Serafim and Claire (4 page)

Patrons streamed out of the bar to watch the feigned execution, and in the flux, Claire found her father. “Papa” — she tapped him on the shoulder — “do you know that none of this is true? The war isn't over.”

He appeared unperturbed. “You're right, it isn't. But . . . can't you
feel
how much everyone here wishes it were? We
wish
it. And sometimes that's more important than what actually is. Can you see? Does that make sense?”

And to Claire, it did. Perfectly. Though she had never told anyone about it, this was what she felt when she danced. It was as if there were some fragmented part of her that was perfect, sublime. It was that same part of her, the one that she constantly
wished
she was, that indeed she could become — though for only the most fleeting of moments — in the act of dancing. When the music and her movements lined up flawlessly, Claire experienced moments of divinity, glimpses where what she wished she was and what she actually was (even if only for seconds) became one. And for the first time in her life it occurred to her that this might also hold true for the world.

Four days later, on November 11, 1918, when the real armistice was signed and the last war the earth would ever see ended, Claire realized that the collective wish of people could, perhaps, attain the hoped-for result. Human beings seemed to have (and Claire certainly more than most) a hidden ability to will change, to shift things — slightly, and for only short-lived instants — to their advantage. It was an astounding realization, and one that filled her fifteen-year-old mind with drunken promise.

Having recalled this memory through to its end, each detail still as vivid as the day it unfolded, Claire remembered with a measured degree of certainty that she had not gotten around to uttering her delicate threat to Dr. Bertrand the other night. She began to remember other things too — how he'd said she had a serious infection, and that he would have to operate on her to find out more. What did that mean, exactly?

Claire fought towards consciousness, a battle, she found, that wasn't all that easy to win. There was no “waking up” to be had. Instead, she was stuck in a hazy confusion of sounds and images, intermittent sensations swinging in and out of a white-edged awareness. There were brief interruptions of touch and smell — being washed with a harsh soap, turned over, propped up, the bitter rod of a thermometer speared under her tongue — but the rest of the time Claire simply felt adrift in a limbo of her memories, the journey exhausting; though in some far-off and urgent way, she understood that she must not, could not, settle by the wayside to rest.

She felt a sudden hand behind her neck, then the feeling of water in her mouth, washing down the pinching taste of copper that seemed to have coated her palate for an eternity, making her tongue clammy. She opened her eyes for the first time to see a middle-aged nun, her habit framing Claire's focus on her face, constricting it, sharpening the woman's frown, the wrinkles around her lips creasing deeper. “Mademoiselle O'Callaghan?” asked the nun. Claire, whose last name was not O'Callaghan but Audette, felt the need to process this contradiction with a blink, though she never quite got around to lifting her eyelids again. Instead, she slid back into an echoing darkness, while the nun, her voice increasingly distant, called after her.

Some time later, Claire tried to move the dead-stone weight of her limbs, and managed to flex her fingers, then her right hand, and, with this, was soon rushing forward into consciousness. Her eyes slowly opened to a bright, blinding light. She began to stretch herself out, and was instantly met with a shooting pain at the bottom of her stomach.

Seeing her distressed expression and open eyes, a nun appeared at the foot of her bed, stern and indifferent. “Mademoiselle O'Callaghan. How feel you this morning?” she asked, struggling to speak English.

Claire, finding that her pain was not subsiding but increasing, arched her back and sank her head into her pillow, her hands rising to her stomach, where she felt, to her horror, filaments of thread, like grotesque insect legs, protruding from her skin, skittering down a thick scar that made a ridge from below her navel to her pubic bone. She relaxed her muscles and remained breathlessly still, until the pain gradually unclenched its fist.

The nun continued to speak in her broken English, explaining how, several days ago, Claire had been brought in just before dawn and left in the entry hall, with a note from a certain Dr. Reilly, who explained that he was a visiting doctor to Montreal, on his way back to Europe. Just prior to his leaving, however, he was called in to perform an emergency appendix operation on you. With this note and his apologies, he left sufficient funds for your care, estimating your stay to be two to three weeks. You are in the Hôtel-Dieu. This is your fourth day. Can I get you anything? Do you need to use the bedpan?

