NICK E-Book

Michael Farris Smith

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 433

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Critically acclaimed novelist Michael Farris Smith pulls Nick Carraway out of the shadows and into the spotlight in this exhilarating imagination of his life before The Great Gatsby. Before Nick Carraway moved to West Egg and into Gatsby's world, he was at the centre of a very different story - one taking place along the trenches and deep within the tunnels of World War I. Floundering in the wake of the destruction he witnessed first-hand, Nick delays his return home, hoping to escape the questions he cannot answer about the horrors of war. Instead, he embarks on a transcontinental redemptive journey that takes him from a whirlwind Paris romance - doomed from the very beginning - to the dizzying frenzy of New Orleans, rife with its own flavour of debauchery and violence. An epic portrait of a truly singular era and a sweeping, romantic story of self-discovery, this rich and imaginative novel breathes new life into a character that many know only from the periphery. Charged with enough alcohol, heartbreak, and profound yearning to transfix even the heartiest of golden age scribes, NICK reveals the man behind the narrator who has captivated readers for decades.

Leseprobe

Praise for NICK

'Eminently readable' - Times

'No shortage of excitement' - Mail on Sunday

'Smith is a well-respected writer with a gift for creating atmosphere' - Telegraph

'An accomplished writer of Southern gothic fiction' - Sunday Times

‘Gripping… the novel rings fiercely true’ - Financial Times

'Vividly imagined and suffused with pulsing narrative energy and an assured, atmospheric sense of period setting and speech' - Irish Times

'An admirable book: atmospheric, haunting, rich in detail and incident' - Literary Review

'Vivid, visual, strong, poetic' - Herald Scotland

'Evocative, rich in detail and memorable. You cannot help but think of Gatsby when reading Smith’s sensitively written tale… A book to read and reread' - Belfast Telegraph

‘A remarkable achievement’ - Independent

‘Exceptionally well written… NICK chimes with Gatsby but even if it didn’t this would be a beautiful read in its own right’ - NB Magazine

‘Pleasurably escapist and full of colourful characters’ - i-news

‘Good and enjoyable… it’s a novel that works even if you have never read Gatsby’ - Scotsman

‘NICK is an exemplary novel. Smith delivers a moving, full-bodied depiction of a man who has been knocked loose from his moorings and is trying to claw back into his own life’ - New York Times

‘NICK is so pitch-perfect, so rich in character and action, so remarkable a combination of elegance and passion, so striking in felt originality that I am almost tempted to say – book gods forgive me – that The Great Gatsby will forever feel like NICK’s splendid but somewhat paler sequel’ - Robert Olen Butler, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

‘Stylish, evocative, haunting and wholly original’ - Chris Whitaker, author of We Begin at the End

Praise for Michael Farris Smith

‘Smith is emerging as one of the great chroniclers of America’s dispossessed’ – John Williams, Mail on Sunday

‘Though Farris Smith has five novels under his belt, he is little known in Britain. That ought to change: let some Mississippian mayhem, murder and misery into your lives’ – Robbie Millen, Times

‘You will not be disappointed’ – John Harding, Daily Mail

‘Flickers with poetic splendour... Repetitions, the falling cadences of country music, phrases strung together in long passages of sustained beauty: it’s rare for desperation to be rendered with such intensity’– Jeff Noon, Spectator

For Sabrea

Hiraeth (n.): a homesickness for a home

to which you cannot return, a home which

maybe never was; the nostalgia, the yearning,

the grief for the lost places of your past.

THE END OF THE MENACING ROAD

A Foreword

by

Michael Farris Smith

I had read The Great Gatsby a couple of times during my twenties. The first time I read it, I was in college and my reaction was almost no reaction. I was a bored and uninterested student and I’m not sure anything less than a lightning bolt striking the classroom would have caught my attention. I even remember thinking, what’s the big deal?

The second time I read it, I was living in Geneva, Switzerland, in the midst of spending an unexpected few years as an expatriate. It was a brave new world, one that I loved right away, one that I embraced, one that I wanted to hold onto and never let go, though I knew a return home to Mississippi was inevitable in the near future. On this second reading, in my late twenties, I began to notice things in Nick Carraway, the story’s narrator, that I found in myself. Uncertainty about where he belonged, but trying to figure it out. Shifting ideas about notions of home and country. A curiosity about the people who surrounded him that often fell into confusion and vagueness. Was it possible I could relate to Nick Carraway?

Fast forward another fourteen years to the next time I picked up The Great Gatsby. I’m not even sure why I picked it up, other than I was looking for something shorter to read and I saw it there on my shelf, and I had mostly forgotten about it. So I decided to sit down and see if it awakened anything in me that might have been lost over the years.

