Disturbed by Her Song
Tanith Lee
writing as and with
Esther Garber
&
Judas Garbah
Published by Lethe Press at Smashwords
Copyright © 2010 Tanith Lee.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Published in 2010 by Lethe Press
118 Heritage Avenue • Maple Shade, NJ 08052-3018
www.lethepressbooks.com • lethepress@aol.com
ISBN: 1-59021-311-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-59021-311-7
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Cover art: David Gilmore.
Cover design: Thomas Drymon, drymondesign.
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lee, Tanith.
Disturbed by her song / Tanith Lee, writing as and with Esther Garber & Judas Garbah.
p. cm.
A collection of dark and fantastical stories.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59021-311-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-59021-311-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
I. Title.
PR6062.E4163D57 2010
823’.914--dc22
2010025907
Meeting The Garbers
I first met the Garbers in the 1990s; that is, I met Esther, and her brother, Judas. Anna didn’t turn up, though she subsequently sent me a polite and kindly note. In fact I’ve never met Anna, not yet, despite being given access to certain portions of her own work, and recently one of Judas’s stories which, it seems, she assembled from Judean fragments.
Esther’s first communication with me involved the viewing of a headstone.
This was an arresting event. She refers to it in her novel, 34, but allowed me to see the stone first. Just as the novel describes it, it was carved, and of very new-looking marble, set above a neatly finished grave. It bore only the number that became the book’s title.
The complete novel was given to me shortly after. And not a great time after that, the first collection – Fatal Women – followed. Some separate stories by Judas arrived a few years after Fatal, and were not included in the initial Esther collection. (Judas doesn’t seem to care about this. He always refers to himself as ‘a Writer’ – but does he mean by trade – or inclination? Has he been published elsewhere? I sense some subterranean work, via a small press of long ago, in French, or even an Arabic language.)
Back in the ’90s, the Garbers were rather striking. (They still are, I would say.) Judas especially was, and remains, a very handsome man, naturally slim and quite tall, by now, I would guess, in his sixties, as I am. But time frames with – definitely Esther – are hard to fix. Her (and Anna’s) childhoods at least appear to have taken place in Egypt in the 1920s-1930s; but then Esther also proposes a young womanhood in England and France, between the two World Wars. By the mid-90s she should therefore (yes?) have been approaching or inhabiting, at least, her seventieth year – or her hundredth! But she looked to me then of a youthful appearance – approximately fifty. She still, I have to remark, does. A smart and well-dressed woman, neither old-fashioned nor let-me-be-of-the-Now, she shows her ethnicity – presumably mostly Jewish; this less in her (excellent) pale complexion, grey eyes and lush, wavy dark brown hair (not a hint of grey in that) than in a sort of antique-coin type arrangement of her profile. Semitic she is. Judas, too, of course. He is besides a seemingly wonderful equality of half Jew and half Arab, with the definite resultant beauty. His hair is mostly still black, his eyes, if anything, blacker than before.
Neither of these people is especially warm and forthcoming however. They are cool, if sometimes observant and witty companions. Both are quite guarded also. Curious, it always seems to me, when their writing is so determinedly open and frank.
They have, they did from the inception, make very clear the different spelling of their surname. Esther, of course, is Garber, which is recognizably European Jewish. Judas meanwhile spells his version Garbah. I haven’t been able to learn if this is based on some variant, presumably adopted by his butterfly mother, or an invention of his own.
I firmly believe that both of them are not merely compulsively truthful, in the way less of the Confessional than of certain writers/story-tellers, but conversely strategic liars. I’m well aware too that neither of them will object to my saying this. (Would I dare say it otherwise?) Lying also has its part in an authorial work-kit.
They do, perhaps inevitably, fascinate me. And whatever they care to reveal, demonstrate, tell me, I find enormously interesting.
There is Esther’s London (UK) flat, for instance. (It has a brief manifestation in an earlier story not appearing in these volumes.) A weird apartment in its way, with a huge main room divided by a single step into an upper and lower ‘terrace,’ and with much smaller rooms – kitchen, bathroom, workroom, bedroom – leading off a gallery above. It has long windows and green curtains, and a view outside of tall, summer-rich trees and grayish stone, one of those inner London streets you suddenly find around Harley Street, the British Museum, or otherwhere. Between the apartment door and the outer front door to the flat, is a ‘storage’ area (what exactly is stored there?) that also has a small guest bedroom with bed and en-suite lavatory and shower. Esther parks her brother out there on his very occasional visits. She has said he has repeatedly requested she acquire a cat, so that he can admire and stroke it, when in residence. But she hasn’t done so, and Judas denies all this. There is always a little scratchiness from both of them, when referring to the other. Or to Anna, actually. It can be seen anyway quite plainly in the text.
As for Anna – as I say, I’ve never glimpsed her. She seems a well-organized, clever, possibly erudite woman, any hang-ups, (as evinced through Esther’s 34, etc) either well under control or – maybe – non-existent. She respects her sister’s and her half-brother’s (Judas is only related to these women through their father) literary work, but has her own agenda. She is far more successfully secretive than either of them. And too Esther’s implication (in her novel) that Anna is – how shall I say? – less than she seems – may be indicative. I wonder if I ever will be allowed, or even able, to meet her? I’m unsure, if given the chance, whether I’ll be eager – or dismayed.
Having said which, obviously, I have never met any of these three in the flesh. In the flesh, so far as I can tell, they do not exist. At least not in any form or body I have ever physically encountered.
Nevertheless, to state they are simply three more of the thousands of characters I myself have written about, or through whose minds I have been made privy to their lives, seems not to express any sort of truth at all. Though I would proclaim this in reference to any character of whom I’ve written – they are all real to me, more real, far more real than so-called Reality – yet with the Garbers some other categorization must be found. I haven’t yet found one. And for this reason, their narratives, which I undeniably write (long-hand, as ever), then type, are styled – for the sake of veracity, never obscuration or gimmick: Tanith Lee writing as Esther Garber/Judas Garbah.
