Daydreams of Angels

THE STORY OF A ROSE BUSH

My parents sent my brother and me to spend the weekend with our grandparents on the south side of Montreal, which they did once in a while so that they didn’t have to go themselves. My mother especially couldn’t be around Grandmother. We always told her that she should make an exception for Grandmother. She had lived through the war and had lost her entire family when she was little. Look at all the things the poor lady had been through. Cut her some slack, for crying out loud. But all Mother knew was that she couldn’t stand the old woman.

Grandmother was sitting in the kitchen in her wheelchair when we arrived. She raised her small hand and gestured for us to eat whatever we wanted of her leftover scrambled eggs. “Allez, allez,” she said. “Don’t be shy. The guilty are never shy. The innocent are shy and it gets them nowhere.”

We pulled our chairs up close to hear her. Grandmother had a soft voice, as if she had been eating powdered doughnuts all day long. And like a cassette that had been repeatedly played, her voice got harder and harder to hear as she got older. I was complimented for my Parisian accent all the time, which I’d picked up from her. Grandmother said she couldn’t understand the French in her neighbourhood. I think she just used it as an excuse not to make small talk.

There was a can of pea soup balanced on her lap. Grandfather yelled out from the bathroom for us to make her lift it. About six months before, Grandmother had had to have bypass surgery because she was having trouble breathing when she walked. She didn’t want to go and we all had to beg her. We told her how much nicer her walks to the Salvation Army around the corner would be. However, due to complications during her operation, she became paralyzed from the waist down, and she couldn’t walk anymore at all. She kept shaking her head at us when we came to visit her at the hospital, bewildered that she had ever listened to such idiots.

After she came home from the hospital, a physiotherapist told her that she should lift a can of pea soup above her head to get her strength back. As was our custom, my brother and I stood next to her wheelchair and yelled and screamed at her to raise the can way up, but she couldn’t be bothered. Instead she decided to eat marshmallows without her dentures in, looking as though she was trying to squash her face into a permanent frown. She told us we were welcome to lift the can up and down ourselves if we wanted.

She lit up a cigarette. She was always setting the blanket on her lap on fire. She even somehow managed to get cigarette burns on my underwear. She had been smoking for so many years that she could suck half the cigarette in one inhalation. Right then, she exhaled a white cat that stretched its limbs and descended from her mouth and curled up under the table lamp.

She asked us to pass her two cold spoons that were in the fridge, to hold under her eyes to help prevent dark circles.

Grandfather came into the kitchen after being in the bathroom the whole time. We asked him if he needed anything at the store. He said yes, and that we should bring Grandmother and the dog along for the walk. As was their habit, Grandfather helped her put on makeup before she went out. He put on loads of blue-green eyeshadow over her eyes and she looked like a clown, but she liked it that way. He stuck some random bobby pins in her hair too. Her hair was so fine that you could see the scalp through it, which gave the hair the effect of looking pink. She put on this enormous pair of sunglasses that might make a person question her sanity. She had seen a documentary about Jim Jones and decided to get herself a pair, that being the only thing she took away from that horrific tale.

She wore a Star of David around her neck even though she claimed that she wasn’t Jewish. She said she only did it because she would get bargains at the butcher.

My brother and I put a ski jacket on over her housedress, pulling her arms through the sleeves as if she was a little kid. She never wore shoes, only a pair of black slippers with embroidered roses. They both fell off while we were running across the street at a yellow light and pushing her like mad. The German shepherd picked one up and carried it to the other side of the street.

Not yet accustomed to the wheelchair, my brother and I were always getting into situations with it. Like that day we tied the German shepherd to her wheelchair and it had pulled her halfway down the block by the time we got out of the store. She accused us of treating her no differently than a dog. We piled the groceries on her lap, which she wasn’t too crazy about either. She lit up a cigarette and smoked indignantly.

Grandfather still thought she was so beautiful. He was afraid that she was going to fall in love with a war veteran who was also in a wheelchair. He wore a fez and a burgundy suit and sat next to a fishbowl outside the Salvation Army. When we saw him, we followed Grandfather’s instructions, which were to just keep pushing if he was outside the store, even when he waved hello.