It was one of the most surreal reading experiences of my life. It seemed as if there was something on every page that spoke to me, that related to my own experiences, that spoke to my own, and still very alive, thirst for the unknown. The further I moved into the novel, the more at home I felt in it. And then getting closer to the end, I came across this line:

‘I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.’

Only a few lines earlier, Nick has just remembered that it is his birthday. As if to remind himself that he exists. That he is alive. The ‘portentous menacing road of a new decade’ rang in my head again and again. I closed the book right there and put it down and could only think about my own life when I was close to turning thirty.

I was twentynine years old when I came home from Europe. And I came back to a home town I did not recognize. My parents no longer lived there. My sisters were gone and starting families and careers in other places. During the time I had been gone, my friends had done things like get married, have children, buy houses, get jobs, get promotions. And here I was, sleeping on somebody’s couch, with all I owned stuffed into a couple of duffle bags. It was strange, not just because of what they had all become, but because of what I had become. Somewhere along the way, I had decided I wanted to try and write. I had spent years reading as I sat in the cafes in France, as I sat in my apartment in Geneva, as I traveled on the train from one country to another, and something had moved inside of me. It’s difficult to explain or define, all I knew was that when I got back to Mississippi, I was going to write. I wasn’t really sure what that even meant.

So there I was. Twentynine years old. On the verge of turning thirty, with the uncertainty of a new decade before me, with my attitudes about self and place drastically different than they had been when the decade of my twenties began, with this urge to try and write, with home and the people I knew all colored in different shades. It felt as though I was standing on the edge of a canyon, a strong wind at my back, and that if I stepped over the edge, I would either be crushed on the jagged rock below or I would be lifted and carried by the wind. It was indeed a menacing road before me, full of doubt.

As I sat there with Gatsby closed, thinking about Nick’s notions of turning thirty, the decade of my own thirties ran through my mind. I did begin to write and it was difficult. I got married. I enrolled in and finished a writing program. I began submitting stories and received a pile of rejections until I finally published a few stories. We moved. I kept writing. I kept getting rejected. My wife got pregnant. I tried to write a novel and it didn’t work. I tried to write another one and it didn’t work. I wrote a novella. We had a baby girl. We moved again. I got depressed. I kept writing. I got depressed again. My wife got pregnant again. I started another novel. Nobody wanted any of it. I kept writing. We had another baby girl. I was going to be turning forty soon. I kept writing and kept getting rejected and kept getting depressed and tried to keep my head above water, waiting for something to happen.

It did. But not until I was forty. My novella was accepted. A year later, my first novel was accepted. I realized then that the decade of my thirties had to be an evolution. It had to be the metamorphosis. I didn’t know it while I was going through it. But Nick Carraway had known what it was going to be like. He had known it was going to be unpredictable, an emotional whirlwind, a decade of challenge.

I opened Gatsby again and finished it. But from that moment, the character of Nick Carraway lived in my imagination and I began to consider him from different angles. But he admits almost nothing about himself in Gatsby. I realized I only knew three things about him. He fought in the Great War, he was from the Midwest, and he was turning thirty. That was it. For someone who I thought I found great comradery with, I didn’t know anything about him at all. The thought occurred to me – it would be interesting if someone were to write his story.

Almost before I could finish the thought, I knew that someone would be me. I shared his feelings of isolation, of bewilderment. I had lived the expatriate life like Fitzgerald and the other writers of the Lost Generation, all of who had a profound impact on both my writing life and emotional life. I was a writer, filled with an idea that excited me and propelled me, which is really the only criteria I have for a project I want to work on. I realized the gravity of it all, the weight of its literary heft, but I could not stop thinking about it, which meant I had to write it. So I did.

It’s impossible to know what is going to grab hold of you. I think back to the first time I read The Great Gatsby and I only shrugged my shoulders. I think back to the second time I read it and I began to feel its emotion and truth. And then I think about the third time I read it and how it changed me. How it became a part of me. How it made me realize that you can face a ‘portentous menacing road of a new decade’ and you can survive and come out on the other end of it reborn. Because the edge of a new decade means you are alive. It means you are on the edge of experiences and emotions you cannot yet understand. It may be a ‘decade of loneliness’ as Nick predicts. But that loneliness may also manifest itself into the wind that carries.

I

1

A heavy morning fog draped across Paris and there was the corner café. The wicker chairs and the flowers on each table and the small man with the small eyes who sang while he worked. The chairs next to the window where Nick sat each morning and drank espresso and watched the hours of his leave tick away and on the days when the sun filtered through the trees and fell upon the cathedral across the street it seemed to him that there could be no killing. There could be no war. There could be no way that one man could drive a bayonet through the skin and bone of another until the tip of the blade dug into the earth underneath. On the days when the children began to appear in the park in front of the cathedral and climb and tumble and chase and the sun came full and the small man sang a long and turning song, then he felt the strange calmness of belonging in such a moment, so far from home, so close to going back to the front, the assurance of the Parisian day warming him so much that sometimes he had to unbutton the top button of his uniform and allow the warmth to escape before it became something else.