That they are both gay is decidedly not the reason. I have written about Lesbian and male homosexual aspiration, love, lust and longing in several other places. Just as I’ve written about and as, ‘straight’ women and men, gifted sorcerers, murderers, gods, demons and saints – and anything else I felt, at the time, given to encompass.
Nor do I think I do write about E and J because they and I share Jewish blood. (I’m a mix – half Russian Jew, a quarter English – with a tiny dash of French – a quarter County Clare Irish, and with a feasible whisker of Russian, and a drop of Black blood – unluckily the last two are probably untraceable.) But Esther and Judas, (and I assume Anna) are far more proper exponents of the Semitic races than I am. E and J at least have the correct looks – as I said before, that glamour you can still see on ancient coins. And they are far more seasoned, steeped in other countries and customs, for example, those of France, Spain and Egypt.
They are not me. They – are themselves.
Evidently, in this perceivably split-personality tract, I am both distancing myself and irrevocably attaching myself to the Garbers. But then, as with most of my characters, and in this instance far more than with any other, they too have attached themselves to me. When they are there (often they are absent), they are clearly delineated presences, just outside the mindscape. And unlike the others, too, they remain largely clandestine.
How much more work they will give me I have no idea. I’ve never sensed a forthcoming library, not even a full shelf. I know there should be one more Esther novel. I even know the title: Cleopatra at the Blue Hotel. This promises to reveal how Esther and Judas first met, as adults, by the Nile. While a second collection of Esther stories and novellas, which includes some pieces by Judas, plus the odd half-glimpse of Anna, already exists. Two of these tales, incidentally, Esther and I wrote together. Lee is truly bats, one might say. Or not. It seemed to me those particular tales have a combined perspective. Certain things I could essay through Esther that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred to me, and (maybe?) vice versa.
To go back to the first introduction and meeting: despite not taking place corporeally, it did begin through a viewing of that pure white headstone. I dreamed of it, in the 1990s, complete with its number: 34. In many Dream Books, a clean, well-kept grave can be interpreted as a brand new start. I took it as such. And about three weeks after began to write the novel with that name. I had the first sentence, and I had the sense of Esther Garber. Nothing more was needed.
More even than with all the differing kinds of fiction I write, the Garbers have given me a significantly unlike territory. In this world, and out of it, anachronistic (deliberately), time-twisting, utterly self-indulgent – why not? Why write in chains? – and experimental. Varnished truth and gloves-off lies: the exquisite question that never has an answer; the answer that is the question.
Thank you, Madame et Monsieur.
—Tanith Lee, 2009
Contents
YOUTH AND AGE
Black Eyed Susan - Esther Garber
The Kiss - Esther Garber
YOUTH
Ne Que V’on Desir - Judas Garbah
The X’s Are Not Kisses - Tanith Lee & Esther Garber
Alexandrians - Judas Garbah
Death and the Maiden - Esther Garber
AGE
Fleurs en Hiver - Judas Garbah
The Crow Judas - Garbah
Disturbed by Her Song - Esther Garber & Tanith Lee
Once upon a time there was a princess, outside whose high bedroom window a nightingale sang every night from a pomegranate tree.
While the nightingale sang, the princess slept deeply and well, dreaming of wondrous and beautiful things. However there came a night when the nightingale, for reasons of her own, did not sing but flew far away.
In the morning the princess summoned a gardener and told him to cut down the pomegranate tree. The man protested; the tree was a fine one, young, healthy and fruitful. But the princess would not relent. For as she said, all that one previous night a nightingale had perched in the branches, and the princess’s sleep had been very much disturbed by her song.
Eastern Tales
translated by Anna Garber
Youth and Age
Black Eyed Susan
Esther Garber
Black Eyed Susan first passed me in the corridor, just after the old woman had pushed me into it. Black Eyed Susan’s eyes were black as ink from outer space, and she stared a moment, coldly with them, at me. But the old woman was still there, poking the twigs of her fingers into my side.
“What? What is it?” I mumbled to her. I had become confused, but already Black Eyed Susan had turned the corridor corner and was lost to view.
“In there,” rasped the old woman.
“Where? Why?”
“There, there.”
Across the corridor was a door, one of many. “There?”
Like a mouse all in black, though not a black like Black Eyed Susan’s, the old woman continued to push me forward as if I were on wheels, towards the door.
It was marked Private.
“But—” I said.
Sharply, leaning past me, she rapped on the door with her horn-rimmed knuckles. For a mouse, the old woman was quite large, but for a woman quite small, shriveled down nearly to a husk, but a hard one.
From within the room a male voice said, “Enter. If you must.”
The old woman turned the handle of the door, thrust me through, and slammed it at my back.
A big, warm room, fire in its grate, armchairs strewn about. Behind a polished desk piled with ledgers and papers, a man of average age and some indications of wealth, eyed me over his spectacles.
“Who are you?” he inquired, without interest.
“My name is Esther Garber.”
“And?”
“I’ve come to work at the hotel.”
“And so?”
“Monsieur, I was pushed into this room by an old woman.”
“Ah!” A bark of laughter burst, beneath his narrow mustache. “Granny at her old tricks.”
“Oh, was it your grandmother then, Monsieur?”
He drew himself up, removed his glasses, and scanned me intently. “I am the Patron. This hotel is mine. Normally you’d have no dealings with me. All that is seen to by Madame Ghoule, whom, I assume, you have already met when hired. However, the old lady you refer to, Madame Cora, will tend to drag to my notice any new girl on the staff I might, she supposes, fancy.”
My face became blank. I met his eyes with all the hauteur of Black Eyed Susan’s. Knowing, nevertheless, that if he must have me, then he must, since it was generally the safest way. Besides. I needed the job here, lowly as it was. My money had run out; and beyond the clean windows of the Patron’s boudoir, light snow was already falling on the little French town.
He said, smiling with disdain, “Well, what do you think?”
“I’m surprised,” I said, manifesting I hoped a halfway ordinary feminine reaction.
“Don’t be,” said the Patron. “My grandmother is mad, of course. Anyway, you’re not my type—” what he actually said was, not my bite of biscuit.