And Grandfather had a point, because even though she was a slob and had to live among us bozos, Grandmother was entirely elegant. Occasionally she would let out some pithy little remark in order to remind everyone that they would never have her pedigree. When we passed the playground, she said, “When I was a child, children recited poetry and suffered existential angst. What on earth are those ninnies preoccupied with?”

Mother claimed that when she was little, Grandmother had ignored her and treated her as if she too were rather dull and a ninny. She said that Grandmother had spent much of Mother’s childhood in bed with the lights off. She didn’t think anything that was happening in the household was of any interest.

We didn’t mind Grandmother in the way that our mother did. She didn’t depress us. She was almost kind of funny. She was different than anybody else we knew. She had this incredible story. It was the most incredible thing about her. Actually, it was so incredible that it was probably the most incredible thing about us too.

Our grandparents had both been born into happy families in French cities, one in Montreal and one in Paris. They had both drawn pictures in chalk on the street outside their buildings. They had both gone to elementary school. They had both worn little black berets on their heads at one point or another. They had both listened to the war being announced on the radio. But once France was occupied, nothing about their stories was similar at all. Even though he was only seventeen, Grandfather got himself a fake birth certificate and enlisted in the army. He headed off to fight in Europe, determined that his fate was over there, despite his parents’ protests. He said that he knew in his heart that the love of his life was on the other side of the ocean and needed him.

This weekend, like the others, my brother and I tried to coax the story out of her. If she had had a few beers, she would tell it. We waited patiently, until she was drunk enough. During that time, Grandfather tried, as usual, to tell her story for her, patching together things he’d seen in television documentaries about occupied France, things he’d seen himself when he was a soldier in the Canadian army, and some things that he just plain made up. Grandfather said that at the beginning of the occupation in Paris, you ran into newly broke aristocrats everywhere. They would be lying on the side of the road, reading books of poetry. They carried around suitcases filled with violins and tea sets. The children held cages with canaries in them while yelling at their poodles to behave. They would sit sighing and discussing philosophy on the benches.

You had to donate your clothes to the war effort so that they could make parachutes out of them. The Germans were all masturbating when a parachute that was made out of girls’ underwear came out of the sky.

The Germans took away some of the statues. They thought it was fine to have a certain amount of statues, but they said the French had gone too far. There were statues of saints no one had heard of and poets who were long, long out of print.

The Germans took away all the French people’s guns, so they had to hunt with traps. There were always children stuck in the traps, hanging from trees in the morning and needing to be cut down. It was like the morning dew. If you had a teenage girl who didn’t come home at night, you could rest assured that she was curled up out of trouble in a net, tucked up warmly in her peacoat and beret.

When there were four empty beer bottles on the end table around the lamp, like spies meeting beneath a street light on a corner, Grandmother suddenly shook her head.

“Ce n’est pas ça de tout!” she said.

Although she had been born in Paris, Grandmother’s parents were from Poland. People said they were Jewish, but Grandmother swore it was a lie. Her mother had died from an illness when she was very young and her father looked after her all on his own. He was a philosophy professor and they lived in a huge apartment filled with books and sunlight. They had a cleaning woman in once a week who sometimes brought her daughter, Marie, along. The two girls became best friends.

It was well known that Marie was a wicked little girl. Marie used to take her finger and write curse words in the air. She would pull the tail feathers off the peacock at the zoo. She taunted cats. But she and Grandmother would walk down the street with their books balanced on their heads and their tongues stuck out, trying not to laugh. Grandmother thought she was so alive.

On the morning of June 16, 1941, Grandmother and her father were arrested. There had been rumours of a roundup, but Grandmother’s father had, despite his extensive philosophical training, a tragic proclivity to err on the side of goodness. The pounding on the door was like the banging of a gavel. Grandmother put on a white dress and a black coat, packed some things in a suitcase and followed her father. He held on to her hand too tightly, and they climbed onto a bus with strangers. When the officers looked at their papers, seeing that Grandmother had been born in Paris, they decided to release her. Such was the terrifying power of whim during wartime. She stood all alone with her white dress blowing around her like a white flag trying to surrender. She wandered, frightened, without a family, and then decided to find Marie. When she arrived at the door she swore that her father would give them all the money he had when he was freed, and they let her in. She looked around, needing to see her best friend.