The morning of the fog, there was no light slashing across the statues of saints and there were no children. Only him and her and the singing man. She sat with him with her legs crossed and her hands flat on the table waiting for Nick to touch them and she said I want to see you in the morning when you wake. She had said this to him before he slept each of the last seven nights, the only seven nights he had known her, the longest he had ever spent time with any woman. His days spent walking with her and trying to understand her elementary English and her trying to teach him words on street signs and in shop windows. Trying to make his mouth make the correct pronunciation by squeezing his cheeks and lips and him slapping her hand playfully and then walking more. Stopping to sit on a bench in a park. Stopping in a café for an afternoon lunch. Ignoring his own reflection in windows because it reminded him of the uniform he wore and what was waiting. Winding through Montmartre and smoking cigarettes and watching an Italian paint the sun as he sat with his back against a tree and squinted through the tree branches toward the yellow sky. Walking along the river in the twilight when the lights first appear and there is both sadness and promise in that wonderful vagueness of day when time holds and anything seems possible.

And then those seven days and nights were gone and they sat together in the café and stared at one another and then stared out into the fog. Her hands waiting. His train ticket was stuck in the breast pocket of his uniform and she said I want to see you in the morning when you wake. She said it every few minutes, no other words between them, as if it were part of the mechanical workings of time. It was a sentence they practiced together and she said it perfectly and when it was time he grabbed her hands and held them and felt her knuckles and then her nails as if he had never seen a hand before. Then he stood and he left without saying a word because he didn’t know what else to do. Something pulsed in him and scared him and kept him from saying whatever it was he wanted to say to her. And he wanted to tell her that I will come back if they don’t kill me and I am damn near certain and scared as hell that they will kill me and you cannot imagine what it is to feel the earth shake with man’s destruction and see the blanket of blood across the countryside and to never be certain if there will again be the sunrise. Each morning that it comes I stare at the horizon and try and draw it inside and hold it. So much that he wanted to say to her but he could not as if there were chains attached to his words and he was sentenced to a life of introspection.

He walked along the sidewalk and the fog swallowed him as he trudged with his pack across his back and his insides splitting and he listened for her voice to call for him. He listened for her to be the one to reach out and to somehow know all it was he wanted to say. He walked slowly and listened and waited for her voice to cut through the gray day but it did not come and then he was too far away from her to turn back. As he approached the train station he saw the other uniforms summoned to return and he heard the engines and the whistles and he was certain that he was going to die in this war. And when he did who would be at his funeral to truly mourn? There would be a coffin in the front of the sanctuary of the white-framed Episcopal church and his family and friends of his family and dedicated customers of his father’s store and friends from the neighborhood and friends from school and an entire church filled with those who had some weightless attachment to him. They would sit on the pews and sniff into handkerchiefs and hug and shake hands and his name would give them all some strange purpose. And they would be there to share in a sadness but who would be there to mourn? To gasp and pray and hurt and hope for his soul? Did anyone truly love him and did he love anyone and the answers to all of his questions were clear and that was when he stopped and turned around and headed back for the café, walking first and then running. The pack heavy on his back and his mouth open in panic and the fog thick and like a curtain that hid her from him.

He ran and he saw lights of the café through the gray and he called for her and believed that he would have someone to mourn and someone to mourn him when the day finally came to lie down and leave the world to all the others. He called out to her as he ran and when he reached the café he stepped inside and he wiped his eyes and looked to their table. But she was gone.

The small man was wiping the bar and humming. He stopped and looked at Nick and then he pointed toward the door she had walked through. He clapped his hands and said Vite, vite and when Nick stood still he slapped the bar and shouted as if to wake him.

Nick dropped his pack and shoved it in the corner of the café and ran out, so little time between now and the train’s departure and he ran along the sidewalk toward Boulevard de Clichy where they had walked so often in the last days. Several blocks and at each turn he expected to see her ahead, to catch her and say those things to her but she was never there. He wondered if he had run past her in the fog or missed her at another café and the fog seemed to thicken with his anxiety and he turned and called and searched but she was not there. He listened for her voice and he ran again and he began to grab at strangers though he knew they were strangers but he grabbed with the fraught hope that her face would be on the unfamiliar figure. They screamed and slapped when the frantic man in an American uniform pulled at them and said where is she and then he gave up on their help. He snatched a café chair and stood on it as if it might lift and carry him to her but there was only the fog in every direction and nothing magical about the chair.