Claire slowly shook her head, then eyed the nun as she walked away to tend to another patient. The nun, however, kept looking back at her suspiciously.

Claire looked up at the ceiling and thought of Cécile. With a false name, her sister would have no chance at all of tracking her down, or of even knowing that she was ill and had had an operation. Claire knew that the moment she had the energy, she would have to write to her sister. She hoped Cécile wasn't worrying, though she understood her sister well enough to know that, by now, there were likely a number of letters from Quebec City stuffed into her mailbox, urging Claire to send news that she was safe and sound.

The nun gave Claire another sidelong glance as she brusquely tucked a sheet under a mattress. Claire realized that (contrary to what she would be writing to Cécile) she was not at all out of danger. Not yet.

Medium:
Wet plate; albumen silver print

Description:
Maria Antónia da Silva (carte de visite)

Location:
Penafiel, Portugal

Date:
1903

A vignette portrait of a girl, just on the cusp of being considered a young woman. Her hair is dark, thick, and heavy, its weight sagging down on all sides from a point high in the back where it has been clasped. Her jawline ascends into milky shadows to meet the lowest drape of her mane, where a single strand can also be seen, having strayed from her barrette, reaching down to touch the tight neckline of her white dress.

She is clearly handsome, her expression at once self-conscious and unassuming. She is also fighting back a smile, her lips pressed tight, laughter mischievous in her eyes. One gets the feeling that she finds the entire portrait-taking ordeal somewhat ridiculous. One also senses that the photographer does not share this amusement; which has only managed to increase it twofold for the young woman.

The portrait, measuring only five by nine centimetres, is bordered with a frosty halo, drawing the eye helplessly in to the young woman's high cheekbones. It is as if she is sitting in a tubular oval of light. And as if this bright tunnel is irrevocably closing in around her.

Serafim's long-term memory
was ter
rible. He noticed that when other people reconstructed their pasts, the access they had to previous moments in their lives seemed to be much like looking through a kaleidoscope, in that each infinitesimal compartment glowed just as brightly as the next, and merely by focusing on one particular chamber they could almost transport themselves to that place, to feel its textures, hold up its velvet tastes and sounds, and feel the air as crisp as the day they'd lived it. Whereas for Serafim it was more like looking back onto a grey beach, where a long, twig-scratched line in the sand gradually vanished into the sea haze of the distance. Squint as he might, the farther away it was, the less he could see.

He believed his earliest memory was of standing in a courtyard, being scolded by his father for appearing shy, if not frightened, of a new maid who had come to live and work in their house. He realized now that the maid before this — though there might have been several — had likely been employed as his wet nurse, as well as his nanny. But this nanny, arguably the most important one in his rearing, had no image or name to go with her; nor a reason for her disappearance, in the same way that the constant coming and going of other maids in the years that followed transpired without explanation. Between all the nannies, there were also discrepancies regarding how a well-raised young man was supposed to act.

He was taught never to speak in adult company, then to speak only when addressed, though not very much — a “yes, sir” or “no, ma'am” would suffice. Some told him not to slouch when he sat, or to fold his hands on his lap, or to scrunch his hat like a peasant; while others didn't mind any of these things at all. He was taught to eat with his fork and knife, never switching hands, which was consistent enough; but he also remembered a new maid arriving one day, horrified at the way he soaked up his winter stew with a piece of bread, spoon in one hand, crust in the other. She'd slapped the top of his head and pried the bread from his fingers, disgustedly throwing the soggy dough into a slop bucket.

“
Virgem
Maria
, child, you're not a barbarian. No reason to eat like one.”

“Oh,” Serafim said, flattening his bread hand onto the table. “What is a barbarian?”

“The sort of person who soaks up their food with bread.” Then, as an afterthought, “Besides Italians.”

“Oh.”

