There is a novel all French schoolchildren are made to read in the new Republic of France, written to outline the nation’s history. I would read it to teach myself both the language and country while at the Conservatoire in Paris. Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants is the story of two orphaned brothers who travel the entire country in search of their uncle, helped at each turn by the good people of France. When the brothers leave home there is a description of the sky. Pas une étoile au ciel. In my clumsy translations I mistook étoile for toil, star for work. By a work of the sky, I thought it meant. By a work of the sky, the orphans left. Not a star in the sky, as the orphans left, was what the phrase meant in that sentence. But still I thought, This I understand. Orphans made for stories.
If I was making for you a book for children, the page opposite this one would be an engraving of the girl as she stands on a street in New York, with a girl’s map of the world, in which she imagines she can go back the distance her mother traveled from Lucerne in Switzerland to Minnesota and find her kin there. A dotted line would connect the two places, drawn by the author. For the final X, the cemetery near the farm in Brooklyn, where she takes the name of a girl, Lilliet Berne, 1860–1863, dead at age three, which she gives the next time anyone asks it of her.
With a dead girl’s name, Death would go looking somewhere else, I was sure. No funeral, no prayers said for her, no stone to mark her rest except this name, the heaviness of it on my tongue each time I say the name all these years, until now, when it has nearly worn away.
Her book closes there and this other one opens. In the first picture, she is standing on the back of a horse, waving to a crowd.
I will try and name, by the end of this, the country this tells the story of.
Five
I WENT BACK TO the river and wandered the shipyards.
I had the memory of a story from my father of stowaways, people who managed to hide on a boat and cross the sea, but I couldn’t figure out how one went about it. The boats all seemed forbidding, silent, impermeable, and the looks the men gave me warned me to stay back. These men were not the kind I’d known before. The way they looked at me, like I was a lamb. I would soon know how lucky I’d been with my widower.
I found a tent pitched near the water, and it glowed and shook with the noise of singing and horses, gunfire and laughter. As I approached, a flap opened, and a dejected-looking woman stumped out.
It was the strangest thing I’d found, perhaps, in all of my short life, this noisy tent near the water, and I waited to see how I could go in. I walked closer. It did not seem open to the public—there was no audience.
The day grew dark. I watched as more and more women left. I knew I would have to leave soon, to work, and yet I waited.
I noticed a man paying attention to me. He came and stood right in front of me finally, tried to press a piece of paper into my hand, saying something to me and gesturing at the tent door, but he hadn’t tried to introduce himself so I ignored him. And after my episode with the farmer, I feared strange men but also myself, a little.
Fine, he said finally, exasperated. Be that way if you must. If we can’t get Muhammad to the mountain, we will bring the mountain to Muhammad.
I remembered my mother would say this when I was stubborn. I looked down at the paper, where it lay on the ground, and read it dully.
Female Equestrienne Rider Needed—Audition Today!
Skill with Firearms and Singing Important! Get Ready to See Paris!
He went into the tent, to my surprise.
The flap flew open again, and this time standing there was a small group looking at me.
A light glowed high above the others, separated from them, and moved steadily toward me. As I watched, it twinkled, broke into limbs of a kind, so that it seemed for a brief moment a dancing figure of fire, something small and capable of lighting, say, a cigar. It danced, moving as if it could beckon me somewhere. Then I saw it was coming for me.
It was a tiny oil lamp, set high up into the curly wig of a strange, enormous, and terrifyingly beautiful woman. A few more lamps lit the back of her head, so that she was curtained in light. Thick red curls rose for several feet above her face. She was accompanied by a giant looking at me over the top of her hair, his face shadowed by the light and by what I first thought was another man, but was instead a woman dressed in pants walking with a soldier’s powerful stride. I looked away, thinking they’d be on their way, but then looked back when from behind them suddenly appeared the man who’d tried to force the paper into my hand. This one! he said. See? Am I right?
They came to a stop in front of me.
Well, he didn’t lie, the woman of fire said to the others, before turning to me and saying, My dear, my name is Flambeau. She gave a curtsy, and the warmth of her fire reached my cheeks and eyelashes. My colleagues and I, it seems to me, have been searching for a girl just such as you.
I stared at her as if she hadn’t spoken at all and then opened my mouth to say, What is it you think I am? and a strange whispery noise came from my throat instead.
I looked around at them and tried again. The sound was ghostly. It terrified me.
My audience looked on, curious and concerned. Cat got your tongue? she said.
The voice was gone, as gone as if it had slunk away in the night and left this in its place.
How do you be? the giant asked. He bowed deeply.
Here, my dear, whisper in my ear, Flambeau said, and so I did.
What do you think I am? I asked, whispering.