He could not miss his train. He would not. It was not what he had been trained to do. He called again. And again and again. A waiter stood next to him and fussed and then Nick stepped down from the chair. He retraced his steps to the café with his eyes searching no more but only straight ahead at the ground before him and when he reached the café the small man said something to him in French that he both understood and did not understand. He lifted the pack from the floor and stuck his arms through the loops and he marched toward Gare Saint-Lazare as if he were already there in the mud and blood. He arrived at the station as the porter made the final call and he climbed into a car but he did not sit down. He stood in the aisle and looked across the heads of the passengers, out onto the platform, pretending to see her.

2

They expected the counter attack at daybreak. The guns rat tat tatted all through the night, white flashes across a clouded landscape that might have been brilliant starbursts in a more imaginative and peaceful place. Flares spiraled, red and yellow arcs of light that kept their eyes open and toward the sky. At sunrise the mist hung low across the land and rose out of the craters like a great mob of spirits ascending and then they heard the planes and it began.

Grenades and shellfire threw the earth toward the sky and then came the roar of thousands of hungry men going for the throats of thousands of other hungry men. The rifles fired and once they were emptied the bayonets and once they were broken off in the rib cages out came the knives and the hands and knees and fists and whatever else could be used to kill. The constant explosions around them and they began to separate, the living and the dead and those somewhere in between. Men and pieces of men. Some walked through the battle, inattentive, looking for arms and hands. Another held the back of his head together with both hands. Some ran away and some played dead and others had long been void of humanity and ripped and shredded like barbarians that needed blood to survive.

They had gained nearly two hundred yards the day before but the counter attack drove them backward. The voice of retreat spread between the shellfire and screams and they turned and they were forced to cross back over the trenches that they had taken the day before. The planes rained down and gave them an escape. Those that were too slow or hobbled or simply dazed took bayonets into their spines and necks and the backs of their heads and those that were still on two feet joined the retreat, unable to save anyone but themselves.

When they reached the dugout they thought they had left for good two days ago, they tossed down their rifles. Gasped for air. Checked themselves for cuts or wounds that adrenaline had overcome. Some vomited. Some talked to themselves in loud voices of fear and hate or called out to people they loved. Others lay back and stared into the smoky sky. Still others bled until they couldn’t bleed anymore.

The planes chased and fired and circled and fired again until the enemy was pushed away. The two armies settled in for recovery, hoping for rations, waiting for what was next. In an hour’s time the dust settled and revealed a cloudless sky all around them. A pale blue. Pure and clean.

Artillery fire echoed in the distance and in the trenches those who were still alive helped with the wounded. A carnival of recovery. Men screamed from missing legs or feet and some fought to breathe against the bullet holes in their stomachs and chests. Stretchers carried out some but others only wrapped their wounds and waited for medics who had no chance of doing all that was needed. In time the screaming would cease. The bleeding would stop. And they all looked around to see who was left.

Random shell explosions came closer and recreated a low lying cloud of smoke and dust. But the sun settled and a ribbon of pink cut through the haze and lay across the horizon. Flocks of blackbirds passed between the shellfire and from one side of the sky to the other the blue transformed from light to dark.

And this was the worst time of day. After the fight and after the recovery and before nightfall. Those who remained waited for the sounds and they came, the voices from no man’s land. The calls for help. The strained cries of dying. The sounds of pain and desperation and begging and pleading. Voices so close but so far away. There could be no help and the voices were already in their graves and they knew it. They knew it because they had sat and listened to the same cries. The same pleas. At the same time of day. There was nothing that could be done for them now but wait for the end but that never kept the voices from crying out until the fall of day, into the earliest of night, through the dark.

Nick unbuttoned his coat. He reached in and took out a rag and wiped the sweat and blood and dirt from his face and neck. He checked himself for cuts or holes and then he felt around in his pockets and found half a cigarette. He didn’t have a match and didn’t feel like asking. He sat on his helmet and leaned against the trench. There was thirst but the water went first to the wounded so he licked his lips and tried to gather a mouthful of spit. Then he swallowed.

A sergeant passed through and a new face was the only one who rose to attention and the sergeant told him to look around. You don’t see nobody else saluting do you? We don’t bother with that on the line. Save your getting up and getting down for the bad guys. Nick took the cigarette from his mouth and handed it to the newbie and he took it and he said I never done that. I never done what I just did.

‘None of us have,’ Nick said.

‘But you been here and done it already and I swear to God I don’t see how nobody’s alive. I don’t even smoke and here I am about to smoke. I never done that.’

‘Sit down.’

‘How long you been here?’

‘I don’t know.’

The newbie sat down. He looked at his hands and then touched them to his neck and ran them along his legs and around his stomach.

