent for a moment, turned over to advance the next farme, and the hall erupted with laughter. Brayden looked up. A middle-aged Caucasian woman, sitting with her son at a restaurant had filled the screen. They were enormous, in their T-shirted corpulence. Brayden felt himself turn bright red. The couple stuffed two sandwiches into their mouths and had the glazed eyes of over-satiated hogs. The woman was in mid-bite, her mouth open and wide, with half-eaten food within. Behind them could be discerned the out of focus, illuminated arches of a large M that the entire world has come to associate with one place: McDonald’s. The photo looked to have been taken from a magazine article, as the small ink dots were barely discernible throughout the picture. Brayden sank in his seat. He felt the attention on him. The laughter subsided finally and a polite silence embraced the hall.

    “I show you this, not for amusement, but to demonstrate the effects of malnutrition and obesity on the human face. Look well at the folds and bloated nature of the two faces, the mother and her son, the musculature of which has been totally effaced by the fat. You see the sagging nature of it, as it pulls the face, with it, by gravity. We must not forget the damaging effects of not only destructive emotions…but also laxity. This poor cretin, here..,” The marker pointed to the son, “..imagine the effects of such eating habits on the development of his face, as he grows older? Not to mention the effects on the body itself. The gross neglect of proper nutrition also has a very telling roll to play in the morphology of the face. These two pauvres here, are deserving of pity more than ridicule. We shall explore the effects of fat deposits on the face next Tuesday. Thank you for your attendance this evening mesdames, messieurs. Good night.” He extinguished the laser and not long afterwards Jean-Marc reillumined the space.

    Although encouraged by Didier’s explanation, Brayden still wished he was somewhere else. As alien as his presence was, he asked himself, in a flutter of paranoia, if, at that moment, the slide had not been inserted at his expense. Bollocks.

    Brayden hardly ever took notes, but transcribed the lectures to his mind like a disciple, memorizing the sermons of a prophet. That was why he felt slightly hurt as he got up, and tried to avoid the amused and coquettishly derisive gaze of those who knew him, as they advanced up the stairs to leave. The lecture had finished and the lights were, once more, turned on. A slight draft wafted through the hall. The doors were opened for students to exit.

    Brayden got up, and as he did, Sébastien came quickly to him from the back of the auditorium. Brayden ignored him, avoiding his gaze. He was too busy trying to catch sight of the young woman he had spotted earlier, in front. He finally saw her, amongst the throng on the other side of the hall. 

   “Sébastien, do you know who—” The young woman walked up the stairs on her way out, and disappeared beyond view. 

   “What.” Sébastien said.

   “It’s nothing---good night, Sébastien.” Brayden picked up his courier bag and walked out as well, partly impeded by the other students who made their way home for the evening. Sebastien looking exasperated, walked away with a mild gesticulation of the arms.

    Arriving at his flat an hour later, he first moved to the kitchenette, uncorked an opened bottle of wine on the small counter, and sat for a moment, in the only chair in the apartment beside the bed. 

    Tatiana had left for Romania, he reminded himself, and he downed the last of the wine from his glass. He wondered, for a moment, what his father would have had to say about all of this. He sat silently, half-expecting, half-hoping his father’s ghost would appear in the room. He poured another drink. He poured another. He thought of the things he had had etched in his mind by being with her: the strong chin, the slight curvature to the nose that at once made her face almost masculine, and at the same time gave her face an elegance, of such refinement, of such unrivalled splendour that he found it challenging to remember where he had seen so much of it before, somewhere, he wasn’t sure; the ample bosom, the slender taut waist, and the shapely buttocks. All things noble, indeed, and his long-forgotten Puritanism demanded that if he was not just a bit too preoccupied with Tatiana’s earthly endowments over other areas of importance, he might indeed figure out where he had seen something as marvelous before somewhere.

   Finishing the bottle, he washed the glass in the sink, put it carefully back in place and collapsed into bed—exhausted.

6

   Brayden was awoken hours later by the dull thump of a motorbike outside the window. It echoed crisply throughout the narrow, empty street, and the windows lightly vibrated as it passed. The phone rang. Brayden let it ring. The answering machine picked up the call. It was Thierry once more. He asked how he was. Thierry was going to Camembert for Christmas and hoped that the two of them could meet, when he returned sometime, as he will only be back in Paris for a short while afterwards. He hung up the phone, and the small room fell once again into silence. Brayden still felt drunk. He took the time now to think about the fight two nights ago, if it could have been called that. It was the first time he had really the time to think about it. The wakefulness that had been induced by the wine made the memories vivid, and as he thought about them, the thump, the abrasions on his face began to throb. He rolled on his side, away from his left cheek, and remembered.

   He remembered making his way quickly to the École after lunch that day, the day before yesterday, around two in the afternoon. He was late for a rendezvous with Sébastien. As he walked into the central court of the École, he saw him talking with a group of third years by the bicycle racks near the wall that divided the court from the deeper walkway to the École, in front of the Palais des Etudes. Álvaro sat on the stone step beneath them with his head in his hands. Sébastien saw him and left their company to walk towards Brayden. He had his standard canvas backpack slung over his shoulder, and astonishingly, had shaved.

    “Salut, old friend!” Sébastien said and continued. “Are you ready? Let’s go.”

    “What’s wrong with Álvaro?”

   Sébastien’s face changed. Looking at Álvaro with the other students, he said, “Oh, it’s nothing. Another amant has given him the finger.”

    Brayden laughed, “Who was it this time?”

   Sébastien looked gravely at Brayden, “You don’t want to know.”    Looking at Sébastien, Brayden tried to fathom the comment.

   “Someone I know?”

   “What? Non, no. One you don’t know very well. Let’s go. We are running out of time.” Grabbing Brayden’s arm, the two walked briskly, with youthful vigour towards the back of the École and made the left turn to the Amphithéâtre de Morphologie. Once there, the varnished wood door was already open and they walked in. The Amphithéâtre was just next to the staircase crowned Lecture Halls and sat opposite the Carving Grounds.

   “Brayden! Brayden…” A scratched, high-pitched voice rang out. Brayden turned in the doorway and looked down to see Criquet, the Alsatian dwarf, walking, briskly towards him from the Carving Grounds at the end of the broad niche—that defined this side of the École.

    “After we stuff our faces tonight, if you want, There’s going be a model at the Charpentier Atelier, does that interest ya?” he said with a quivering, brown cigarette in hand, displaying his tobacco-stained teeth.

   Brayden looked at Sébastien as he repeated to himself what he could catch in his mind. Finally, he nodded, as he understood the general idea.

   “We’ll see Criquet,” he said, “At the moment, I don’t know what time I’m leaving tonight. We’ll see each other a little later, OK?”

   Criquet looked momentarily defeated, dejected, as he recoiled a bit, and nodded cautiously. Brayden continued into the Amphithéâtre, and sat down.

     Brayden remembered he was located near the very top of the Amphithéâtre, the model having already set into pose, so Brayden moved slightly to his left. The only glimpses that Brayden had of the inner workings of this unique branch were in his frequent clandestine trips to the Département de Morphologie, earlier as an unsightly fashioned tourist, to attend the open drawing workshops there, twice a week, open to all. It was the only time when the Amphithéâtre was open to the public, and was not to be missed. It had been his first taste of the École. Brayden laughed; he remembered Thierry’s reaction to his exuberance at having first stepped within the Amphithéâtre, and having related his reaction to a rather sated female nude model earlier that day, in a suggestive pose. Brayden had related to Thierry how much he had marvelled at the exquisite plaster copy of Houdon's life-size écorché as well, mature young lad that he was—and that was on the left side of the Amphithéâtre—with its raised right arm; a male or female model posing for the group on an ordinary basis. Dusty and chipped though the sculpture was, the Houdon, it made no impression on Thierry, who simply continued blowing smoke angrily from his nose, across the table from Brayden that day, two years ago.

   Brayden’s mind went blank for a moment near the back, in the present, having been shaken from his reminiscences, he rolled in his bed, until he brought his thoughts to bear on the memories at hand that so upset him. He remembered recognizing the model that day, yesterday, in the Amphithéâtre. It was the pretty, brunette Sophie, a young model who was raising a child by herself. The mystery for Brayden was how such a beauty could have ever found herself so alone. She was a cracker. She couldn’t have been more than twenty, he thought. Far from glamorous work, artist modelling, she modelled to make money to support the two of them, herself and her child—an all-too-common scenario in Paris. Maybe there were others, he wasn’t sure. Her fortune, or misfortune, lay with the fact that she was so well-proportioned, almost classically so. It was baffling. But this was common for all the models. So many were breathtaking—the women of course. As meagre as the living was for them all, they had the honour of being one of the best—an École model. Brayden remembered in bed, beginning to concentrate then, and the distracted thoughts he had that day began to fade, as he set himself to the task of drawing. 

   Instead of drawing the model as one sees her, the student was encouraged to draw the individual masses of the forms topographically, that day, one on top of the other. It was the mission for the day. An outline, for the ribcage preceded another, defining the relationship of the waist followed by yet others, showing the orientation of the head, the legs, and the delicate feet…beautiful. Brayden glanced, at Sébastien, further down in front; Sebastien noisily erased, with his right hand, what he was doing. Brayden smiled wisely and continued his drawing. Sophie was leaning on her right leg and had statuesquely raised her left arm over her head. The other hand lay on her waist majestically. There was a slight contortion to the torso, complicating the pose. In the mind’s eye, it was possible to create a three-dimensional image of the figure from above: the assignment. You could rotate Sophie, on her axis, or see her from different points of view, with closed eyes naturally. Brayden tested this, by closing his eyes at that moment, for several moments. Brayden had noted, in his readings of Rodin’s early years, in Paris, in the Library, of similar exercises being done in nineteenth-century France, during the Belle Epoque. Les pauvres. The aim, of course, was to improve the memory of the artist in capturing the model, in action, or in a particular pose. Similar exercises involved having the model walk across the room and drawing the pattern of locomotion afterwards. It was brilliant. To some, the exercises seemed downright nonsensical. Why not just take a photo? being the most common complaint. But Brayden understood the intention of the exercises: they were meant to open one’s mind, to the nuances and subtleties of figurative expression. It was an effort to escape the banal interpretation of the figure toward a more careful examination of the complexities of the exquisite human machine. Our machine. It was very French.

    The pose ended, and was met by the sort of repose from the students that often accompanies the conclusion of a quartet movement, or recital. Students silently rolled their necks, sharpened pencils, or simply looked briefly around themselves, to survey those in the Amphithéâtre and those in it. A few throats were cleared, principally from women. 

   The model took another pose, to which was added three more, before the séance was over. Both men and women collected their belongings, and walked to the exit. Brayden took the time to look over his work, then noticed Sébastien walking up the central staircase corridor towards him.

   “Deed you enjoy eet?” Sébastien said, in heavy English.

   “Yes. Yes, it was good. What do you think?” he said, as he showed his drawings to Sébastien.

   “Hmff,” Sébastien replied. Brayden laughed.

   “Listen, Brayden,” he sat down next to him on the wood bench. Frozen, mouth agape with his two hands in the air before him, almost for comic effect. He looked at Brayden. Finally beginning, he said, “Adèle and I…” Sebastien smiled, with a mild look that Brayden was almost certain might have been stupefaction, said, “…you know that we are together?...Right? Good! We begin to worry about you and Tatiana, Brayden.” There was a pause, as Sébastien tried to gauge the reaction.

   “Continue,” Brayden said.

   “I have the impression that...the two of you are, at a moment where….your relationship could either become very close, or how can we say?…,” he looked at Brayden as he feigned rolling his eyes, looking for the right word to pluck out of the air. Brayden waited, Sebastien continued, “…rather nightmarish.” 

   Brayden paused. “The relationship is going rather well, Sébastien. Don’t you two worry. Of course, we have difficult moments but there are other times that are relaxed as well. Thanks.”

   “Good,” Sébastien said, placing his palm on Brayden’s thigh. “I mean, everyone knows she has a boyfriend back in Romania, anyway, but…good. Well, see you later then?”

   “Yeah. See you later,” Brayden replied, uncomfortably, as Sébastien got up and walked out.

    Brayden left the École. He went to a patisserie down the street. He ate a stale baguette with butter and ham before returning. He wandered to the Cloister, chatted with Jean-Marc for a few seconds, and attended another open drawing class, at Jean-Marc’s invitation, before wandering to the Palais, where an exhibition on the writings of Saint-Simone was underway. Upon leaving, as it was getting far too late—and he didn’t feel like working so much now—he walked to the stairs at the entrance to the Palais, and then turned to the majestic flight of stone steps, up to the Library.

    Looking at the new publications rack, he grabbed a booklet with an overwrought analysis of Greek Sculpture in the École’s collection, and sat down and read.

    Night descended. Álvaro came into the library at around eight-thirty, as a breeze had picked up outside, rattling the old windows within. He spotted Brayden and slid into the chair just opposite, between the cherry wood tables that extended the width of the room. He pulled what appeared to be two bottles from his grey, fleece jacket and offered a Coke, to Brayden.

   “Tiens,” He looked behind himself sharply, as if to demonstrate that the librarian was preoccupied. Brayden leaned to his left and sure enough, the woman was busy, placing magazines on the rack towards the front entrance. Brayden took the Coke.

   “Where did you get them.”

   “I stole them from the cafeteria worker, down below.” He smiled, and then forcibly exhaled, looking to his right.

   Brayden took a sip. It was a bit warm, but he felt slightly revived by the fizz.

   “So, How’re you?” Brayden said.

   “Oh! You know, all right, I guess. I’m having trouble with a project that keeps me very preoccupied at the moment.”

   “Oh really. Who is she?”

   Álvaro took a long sip from the drink he held, before looking slightly up and smiling proudly, “Non, non. It’s a sort of performance piece. It just began a few weeks ago. I don’t want to talk about it.” He brushed it off as if he were finished for the moment, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. He looked innocently behind Brayden for several moments as if distracted. Brayden’s heart sank. Continuing, Álvaro said, “Listen, hein..mon vieux, I’m leaving for the Charpentier Atelier. I simply wanted to tell you that we are all happy that you returned this year. Frankly, the tests last year were hard, non?” he said, wagging his hand by the wrist and expanding his cheeks as if to strongly exhale, as he got up to leave. It was a characteristic French gesture, and he did it perfectly.

    Brayden said, barely restraining his sarcasm, “Ah. I didn’t know you possessed a mandate from the students here.” 

    “What? Oh yes. Follow me one day, and you’ll see..,” he said, getting up, bowing unapologetically with the Coke in hand. He backed into the librarian.

   “You can’t drink here messieurs, it’s forbidden,” the well-dressed librarian said. She stood just behind Álvaro with her hands crossed. “You have to leave. I’m sorry, Go.” Her stocky frame came to life, brushing them with her two hands, like a grandmother who has just caught her grandchildren eating her most prized gateaux. With knitted brow, she pushed them away with her hands, before vigorously closing the books that had been left on the table behind them.

    Álvaro began to leave, but, within earshot of the librarian, turned to Brayden and said that they should take the drinks outside immediately, motioning with his arm. Brayden got up—annoyed to have had his reading interrupted—and followed Álvaro out.

    The breeze, that had agitated the windows, outside, had grown stronger and it was quite remarkably, ice cold. The two of them instinctively raised their collars and adjusted their neck scarves as they left the warmth of the Palais. Brayden lit a cigarette. The École was almost empty now. Álvaro mentioned to Brayden that he had brought the frigid cold of the American Rockies with him, to Paris, to which Brayden laughed and they continued on. They headed in the direction of the Charpentier Atelier. As they approached the main door, Adèle came rushing out, with tears in her eyes.

   “What’s wrong?” Brayden asked. She looked in his direction, then simply turned away, and continued walking with head down.

   “It’s nothing. Come on. She’s a woman, forget it for right now.” Álvaro said, and opened the door.

   “But… She forgot her coat,” Brayden said, as Álvaro took him by the elbow.

    A soft, dry wave of heat greeted them as they walked into the studio. The stove in the corner was on, and the woman, the model looked to have been in pose for quite some time as Brayden could make out the glistening of the pores on her face. It was a standing pose. About five or six students were corralled around the model as she stood on the wood table in the corner of the room. Two students, both women, put down their tools and walked out, no doubt to collect Adèle.

    As the pose was interesting and the heat, difficult to abandon, Brayden took his jacket off and opened his bag to extract his tools. After positioning a stand, near the model, he looked around the atelier for a free armature. He found just one, as the model finished to repose for several minutes. Quickly taking his bucket, he walked over to the clay vat at the opposite side of the large atelier to get some clay. As he did, Criquet lay seated on the edge of the vat, smoking a small brown cigar and chatting with one of the new students.

   “No, no Brayden. Don’t take the clay there; it’s for Philippe. He needs it tomorrow morning for some moquettes. Take some there,” and he pointed to a small lump of clay in the right corner, nearest to Brayden.

   “I can’t take that. It’s all rusted?!”

   “Take it. It isn’t that rusted…look,” he said, pointing vaguely but with certainty, as if it were obvious. Criquet continued talking elsewhere.

    Acquiescing, Brayden started grabbing clumps of it, and putting it into his clay-covered bucket. He walked back to his stand. The model resumed her position on the makeshift altar—at the request of Sandrine—and Brayden started to work the clay onto the armature, beginning first with the torso, and working his way quickly, to the two legs, making a small clay base for the sculpture, upon a second grab into the bucket. Taking a moment to step back, he squinted his eyes, at the model to see the major forms, and resumed working.

   “Does anybody smell something?” Álvaro asked the group, quietly, smelling into the air as if he had just caught a whiff of something objectionable. Two women, including Sandrine began to stifle small, staccato giggles. Brayden ignored them questioningly and continued. After a moment, Brayden, too, began to smell something. Something sulphurous, rotten, and he said, “I smell it too, Álvaro. What is that?”

   Giggles began to erupt from more in the room. Pausing once again to inspect his work, Brayden wiped his nose with his hand, and then he knew. Smelling his hand once again more forcefully: the sulphurous smell of excrement filled his nostrils. He looked at his hands, and then his sculpture, and he began to heave. The laughing stopped. Half-digested Coke in his stomach rose at the invitation. Brayden fell to his hands, and he tried to control the hot liquid that, to his mortification, came into his mouth, until it finally surfaced.

   Álvaro and Criquet tried, and succeeded to erupt in laughter, leaning over to grip their stomachs as they almost forced themselves to the floor. Rousing themselves, feigning, after a few moments, Brayden stood up, looking at his two hands. Criquet croaked with his high-pitched voice into song, apologetically:

And when they drank enough,

They stuck their noses to the sky

   And with this, Álvaro chimed in as well, and they became a chorus.

…cleared their noses to the stars

And they pissed, as I cried,

On unfaithful loves!

   They laughed once more as they sang the final phrase, arm in arm, turned, and walked out of the atelier, banging the heavy door behind them quickly. Beyond the doors:

In the Port of Amsterdam!

In the Port of Amsterdam!

    Their muffled voices resonated as they walked away, into the night air.

     Sandrine—who had been working across from Brayden—looked at him, biting her lip, “It’s really not funny, that.” she said.

    A cacophony of laughs followed, from the students who remained.

    A heat erupted, in Brayden, as the beads of sweat began to collect on his face. Nonchalantly getting to his feet, Brayden slowly turned to grab a large, clay encrusted stick that was near the door, and the laughter in the room abruptly halted. He walked outside quickly, and then ran, as he gained on Álvaro—the two pranksters navigating their way through the carving stands. They had their backs to Brayden, and as he reached them, Brayden quickly lifted the stick, over his head. 

   “Álvaro! Attention!!” Criquet said, quickly spotting Brayden over his small shoulder.

    With one movement Álvaro turned, the stick hitting him, grazing him along the face, and he spun around with his fist, clipping Brayden on the side of the temple. Álvaro regained his balance; Brayden stumbled, and Brayden hit his head on the corner of a stand. Reaching with his other fist, Álvaro struck deep into Brayden’s stomach, and Brayden dropped the stick. Collapsing, Brayden doubled over, held his stomach, and fell on his knees. Criquet—not to be left out—kicked Brayden repeatedly with his tiny legs as Brayden and he collapsed to the ground. Brayden remembered Criquet’s dwarven frame stumbling with the blows, and then he remembered smelling alcohol. Criquet kicked, yelling, “Allez! Allez! Allez!” before silence soon returned.