I should now be modestly insulted, perhaps. I lowered my gaze, and thought of ink-black eyes, floating there between me and the patterned carpet.
He said. “What did you say your name was?”
“Esther.”
“And your duties here?”
“Bar work, and some kitchen work, so I was told.”
“And why then are you up here at the top of my hotel – aside, of course, from Madame Cora, who will have waylaid you somewhere between here and the ground floor?”
“I’m to sleep at the hotel, so Madame Ghoule informed me.”
“Of course. Very well then. I wish you a pleasant stay,” incongruously he added.
So I was dismissed, opened the door and came out, looking uneasily about for mad Madame Cora. But there was now no sign of her, no sign of anyone.
The entire hotel, which called itself The Queen, had a forlorn winter appearance, and few guests. Madame Ghoule, for it had been she who interviewed me, was a formidable barrel of a woman. The interview had consisted of her terse remarks on my proposed duties, and the evidence that I looked too skinny to be able to do any of it; was I therefore strong enough? I lied that I was, which she at once accepted. “You will keep no tips for yourself for the first fortnight, that is our policy here. I hope that is understood.” I said it was. “After that you will receive your portion of tips from the communal dish.” I knew, having done such work previously, the ‘portion’ would amount to only slightly more than the initial fortnight’s nil.
Walking back along the corridor, I found myself, instead of taking the back stair downwards to my allotted room, turning the corner. But Black Eyed Susan had vanished entirely. She might be in any of the rooms, or none. I knocked quietly on each closed door I now passed. But stopped this after one was suddenly flung open, and an irate man in shirtsleeves cried, “Have you brought my beer? Where is my beer?” I apologized, and told him it would shortly arrive. “I have been waiting here half my life,” he ranted, “for one tankard of bloody beer!”
Below, on the third floor, when I reached it, I located my room. The bed had been made up – then unmade and left open – and the sheets seemed to have been slept in only that morning. Some longish, dark brown hairs lay on the pillow, and bending over it, I inhaled a faint musk of violets.
Hadn’t just such a scent wafted by me in the wake of Black Eyed Susan?
I thought, with abrupt alarmed excitement, that maybe she and I were to share this room. The bed was easily wide enough. But there were no personal items put about (aside from the dark hairs). It was an awful room, in fact. Bare floorboards, on which somebody had thrown a single rough shabby towel to act as a rug, an overhead electric light without a shade. The windows had tawdry curtains, and outside the town was settling grimly into the icing of the snow.
I made the bed again, and went along to the bathroom, which lay another floor down. Only the cold tap would run, though the hot made urgent chugging noises. I did the best I could with myself, then went back all the way downstairs.
The bar, where I was to begin, was in the charge of a tall, thin woman. She sat in a sort of open kiosk to one side sewing things, which changed color over the days and nights, from white to red to grey, but which even so never revealed their intentions. To me they looked most like bags for octopuses. Nevertheless, despite the octopus bags, she kept her scalpel of an eye on the room, calling out with no warning, in a shrill voice, either to me or the male waiter: “Window table wants serving. Make haste with the coffee.” Such things. The customers, who came and went from the street outside, or ambled in from the hotel itself, tipped her in preference to us, and I saw the loot always go directly into her pocket. Her name was Mademoiselle Coudeban.
At intervals I was retrieved from the bar to wash up dishes or floors, scrape potatoes and peel onions, or pour boiling water on beetles below the sinks. After a day or two, I was also sent to lay tables, and next carry plates into the restaurant, under the large, chilly eyes of the Chief Waiter.
At six, midday and seven in the evening, I ate in the kitchen, at one edge of a littered table. These meals were gratis, but consisted of soup, bread, and sometimes cheese. Three chambermaids also came down to feed in this way, but they were given pieces of pies or meats already prepared for the paying customers. I was obviously too new for this treat.
The chambermaids questioned me eagerly. I was a fresh face, and apparently they longed to hear of other venues. But I didn’t make the grave error of saying I had come from anywhere fascinating. I made myself as dull as possible. Nor would I take sides in their instantaneously conjured arguments. Soon they were offended with me and left me alone, only murmuring the odd sulky slight behind their hands.
Black Eyed Susan, however, did not appear in the kitchen, nor any other place. All that first day, evening and night, until I was cast out of the bar at two in the morning, part of me was alert as a pair of raised antennae. But there was no trace of her at all. Finally I asked Jean, the bar waiter, if anyone else worked in the hotel, aside from the people I had seen. He answered me that of course no one else was there, what did I expect, in winter?
When at last I crawled upstairs that first night-morning, washed in the cold water, and went to my icy little room, no one was there either.
I hadn’t put anything out in the room myself, partly for fear the few things I had might be stolen. The space looked miserly empty, and quite frozen in the snow-light from beyond the window. All that day the snow had descended, and been tramped for proof into the hotel. Now the town lay like a white desert. A scatter of lights burned on in distant white humps that might be houses, or only hills. Far above a scornful moon loitered in the clearing sky. Dogs barked to each other and fell silent. Cars had been banished from the roads.
The hotel however snuffled in its half-sleep. And all around a muffled roaring blew about, which might be the hot water pipes of the heating system, which worked, doubtless, everywhere but in my room.
I knew I’d better go to bed. Tomorrow I must find more blankets and perhaps an old-fashioned stone hot water-bottle.
Under the cold sheet I lay rigid, tempted to snivel at my plight, which was all my own fault anyway. But sleep overtook me before tears could. I woke at a quarter to six to the alarm call of someone thumping on my door.
“Are we on fire?” I shouted. “Go away.”
“Such impertinence!” shouted back Madame Ghoule.
It turned out it was her duty to arouse from slumber all the girls who worked at The Queen. Having herself retired to bed at ten-thirty, I’m sure she sadistically enjoyed her morning task.
Days and nights passed then in this way. It was true I learnt the names of the three maids – Sylvie, Claude and Jasmine. I was also propositioned by one or two male customers in the bar, evaded them, and was told off by Mademoiselle Octopus – whether because she thought I’d said yes, or because I refused, I wasn’t quite certain.
