13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [27]
Sometimes I talk to myself when I am alone. Sometimes I startle myself with the sound of my own voice at unexpected moments.
I try my best to keep myself together.
Do you recall the postcard of the group of men in puttees that I scanned for you with my first letter to you, Sir? The one with the black dog in the foreground. This one:
Most peculiar: before I went to work yesterday morning, I felt this irresistible urge to pocket the card. I did. I wore it in my suit jacket all morning, and when I passed Josianne’s desk on the way to my office, I took it out and touched her shoulder with it. I had absolutely no intent to do this; after all, she had given no signs of friendliness since she’d come to my house that strange day, had not even asked if I was feeling better. It was as if I had made the gesture with no volition at all, as if my fearful resistance itself had fueled it. She looked up at me and asked me what I wanted, and I was confounded. I just stood there with the card in my hand, displaying it dumbly to her. She took it from me, beheld it for a moment, and said:
“C’est drôle comme les anglais sont pimpants et efféminés.”15
“Pardon?”16
“Les français portent les uniformes clairs. Les anglais sont en foncé.”17
“Comment savez-vous ça?”18
She shrugged when I asked her this. She mumbled something about having been with a historian once, and handed the card back to me. She didn’t ask me where I had gotten it. She went back to her typing. I slipped the card into my pocket, and as I did so, there was a queer crackle in my head like radio interference that made me think that I must have hallucinated the entire incident, but as I walked away I heard her voice: “Si vous avez d’autres trouvailles, vous pouvez certainement me les montrer, Trevor.”19
I looked at her, a not-unpleasant shiver sliding down the back of my neck. Her hair flamed red like a beacon and she was smiling. I was utterly flustered, so flustered in fact that I asked her in a tumble of uncontrolled words if she would have coffee with me after work. She considered the idea for a moment and then waved me off with an airy “Non, non—pas encore…”
Not yet? Whatever could that mean?
Ah, my apologies, Sir—this is unrelated to my studies. Findings:
one pair of mesh church gloves, black.
one pair of mesh church gloves, white.
photograph of a young man in uniform, unidentified.
one gold cross pendant, large (almost as long as my little finger).
one silk handkerchief.
As I take my leave, I might as well offer you another one of those great groveling greetings:
En vous remerciant d’avance et dans l’attente et l’espoir de vous lire, veuillez agréer mes salutations les plus chaleureuses,20
Trevor Stratton
Au nom du père et du fils
*
THESE GLOVES—THEIR UTMOST DELICACY, the craftsmanship of their lacework, the fact that they are still structurally sound after all these years of silent stillness tangled in this uncanny record, sound enough that you could slip them on without ripping them if your hands were small and slim enough, if your hands were the same size as the phantom hands implied here: those of Louise Brunet, born 1896—
These gloves haunt you.
But let us not be bothered with that now. Let us not slip onto our own body these accoutrements of the dead. Such a gesture would be a bit strange, a bit unsettling. Such a gesture is unnecessary when the object is before us and we can look at it at our leisure.
The gloves are flexible, strong, starkly black. They look like something to be worn to the funeral of a beloved someone; as you might have observed, they look like a widow’s gloves. The truth is that they are merely church gloves, worn every Sunday to holy offices. The color is so because white gloves are better suited to a virgin (or at the very least, a young and unmarried woman who could still plausibly undergo such a pantomime of purity).