Serafim's father's room was a place with even more mystery. Sometimes, at night, he would steal through the halls and stand outside the door, listening to the strange struggling sounds that the voices of his father and the current maid were making on the other side. But what really drew him to his father's room was the photo on his escritoire.

Serafim couldn't remember when he first sat on the edge of his father's bed and studied it, he only knew that at some point it had become a fixation. What he did remember was the day one of the maids told him it was his mother. Tidying his hair, she said, “She died two years after this picture was taken, in 1905. And do you know the very last thing she did?” A soft arm wrapped around Serafim's shoulders, her lips speaking half pressed against his head. “She delivered you, Serafim, into this world. She was very brave. She was fifteen.”

The photo held her stories in the worst way it could — by hiding them. Serafim had never seen women — in the streets, sitting at café tables with their tall and elaborate hats, washing clothes in the river, filling wooden buckets from the city's fountains, removing steaming pots from a range — staring fixedly forward in such a way. The only life that could be derived from the photo was in the painful restraint of her smile, and the faint sepia blush of her cheeks. And what could that possibly tell Serafim? He was at a loss. Hungry for intimacy, for familiarity, and the still, brown-scale portrait offered nothing in the way of sustenance.

When his father would catch him sitting in his room with the picture, he would instantly seem tired, sure that Serafim had yet another question for him. Did she like oranges? Could she sing? Was she afraid of heights? What was her favourite bird? And when she wasn't paying attention to what her hands were doing, would she sometimes crumple her hat like a peasant? But even more disappointing for Serafim was the fact that, most of the time, his father didn't know the answers. He'd proposed by letter, spent six months getting acquainted with her in public places and in the company of a chaperone, and was only married to her for eleven months before she passed away.

Well, did he have any other photos of her, Serafim wanted to know, pictures where, maybe, she was doing something? No. None. Serafim's uncle, a not exactly successful photographer in Oporto, took a picture of the couple on their wedding day, but, in some kind of bungling chemical mistake in the darkroom, he'd ruined it. “Soon after that,” his father said, “she was with child, which is rather unsightly, to say the least. So, no. Only one photo of her was ever taken. Which is why we should put it back on the escritoire where it belongs.”

One of the other things Serafim remembered well was how he met his friend Álvaro. It was during their lunch break at school, in the playground. Children were running maniacally in circles, hollering and bellowing, their golden minutes of unrestrained conduct, raising dust from the sandy ground, lines of boys chasing each other, girls skipping rope in song. Serafim, too subdued to run amok with the screaming droves, came across Álvaro crouched near one of the few bushes in the schoolyard. His hat was off and he was reaching as far as he could into the shrub, burying his face in the leaves.

“What are you doing?” Serafim pulled his shorts up higher onto his belly.

Álvaro answered quietly, and in a tone that suggested Serafim would likely not understand. “I'm trying to catch a long green beetle.”

Serafim bent down and parted some of the leaves. “Oh. He's nice. Can I help?”

“No,” Álvaro said impatiently. “You don't — I don't want to kill him. Just catch him.”

“Yes. Me too.”

“Well. Okay, then.”

It began simply enough, but when the beetle kept crawling farther into the centre of the shrub, adeptly evading the boys' hands and hats that crunched through the twigs and snagged on branches, neither of them stopped. Their arms became scratched, their white shirts — sleeves folded up to the elbows — grass-stained and soiled, their hats sullied. Still they didn't give up. A teacher shook his deafening handbell to summon the children back into class, but neither of them listened, or even seemed to care. They were so close to catching the beetle, Serafim's hat perfectly poised below the insect, deep in the inner branches, Álvaro's extended fingers centimetres away from tipping it into a cloth trap, alive.

Finally, the insect expanded with sudden wings and flew off, bouncing between several branchlets and landing somewhere else in the shrub. They tried to locate it again, for several minutes, exchanging glances that spoke of the trouble they would have to face. At last they gave up and ran into the school, where, hanging their hats up in the cloakroom, they endeavoured to sneak into the class. Serafim went first, slipping behind his desk almost unnoticed. But the movement caught the corner of the teacher's eye, and he turned just in time to see Álvaro tiptoeing down an aisle to his seat. Álvaro had to sit at the front of the class for an hour, cowering on a stool taller than he was, wearing a pair of donkey's ears fashioned out of folded newspaper. When he'd first put them on, the class erupted in laughter, some pointing, the girls covering their mouths. The teacher slapped a ruler onto his desk, and the classroom fell silent again.

