Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

She laughed. It sounded angry. ‘They’re slaughtering the French armies , Sid. What do you think they’ll do to the civilians ?’

I sort of blushed. Girl had a way of making you feel a fool.

‘You sure you wouldn’t rather Chip be here?’ I said.

‘Chip doesn’t exactly blend in.’

I blushed some more.

She led me down across the Seine to a big picture house where they was showing Pygmalion in a matinee. Folks drifted in real slow, like they ain’t passionate about the picture but what else they got to do. I shielded my eyes from the sun, the sweat already trickling down my spine as I paid up at the ticket window. We slipped inside.

The theatre was crowded, smelling of cigarette smoke and roasted nuts. I was nervous we might not find three seats together, but Delilah strode straight down the aisle, sliding into a velvet chair. Ignoring me as I took my seat, she set her shawl and purse down on the vacant seat beside her, the brown paper envelope holding our passports and money sticking clearly out of her bag.

‘Is you contact here?’ I whispered nervous-like. I glanced back at the faces, at the men with their tired eyes. The houselights was going down.

‘Jesus, Sid. Turn around .’

Then the newsreel started, a sharp blue light cutting through the smoke in the darkness. And all at once the theatre filled with jeering, shouts, catcalls. It was footage of Frog infantry crouched in their damn trenches, filing past with rifles slung. I ain’t understood none of the damn narration, but the images was clear enough. Kraut soldiers with their hands held high in surrender. British fighters taking off in long fierce runs toward a frighteningly empty sky. Images of Krauts fleeing the battlefield, pulling away from outbuildings and barns. There was shots of old King Leopold glowering, and damn Petain standing firm.

‘What they sayin?’ I whispered.

Lilah scowled. ‘We’re holding the Germans in Belgium. We’re advancing.’

‘Advancin on Paris, maybe.’ I smiled bitterly.

‘Hush.’

But glancing at her purse, I give a start. ‘Holy hell.’ I gestured at the seat beside us. ‘It gone . Lilah. The envelope’s gone, girl.’ I twisted in my seat, stared deep into the smoky theatre.

Lilah hauled me round, give me a cold glare. ‘Just watch the screen, Sid. Jesus.’

I felt uneasy, my knee going up and down. I wiped my hot hands along my thighs. ‘So that’s it? So now we just wait?’

She wasn’t hardly listening.

‘Okay. So let’s ankle, girl.’

But she grabbed my arm, held me in my seat. Her wrists looked damn thin, like she ain’t been eating enough. There was that old clean lake water scent on her. ‘Watch the screen, Sid,’ she whispered again. ‘We came to watch a movie, remember? Enjoy it.’

Pygmalion , hell. Now that was one damn foolish picture.

And so we waited. Days passed. Every last one of us damn anxious and lying about it.

Then, overnight, the kid just stopped eating. Already lean from a diet of water, rot, gin and roasted street nuts, he now seem unable to take nourishment from nothing. The best cuisine in the world wouldn’t help him; even small meals made him ill. Was like he was feeding on that fury running through Paris, that steady fear beginning to build.

Sure, butter, sugar, bread, eggs, all that got real damn scarce. We ain’t got no coffee at all in the flat, taken to drinking some gruesome boiled chicory juice Lilah brought home, sweetening it with saccharine. But kid refuse everything we scrounge up. He grown thinner and thinner, his trousers slouching off him even with the belt pulled to the last notch, his shirts dragging off his bony shoulders, coming untucked. Seeing his throat rattle in his collars, I shook my head, thinking, boy, you skinny as a gut-string. He got the look of something hunted.

And then one morning he just collapsed. He ain’t even got the strength to haul his thin body up out of them blankets. There was a darkness blooming in him, and hell if it ain’t scared all of us.

I found Delilah in her room, grim, worry etched in her face. I known what was troubling her. ‘He just ain’t been eatin,’ I said. ‘He just weak.’

‘It’s like what happened to Louis,’ she said.

I frowned. ‘It ain’t nothin like that.’

She was sitting at her vanity, staring at herself without really seeing. ‘Louis stopped eating, too.’

‘Louis et matzos.’

Her smile got something of a sadness about it. ‘Yes. He did.’

‘You thinkin he picked this up from old Louis?’

She shrugged, disconsolate. ‘I don’t know. But Louis got through it okay. So if Hiero’s got what Louis had, he should be all right.’

But she sounded real tense about it. I stood there at the vanity, watching her reflection as she unwound the wrap from her head. The silence felt so delicate, so intimate. I held my breath. Her scalp looked smooth, pale, near blue. She run a hand along it absently, her eyes drifting over to the window where the blackout curtains was bunched up and tied off. I gone over to her, put a calloused hand on her bare shoulder, the thin birdlike bones there.

‘It’s serious, Sid,’ she said quiet-like. ‘We need to get him out of here.’ Then she lowered her hand, lifting my fingers one by one off her skin.

‘Don’t, Sid,’ she said. ‘That’s done. That’s over.’

I blushed. ‘Aw, Lilah, I wasn’t tryin to… I mean, that ain’t—’ But then I just gone silent. I felt damn foolish. Cause it was true, somewhere in me I was still thinking it. A thing like we had, it don’t just cease .

But seeing her then, without no anger in her, just this enormous sadness, I known for real whatever we had once was just ash and dust now.

……….

Still, something softened between us after that, some kind of tenderness come back. We was all of us sick with fear that we wouldn’t get them visas. Being stuffed into a small flat together didn’t help none. We grown frayed, thin, listless.

And then, at last, word come in from Armstrong. Ain’t heard from him in weeks. I seen it troubling Lilah, seen how careful she was to not go on bout it. But she’d comb the papers each morning with a cold eye, them papers reduced to a single sheet, double-sided, with all them vast white blocks where the text been censored out. The war was here, even if the Krauts wasn’t.

That day a letter come in the mail. From the look of it, it been delayed some while. Armstrong, it seems, done sailed out from Bordeaux on the fourth of June. Headed back stateside with his gates. He wrote urging Lilah to come on down to him before he set off, for all of us to get out right quick. Said not to worry bout his furniture . Son of a bitch. Lilah set her jaw reading this, her eyes hardening.

‘Long as he get out,’ said Chip, scowling. He spat and got up from the table.

Hiero, it was like he just woken from a sweet dream to find hisself in a cold room. He hitch up one shoulder, turn his face aside, close his damn eyes.

So that was it for the recording. It finally come to nothing. I thought I’d feel pleased about it, relieved at least. But it things ain’t never what you expect. I looked with pity at the kid.

We all of us felt abandoned. And the war, it was just getting worse. Every day in the long southerly boulevards refugees streamed past, pushing carts, wheelbarrows, even baby carriages filled with luggage. Dutch and Belgian families, walking their bicycles, all of them exhausted, dragging on like they ain’t got nothing left in them. I seen a woman in a black evening dress and boots, huddled on a curb on the Champs-Élysées, not even lifting her damn face when the taxis honked at her. No one even give her a glance.