‘You’re not hit or you’d know it.’

‘I don’t believe it. How come? That shit’s flying everywhere.’

‘Don’t think about it.’

‘I don’t even know if we won or lost.’

‘Me neither.’

‘Then what the hell are we doing?’

‘Trying to win or lose.’

‘I can’t do this. I can’t. I got to go.’

‘You’d better stay down.’

‘I can’t. I can’t stay here. I got to go.’

‘There is nowhere to go.’

‘Bullshit. I’m going home,’ he said and he stood and put on his helmet. Picked up his rifle. He turned in a circle as if looking for something else.

‘You’d better stay down,’ Nick said again. ‘If your head pops up above that trench you’ll get it.’

‘I ain’t going that way,’ he said. ‘I’m going back the way I came.’

The sergeant passed back through and the newbie saluted again and the sergeant said I told you not to do that shit.

‘We’ll get rations soon and you’ll feel better,’ Nick said. ‘Find a light for that cigarette.’

‘Do we have to do this again tomorrow?’

‘Probably. And the next day too.’

‘Then I won’t feel no better. I got to go.’

‘Okay,’ Nick said. ‘But keep your head down. And give me back the cigarette.’

The newbie gave the cigarette back to Nick. He looked around nervously. The sky nearly dark and lanterns glowing along the trench.

‘The flares will begin soon,’ Nick said. ‘If you wait those will make you an easy target.’

‘I never done nothing like this. I can’t stay here. Don’t tell nobody.’

Nick nodded and then told him to go west. Or south.

‘Which way is that?’

‘Like you said, the way you came from.’

‘I ain’t a coward.’

‘You don’t have to explain.’

‘I ain’t.’

‘You’d better keep your head down.’

The newbie pulled his chin strap tight and then stepped past Nick and he crept along the trench as if anticipating an ambush from his own kind. The others noticed him and had seen this before and someone called out to give momma a big hug. I should have told him, Nick thought. If nothing else you will be alive for another day if you stay here. If you keep your head down. As soon as you climb up and out, you are dead. As soon as you are alone, you are dead.

3

The rations came in the morning. Tins of sardines and pressed ham. Bricklike bread. Water and cigarettes. They ate with their filthy hands, allowed more per man today than they would have received the day before. The planes returned but there seemed to be a pause. No orders had been passed along, no command to get up and go. Though it could come any second.

Nick’s right hand shook uncontrollably. He sat on it. Held it folded under his arm. Talked to it. The shaking had started in the night and only stopped when he fell into a brief and fidgeting sleep. When his eyes opened, the shaking returned and it had not stopped. He ate with his left hand hoping that any type of nourishment might return some strength and settle his hand and his nerves.

He wanted desperately to take a walk. To climb up and out of the dugout and to walk across the countryside and touch the wildflowers and find a butterfly and lie down in the grass and feel the breeze. He wanted to be alone, to have to see no one and talk to no one. He wanted the constant pops of the shells and the hum of the planes overhead to go away. Silence. Only a simple silence and a walk and he felt like he could be human again. But that wasn’t going to happen. He ate and took slow and heavy breaths and finally the shaking slowed and then stopped.

The men ate and settled in. Still no suggestion of a fight today. Down to his left a trio with Texas accents played cards and to his right a dozen men gathered and paid cigarettes and pennies for the chance to see photographs of naked French women that the trench entrepreneur had brought back from leave. Those who paid got to hold the photograph and had to fight off freeloaders peeking over and around their shoulders. Those who paid were allowed to hold the photograph for maybe a minute and then were forced to give it back. Pay up if you want a second look, the entrepreneur said. Those girls ain’t cheap. The men with something to give happily bought a second look and those who didn’t moved up and down the trench trying to borrow or steal some currency.

Nick held a stick and drew shapes in the dirt. A triangle, a square, a rectangle, a circle. Like the worksheet of a little boy. Then he tried to draw the head of a dog and it looked more like a horse. He then drew a pig face with some success and he gave it the body of a giraffe. He wrote his name. He wrote her name. He drew two stick figures standing next to one another. And then he fought the schoolboy impulse of drawing a heart around the stick figures and instead he only drew a line that connected the two names. Then he picked up a pebble and dropped it on the connecting line and he made the sound of a tiny explosion almost at the exact instant that a heavy explosion shook the earth and the men reached for helmets and rifles but then a lieutenant called for them all to sit tight. It ain’t as close as it sounds. We’re not going anywhere.