Over the next hour, the boys swapped impish grins, Serafim admiring the scratches on both of their arms, the smudges of green on their sleeves. They had recognized a certain tendency in one another, a kind of obsessiveness, and they understood that what had once been a personal solitude would now be a sovereign country, whose border would redraw itself wherever they chose to walk together. They were inseparable for the next thirteen years, until 1926, when Álvaro moved to Lisbon to follow the anarchists.

While they were thirteen years of resolute friendship for the two boys, they were not easy years for their homeland. The already indelibly serious Portuguese adults were given increasingly grave things to discuss and fret about. There was constant talk of the failing republic, of economic crisis after crisis, political catastrophes, strikes, protests, uprisings, and, when both of them were nine, something called the Great War.

When it began, the Great War hadn't really concerned Portugal, which was officially calling itself neutral. But there was an age-old alliance and interdependence between Portugal and Britain, and when the Germans were seen to be using Portuguese waters undeterred, and even mooring in the country's protected harbours, Britain tapped an admonitory finger on their ancient treaty of allegiance, which had been upheld more or less consistently since the Middle Ages. Portugal kicked the dirt at its feet and reluctantly stepped forth.

Serafim's father had been the owner of a small barrel-making business — his callused hands smelling of oak and pungent shavings, sawdust frosting the hair of his arms — and he filled orders that came almost exclusively from England. With Portugal entering the war, merchant ships became susceptible to U-boat attacks. Exports all but froze. Serafim's father found himself out of work, and brooded over his financial situation for a month before he made a decision. He rented out their home, joined the army, and sent Serafim to live with his aunt and uncle, the floundering photographer. There were, his father argued, far-reaching benefits to this decision. Besides, he said on the day he left, the Great War couldn't hold ground for eternity.

It would, however, for him. The Portuguese divisions were soon spent and exhausted on the Western Front, desperately holding a position that was precisely at the point where the Germans believed they could breach the line. The Huns gathered their troops for a concerted effort, then, on a clear day with a gentle breeze in April 1918, barraged the Portuguese with heavy artillery and lethal gas, and ploughed through and over them with a troop count that was fivefold that of the Portuguese divisions.

The news of the cataclysmic Battle of the Lys was headlined in bold letters across all of Portugal's newspapers, and was read aloud in cafés in exceedingly quiet tones. The wounded returned equally hushed, in crutches or slings, with wide patches over their eyes, or as
gaseados
, men who wheezed and gurgled as they laboured to breathe. The dead, including Serafim's father, were buried in the hills where they fell.

Serafim was thirteen, and now a de facto adoptee of his aunt and uncle, living at their house, where he spent much of his time sitting on the tiny balcony that overlooked one of Oporto's busiest streets, holding the portrait of his mother as if to compare it to the animate people who passed below. It was an unsettling habit, and one his uncle had stepped out onto the balcony to address on a dreary winter afternoon. He stood for a moment, looking at the laundry that hung from the balcony above, bed linen billowing in the smoky air. A large white sheet heaved a world-weary sigh. No, he couldn't bring himself to reprimand the boy for being so understandably odd. Instead, at a loss for words, and seeing the portrait in Serafim's hand, he scratched the back of his neck. “Would you, perhaps, like to give me a hand today, in the studio? I've got a lot of darkroom work. I could use your help.”

Serafim stared listlessly into the street then at the portrait, straightening up in his chair, which was positioned sideways and exactly the width of the balcony. “Making pictures?”

“Developing them, yes.”

Serafim struggled to stand up. There was barely enough room for the two of them on the terrace, and he had to half lean out over the wrought-iron railing. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, please. Teach me.”