Fifteen-year-old Grandmother sat on Marie’s couch and looked bewildered that night. She was still wearing her coat over her white dress and her hair was sort of messy. She gazed around the strange apartment, so different from her own. The wallpaper had brown and orange flowers on it and was coming apart near the ceiling. There were fingerprints all over everything. Everything was old. The couches were all lumpy and the covers were threadbare. Clothes that had been worn too many times were hanging from a line in the kitchen.

That night the family was in an uproar. They were in the middle of a fight when Grandmother came by. The fight would continue for the whole time Grandmother was there and for the rest of their lives, actually. Grandmother was shocked by the way that Marie’s mother talked. She would hurl all sorts of invectives at her boys. “Stop talking right this second, Buddy, or I will come over there and smash all the teeth out of your mouth.”

Grandmother had had no idea that people could talk that way to one another and then fall asleep and wake up in the morning as if nothing had happened. It was so dirty and dark. It didn’t even seem like those types of words belonged in the house. It was like discovering a rat in the kitchen.

All the children in the family had been raised on these harsh words. You could tell that at first glance. They all had nasty looks about them. It was hard to even tell what their appearances were actually like because their bitter expressions got in the way.

Grandmother had been raised differently. It had never occurred to her that there was a possibility that she might not be loved. This made her a trusting, sleepy little girl for the first years of her life. She was good at the things that a little girl is supposed to be good at, which are not necessarily things that are great in themselves. And they were useless during a war.

Marie was always hungry for any sort of affection. She was like a stray dog in that way. Grandmother got too much affection. She was like a fat, declawed house cat with a little bell around its neck in that way.

Marie let her sleep in her bed and let her tell the authorities that she was her cousin. If it was known that she was a Jew, she would have to wear a yellow Star of David, be banned from movies, cafés and parks, be denied a radio and be subjected to curfews. She would never be allowed to have any fun at all. And you never knew when she’d be sent off herself.

Marie noticed that songs on the radio always sounded better now that Grandmother was around. She liked lying in the dark and whispering aloud a question like, “Do you think that we only started existing when we came into this world or since the beginning of time?” And hearing a voice whisper back, “Only since we were born.”

They could pass as cousins too. They both had dark hair and blue eyes. Only Grandmother was a million times prettier.

Grandmother had enormous eyes. She said that they were never like that before the war. When she was separated from her father, she got a shocked expression on her face that she couldn’t get rid of. That’s why she was beautiful. She had eyes that looked like those of a frightened animal.

The girls went to the same school now. Because it was wartime, all the boys fell in love more easily. All the boys liked Grandmother more than Marie. They passed her notes in class. Each note, in boy’s handwriting, said more or less the same thing: “You are the one.” Marie hated Grandmother with a passion because of this. As they were walking home from school one drizzly day, two boys passed, riding together on a single bicycle. They laughingly professed their love for Grandmother, blowing kisses that came at her like moths to a light bulb.

Marie stopped and turned viciously toward her friend. She reached out both her arms and shoved Grandmother hard in the chest. Grandmother toppled off the sidewalk and fell into a puddle on the cobblestone street. Her skirt was covered in mud and her knees were both bleeding. She held her hands in front of her and saw that the palms of both were red from being skinned. Grandmother looked up at Marie and Marie looked down at Grandmother.

Marie was the type of girl that cannot tear herself away from the people she abhors. Grandmother had a streak in her that made her fall in love with those who treated her badly. And thus their feelings for one another intertwined like the branches of two unattended rose bushes in a garden.

Marie now sometimes ignored Grandmother in the playground at school, telling the other girls to turn away from her too. Or she would walk ahead of Grandmother on the way home, quickening her pace any time she almost caught up. She complained while changing into her nightgown about not having her own room anymore. She told Grandmother not to talk for the rest of the evening, so that she could pretend she wasn’t there. Grandmother tried not to breathe a word. Marie yelled at Grandmother to make herself smaller in the bed. And the two girls grew closer and closer.

As the war went on, Marie’s feelings toward Grandmother spread quickly to the rest of the family. They deliberately forgot to set her a place at the kitchen table. She started to feel anemic because she hadn’t had any meat in ages. When she was feeling faint, she would hallucinate. She chased a little white kitten down the street. When she finally caught up to it, it was only a white paper bag being blown by the wind.