He drew long hair on her stick figure and then made scissors with his fingers and pretended to cut it off and he left the trench and was standing at the gates of Parc Monceau where they had found one another. He was watching the pigeons dance around the bust of Maupassant and a carousel turned and played a mechanical song while children sat atop ornamented horses and went up and down. Women stood together with strollers. A man slept on his back on a bench with a newspaper covering his face. Nick flicked a pebble and scattered the birds from Maupassant’s shoulders and then across the pathway he had noticed her pushing a cart. She stopped at each bench and stopped people walking and she held picture frames toward them. Waved her hand across the frame and some nodded politely and kept going and some paused and touched or maybe held the frame but none bought. An older woman gave her a franc coin but didn’t take a frame and she tried to give it back but the old woman wouldn’t have it. She moved along with the cart and tried again and more rejection. Nick moved to keep watching her. She made a lap around the pond and behind the willows and sat down on the steps of a short bridge and nibbled at something she pulled from her pocket. Her hair was cut short and choppy and she wore no gloves and had a coat too big for her. Her skirt rose above her knees.

Nick had walked past as she sat on the steps and he looked into the cart. An assortment of handmade frames, decorated with red and black strips of lace and tulle and costume jewelry. A frame on top of the pile held the sepia photograph of a naked woman holding the neck of a bottle of absinthe in one hand and a short whip in the other.

‘You like this one?’

‘You speak English?’

‘Of course. Do you?’

He lifted the frame that held the naked woman. He looked into the cart and the other frames were without the same allure.

‘How much?’ he asked.

‘You do not want this one. It is only to make men look. And some women. It is not so easy to sell an empty frame.’

‘Do you make these?’

‘Yes.’

‘I can buy one?’

‘If you want.’

He reached into the cart and took out a frame. Rudimentary and uneven but a red ruby at each rough corner.

‘This would be good for my mother.’

‘Is your mother alive?’

He cut his eyes at her. ‘She would have to be.’

She stood from the steps. Brushed the flag on the shoulder of his uniform.

‘Do you enjoy this war?’

He gave her a baffled look.

‘I think some men find pleasure in a war,’ she said. ‘I cannot think of another reason to have one.’

‘Neither can I.’

‘But you do not enjoy it.’

‘The only men who find pleasure in a war are the ones who get to decide that we have one.’

Another shell exploded and Nick jerked and his helmet fell off. Again they were told to sit tight. Again he returned to the park.

‘Where is your home?’ she had asked.

‘It’s getting difficult to remember,’ he said. He then moved his eyes from hers and studied the frame. ‘How much for this one?’

‘Whatever you like to pay.’

‘I would like to pay for that one,’ he said and he pointed at the naked woman.

‘That is not for your mother.’

‘You are right.’

She took the frame from his hand and set it into the cart and said we can talk of this later. Right now I would like a coffee. If you would like a coffee also then come with me. He had noticed her eyes being somewhere between green and blue and her small mouth and nose set between sharp and drawn cheeks.

‘Can we also eat?’ he asked. ‘I’m hungry.’

‘Yes,’ she answered. ‘We will have a coffee and we will eat and we will walk if we like one another after everything.’

After everything they liked one another and stood to leave the café. She asked Nick to wait outside as she had to go to the toilet. He stood on the sidewalk with her cart and smoked but when he looked back through the café window he saw her not in the toilet but sliding from table to table and snatching fragments of bread and halfeaten pieces of meat and cheese and stuffing them into her coat pockets. She swiped cigarette butts from ashtrays and dropped them into another pocket. Nick turned away when she made for the door and hoped she hadn’t caught him watching.

They walked and she pulled the cart and she sold two frames along the busy Boulevard des Batignolles. Nick noticed her careful tone when showing the frames. Her dirty fingernails gently handling her work. The artisan pride when she delivered. He thought she seemed like something out of a story and that their meeting and then eating and now walking felt like the product of someone’s imagination but then as they moved along Boulevard de Clichy and up into Montmartre she seemed to merge into the physical world. He found himself bumping into her just to make contact or touching her arm or hand when helping her move the cart up the tall stairs that lifted them to the top of the city. She was a voice. A real voice on a moving body with eyes that gave him attention and kept his thoughts on right now instead of what lay ahead or behind.

‘Do you want to know where we are going?’ she asked when they reached the top of the steps.

‘Not really,’ he answered.

‘I would like a drink and it is cheaper in Montmartre.’

‘I would hope so as many stairs as we’ve climbed.’

‘Have you been here?’

‘No.’

‘Then look.’

She took him by the shoulders and turned and faced him toward the city that fell below. Their steady ascension had taken them to the edge of Place du Tertre and Paris stretched out and sat quietly as if without engines or voices.

‘If you stand here for a long time it is possible to believe that nothing is bad,’ she had said.

‘Nothing?’

‘Rien.’