The snow remained on the town, sealing us in a white envelope of inertia.
On my fifth evening, I saw the man from the upper corridor, the one whose door I had knocked on, and who had flown up honking for beer like a desperate goose.
He draped himself at the bar counter, and peered at Jean, who was presiding over the bottles of absinthe and cognac.
“Say, Jeanot, I want to ask you something.”
“Yes, Monsieur?” Jean was always polite to guests.
“It’s a bit tricky. You see, there is a woman I clapped eyes on, up in the top corridor. A real—” he lowered his voice to protect the room, though not myself, who was stood there not two feet from him – “eyeful. A stunner. Could be from Paris. Thick brown hair tied back very neat, and a brownish skin. Black eyes. Black as coal. And a figure – well. And her legs, Jeanot. What legs those are. It was the other day when I came out to see about that beer you forgot to send me up—”
“Most regrettable, Monsieur—”
“Never mind that. I’m standing in the corridor, ready to come downstairs after my drink, and there was this piece of delight, slinking along the corridor. And she had on a uniform, like your girls wear who tidy the upper floor bedrooms.”
“Yes, Monsieur,” said Jean, patiently.
“Well, I’ve never seen her before, and as you know, I’ve stayed at The Queen in the past. So I wondered who she might be? And believe me, Jeanot, old chap, I’d like to know.”
“No one, Monsieur,” said Jean. “There’s no woman works here of that description.”
“A guest then?”
“No, Monsieur. We have, at present, no women guests staying at the hotel.”
Monsieur of the Beer drew back. He scowled. Then turned on me. “You then. If he won’t say, you tell me. Who is she? I’ve only spotted her once. But that was enough.”
I knew who he must mean, for the one he had detailed was none other than the woman I had seen on my first morning, after Madame Cora had grabbed me.
I said, “I don’t know who you refer to, Monsieur.”
“Oh, is it some shit of a conspiracy? Why? I’ve had half the other girls in this rat-hole. So why clam up over this one? Aren’t I good enough now? Money not good enough?”
“Please, Monsieur,” said Jean, “you are upsetting the other customers.”
“Fuck the other customers. Come on, Jeanot. Is she your fancy piece? I doubt it.”
The other denizens of the bar were actually quite enjoying this theatre. But at that instant, Mademoiselle Octopus, who had been absent from the room, sailed in at the doors. She loomed over the Beer Monsieur and said, in a scratchy cruel little voice, “Where are your manners? Where do you think this is? Have I to have you ejected?”
And to my amazement, the riotous Monsieur Beer subsided, blushing and begging her for leniency.
At that moment too a flock of would-be drinkers entered from the street, their shoes and boots thick to the ankle in white. As I hurried to serve them I thought, with vague wonder, Black Eyed Susan doesn’t exist – yet two of us have seen her. She must be a ghost.
Obviously it was unreasonable that I should call her Susan. But I’d lived, even then, in England long enough a while, the phrase had sprung to my mind.
Having decided she must be a ghost, I felt I should at least reorganize her name. And so she became Suzanne des Yeux Noires.
That night the Patron of the hotel came into my room.
I had just staggered in from work and the night was young, only twelve-thirty this time, for the bar (which operated by some autonomous law regulated only by how many heavy drinkers were present) had closed up early.
“Well, now,” said the Patron. “Here I am.”
I looked at him, displeased yet neutral.
He said, “Is this the dungeon they’ve given you? Poor little girl. What a nasty sty – and so cold. Have you turned the radiator off?”
“It doesn’t work,” I sullenly told him.
“Dear God. You’ll catch pneumonia. Well, well,” he rambled on, idling round the room, as if examining my personal clutter and knick-knacks, of which, as I’ve said, I had few and displayed none. “What was your name again? Estelle, was it?” When I couldn’t be bothered to correct him, he cogitated “No, no, that’s wrong. Is it Estrellya, then?”
I said, gently, “Monsieur, please excuse me, but I’m very tired. I have to be up before six tomorrow.”
“Of course, of course. Well, well,” he said. He sat down on the bed, and gradually began to undo his shoes.
In bemused horror I watched this procedure, which was followed soon enough by an unknotting of his tie, a removal of his coat and waistcoat.
All the while he went on speaking.
“No, it’s not Estrellya, is it? Estina. That was it? No? No, no. You see, my grandmother still believes I must want young women. She has always thought this, but in fact,” he rolled his eyes at the ceiling, from which icicles might well be hanging, “in fact I married young only from duty. My wife died long ago. My mother lived longer, but then she too died. My grandmother still lives, voraciously. Well. So it goes. So it goes.”
By now he had divested himself, not only of his previous character, but also of all his clothing aside from his shirt. Bulbous hairy legs, veined like the best marble, protruded beneath, also there sometimes showed the soft beak of his penis, which lay innocently already sleeping. He got up again, pulled wide the bed, and quickly coiled himself into it.
He was entirely asleep in seconds. The room rattled at his baritone snores.
I, like the fool I was, stood there in my dark uniform dress, very like, I thought, that which Suzanne des Yeux Noires had worn, save hers, (despite Monsieur Beer’s mention of legs) had seemed rather longer, almost to her slender ankles.
What now?
After ten minutes of standing – my room did not provide a chair – I let myself back out of the door. I poised in the corridor, which was really warmer than my room, though lit only by the snow moon at the window, considering that the dark hairs I’d found on my pillow were really not so very long, and might have belonged to the Patron (the musk of violets being probably only my imagination), and that maybe the man often slept in that bed.
It was odd. But I have met – had met even then – so much oddity.
While I was stuck there in the corridor, wondering if I should now creep down to the kitchen and sleep Cinderellerishly in the grease by the ovens, another door opened far up the passage.
Someone stole out, voluptuously stealthy in her nightgown, her hair undone and lying loose all around her, like a soft silver mist.
“Oh, has that pig gone in your room? What a pig. Come with me. It’s freezing out here.”
She took me by the hand and led me, in a daze, along the passage and into her own chamber. It was Sylvie.