   And then Brayden couldn’t remember anything. He rolled on his side, in bed, away from the wall, and he began to dream in his small apartment. He dreamt he was amongst rocks, and cliff-faces. He was scaling a mountain, in a grey fog, his hands raw, and a sun was rising, except it wasn’t high above him in the white sky, but was far down below him, and then he remembered feeling cold. And then, as if by some incantation he couldn’t quite fathom, he slept.

7

    A month later, addressed to him in blue ink, it was like the others. He had begun to receive the letters not long after he left the United States. Opening it from the rez-de-chaussée, where his, along with all the other tenants’ mailboxes were, Brayden also extracted a flyer from a French institute—for the amelioration of the French language for foreigners. The latter he threw out. He began to read the letter he held in his hand, as he blindly walked up the six flights of stairs. 

    Dear Brayden, it began, I hope you’re well. The house is looking good, with the improvements that have been made. Your room has been left untouched as you requested. I’m writing to you because I have received word from the lawyer charged with the allocation of your inheritance. It’s not good news I’m afraid. He has told me that, per your late father’s request, he will be shrinking your monthly stipend by four hundred dollars beginning in February. Mr. Crawford has told me your father did not make allowances for the money to be used in so wanton a fashion as he says you’ve used it over the past three years. As he is the executor of your father’s will, there’s really nothing I can do about this. I’m not one to meddle in your business, and it sounds as if you’re having a wonderful time in France, but now might be the time to start thinking about coming home. Mr. Crawford has assured me that the inheritance will be in safe hands until your return, and there should be plenty of money for you to go into business with or otherwise continue your education here in the U.S.

   I want you to know that I understand how affected you were by your father’s passing. We all were, the letter said, in a diminutive, weak scrawl that was quite different from the other words. The letter continued: you have to understand that time heals, Brayden. Maybe not now, but with time you’ll come to accept what has happened. Please keep in touch. Look at yourself, Your Mother.

   Brayden walked into the apartment and sat on the bed. Placing the letter beside him, he took out his wallet and examined the contents: three one-hundred-franc notes, and two American Express traveller’s checks for five hundred dollars apiece. Counting off in his head, he surmised that it gave him enough time to spend the next three months in relative security. After that, he would have to see. In addition to the money, Brayden also looked at the business card he had been given, by the tall gentleman a few days ago in the Carving Grounds. The coincidence was almost too good to be true, he thought. As Christmas was the day after tomorrow, it really wouldn’t pay to call right now. He would wait until his return from Lille before calling the atelier. Of course, Brayden wasn’t too enthusiastic about the idea of abandoning the École to travel to Limoges, but, in light of the letter, it certainly would be better than returning home. 

   He thought about the state of the garage when he left. Despite the inheritance that Brayden had—from gold, and diamond jewellery his dead grandmother had left the family—his father Frank had lived the way many people with large amounts of money do— modestly, trying also not to draw attention to the fact that Frank’s mother had amassed a small, apochryphal fortune by the time she died of cancer at seventy-three. Frank had just returned from the war at that point. But when Brayden packed his bags for Europe in ‘92, Brayden’s father had already been in the hospital for almost a decade, and Frank’s mother had left the garage, almost in an idolatrous way, untouched, the way it had been eight years ago. 

   His father had been ill since Brayden was thirteen all conjectured. Committed at Brayden’s fourteenth year, he was sent to a state hospital, for veterans, where he remained until he died. The sheer meaninglessness and shock of his father’s death years later was, Brayden had to concede, he had to conclude, a trigger for his coming to France three years ago. Despite his mother’s pleading that seventeen was far too young to do anything so outlandish, Brayden left anyway. Brayden left surreptitiously late at night and paid for a cab to take him to the airport. Something about the spectre of Rimbaud created an unsightly compulsion. It was a memory that now left a bitterness of unspoken shame in his throat.

    Rising from the bed, in Paris, Brayden walked to some books stacked into a built-in series of shelves along the wall, near the front door. He extracted a worn paperback book on The Birds of America—the abridged edition—and opened it naturally where it did, as if awaiting him. Brayden read the inscription on the front page: To Brayden—Don’t let the bastards chase you away, Love, Dad. Drawn beneath the inscription, in bold black ink, was an exquisite rendering of two eagle’s wings, with long primary remiges fanning out on either side. Brayden’s father had given the book to him when Brayden was preparing to enter college for the first time at the age of fourteen. He failed.

   He wondered for a moment what his father must have been thinking. He really wanted to know. When Frank glued feathers to his arms from the arts and crafts room and escaped to the roof, only to jump to his death from six floors up, Brayden really wanted to know. He could see him falling, in his mind, the white feathers (he supposed) trailing lightly behind him as he plummeted like a stone, before landing into rose bushes next to the garden at the base of the tall building. He wondered if it was a final act of defiance, or if he had—as so many tried to say afterwards—simply lost his mind.

    A small photograph of his father was within the book, on the next page. Brayden contemplated it for a moment. His father was holding Brayden up in his arms, like a trapeze artist, as they both stood at the circus. Barnum and Bailey had made the trek all the way to Concord one year, when Brayden was ten years old, and the family went without so much as a plan. When Brayden’s father read about the circus in town in the newspaper, he walked to the door, opened it, and said, Everyone in the car, now! The trip took three hours, and when they arrived, magically, the next circus performance began about ten minutes after they got there. Driving back at twelve o’clock at night, Brayden could still remember the fluorescent blue cotton candy he tugged at, against the better judgment of his mother, and the relative indifference of his father, as the long beams of the headlights illuminated the solitary, frightening wood roads, back to their house.

  Brayden’s father had the disease, Brayden’s grandmother, Frank’s mother, used to call it. The disease that compelled otherwise sane individuals to waste enormous amounts of time, money and energy on that most foolish of pursuits, airplanes. At various points in Brayden’s childhood, there collected not one, but three Cessna Cherokees at the local airport in Whitefield. This desire however, grew dull with time, and Frank sold the used planes, finding himself more and more attracted to one of the most dangerous—but thrilling—areas of aviation: engineless flight. Gliders replaced the Cessnas, and began to litter the backyard when Brayden had reached the age of twelve. The backyard, substantial at ten acres, could easily house three gliders without wings, but that wasn’t what made the neighbours talk. The neighbours began to talk when Frank started building things late into the night.

    It had started innocently enough, as small adjustments to ailerons, protective gear for the all-glass canopy, fixing hydraulics, or new instruments for the flight panel. Frank had been a pilot, in the War. With time, though, Frank’s trips to the airfield in Vermont with his glider trailer began to lessen, replaced by long, steady evenings in the garage, lit by the generator that was kept there. Brayden would hear its hum late, very late, until he would fall asleep to it, and even sometimes wake to it, in what amounted to an ‘all-nighter’ in the garage. 

   Eventually, but not all at once, Frank Lamb abandoned himself and his son and his wife to immerse himself in the writings of great pioneer aviators like Otto Lilienthal and Plicher and Chanute. This was his father’s idea of “getting to the source”, getting to the original untainted truth of it all. Interest and infatuation gave way to obsession, when Brayden first entered junior high school. Brayden soon found himself the butt of jokes, like being labelled “son of birdman”, which later became “son of birdbrain”, when some fathers of fellow students—who had been hunting—discovered Brayden’s dad caught in a ditch, at the bottom of a ravine, in a ridiculous winged contraption, which Brayden immediately knew was his father’s re-creation of Lilienthal’s Sturmfugel; his father had spared no expense of time or money on it over the past winter. Parts arrived from remote places like Saskatchewan and Bonners Ferry, Idaho. The comments and rumour mongering were minor setbacks, interferences, or ‘utterly meaningless’ distractions, his father used to say during such times. It was little consolation to Brayden however, who had to endure dead pigeons and sparrows hanging from his locker in gym class. Idiots. 

   Historical promiscuity and an interest in the dawn of flight were beyond the local town’s inhabitants, who partook of the normal recreations for their age: boating, fishing, and above all hunting. They only saw an idiot who would throw himself off of ravines and steep hills, with nothing but paper, metal, and wood holding him up. 

   For his part, Frank would go on and on about the idiocy of the average citizen in the town. They became, when commented on in conversation, slaves, morons and unenlightened animals. 

   Despite this, Frank had the interest of the town when a crowd had gathered—hoping more than anything for crazy Frank Lamb to break his neck this time than out of any genuine concern. Instead, shocked silence, and congratulations greeted him, when he flew five hundred yards, gently, like a hawk, to the bottom of Mount Crescent—which even garnered his father a write up in the Manchester local paper, and The Boston Globe. But it was short lived. Frank broke the successful winged contraption two months later, when he backed over it with his pick-up, which happened to have occurred when Frank got into his car, after exchanging smiles with a pretty young thing, Jessica Lovitt, all nineteen-years of her, and this, observed by her father, who was on the town board, and was not amused.

   An unofficial pacifist after the War, he never talked about it, or his pacifism. From the time Frank Lamb returned, from Vietnam, and after hospital, when Brayden was two, until his death, Brayden knew absolutely nothing about that mysterious and exotic sounding place: Vietnam. A pilot on a UH-1B Iroquois, more commonly known as a Huey, his father returned to his wife, packed his military uniform in a trunk with his three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and placed it way up high on the most difficult shelf to reach in the barn, and was silent on the matter. Demonstrations were going on everywhere at the time, but Frank didn’t take part. Brayden’s mother would sometimes talk about Frank when he wasn’t around. She would talk of the lifelessness in his eyes, the look, like he had had all the colour sucked out by some invisible monster; she would say it had given him his life in exchange for the eumelanin in his eyes. Brayden often wondered if this wasn’t in fact some sort of code, for something that happened to his father, over there. Brayden never asked.

   Unlike other vets, who took to veteran’s reunions and other get togethers, Frank Lamb didn’t attend any—at least not to Brayden’s knowledge. The subject of the War never came up, until Brayden had to write reports on it later in junior high. Go ask your mother, was the only reply he got. It didn’t hurt the reports. Everyone Brayden knew, also knew that his father, like other dads, was a veteran. The teacher had simply assumed that because Brayden wrote about it, it had to be true, even if the details contradicted the taught material. What they didn’t know was that Brayden had to spend three long nights in the Whitefield Library to get all the material in his head before setting it to paper. The parts about his dad were fictitious, drawn from a book called Bloods, which had to do with black GIs in Vietnam, but there was enough material about Hueys and their crews for Brayden to weave the untruths.

  Brayden looked at the book again, this time in Paris, in an approaching Springtime in nineteen-ninety-four, and put the photo from the Big of American Birds back in place. He then turned back to the inscription put there by his father and read it once more: Don’t let the bastards chase you away. Brayden folded his clothes, placed them and the book in his father’s stolen duffel bag, walked out and down the staircase, and slung the bag over his shoulder, as he walked down Rue Saint-Antoine.

PART TWO

8

Grey winter hovered over the zinc roofs, building in intensity—festering; filled with the waste from diesel fuel, methane, cigarette smoke, and factory effluence, a more pleasant aroma began to rise in combat with the early evening air. Filtering up from the streets, boulangeries, cafés, restaurants and bistros came the odour of baked bread, meats, fruits of the sea, foie gras, cheese and wine. It was the smell of life’s necessity, and of necessary animal sacrifice. Death and human hunger, wed in a ceaseless revolution on every plate in every restaurant.  The warm, salty smell crept thickly, offering the promise of warmth, conviviality, and satiety. It quickened the paces of all who walked the streets, ushering them home. 

    The storm that agitated not high above blew a callous breath, which descended perpendicularly into the streets, unfolding in every direction. It passed along the great skeletal iron phallus of France, La Tour Eiffel—dark against the falling light, wrapped itself around it several times, before throwing itself again into the adjoining streets and alleys. It passed like a rapist: lifting skirts, ripping hats from heads, rustling papers and dead leaves alike as it blustered its way through the limestone streets of Haussmann’s Twelve Great Avenues. And as the stiff breeze announced the weather to come, it hit Thierry in the face. It attenuated his late afternoon inebriation as he flinched, goose flesh rising up his back. Turning up his collar, he walked again into the wind toward his Sixth Arrondissement apartment. The sun--a ghost of its earlier brilliance--tucked itself between the two columns of trees that lined the end of the street; the yellow disk cut into sections by a leafless black tree at the end of the avenue. The long shadows cast by those who walked ahead moved like disembodied spirits, made all the more living by his intoxication. Catching the edge of a copy of Le Monde as he passed, the wind fell silent for a few beats, giving him the opportunity to reheat himself in the rays of the sun in front of the tabac. The heat warmed the black and white-checkered scarf around his neck, creating a cushion of warm air between his unshaven neck and clothing as he looked down, his two hands thrust into his black wool jacket. 

   On the cover, a photograph of a little negro girl, standing next to her once living, now dead mother. Her small dress, with pink and white flowers—although missing in the micro-dotted newspaper photo—stood out sharply to him. Overall, it was just as he had remembered it, the day he had taken the photo. The girl staring at the lens of his camera, numbed by hunger, her thin brown limbs and legs sprouting from the new dress she had worn, her hands together in supplication. The things he remembered were more poignant than what the photo conveyed. Things that the readers of the article would never know. Like the fact that the girl along with her mother died within an hour after the photo was taken, that the dress she wore had been bought for her the week before, that her name was Espérance, and the fact that the editors at Le Monde had censored the majority of the article—leaving the author close to tears. His lunch turned sour, as the tannins from the carafe of wine rose to the back Thierry’s throat. He swallowed. The title to the frontpage article read, “Le silence des enfants rwandais.” It was a Thursday, and he cursed, bought the paper—and a packet of cigarettes—before returning to his walk home. 

    Mounting the stairs to his flat, he opened the door, with its familiar creak, and went to the kitchen to grab another drink. The air was thick with the neglect common to a bachelor of his age. It was the first real opportunity he had, to relax, in his own space, since returning three days ago. Upon his arrival, then, he had stopped briefly by his Quartier Latin apartment, to drop off his belongings, and no sooner had he walked in than left again, to join Agnès for lunch, which led to a dinner with her and her friends. He had called Katya immediately afterwards.

     Now, looking in the cupboard, he searched near the back for his Coeur de Lion Calvados—a routine gift from Agnès, her father having invested in the Normandy distillery decades ago. Cursing, when his hands grasped the empty bottle that had stood for months near the back, his instincts told him to run out to the hypermarché, until the alternating red light of the answering machine in the salon caught his attention. He skimmed through the ten or twelve messages. This was followed with a light sprinkling of phone calls from friends and colleagues to congratulate him on his most recent photographs. Une grande reussite. After these calls, came a message from an old friend, Vikram, from Bombay. He was covering the recent elections there. Having known each other when they both worked in Paris, he hadn’t heard from him since Vikram left ten years previously. Thierry made a mental note to call him back when he got the chance. Not now, in any case—he was too drunk. A few more messages came and went, which Thierry disregarded, before a familiar voice—young, accented—came through the speaker. It was from earlier today. Allo, Thierry, it said, It’s Brayden here. I just received your message. I haven’t seen you in some time. Agnès said you just returned from Africa. Anyway, I look forward to meeting with you when you return from Christmas. I’d like very much to hear more about your adventures. Take care.

     Adventures. Agnès had told Thierry yesterday, when he left a brief message for the American, that she had mentioned to Brayden that he was back. She said Brayden’s French had improved, which was a delight to hear—both literally and figuratively. Thierry was fond of him, Agnès knew, which perhaps made her think that it would do Thierry good to hear from him. Like so many Americans, there was something direct about the American that could grate the nerves a bit, almost an infantine candour. Despite this, Thierry supposed that, like most men his age, he could see something of himself in the promising young man. He thought it might have been passion, or excitement—something. Thierry wasn’t sure. The American had certainly exceeded his expectations. The École des Beaux-Arts. Pas mal.

    Brayden took to Thierry like a sort of father figure, or a distant uncle maybe. As a result, Thierry felt it his duty to keep an eye on him, watch out for him. It wasn’t entirely unwelcome, this paternalism, as Thierry didn’t have any family of his own; he was flattered by it though, and as Thierry came to understand that Brayden had lost his father at a young age, or so he had been told, he began to feel a sort of obligation toward him, lost as he seemed to be in Le Monde Francophone. They had been introduced by Brayden’s old propriétaire, an older woman who was a mutual acquaintance, who, like Thierry, had been a journalist. She had a sympathy for the Americans that bordered on adulation, and many would say justifiably so. This was linked to her jubilant experiences housing American GI’s after the Liberation of ‘44, one of whom in fact, became her husband. 

    In the past, meeting Brayden from time to time helped break up the day, and invariably added comic relief.  In particular, Brayden was fascinated by Thierry’s conquests, and they often would talk about them over a pastis or some other drink at a café beneath Thierry’s apartment well into the evening, when he had so much more time than he did now. Then, Thierry was a quasi-employed photographer. But certainly not now. Not after his grande reussite. Brayden would have liked to have been born French, Thierry thought, he was almost certain, and he knew this because of Brayden’s thirst to understand French Culture. He seemed perpetually studying it, trying to immerse himself in it more and more. His involvement with the École des Beaux-Arts was an extension, a result of this desire for complete immersion. No, it was certain that Brayden was not at the very least lacking in courage. What made him abandon his country and embrace the French was still a mystery, and evidently a world war had nothing whatsoever to do with it.

    Agnès had called the young American several times since Thierry’s most recent departure and had much to tell, or so she had said. She had been responsible for helping Brayden find his apartment across the street from hers. Agnes had said recently that Brayden had a girlfriend living with him, an older girl. Thierry could have pried into what she wanted to say, but at the time—after having so soon returned from Africa—his mind was elsewhere, and he had changed the subject. 

     Before even touching down at Charles de Gaulle, the images he had taken with his camera left his mind feeling charred, abused. He felt as if he had been a spectator to things and images no person should have ever been exposed to, and it had robbed him of something. It made everything he had experienced since returning, vapid.

   Now, the desk in his office was covered with a thin layer of dust, which had collected over the months, covering a mountain of photographs he had left behind. He had received a frantic phone call back in April, urging him to be one of a pair of photojournalists en route to cover the double assassination of the Rwandan and Burundi Presidents in a plane crash; it was a throw away assignment at the time. He took it, leaving at three o’clock in the morning, and caught the connecting flight to the Congo from Zaire. It was the sort of break he had been needing. Within two days of arriving, it became apparent that the assignment was a powder keg.

      A manila envelope of rejected images he had submitted to various newspapers—Le Monde included—lay underneath the stack he had brought back from Africa. Pictures of a small street fire set off by immigrants in the Banlieue, various government officials on holiday, a celebrity here and there. He thought to himself how meaningless they all had been, in light of the ones he had recently taken. As he looked at the new pile of folders on his desk, the nightmare of their contents rose to his head, an irrepressible scream. They were images seen almost entirely behind the black viewfinder of his camera. It would’ve been infinitely better to him never to have seen them at all.

     Pausing for a moment, Thierry grabbed a pair of scissors from his desk drawer, delicately cut out the photo from the newspaper, and thumb-tacked the reproduction above his desk, to the wall.

    He closed his eyes, light-headed from drink. Fabrice, his colleague, had told him to visit a doctor, a psychiatrist. A lot of us are planning on seeing him, Fabrice had said in passing. Fabrice was catching a connecting flight to Marseilles, and Thierry to Paris. At the airport café in Morocco, Thierry had opened up to him about the nightmares that began not long before he was due to leave Africa. It would do you good, Fabrice had finished with, slipping Thierry the number. 

