“But you’ve been here, Vera? You said you had been all over.”
“I haven’t been exactly here. I thought it would be nice for you for Christmas.”
Lottie considered briefly the preposterous thought that Vera had not been trying to wear her out but to entertain her. Suddenly, as if it were Lottie’s fault, Vera began to complain about the way streets had been in Winnipeg when Vera’s mother was a girl. Where Vera’s mother had lived, there hadn’t been any sidewalks; there were wooden planks. If Vera’s mother stepped off a plank, she was likely to lose her overshoe in the gumbo mud. In the good part of town, on Wellington Crescent, there were no pavements either, but for a different reason. When Ukrainian children were taken across the city on digestive airings, after Sunday lunch, to look at Wellington Crescent houses — when their parents had at last lost the Old Country habit of congregating in public parks and learned the New World custom of admiring the houses of people more fortunate than they were — the children, wondering at the absence of sidewalks, were told that people here had always had carriages and then motorcars and had never needed to walk.
Vera was passionate over a past she knew nothing about. It was just her mother’s folklore. Vera’s mother, Lottie now learned, had washed in snow water. Vera herself could remember snow carried into the house and melted on the kitchen stove.
“Well, then, your father moved the whole family, I suppose,” said Lottie, remembering Winnipeg Culture Patterns with Dr. Keller.
“That’s right,” said Vera, without inflection. “To your part of town.”
Lottie had still not sent the Christmas cable to Kevin. Could she send it from here? It was early morning in Winnipeg — scarcely dawn.
Lottie intended to set off for Strasbourg the instant Christmas was over, but Vera gained another day. In the morning they went to see a movie called Das Herz Einer Frau, subtitled Ich Suche Eine Mutti — an incredibly sad story about a laundress and her little boy. Lottie, exasperated, turned to say something but saw that Vera was wiping tears. Later, she and Vera boldly entered a police station, where Vera asked questions on Al’s behalf. Lottie sat staring at a sign: “C’est CHIC de parler Français!” “Chic” was in red.
It was plain that Vera’s plans had gone wrong; Al’s arrival should have coincided with Lottie’s going. Vera did not want to go off to Strasbourg in case he came here, and she did not want Lottie to desert her. She coaxed from Lottie one more excursion, this time not far away. After a mercifully short bus trip, they walked under pines. In these woods, so tame, so gardened, that Lottie did not know what to call them, they stumbled on a ruin covered with moss and ivy. “It is part of the Maginot Line, I think,” said Vera.
Lottie, frantic with being where she did not want to be, turned from her and cried, “Is that what it is? The Maginot Line? No wonder they lost the war.”
“Is that what Dr. Keller taught you? Why do you think one piece is all of everything?”
“What else can you do?” said Lottie. The mist carried in her lungs since Paris darkened and filled her chest. “You don’t understand, Vera. I’m not strong physically. That’s what I meant that day on the train, when you said ‘weak, not frail.’ I am frail, and I have to do this thesis on my own. I have to choose my own books and work with people I’ve never met before. I’ve never used a strange library. You’ve made me walk a lot. I’ve got this very low blood pressure. One day my heart might just stop.”
“Yes, well, it was a mistake,” said Vera. She folded her arms under her cape and kicked at the Maginot Line instead of kicking herself, or Al, or Lottie.
III
The advantage of Strasbourg over any other place was that Lottie here had a warm room. In a hotel on the Quai des Bateliers, discovered by Vera, she unpacked the notes and files. She could see the spire of the cathedral, encased in scaffolding, rosy and buoyed up on plain air. Chimes and bells evenly punctuated her days and nights. Every night, at a dark foggy hour, she heard strange tunes — tunes that seemed to be trying to escape from between two close parallel lines. The sound came from a shack full of Arabs, across from the hotel, on the bank of a canal. In the next room but one, Lottie had a neighbor, a man who typed. The empty room between them was a sounding box. She heard him talking to himself sometimes and walking about. His step was quick. Vera was also on this floor, at the end of a corridor papered with lettuce-sized roses. Her room gave onto nothing of interest, and her window sill was already a repository for bread, butter, dime-store knives, and old newspapers.
On January 9th, a month to the day after her arrival in France, Lottie wrote her first long letter to Kevin. The postcards she had sent from Paris and Colmar said, “I am working hard,” which was not so, and “It is terribly cold,” and “I’m saving it up to tell you when I get back.” Her real letters to him were those she composed in her head and was too shy to write. She could imagine him listening to anything she had to tell him but not reading what she wrote. “I went to the opening of the European Assembly in a new prefab building that already looks like a shack, looks left over from the war,” she wrote, hoping that this would be a letter of such historical importance he would keep it in a folder. “A sign said that anyone showing approval or disapproval would be thrown out. There were hardly any visitors, and I did not have the feeling that history was being made. It was all dry and dull. I listened to the translators through the headphones, but it was more of a strain than just hearing an unknown language. Sort of English-English and bored French. M. Spaak was not there, because he had rheumatism (at least that’s what I understood) and just when this was announced I felt the start of a chill and had to rush out and home in a cab. I was shaking so much in my fur coat that Vera was frightened. It’s not serious” — she felt her beginning going off the rails — “but I’ve got a chill and a fever and a bad cough and a pain in my chest and a sore throat. Vera has bought me some pills full of codeine. Vera believes in sweat. A dog that belongs to this hotel, name of Bonzo, came in to see me. I gave him a piece of stale bread and he took it under the bed, with his legs and tail sticking out flat. It suddenly occurred to me today that there is no such thing as sociology. When you are a sociologist, all you can do is teach more of the same, and every professor has his own idea about what it is. Vera says that if I were studying the integration of Indians, which never happened anyway, it would not be called sociology. Vera will take this out to mail.”
Lottie could eat nothing until the next day, when, mostly to pacify Vera, she picked at a helping of macaroni and gravy. Vera sat at Lottie’s clean table and proceeded to make a mess of it. She drank beer out of a bottle and, when she had drunk all she wanted, poured the rest in the washbasin. “Do you mind the smell?” she asked, too late, peering down. Vera was already on a first-name basis with the whole hotel, and particularly friendly with the man who typed. He was an elderly madman, who had only a week before been released from the mental ward of a military hospital.
“What do you type?” Vera had asked him.
“Poems,” he replied, looking at her with one eye. (The other was glass.)
Vera read aloud from France-Soir to Lottie, who disliked being read to. “Le trentième anniversaire de la mort de Katherine Mansfield est célébré aujourd’hui à Avon.”