Ah, what a transformation she’d achieved. Admittedly, her radiator worked, but all else was due to her, or so I guessed. Her bed was heaped with a glorious patchwork quilt, made of rather map-shaped pieces, colored blue and scarlet, amber and ivory. Rugs massed on the floor. Thick curtains of a dense indigo masked the icy unfriendliness of the outer streets, and her overhead lamp, though unlighted, had a shade like a lace birdcage. Meanwhile a stand of candles blazed on a table near the bed, and here too were spread cosmetics, mirrors, sweets, a bottle of wine even, and two polished glasses.
“Do you like my room?” asked Sylvie, like a clever child.
“Very much.”
“I’ve been here three whole months. You have to do something, don’t you?” I looked at her in a bedraggled way. Laziness, or some other worse element, tended to make me always feel I had better do nothing. But I nodded. She said, “Let’s have a glass of wine. You can share my bed if you like. Look, it’s huge. And we’re just two little girls, aren’t we?”
We had the wine. I’d thought she hadn’t liked me. And besides she might turn like milk in the morning. But milk keeps better in winter.
I undressed behind a bird-painted screen she had, and put on one of her nightgowns. I undid my hair. Next we were in the bed, which was warm from her occupancy.
“Shall I blow out the candles?” she said. She looked playful.
“Yes,” I said.
In the dark there was a brief pause, during which my blood hummed like a hive of bees. She was less than my hand’s length from me.
Then she moved up close to my side.
“We’d better stay together, or we’ll be cold.”
“Yes.”
“What fine hair you have, Esther. Oh dear, so sorry, I never meant to touch you there.”
“That’s all right, Sylvie.”
“Oh! There. I’ve done it again. What will you think?”
“Well, perhaps...”
“Really? Oh!” Now more genuinely, “Oh – that’s – wonderful—”
I felt over every inch of her through the nightgown, which presently anyway we took off, and next mine.
She had that smooth deep skin from the south, heavy and satisfying as treacle. Her hands and elbows were rough, but all the rest glided. Her breasts had centers like the smooth pink sweets on the table. I sucked them until I thought they might explode like sherbet bonbons in my mouth, and Sylvie yelped softly, pulling my hair. The core of her tasted of the sea, and had the texture of firm plums. The urge to bite her was nearly unbearable, so I bit her stomach all along its curve, leaving little marks to remind her in the morning. Before returning into the depths of the sea-plum.
She wouldn’t let me make her come though, not like that. I had to lie over her, pressing her down, staring at her eyes in the dark which it seemed to me was total, thanks to the thick curtains. Our hands twisted and spasmed. At the last glorious seconds she became all I’d ever wanted. But thank God, once we had fallen together like a collapsing fan, silently screaming into each other’s flesh, she became again only a charming companion in a bed warm as toast.
“That was lovely,” she whispered as we turned over to sleep, spine to spine, her buttocks couched in the small of my back. “And I knew you would.”
“How?”
“Just something. You know Madame was like that once? Or so they say.”
“Madame – which Madame? Madame Ghoule?”
But Sylvie slept, her appetite appeased for now.
I lay awake about twenty minutes, curious, almost happy.
And long before the sadist battered on the door at a quarter to six, Sylvie and I had woken once more, and once more coupled, twining as if we had slept away our bones.
“Yes, Madame!” called out Sylvie however, at the appalling knock. I of course kept quiet.
And through the door Madame Ghoule declared, “You must wake that new one, that Estette. I have been unable. My God, how she snores—”
A delicious time then, after all, at The Queen. Sylvie and I. We would meet almost every night when our work was done. I bought her a few flowers and cakes, cheap beads, a comb for her hair, proper tribute, and all I could afford, smuggled in wrappers or under my outdoor coat. The town, still floured with the now-decaying snow, opened up its shops for me. By day she and I would pretend we didn’t care for each other much, and sometimes she would say something faintly disparaging about me to one of the others, loud enough I couldn’t fail to hear, and then she’d wink at me. At night, between the sessions of sex, she would mock the other girls. I told her to be careful, to be wary.
I didn’t love her. It was more enchanting than that.
Love can be a shackle so loaded with its own imprisoning power; it hauls you to the ocean’s floor and throttles you there. But this was that other sort of love, honorably ancient as dust, and light as the opening spray of champagne that, once left, soon invisibly dries.
Did I then think of the other one, the ghost, Suzanne? Yes. Now and then. Involved in this unexpected romp, that gave me besides a warm bed, and even demonstrated for me the way to make the hot water come in the bathroom (Sylvie beating with a broom-handle on the tap) that also managed to see me given slices of meat in the kitchen, and other delicacies (by telling the contra-suggestive cook I should on no account get anything of the sort), even so, unforgivably (or inevitably perhaps, if I’m honest), some part of me was still glancing round to find the pain, the elation, of an unrequited obsession, therefore the black-eyed arrogance of Suzanne, the ghost.
To that end, I began to seek out Madame Cora, the grandmother of the peculiar Patron.
After all, that first morning, it was she who had yanked me up into the corridor where I’d seen Suzanne. And surely, if Monsieur Beer had beheld the apparition too, Madame Cora must likewise have done so. (To approach Monsieur himself had been out of the question. Following his outburst in the bar and the Octopus intervention, he’d fled the hotel the next day.)
Madame Cora, though, was a handier proposition. She dined almost every evening at eight o’clock in the dining room, where I was by now nearly always expected to assist in the service of guests.
Normally the Chief Waiter tended to Madame Cora, but once I had made up my mind, which took, I admit, two or three weeks, I slipped between them like a narrow knife.
“Good evening, Madame. We have an excellent fish tonight.”
“What do you say?”
“An excellent fish. The cook has prepared it carefully and several people are praising it. I hope you’ll like it, Madame. May I bring you a fresh carafe of water? This one has a fly in it.”
She stared into the carafe, which had nothing in it but the water. She said, “Very well. What’s your name?”
“Esther, Madame. We met on my first day at the hotel.
“Est,” she said, looking at her first course, a sort of mushroom creation, which she’d broken but not eaten. “The East.”