    Thierry leaned forward, grabbing a new, dustless envelope, on top, which still had the lingering, faint smell of his black leather carry-on. He loosened the red string and proceeded to scatter the images on the desk in front of him. What fell out were the many photos and contact sheets of bodies laid out on large tarpaulins, within churches; swollen eyes and flies from a refugee camp in Zaire; a twelve-year-old Hutu with a blood-stained machette, and another photo: he had taken it not long before leaving France. In it, although looking more debonair and alive than now, was a smiling face that now seemed a stranger to him. He separated the photo of himself and Agnès from the others and held it up. Letting the photo fall back on top of the pile, he put them away, placing them in his black filing cabinet and went to the mirror. His dirty blonde hair hung down in loose curls. Large circles of grey flesh sagged from his eyes amidst the prematurely marked wrinkles that his last trip had given him. “One would say fifty, perhaps fifty-five.” He stuck out his tongue and inspected the light corpuscles—bleached by the smoke that he filled his lungs with on a regular basis. It amused him to mock his age like this. He was actually forty-two, but ridiculing himself made him feel as though the image and he, had nothing whatsoever to do with one another, which comforted him.

     Thierry dug into his pocket and fished out a twenty-franc coin before placing the piece back. He was tired from the night before, and didn’t feel inclined to go down the stairs only to climb back up again. Giving up his search for a drink, he walked back into his office, picked up the half-empty packet of Gauloises that sat on the wood desk, sat down next to it and began to light one from the pack, until he remembered that there was a Marijuana joint in his desk drawer. He opened the drawer to his desk and after shifting some papers to the side, found it near the back, rolled, dried and withered. 

    Wondering if a nine-month-old joint still smoked well, he leaned back in his chair and smothered the tip in his lighter’s yellow flame. The rich smoke filled his lungs as he held his breath for several seconds—the buzz reaching its apogee—until it released, and he watched it escape into the room. The nebulousness of his thoughts dissolved ever so slightly, like the smoke in the room: the hills of Nyanza, and the forested refugee camps of the French Humanitarian Protection Zone beginning to dissolve into the stale air, until, he began to hear, as if for the first time, the calming din of noise from traffic filtering through the window panes. It was growing as the night progressed—the sounds of car horns, the screech of a motorcycle. All above the constant, cacophonous, beautiful noise of traffic. 

      It was his third week day back in France and Thierry wanted to hear the noises, he wanted to repossess the care-free life he had, before he had left. He hoped that being in France once more would maybe not crush, but at least soften, the nightmares. The night with Katya had proved him wrong. He thought of all the times he had sat in a hut or church, slowly reciting the names of various Catholic school teachers in his head—Madame de Savoie, Monsieur Gervais, Mère Tillmann, Prétre Potiron—as an effort to stop the daily advance of what his eyes and camera were showing him. Patience, Agnès said a few days ago. Walking to the window, he looked down to see the traffic. It danced in flashes of white and red as its ignorant occupants went about their mundane, self-absorbed lives. He turned the large knob of his window clockwise and opened it. The noise sharpened and grew, followed by an infernal breeze that entered, an uninvited guest, tumbling the mess of papers from his desk onto the floor. He closed it again.

     Returning to the toilette, he pissed. He turned on the sink tap. It spoke with a loud, knocking groan. The faucet spat the cold winter water into the sink—a machine-gun firing—until it returned to a regular, even flow. Splashing what had the appearance of water onto his face, it trickled down his neck and cheeks, before falling down into the black void of the drain. He looked at it for a long time; the small, muddied drops of water rolling back into the porcelain bowl, hanging desperately over the edge of the void, until dropping, gone forever. Hundreds of thousands. 

     Looking at the solid red dot of the answering machine, he moved to the phone. Thierry glanced at his watch, which told him that it was still an appropriate time to call. He dialled the number and Antoine picked up.

9

   Thierry had indeed gone to Camembert. He had gone on the Saturday before Noël, as planned. Agnès met him at the small train station, and drove him to her family’s country home—nestled between a cow pasture and at the end of a relatively narrow line of defoliated trees. His memory of previous trips there— although at times warm and anodyne—was however, one of the things that almost repelled him from going. 

    Before leaving, he had stood looking up at the ceiling of the Gare de L’est, at the quai departure and arrival board. With their curved panes of glass and steel, mercilessly upstaged as they were by the large, hanging cloth advertisements for Fiat and Audi, he was still unsure if he should go—despite a ticket in hand and a backpack. The feeling that stopped him from wanting to go was like a phantom that lay forever in his peripheral vision, much like the echo of a bright light, always disappearing when he tried to see it, directly. This, and Agnès’ father, who seemed incapable of the sort of concern that Thierry expected from a grandchild-less, retired, ex-Vichy clerk—regardless of Thierry’s at times tepid affair with his daughter. Thierry’s lack of commitment to Agnès took a toll on the relation with the father, somewhere, Thierry was sure.

    Living in a region so well known for the beginnings of the attack and overthrow of the Vichy regime, and the commencement of the Nazi flight from France, it couldn’t have been easy for Agnès’ family all those years ago. At the Allied invasion, her father had made claims to have participated in the Resistance, by acts of discrete subterfuge within his role as clerk. But his testimonials went unnoticed (or at best doubted). Those who knew kept quiet (or were silenced), and after a brief but unremarkable career in Calvados distillation, he threw in the sponge.  It wasn’t entirely his fault. After the fall of Vichy, the rancour of those who openly resisted took precedence, and the spectre of vengeful retribution fell on the collaborationists, involuntary and voluntary alike. The shame of this shadowed era of the family’s past had had its effects on the newer generation, Agnès and her brother, who seemed to be in constant flight from it, toward humanitarian work, leftist causes and candidates, and a general refusal and intolerance to even mention the word, the unholiest of accusations: collaborationist. It was no coincidence that she and her brother both lived in Paris, where anonymity is shared by so many.

    The day before Thierry called Agnès to confirm that he’d be joining her for Noël, Thierry had to meet with Antoine first, to finalize details about his lecture, and to understand what interests, exactly, his employer Le Monde had with it.

    The sun had induced a thaw on the snow that afternoon, a Tuesday. Collecting in the gutters, it was swept there the day before by the various green-suited, black faced émigrés. The brown and tan snow piles were slowly leaking into the drains, leaving only half-melted piles of slush and ice for passers-by to slip and fall on. The weather had improved to such an extent that café owners had cautiously unrolled their verandas and set the tables and chairs outside. 

   At the Café de la Paix, next to the Paris Opera House, Antoine extended his hand to Thierry, standing to receive him at the small round table. Next to him, a pink-faced man with sunglasses and designer grey suit, a bright, pink silk bowtie, large shoulders, moustache, and closely cropped hair, also rose to greet Thierry.

    After Thierry’s conversation with Antoine the day before, Thierry had been told to bring the photos that he thought likely to show at the slide lecture in February to The Association of Photographs Françaises. It was a tepid affair. When Thierry had asked Antoine which ones, he had said: all of them.

    Thierry grabbed Antoine’s hand that day, and the thought came to his head that the location was perfect—superb really. What better place to enforce censorship than in the heart of the crowd, in the bright sunlight of the café; amidst the tourists and throng (the majority huddled inside from the cold air)— most not knowing more than a handful of words in French. 

  “How are you Thierry?” Antoine smiled broadly. “I trust Agnès is well. This is an associate, from the newspaper, Monsieur Jean Mallamé. Perhaps you’ve made his acquaintance, before? I’m not sure.” 

   Thierry looked at Antoine and shook his head, “No…I don’t think so, no.”

   “Well then, allow me to introduce Monsieur Mallamé.”

   “Pleased to make your acquaintance,” Thierry said, formally, extending his hand, which was received by Mallamé’s hand. It was a strong, large hand, Thierry remembered thinking afterwards—slightly sweaty, but an unusually strong grip for a Frenchman. Mallamé sat down abruptly. Thierry and Antoine were left standing awkwardly until they too sat down. It was as if Mallamé had, in the gesture, indicated that he, not Antoine—or Thierry, for that matter—was directing this particular meeting involving choosing photographs for the Association. The sudden shift in power seemed to disconcert Antoine, who recovered by talking of an extraordinary concert he had seen the night before at Place de la Madeleine.

   After a brief, glowing analysis of the piece that Antoine described for them— something by Honegger—Thierry placed the medium sized black portfolio case he had brought with him on the table, and unzipped it. Opening it, Thierry had placed the contact sheets he had developed in the small hotel in Kigali into the individual plastic sleeves. He slid the portfolio toward Antoine and Mallamé, and took two loops out of his coat pocket. He placed them on the open portfolio. 

   Antoine and Mallamé took turns looking at the fifty odd sheets. Antoine mumbled something to Mallamé, and Mallamé, looked through the loop again, attentively, this time. This went on in relative silence, as they would talk, re-examining previous sheets, flipping forward, retreating, advancing, before mutually agreeing to return to the first sheet—about half an hour in sum. Antoine had ordered a carafe of wine beforehand, and during the course of which, it had slowly emptied its contents into all three until it stood, annoyingly empty, refracting the late morning sun into Mallamé’s face.

   “You do of course realize Thierry, that it would be technically impossible for you to show all of these images at your lecture,” Antoine said.

   “Yes, I’m quite well aware of that.”

   “What we would like to do is take the liberty of editing the images for you, before February, that is to say. Would you be cooperative in this regard?” Thierry thought for a moment. “Which images do you plan on eliminating?” he said it, and winced to himself, as he decided that the question was rather idiotic on his part really.

   Antoine raised his eyebrows, “Well, quite frankly, there are many images in here that would stand in high honour of your artistic sense, no doubt, without having to expose the Association to the plethora of photos of…death you have. For example, you have quite a few images of groups of bodies—quite a few, as a matter of fact. Is it really necessary to show all of this? I don’t believe so, wouldn’t you agree, Jean?” Mallamé sat forward in his chair, and cleared his throat. 

   “Yes. It’s just too much.” He said with a wave of the hand, “The images of the rebels in the jungle are fine. The photos of the RPF on the march are also good. We don’t have any problem with those, but, with regard to the….carnage, that is something we need to…. work around.”

   “What do you mean exactly—work around?” Thierry objected.

   Mallamé folded the portfolio over and said, “It is in the paper’s best interests that the images of this conflict be handled in such a way as to not misrepresent it.”

   “I’m sorry, but how can any images misrepresent the situation in Rwanda?”

   “The situation, as you call it, is a tribal conflict, between Hutus and Tutsis. That is all. There has been much death both on the Hutu side, as well as the Tutsi. It’s true that the French presence has been considerable—serving a humanitarian role—but I’m afraid that if you were to show the extent of this…this folie, it might perhaps attract attention and reflect poorly on the international efforts to control the conflict by the Governement. “A bit paranoid.” Thierry said under his breathe and he laughed quietly. “For example,” Mallame continued, “…you have several photos in here that show French troops standing by, as Hutus, I’m assuming they’re Hutus?” Mallamé looked at Antoine, who nodded quickly, affirmatively. Mallamé continued, “…attacking with machetes another group of blacks. Images such as those unfortunately would not do, not at all. The position of Le Monde is, and will continue to be, that the conflict is a tribal one, and it’s important, for the sake of the Country’s image, its respect, if not its sense of good taste, that images such as those, not be shown.”

  Thierry paused. “Sans blague?” Thierry, deciphering the rest, said affectedly, “Gentlemen, what you have been shown is an unaltered panorama of the “conflict” as you call it, in Rwanda. An attempt to paint the picture that somehow the two ethnic groups are at war with each other in an equal way, is, in my view, untenable. I’ve seen the deaths, the carnage, the massacres, and I can assure you both, that the vast numbers of Tutsis, as well as moderate Hutus from what I’ve been told, have been killed in what could very easily be described as a ruthless, systematic fashion. It’s unimaginable. That isn’t misrepresentation, it is, simply, the truth.”

   Antoine almost cut him off with a cough, “Well, Thierry, in the best interests of your continued presence with this newspaper, you really should think very….carefully, before jumping to any conclusions. You are, after all, one photographer. True, you did see much death, but we have other photographers who have gone on record that the newspaper’s understanding of the situation is…accurate and…. balanced.”

  “Fair and balanced.”

  “Nuancé,” Mallamé interjected.

   Thierry stole a sip from the last of his wine. Antoine added, “Take some time to think about what we are wanting to do for you, Thierry. Nobody is holding a gun at your back, forcing you to do anything.” Antoine and Mallamé laughed. “We will take the portfolio from you, edit what we think should be edited, and that way, you will have much work that has been done for you.”

   “And if I decide not to agree with the newspaper’s “representation”?”

  “Thierry. You don’t have any choice.” Antoine smiled. “Call me after Noël, and we’ll arrange a time for you to come into the office with the portfolio.” 

   The three got up off their chairs and shook hands. Thierry zipped up the portfolio, as Antoine began to walk away. Before they parted, Mallamé—who looked disturbed by the exchange at the table, as if he had an itch that he just couldn’t get to—walked closely to Thierry. “Antoine tells me that you are very close to your friend, Agnès? It would be a great shame for her to discover anything about you, something that may hurt her?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we are only men, are we not? When we have sudden urges, instincts, the weaker sex invariably gets hurt, doesn’t it?” Mallamé grinned broadly behind his impenetrable black sunglasses, and walked away. Thierry put his portfolio under his arm, and walked in the other direction and whispered, Cochon. Vraiment. He shook his head as he walked away. Thierry, looked over his left shoulder and saw Antoine laughing. When Thierry reached Paris again, after his trip with Agnès, he asked Antoine who Monsieur Mallamé was. Antoine said he had no idea.

*

   Thierry saw the arrival of his train. A sense of defeat, and in the back of his mind a blunted sense of urgency, rather than any genuine interest to go to Camembert, finally overcame him. He got on the TGV, making the one-hour train journey to Normandy. 

    The train pulled away from the Paris station. The glass and metal of the rounded ceiling of the arrival and departure hall disappeared, and buildings blurred by, as the speed increased, giving way to the impression of large housing developments, dissolving into the slums. Dissolving into the Banlieue. Until this too faded. White snow fields finally took hold fifteen minutes into the trajectory, and the sun that had made its presence felt in the morning crept behind very heavy and burdened clouds as the train furiously sped on. That Thierry thought that the clouds looked like dark burning smoke didn’t surprise him much. That he half expected to see bodies in the snow below, did.

   Resurfacing here and there, the sun with its rays penetrated and illuminated patches of the flat white plain stretching before him, separated only by blackened hedgerows. The light was intermittent, always consumed again by the darkness just when it appeared that the sun would vanquish. Thierry watched as the hedgerows fell dark once more, and he waited for the sun again. He leaned his head against the glass. It was cold and he slept.

   Driving to the family home from the station, a calm, uneasy and expectant, fell between the two passengers. Thierry asked if he could smoke, to which Agnès asked him to roll down the window. Finally, as the car left the main route, and began to follow the long single lane road towards their destination, Agnès finally cracked.

    “We’re so quiet.”

     “Yes,” Thierry paused, before adding, “Agnès, it’s really nothing, but you might want to put me in your back room somewhere; I’ve been having…nightmares lately.”

        Agnès was silent. Thierry straightened himself in his seat, “It’s nothing. It’ll pass. I just need some quiet time. Please don’t be offended if—”

    “No, no. Of course not. I understand,” she said it quickly, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, but there was a tenderness in it that disarmed Thierry, quite intentionally.

    “Look, Agnès. It’s nothing, really. Forget it, Forget I said anything.” Moments passed, and with it, the countryside. Agnès grew silent.

    “Thierry, there is one thing I should tell you—Papa hasn’t been well lately. My brother and I think his mind might be going.”

     Thierry took a drag on his cigarette. “I’ll be on my best behaviour.”

     “Thank you, Thierry.” And Thierry looked out the window, rather disheartened she thought.

     The light blue Citroen took a right turn, as the vegetation and brush gave way to an open snow-filled pasture, flat, with round bundles of collected grass dotting the open space far into the distance, like a Monet. Their tops were covered in snow and gave to them a profound heaviness, and as the row of naked apple trees approached quickly ahead, the two ceased talking. 

   The car took the gravel path up and parked in front of the two front doors, one of which was open. They were set into a walkway within a round, stone tower. This, enclosed by a square two-story structure with timbering on one side of the tower, Tudor style, and stonework on the other; all of which was mounted by a conical snow-topped shingled roof, and an attached barn on the far right. Various trees and rows of shrubs sheltered it all. Dark mud had collected around the property, interspersed with piles of slush and snow that had obviously been put there in a careless way, away from the driveway. Thierry thought that it looked as if some sort of god or deity had taken it upon himself to dump a thick layer of dirt and mud all over the property, and to sprinkle it with a thin layer of snow that slowly began to melt, despite the first touches of spit he felt coming down—a sea drift from the coast no doubt. Thierry looked through the window of the passenger side and saw a tethered horse wearing an English saddle, being led into the barn by Agnès’ father, who waved his hat as the car parked. A thin trail of smoke leaked from the chimney, and as Thierry opened the door, he could smell the burning wood. 

   The old man more was heavy-set than before, when he had seen him last. More thin-haired than Thierry had remembered, with square shoulders, rounded at the back, as if having endured the weight of time and memories unknown, before finally succumbing to it as he flirted with his seventy-fifth year. He wore a loose pair of trousers with suspenders, dark with wetness, near the ankles, dark blue rubber boots, and a charcoal tweed blazer over a white, ironed collared shirt.

  “Agnès. My lovely daughter! Come and kiss your dying father,” he said, with disproportionate gaiety. He walked to the car after tying off the brown horse and moved around to the driver’s side. Agnès barely had time to close the door, before he took her in his arms. He kissed her on both cheeks.

   “Papa, you’re not dying, and it’s not as if you haven’t seen me for years. I just retrieved your package for you,” Agnès said, and she smiled to Thierry, who likewise tried to suppress the natural ebullience that the old man evoked in almost everyone. Thierry tried to shake off the smile on his own face, but it was like a mask and he couldn’t remove it in time.

   “Ah, Thierry.” Perrineau walked over and threw his hand out, shaking Thierry’s with a strong grip. It was warm. “Your journey went well?”

    “Which one, Monsieur Perrineau? Rwanda, or the one I just took?”

   “Ahhh! Agnès. You see? Obviously the African sun hasn’t ruined his rhetorical skills,” The old man said, and returned to Thierry, “Which ever one you care to talk about.” The old man said.

  “The trip from Paris was calm, thank you.” Thierry said.

   The old man was momentarily silent, but said, “Very good. Please, there is a drizzle coming in from the coast. Come inside, come inside.” He yelled to the open door, “Maman, We have a guest!” The three walked towards the open door and went in, after wiping their shoes on the generous, warm mat in the coatroom.

10

   The Midnight Mass at the Église de Camembert, which lay at the bottom of a hill dotted with white, apple tree blossoms in the Summer, was guided in silence by the choirmaster, as the chanting of the choir tried to keep up. The choirmaster had unfortunately paced his piece of music a bit too fast for the adolescent youths. Old Monsieur Perrineau made no hesitation of reminding his guest to the fact, as Thierry heard him complain silently, with inflections of distress in the old clerk’s sunken eyes. The piece that evening, which included a prayer, liturgy, sermon, and communion, was Fons Bonitatis, in Mode VIII Kyrie, Le Jour de Noël. 

    On the whole, the service was uneventful. One feature that made it different however, was the spectacle of Agnès’ brother Christophe, who watched his father stand in line for the communion, and cried silently from the pews. He, like Thierry, remained seated.

   After the service, the believers and nonbelievers alike began to file out of the church, as the drizzle that had taken hold in the late afternoon, became more pronounced, melting the snow, and turning the more tenacious bits into ice. Agnès, Thierry, and her family, retired to the house for Le Réveillon.

   Agnès mother Aurelia, had spent the greater part of the day in the kitchen, roasting a pheasant, and Lapin aux Pruneaux that she had presently placed around the table, carefully, and with grace.

   They ate. Afterwards—and after two superior bottles of dark St. Emilion—the group retreated to the salon for drinks, and for Thierry and Perrineau to smoke.

