Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

I had a fantasy of barricading the room to make them listen to us instead and to take, for our pay, everything they wore, he said. Leave them naked, tied to the chandelier. And the baroness, she liked me. He winked. Instead, we took our pay and drank. I have lived on the generosity of women with bracelets that could pay for a room full of men like me. But this is not how I wish to live with you.

He set the bag back on my thigh and sat up to push back my hair.

You may notice, we are surrounded by Communards who would shoot us as deserters, he said. And should we escape them, Germans who may shoot us as spies. And then, apart from the patriots, the siege takers, and the partisans, there are the ordinary thieves who would kill us just for one of these. He pointed at the bag.

I must leave, I said. I must leave him, and Paris, and he must not know where I go, and you must come with me.

So it’s like that, he said. I had wondered. This was your first stop.

I said nothing.

I’ve just only found you again, he said. I am not ready to lose you or to die as quickly as that. But we should not go now. He touched the little bag with a finger. But don’t go back. Does he know you’re here?

No, I said. Well, he may. I left no evidence of a next address. But he is clever.

Stay here then, he said. We will be safe here until it is safe to leave.

You don’t know him, I said. He’ll find us if we stay in Paris. And then he’ll kill us both.

You don’t know me, Aristafeo said, smiling, and he kissed me again. I keep the dogs a little hungry for a good reason. He may try to kill us. But he’ll die first. And if not, then at least I’ll be sure we’ll all die together.

This silenced me.

I won’t let him have you, he said.

I only nodded.

He helped me dress again, laughing at all of the strings and undergarments, but he was very able at it all the same, and it was then I looked around at his surroundings.

A few touches seemed to be entirely his, like a walking stick by the bed, topped by a silver fox head. The rest was a bland elegance: In his study there was a golden velvet couch and a Persian rug in red, blue, and white. A dark walnut chair with legs like corkscrews and dark leather upholstery sat by an old desk painted black wood with gold leaf. A sword on the wall and a musket.

I felt myself looking for a sign that the Empress had been here, but I could not see it.

Welcome to your new home, he said.

With that, he leaned in and kissed my head once more, and whispered, as if he’d guessed at what I suspected, She was never here .

§

In those first days I was anxious; I stayed inside as much as possible, and when I went out, I wore kerchiefs to shadow my face. I did not know the tenor’s regular path through the city; I did not know where to expect him. I did not even know which markets Lucy attended, which butcher and so on, but I knew enough to know they would not come to the Marais for goods. I knew to avoid my little perch at the Opera, but this no longer mattered as it once had.

And while thoughts of the market and seeing Lucy or Doro sometimes gave me pangs of missing them, the moment I understood that one of them had betrayed me to the tenor on Aristafeo’s visits meant that among their tasks was spying on me, and the memory of my affections for them now humiliated me instead.

I would spare you such trips, Aristafeo said. I assured him I would do my best to help him with whatever errands could still be attended to as I didn’t want to stay only in the house. This was another Paris I was meeting there in the Marais, one without the tenor, and I began to enjoy the city in my newest disguise in some way I never had before.

Soon enough, there was less and less need of going to the markets for there were only long lines in the cold for what little was there.

Is it time to leave? I would ask him every so often.

No, not yet, he would say each time.

By December, the food crisis in Paris was in extremis. The cold at least kept the smell of the garbage down, and there was less garbage also, and what there was had less and less in it that would rot.

The Third Republic had proved no more effective at ending the Siege and fighting the Prussians than the Second Empire, though, of course, I wanted to know only when we could eat again. As winter started, the hunger became unbearable, and now there was also a need for wood for fires. I sometimes longed for my dresses, but the last dresses made in Paris would bag on me where once they had fit perfectly. I could no longer wear them even if I could retrieve them, for fear of appearing a woman of means. I instead contented myself with my one dress and took hat pins and pinned it for some time so it fit until I became too thin, and then I let it hang loose so people would not stare.

To eat, I went to the Bois with Aristafeo and the Lords of the Lower Gardens, and watched them as they hunted for animals while I collected chestnuts for roasting later. Soon I also gathered the leaves, and sometimes pieces of bark, to make soup. I did this until the trees were all bare, stripped from root to just above where the tallest man could reach.

The walking stick was for disciplining Gaston and Frédéric. Aristafeo let them range over the Bois, where as late as November they found rabbits and rats and sometimes a cat. We let them eat first, and then they would hunt for us.

To be so hungry again, hungrier than I’d ever known as winter began, I felt with certainty that my death was coming for me; soon I’d be reunited with my family, called before the Lord; for all of my sins, my lies, my selfishness, and my lust, now I would finally be caught.

And each time I arrived at this conclusion, I put it out of my head until it became a trail I walked regularly in my thoughts, from waking to the hunger, from the remembering to the forgetting.

§

To stay sane as best we could, we adopted a schedule to which we stuck regularly. He would wake first and start a fire for tea — coffee was no longer available. When I woke, the tea kept hunger at bay for a time, and we would then rehearse. I would do my warm-ups first, my Viardot-García scales, at the piano, and then he would do his own warm-ups and play, and then in the late morning we would rehearse together. We would break to hunt for our luncheon, and then we would return, and then I might read, or he would, with more tea to keep us from hunger, and then it would be time for whatever supper we could muster. Sometimes he taught me Spanish, and more and more we drank wine in place of tea, which also kept the hunger at bay and cast a lightly drowsy light in which it was easier to bear the day. But he never took a single visitor, he seemed to have no friends to speak of, and he did not seek out friends at their homes. We had no society except each other and the dogs. We made love still, but I no longer made a display of my body; it was too cold and I was too thin. I wanted his last memory of me to be one of a plumper breast, such as it had ever been.

I no longer asked when we would leave.

Time, for that matter, seemed to have stopped altogether, each day the same until some new shortage would occur, and soon after the streets would fill with hearses and coffins as whoever could not survive this newest famine died.

One afternoon, after we returned to the Marais with a few thin rabbits the dogs caught for us and he had skinned them in the kitchen and I had stirred the fire back to life and set chestnuts to roast, he appeared in the kitchen’s door. He had asked if he should save the blood for blood sausage, which I did not know how to make, and this surprised him some. That is not the woman I am, I said, and he laughed.

When the rabbits had finished stewing and the chestnuts were done, I left the kitchen to find him. He sat staring into a glass of red wine, and without looking up, he poured another for me.