The Chief Waiter was there. He leaned over us. To me he said, “What are you doing here? Table seven wishes the roast chicken with sauce.”
“Excuse me. Madame’s water has a fly in it.”
“A fly? In winter? Never. There’s no fly.”
“Please look there. It’s a fly.”
He raised the carafe, squinting in, his large, hopeless, unfair eyes expanding through the glass into a pair of ghastly swimming eye-fish.
“Nothing,” he said.
But Madame Cora flew into a temper. “Let her take it away. There’s a fly! Of course! Do as you’re told.”
He cowered and I sped out with the decanter.
Coming back in after a moment with, of course, the same water, I saw Madame Cora was now sitting alone again, the Chief Waiter spun off like a displaced molecule to the other side of the restaurant.
When I set the carafe back down before her, she put out her hard and bony hand and gripped my wrist, as at our meeting. This time I bent willingly towards her.
“Did he have you?” she asked in a low rasping voice.
She meant the Patron.
I said, truthfully, “He spent a night in my bed, Madame.”
“Ah, good, good.” She nodded and let me go. “He must be appeased,” she said, obscurely. Her old eyes – what was she – seventy, seventy-five? – were dark yet filmed over. Her sad and disappointed lips turned down. And yet there was to them, those lips, something that once had been gallant – the lines running upward before the depression of gravity and age pushed them earthward. “He may wish to do it again,” she said. She shot me a look.
“Very well, Madame,” I said, meekly.
“Good. You’re a good girl.”
I filled her water glass. She seemed thoughtful. I said, “Madame, that young woman who passed us that day in the corridor, she had brown hair and very black eyes. Who is she?”
Madame Cora glanced at me again, and she smiled, pressing her sad mouth upwards.
“So you saw her?”
I straightened. A chill ran over my back.
“Yes. I did. What – who – is she?”
Her smile closed like a secret lock. She said, still locked smiling, “I don’t want the fish. Bring me some cake now, and cheese.”
She saw my defeat. She seemed to take definite pleasure in it. I understood it would be currently useless to try to question her further. Even so I said, “I call her Suzanne.”
“Do you?” she asked. She laughed. It was a spiteful little bark, like her grandson’s, the Patron. “Suzanne? That was never her name.”
She must have made some gesture to him, for the Chief Waiter was suddenly there again, hustling me aside. “Go back to the kitchen at once! What are you at, bothering Madame?”
And back to the kitchen I went.
That night, in bed with Sylvie, I let her feed me chocolate, and told her I was unhappy as I’d been thinking of my dead mother, and my father, who was a crook. This launched her into some long epic tale of her own family and its vices, and in the end I was able to avoid making love with her. That night I felt I couldn’t. But in the early hours of morning, before the yammer of Madame Ghoule on the door, I seized Sylvie in my arms, waking her to sensation so violently and harshly she began to cry, though her weeping was soon lost in other passions. “You’re so unkind, Esther,” she told me, snuggling into my body afterwards. “Don’t you like me, really?” “I think you’re quite wonderful,” I said. “No,” she said. “But never mind. Do you know,” she went on, as I was drifting off again to sleep, “who gives me these chocolates, and the wine?” “The Patron,” I suggested dreamily, She giggled. She said, “Oh no, it’s...” I was asleep before I heard what she said.
I dreamed I was standing by a vast expanse of water, brown and glowing, a river. Palm trees rose above me, with pleated tines like sculpted bronze. A crocodile waddled like a green sausage on legs across a mud bank, and I heard my mother’s long-ago, exasperated sigh.
When I woke up, in the moments before her knocking, I thought, It’s Madame Ghoule who is this way too, and who accordingly gives Sylvie confectionary and wine. And when the knocking came and Sylvie only stirred in my arms, I called out loudly, “Thank you, Madame. We are awake.”
To her credit I heard her answer steadily, “Excellent. Please see you’re both downstairs and at work in twenty minutes. “
The snow which had loosened and regrouped, now sagged, and turned to a thick dirty sorbet, that ran off the town, leaving the roofs with loud bangs like the concussion of bombs. Released, the trees lifted black arms to a wet sun, against a scudding sky. Soon feathers of new life appeared on them, a tawny northern fuzz that, in a handful more weeks, might break to pale green.
Standing in the bathroom in my slip, hammering as usual on the hot tap, I watched in astonishment as the entire faucet gave way, spewing out fairly hot water across most of the room.
By the time I’d summoned assistance, the bathroom was flooded, the water, now growing cool, spooling away down the corridor in a glowing river.
Madame Ghoule summoned me.
“This is a disgrace, Mademoiselle.”
“I’m sorry, Madame.”
“Sorry is no use. Do you know how much it will cost to repair the damage?”
“No, Madame.”
I thought she would dock my already meager wages. Instead she proclaimed, “We haven’t been at all satisfied with your work, besides. You’re slapdash, tardy, off-hand with the customers and, I hear, leave bits of food stuck on the plates when you wash them.” I could say nothing to that. It was all true. “The cook has said you eat too much. In addition, you were told you’re allowed only one bath a week, yet I gather you’ve been bathing almost every day.” Also undeniable. I thought to myself, Yes, and you’re jealous that I get into bed with Sylvie. But Madame Ghoule didn’t list that among her sequence of complaints, of which there were several more. When she concluded, I waited for the axe to fall. It fell. “I think we shall wish to dispense with your services. Indeed, I think we shall be overjoyed to dispense with them.”
Spring was coming. Despite my small gifts to Sylvie, and various essentials I’d had to buy for myself, I had by now accumulated enough to tide me over. I had been at the hotel called The Queen for almost two slow months – I would have been off anyway before much longer.
“Very well, Madame. Can I expect any wages owing to me?”
“Certainly not. Think yourself lucky you’ll be asked to contribute nothing to the repair of the bathroom and corridor. “
There are few things so liberating, I’ve found, as being summarily sacked. Not even any guilt attaches.