   Thierry had felt a pressure on his mind since his arrival, and it didn’t go unnoticed. The recurrent nightmares had left their trace, under his eyes, and in them, where those who looked carefully would have noticed their alarm at a door closed too suddenly or a loud noise in the meadow not escaping concern from their guest. Or the tension in Thierry’s brow when the local hunters earlier that day had fired off a distant shot, in the forest. It added disquietude to the silence as the group walked into the room, opened a decanter of Brandy, and all made themselves comfortable in the tastefully furnished room. It was as though they drank with a phantom present, or like those who had just witnessed a terrible murder, but not being sure of the identity of the murderer, fell into a nervous, uncomfortable silence. Agnès, Thierry was sure, had at least told Madame Perrineau about what she knew—which wasn’t much—about Thierry’s change of humour since his return, and its origins. But, as Thierry made himself comfortable in the loveseat, next to Agnès, he felt the pressure. Though politely distant and unobtrusive, he felt the pressure to finally open himself narratively—in the sanctity, safety of this private salon. Away from newspaper editors, away from the tensions of Paris, sequestered in the darkness of vast swaths of snow, mud, and desolate trees. To speak of the horrors that this provincial family could not hope to imagine.

   Christophe started the discussion as he snifted his drink, by talking about the local politics of the region, particularly, the coming mayoral elections. Jean-Marie Le Pen was gaining in the polls that year throughout France, and no less so in Normandy. Members of his party were vying for a foothold. They talked about the feast that Agnès’ mother had made, Les immigrés, about how superb it was, the dinner, having been done with the lardons instead of the butter, and finally they turned to the weather, and then the immigrés once more. They talked about how inclement it had been, and how wonderful it was to have the precipitation, as it meant more apples for the harvest, and more grass for the cows to eat, to produce the famous cheese—despite the fact that there was some disagreement between Christophe and his father about whether it was any good to pasteurize Camembert for the big hypermarchés. It ruined a time-honoured method, and destroyed the flavour. Finally, silence reigned once more, a breach, through which Thierry felt the expectation to speak.

   Perrineau began, by saying how happy they were that Thierry had made the trip to Normandy, as he understood that the affairs of a man of his age naturally would have inclined him to stay in Paris, perhaps to finish up some work he had started. To this Thierry said that after his trip to Africa, work was the furthest thing from his mind, and he looked to Agnès as she looked down at her Brandy. It was only at this point that Christophe asked Thierry if he cared to talk about his time in Africa, what it was like, whom he had met, and things along these lines. Thierry began, slowly at first, interrupted by some long pauses, as he tried to assemble coherence in his mind, and by the nervous clearing of his throat several times. He began.

    As Thierry started talking, the Perrineau’s neighbour, a doctor by the name of Harbert—a prestigious name for the region—had visitors to his barn. He kept a small colony of rabbits there. As Thierry began to talk about the horrors he had seen, and all became silent in the salon, the two foxes had managed to enter the barn that looked almost like a church, some had said, with its tall ceiling, and the window that sat just beneath the joint of the two sides of the roof. The moon had come out. It shone down from the window, making the job so much easier for the two predators. They pried open the small wire gate with their teeth, containing the rabbits, and managed to steal three of them—one in the mouth of the first fox to enter, as it was smaller than its partner, and two rabbits in the mouth of the other. They were three of the five rabbits that Doctor Harbert kept, and as the two foxes made off with them, the two other rabbits, who were just kits, and hence not worthy of the meal, scrambled into the loose straw, shaking violently with fright. The ravenous foxes ran away with their live prey, as the rabbits squirmed and writhed with their necks caught painfully within the foxes’ jaws. The teeth of the foxes had already at this point punctured the flesh of the rabbits, and blood began to seep into the foxes’ mouths, making their stomachs churn their acids, with excitement. The rabbits had names. Doctor Harbert’s children had given them names: the single rabbit in the mouth of the smaller of the two foxes was named Tintin, the other two, in the mouth of the larger fox, Sophie, and the last was Obelix. Tintin was a grey rabbit, with softened ears like goose down and a nervous disposition that often made him seek the warmth and shelter behind the other rabbits, when Harbert’s wife came out to feed them vegetables from the garden. Sophie, who’s neck had been snapped in the jaws of the larger fox, was the mother of the two babies that had been left behind. And Obelix, the father, who now violently kicked his back legs, his head contorted and twisted, pressed as it was right next to Sophie’s limp face, was the largest of the group. The foxes had reached a clearing of open snow under the moonlight, deep in the wood, about twenty yards from the Harbert’s house, and began to feed. Sophie was the natural first choice, as she was already dead, so the larger fox started pulling at her leg with his teeth, as Obelix sat still to the side, terrified to even move, as if in a momentary trance. Little Tintin tried to run when the smaller fox placed him down on the snow, but this was soon dashed, as the fox grabbed him again by the throat and bit strongly, shaking his head back and forth, until Tintin was finally dead too, his body trembling as the brain shut down. The larger fox at this point had pulled off Sophie’s back leg, leaving the pink and bloodied flesh on the underside of the animal exposed and viciously bleeding. After having gnawed on the hind leg, the larger fox remembered that he still had Obelix to eat as well, and moved to him. As he did, a sudden final will to live overcame Obelix, and he jumped quickly into underbrush, quickly followed by the fox. As disoriented as Obelix was, the fox had no problem finding him once more though, and gripped Obelix’s skull in his jaws and crushed it, blood shooting everywhere, killing the rabbit instantly. The two foxes ate, tearing at the fur and meat of the rabbits for the next two hours, discarding the bones that had been stripped clean, gorging on the intestines that spilled out of Sophie’s body cavity, eating the soft tissue from Obelix’s shoulders and back legs, until finally the two foxes fought with each other over the carcass of Tintin, which they took with them, half in one mouth, half in the other. And then they left.

   When Thierry had finished talking, the first waves of sunlight had begun creeping through the curtains and over the furniture in the room. They had crept as he had talked, illuminating the sky with steady growing shades of turquoise, until it turned vermilion, just before the sun’s rays finally erupted over the pasture to the east of the salon room, with pinks and stark yellow bands, hitting the china in the room, then the liquor tray in the corner, before completely consuming the half of the room that gave out to the field. The view from the two windows that faced the dawn showed the yellow disk mounting above the hedgerows and electrical wires. 

   Thierry stopped. Monsieur Perrineau lay asleep in his chair, Madame Perrineau next to him with her café. Christophe stood by the window, looking out, as he saw what he thought were two distant foxes traverse the pasture and escape into the brush. Agnès was still next to Thierry, her hands in her lap. 

   Madame Perrineau put her coffee cup down, quietly, onto the side table and paused, as if at that moment robbed of any words, before she said, “What does one feel, after witnessing such things?” or something to this effect. There was a look in her eyes that was more memorable however, as she scanned about the room.

  Thierry thought for a moment. “I feel nothing,” he said, but immediately felt as if this was the wrong thing to say, to admit, but he was certain that he would be unable to find any other appropriate words, he knew.

   Agnès put her hand forward, and took Thierry’s, with tenderness. The eyes of those in the salon grew heavy, and not long afterwards, the group retired to their rooms, where they slept until two o’clock in the afternoon. Thierry was awoken by stirrings downstairs at that time, most probably from the kitchen. Opening his backpack, he took out fresh shirt and trousers, and walked with his travel kit to the toilette where he took a long shower, shaved, and then went down after dressing, to smoke outside.

  Madame Harbert called the Perrineau’s to complain about the fox attack the night before. Thierry sat outside the window to the kitchen, listening to Madame Perrineau console the poor woman, who sounded as if she was in a very sorry state. Christophe said that those must have been the same foxes he saw yesterday. The Harbert children were hysterical with grief. In addition to the three rabbits that were taken, the two kits had run off into the night, nowhere to be found. The doctor was gone for the day, and would be unable to lay out traps for the two thieves, so Madame Perrineau passed the phone to Monsieur Perrineau, who agreed to lay them out for her in the Doctor’s stead. When Thierry finally walked back into the kitchen, the two were arguing logistics for the afternoon, as Thierry helped himself to some coffee from a percolator. Agnès was nowhere to be seen, and growing bored, Thierry went back to his room as he heard the door slam downstairs—Madame and Monsieur Perrineau, starting their day.

   It wasn’t long after Thierry laid his head down on the bed that he soon heard a knock, low, almost inaudible, at his door. For a moment, Thierry’s mind flashed before him, the nightmare he had experienced four days ago. He looked at the white door, and said to enter. A moment passed, until Agnès opened it, looking behind and closing the door silently behind her. She was bare—except for a long, light blue t-shirt that hung down to her upper thigh. Thierry rose on his elbows and saw her long, beautiful legs move quickly toward him. Her black pubis appeared beneath the shirt, exposed intermittently as she walked. She finally reached him, kissed him openly, hastily, as they both collapsed onto the bed. 

   “We don’t have much time,” she said, her newly minted breath against his face.

   “I know,” he replied as he undid his belt.

*

   Thierry screamed. He clutched his throat and opened his eyes.

  “What is it! What’s wrong?” Agnès said next to him under the blanket. There was a knock on the door, and Christophe asked behind it what the scream was. Agnès yelled at him that it was nothing. “Çava, çava.” she said. Thierry rolled over, away from Agnès as his heart beat savagely.

    The two lay in silence, Agnès, lightly rubbing Thierry’s back under the covers, as her amant lay on his side.  “They will pass with time,” she said.

   “And if they don’t?”

   “Then you will have to see someone. But, they will pass. I’m sure of it.”

   “What makes you so certain?”

   “After what you told the family, last night? I would say that what you’re experiencing is quite natural.”

   “What I said last night isn’t everything.”

   Agnès looked at him. Thierry could feel her eyes on his back, and he rolled over, onto his stomach, propping himself up with his elbows as he sweated.

   “There is something else,” he said, and he looked at her. She was silent, but her eyes were large, and she sat herself up slightly, to brace herself for what was to come next. Something in his eyes told her that he was about to relate something of importance.

  Thierry began to talk about the killings again, about taking the photos at the crash site of the downed Presidential jet, and about something else—a hospital. A hospital. Thierry and his team were riding in a jeep, escorted by Belgian troops, towards a psychiatric hospital, in Kigali, run and housed by Belgian nationals. It was the beginnings of the mandatory evacuation of nationals from the country, and Thierry’s editor had received a phone call, to the hotel, requesting coverage from his photographers. Thierry grabbed his Nikon, ten rolls of unexposed film, and headed out the door with Fabrice—the other photojournalist in his group.

   “…You forgot your filters, Thierry!” the editor, Guillaume said, nervous, cigarette in his mouth, still on the phone, as he picked up the small black bag by its thin, stitched handle with his index finger.

   “There’s no time,” Thierry said, rushing out the door. Thierry checked his aperture and f-stop settings in the hall while he waited for Fabrice, before slamming the hotel room door, and they went running down the stairs to the waiting jeep in the parking lot. When the pygmy driver saw them, he reversed the jeep out of the parking space, and drove toward them. Thierry and Fabrice jumped in before the jeep had even a chance to stop, and it accelerated onto the main road toward Kigali Airport.

   French and Belgian paratroopers took the Airport during the night, as gunfire and explosions broke the silence of the city—not diminishing until about 6 am. Thierry, his editor, and the other photographer had held up in their hotel room all night, as the gunfire popped throughout the town, up and down the street. The main office in Paris told Guillaume that he was to go with his photojournalists to the airport, to meet up with a French contingent force of about five hundred who had landed with the Belgians last night. But sudden outbursts of fire broke out, and Guillaume lost his nerve at the last minute.

   “Shit! I should have grabbed the film,” Thierry said.

   Fabrice tapped him on the shoulder, “What did you say?” Thierry said it was nothing, and turned to look through the windshield again. The carnage that they knew was unfolding throughout the night became apparent, as the jeep Thierry was in, wound through the streets. Mangled and mutilated bodies, with an arm here, a head there and small streams of blood, seeped into the gutters as they quickly drove by. Drunken Interahamwe—the civilian militias—mulled about, hovering nearby with looks of the devil in their eyes, bloodied machetes in their hands. Killing someone with a machete. Thierry couldn’t have imagined it, until now, as he tried to steady himself, gripping the side of the windshield. Many of the bodies displayed open, large gashes—unsuccessful hacks and slashes, with flesh oozing out of them, or intestines, internal organs. A primeval revulsion swept over Thierry as he saw all of this. He hadn’t enlisted for this spectacle, and as the jeep drove on, the horror overtook him; the sheer meaninglessness of what he was witnessing. It was as if his mind was folding over itself and the only thing to keep him from screaming was the grinding of his teeth. But there was something else he felt, as he tried in vain to look away. Something else stirred in him that he wasn’t eager to explain, not to Fabrice he was sure, or anyone, and it shamed him: it was fascination. And as he looked and stared, incapable of taking even one photograph, the jeep swerving past overturned cars and stray dogs. The Interahamwe just stood there, and waited.

   The Rwandan Army had blocked the main road to the airport, the pygmy who drove them, Ntagahera, said, as they began to break at a mound of barrels, furniture and barbed wire guarded by two fresh faced black men—their heads shining in the overcast light. Ntagahera managed to convince the two soldiers to let them pass, which the two red-eyed Hutus did, reluctantly, after Thierry and Fabrice showed their press badges. Thierry briefly wondered, as the jeep turned left up a red dirt embankment, if they would have been as successful passing through if they weren’t French. 

    A thin stream of bloodied, dirt water trailed down the road, away from them. Continuing, the terrain flattened out once again as they reached the airport and they were met by armed paratroopers with red berets, and Belgian flags on their arms. They stood next to a large armoured vehicle in the middle of the road. A machine gun was mounted to the top, manned by another Belgian. A large troop transport truck came from the opposite direction, from the airport, and drove by the jeep. Thierry turned and raised his camera; military personnel were packed inside like cigarettes into a cigarette box and he snapped about five shots before it disappeared behind a grouping of trees. Thierry turned back to face the front again, as the jeep slowly approached the armoured vehicle. Stopping them with his hand up, the Belgian paratrooper with assault rifle walked to the jeep; Ntagahera nervously put his foot on the break.

   “It’s a good thing you’re white,” the Belgian said to Thierry, without elaborating. “Papers please,” he said, with bands on his shoulder—the mark of an officer.

   Thierry grabbed Fabrice’s badge from the backseat, and passed it along with his to the paratrooper.

   “What are you doing outside of the airport? You were supposed to stay with the others,” the officer said.

   “What? No. We came in three days ago.”

   “Where are you staying?”

   “At a hotel on the east of town.”

   “You have to stay with us now. All Europeans have to leave, including the press.”

   Thierry said he wasn’t going to complain, and mentioned that he would have to contact his editor, as he remained at the hotel. The officer said they would send a jeep to get him. From now on, Fabrice and he were not to leave the airport, without escort. Thierry said that he and the other Frenchman were supposed to meet up with a group, to cover the evacuation of Belgian nationals from a psychiatric hospital. The officer nodded.

   “They’re all in the main building. Go up around the side and park.”

   He finished by asking Thierry for directions on how to get to the hotel where Guillaume the editor was, to which Thierry scrawled down a rudimentary map on the back of a paper bag that was on the floor of the jeep. But it was illegible to the paratrooper, so Ntagahera had to draw another one, which he then passed. The Belgian gave them back the two badges and waved them through. Thierry looked in the rear-view mirror and saw that the paratrooper began talking into his two-way radio.  Just behind the military vehicle—in the bushes that framed the sidewall of the main building of the airport—lay two bereted machine gunners, face down with heavy machine guns. They had had their sights on them the entire time, Thierry thought. 

    Ntagahera drove them around to the front of the main building onto the tarmac and parked. Extending the length of the runway lay three enormous, camouflaged transport planes, parked and guarded. Building up speed on the runway itself was a fourth. It lifted off the tarmac, and beneath the whine of the engines could be heard the distinct pop of gunfire. Hot countermeasures—a dozen flares—erupted from the sides of the steeply banking aircraft as it ascended, phosphorescent and orange, with long trails of smoke. Thierry overheard a French paratrooper lean into his shoulder-mounted intercom, and quietly say that the first one was away.

   Military vehicles stood nearby, and the runway was scattered with hundreds of soldiers, who had successfully positioned gun posts along the chain-link fences on either side of the long stretch of dirt. After Ntagahera parked, however, two more Belgians yelled that he couldn’t stay, they yelled in French that the black had to go, gesticulating with their rifles, so he got back into the jeep to leave. Before he did, Thierry stopped him, walking to the driver’s side and grabbing him by the arm. He told him to drive straight back to the hotel. Tell Guillaume that they would be leaving soon, and not to forget the rolls of film that had already been exposed the few days before, at the other end of the airport where the Presidential plane had been shot down—and the wreckage still remained. Thierry thought it wise to try to remind Guillaume of this, as he was forgetful, having recently even forgotten his glasses in the hotel bar two nights ago. Thierry knew that Guillaume was so spooked, he might leave without taking anything. Above all, Thierry finished, by saying to Ntagahera, tell him, don’t forget the film. Ntagahera nodded his understanding, and he wheeled the jeep in a U-turn and sped off. Ntagahera was Pygmy, not Hutu or Tutsi, so he was safe, Thierry said to himself, as he watched the jeep disappear around the side of the building.

   Thierry and Fabrice walked to the open doors and entered. Within, about two dozen journalists were huddled on the floor or standing, some smoking, as ten heavily camouflaged and armed troops stood close by, looking out the windows or communicating via two-way intercom. There was activity brewing, as some of the journalists, both men and women, had gotten up as Thierry and Fabrice had walked in, and appeared to be making ready to leave, as some of the photographers started loading film and checking their equipment, and the other regular journalists made last minute phone calls to their respective offices. A few TV crewmen nonchalantly filmed the scene.

“It’s like an audience waiting for a show,” Fabrice said. Thierry nodded and said, “They have no idea.”

   A Belgian paratrooper came out of a room, and motioned for the group to follow him. They moved into a hallway, and outside a door, where ten vehicles waited, some military, others trucks, vans and cars commandeered for the occasion. Three large, empty cargo trucks were at the front of the column, manned by machine gunners in the back. Journalists hopped into the commandeered cars and trucks; Thierry and Fabrice grabbed a small, red Toyota truck and turned the ignition. The convoy began, slowly at first, then building in speed as the momentum picked up. Paved roads slowly became dirt, and the buildings were abandoned to trees and dense, green, Congo foliage as the convoy climbed up the road, away from the valley to their left. It reached the grounds of the hospital five minutes later. As Thierry’s truck climbed an embankment, more Interahamwe with machetes and rifles, young, t-shirted, others with what appeared to be blazers on, camped outside.

   “Wolves waiting for the hunt, Thierry, look,” Fabrice said, as he pointed with cautious discretion. Thierry turned to look. The convoy took a right turn at a fork in the dirt road, and it climbed up before flattening out at an area of dense vegetation. The hospital came into view, with its orange walls and decorative low brick fence appearing through the trees. The column of vehicles parked just out front as some cars—with journalists—parked just off the road; the paratroopers wanted to leave as quickly as they could.

  As the journalists got out of the vehicles and moved towards the hospital, Thierry saw one then two, three and finally dozens of black people file out of the hospital, running with arms held high, screaming as they ran toward them. Shutters started snapping, the Belgian paratroopers began running toward the hospital, guns at the ready. The two soldiers at the front made a hand gesture, signalled to the paratroopers behind them, and more followed.

   Thierry began to take photos, as a wall of photographers assembled at the opening of the long driveway bordered by greenery that unfolded directly onto the hospital grounds. The blacks were Tutsi, having taken refuge in the hospital for the past three days, they made this known, as one of them—a large man with gold watch and a wedding ring—attempted to talk to a paratrooper who waited for the others who had gone into the hospital to retrieve the western staff.

   “For three days, we’ve been inside there. There are cadavers inside!” The large man continued, but the paratrooper said nothing. The Tutsi continued talking to him for about a minute, before giving up, as the paratrooper walked away, and the crowd of Tutsi refugees began soliciting the journalists. They stood there, the journalist about twenty feet from the Tutsis. The Tutsis posed for the camera, some smiling, gesticulating with their hands as the refugees extended the entire length of the hundred-foot driveway. Some smiled and laughed nervously—a desperate act to win sympathy from the white men and women with cameras. The dozen or so journalists took photos, taking notes, as some remained silent, some even smiling as the Tutsis put on the spectacle for the photographers’ cameras. 

