Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

Instead, I stood there until I was sure I, too, would die soon. And I did not wish to die just yet, not before I could sing for Aristafeo one more time.

After that, I would welcome it.

I had no intention of leaving, of surviving Eugène, you see, despite his plans. There was no life after this. Nothing I wanted would remain, certainly not me. If everything I loved was to die again, I would be sure death took me, too.

§

The next day I wrote to Aristafeo. I told him of the concert, of the need I had of an accompanist. Would he join me? I need you, I wrote. I sent it by the only post I knew I could trust, my own hand, sliding it under the door to his empty courtyard before I ran away.

ON THE DAY of the concert more flowers lined the streets than ever before, and by the late morning, the crowd was much larger than I had expected. I think everyone remaining in Paris had come. The Tuileries garden was full of picnics, wine, children — and it seemed as if my funereal feelings could only be wrong.

Eugène had said I did not need to dress fine, and so I had not dressed fine. They will believe you are putting on airs if you do, he’d said. I sat happily in the grass, as I had as a child, listening to the performers until I was hungry.

As there were many acts still to go before mine, I left and walked to the Marais, to Aristafeo’s house, to look for him. He had not written back. As the day of the concert approached, I prepared to sing a simpler song if I needed to accompany myself, but even as I made my way into his neighborhood, I still hoped he was on his way — that if I walked the route I was sure he would take I might find him. And I was intent on keeping that hope all the way to his door.

The streets grew quieter the farther I got from the Tuileries until there was too much quiet. At first, I thought it was because all had gone to the concert. I knew it before I turned the next corner, though, the silence of death, and so as I came to the corner of the street, I stopped.

I saw first the terrible color in the street, mixed blood and wine running out of doors. Broken glass glinted like smashed ice everywhere inside the one café I knew to still be open and the nearby buildings. The doors had been shot to pieces, as had the wood, not broken as much as torn. The men in the café, the women, the children, all were dead, also torn, their expressions like masks dropped at the moment of death.

I stood very still, afraid to move. The terrible flood of the broken red street.

They were here in the city then, the Versaillais. The destruction was so recent, I could smell the burning food on the stove. The time the tenor had given me was indeed false. I could hear guns now in the distance, but a sound like a thousand guns, an impossible sound. A sound like the end of everything.

We could not hear them over the concert.

I pulled my skirt up and walked through the blood and wine into the café, past the smashed people on the floor, past the smashed mirrors and tables, the only sound the crack of the glass under my feet. I had moved on instinct away from the noise, out of the street, and this was the one open doorway. I stepped into the kitchen, the stove fire still burning, to find the chef on the floor, the pans smoking; and I pushed them to the side. There was a pail of sand for the fire and I threw it on. An unmarked wrapped ham sat where someone had taken it out. The Germans or the Versaillais, whoever had done this, they would not steal the food, I knew. They would have come well fed. The dead had no need for the food left behind and I didn’t know when I would be able to find such a thing again, so I put the ham in my bag and made my way through the shelves to leave by the kitchen entrance through the back.

I stopped again by the door, as if there were something more to do, but I paused. If I stayed here among the dead, I would be safe.

It was all undone, emptied into the street. I would not sing tonight, I would not get into the balloon, I would not escape.

I continued, followed only by my own dark steps across the floor when I looked back. I went into the street to continue to the next and the next. The ham knocked against my back.

I heard now the screams from the Tuileries and again the terrible noise of the guns. The guns they used on us that day were terrible things, the like had never been seen, able to shoot hundreds of bullets. This was the day we learned guns like this existed, shooting with this terrible speed.

There were so many of us, and they needed to murder us in crowds.

As I stared down the street at the people running from the concert, I saw a shape I knew.

Aristafeo.

I screamed his name in my voice made for crying out in terror. A harpy’s bark, the full force of my voice. I’d never once made a sound like that before, and it shocked me. Him as well, for he heard it and turned and ran toward me instead, and as he did, the people behind him fell, exploding into storms of blood and bone, their terrible cries cut short as their hearts burst or their mouths were shorn away.

He was a fast runner, faster than I. He knew his streets well, and he pulled me along behind him.

§

We ran.

We ran until the streets were quiet again, away from the fighting, and soon found ourselves at the Jardin des Plantes. Aristafeo made to enter, and I questioned him, and so he explained. The zoo animals had all been eaten or died. No one would search there. The soldiers would go through the wealthy homes around the palace first, even into the palace itself, looting for valuables or food or both, killing as they went. No one would bother to search an empty zoo.

In we went. A few surviving monkeys still lived in the monkey cage. No Paris butcher had managed to defeat them. They shrieked defiance as we passed.

§

We did not speak of death. We did not speak of the secret chamber, the Empress’s bracelets, or my little gift. We did not speak of the strange guns of the Versaillais.

Instead, we lay together in the back chamber of the lions’ cage. It was larger and cleaner than the elephants’, and fit us, lions being of an approximate size.

Tell me a story, he said finally. Anything. Tell me the story of your escapes. I want to hear everything you have escaped from.

I told him of my family’s death, my time in the cirque, and how I had tried and failed to get to Lucerne. Of the Majeurs-Plaisirs and learning to beat men as if they were horses, as if I were racing them to their satisfactions. I told him of the secret of the scratched looking glass, of the long chamber for spying on the secrets of men, of learning to sing my first aria, “ Regnava nel silenzio ” from Lucia.

This is quite a beautiful aria, he said. Will you sing it for me?

Softly, I sang it as he lay against my chest, his hands tangled in my hair.

I told him still more — of my escape from prison into the convent, and my service to the Empress and the Comtesse; of my capture at Compiègne and my performance as a doll; of my being made to return to the tenor and my study at Baden-Baden.

As I came to the end of my stories, Aristafeo had fallen asleep. In the dark I saw again the tenor as he sat up in the box of the illusion theater with his look of intent surprise, ignoring the angry Euphrosyne. I wondered when he had decided it was time for me to die along with the rest. If he had decided this earlier, say, before he vanished. Or if it was later, when he knew I was with Aristafeo.

Or earlier, when he had taken me back from the Comtesse.

All his little notes, the dance of it all. And then it didn’t matter; he didn’t matter. He couldn’t matter, not now.

§

When we became hungry, I remembered the ham, and we cut off a piece each and ate.