Deux Ans Après

In the blue light from the open window, I rise from the nest of sheets on my featherbed in my garrett room. I stare at the man in my bed for a moment, pale shoulders moving slowly, a furrow between his dark brows. Silently, I kiss it before slipping on my woolen shawl from the night before and slipping out the door. I make my way down the dark stairs, careful not to tread on the creaky board outside Veuve Valois's room. She hunts me like a cat in the night for my rent. I hoist open the oak door, stepping out into the bedewed morning.

On a clean morning like this one, light softening the harsh corners of buildings and cats darting between shadows to avoid the rising sun, it is easy to remember the days before the Nazis came. They have been gone for two years now, yet it still seems strange not to see their harsh flags waving from iron terraces, bloody before the pastel walls. I had been just a stupid girl when they came, just arrived from the country. I am a girl no longer. Now I am ancient, as we all are.

The paving stones pass beneath my feet, slick under my hard shoes. I purchased these on the day Jean was shot, just hours before... The sun has still not risen, but Paris is beginning to stir, women shouting from the windows above me and slamming doors down the street. Marie's pâtisserie will not open for some hours, but I know that she is in the kitchen, grinding beans for the first customers of the day. I slip through the ruelle and back around the side of her cream-coloured building, opening the back door and calling a greeting. She knows that I will appear every morning, but since the day I startled her and she dropped a dozen fresh eggs, she likes me to announce my presence.

"Bonjour, Estelle." She glances up as I enter the kitchen. "How are you this morning?"

"As fine as the night was long." I give the same reply that I have given for the past four years. Once it was a code; now it is tradition.

"Do you have a new story for me to read?" Marie smiles slyly as she works the bean grinder, her moles moving like a constellation over her tensing bicep. She has been reading my stories for as long as I have been writing them, and her eyes pass over every word before my editor ever sees them.

"Non. But Henri is still in my bed, so I have plenty of inspiration from last night." I say this because I know that it will make her laugh, and she does.

"What, did you tire him out and leave him there again?"

"But of course. You know no man can keep up with me!"

She shakes her head, still smiling, and points to my writing stool near the sink. "Save your sordid tale for your notebook."

I sit, and the morning passes as they all do, in comfortable silence. She, preparing to make customers happy with a wonderful breakfast, and I, preparing a feast of lubricious words. When Martine arrives in from placing the chairs in front of the pâtisserie, I rise to walk to my table. Marie hands me my petit café and warm croissant. I nod my thanks, whispering that she will receive my story in the afternoon as payment.

I pass the glass case of pastries, carefully balancing notebook, cup and saucer, and plate, and walk out the front doors to my table in the air. I am the first one there, as I am every morning. The sun is rising now, not yet over the buildings. And I sit and I watch this city I love so well wake, this city that taught me what it was to hate. And then I turn back to my words of not-quite love, selling the image of my body and the deeds it has done to the masses.