    Finally, Thierry got tired of being continually obstructed by the others and crouched down, stepping forward about five feet. He saw a sea of dark hands extended in front of him, with panicked, stricken faces. As he finished his roll, he put his camera down from his eyes to reload. As he did, a woman, tall, with elegant neck, moved forward through the crowd, she had her daughter with her, in front of her, and she reached the front of the Tutsis just as Thierry raised his camera again. The daughter was like her mother: thin, with elegant wide-set eyes and a dress of light blue, with white and pink flowers. She didn’t wave her hands or mime to the camera like the others. Thierry felt himself stricken by the stupefying elegance of the pair. The woman—solemn amongst the crowd—looked at Thierry. The little girl raised her two hands in front of her, and Thierry took the photo.

   “That’s a beautiful dress you have there,” Thierry said, as he advanced the film to the next frame.

    The mother looked at Thierry as if he had just said something injurious, condemnatory. “I bought this dress for my daughter a week ago. Her name is Espérance, white man. We had tried to leave the country, but our car was taken, and my husband killed. I hope you take a good look at this dress my daughter wears, white man. I hope the photo you just took means something to you, because after you leave, this dress will be stained with blood.”

  Thierry stopped, and lowered his camera. She continued, “Please take my daughter. Take her away from this hell. Please! Take her away!!” She pushed her daughter toward Thierry. Thierry grabbed the girl and lifted her up into his arms. A paratrooper walked over to him. “Put the girl down.”

   “Why? We have room in our truck. We can take her!” Thierry said.

   “No you will not. Put her down right now,” the paratrooper roughly grabbed the girl from Thierry’s arms and put her back on the ground. The girl began to cry. The Belgian pushed her back toward the woman, and the crowd consumed the mother and child once more.

   “You all need to step back, step back,” the paratrooper said to the journalists, who had slowly crept closer to the Tutsis. Thierry looked to the large trucks that had been at the front of the column. About ten people were now inside the half empty trucks, and a paratrooper closed the door with a slam.

   “Alright! We’re leaving. Everyone go. Right now!” the paratrooper who had accosted Thierry said, and jumped into the passenger side of the large truck. The journalists picked up their gear as the sounds of engines began to ignite and they started to run back to their cars. Thierry and Fabrice got to the small red truck as the sounds of gunfire began. This was followed by screams in the direction where the Tutsis were. Thierry climbed into the driver’s side, and as he did, three Interahamwe ran beside the car with machetes. The calm had given way to a human cyclone, a dark energy that now swarmed around their truck. Screaming began.

   Fabrice looked at Thierry, “Thierry, we have to get out of here! Move! Move! God damn it!!”

    Thierry started the ignition and pulled away, quickly gaining on the rest of the convoy, which had left at a fast clip. Thierry put the accelerator to the floor. As the screams and gunfire subsided, Fabrice began to breath more regularly. Turning to Thierry, he said, “What did I tell you. Wolves,” he paused, and then added, “Did you get some good shots? Of the mother and daughter?”

    There was a quiet knock on the door. Thierry stopped talking, and Agnès got out of the bed and stood by the door. “Yes?” she said. It was Madame Perrineau. Monsieur Perinneau hadn’t returned. Thierry looked out the window; it was getting dark. Agnès opened the door slightly and exchanged a few words with her mother. Closing it again, she walked to the bed and threw her t-shirt back on.

   “We have to go looking for Papa. It’s probably nothing,” she said, but she was nervous, Thierry could tell from her eyes. She walked out the door.

    He quickly got dressed and went down to the kitchen. Madame Perrineau was there, along with Christophe and Agnès, who were putting jackets on. Thierry asked if he could go, to which they said yes. The three grabbed two flashlights in the cellar, and walked out into the cold air. 

   Agnès assumed that her father had gotten lost in the wood to the north of their property, and as they advanced through the ankle-deep snow and ice, the sky glowed red; the field they crossed, pale and lifeless. By the time they reached the wood, the sky had darkened considerably, and they switched on the flashlights— their glow beaming across the decaying rock walls that had once demarcated the juncture of properties, amidst the fallow trees and bushes.

   Twenty minutes into their entry, Christophe found a trap laid out, empty and thinly concealed, with dried leaves and vegetation.

  “He’s been through here,” he said. Christophe then began beaming the flashlight over the ground, looking for tracks, footprints. He said he thought they should look in that direction, pointing the flashlight over a downed tree trunk to the group’s left, and, as he did, his beam caught a figure standing at a distance, that quickly walked away. Agnès yelled. “Papa! Papa!” There was no answer, and Thierry and Christophe jumped over the log and ran to where the figure was standing. They reached the clearing, and Christophe flung his flashlight everywhere. It finally settled on Monsieur Perrineau, sitting on a mossy rock, at the outskirts of the clearing, his eyes looking at them, but not seeing them.

   “Papa! Are you all right? What are you doing!” Christophe said, as Agnès came running to the opening in the wood. Perrineau sat, the flashlight reflecting in his moistened eyes. “Where are my children? Where are they, have you seen them?” he said, with his hands in front of him as if he was slowly dipping them into something hot, scalding in front of his face. Christophe ran to him and forced his father to his feet. Christophe’s soles made a crunching sound, and he passed the beam of light over his feet. He saw bones under his shoes. His father let out a staunched cry.

   “Oh my God, Papa. What’s wrong? You’re children are right here. Oh, Papa,” Agnès said. Tears trailed down her face. Christophe leaned down and held his father’s cold visage with his two hands. The old man looked up at Christophe, and he moved his eyes over Christophe’s face, caressing the contours of it with his mind for a moment, until the faintest recognition became apparent in his sunken eyes, and then submerged into the ocean of confusion that had taken hold of him once more.

  Christophe said, “Papa. We have to go home. Come on, I’ll carry you.” He passed the flashlight to Thierry, and hoisted his father onto his back, and the two walked away, looking like Anchises and Aeneas, leaving the blackened wood. Thierry and Agnès followed, beaming the flashlights ahead of Christophe so he wouldn’t trip.

  They returned. Christophe and Agnès took Monsieur Perrineau to the hospital. Thierry waited at the home, feeling it was inappropriate for him to go with the rest of them. Madame Perrineau was too overtaken to go, and retired to her room. Thierry waited in the kitchen and read some chapters from Stendhal’s Le Rouge et Le Noir. He had grabbed it off the wall in the library. He took the liberty of making some coffee for himself, and turned on the small, old radio that rested on the kitchen table, listening to the news amidst the din of white static.

   Monsieur Perrineau returned at half past three, with his children, who put him immediately to bed. Agnès came into the kitchen and sat down. Agnès and Thierry spoke for two hours after that. Her father indeed had Alzheimer’s. Agnès said Le Réveillon had put too much stress on his mind, provoking the attack. 

  They then talked about her childhood, growing up in the house, their meeting for the first time at university, anything, to not talk about the recent events. And she broke down, and only then did they talk about her father again. She cried. Thierry put his arm around her, and then he kissed her. She wiped her tears away and said she felt ashamed that Thierry had had to go through all of this, to which he consoled her and told her she was being ridiculous, and then they went up to bed.

   That night, Thierry dreamt that he was on fire. It wasn’t painful, but hot and penetrating. Emitted from the very pores of his skin. Originating from deep within him, enveloping his body with its yellow, undulating limbs. He was in his apartment, going about his activities, meeting people, looking over his work, going to a café, kissing Agnès, and he was consumed in flames.

*

    …the legacy of the Morphology Department is long, and reflects the consistency over centuries of discipline and intellectual, scientific inquiry as an indispensable part of the education of the artist—regardless of his eventual evolution at the École. Despite the introduction of the Mediathèque Department—a division of the École that is without any doubt useful and timely—the necessity of an artist’s understanding of the uses of Morphology as it pertains to design, construction and even to the very origin of aesthetics itself, is I hope, from what I have already outlined above, obvious. The continued existence of the Morphology Department will serve both the interests of the next generation of École students, and compliment the recent technological concessions made to keep the École au courant with the nature of the ever-changing artistic climate. My defence of the Department is now at its close; I trust that the correct judgment will be made, in the best interests of the École, and to its rich, and vital to preserve legacy.

   Professor Nicolas Didier leaned back, picking up the last page of the letter, to examine it in the fading light from the window. He placed his pipe on a tray by his side and saw that the cinders had extinguished themselves. He relit the pipe—something he hardly ever did, having given up smoking twenty years ago—and lightly drew on the pipe with his breath. He read the final paragraph once more. The smoke was nostalgically sweet, and it soothed him as he put the letter down and crossed out the final word ‘legacy’ and placed ‘heritage’ in its place.

   Monsieur Girard strode into the office and immediately noticed the smell of tobacco. Just as Didier had, he too found the smell transporting, to when he had recently been introduced to the Department himself. In addition, the smell also told him the truth that Didier was feeling the weight of what was before him, and this troubled his former student.

“Please excuse me, Nicolas. I simply came to collect some books for the Amphithéâtre tomorrow.”

   “Non, non. It’s nothing,” Didier said, and continued, “I was…simply putting the final touches on this letter to the Ministère de la Culture. It’s being mailed tomorrow.” Didier looked knowingly at Girard, who made an effort to seem too busy finding his books to notice the air of dread that collected in the quick draws from the pipe Didier made with his mouth. Without turning his head, Girard said, as he strained to look for the final book on a top shelf, “It would be well for you…not to worry yourself over this.”

   Didier was touched, but said, “There are larger things at stake than simply the salaries of the department’s future heads.” Girard felt mildly scolded, in the unique way that Didier always could, reminding him once again that the preservation of history was at stake, as well as the prestige of the coveted department chair. Girard decided to make light of it. “The ministère will no doubt come to a correct judgment. After all, they aren’t stupid, and they are the preservers of French culture par excellence, don’t you think?”

   “I once thought as you do, too. And then little details like war come along, and remind one of how fragile culture, civilization, and its myriad useless artefacts really are to politicians and soldiers.”

   “Yes, as long as one doesn’t mention such truths too loudly, and in the wrong company,” Girard responded, and he didn’t watch him, but Girard felt the corroded embarrassment of his old, and at one time recklessly loquacious teacher dwelling on the comment.

   Didier thought for a moment, “Rubbish. I don’t drink anymore. And those I may have insulted have long since died, or retired.”

   “Well yes, you are fortunate to have outlived many of them,” Girard said, finding the book he was looking for. He turned to Didier, and continued, as he made ready to leave the room, “Are you sure about your choice of the American to participate in the demonstration?”

   “Jean-Marc recommended him. He said he had a strong hand, and besides, the Director had asked me to keep him occupied, to in a sense keep him out of trouble.” Didier stared cold faced at Girard. It had been a long time since Didier had realized that he had to, at times, cheated the truth with Girard.  Didier knew that his former student and colleague was a bit narrow-minded, a bit Chauvin, about certain subjects, and no less so about foreign students, particularly those with talent at the École.

   Girard tried his best to probe the comment, but eventually shrugged and said it was probably a wise choice. After all, he did draw very well, and as timid as he was speaking French in public, he was not likely to cause any embarrassment when the time came. Didier agreed, and Girard walked out mumbling something about a lost lamb, and shaking his head.

   A lost lamb. That was what Girard had called the American the last time they had talked of him together. That was well over two weeks ago. Didier paused, placing his two hands behind his head, and he remembered another time when he had heard that same expression. Except it wasn’t in French, but in German: eine verlorene Lamm. 

   Didier leaned back in his chair, as it emitted the familiar metallic wince. He had become accustomed to it. Eine velorene Lamm. He remembered vaguely the circumstances of when he had been called that over fifty years ago. It irritated him then. He was seventeen at the time. It irritated him now. As his mind dwelled on it, his memory focused. Condensing until he became quite confident that he remembered the exact circumstances of having heard it, in a small town called Arbres-sur-Rivière. After all, Didier thought, danger has a way of burning emotions and remembrances into the brain like nothing else. Danger is a solder that makes the experiential burn of memory more permanent in the mind’s eye. He knew exactly who it was now, how could he not? And as he closed his eyes and opened them again, he could see his face exactly as he saw the hue of the final golden shades of sunlight struggling to hit the opposite wall in the office.

   He had been belligerently peddling his bicycle for twenty minutes then, ever since he had left, and fast enough to dissuade those he passed on the road from stopping him for news, and slow enough to not arouse suspicion from the Wehrmacht who routinely drove up and down the dirt road. 

   The road was elevated, rising above open fields that spread out on either side of it, as if when seen from high above, the road were a sort of wound, or perhaps a raised scar on the surface of the grass. If this was true, then the elevation of the land to the south, and to the immediate east and west in the opposite direction from where Nicolas was peddling, could have been thought of as being the thick growth of a beard on a large, war-tormented face, known as the borderlands of Limousin and Poitou-Charentes. It was rugged country, at the juncture of the mountains, rivers, trees and open fields of Le Massif Central, before the mountains sloped down into the vastness of the Loire wine country further northwest. Les bottes, the Germans, had been trying to raze this beard for some time; Les Maquis had so far prevented this, and dominated these areas since 41, since the Occupation.

Further up the road, Nicolas saw the shape of the checkpoint he was anticipating. As the day was hot, the three bottes who stood at the road divider were sharing a canteen of water, and had unbuttoned the first few rungs of their tunics. When the first German spotted Nicolas, he held out his hand to the bicyclist and Nicolas knew almost immediately that they had been drinking. He squeezed the break and he felt the tire seize up in the back. For added stopping power he let his right foot drag, picking up light dust with it as it did. Looking to his left, he saw the legs of a woman on her side behind the car of the small checkpoint, lying comfortably in the grass with her stockings around her ankles.

   “Ahh! Warum der Ansturm! Es ist ein schöner Tag.” And then he switched into French. “Papers,” he finally said, and Nicolas reached into his back pocket and pulled the paper card out of his wallet. The soldier asked Nicolas to step off his bike, and he felt up around his body, under his arms and down his legs. 

   “What’s your business in Arbres-sur-Rivière?”

   “The bread lines start in twenty minutes. My mother is needing the rations, sir,” Nicolas said.

   “Well then, you don’t need to be speeding like a bolting horse anyway. There will be plenty of bread for your mother without the added sweat you give yourself. Move along.” The soldier raised the metal guardrail that blocked the road, and Nicolas walked his bicycle through. He continued on for twenty yards like this before turning to see how far he had walked from the roadblock, and climbed on his bicycle once more. The bike swayed from side to side lightly, until he picked up speed, and it settled into a smooth momentum. He reached the white and black sign for Arbres-sur-Rivière. A woman with a scarf was picking up bread that she had dropped along the side of the road. When Nicolas passed her, she looked up at him, and then looked directly back from where she had come from. Nicolas turned to face front again, and he jumped off his bike as the road began to incline into the town. The dirt road dissolved into cobblestones. He passed the remains of the old abbey on his left, which made a roundness to the entrance of the town as he climbed relatively quickly with his bike.

   “Hergekommen, Junge.” Nicolas heard down an alleyway to his right. Nicolas stopped, and turned to see four figures walking his way. As they got closer, he saw what were unmistakably two men in military uniforms. Each had a woman on his arm. The tall officer with the blonde woman in a red dress raised his hand to Nicolas. As the mid-afternoon sun had blanketed the alleyway in shadow, he strained to see who it was. The men and women left the darkness, as one of the women, in brown with a matching hat, tripped on a step. He recognized her; she had been present at a restaurant in his town the week before.

   The German approached Nicolas, and mussed Nicolas’ hair with his hand. “Nicolas Didier! Your father did an excellent job on my gunner’s tourniquet. Please tell him that he’s welcome to drink with me the next time he comes to Arbres-sur-Rivière. How is he? Is he well?”

   “Yes, sir.”

   “It’s not often I find a Frenchman with such a knowledge of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. Will you tell him this for me?”

   “Yes, yes. I would be very happy to sir.”

   “Good. My name is Staffelführer Baer. I was at your house two weeks ago. Now, where are you off to today?”

   “The breadlines, sir.”

   “Such a mundane task for such a handsome man,” the woman in red said.

   “Enough. You’re drunk, Giselle,” the officer with the brown dressed woman on his arm said.

   “That’s fine, fine Dietrich,” the Staffelführer with the red dressed woman said. “After all, he is a handsome young man,” he said. “A little young perhaps for Giselle, but there is something else in this young man. Wouldn’t you agree, Dietrich?” The officer stopped, and stepped back with a feigned air as if he were about to paint a portrait of someone and was getting distance between himself and the subject, to get a better look. “One would say there is something lost about him, in the eyes. Eine velorene Lamm.” Baer said, with a flourish of the hand. The group laughed.

   “Stop with your religious comparisons, Engel. I’m thirsty, let’s go somewhere where I can wet my mouth,” the other officer said, and the group moved on. They strode a few paces down the road; Baer turned again to face Nicolas and said. “Don’t forget now, Jung.”

   Nicolas raised his arm in acknowledgment. He heard laughter as they passed behind the abbey remains, and he walked his bicycle up the stone road toward the centre of town. He turned left at the top, and proceeded to descend, approaching a café with a red veranda and chairs. A man finished downing his pastis as Nicolas approached, and folding his newspaper, got up off his chair and started walking ahead. The man wore a felt hat and matching steel-coloured suit. He approached a garbage can and dropped the newspaper into it, turning right up the street. Nicolas followed him with his bicycle, carefully trailing at about five yards distance. The man turned right again. When he reached the top of the street, the man stopped and lit a cigarette. He looked both ways and turned right, walking up the street. As Nicolas reached the top, where the man had lit his cigarette, another man, with gold-rimmed spectacles, coatless, and heavy around the waist passed Nicolas traveling down the slight incline to the left, on the far side of the street. Without looking at him, the spectacled man passed in front of a movie house and continued walking. Nicolas felt apprehensive. He looked at the man in the suit that had reached the end of the street by now, and he glanced at Nicolas briefly. He made a light gesture with his hand, as if he were shooing a fly mid-thigh, before disappearing. Nicolas turned left, and started following the man with the spectacles. He was pear shaped, with black suspenders that matched the oiled hair swept back tightly behind his head. The man crossed the wide street, and turned right down a narrow alley, and Nicolas followed. When Nicolas reached halfway down, a heavy door opened. Nicolas looked in and he saw a dark silhouette motioning for him to enter. Without even daring to look from where he had come, or to see the man he had followed, Nicolas picked up his bike and quickly walked into the courtyard through the door. The door slammed behind him. The man, still in darkness, grabbed Nicolas’ bicycle and carried it swiftly up a stone staircase to the right. He had a nearly spent cigarette in between his tightly held lips, and he made an abrupt heft of his head, and Nicolas knew he wanted him to climb up the stairs with him. Nicolas followed. He entered the door the man had walked through, and he felt thick hands on him. The door slammed.

   “Were you followed. Did anyone stop you?” he heard a voice, with an accent. He thought it might have been Catalan, but he wasn’t sure. Nicolas looked to his left and he could see the sliver of light from the covered window illuminating the face of the man who had carried his bicycle up the stairs.

   “No. But two SS officers did. They asked me to give a message to my father,” Nicolas said.

   “What did they say?” the voice said, with a touch of alarm.

   “One of them asked me to invite my father for drinks, the next time he’s in Arbres-sur-Rivière.” There was a silence, a pause. Nicolas heard a breath, an exhalation, and a light switched on in the room. It was a small room. It looked as if it might have been some sort of granary, or shed. A small table was in the middle of the room. A small, round drain was between him and the table. One large man stood leaning against a leg of it, and another sat behind. The turning on of the light above had set the light bulb in motion, attached to the cord it was on. The shadows of the men and table gently rocked back and forth for a moment, in time with the metronomic light as it swung back and forth. The man sitting at the table motioned for Nicolas to come forward. He had a well-tailored hat on, which cast a shadow over his face, and was impenetrable to the light in the room. He also wore a scarf around his neck, which Nicolas thought a bit unfashionable for the weather.

