13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [3]
The men who used to work with him say his pathetic drunkenness is caused by his recent retirement—he simply doesn’t know what to do with himself.
He never explains to anyone the reason for his sudden excess. In July he comes back to himself. He lives a quiet life. He doesn’t belligerently look into the German soldier’s eyes when he gets asked for his papers on the street, a mere three steps away from the front door of his apartment building. He doesn’t belligerently refuse to meet the German soldier’s eyes when the soldier looks into his face, scrutinizing him for signs of subversive tendencies. He respects the curfew.
He buys meat on the black market. On the black market, he also buys a delicate pair of sheer stockings with a black seam up the back: a gift for his daughter. She thanks him but doesn’t wear them. She says she will save them for a special occasion.
HE KNOWS HIS VISION up close is failing. His work becomes more difficult. Soon he’ll have to retire. This frightens him. He would like to be able to work all the time—it would make it easier for him to ignore the rising rumblings of the forthcoming war.
HIS DAUGHTER HAS BEEN trying for years to have a son. She has not been successful in begetting any child, not even a daughter. She cries to him: “I am too old now, I never will. Why didn’t I? Am I not a real woman?”
He holds her febrile body against him. He feels her hot face against his neck, moist with tears. “My dear,” he says, “be glad you don’t have a son. Look at the shape this world is in. Be glad you don’t have a son.”
Still, he would have wished a son for his daughter, just to make her happy—even though he knows that the grief of losing a child is much keener than the grief of never having him.
HE LOVES HIS WORK, its tiny precise nature. He can get lost in it for hours. He has been doing this work for so many years that his hearing has lost sensitivity to the sound of the drills and sanders. It hardly even registers anymore. When he was young, the noise echoed in his head for hours after he got home. He could hear it as he went to sleep—even when he made love to his wife, so long ago.
THE GREAT WAR IS receding; it is a new decade, and his daughter seems to be taking well to married life. It doesn’t escape his notice that the fellow she married looks strikingly like him. The resemblance makes him smile. It isn’t uncommon for good girls to marry their fathers.
She babbles joyfully about having a son. She cannot wait to cut up her wedding dress to make baptismal robes for the plump pink baby boy she will push forth from herself, in blood and pain and happiness.
He looks at his daughter’s sweet oval face, at the young hope in her dark eyes, and is reminded of his wife. Louise is the only thing he has left.
HE GETS A GREAT price on fifty-seven eight-millimeter pearls from one of his suppliers. Their color is beautiful: a uniform cream that can flatter any complexion. They are also almost perfectly round. Their smooth weight in his hands is a joy to him.
He has one of the women in the shop string them on white silk thread: though his hands are skilled in so many ways, he has never been good with knots. He is a man for metal and stone, for welding and cutting and polishing—a man for intricate patterns in chains of gold and glinting facets on diamonds.
He makes the clasp himself, from white gold. He encrusts it with tiny round diamonds. It is truly a labor of love. He will give his daughter the necklace on her wedding day. She is marrying a fellow that he approves of, who works under him at the shop. The fellow’s name is Henri Brunet. He should train him to take over, after he is gone.
HIS ELDEST CHILD, HIS only son, dies swiftly of the Spanish influenza in December 1918, after surviving the Great War. His life is a disaster. If it weren’t for his daughter, he would take the rifle he went to war with, wedge it tightly under his chin, and blow the back of his head