I went straight upstairs to my cold room (noting in passing, the Patron had been in my neglected bed again, this time smothering the pillow with hair oil), and changed into my own clothes and high-heeled shoes. I brushed my hair and left it loose on my shoulders, and applied my reddest lipstick to my mouth.
Then I went straight down to the bar.
“What are you doing here like that?” demanded Jean, caught, I could see, between abruptly noticing me as female, and prudish slavish disapproval. “You can’t wear all that rouge, or those shoes – and some drunk’s sure to spill something on that dress.”
“I’ve been fired,” I announced. “I’ll have a cognac. Here,” and I slid the coins to him across the counter.
Bewildered by this painted fiend, who only an hour ago had been meekly pouring out alcohol or coffee beside him, Jean measured my drink and handed it to me. Behind me, I heard a dim stirring and rustle, as Mademoiselle Octopus laid down her sewing in the kiosk.
“I want to know something, Jean,” I said, boldly. “That dark woman the beery Monsieur liked upstairs – who is she?” He blinked, and I went on, “I know there was someone, though you were at such pains to deny it. I did too, remember, to help you out. But now I’d like to be told.”
Jean opened his mouth. Stubbornly closed it. Then took a breath and said, “It’s none of your concern.”
“Did I say it was? I just want to know.”
“Oh,” said Jean, also abandoning any reserves of the commonplace, “I know why you’d want to know. Oh yes. I’ve heard about your sort of girl. Oh yes. Sylvie’s said to all of us, she’s not safe when you’re around. Had to lock her bedroom door, she said, you were so persistent.”
I shouldn’t have been startled by betrayal. Being betrayed, one way or another, had become symptomatic of my existence. But for an instant my guts gave a sick lurch, and I downed the cognac, and thrust the empty glass back at him. “Another. And watch your tongue, sonny. It’s Sylvie you should be careful of. And that Ghoule. Also your Patron. This hotel is a madhouse.”
Jean wouldn’t refill my glass, so I grabbed the bottle from him, and sloshed two glasses full. Clattering down more coins I said, “Drink up, before the sewing witch comes over.”
Sheepishly, used I suppose, as many of them seemed to be, here, to being overridden by women, Jean swallowed his glass-full.
He said, to the counter, “You’d better not go after that woman upstairs, though. Just better not. Not if you’ve been entertaining the Patron.”
Unnatural woman and also floozy, it seemed.
“Why is that?”
“She’s his regular. Class. Brown hair and black eyes and that swarthy skin from the south. That’s her. He makes her dress like a chambermaid in one of the old uniforms. We all know. We keep quiet.”
A dank disappointment listed through me. One more betrayal. For my mystic Suzanne of the Black Eyes was not a ghost, only some upstairs classy whorey convenience of the hotel owner’s, of whom we must all pretend unawareness.
“I don’t believe you,” I said, casually. “How could you know anything about what the Patron does?”
“Well, that’s where you’re wrong, see. I do know. She’s the widow of a living man. He’s crippled, and they’ve fallen on bad times. Not a servant in the house. Also she can’t get anything from him, in that way. So she comes up to visit the Patron now and then. Her name’s Henriette de Vallier.”
“What an invented-sounding name.”
“It’s not. It’s her name. She lives in one of the rich houses on the rue Rassolin.”
A presence was at my shoulder, breathing on me a camphor-flavored pastille. Mademoiselle Coudeban, seamstress of bags for octopuses.
“What is happening? Why is this girl here dressed in this sluttish manner? Go up at once, girl, and wash your face. “
I turned and beamed at her. “Can I buy you a drink, Mademoiselle?”
“What effrontery! It’s forbidden to drink on duty in the hotel. As for you, Jeanot, I quite plainly saw you swallow a glass of brandy.”
“I gave it him for the shock,” I said. “I’m no longer the employee of this strange building. I can do as I please.”
“And I, miss,” snapped Mademoiselle Octopus, “can have you put straight out of the door.”
Although she had set down her sewing, I could see it over her shoulder, lying across the chair arm in the open kiosk. It was a shape like a map of India, perhaps, and of a deep amber color. I had seen such shapes and shades in the patchwork coverlet of my lover Sylvie. Suddenly I knew quite well who else had given Sylvie presents for her favors, and who else, too, had been betrayed. In that instance, to me.
I didn’t have to say a word. By some bizarre osmosis of our brains, Mademoiselle Coudeban and I immediately and completely understood each other, and that, for now, I was potentially the more dangerous.
Her thin crunched-together face turned bitter and pale like a sour fruit sucking on a sour fruit.
I said, “Won’t you take a drink with me, Mademoiselle?”
“It isn’t allowed. But for yourself, since you say we no longer employ you – well. You must do as you like.”
After my earlier onslaught on Madame Cora in the dining room, I’d done nothing else, not knowing what else I could do.
Sometimes I had, during my breaks or on some excuse, gone up to the top corridor and walked about, passing several doors unmarked, or marked Private, but no longer knocking. In fact at that juncture no one at all seemed to be on the top floor. The hotel guests were, all told, very scarce; one came across them only in the bar or restaurant, or very occasionally on the stairs between the second and third stories. I’d already arrived at a surreal conclusion, which was that the hotel was primarily run only in order that its own weird, deviant and deranged life might go on. The enlisting of guests – even staff – being simply camouflage.
Now I’d been manumitted from slavery to the organism, however, I stalked out into the town, warmed by the brandy, and set off towards the street Jean had stipulated. I had seen it before, gone down it once on one of my solitary, aimless walks, which only gained meaning after I began to buy gifts for the faithless Sylvie.
The houses were tall and joined, with sloping ridged pestles of roofs. Iron railings enclosed clipped cold gardens the snow had spoiled, and here and there was a courtyard, one now with a little horse standing alone in it, browsing at a tub of wintry grass. Few cars moved along the avenue.
As in the hotel’s upper corridor, I went to doors and knocked. Generally a maid appeared. “Oh, excuse my troubling you. But I’ve lost my kitten. Have you seen it? A little ginger cat, tiny—” Some were sentimentally concerned and took up my time suggesting various means to recapture the errant feline. Some gave me a gimlet glance and saw me off with a “No, Mademoiselle. You must try elsewhere.” But all managed to inform me, in roundabout ways they never noted, that theirs was not the house of Madame de Vallier.