   “Don’t be afraid,” the hat said, rising slightly. Nicolas turned and looked to the left and right. He advanced a few paces. The other men surrounded him. One of them said, “Go on. Go on.” Nicolas turned to see who had said it, and Nicolas picked his leg up. Standing on one foot, he unlaced his left shoe and removed it. He offered it to the man who was sitting down.

   The man took hold of it, at the tip, and looked at it sideways for a few moments. Flipping the shoe over, he felt along the sole. Finally he gave the heel a swift push with three fingers. It slid forward, revealing an open space between the sole and the outsole. A paper was inside. The man unfolded the paper and a piece of muslin fell delicately to the table. The man stopped, as if he hadn’t exactly expected this, and he picked it up, and opened it. As he unwrapped the carefully folded muslin, what appeared to be a microfilm, elegantly placed into a piece of off-white cotton cloth, was inside. The seated man passed the microfilm to another man, the one who had grabbed the bicycle, and he raised the sliver of black, shiny plastic up to the light. He inspected it for a few moments, before finally saying, “It’s good.”

   The seated man reached into his back pocket, his jacket pinching into all sorts of thick folds, before removing a gold cigarette case. He removed a cigarette from it, and lit it with a match. Nicolas saw the man’s face for the first time. He offered the open case to Nicolas, more as a formality than as an actual gesture of generosity. Nicolas shook his head lightly from side to side. There was a small laugh. “He’s young,” Someone said. The man with the hat sitting at the table told him that he could go now. He was given back his shoe. Nicolas paused. Another man said, “There’s your bike.” Nicolas rapidly grabbed the bike, which was leaning against a plastered stonewall, and he followed the man ahead of him, until Nicolas began to see light from a covered window.

   “From here, you’re on your own,” the man said. He pointed to the door ahead of the two of them, and Nicolas walked to it, opened it, and strode out. He immediately recognized that he was on the original street where he had crossed from one man to the other fifteen minutes before. He quickly found his way down a few side streets until he saw the growing ration line. He propped his bike up against the brick wall at the end of the line, and he leaned into it, crossing his arms.

  What bothered Didier, as he reflected on these early matters of his manhood, during the war, was not that he had been a seventeen-year-old virgin. Nor did it bother him that the ground kept giving way beneath his knees, as he had the woman with the red dress’ legs over his shoulders. What bothered him was that on the evanescent day that he was finally shedding his virginal shame like a scab, the Allies had chosen this particular moment to start strafing runs over the surrounding countryside. He was almost at the point of climax, when the distant explosions grew louder, completely upstaging his carnal fervour with the woman, and the windows started to shake. For a moment he stopped thrusting on top of her, and he tried to understand where the sound of shaking glass was coming from, as he was in the middle of a field, until another explosion woke Nicolas with a start, and he rose in his bed and immediately looked out the window. The last explosion lit up the sky, sending the flora horizon into blackness. The window to his room shook once more, and he turned to say something to the woman, but when he did, she was no longer there next to him, or under him, to be more precise, as he had dreamt the sexual encounter completely.

   Didier remembered that when he awoke moments later, he saw that American planes were strafing the fields, and further down the road, explosions and the crackle of automatic weapons were alight in Arbres-sur-Rivière. What Didier didn’t know, but would know in a few more minutes, was that his father was about to wake the family to tell them that Arbres-sur-Rivière was being razed, and that the inhabitants were being systematically executed by the Nazis.

11

    The door opened, and Brayden walked back into his chambre de bonne, flinging his duffel bag onto the bed. He didn’t waste any time, taking the business card out of his wallet and moving to the phone. The telephone he had received from France Telecom was a generic black-corded phone, with place marks and buttons on the base station for speed-dialling contacts. He really didn’t have any contacts—apart from the one he now held in his hand—and couldn’t quite understand the French directions of how to program the buttons, so they all remained blank. He dialled the number and waited. The dial tone ended, only to be replaced by an answering machine. He left a message, and hung up.

    Moving to the bed, he opened his duffel bag, extracted the bottle of wine he had just bought downstairs, and drank a good portion of it—enough to put him into a pleasant early evening drowsiness, and he slept.

   The next few days were passed in relative calm. Brayden walked the city in the evenings, and ducked into a bookstore to buy a present for Adele: a French translation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. He had skimmed through them in high school, having read the first fifty or so, so he thought she might enjoy them, as Adele and he spent so much time talking about his life in the United States and vicariously, the English language.

   La Nouvelle Année arrived, and Brayden took special pleasure in walking to the Champs-Elysées, to see the crowd that had amassed there—and which does every year. Midnight came, and as the bottles of Champagne were opened, and the revellers danced and sung, he felt a loneliness grip him, staying with him only until he returned to his flat in the Marais. Three years he had been in France. He drank himself to sleep that night, to the sound of car horns, and the yells of passers-by down below.

    Tatiana arrived at the flat the morning after, early, and found Brayden on the bed, faced down on the pillow. She whispered in his ear to revive him, “Salut, mon amour.”

    He groaned, his head spinning. He didn’t acknowledge her, but pulled himself up off the bed and went to the mirror. “So, did you have a good vacation?” He said from the bathroom, sarcasm in his voice as he soaped his face to shave. He looked at himself, dark circles under his eyes. The wounds he had endured were quickly fading though, which cheered him up.

   “Yes! Yes! Flavius wasn’t there, so I spent a few days with my mother. And you?”

   “I just got back from..,” he stopped himself and twisted the tap. Ice-cold water burned his hand. Tatiana unpacked her clothes, and he could hear her drop her shoes roughly on the wood floor.

   “What? What did you say?” she said on the other side of the wall.

   “Nothing,” he said, quietly to himself and continued to lather his face with one hand, as he tested the water with the other. The tap ran from lukewarm to hot. Several moments passed and Brayden came out, threw his coat on and made for the door.

   “I’m leaving the École,” he said, as he downed two aspirin from the bottle sitting in the receding bookshelves.

   There was a touch of nervousness in the way her voice cracked as she said, “I’ll see you later then.” He passed her on the way out, and glanced down at her. She looked mildly concerned, behind her heavy eyeliner as she unfolded her black dress slacks. He walked out. 

    Arriving at the École, he paralleled the large, imposing limestone wall that guarded the school from the passers-by. Seized with a panic, his chest tightened, and he stopped just before the entrance. He pulled out his pack of cigarettes, lit one, and took a few long drags as he leaned against the wall. As the nicotine entered his bloodstream, the fear began to subside, and, throwing the half-spent cigarette into the gutter, he whispered to himself, “À l’attaque” and walked in.

*

    It was to be a good day for him. As the sun rose, Brayden finished his work on the limestone bust of Dante, around noon. The Charpentier Atelier was closed, and the Carving Grounds lay barren for most of the morning—perfect for working. For the better part of his time that year, he had been fighting over it, leaving it, cursing it, and finally returning to it. As rumour had it, the limestone he and the others had been carving into had been rejects from the Pont Neuf, so Brayden thought it was a huge waste to abandon the block. He had spent what felt like an eternity on it that morning, revived by the compliment he had received before, as he stood carving and smoothing the forehead with its numerous wrinkles, or making sure that the eyes had the proper expression to them. His determination to succeed with this copy had drowned out the voices of reproach in his mind, and he laboured on. 

    He did have one setback that morning, maybe due to too much wine drunken over the holiday or maybe due to the throbbing bones in his hands: just before finishing, he accidentally chipped the nose. He had tried to obscure it with some sanding, here and there, and even convinced himself that it wasn’t that bad. But it was too late; as the atelier began to come alive, Sandrine had seen it, and took a photo of Brayden, as he had paused to reflect on the damaged bust. She walked out of the atelier, snapped the photo, and walked back in. C’est cuit. Fed up, Brayden put his tools away, and left.

*

   The month passed uneventfully. Brayden started another block, this time much larger, attended the art history classes, and began reading anatomy books in the morphology office. The message he had left went unanswered. 

   Attending the morphology lectures, he had the opportunity to give Adèle the paper wrapped book of sonnets, which she summarily returned to him, a sour, contemptuous look on her face. Tatiana was busy building an architecture model for a class, so she was often out. All toll, it was just a regular month of numbing work, with intermittent contact with others.

  Everything changed on the last Friday of the last week when Brayden returned home for lunch, to find a message on his machine.

*

    Returning to the École afterwards, Brayden couldn’t control the lightness in his step. The call had been from Monsieur Levecque, the man who had looked at his sculpture the two months before. It was indeed him, as Brayden recognized his voice on the machine. He had said that he wasn’t expecting a call from Brayden so soon, but he was glad that he had called. As Brayden was to find out, the temporary workspace that his atelier had secured very recently in the Banlieu, had to let go of one of their sculptors, so there was a position open. After calling him back, Brayden made arrangements to meet him the next day, a Saturday, to secure a weekend job. He was to meet him at ten a.m., tomorrow. Brayden jubilantly passed through the entrance to the école. He blew a kiss to the limestone Poussin above, and saw Sébastien. He waved. Sébastien waved back, bowing as he did—an imitation of the proper gentleman, a caricature really. He saw Sandrine, and waved to her as well. Brayden’s ship had come in, and he wasn’t about to ruin it for himself by letting others interfere with his happiness at that particular moment. They hadn’t discussed money on the phone, but Brayden felt reasonably certain that it would give him enough to survive, and more importantly, to continue with his studies. Brayden turned a corner, and he saw Tatiana, talking with someone. As he approached, he saw who it was. It was Álvaro. Brayden stopped. He looked at the two of them for a moment, Tatiana turned and looked at Brayden. She waved. Brayden continued walking and as he did, he heard Álvaro’s mocking laughter to something Tatiana no doubt had said.

   The door to the morphology office was open, and Brayden walked in, making his way past some first years to the back room. It was empty, except for the occasional presence of Monsieur Girard, who walked in, and grabbed various osseous specimens to use as study aids for the first years. Brayden walked to the glass enclosed bookcase in the corner, hurriedly scanned the books, until finding the one he was looking for, l’Anatomie Artistique by Richer, and took the large volume and sat down to read. He had just recently reviewed the muscles of the lower leg, and now opened up the large, grey hardcover book to the muscles of the thigh and biceps femoris. The students in the corridor emptied, talking away as they walked into the growing darkness of the late afternoon, and Brayden was once again alone. Didier had given him the honour of a key, which he was to share with no one, and this fact gave him confidence to read as long as his eyes had strength.

   Two hours passed. His initial enthusiasm subsiding, and wearied by the silence in the office as the day began to grow dark, and the sight of Tatiana with Álvaro on the École grounds, Brayden leaned back in his chair, and looked around the room. He yawned. He closed the book, and placed his head down over it, onto his folded hands. He closed his eyes, and he began to build fanciful clouds in the sky of his mind: about what the work would be like that weekend; what the atelier would look like; who he would be working with; what sorts of things they would talk about as they worked; what galleries would be affiliated with the atelier, and other myriad nonsensities. He drifted, his mind slipping silently between the world of chimeras and the world of now. 

    He was awoken by the sound of rain falling from outside, and then a pen dropping, and a curse in French. Bringing his head up, Brayden saw Didier’s grey trousers, more specifically his behind, right in his face, as Didier leaned over to pick up the pen he had dropped. He had slipped into the office without waking Brayden, and as Didier looked over the dark floor with his hand, was unaware that Brayden had re-awoken. Looking down, Brayden said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got it.” Brayden leaned down, a few inches from where Didier’s spotted and wrinkled hand was searching, and grabbed his fist around the metal pen. Didier started slightly, “I’m so sorry, did I wake you?”

    Brayden smiled, “No, no. I was just resting for several moments.” Brayden got up, making his way to the same bookcase as before, and removed another book, this one by the American anatomist George Bridgeman, and began to turn to the pages he was looking for, to cross reference with what he had become drowsy with in the other book. It was also an effort to appear busy, for the sake of the morphology professor.

    Didier sat down in the antique wood office chair across the table from Brayden. “So how are your preparations coming along. You know, the demonstration is quickly approaching.”

   “They’re going well. Last week I reviewed the muscles of the back and torso, and this afternoon I’m—” 

   “That’s excellent. I have no doubt you’ll be well prepared,” Didier winced, as if he was doing something painful under the desk, continuing, “Don’t forget to also make use of the blackboards in the Amphithéâtre down there,” Didier pointed to the doorway, at the opposite side of the room to the corridor, which led to the Amphithéâtre.

   Brayden looked over his shoulder. “Well, yes, I had thought about that, but I wasn’t sure if I had the permission.”

   “Brayden, Brayden. You are a student at the school. You technically have the same rights as any of the others.”

   “You should mention that to the casting atelier head.”

   Didier laughed, “Oh really?”

   “Yes, the wait to cast a piece is considerably long, especially if you are a foreign student.”

   “I’m sorry to hear that. Then I guess it is fair to say that….no democracy is perfect,” Didier said. Brayden laughed, recognizing the quip. Didier smiled, and massaged his foot that he had taken out of its shoe. 

   “What did you do?” Brayden said. 

   Didier looked at him, “What? Oh, to the foot you mean? I think I twisted it lightly on one of those infernal stones in the courtyard.”

   “I’m sorry to hear that.”

   “Yes, I got out of my car, and as I stood, the shoe slipped and, well, voilà,” he said, displaying his foot with his hand. “Has that been happening often lately.”

   “More and more every year, I’m afraid. Usually when it rains. The precipitation makes the stones very slippery. The diesel exhaust that settles over it just makes it worse. But, it will only be a few more years for me here, and then Monsieur Girard will be taking my place as head of the department.”

   “It’s quite an honour, I guess.”

   “Yes, it is. He deserves it though. He has been industrious, loyal, tireless, and…..persistent.”

   “Not in that order of course,” Brayden said. Didier smiled politely, and Brayden sensed he was overreaching. 

   “I know someone who is also rather…persistent,” Brayden said, without really knowing to what he was referring. It was an effort to alter the line of discussion.

   “Oh really? And who is that.”

   “My girlfriend.”

   “Ah, yes. Someone told me you had one. Something about an architecture student, non?”

   “Yes.”

   “I’ve heard she is rather, outgoing?”

   “Yes, I suppose she is, a bit.”

  “One needs to be careful with women of that sort.”

   “Yeah, I’m beginning to appreciate the fact,” Brayden reddened. Looking around the room, he desperately sought to find something else to talk about but couldn’t find anything. He spotted a small paperback, worn, resting on top of the others. Le Bouddhisme: Analyses et Explications by a French author, Benoit Glisseman.

   “Interesting book, Monsieur Didier, I can’t say I know much about Buddhism.”

   “What do you mean?” Didier said distractedly. He looked to where Brayden was staring, “Oh, that. That’s not mine. It belongs to another of the students who will be taking part in the demonstration with you next month.” Didier stopped massaging his foot. “A charming young lady, a first year. You’d like her: tall, elegant, and quite a beautiful specimen of anatomical perfection.”

   “You mean she has a beautiful body.”

   “Well actually, I was referring to her eyes, but she has that too. She has an interest in esoterism, among other pursuits. You know women of her age, they are forever searching, spinning, like girouettes—never stopping until they are rusted.” Brayden looked confused. Didier stopped and said, with a thick accent, “Wessor-vanes?” 

   Brayden nodded. Didier looked relieved, and continued. “She was speaking to me about it the other day—Buddhism. I thought at that time that it was rather fascinating, this business of emptiness.”

   “Emptiness?”

   “Yes. It’s a concept. A belief. Well, actually, from what I could gather, it goes a bit beyond a belief, it’s more of a subject that binds the entire religion together. The awareness of it, the Buddhists call it ‘suchness’.”

   “You seem to know a little bit more about it than you are letting on.”

   “Well, after she left the book, I read some of it. That’s all. It’s really quite simple, and the epithet ‘emptiness’ seems to me to be a bit misleading. The belief is defined by a faith in the interconnectedness of all phenomena.” Didier looked about the room, until his eyes fell on the very chair he was sitting on. Sitting up, and half-limping to lean against the table, he pointed to it and continued, “For example, this chair. It is called a chair, and that exists as a series of symbols, letters, that we have put together as a people to signify this chair. But in looking closely at it, the identity of it begins to disappear—it’s autonomous nature, as distinct and independent, begins to elude us. This chair, is in fact a piece, or pieces of wood, that was originally part of a tree. It has been milled and shaped, joined with bolts and screws, finished with lacquer, and is dependent on being called a chair by the floor that it rests on, and by the necessity of someone sitting in it. To another society, it might have been turned upside down and used as some sort of sacrificial altar, or maybe as a deity, who knows? That is what makes a chair. As an identity, its ‘chairness’ disappears completely. What constitutes a chair is all the myriad elements combined together, interconnected, that create the chair we see. As a self-sufficient, independent entity, it doesn’t exist. Its existence is dependent on all of the processes I just mentioned. Interesting, isn’t it? So, in a sense, one could say that this is not a chair.”

   Brayden was silent. Didier looked at him, recognizing the glazed look, he returned to sitting in the chair and said, “Another example: You are Brayden. Correct? You were born by the coupling of your mother and father. In order for you to grow, you needed food, and nurturing, and water. You depend for your continued survival on the gravity that holds you to this planet, and on the air that we all breathe—in addition to the other things I just mentioned. So, as an autonomous entity, free from all dependence, where is your being?”

   “I don’t…exist?” Brayden said.

   “Precisely. Well, I must correct myself here. You exist, but not in the way that you may think you do.”

    Brayden paused. “And you learned all of this from that small book.”

   “That, and talking to Claire, yesterday evening,” Didier smiled, with a hint of self-indulgence. “She’s really quite intelligent for a nineteen-year-old.”   

   “She’s the student you spoke of. Aren’t you a little old for her?”

   “Watch your impudence, young man. I may be old, but I’m not blind.”

   Brayden thought of the lost pen. “My apologies.” He paused, letting the moment pass before saying, “I’d like to meet her, this Claire.”

   “Oh, you’ll meet her. She’ll be in on Monday. Arrive around eight am, sharp, and you’ll have your chance.” Didier grinned broadly and then said absentmindedly, “As a matter of fact, she also gave me this…” He leaned forward, grabbing his notes that lay under some books. Lying between some of the pages, he loosened a piece of what looked like watercolour paper. “Look.”

  Brayden held out his hand, looked down, and then began to feel a quickening in his pulse. It was the black ink drawing, of Monsieur Didier. The one he had seen drawn at the morphology lecture before Noël. “It’s not a bad resemblance, don’t you think?” Didier said.

  Brayden looked up, “So, you said eight o’clock?”

  Didier leaned forward, placing one hand on his waist. “Yes. So?...Any questions?”

*

   Brayden, due to the watch that he didn’t have, missed his appointment, with Destiny.

   “It’s not normal for you to carry on like that in front of the whole world! It ceases to be flirtation! It becomes a show!” Brayden said, standing over Tatiana. “Everyone knows you live with me, for God’s sake. Don’t you think it makes me feel bad to see you do it? I mean, of all people,” he slumped onto the bed.

   “You’re so stupid. You’re not even aware how much! I have the right to talk to whomever I like! If you don’t like it, leave me the fuck alone!”

   “No! I won’t leave you alone. I don’t give a shit what you think. Look! We live together. We eat together. We sleep together. So what makes you think you can carry on like that.”

   “I told you! I have a boyfriend in Germany.”

   “Then why were you flirting so much with Álvaro? Well? Fuck off!” he said, walking to the other side of the room. “I wasn’t flirting with him! I was talking.”

   “Oh really, what about?”

   “That’s none of your business!” Tatiana screamed and quickly went to the bathroom and grabbed a razor from the shelf. She walked back into the main room, turned, and sat down in the chair next to the bed.

    “What are you doing?” Brayden said, alarmed.

   Very quietly and with an air of nonchalance, she quietly arranged herself in the chair with her hands up as if she were about to thread a needle. Slowly and with exactness she dug the tip of the razor blade into the flesh of the back of her wrist. Evenly and without an ounce of pain in her face, she slowly drew the blade across the top of her hand. This being done, she began again, this time drawing another gauge, just beneath the previous one.

   “But. You’re crazy!” Brayden said.