She decided it was too much effort to escape their grasps, so she started sleeping with Marie’s brothers. She slept with them in the bathroom and in a tool shed down the street.

She said sex happened much faster back then. It happened so fast that you were barely aware you were having it. You never got naked. You only moved away whatever parts of your clothing absolutely had to be moved. She didn’t know that you took your shoes off for sex. She didn’t even know there was a way to have sex without her stockings still on and her underwear around her ankles.

Her foster mother told her that it wouldn’t hurt to indicate to the baker that she might be willing to sleep with him. She set Grandmother up on dates with men she met on the street. She told Grandmother that she should be very, very friendly with the butcher.

She waited in queues for their rations. They always made her go, but she didn’t really mind. She liked that there was something useful that she could do. She would bring home the meagre groceries, knowing that there wasn’t much in the bag that would be hers.

One day the German officers set up a canteen on the street. They called out that they were offering free bowls of soup to anyone who wanted some. Grandmother had been hysterical with hunger for the past couple of days. She had twitches, as though she were a telegraph receiver that was being sent messages. She walked up to the canteen and put her hands out. The officer winked at her and gave her a bowl of soup, and she ate it ravenously.

When the neighbours saw Grandmother sitting on the curb, eating her little bowl of soup with her legs crossed, they sent their children out too. For some reason, because she had gone first, she took the brunt of the shame. They could hate her for it afterwards. She was like shame personified. Grandmother sensed this, but she didn’t care all of a sudden. She held the bowl up in the air when it was empty. She kissed the side of it.

Grandmother and Marie liked to sit around and discuss the atrocities of the German officers. For instance, the Germans bought all the gloves in the shops in Paris and they mailed them to their sweethearts and wives in Berlin. Grandmother and Marie would insult the German girls. They thought they had really fat legs and had faces like men. They made up all kinds of things about German girls. Of course, they hadn’t a clue what they might possibly look like, except that they were wearing gloves that rightfully belonged to Parisian girls.

One day, while they were talking about their stolen gloves, Marie picked up a stone and threw it at a cat. The surprised animal moved back as suddenly as though it were a child grabbed by the scruff of its neck by a schoolmaster. Marie yelled out that she was miserable because she was poor and ugly and no man would ever buy her anything like gloves. She held up her hands for Grandmother to see. The tip of each finger was pink because of the cold. Grandmother thought that if Marie was made happy, then her heart would thaw and she would be kinder to her.

That was when Grandmother decided to find a way to get Marie a pair of gloves and many other things. It was also the hunger that lived in her belly like a small animal. It gave her the determination to do anything. She shrugged off her notions of what was intolerable and unimaginable and got on with the business of surviving.

Grandmother approached some German officers who were standing outside a post office two days later. She asked where she could get a pair of black gloves. One of them whispered the way into her ear. She followed him back to a hotel that German officers had taken over to live in and use as headquarters. He led her up a flight of stairs, down a hall, past numerous doors and into a large apartment. She was so nervous with the officer that he gave her a glass of champagne to make her calm down. It made her laugh, and she laughed so hard that she started to cry.

He made her sing him the alphabet. He wept because he thought it was so lovely. She mostly knew the words to nursery rhymes and the songs that she had been forced to learn at school. She sang him a song about cleaning off the top of your desk.

He made her take a bath because she smelled so bad. He had a French maid, who scrubbed Grandmother under her arms with a rag and washed her hair. The maid brushed her hair and combed it over to the side. He gave her a pair of lace underwear with little bows along the elastics to put on. The comforter on the bed was covered in a pattern of roses.

When they were done, the officer gave her a pair of black gloves. He also gave her a mark, which was supposed to be some crazy amount of money now. And he gave her a fancy pastry, the likes of which had not been seen in Paris since the occupation began. She couldn’t wait to eat it in private. She peeled off the paper, which rattled like a tiny fire, and ate it as she was walking home.

She was whistling a German tune that the officer had put on the record player. She couldn’t help it. It bothered everyone that she whistled that song. But once she had been made love to while listening to that song, so how could it not be stuck in her head?

She said that he made her take off her shoe and sucked on her toe. She said he sat on a chair, pulled his pants down and started masturbating. She got embarrassed and turned to the wall. He begged her to turn around and just look at him once.