At the fifth house along the right-hand side, where a bare peach espalier clawed at the wall, a woman answered the door who wasn’t a maid.
I looked at her, her fair hair held back by clips, her white face, green eyes and narrow mouth. No Black Eyed Susan she.
“Your kitten? Well, Mademoiselle, how can you have been so careless as to lose it?”
“Oh come, Lise. Don’t be harsh.” This from the shadowy stair along the hall. The voice was low and eloquent, and then there came the faintest slenderest gust of violets—
I stepped back, my heart hammering like the broom-handle on the tap of my ribs, to disrupt them and let hot hope explode outwards, splashing the espalier, the blonde woman, and anything else within reach.
Why do I put myself into such positions? Quivering down some alien street, knocking at doors and lying, in case I might find the barbed blade of a perfect, dreadsome love—
Then she was in view, the second woman who had spoken.
I said, before I could prevent it, “Madame de Vallier!”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Do you know me?”
“Forgive me, Madame. Not at all. I saw you – in a shop in the town, and someone spoke your name.”
“How odd,” she remarked.
She stood looking at me, not five feet away, the other woman, who she had called Lise, eclipsed and slunk aside.
Madame de Vallier paused in thought. Then: “Now the best thing,” Madame de Vallier said, deciding on being firm and kind, “if the little cat has a favorite food—”
As she proceeded to give me her good-natured advice, I gazed at her, dumbfounded. Here was the woman with whom the Patron slept, presumably sometimes even in the beds of hotel staff such as myself. And she was exactly as Monsieur Beer had described her. Her chestnut brown hair was strictly tied back into a snood of black velvet. Her honey skin and faultless figure encased in neat black clothes that did indeed additionally reveal slim and well-formed legs. She was apparently in sartorial mourning for the living man of whom she was a ‘widow.’ The man who couldn’t give her any more sex, or servants. She was pretty, certainly, in a pre-cast, unsurprising way. And her eyes were the dark brown of damp cedar wood. But not black, not black at all. Nor was she Suzanne. That is, she wasn’t, nor could I ever have mistaken her for, the black-eyed creature I’d glimpsed in the corridor during my first hour at the hotel. Monsieur Beer and I, evidently, had seen two different women.
Henriette de Vallier finished her treatise on cat-retrieval. I thanked her effusively, and paced back down the path, looking as dispirited as any girl might who had just mislaid her beloved kitten. (I heard Lise malignly whisper, “She’d been drinking, too. You could smell it on her.”)
I went and sat under a plane tree in the Place de la Fontaine, which was fountainless and winter-grim.
The life of the town mechanically passed me, up and down. Everyone was so involved, slotted each into their niche, whether comfortable or not, with a kind of self-satisfied assurance. I am angry, so angry, would say one face going by, or another, I am in such a hurry, or I am lost in my thoughts – ask me nothing. Even the smaller children who appeared seemed already enlisted in this army of the predestined, and already in the correct uniform and with the correct rank ascribed.
Only I sat there, outlawed flotsam – or jetsam more likely, hurled from the floating insane asylum called the Hôtel Reine.
I don’t believe in ghosts, or think I don’t. Or didn’t or thought I didn’t, then.
But I had seen her. She had gone by. And if the delicate whiff of violets was only some leftover of the other presence of Madame de Vallier, Black Eyed Susan had still been as real as I, or as the dotty old Cora, hanging on my arm.
Which brought me again, of course, to the Patron’s grandmother. For she alone had been with me, when that being crossed our path. And she alone had later said to me, “So you saw her,” and “Suzanne? That was never her name.”
That night I dined in the restaurant of the Queen Hotel.
I wore my one reasonable dress, which really was quite reasonable. I had an omelet, a salad, and something that may have been pork. Also a bottle of wine.
I was scrutinized by everyone, both the waiters and the customers, who all knew me by now as “That one, that Esette.”
At ten minutes to eight, Madame Cora came in, leaning slightly sideways, as if on an unseen companion, and so moving rather like a crab. She sat down at her usual table, and the Chief Waiter hastened to her side. As always happened she took a long while, questioning every dish, clicking her tongue over the cook’s efforts, asking for water, saying her napkin was soiled.
They brought her a plate of eggs, and she played with it, testing it as someone does who is perhaps searching for poison. When she laid down her fork, she looked around at last. And her watery grey-black eyes alighted on me.
Rather than seem amazed, Madame Cora nodded, as if I were a somewhat inferior acquaintance of long-standing. I picked up my glass of wine, and went across to her table, hearing about me the dismayed murmurs of our fellow diners.
“Oh, sit down, sit down,” she said impatiently. And down I sat. “What do you think is in this food?”
“Eggs, I believe, Madame.”
“Possibly. Useless, this cook. There was one here once, a fine cook. But that was before the war. He died in the trenches,” she added, with a frown of selfish annoyance. “Since then, none of them are any good.” She was such a little, wizened thing. On her hands there were no rings, not even one for wedlock. She dabbed her lips and pushed the dish away. “Do you want it?”
“No thank you, Madame. I’ve already eaten.”
“Who are you?” she said.
“My name’s Esther, Madame.”
“Est,” she said, as before. “From the East... How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Pouf! You look only sixteen. A girl. If you’re so old, you should be married.”
“If you say so.”
“Don’t you like men?” I said nothing, only modestly lowered my eyes. Madame Cora went on, “I never did. Foul brutes. But there, I had no choice. I used to bribe him, my husband, bring him girls – it kept him away from me. Then, despite everything, I had a child. My God, my God, the agony. They gave it to me and crowed, ‘Look. A son.’ I hated it at once. It grew up to be the present Patron’s father, you see. Then there was this one, the Patron himself. I’ve brought them all women. It’s all they can think of, pushing themselves into some woman. Horrible, stupid. What can it all mean? The church says it’s our duty. But no, no, that was then. Surely that’s all changed by now.”