13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [69]
The snip of the scissors is barely audible as I close them again, and the thread falls away from them airily, as light as snow. It is a frigid morning in the waning days of the year 1918; the hands wielding the scissors are a woman’s hands; the eyes glancing back at me from the mirror on the wall are the same eyes that looked down at me after I’d fallen on the metro. Briefly they flit away, then back—how stunningly seamless this is: I am Louise Brunet, and there is no fever in my body. The fever is even gone from my brother’s body: he has died mere minutes ago. I am sitting at the dining room table with my father and the priest who administered the last rites. I am sewing a fallen button back on my father’s shirt, paying close attention to my slow work because I cannot bear to glance at either of them. The war is over and still he is dead and I feel nothing. His skin is as white as the sheets he is tangled in, his blood is cooling, and soon his eyes will begin to sink slightly in his head. His face will be unrecognizable, a collapsed relic of his former self, and through the hours of the wake I will hardly be able to stand looking at it—this empty husk, my brother?
The three of us sitting here around the dining table my mother chose when she married, in this pregnant silence.… My father is staring into the middle distance, glowering, and the priest looks uneasy, as if the ire is aimed at him personally. He feels compelled to say something he thinks will be comforting, and as soon as the words come out of his mouth, I know they are a mistake:
“I know this is very difficult and I am very sorry for it, but we must learn to offer up our sufferings to the Lord.”
My father stands up abruptly as if on springs, and I have never seen a look on his face such as he has now. He is distorted with beaming crimson fury, more terrible even than when he forbade my marriage to Camille. He nearly growls, “Your Lord is a vile, piteous joke. Your Lord should have taken him before leaving him for four years in the trenches, if taking him too soon for no good reason was his grand plan.”
“Suffering cleanses us,” the priest attempts. There could not possibly have been a more wrong thing to say, and my father moves against this pronouncement with striking-snake speed. He snatches up my sewing scissors and clenches them, with the small sharp point jutting out from his fist. He raises his arm, and I gasp, “Father—”
Both of them turn their heads to look at me, as if I had addressed them both; yet I do not care about the priest. I can imagine my scissors protruding at a jaunty angle from the side of his neck, and this does not bother me at all. Let his blood gush down his cassock; in all likelihood such a small blade could not inflict a lethal injury anyway. I just don’t want my own father to lower himself to such an act of violence, not today of all days. Today we are already all too low.
The priest opens his mouth to say something, but my father has the good sense to interrupt him before the words come out; he says in a trembling voice, “You will not say another word. You will leave this house at once or I will shove these scissors into your throat, I swear it.”
The priest stands, stock-still, while looking at me with imploring eyes, as if I were the one responsible for these proceedings. I very gently shake my head no, and he thankfully shuts his mouth. He backs out of the room, leaving my father and me alone, and as the front door