But afterwards, she sat happily watching Marie pull the gloves on and off. Marie threw her black hands around Grandmother’s neck in gratitude.

With most of the soldiers, it went pretty quickly because they didn’t speak any French. She was made love to by one soldier while standing on her head. She got down on her hands and knees and pretended to be a dog for another. One fair-haired and gentle-looking soldier tied her wrists to the bedpost. A fat soldier wanted her to give him a hickey on his neck while he banged his knee and laughed uproariously.

One, who was a teacher in Berlin, made her pretend that she was back in school, practising her handwriting. When she made a mistake, he bent her over his knee and gave her a spanking.

One wanted her to cry. He made her sit quietly naked on the side of the mattress. He had found that if you let a girl sit without any clothes on for long enough, then she would always start to feel melancholic and begin to weep. And then, when Grandmother did inevitably start to cry, he kissed her face madly. He said there was nothing that he loved more than kisses that tasted like salty tears. He had gotten a taste for it while he was on the Eastern Front.

Afterwards, she would always stuff a pastry into her mouth before heading home. She wasn’t letting herself be starved to death anymore. But she felt more guilty about eating those cakes all by herself than she possibly could about sleeping with the German soldiers. She didn’t feel anything about that at all. She knew that it wouldn’t matter when the war was over. The important thing was to survive. And then somehow — in a way that you couldn’t rationally grasp — all this would be gone. Like when you wake up from a nightmare and everything goes back to exactly the way that it was before.

When a soldier with black eyes picked her up and began fucking her against the wall, she tried to convince herself that it wasn’t actually happening. There was a yellow lampshade with little crystals hanging from it on the table next to them. The crystals were knocking against each other violently. And if this act didn’t really exist, then what was making the lampshade shake like that? It must be an army coming, or an earthquake. The act of the soldier making love to Grandmother was as violent as all the German tanks rolling into Paris.

She never went to dinner with the officers or hung around longer, because she wanted to get back to Marie. She would dress so quickly that she would get tangled up, trip on her stockings and bang her chin on the floor. Each time, she would get more and more desperate to get back to Marie.

It was Grandmother who started it. Everything that she had known before the war had been taken away from her. There was no way that she could deal with that. She couldn’t just sit there and be overcome with loss. She had to make Marie her whole world. She became fixated on Marie.

Sometimes the things that Marie did filled her with so much wonder that she would feel herself trembling. She watched Marie’s fingers lacing up her shoes and she thought it was so exquisite.

The way Marie would shake her curls out after pulling on a tight turtleneck was so wonderful too. She would try and do it herself in exactly the same way, so that she could feel what it was like to be Marie. She was the only person in the whole world that got to watch Marie sitting on the side of her bed in her underpants. And see Marie’s bare feet at the end of their bed.

She liked the way that there always seemed to be dirt under Marie’s fingernails. She liked the way that there were hairs around Marie’s nipples. She would lie closer and closer to Marie as they were sleeping. She marvelled over Marie the way that a mother marvels over a newborn baby.

When she was asleep, Marie would swat at Grandmother with her little hand in the air as if to wave off a fly. And she would murmur from somewhere deep in a dream for Grandmother to get the hell away from her.

Grandmother knew that she was getting on Marie’s nerves. She knew that she was so adoring of Marie that there was nothing that the girl could do but despise her. But the more Marie abhorred her, the more madly she tried to somehow possess her. Isn’t that the way that love works?

One night she put her hand on Marie’s belly. She knew that Marie was still awake. She knew that Marie wanted to push her hand off, but she also knew that for some reason, Marie could not. Her hand had put a magic spell on Marie.

She put her hand down Marie’s underwear. Marie was helpless. Marie was desperate for her to do what she was about to do. She put her finger on Marie’s sweet cunt and began to rub. When Marie moaned, everything in the world was filled with sweetness. When it was over, Marie rolled over, still pretending she was asleep.

The next night she kissed between Marie’s legs. One officer had given Grandmother a bottle of champagne. He had six cases of it. She and Marie burst it open in their room with the lights off. It was warm and the suds poured all over their knees.

There was a light layer of snow all over Paris, as though it had been dusted like a bundt cake. Grandmother’s coat left her chilly. It was threadbare and had gone to seed and the lining had long since been torn. She had always hated the cold so much. Her father would laugh and say that she needed more meat on her bones. She took the money that she had made and went to see a dressmaker that an officer had told her about. She wanted to get herself a coat that fit her and kept her warm and made her feel like a human being again.

