Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

He seemed to struggle for what to say. He still wanted to live.

Thank you, I said. You honor me.

It was a love gift, for all his talk, one with no strategic value. The last gesture of a doomed man toward a doomed woman. If he had been a count, it would have been a diamond bracelet, but he was Eugène.

Per my plan as the new and only member of the aerial balloon program of the Commune of Paris, I went to the newspaper’s office after I left him and took out the advertisement as the tenor had asked. Addressed to André Lavertujon, Oui, 2151871 is all it said.

In response, I received a last note.

Comprimaria,

Be sure to leave before nightfall, my Falcon. And be swift.

§

Eugène trained me at the Gare du Nord nearly every day for the next few weeks as we prepared. Afterward, he would make love to me in the training basket suspended from the girders of the abandoned station. A caution against a casual observer, he said each time. He liked to sit underneath me on the balloon basket’s floor, reaching up to trace my neck in the aftermath.

I did love him, such as I could — I loved him because he loved me. I wanted to find a way to betray him in his plan, to force him to live, and for me to find some way to do more than leave. So today I asked him, This impulse to save me and not you. And not your men. Have you given up?

No.

He said this clearly, quickly. The answer ready. I was prepared to lecture him, and he continued, almost amused.

Just because I feel prepared to die here doesn’t mean I’ve given up.

It would be a better world if you lived, I said.

Perhaps, he said. But perhaps it will be an even better world if I may die as I choose.

I had shown him the new note; he said it only confirmed what he believed, that I was observed by the tenor. He then asked why the tenor called me his Falcon. What is this? “My Falcon”? Are you his spy?

It is only a kind of voice for a singer, I told him. A Fach. I explained what it meant.

Falcons are what the Prussians use to kill our pigeons, he said, smiling ruefully. All our hopes of communicating with the world dead in their hungry mouths. But if you are a singer, you must sing for us before you leave.

He described the Commune’s plans for a concert at the Tuileries with fifteen hundred performers. I said I would.

Why do you believe he is still here? I asked.

Eugène pointed above us to where the balloon would be. We have not flown the balloons because they are all shot down, he said. But what’s more, we lack the coal gas to fill them. Not even the Versaillais could launch such a thing. Of the people to fly a balloon from the Commune now, only a Prussian spy would have the gas for this flight. And worse still? Our flag flies from the Opera. He spat after he said this.

He loves you, yes?

Yes, I said.

Is this his ring you wear at your neck?

No, I said.

Good, he said. I will see him die as you leave in his balloon.

Eugène kissed me. I am off to attend a meeting at the Hôtel de Ville. We are to discuss food shortages, he said. But do not worry. We have little food, but because there are more desertions, we will not starve. You’re nearly ready, he said. Think on what you will sing for us before you leave.

I stayed in the basket for some time. I imagined it lifting from the roof, the floor littered with mail. Letters from men and women about to die, letters from the already dead. I would fly at last. Perhaps I would go to my death, my body broken and the pieces strewn across the forests around the border with Germany or tossed into the sea. Or perhaps I would land in Belgium, a place no one knew me. I would land, survive, walk free into a new city, raise a family there, teach them to sing opera. My very own García family.

I took the ring from my neck, slid it off its chain, tried it on my finger once again. The finger nearly took it. Another month of meals like the last and it might fit.

Eugène’s question about the ring had directed me to my own feelings, quiet all this time — the owner of the ring had not come once, had not written. He seemed to have accepted my departure. I thought of him standing at the door to the Empress’s chamber. My ruby rose glinting there by her bracelets.

The only death I feared was the one that kept me from him.

I loved him still.

§

As I undressed slowly in front of the mirror that afternoon, a terrible truth became visible.

My figure had returned but the color of my complexion had not. I was as white as the tree bark I’d eaten. Only my mouth, the aureoles of my breasts, my notch — only these had the faintest pink. I had undressed in some anticipation of preparing to undress entirely for Eugène. Aristafeo’s ring was a lurid green spark at my throat.

I took a rouge pot up and then set it down and withdrew to my bedroom instead, in horror, climbing into the bed and pulling the curtains at the sides shut, as if that could help. I remembered a story Natalya had told me once, in Baden-Baden, of a story her grandmother told her. We were speaking of Amina, of her nightly walks through town, how she had terrified her neighbors in the night, and Natalya said, She was most likely a vila.

Vila? I asked.

Vilas are very pale, she said to me. One day they wake up all white like a good tooth, and she pulled her lip and pointed. My own grandmother explained it to me this way when she told me this, she said, laughing. She didn’t have one good tooth. She was trying to get me to behave, to be a good girl, and told me they were women who wasted their lives in selfishness, she said, made to care for the forest.

If you hear them singing, you must run, Natalya had said. They sing so beautifully you will sit and listen forever until you die of hunger or grief, all your needs forgotten in listening to them. They can take the shapes of wolves, or swans, or… falcons.

She gasped then. Perhaps you know this! Perhaps you are one. This is your secret, is it not? And she laughed finally, and I relented and began to smile.

They are also equestriennes! They can ride horses without a saddle. Clearly, you are one. She told me if you charm them, you can get them to punish a man who broke his word. Will you punish a man for me? How can I charm you?

The present must be very fine, I’d said to her. We are a fickle kind. But, of course, I loved her best, and said I would do anything she asked.

How I missed her. I missed them all.

A crack of thunder came from outside, shocking me. The thunder shook the mirrors in my room, rattling them against the wall so that I swept the curtain back to see a swift blaze of lightning go by the window, like the passing of a god.

Rain fell next, hard, a torrent. I sat listening to it, my eyes closed. It had been so long since I’d heard thunder, I went to the windows and opened them then closed them, thinking to do better. I wanted to feel the rain on my skin.

The building was empty — if a neighbor or the concierge remained here, there was no sign. The tenor had taken me to the roof to show me the view early in our time here, and so I remembered the way as I climbed it.

I feared I would find him there, but there was nothing, not even the cats.

The streets below were empty, there was no one to see me naked on the roof as I let my bedclothes flutter around me in the wind. Paris seemed entirely empty but full of blooms — the flowers had returned with the spring, and someone, most likely the Commune, had lined the Place de la Concorde with bouquets at the monuments. The effect was like that of flowers for a vast funeral. Paris for a tomb. The rain now come to wash it clean, as it cleaned all graves.

The wind turned and the rain flensed me then, the cold spray shocking me. More lightning came, more thunder. I watched the bolts fly down and strike Paris and wished to be struck also. To be consumed by the storm. I wanted to run the silver rooftops of the city until I was taken up, and if I was a Vila now, watch as my arms turned to swan’s wings lifting into the sky. Wreathes of lightning for my crowns, and palaces of thunder, the size of mountains, mine to command. This would be how I would leave, and I would never return.