   “Oh. It’s so beautiful,” she said quietly, as a small strand of ruby red blood came to the surface and ran down her wrist. 

   The spectacle went on, Brayden staring over her, as she drew more lines into her flesh. Finally he said, “Listen. I’m sorry. Don’t be like that. I’m sorry. Please don’t do that.”

   She looked at him through the corner of her eye. He nervously sat down on the bed, gripping the metal bed frame as tight as he could. She stopped.

  Silence shed to the floor like a snakeskin. Brayden picked himself up off the bed. “I’m leaving now. Can I trust you to keep your flirtations to yourself for two hours?”

  Tatiana was silent, and he thought he caught the slightest smile across her face.

  He walked out. What had he just experienced? A cry for help? Or was it something else. He brushed his hair with his hand. Folly is contagious, he said to himself. He took the RER to his stop, some forty minutes outside of the Centre-Ville. He felt frayed at the edges, raw. By the time he got there, he didn’t feel quite as hopeless as he had with Tatiana. The distance between them was soothing, like the feeling of putting distance between oneself and a concentration camp memorial, or the feeling of finally being able to leave a hospital waiting room, and he walked into the large industrial building, hopeful. 

    He took the large freight elevator to the sixth floor, looking up as he did through the black metal bars, the floors getting closer, overtaking the elevator, and falling down past it into the darkness below him. He became fixated on the skylight at the top of the elevator shaft almost not noticing that the elevator had stopped. Sliding the metal gate, he stepped out and walked down the hallway. It was dark and a shape was moving in the corner near the window until Brayden realized it was a man. The door was ajar, and Brayden pushed it inwards. A man at a desk, with young and curly black hair sat shuffling through some papers. He had a polo shirt on and when he saw Brayden, he said hello in English.

   “Bonjour,” Brayden said.

   “It’s OK, you don’t have to talk French here. I’m American.” He extended his hand to Brayden as he stood behind the desk. It was warm, and wet, “I’m Bob.”  Bob took Brayden into the other room opposite the desk, and sat down.

   “So Monsieur Levecque is in the back. If you would, stay here for a few moments and I’ll tell him you’re here.” Bob walked out. Brayden glanced around the room. He saw a bowl of sweets on the desk, the desk unkempt, with small nonsensical clay shapes scattered about. He looked up to a calendar on the wall behind the desk. Looking more closely, he saw that it was a photo from Disneyland, of a large space ride, or something. Right next to this, mounted on the wall was what looked like a fiberglass reproduction of a Leonardo Da Vinci horse’s head, replete with flaring nostrils and wild eyes, as if it was a morsel from some larger rearing statue, the head of which had been moved to the office for safe keeping.

  Levecque walked in. He was in his trench coat, as before, but it was covered with parts of clay and what looked like scrim—the fibrous, yellow grass used to reinforce moulds and casts. He began in English first, and later in his native French as he had difficulty framing his words in English.

   “Brayden. So nice of you to make ze treep here out of short notesse.”

   “Oh, it’s nothing, really.”

   Levecque sat in his chair and leaned back. “So,” he scratched his forearm self-consciously, “why don’t you tell me how someone with your ability managed to create such a remarkable study of Dante.”

   “You mean my education?”

   “Yes, go ahead. Tell me.”

   “I was a student at the University of New Hampshire for a year, I dropped out,” he said, “and gained admittance to the studio of a, Mister Antonio Rossini.” Brayden lied.

   “Oh really? An Italian.”

   “No. He was Jewish-American. He changed his surname to match his Italian first name.”

   “How odd.” Levecque leaned forward, “Would you like a sweet?” he said, offering him a small bowl of candies.

   “Why, yes. I’ll have one. Thank you.” Brayden said, and he continued talking, about his acceptance to the École, his studies in an open atelier on the left bank, his trips to the morphology Amphithéâtre, as he unwrapped the candy and put it in his mouth. Levecque stood with his hands together, as Brayden sometimes would as a child, with a mirror, creating humping spiders on the surface of the glass. The sweet was orange and chocolate flavoured Brayden thought, and he continued talking as he placed the candy in his left cheek, letting it slowly dissolve. When he had finished, Levecque leaned forward, “Well I think you’ve done very well for yourself as a foreign student here in France. You know, the French can sometimes be rather exclusivist,” He raised his eyebrows, puffing his cheeks.

   “Yes.”

   “Well, I have to tell you that after seeing your bust, I only asked you about your experience as a formality. Bob and I have been managing the atelier for fifteen months now, on our own, seeing that guests are taken care of, keeping the atelier in order, etcetera. Now, I am willing to offer you a position as a second apprentice to me. How does that sound?”    “Well, what sort of work do you do.”

   Levecque stood up, walked to the door and closed it. “We’re working on a very secretive project. It comes from very high up. I wish I could tell you more, but unfortunately, I can’t tell you anything until we sign the paperwork and I give you a non-disclosure agreement.”

   “A non-what? I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

   “It’s a form to guarantee the privacy of the project. It’s a very large project, I assure you. If you were to come on board, it would give you about five hundred francs a week? And you would most certainly be guaranteed work through the summer. So, is there anything I can tell you before we sign the papers?”

   Brayden thought for a moment, and then said, pointing, “What is the calendar about there? Levecque turned, and started, “Oh. That’s nothing. A gift to the atelier from an American patron.” He walked over and ripped it off the wall. Brayden thought for a moment, and briefly ruminated that he should ask who Monsieur Chevalier is—as he had heard no mention of him since his initial conversation the day before. Brayden shrugged his shoulders; it’s all about the money. Two thousand francs a month would really help him out, and he thought again for a second—which was all he really needed—and said, “Alright. I’ll do it.”

  Levecque smiled, and touched Brayden lightly on the shoulder, rubbing it gently. He then walked to the file cabinet behind the desk. Extracting two forms, he placed them side-by-side in front of Brayden. He showed Brayden where to sign, who signed, and then the two forms disappeared with Levecque. Several moments later, he re-entered, passed one of the forms for Brayden to keep, and said that he would call him later that afternoon with more details about his first day tomorrow, a Sunday, and Brayden left. He had finished sucking on the candy at this point, and he lamented the fact that he couldn’t have another as the freight elevator descended. Brayden realized, as he walked out of the building that he should have asked Levecque or Bob where he could get a sandwich, before abandoning the idea as he walked down the street, turning left and descending down into the RER entryway where he had come from just half an hour before. Two elderly women were cooking from a makeshift grill on the stairs. It reminded Brayden of photographs of nineteenth century Russian serfs he had seen in a Paris photo gallery the year before, and then Brayden passed though the gated entryway, and began the long walk back through the labyrinthine station, making his way home.

  When he had returned to his flat, he was alone. Tatiana had disappeared as she often would, when she knew that Brayden was to arrive. Brayden opened the small box fridge in the kitchen. It was empty, but there was some milk, so he poured a small glass for himself, walked to the bookshelf, helped himself to the book he had bought on Montaigne, and read for the rest of the afternoon. The room began to darken, the words on his pages slowly growing more and more faint, like a slow Hollywood fade out, or like the last moment of consciousness before passing out, and the yellow and orange lights from the street below began to lighten up the small ceiling, until it felt to Brayden that he was at the bottom of a dark ocean, watching the blurred images of life frolic above. He fell asleep to the pleasant sound of a carousel at the junction of the two streets down below, its refrain repeated again and again, later he heard a hand organist broodingly dance up and down the white and black keys at the other side of the street, and later, he heard the sounds of young revellers walk beneath the building, a glass bottle breaking, the sound of a woman laughing, and then a jubilant scream of excitement, until the calm was fractured by the red blinking display and the sharp ring of the modern black phone.

*

  The Sunday, he arrived at ten am as foreseen, was handed a broom by Bob, and Brayden spent the next hour sweeping up the atelier. During that time the two young men talked. Brayden learned that Bob hadn’t been entirely truthful the day before when he had said he was American. As Bob devoured a saucisson, that he cut large chunks from with his thumb and knife, Brayden learned that Bob was half Gypsy—half-gitane. His mother was from New York, had met his father in Central Park where Bob was conceived, had returned to France together, gave birth to Bob, travelled through large areas of Spain, until finally begging for money in Cordoba, starving against the yellow stone walls of the Alhambra, a fight in a bar, before finally settling in Milwaukee with his mother’s mother—Bob’s words—when he was eight. By the time he had finished talking, Brayden had dumped the final tray full of dust, clay and scrim into a waste bin, and he sat briefly, at the corner of a large tarpaulin covered armature.

   “You’d better not sit there,” Bob exclaimed. “Well, what I mean is that Levecque will be furious if he sees you there. That’s his latest sculpture.” Brayden sat up quickly, apologized, and Bob said it was nothing. It would take him a few weeks to get used to the way things are done here, Bob said. He added, “Say, would you like to see them?”

   “See what? You mean the sculptures?” Brayden shrugged his shoulders, “Yeah sure. I mean, if I’m going to be working here anyway, I suppose I should see them at some point.” Brayden said this as he glanced the room, looking at five tarpaulin-covered sculptures, all larger-than-life size. He wasn’t as curious as he had been. Upon studying their shapes while cleaning up and listening to Bob, he thought that he had already solved the mystery of their purpose. As he looked at them, he began to guess what they were most probably for. Numerous times, Brayden had seen similar shaped sculptures of male or female forms, called atlantes or caryatids respectively, used to reinforce, or ornament the tops of columns in buildings throughout Europe. Obviously, these sculptures had a similar objective. The only thing that remained a mystery was whether the sculptures were to be abstract, expressionistic, surreal, etcetera. Of this, Brayden held much hope that he would finally, if he played his cards right, have an opportunity to impress Levecque with his abilities, and he hoped, as Bob finished eating, that they would be some sort of representational effort. He knew that it would be such a project that he could really cut his teeth on. Briefly, Brayden’s imagination expanded, and he thought of his own atelier, his own workers, and money to build an atelier and reputation like this one.

   Bob finished eating his piece of meat, got up and walked to the first sculpture stand, near the door. With a sudden pull, the tarpaulin fell, and then he moved to the other four, tugging at them each in turn—the floor littered with the sack cloths—as the two young men stood looking at the denuded sculptures. They appeared to be in brown oil-based clay, common for quick, efficient work in a high production atelier. Brayden stood. What he saw were five—well, actually four and a half—Seven Dwarfs. Brayden recognized Grumpy, he recognized Sleepy, Dopey, and what appeared to be either Bashful or Doc, but he wasn’t sure.

   “Is that Bashful?” Brayden pointed to the seven-foot sculpture that he had been sitting on. The face was obscured, as it was recently worked up with clay.

   “No, no, Sneezy. You see? With the hand up like that, at the nose,” Bob mimicked the sculpture, letting out a fake sneeze.    “Wow. I really don’t know what to say,” Brayden said.

   “Yes, they’re wonderful aren’t they.”

   Brayden added, “So how, ahh, how many are you doing?”

   “Well, once we complete the seven, we can make as many casts as necessary. They’re going to be cast in fiberglass, all twenty-eight of them, so that they can be painted afterwards.”

   “Twenty-eight. Oh, so you’re going to paint them, too?”

   “Yep. Look over here. Here are the paints already,” Bob pointed to the wall of tin cans in the corner. Brayden put his hands through his hair. Each can was affixed with a bright blue logo that said EuroDisney, and below, colours like Mickey Mouse Red, Goofy Yellow, Snow White White, Donald Duck Blue, and Pinocchio Brown. 

    Bob smiled, “Yeah, it’s kind of overwhelming isn’t it?”

    Brayden nodded, he felt the leg he put his weight on buckle. He corrected his stance. “The previous sculptor, the one who had to leave—where was he from?”

    Bob said, “He was American too. The boss thinks having American workers pleases the client.”

   “Why did he have to leave, the American?”  

   “Cancer.” There was a long pause.

  “And that is, the client?” Brayden stammered.

   “What?”

   “The client is who exactly?” Brayden said, correcting himself.

   “EuroDisney. You see, there are small stickers—”

   “Yeah, yeah, I saw them.”

   “Well anyway, we have to lay out the blocks of clay for tomorrow. We’ll set them right next to the microwave, over there, and then next week you can do it yourself.”

12

   Thierry pushed the shutter button. The viewfinder went black for a moment, and then opened once more, revealing Agnès’ frame sitting on the bed, her breasts heaving in and out with recent excitement. Her face flush from the late Spring heat, and from something else. She had just finished having her photograph taken, away in the corner of the small apartment, doing a handstand. They had just had sex. He knew what she was doing, how could he not? But he wasn’t in the mood to object; he even liked the idea.

   The two now sat naked, across from one another. Thierry with camera in the leather chair beside the bed, Agnès sitting high, near the cushions. They were in Agnès’ apartment this time, and they thought they were happy. 

   Thierry had forgotten how good Agnès was—how well she could navigate her way around a man’s body; like an archaeologist, slowly and carefully uncovering the remains of an ancient dwelling. Tenderly separating the earth from brick, uncovering long forgotten stone tools used for survival, but long since forgotten. He liked the surface of her fingers as they caressed his chest, lightly working their way over his penis, only to envelope it with her wet tongue and mouth. They’d had sex many times since the first instance a month ago, in Normandy, and the ritual was developing of spending the weekend afternoons together. 

  Agnès’ body had matured, Thierry thought, becoming more angular, and his had grown flabbier, with tension running along his developed legs and back, like an old rope, or maybe this was just the way he felt. But they had returned to each other’s bodies like one returns to a happy place once visited, but long since faded from the mind. They were drunk with the newness of what once was old, and with the rediscovery of it—the nostalgia. 

   Agnès had suggested it, the photos. She thought that the re-wiring of Thierry’s brain—seeking new neural pathways, as she put it—by seeing objects of love and beauty in the viewfinder of his camera, instead of horror, would prove to be therapeutic, healing. He wasn’t sure that it was working, as the nightmares had only subdued slightly, and he was developing an unhealthy addiction to marijuana. Agnès knew nothing of this of course.

    She sat, enjoying the camera on her, as she posed again. She reclined, her waist high in the air on her side, like a warm and tender hilltop; her torso and head flat against the bed, flowing down into a valley; the concavity of her shoulders, a crevice. Soon, Thierry was aroused again, and they had sex once more. Afterwards, and feeling the warm sun’s rays leaking through the shutters, Agnès left the bed and walked to open them. She sat down at the small table next to the window, and poured herself another glass of the bottled Perrigrino that was half empty. Thierry raised himself up, putting the pillow between his shoulder and his arm and looked at her for a long time. He watched the shadows under her eyes, which she had closed as the sun warmed her face and body.

  “You shouldn’t stand so close to the window, it’s almost rush hour down there.”

  “Ahh. I couldn’t care less. If I want to bathe naked in my proper house in front of my proper window, I’ll do it.” She smiled at him, holding her hand up to her brow to better see him. “Besides, I want to have a healthy complexion before your little talk about the ‘tribal conflict’ in Rwanda.”

  “You’re so beautiful there,” Thierry said, only to be interrupted by a whistle from down in the street. Agnès looked down, giving the stranger the finger and half closed the window shutter again. Agnès looked at Thierry and they laughed.

  “What happened with the last test?” Thierry said, as Agnès stretched her two feet up on the bed. “Negative.” she said, and then added that she didn’t want to talk about this right now, and she asked about the slide lecture again. She wanted to know if it was really something he wanted to put himself through, so soon after returning from Rwanda, and with the nightmares and such. “It’s a very good thing for my career all the same,” he said.

  “When did you drop off the slides?”

  “Yesterday afternoon.”

   “Did you?....,” Agnès said.

   “Yes.”

   Agnès looked relieved. She walked over, and put her arms around him. “Bravo, mon amour.” She kissed him. She was referring to images that Thierry had placed into the slide tray that hadn’t been selected by Antoine two days ago. They would probably be taken out, he was sure, but he felt he needed to at least make the statement that he was unwilling to submit completely to the leash he had been placed into.

   “There will be consequences,” Thierry said, not completely understanding himself what consequences he was referring to. He would lose his client, Le Monde, but there were other newspapers: Le Canard Enchainé, L’express, La Liberation. The thought satisfied him. He would surely receive a bounce in his reputation after the slideshow—the perfect time to go looking for other clients— but the final words from that character Mallamé still rung in his ear. Who did he really take himself for anyway? As he looked at Agnès, her face close to his, he felt that whatever Mallamé was alluding to with his remarks about Agnès, their bond was very solid right now. There was really nothing he could do to touch Thierry, he thought. He kissed Agnès on the forehead.

   “Good. I have to get ready to meet someone in an hour,” he said, and got up off the bed to dress.

  Agnès moved to the window and lit a cigarette, sipping the last of the water as she gazed out the window. As Thierry put his pants on, he wondered what she was looking at. Where her mind was. He wondered if she was suddenly upset that they had to part, maybe about the test results. He looked at her figure, her slender back, the broad shoulders that recently reminded him of the skin tight bicyclist outfit she wore last week, the way it accented her curved but slender frame, the lines of the one-piece suit adding particular strength to her shoulders, making them almost seem masculine and hard. As they drove to the coast and biked the length of the southern Bordeaux coast, he remembered the long stretch of sand dunes they arrived at and traversed after a lunch in a small café down the road. He remembered the eyes of the locals on her body. Thierry placed his shirt over his head, looked at her thin but broad hips, transfixed as she was at the window, her bottom ending at the gluteal fold, before her thin brown legs covered with transparent hairs (She hardly ever shaved them and didn’t need to) met at her inner thigh. They radiated with the sun on them, refracting the light in the unique way that women’s body hair does, creating a faint glow over the surface of the leg, like a halo. She was a find. He knew this now.

“Thierry, come and have a look,” Agnès said, without moving from the window.

  “What. What is it?” Thierry said, distracted.

  “Really. Come and have a look.”

   Thierry straightened his shirt and walked behind Agnès. He looked out the window. “Ahh! La vache!” Thierry said, and moved quickly to the side chair and picked up his camera. He asked Agnès to step away from the window, which she did reluctantly, and he raised the camera up to his face. 

Thierry felt a hand over his lens, and removing his face from behind the camera, Agnès looked sad and said, “Don’t Thierry. It’s indecent.” He looked at her for a long moment after that, and removed her hand from the camera. He again raised the camera to his eye. Through the view-finder, he manually adjusted the aperture to the light, making his best guess without a light meter, focused the blurred image, and pushed the button.

*

   The tailfins to the many passenger jets that he saw through the tall windows, looked to him like the many bodies of sharks, loitering amongst the reefs, ready at any moment to devour the small fish that loitered as well, amongst the multi-coloured coral. In the crevices, niches, and dark corners of the low-tide reef, waiting for the timid fish to come within range. At least, this was what Brayden was thinking at that particular moment. The comparison of a reef to an airport appealed to him. Like a reef, an airport is a station, a place of the joining of land (stable, solid, unmoving) with the ocean (the moving, the tumultuous—le voyage). 

   Reefing, Brayden also knew, from his father, was the action of trimming sails on a  boat—to loan to it stability, and balance, in rough seas; like a middle way, the proverbial ‘sweet spot’, between the state of motion and un-motion. The comparison comforted him, and he waded into the warmth of this particular bright blue, shimmering thought.

   The phone rang in his apartment two days ago. Brayden reluctantly picked up. “Hello. Brayden?” Sébastien’s voice, chimed irreverently on the receiver.

   “Yes, it’s me.”

   “What’s going on? You haven’t been coming to the École for several days. The morphology professors have been looking for you, my friend. Quelque chose ne va pas?”

   “I’m doing fine. I’ve been preparing for the épreuves Sébastien. I don’t think there is much for me to talk about right now.”

   “What?”

   “Yes. I’ve been studying for two days. I can’t keep up with the lectures, I can’t fathom any of what I’m studying, it’s hopeless. In any case…”

   “That’s ridiculous! Come with me. I’m going to a café in the Sixth Arrondissement.” Brayden thought about it.

   “OK. OK. I’ll see you in a half hour in front of the school. Is that alright?”

   “Yeah. Yeah. That’s fine. See you soon,” Brayden said and hung up the phone. He walked to a side table, put his cigarettes in his pant pocket, and grabbed his coat, making his way to the door.