She looked at the reflection of her body in the dressmaker’s full-length oval mirror that had the ghostly effect of making her look as though she were lying at the bottom of a tiny boat adrift on a river. She felt a little bit good about herself when she noticed how much she looked like an adult. She was able to buy herself a coat. She had a little bit of independence and power in the world now.

She knew that her foster mother wouldn’t say anything about her coat. She had started to give money that she made to Marie’s mother and nobody could say anything to her after that. They left Grandmother in peace. Actually, Marie’s mother wondered why she even wanted to stay in that crappy little apartment. After all, she could get her own little place with wallpaper with birds on the wall and a big brass bed by the window.

And Marie was not jealous, because Grandmother had bought an identical coat for her. Whatever she bought for herself, Grandmother also bought for Marie. They had matching black high heels with buckles across them. They had matching blue dresses with a circle of little white buttons shaped like roses around the neckline.

Marie’s feelings for Grandmother changed from moment to moment. She would feel so incredibly good about herself when Grandmother was around. She would feel like a million bucks. She knew that it was Grandmother who had made her feel so cocky and bold and full of herself. Her mother didn’t really care for her, her father knew nothing about her, and her brothers were little better than thugs. They would never be able to see the things in her that Grandmother saw.

She loved her new things. No one in her life had ever bought her anything special or given her any gifts. But as much as she loved these pretty things, she loved revenge more. What would make her feel the most good about herself would be to see Grandmother destroyed.

When they were standing next to each other, Grandmother and Marie would always be touching. They always walked down the street with their arms linked. But one chilly afternoon, when Grandmother tried to take her hand, Marie jerked it angrily away. Then when they were in the secrecy of the stairwell up to the apartment, Grandmother tried to kiss Marie. Marie gave her a violent little shove.

“Why do you want to kiss me?” Marie asked. “You spend all day kissing people. You must be exhausted.”

“Why would you say something like that?” Grandmother demanded, helplessly.

“Anyways, I can’t afford it. I know that it’s very expensive to kiss you. I guess that I have no choice but to find somebody who kisses for free.”

“You’re not going to get a boyfriend, are you? You’re not going to let anybody touch you?” Grandmother asked. She was seized by panic.

“Are you nuts? How can you ask me something like that? You let men stick their things in you? And you don’t want me to even hold hands with a boy?”

“It’s not the same.”

“You think I’m wicked and that I have no feelings at all. You think that it doesn’t bother me that you sleep with those men. You think that I have a rock for a heart.”

“Do you want me to stop? I will.”

“What, so then you can mooch off my family again and go around acting like you’re afraid of your own shadow? No, thanks.”

She stormed ahead of Grandmother into the apartment. Grandmother sat down on a step and started to weep in frustration, and her sobs echoed so loudly in the stairwell that it was as though she were a monster. Coming down the stairs, the neighbours stepped nervously around her as though her crying might be contagious. It was so difficult to love Marie. If only she could make Marie happy, then all her problems would go away. Not even the war or the winter would matter.

Grandmother knew that Marie had feelings for her. But she also knew that Marie was ashamed. After they made love one night, Marie sat up in bed and glared at Grandmother angrily.

“This is what you do, isn’t it? You seduce people. You imagine that I’m going to continue doing this filthy thing with you for the rest of your life. Well, you’re wrong. This is disgusting. I can’t wait for the liberation.”

Marie knew that any mention of the end of the occupation bothered Grandmother. She would bring it up every time they were together. Marie said that, once the Germans were out, they were going to serve cake to everyone and give out medals for valorous deeds. She said that there would be fireworks. People would throw their boots into the sea. She said that there would be black jazz players on the roof who would play all night. Marie was even practising some English words in order to make a speech to thank the American soldiers for helping to liberate her country.

For some reason, Grandmother was never included in any of these plans. It was somehow implicit that she wasn’t going to be a part of the festivities. Moreover, Marie seemed to imply that Grandmother would be punished for what she had been up to with German soldiers. Marie informed Grandmother that they would give twelve-page reports on what each citizen had been up to during the war. All the other children would go back to being children, but she didn’t know if she would be allowed to. Where was she going to live? Who would look after her? She had such a bad reputation that nobody would marry her.