He turned to her. Her eyes across the Parisian sky but the life quickly drained from them and then her melancholy bled into him and he felt her solitude. He stared across the city and sensed not only her loneliness but the eternal loneliness that resides in us all and for the first time since he had felt the anxiousness of youth he realized that he wasn’t alone. There are others like me, he thought. And she is one.

She sat down on the top step.

‘Wait here,’ he said.

He walked into a bar at the corner of the plaza. Two men stood at the doorway and argued in Spanish and he stepped between them. One called Americano but Nick kept his head down and moved to the bar. He bought a tall carafe of wine and he took two glasses and when he slid back between the two men they clinked their beer glasses to the wine glasses squeezed between his fingers.

He returned to her and she sat with her knees drawn against her chest and Nick poured. When the wine was gone the day began to fade and they walked back down the stairs. She asked him to help with the cart to where she stayed and they moved into Pigalle, a gritty series of streets scattered with dance halls and red lights. She walked more quickly through Pigalle and Nick hustled with the cart to keep pace. He was about to ask why she was racing when she pushed open the door of an empty building and they stepped inside. Nick paused and looked at the dustcovered windows and then back and forth along the street and she reached out and took him by the arm and pulled him inside. She closed the door and slid a cinderblock behind it to hold the door shut and told him to follow. They stepped through the remains of a job begun and then abandoned. Scraps of plywood and lumber and large chunks of plaster wall lay scattered across the floor and a giant coil of wire nestled in the corner like a copper tumbleweed.

Nick followed her to the back of the building and then she opened a door that led to the alley behind. She stuck her head out and looked both ways and then she motioned to him. They stepped across the alley and went into a door that was wedged open with a folded magazine and inside the door was a staircase. Once Nick had cleared the doorway she closed the door gently and the light of day disappeared.

The stairway was enclosed and windowless, the only way in or out the single door. She took out a matchbox and a halfsmoked cigarette. She stuck the butt in the corner of her mouth, struck a match, sucked hard to relight the butt. Then she held the match toward the staircase and nodded as if the gesture itself were some additional secret he should recognize.

She went up first. The match burned away and she tossed it and Nick followed her closely in the darkness, a steep and narrow rise. She didn’t speak and he didn’t ask and they kept going up and up until they reached the top floor. She asked if he was still there and he whispered yes. You don’t have to whisper she told him and then she opened the door to the attic.

She dropped the butt from her mouth and squashed it with the toe of her boot and walked in first. The attic reached high above them and loose arms of plywood lay across the beams. Clothes racks filled with old costumes covered the attic floor space and she moved through the tight rows, turning her thin frame sideways. Nick trailed her, the costumes brushing against him and the evening light coming in the windows and shading everything in blue. He stopped in the middle and gazed at the cluster of dresses and suits and coats and the stacked boxes of hats and shoes.

‘What is this place?’ he asked.

But he saw on the other side of the costumes a chair and a thin mattress on the floor and an open suitcase. She crossed the attic floor and stopped at the windows. Evening lights had begun to shine and she emptied the cigarette butts and scraps of food from her pockets onto the windowsill.

Nick moved out of the costumes and noticed a shadeless lamp on the floor next to the mattress. He bent to turn it on and she said not yet. Scattered on the floor were newspapers and old magazines. Costume dresses lay piled on top of the mattress for warmth and comfort and in the windowsill with the butts and food lay stockings and a hairbrush and handheld mirror. On the floor beneath the window was her cut hair and a pair of scissors. Long and curvy locks of brown like cut strips of ribbon.

She opened the window. From the end of the block came the rhythm of a bass and a snare drum and an energetic clarinet twisted through the thumping beat like a tenor-toned snake. Solitary lights glowed across the rooftops. A horse and buggy clopped past underneath and the shrill laugh of a woman came from somewhere close. The Parisian sky was clear, the stars visible and the stovetop smoke from homes pushed in the breeze like earthfallen clouds.

She picked up the brush but set it back down and she ran her fingers through her choppy hair. She threw her head back and shook it in habit of having the length. Then she turned to him and said mine is more short than yours.

‘It looks good,’ he said.

‘Men like long hair, I think.’

‘Then why did you cut yours this way?’

‘Maybe I do not want men to like me.’

‘Do many men like you?’

‘You must look around Paris. There is no such thing as many men. They are all somewhere else.’

‘It’s possible I have stood beside some of them. But they will come back.’

‘And so my hair will come back.’

‘I like it this way.’

‘Then maybe you are not a man. Maybe you are something different,’ she had said.

A litter of shellfire snapped him from the attic and he fell facedown in the dirt. Grabbed his helmet and he and the others hugged the earth and felt it coming. He told himself to think of her think of her think of her.

