13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [7]
“Do you need anything?” Louise asked.
“Do you see him?” her brother whispered back.
“What?”
“The fellow in the corner of the room—do you see him?”
He did not seem frightened; instead he looked almost conspiratorial, as if they had come upon some unexpected animal in the forest and he was deciding whether he wanted to spook the animal for fun, or merely stay still and watch it.
Louise looked and saw only an empty wooden chair, bathed by the dimming light of late afternoon.
“He is sitting in the chair,” he explained.
It pained her that her brother had clearly gone mad with his illness. She tried to believe that this was not a bad sign. “There is no one in the chair,” she said softly.
“Yes, yes—be still and look carefully. There is a man sitting in that chair with his legs crossed and a pad of paper resting on them. He is wearing dark slacks and a white cotton shirt and a blue tie. He is quiet and he is taking notes and he is looking at me.”
“Oh, darling, there is no one there—please, come back,” Louise said, her eyes filling with tears.
“It’s all right. He’s not hurting me. He’s taking notes on my dying. He is a scholar and such things interest him, you see. He has your rosary in his left hand.”
“What?”
“Your rosary, the one you’re holding. He has it in his left hand, and when he is not looking at me, he is looking at it.”
“That’s impossible: I am holding my rosary,” she insisted, as if his acknowledgment of this fact would immediately make him well again.
He shrugged. “I know it’s impossible, but it is so. He is holding your rosary and oh—now he is looking at you.”
Louise flinched as a start of electricity snapped in the pit of her chest when she heard these words, and as the tremor zinged from her solar plexus and down her arms and into her startled hands, she saw a flash of something white above the chair—like the crisp white cotton of the shirt on the man who clearly was not there. She thought she heard a pen scratch a few words on paper. She thought she felt a quizzical gaze run up her body and she opened her mouth to say something, but before any words came out, the feeling of the nonexistent eyes went away and she was sane again.
“He is looking at me again,” announced the thin voice from the sickbed. “He looks a little sad. I think he knows I am going to die soon.”
“Oh, no—please, don’t say that. You’re going to get well. I am going to get you another cold compress. Would you like another cold compress?”
Louise’s brother smiled weakly and nodded yes, then sank back into his pillow and closed his eyes. It was the strangest episode of his delirium: so quiet and so gentle, not like his other terrified ravings full of shell impacts and screaming exploded soldiers. There was a terrible night where he wheezed and coughed and twisted on the mattress in an agony unbearable to behold, convinced that he was being gassed again.
This day with the peaceful academic taking notes on their unwinding lives in a corner of the room—Louise never forgot it. Her brother died the next day of the Spanish influenza.
Petit calendrier memento pour 1928
*
AS YOU CAN SEE, the notebook is tiny—approximately two by three inches—but its paper is good and thick. Behind the flowered cover, the front flap announces: “This Calendar contains THE CHARTS of Luck-Bearing Precious Stones.” The first page advertises the business of a jeweler named Cleper, whose shop is on the boulevard de Strasbourg. The diary is clearly a small favor given to customers or potential customers as a form of advertisement. Louise has it because Cleper worked in her father’s shop with her husband, before Cleper split off and opened his own shop. The three men are still friends.
Cleper was very proud of his little diary idea, and gave one to his friend Brunet, who