Once the war was over, everyone could stop pretending certain things. You could stop pretending that people who hadn’t come home were coming home. Her father wasn’t coming back. She would be homeless. Marie was her only home now. And so time passed.

When the occupation was over, a new sort of terror immediately began. They had to take their aggression out on someone and the Germans were leaving. They couldn’t just go back to ordinary life. They were like a cat that had climbed up on a table and had lapped up a glass of whiskey and was now so drunk that it was taunting dogs. They looked for collaborators to prove that they were not collaborators. They ferreted out the weak to prove that they were strong. They wanted to be good, so they acted in an evil way.

People were going crazy when Charles de Gaulle took over as president. As a form of celebration, people threw tomatoes and rocks at Grandmother as she walked down the street. They called her a whore for having slept with Germans. Her head was shorn, because she had been cornered by a group of men who shaved her hair off. A girl who had fallen in love with a German soldier and had been living with him was tied up and forced to walk down the street naked while three-year-olds screamed at her, calling her a whore.

It was Marie who had turned Grandmother in. As she walked down the street, she held her head high. She didn’t care. Her heart was already broken. They could not touch her.

A year later, Grandfather was still dressed in his Canadian uniform, celebrating the end of the war in the streets of Paris, when he chanced upon her. Grandfather had spent the whole war hoping most of all to stay alive, but also, when he had a moment to daydream, hoping that he might get a chance to see Paris. And here it was, in its wonderful glory. The buildings were so elegant and the cast iron balconies grew on the sides of them like beautiful climbing vines that covered the whole city. Who would imagine that a boy from Saint-Henri in Montreal would find himself here, in the city of culture and refinement?

When he saw Grandmother leaning against a stone wall, it was love at first sight. She was eighteen years old. She had a black top hat perched at an angle on her head. Her hair had grown out since it had been so brutally cut, and it now curled around her earlobes. She was so pretty in her black dress and high-heeled shoes. She had a brand new coat slung over a suitcase that she was carrying in one hand. She was smoking a cigarette with her other and she was the only person in the huge mob who wasn’t smiling. He knew right away that she was a displaced aristocrat. She had ridden out of Paris when it was first occupied in a car with a pile of birdcages, a poodle and three maids. She was the type of girl who could write poems in cursive with a piece of chalk. She knew magical things about forks. There were probably philosophical texts that had been dedicated to her. She was exactly the type of girl that she was before the war. He took her away from France when she asked him to.

And when she was done her story that day, she held up a hand mirror in front of her that had a painting of a rose on the back of it.

“I wonder what Marie would think of me now,” she said. “She wouldn’t be so angry with me. She wouldn’t be jealous of me now. I wonder if her hair is still so dark. It was so pretty. A lot of people didn’t think that she was pretty, but I really thought she was so lovely.”

Grandmother could get lost looking in a mirror and wondering out loud to herself about what Marie was up to, for hours sometimes.

“She must have gotten old just like me. Of course, she would have had to. How strange? We were the same age, you know. She was three days older than me. We both named our cats Napoleon Bonaparte.”

Grandmother was always wondering what on earth had ever happened to the magnificent Marie. After all these years, she still longed to have Marie whispering questions to her in the dark.

“The way that air smells like snow reminds me of Marie. I can’t imagine why.”

She sighed, and we knew that for a moment she had forgotten about my brother and me. This was what had enraged our mother so much when she was young.

You might assume that our grandparents had an unhappy marriage. But Grandfather never seemed to mind coming second place to Marie or that he could never live up to the events that had happened in Grandmother’s past. Grandfather felt that he had pulled a fast one on the world by marrying someone so classy and refined. Naturally she was harder to please than the wives of his friends, but that was because she had much more sophisticated tastes.

Just as Grandmother was finished telling her story and had put down her hand mirror, Grandfather jumped up and hurried across the room to turn on the radio that was in their big wooden stereo. There was a radio show that he liked that played old-timey records. He was doing some sort of dance move where he snapped his fingers and bent over and took little tiny steps backwards. My brother and I found his dance routines hysterical. Grandmother looked at him for a moment as if he were completely insane. And then she couldn’t help but start laughing out loud. She laughed just like a child.