She had pulled the windows closed and turned around and looked across the makeshift room. They stood together in the attic above Théâtre du Rêve, a small theater below that once thrived with dance and song but had stopped trying during the war. The attic was a place to store the production costumes, racks of discolored highnecked dresses and floorlength overcoats and mismatched suits and evening gowns. The clothes were bunched tightly on the racks and the racks filled the floor and wall space but for a slither of a pathway that led from the door to the window. Coming and going her shoulders brushed the forgotten costumes and she told him the touches seemed to her like a friendly welcome or the loving sadness of goodbye and there was a comfort in not being alone in the attic room but surrounded by the costumes that once had life. She had found the attic by accident, she told him. Wandering with all she owned in her suitcase and looking for any open door or any empty building to get into for a night or two or three. She had looked into the windows of the building under renovation and turned the knob and it opened and she sat there the first night. Waited for the morning and for the workers to return. But they hadn’t. And so she had stayed another night and another and she realized no one was coming back. She had gone into the alley to piss and she had seen the back door of the theater and then found the staircase and then found the costumes. She felt safer up high. Warm among the costumes. Eyes across the city. She had a window to look out and wonder what was going to happen to her.

‘You live here?’

‘Until someone asks me to leave.’

‘I don’t think you need to worry about that. It looks like a costume graveyard.’

‘What is this word? Graveyard.’

‘It is the same thing as cemetery. Do you know the word cemetery?’

‘I know this word. So you believe the costumes are dead. I believe they are alive.’

He nodded and picked up a wedding gown from a pile of dresses on the bed and he held it up as if to examine its craftsmanship. He touched the sequins around the waist and along the neck and then he folded it and laid it back on the pile.

‘It does not matter. I will not be here long. Someone will come.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘I do not know.’

With me, he wanted to say. But he had nowhere to take her and no promise he could make.

‘I am afraid most nights,’ she said.

‘So am I,’ he answered. And as soon as it was out of his mouth he wanted to take it back. To hide this part of himself. But it was honest and quick like a heartbeat, nothing to be controlled. He folded his arms. Rolled his eyes to the ceiling. Tried to think of anything else.

‘How do you make the frames?’ he asked.

She opened the windows again and said come over here. They leaned out and she pointed. A scrap pile of wood lay in the alley several buildings away.

‘A person who makes things out of wood leaves this,’ she said.

‘A carpenter,’ Nick said.

‘A carpenter,’ she repeated. ‘And then I take the pieces of cloth and the lace and buttons and many other things from the costumes. The glue I steal. I put them together like a child with a puzzle.’

‘Tomorrow I will buy you a big bottle of glue.’

‘Tomorrow you will no longer want to see me. Or tomorrow you will no longer want to leave me.’

‘I think there is something in between that.’

‘No. I think it is one or the other.’

She was blunt and beautiful and scratching and clawing and free and bound and she seeped inside of him. She is so different and I am scared of her and I keep finding new ways to be scared but not right now. Don’t let it show right now.

‘I have a room where you can come and stay,’ he said. ‘It is closer to the river. There is a nice café next door.’

‘There are many nice cafés.’

‘Not as nice as this one.’

‘Does your room have four walls and a woman downstairs who asks for the key when you leave?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I think this room is better and you can stay with me.’ She closed the windows again. Several wine bottles with candles in their necks stood together in the corner and she lit them. Then she sat on the edge of the mattress and unlaced her boots. She took off the first one and held it up and felt the wobbly heel and touched the tender, worn sole. She took off the other and tossed them next to her suitcase that lay open with her few clothes spilled out onto the floor. She stood and unbuttoned her loosefitting coat and her loosefitting blouse and hung them on the back of the chair. She stepped out of her skirt and then rolled off her stockings and the cool night air sent chills along her arms and legs and she shuddered for an instant. And then she lay down on the mattress, sliding herself between the pile of costumes. And she waited.

This is not real, he had thought. You are not real and if you are what do you want and what will happen after this.

She waited.

You do not do this with someone. You do not walk across a park and find a woman who speaks to you with direct and maybe honest words and you do not go with her to a strange place and you do not do this. This is not real. This is some ploy or some trick and you cannot be there the way you are there and I don’t know what you want. And I don’t know why I am scared of her.

She waited.

His hand began to shake and he grabbed it quickly as if it might strike lightning if ignored.

She waited.

Maybe this is real. Maybe I can have this. The world is different now and you know that and maybe your world can be different too and you can have this and you can lie down with her and she doesn’t want anything and she is not going to trick you and this is real. Maybe you can touch her and feel her and maybe the sky is still blue and the sirens reverberating outside across the city are not for you. Maybe this.

She stared at his hand. She moved onto her elbows and her chin rose above the fringe of the wedding gown and she said something in French. Whatever it was she said had drawn him to her and he went down to his knees beside the mattress.