To Amalia, standing beside her, Marie seems unable to support something just then — perhaps the weight of her own clothes. Amalia reviews her friend’s errors — her broken English, her plucked eyebrows, her flat feet in glossy shoes, the fact that she stayed in Romania when it was time to leave and left when it was better to stay. “Will my clothes be all right for there?” says Marie, because Amalia is staring.
“You may not be going. Didn’t you hear the young lady?”
“This isn’t the last word, or the last letter. You will see.” Marie is confident — she shows her broken teeth.
Madame Gisèle is interested, though she has heard this before. She cuts the deck and says, “Here it is—réception d’une missive peu compréhensible.”
“Pff — fourteen months ago that was,” says Amalia. “Then they wrote and asked for centimeter-by-centimeter enlargements of the pictures of her lungs. You haven’t told me why Marie left the friends who had bought her a bed.”
“Because she found a room by talking to another Romanian on the street.”
“That is true. But she had the room for days, weeks even, before she decided to leave.”
“Something must have made her decide,” says Madame Gisèle. “No one can say I am not trying, but your questions are not clear. I am expecting another client, and I have to take the dog out.”
“There must be another reason. Look again.”
Every evening when she came home from work, Marie helped Amalia chop the vegetables for the evening soup. They sat face-to-face across a thick board on which were the washed leeks, the potatoes, the onions, and the parsley. Amalia wondered if she and Marie looked the same, with their hands misshapen and twisted and the false meekness of their bent heads. Living had bent them, Amalia would begin to say, and emigration, and being women, and oh, she supposed, the war. “At least you didn’t marry a peasant,” Amalia said once. “At least I know what class I am from. My ancestors could read and write from the time of Julius Caesar, and my grandfather owned his own house.” Marie said nothing. “If only we had been men,” said Amalia, “or had any amount of money, or lived on a different continent …” She looked up, dreaming, the knife in abeyance.
Sometimes Amalia spoke of Dino. Sometimes she giggled as if she and Marie were still Bucharest girls, convent-trained, French-prattling, with sleek Turkish hair, Greek noses, long amber eyes, and not a drop of foreign blood. “Your apartment, Marie?” It was white and gold, Amalia remembered, and there was a row of books that turned out to be not Balzac at all but a concealed bar. There was an original pastel drawing of a naked girl on a diving board, and a musical powder box that played “Valentine.” “After I married Dino, we came back sometimes and sat on the white chairs and watched your friends dancing — do you remember, Marie? — and we waited until they had gone, and you would lend us a little money — we always paid it back — and you gave me a fox scarf, and a pin that showed a sleeping fawn, and a hat made of sequins, and perfume from France — Shalimar. I kept the empty bottle. Your life was French.…” It has always seemed that the old flat furnished by Marie’s dead friend is the real Paris, and the row of Balzac that turns into a bar is the truth about France. “Dino was apprenticed to a glovemaker at the beginning,” Amalia said, “and his hands had a queer smell, something to do with the leather, and he never dared ask the girls to dance.” Marie went on chopping leeks, holding the knife by the handle and blade in both swollen hands. Amalia said, “He’s afraid of you, Marie, because you remember all that. He was always mean and stingy, and he hasn’t changed. Remember the first present he ever gave me?”
“A gold locket,” said Marie gently.
“Gold? Don’t make me laugh. I put it around my neck and said, ‘I’ll never take it off,’ and he said, ‘You had better sometimes because the yellow will wear off.’ ”
She laughed, laughing into the past as if she were no longer afraid of it. “He hasn’t changed. I thought of leaving him. Yes, I was going to write to you and say, ‘I am leaving him now.’ But by then we had so many years of worry behind us, and everywhere I looked that worry was like a big stone in the road.”
Marie nodded, as if she knew. She never said much, never confided. Amalia snatched away the last of the vegetables and said, “Let me finish. You are so slow,” and then Dino came in and slapped the table with the flat of his hand, so as to send the women flying apart, one to put the soup on the stove and the other to go out and buy the evening paper, which he had forgotten. It happens every night for a year, it can happen all your life, Amalia was thinking, and suddenly you have all those years like a stone. But Marie once sat quietly and said, “Listen, Dino,” so carefully that he did seem to hear. “I am not your slave. Perhaps I will be a slave one day, but I don’t want to learn the habit of slavery. I am well and strong, and my whole life is before me, and I am working, and I have a room. Yes, I am going to live alone now. Oh, not far away, but somewhere else.”
“Who wants you?” Dino shouted, but he was in a cold sweat because of all Marie knew, and because she had never asked about the rings she gave them. Amalia was thinking, She is too ill to live alone. What if she dies? And the rings — she has said nothing about the rings. Why is she leaving me?
She looked around to see what they had done to Marie, but there was no hint of cruelty or want of gratitude in the room. Marie would never guess that Amalia had been to Madame Gisèle, saying, “How do you kill it — the buoyancy, the credulity, the blindness to everything harsh?”
“Marie,” Amalia would like to say, “will you admit that working and getting older and dying matter, and can’t be countered by the first hyacinth of the year?” But Marie went on packing. Amalia consoled herself: Marie’s mind had slipped. She was mad.
Marie straightened up from her packing and smiled. “Three people can’t live together. You and Dino will be better alone.”
“No, don’t leave us alone together,” Amalia cried. There must have been some confusion in the room at that moment, because nobody heard.
Last autumn one serious thing happened to Marie — she was in trouble with the police. She says that at the Préfecture — the place every émigré is afraid of — they shut her in a room one whole day. Had she been working without a permit? Did she change her address without reporting it? Could her passport be a forgery? Marie only says, “A policeman was rude to me, and I told him never to do it again.” Released in the evening, having been jeered at, sequestered, certainly insulted, she crossed the street and began to admire the flower market. She bought a bunch of ragged pink asters and spent the last money she had in her pocket (it seems that at the Préfecture she was made to pay a large fine) on coffee and cakes. She can describe every minute of her adventures after she left the Préfecture: how she bought the asters, with Amalia in mind, how she sat down at a white marble table in a tearoom, and the smoking coffee she admired in the white china cup, and the color the coffee was when the milk was poured in, and how good it was, how hot. She shares, in the telling, a baba au rhum. You can see the fork pressing on the very last crumb, and the paper-lace napperon on the plate. Now she chooses to walk along the Seine, between the ugly evening traffic and the stone parapet above the quay. She is walking miles the wrong way. She crosses a bridge she likes the look of, then another, and sees a clock. It is half past six. From the left of the wooden footbridge that joins Île Saint-Louis and the Ile de la Cité, she looks back and falls in love with the sight of Notre Dame; the scanty autumn foliage beneath it is bright gold. Everything is gold but the sky, which is mauve, and contains a new moon. She has spent all her money, and cannot wish on the new moon without a coin in her hand. She stops a passerby by touching him on the arm. Stiff with outrage, he refuses to let her hold even a one-centime piece so that she can wish. She has to wish on the moon without a coin, holding a second-class Métro ticket instead — all that her pocket now contains. She turns the ticket over as if it were silver, and wishes for something with all her heart.