    Brayden walked towards the entrance to the school. It was about two thirty and he checked the time by taking a more than passing glance at the wall of a café nearby.

   “Et te voila!”

  Brayden looked up to see Sébastien walking towards him. “Listen. Let’s go have a drink at the Café des Artists,” he said.

  Brayden agreed. They crossed the street and made their way to the entrance of the café. It had a black façade with bold gold letters. Brayden knew of this café, having had several drinks there with Criquet earlier in the year. They entered through a door that faced a small side street that connected to Rue Bonaparte and made their way inside. The air was stained with a light fog of cigarette smoke and wreaked of spirits as they passed a few tables to get to the back wall. Sébastien said salut to several of the students who sat on either side of them at black tables as they walked, noisily bumping the chairs that cluttered the room as they did. Sébastien finally collapsed in a chair facing the café against the far stuccoed wall.

   “So, Brayden. We haven’t seen each other for a few weeks.”

   “Yes, that’s a shame,” he said. The waiter arrived at the table.

   “Two glasses of red wine, s’il te plait.” Sébastien said, looking up at him. The waiter walked away.

   “Really. What is all the nonsense about failing the épreuves?”

   “As I told you on the telephone, I’ve really tired of it all Sébastien, that’s all.”

   “But, what will happen to you if you return to the United States like this?”

   “I will probably be mortified by some old friends, that’s all. In any case, the situation at the school doesn’t sit well with me.”

   “Well then, they aren’t very good friends if they behave like that! What situation are you talking about?”

   “Don’t be so stupid, please Sébastien.” Brayden said scornfully. “You know just as well as I that I have never been that popular with the students or the professors.”

   “But, you shouldn’t concern yourself with that!”

   Sébastien was right, but Brayden couldn’t see himself returning to a school in which he had become so thoroughly demoralized. It had become a prison for him.

   “For you, it’s different.” He continued, “You’re French. You’re accepted no matter what you do, but for the foreign students, it’s different. I should never have come to the École.”

   “Well. Now you’re speaking like a small child.” Sébastien said, crossly, and continued, “There are a lot of foreign students who are second or third years who mix well with the others.”

   Brayden saw that he was not going to be given any rope by Sébastien, so he gave in and sat opposite him in silence for several moments.

   “How’re things with Tatiana?” Sébastien finally said after taking along draw on his wine glass.

   “She is driving me crazy.”

   Sébastien laughed. “Well, that wouldn’t surprise me.”

   “You know that she loves you, Brayden,” Sébastien said with a smile.

   “That would surprise me.” Brayden said and Sébastien laughed once more. Brayden’s mind immediately recalled seeing Dopey from the Chevalier-Levecque atelier.

   “Listen!...”Sébastien said loudly, “There are other girls! Only the day before yesterday, I saw two nanas…”

   “I don’t want to listen to it—”

   “…and one of them had these beautiful tits. They were like these two, huge melons…”

   “I don’t want to hear it, Sébastien!”

   “Well, if you are going to be like that!...” He gesticulated with both hands in the air.

   “You know Brayden, really. I don’t understand you. You come to France. You are accepted to one of the biggest schools in France and you walk and breath like a sort of ghost.” He paused.  “What is wrong with you?” he finally said, exasperated.

   “I don’t know what you are looking for,” Sébastien said quietly. Brayden was silent.

   “Good. As for me, I’m leaving,” he said, looking from side to side as he slapped his thighs and got up. “I hear Tatiana is free anyway,” he laughed, “Anyway Tatiana.”

   Brayden got up and placed a few francs on the table. At the front of the café, Sébastien paused and said, “Here is my brother’s address. If, one day you return, call me.”

   “If I need your address Sébastien, I’ll look for it in the trash.” Sébastien looked at him for a beat, he wanted to take a swing at Brayden and then, pausing defiantly, he walked off. Brayden turned and walked down the opposite direction.

   “Everyone tells me she sucks well, you know?”

   Brayden stopped and turned. Sébastien continued. “Yes, she sucks well and it’s all your fault— you disgrace!” Sébastien laughed. “Your first mistake was leaving with Adele to go to Lille. You shouldn’t have taken your chances on the German putain you left behind.” Sébastien made a circle with his two index fingers in the air. “You should have found a nice, round-faced American girl with a large bottom to fuck.” Sébastien glared at him.

   “Yes, I know,” Brayden said and walked away. Sébastien threw his hands in the air and left, in the opposite direction. Brayden walked for several miles and took refuge in a bar on the right bank. He wasn’t sure which Arrondissement he was in, but he was almost certain it was somewhere in the eleventh, maybe a few dozen blocks from the Bastille as he could faintly hear the car noise of a busy roundabout.

   He drank for the rest of the day and finally collapsed on a bench overlooking the Eiffel Tower, with parts of Les Invalides snatching through the trees, and it grew dark. Brayden had given up on watches since the beginning of his twelfth-grade year in high school, but he was relatively certain the time must have been close to eleven. Eventually, he sat up off the bench once more and saw a body descending from the six-floor building across the street. It perched delicately on a bicycle railing and spread wide its wings, the wings of a condor or albatross someone might have said, but Brayden was too drunk to notice. Brayden’s eyes finally settled through the haze of intoxication that grinded behind his eyes, and he recognized the face of birdman amidst the wings that grew out of the place where his father’s arms would have been. 

   “Hi dad,” he said.

   “Hello son,” The creature said.

   “Nice wings.”

   “Thanks. Can I sit down?”

    Brayden took the flowers that he had bought upon leaving the bar and moved them to the other side of the bench. Drunk, he had considered reconciling with Tatiana at about eight o’clock that evening. The apparition sat down next to Brayden. “What a view,” It said and exhaled.

   “Yeah, it’s really something,” Brayden said.

   “The sun will be up soon. You should get some sleep.”

   “I don’t really care anymore.”

   “Well, you should. You never know what might be around the corner. Might be a beautiful day. What’s troubling you?”

   “I don’t know dad. It seems like every time I get close to something, something, something I care about, the essence of something, it slips through my fingers. I’ve been wandering around France for three years now, and I don’t feel any better, or any worse from it. My life’s a mess though dad. Nothing has turned out the way I’d planned.”

   “Well then, maybe you should stop planning.”

    Brayden looked at him. “You have to plan your life out.”

   “For what? You’ll be dead soon. Look, every single person on this planet right now, everyone, will be dead in one hundred years. One hundred twenty, tops.”

   “Is that why you’re here, to portend the Apocalypse?”

   “What!? No. There are others who will do that. No, I’ve come to talk to you, that’s all. Tell me, Brayden, you’re on the other side of the planet, you’ve dumped the girl you love, your school plans are in ruins, and you’re sitting here talking to a ghost with enormous wings. What do you think can be learned from all this?”

   “I think I’m losing my mind.”

   “That’s probably true, but that doesn’t tell me what you’ve learned.”

   “I’ve learned that the world is a chaotic, dark place, without any sort of meaning, or hope. We all sit here on this globe, as nuclear weapons spread from superpower to smaller power to individuals, as the ones’ who choose to ignore this, indulge in their selfish desires, like animals, like fools on a ship, slowly sinking into a black morass of goo, strumming our band instruments as the ship slowly sinks, and after that, after everyone drowns, there’s nothing. No saviour, no divine plan, no hope. An ugly end to an ugly accident called humanity.”

   “Geez, that’s dark.”

   “Well, you asked me what I’ve learned.”

   “Yeah, I guess I did. Tell me, if what you say is true, and we are all just aimlessly frolicking aboard a sinking ship, what is there to do then, but to be a part of it.”  

   “I’m not sure I follow you. Is that a question?”

   “Sort of.”

   “If we are doomed to be with one another on this ship of fools, how can we make things easier for ourselves? How can we possibly endure the madness, the heartbreak, and sheer senselessness of it all?”

   Brayden looked at the ghost. “Build a fortress, climb inside, and lock the door.”

   “No, Brayden. Love one another.”

   “You can’t be serious,” Brayden said.

   “I’m dead serious. Don’t judge, that’s the quickest way downstairs.”

   “What you mean there is a place down there?”

   “Well, not per se, but it exists, I can assure you.”

   “So then, what’s the best way to avoid, this place, down there, wherever it is? After all, we’re all going to die anyway.”

   “Simple: Love, and don’t judge; accept others; be good to others; put the happiness of others before your own happiness. And don’t expect so much from life. Follow this advice, and regardless of where or what situation you find yourself in, you may be on a ship of fools, but you won’t be one, and that is what is called beauty.”

   “Beauty. Is that the goal?”

   “It’s more of a by-product, I would say.”

   “A by-product of what?”

   “Humanity is drifting on a thick black tide of desire and strong emotion. It’s the sea that this ship of fools floats on, and its current guides the boat, dictates what direction it goes. These are the poisons that hold everyone in their grip: all euphoria, terror, selfishness, greed, sorrow, loss, and evil spring from their depths. If you desire less, if you grasp less, you will be free. Your mortal body will still be on this ship you speak of, but your mind will be free, and anyone who comes into contact with you in such a state will be blessed by the contact, and will transform from a fool into a proper human being.”

   “That sounds like prophesy.”

   “No, it’s not. Now, imagine if we had a world with so many like-minded passengers, so many like-minded human beings who desired less, who expected less. The ship would slowly turn into a golden galleon, filled with flowers, and beautiful overflowing nectar. It would turn from a hellish ship of folly and vice into a heaven of sorts. A heavenly vessel. Can you imagine it, Brayden? Not navigated by the current, but by the passengers of the ship? The destination might still be irreversible, but at least, for a time, there would be reason and calm abiding on the decks and in the galleys. Love is the pathway to the human heart. Love is the pathway to Heaven. It always has been, and it always will be. And that’s why it’s beautiful.”

   “So what do I do now?”

   “Well, to begin with there is a mother out there who is dying to see you.”

   “And then?”

   “Find a town, find a street, and love.”

    Tatiana had known for several days that Brayden hadn’t been his normal self. He had sat absorbed in thought by the window smoking on the few occasions when they had bumped into each other at the flat. He had taken to reading The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, she remembered thinking, as she saw the book by the windowsill that morning. Opening it, it had been bookmarked at On Some Verses of Virgil. He was making much progress.

    She rang him that evening after he got back to the flat from seeing Sébastien, at around midnight. He asked her to meet him in the café down below saying he had to talk to her. Brayden sat for an hour in the café near the window as he slowly downed his espresso and waited for her to arrive—as the café began to close. A waiter wiped the tables and emptied the ashtrays, as another wiped and polished the coffee maker behind the counter. Finally, Brayden made out her shape walking down Rue Saint-Antoine. She was wearing the bomber jacket that she had been given by her boyfriend, in Germany, and came in and stood at the edge of the table facing Brayden. Tears rolled down her expressionless face and cheeks at this moment, and Brayden was at a loss to explain why he just wanted to slap her.

   “Sit down,” he said.

   She sat down, and wiped the wetness self-consciously, egotistically from her face.

   “We’re closing in several minutes,” A waiter said from across the room, cigarette from his mouth.

   They sat in silence, in a sort of game of chicken. Each waiting for the other to begin, but finally the noises from the café workers forced Tatiana’s hand, “It’s over?” She exclaimed.

   “Yes.”

   Her face became a mask, as if she had been wearing hundreds of them, with each one removed as time passed, until finally she was left with her final disguise, which by proximity to her real face (that had lain forever hidden) bore a stronger likeness to it. It was a face of utter contempt, puerile, Brayden thought, glacial.  But having been stripped of all but one of her masks, this one betrayed some of the expressions of the real face, and she looked pugnaciously down to the table, like a child who had been found out.

   “I’m not responsible for your crap,” she said.

   Brayden sat and looked at her. He felt sorry for her in a way.

   “I’m leaving for the United States tomorrow morning. I would be grateful if you would pick up your things after tomorrow at the latest, as the propriétaire will be showing it to others if you don’t collect your things by then.”

   “And what about your studies Brayden?” Tatiana looked at him. “Alright,” she said, as if she were talking to an imbecile, slowly leaning on her elbows as she posed with the cigarette. “And, where do you want me to go? Didier will be disappointed.”

   “That doesn’t concern me,” he said

   “Is there someone else?”

   “Yes.”

   She smiled under her fur collar and lit a cigarette.

   “Did you sleep with her?”

    Brayden was silent at first, and lied, “Yes.”

   He looked down at his small brown espresso cup and tipped it slightly against the saucer. The black coffee had a round ring of light tan froth to it and it jerked to his movement. He saw that there was enough for one more taste. He rolled the liquid—so that it picked up the soft foam—and he took a final sip.

   He lowered the cup to the table, placing it delicately into the round groove made for it by the saucer. “That’s all I wanted to say to you, Tatiana.” he said. He exhaled, having exclaimed what he had wanted to say for months. He had felt in those months that he had been looking into a fog bank, dark and impecunious, at a blackened, masked figure that he couldn’t make out the shape of exactly, until he saw Thierry’s photographs. All these months he had asked himself what the vague, masked figure in the fog bank had been: a vampire? A statue? Or a madwoman. He now looked at the figure under the light of the café with her final pretence giving away parts of her eyes and face. He saw a child. 

   Brayden stood up, his chair making an abrupt sound, and he walked out. As he passed around the outside windows of the café, he saw Tatiana looking down at the table, the final mask slipping from her face, and he went through the double wood doors, being careful to close them behind until her heard the metal click of the lock, and strode up to his flat.

   “We are closed, Mademoiselle,” The waiter said, lighting his last cigarette from his pack.

   “Stop! I’m leaving!!” she said, loudly, as the waiter grabbed his coat off the wall and began to turn off the lights. Another woman shunned, he thought, and tried to count how many he had witnessed during the day.

   She sat for several more seconds, huddled as she was in the café—with her fur lined jacket next to the window—and imagined that Brayden was her cigarette. She brought it close to her face, examined the ash and flame that lay beneath it, and smiled. Tatiana extinguished it, with a ferocity that made even the leaving waiter start, pausing to look at her, his cigarette hanging from his half-opened mouth. “What’s your name?” he said. 

   Tatiana rose off the chair, her back to the man, smiled, and walked to get her coat off the wall. As she did, all of the masks that had been scattered to the floor, clung to her face once more, and she felt somewhat restored to reason.

   Brayden passed an envelope addressed to Didier to a flight attendant, who graciously agreed to put the envelope with the outgoing mail. The letter was an apology and an explanation. Brayden was sure Didier would understand. He looked up, to see that his flight was now coming close. It was to depart at 9:35. It was now 8:57. He passed the five franc note to the casier, took his bottled water, and picked up his bag, making his way down the departure hall.

   The light from the setting sun fell across the many dark seats, piecemeal, as if the rays had been given to the hall in very small amounts, and at very high interest rates. He looked again out the window as he walked, as an American Airlines jet pulled closely to one just like it, and he saw the scissor like joining of the two tail fins, and the high whine of the engine before it began to idle. Very much like sharks he thought, or perhaps birds of prey: ready to devour the smaller animals in this airport, only to fly back to their nests and regurgitate the exhausted, famished, nicotine deprived prey into the mouths of smaller predators, who would speed them on their way, along roads, under bridges, through tunnels and dump them onto the front porches, garages, and apartment buildings of America. As he thought these things, Brayden was awoken from his nonsensical reverie in a jolt, as if the foolishness of his thoughts demanded a swift slap across the face, and he felt the large form of something shock him to his immediate surroundings. A woman, in a black flight attendant’s uniform fell to the ground in front of him, as Brayden’s drink flew out of his hand. It dropped—bouncing—and rolled around the circumference of the woman—who now sat on her ass, on the floor. The blonde woman quickly placed her delicate hand over her stomach, which was very pregnant, and without looking at Brayden, took in a deep breath, puffing through her cheeks.

   “Oh my God, are you alright?” Brayden said, crouching down to pick up the black carry-on she had dropped. “Here let me help you,” he added, and offered the flight attendant his hand. She looked at the hand and then at Brayden, and took hers and placed it in his. Brayden followed by taking his other hand, and placing it under her elbow for added support, and heaved her back up, to her feet.

   “Thank you. I don’t know what happened. I was looking for a bathroom, and suddenly I was on the floor. How stupid, I’m so sorry.”

   “Don’t be. It’s normal, so many people in a small space, waiting to be devoured by these large metal beasts.”

   “That’s an unusual way to look at it.” She smiled and said, “I was actually thinking something similar myself.”

   Brayden was about to say something else, and he opened his mouth to do so, when the pregnant woman quickly let out a small cry. “Ahiee! He’s kicking again. No, wait. That’s not a kick, it’s a contraction.”

   Brayden took her by the elbow. “You seem a little premature for a contraction. You should really sit down. Look, over there is a café.”

   The woman nodded her head, and Brayden walked her over to a round empty table and they sat down. She breathed deeply a few more times.

   Brayden said, “You look to be about end of second term, right?”

   She nodded.

   He continued, “Look, is there someone I can call? Maybe the father should know what happened.”

   The flight attendant gazed at Brayden for a moment, then said, “The father doesn’t know.”

   There was a pause. “Oh. I see,” Brayden said

   “Iee! Another contraction!” 

   “Look. You stay here for one moment. I’ll call the airport security.”

   The woman grabbed Brayden’s hand. “No. Don’t go. You might be right. The kicks are so strong. I’m so sorry, I’m making a fool of myself. I’ve never been pregnant before.”

   “What? You mean you don’t have five children at home just like every woman your age?”

   The woman apprehensively smiled as she exhaled through pursed lips. A man from behind the café counter came over, throwing his white towel over his black vest.

   “What’s going on? Is she going into labour right now?”

   “Brayden turned to him. “No, I think she’s alright. Just a bit nervous after a fall.”

   “Wait here. I’ll call the paramedics.” The man walked to one of the gates, spoke to a male flight attendant, who looked in Brayden’s direction, picked up a phone and dialled a number. Brayden looked back to the woman. “Everything’s alright. They’re calling the paramedics.”

   “You’re American, aren’t you?” she said suddenly.

   “Yes. Is that a problem?”

   No. I just didn’t notice it before. What are you doing in France?”

   She winced once more and Brayden said, “I don’t know. I just ended up here. I was planning on going back home tonight.”

   “Will you miss your flight?” she said, trying to look at the departure board.

   “Don’t worry about it. I can reschedule. How is the little one?”

   “I think he’s left for dinner.”

   “You said ‘he’ earlier. Are you having a son?”

   “I really don’t know. I’ve always assumed it was a boy by the strength of the kicks.”

   Brayden smiled, “Well, you’ll soon find out anyway...in about three months I’m sure. Do you have anyone you can call who can help you through this?”

   The woman pensively glanced at him. “No, I don’t have anyone here. I was in the process of flying back to Frankfurt, for that reason.”

   Brayden nodded. He looked around him, almost in an effort to see if he could find someone to relieve him, and then he looked at his hand that was gripped by this pregnant flight attendant. It was giving off a lot of heat—their two hands joined so tightly. He made an effort to release his hand, but couldn’t, as the pregnant woman unselfconsciously held it tight.  He looked at her long hair, that had been forced slightly out of place by the fall earlier, with a few strands across her eyes, and he looked at her delicate features, almost childlike, and then he stared at the small German flag she had on her lapel.

   “Would you like me to help you through this?” Brayden finally said.

   “No, no. You don’t have to. You’ll miss your flight.”

   “That’s ok. I really don’t mind. Truthfully, I wasn’t looking forward to it that much.” Brayden paused, looking down once more at their two hands together. “I’m Brayden,” he said and he smiled. She looked at him, slightly irritated at first, and then the expression changed, from embarrassment to something else. He’s too young for me, she said to herself. She smiled behind reddening cheeks, her blonde hair loose around her shoulders, “I’m Katya.” Brayden squeezed her hand lightly, bringing it towards him slightly, affectionately, and said, “Enchanté.”

   “Ahh! He’s coming again to kick me,” Katya pulled Brayden’s hand to her stomach. “Can you feel him?” Brayden smiled, and said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, “Yes, I can.” he said, “I can feel him.”