He likes her, and I know why, Lottie thought. Because she is English. His family will look after her, feed her, find her a place to stay. If I were having a hungry winter, I would be the immigrants’ child who hadn’t made it. I wouldn’t dare have a hungry winter.
The sun shone — a pale sunlight, the first of 1953. Vera climbed up the spire of the cathedral while Lottie waited below — two hundred-odd steps of winding stone to a snowy platform where pigeons hopped on the ledge, and where eighteenth-century tourists had carved the record of their climb. Up there, Vera heard the piercing screams of a schoolyard full of children. She went up a smaller and older-seeming spiral to the very top, above the cathedral bells, which she could see through windows carved in stone. Ice formed on the soles of her shoes. She was mystically moved, she declared, by the appearance of the bells, which seemed to hang over infinite space.
Walking in Vera’s shadow, Lottie thought, I should never have seen her after that trip to Fontainebleau.
The days were lighter and longer. The rivers and canals became bottle green, and the delicate trees beside them were detached from fog. Vera and Lottie went often to the Grande Taverne de Kléber. When Lottie had enough kümmel to drink, Vera made sense. On one brilliantly sunny day, two girls came into the Kléber laughing the indomitable laughter of girls proving they can be friends, and Lottie said, “Look, Vera, that is like you and me.” Presently they got up and changed cafés, moving by this means four streets nearer the hotel. The table here was covered with someone’s cigarette ash — someone who had been here for a long time. There was in the air, with the smell of beer and fresh coffee, a substance made up of old conversations. The windows were black and streaked with melted snow. Each rivulet reflected the neon inside.
“Let’s go over to Germany,” Vera said for the second time. “It’s nothing — just another bus ride. Maybe a train this time. All I have to do is get my passport stamped and come right back. It’s just like crossing a road.”
“Not for me it isn’t.”
Falling asleep that night, Lottie heard, pounding outside her window, a steam-driven machine the Arab workers had somehow got their hands on but could not operate. They sounded as if they were cursing each other. The sounds of Strasbourg were hard and ugly sometimes: trains and traffic, and in the night drunken people shouting the thick dialect.
“Lottie, wake up,” Vera said.
Lottie thought she was in a café and that the waitress had said, “If you fall asleep here, I shall call the police.” The room was full of white snow light, and Lottie was still clothed, under the eiderdown. Someone had taken off her shoes. She saw a bunch of anemones, red and blue, in a glass on the edge of the hopelessly plugged washbasin. “The nut next door brought us each a bunch of them,” said Vera. She was bright and dressed, wearing tangerine lipstick that made her mouth twice as big as it should have been. “You know what time it is? One o’clock. Boy, do you look terrible! Al’s just called from Paris. I wonder who paid for that? I thought he was calling because it’s my twenty-first birthday, but he’s just lonely. He wants me to come. I said, ‘Why are we always doing something for your good? You’ve already left me stranded in Alsace.’ I don’t think he ever intended to come. He said, ‘You know I need you, but I leave it up to you.’ It’s this moral-pressure business. Would it work with you?”
“Yes,” said Lottie. She lay with her eyes open, imagining Strasbourg empty. How would she go alone to the post office?
“I hate letting him down. He’s been through a lot.”
“Then go.”
“I don’t think I should leave you. You look worse than when you had Virus X.”
“We’ll go out and drink to your birthday,” Lottie said. “I’ll look better then.”
Walking again, crossing rivers and canals, they saw a man in a canoe. The water was green and thick and still. Along the banks the trees seemed bedded out, like the pansies in the graveyard. How rough and shaggy woods at home seemed now! Nothing there was ever dry underfoot until high summer, and then in a short time the ground was boggy again.
“I always felt I had less right to be Canadian than you, even though we’ve been there longer,” Vera said. “I’ve never understood that coldness. I know you aren’t English, but it’s all the same. You can be a piece of ice when you want to. When you walked into the restaurant that day in Paris, I felt cold to the bone.”
The canoe moved without a sound.
In a brasserie opposite the cathedral, where they celebrated Vera’s coming of age, smoke lay midway between floor and ceiling, a motionless layer of blue. “I only want one thing for my birthday and there it is,” said Vera, pointing to a player piano. Rolls were fed to the piano (“Poet and Peasant,” the overture to “William Tell,” “Vienna Blood”) and not only did the piano keys rise and fall but the circle of violins, upside down, as if reflected, revolved and ground out spirited melodies. Two little lamps with spangled shades decorated the instrument, which the waitress said was German and very old. That reminded Lottie, and she said, “I’ll go with you tomorrow, if you want to, to get your passport stamped.”
“It’s not Moscow, for God’s sake,” said Vera. “It’s only over there.”
They stayed after everyone else had gone, and the smoke and the smell of pork and cabbage grew cold. They drank kümmel and made perfect sense.
“But Vera” — Lottie tried to be serious — “what are you going to do now that you are twenty-one?”
“I don’t know. Find out why one aspirin was missing from each tin.”
When they reached the hotel, drunk on friendship and with nothing to worry about but what to do with the rest of the day, Kevin was there. He sat with his habitual patience, in the hotel lobby, wearing his overcoat, reading a stained, plastic-covered, and over-confident bar list — the hotel served only coffee and chips and beer. He was examining the German and French columns of the menu with equal forbearance; he understood neither, and probably had no desires.
One day, she would become accustomed to Kevin, Lottie said to herself; stop seeing him, as she had nearly grown used to mountains. She thought, crazily, that if it had been Dr. Keller or any other man here to take her away, she would have clung to his hands and wept all over them. He looked so reassuring. She thought, A conservative Canadian type, and the words made her want to marry him. The confidence he assumed for them both let her know that if she had not worked on her thesis it was Dr. Keller’s fault; he had prepared her badly. If she had been taken ill, it was because of a virus no one had ever heard of at home. When she saw the shapeless overcoat and the rubbers over his shoes that would make people laugh in Paris, she did not care, and she was happy because he could not read anything but English. That was the way he had to be.
“We can’t talk here,” she said. “Come upstairs.”
“Is it all right?”
“Oh, they don’t care.”