Sarah Bynum - Madeleine Is Sleeping

what Madeleine thinks is: Oh yes. I know what you mean exactly. Like the words: Orchard, swallow — but she cannot finish, because even to think her words again is to use them, to wear down the coins through repeated touching until they are of no value at all. So instead she says, stoutly. Do not worry. I will find him. And then we will all escape.

Madeleine, in secret, wonders what will happen after the rescue takes place. There is the problem of numbers. The girl, the photographer, the flatulent man: three of them panting on the grass, with earth clumped in their eyebrows (escape by tunnel), or welts rising on their wrists (escape by rope). Or perhaps they are altogether untouched, having cooked a sticky and soporific pudding which the matron, unknowing, served the director with his lunch. Three people lie sprawled on the grass, chests hurting, the hospital far behind them. Will the flatulent man rise up on his elbows, seeing Madeleine as if for the first time, noticing how well she looks, how bravely and wisely she carries herself, how her complexion has brightened and her figure filled out, how she has, in short, grown into a beautiful woman? (Why did I not see it before? he wonders. Right beneath my nose! he marvels.) Or will he roll onto his side, and find himself gazing at a dreamy young man, of a gentle and accommodating temperament, with whom he might retire to a fishing village on the edge of a warm sea and develop a lasting friendship? (There will be wine in the afternoons, he thinks; there will be a basket lowered and raised from our window.) Will he rise up on his elbows, or will he roll onto his side? It is impossible to predict. If only a fourth should appear! The plucky kitchen boy, who aided the escape. The cynical magistrate, heart softened by the nobility of their cause. The long-lost fiancee, believed captured by pirates, who has disguised herself as a foreign prince and earned a university degree. The resourceful milkmaid; die soldier, the poet, disaffected with his art. Anyone would do. Even the matron, the director, the Dromedary Boy. All are loveable, once one learns how. Because a certain symmetry is required. If not everyone is accounted for, the plot seems less bold, the escape less like an escape. What had once seemed a story is revealed as nothing more than a series of miscalculations, muddles, trap doors, false alarms.

but there is no need to continue searching for the flatulent man. He is delivered to them. Or to Adrien, at least, on a temporary basis: the subject for a study of Embarrassment. M. Pujols face, upon seeing the photographer, causes the director to reconsider. He is Stupefaction, the director cries, personified! Adrien ducks behind his machinery. He, too, is taken by surprise. For here at the hospital, where hygiene is so furiously: pursued, the matron has forbidden moustaches, especially those that require waxing, and M. Pujols face, destitute of moustache, is hardly recognizable as his face at all. It would have been preferable I if he had lost an eye. Also his body: it does not seem the same. Underneath the white smock that all the patients must wear, M. Pujol appears to be less perfectly slim, less gendemanlike, and though Adrien has seen him a hundred times without clothes, the thought of it now horrifies him, faintly. For this reason the photographer remains hidden beneath his black hood, even after the director has left them alone. He is afraid that if he were to emerge, his own face would be legible, a new entry for the alphabet. Under D, for Deadened Affection? No, that is not it, exacdy. The sight of M. Pujol still provokes him. He is dismayed to feel something twitching, like the snout of a little dog rooting in the leaves. He snaps it backwards on its leash; his nose wrinkles at what it has found. Perhaps, if M. Pujol were behind the camera and he in front of it, the photograph would be tided Repulsion.

the widow? She is well? We have come to rescue you. And the others in our company? But we haven’t figured out a plan. So you are no longer taking art photographs? The girl and I. We came here. You have chosen, instead, the scientific. As 1 did! It will not be easy. Though I think I might be a disappointment to the director. She loves you. Apparendy little can be learned without opening me up. I am just helping her. Could you say that again? Your voice. It is muffled.

the pony cart, never known for its reliability, seems now in danger of collapsing altogether. It is unaccustomed to the weight of M. Jouy, who sits placidly at its edge, his feet dragging along the dim road and raising dust. To keep the cart from upsetting, all the brothers and sisters have scrambled to the front. They disagree over who will wield the switch. Their teeth rattle in their heads. But this cannot stop them from singing. We are the most cunning family in the world! Claude shouts to the moon. Jean-Luc, who has strained his back, is not as convinced of this. Next we should kidnap the prime minister and demand ransom, says Lucie. No! cries Mimi. He dislikes children, and will make an unpleasant prisoner. I say we should take the princess, who will do everything as we tell her. Oh, it is easiest for the little ones! Jean-Luc moans. To Claude’s disappointment, M. Jouy has not joined them in their singing. He has not spoken, in fact, since his abduction, nor made any sound at all. It is because his mouth is full, says Mimi. Lucie makes a note of this: He has been taught good manners, even though he is an idiot. What if we take away his cookie? Claude suggests. But they shy away from the idea, these fierce-hearted children. It touches them strangely to see M. Jouy eating, the slow grinding movement of his terrible jaws, heavy as death. But he takes the tiniest of bites! It is like waking up the miller, setting those huge stones into motion, for only a half cup of meal. But this is clever, thinks Lucie. To make the cookie last. I know, says Jean-Luc, forgetting for a moment the pain in his back: ‘What if we were to flick him, lightly, with the switch?

Madeleine stirs in her sleep. She opens her eyes to see the photographer, his face close to hers. In this half light, she is not afraid to reach up and touch it with her ruined hand. What is happening? From the corridor outside she hears the ringing of a hundred litde bells, bells meant for summoning the director to his dinner or announcing the arrival of a visitor, but now their small polite voices are raised all at once, in alarm. The long hallway hisses with the sound of slippered feet. A patient was kidnapped, the photographer whispers. And knowing that the matron is thus occupied, he lifts up the covers on Madeleine’s cot and climbs in beside her. They lie close together for a long time. The girl breathes so heavily he thinks she is asleep. But then she says, clearly, So it can be done. He moves her hand. He places it carefully. She is talking about escape.

jean-luc expects to receive some credit for the cruelty of his suggestion. But Beatrice only laughs at him. A switch! How childish. Her laugh reveals every way in which his thinking is tedious and quaint. Jean-Luc returns sadly to nursing the strain in his back. She acts as if she is the oldest of them all now. She turns and looks at the other children, daringly. You want to hear him talk? she asks. Not one of them says yes. But she doesn’t need them to. The horse lets out a litde groan when she pulls on the reins, a warning he might not get started back up again. She’s heard it before; she drops down onto the road, marches to the rear of the cart. On her face is the sly, important expression that the postman wears while making deliveries. She pretends as if she doesn’t notice how hungrily her brothers and sisters are watching her. And then, with the same neatness of movement, the same absence of imagination with which she straightens the tablecloth, wrings the laundry, beats the carpets, dresses the children, heeds her mother’s every command, she lifts the edge of M. Jouy’s smock so that she can unbutton the opening to his breeches. The children, too, let out a litde groan. This is a constant source of wonder to them, that Beatrice should appear docile while being so profoundly disobedient.