LITMIR.BIZ

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called Wormwood. His nose and tongue and knees horribly protruding, Wormwood was sitting on a stump.

      Gran’père was asleep and as he slept he whistled: a sound as monotonous as the wind. Downstairs a clock ticked; I could hear M’man’s soft breathing and from time to time I heard her sigh: “Ah, merde. Merde, merde, merde.” She was almost singing.

      On the desk there was a little china vase and because it was too deep to see inside I emptied it into my hand. Some pen nibs tumbled out, two coins, and a key. I slipped the coins in the pocket of my nightgown and examined the key. It was very small and appeared to be made of green brass. I held it in the palm of my hand and, making a fist, squeezed hard. When I opened my hand I could feel the key’s impress in my flesh with the tips of my fingers.

      Once when I was a tiny child I had asked Gran’père why he kept a thing as ugly as Wormwood around. “If Wormwood were mine,” I told him, “I would throw him into the fire.” Gran’père said: “Little idiote! Wormwood is made of brass and cannot burn. But he has a hot temper: behave yourself, Nanu, or he’ll wake up—because yes, even though his eyes are open he is fast asleep. If I decide to wake him, you’re finished, Nanu! Foutue! Foutue! Fucked, petite garce. Tu comprends?”

      Remembering this, I bit my lip, but what I really wanted to do was bite Gran’père. I imagined creeping across the room and poking my head under his covers. Before he or M’man would know what was up, I’d have taken a good bite out of Gran’père. And because the room was dark, Gran’père asleep and M’man sleeping too, I stuck out my tongue. I stuck it out so far it touched the bottom of my chin and still I had not stuck it out far enough. Then I saw p’tit Pierre standing inside the door. Made fearless by the dark and the fact that Gran’père was dying, he crept over to me. His mouth hot against my ear, he said, “I saw you! If le père Foucart doesn’t die I’ll tell him! I’ll tell him I saw Nanu making faces in the dark. And then I’ll watch him give you a good spanking with his shoe.”

      I said, “I don’t give a fuck.” P’tit Pierre grinned. He said, “Can I kiss you? You are so pretty, Nanu.” I said, “You make me want to shit you are so ugly.” P’tit Pierre began to laugh. I could hear him laughing quietly beside me in the dark. Then, crouching down, he waddled like a dwarf around the room, sidling dangerously close to M’man’s chair and Gran’père’s bed, looking droll and sinister, too. Once more he was standing beside me. He picked up Wormwood and the china vase, scattering the pen nibs on the table.

      “There’s a key,” he whispered. “Help me find it.” I said, “Why? Why should I help you find it? You’re nothing but a little thief.” I was squeezing the key so tightly my hand was throbbing. “Because,” he said, “it’s a thing le père Foucart showed me.” And he imitated Gran’père’s voice so well the hair stood up on the back of my neck: “P’tit Pierre! Viens! Look at what old Wormwood knows how to do! And better than you, I warrant, little brigand!”

      In the dark room, M’man softly snoring and Gran’père whistling like the Devil, I said, “Hush! You sound just like him! I’m afraid! Stop or I’ll do it in my pants.”

      P’tit Pierre fell to his knees and then, his fist in his mouth to keep the laughter deep in his belly, he rolled across the floor. I could hear Margarethe stirring in the house just under us. “Are you going to sleep here?” P’tit Pierre, now at my feet, gazed up at me.

      “Bien sûr! Idiot! Gran’père is dying. I have to stay till he’s dead.” P’tit Pierre then said very seriously: “Nanu . . . I’ll be your husband one day.” I said, “Non! M’man told me we can’t be married because your m’man is a maid who empties Gran’père’s bedpan.” Hurt to the quick, p’tit Pierre growled: “Your papa has run away! You’re no better than a bastard like me.” “My papa did not run away!” I pinched p’tit Pierre’s arm so hard he cried out, waking my m’man. “Hush!” she scolded. “Hush, Nanu. Or I’ll burn your tongue in the fire!” But almost as soon as she said this she was asleep.

      “My papa is a soldier,” I said. “He’s fighting the boche. When he comes home he’s taking me to Holland,” I said. It seemed to me p’tit Pierre was crying. “We could elope,” I said, “and live deep in the woods on the hill. No one would look for us there. We’ll eat berries—”

      P’tit Pierre was beaming. “And nuts and wild partridge eggs,” he said. “We’ll sleep in a big pile of leaves.”

      “I’ll make us a blanket of moss,” I said eagerly. “And when we have babies I’ll kiss them over and over.” As p’tit Pierre looked on I held an imaginary baby in my arms and covered it with kisses. P’tit Pierre bent over me, kissing the air.

      “We’ll sleep in a bed of roses,” he said, recalling a song he had heard in the street. “We’ll burn frankincense like they do in church.”

      “Roses!” I pretended to spit. “Where will you find roses?”

      “In Iron Corset’s garden,” he said gleefully.

      “I don’t want my m’man’s roses,” I said, and I pulled his hair.

      He said, “I’ll make you a bed of fox fur. And when the werewolf comes I’ll chop off his head.”

      “When I am a woman,” I said, “I’ll run away for sure.”

      “When I am a man,” p’tit Pierre said, “I’ll shit without dropping my pants.” We both collapsed on the floor, silently laughing. Then for a time we lay together and I could hear p’tit Pierre’s heart moving beneath mine.

      Because of M’man’s violent temper and the injury caused by Papa’s departure, to recall the past meant upheaval and isolation. But that night in p’tit Pierre’s arms I dared remember an afternoon when Papa and I climbed the hill up to the Bosc du Puy. At the top we rested beneath the ancient trees. We saw a fox pass by, a glassy-eyed rabbit thrown over its back. We saw a snake, green and gold, its eyes gold, moving among the roots and leaves.

      Papa was a geologist—he worked for the mines—and that day he told me about the creatures that were buried when the hill was formed. He said we sat at the foot of a tree rooted in a soil black with volcanic ash and the bone dust of woolly rhinos and horses no bigger than cats. He described the water volcanoes of Iceland, the volcanic bombs of Vesuvius, the eruption of Mount Pelée in Martinique caused (or so some said) by an unusual conjunction of the sun and moon. And although it was a story I had heard before, Papa described the whale skull his own father had found digging a wine cellar deep in the yellow clay under rue Dauphine. The famous naturalist Lamanon had rewarded my great-grandfather with a kiss.

      “One day I will take you to Holland,” Papa had said, tenderly stroking my hair. “The skull sits alone in a hall of the Teyler Museum.” After a moment’s reflection he added: “The hall is the size of this wood.”

      I was roused from this memory, so like a reverie, by Gran’père’s snores. They sounded like a knife shaving bone. M’man’s snores made the sound of a glue pot simmering. I knew that because once I had helped Papa make glue with the hoof of a horse.

      “Fais-moi peur, Nanu!” p’tit Pierre whispered in my ear.

      “I can’t. Not with them so near.”

      “Yes you can! They are both as good as dead. Start like this: ‘The voyage was doomed from the start.’ ” He nuzzled my neck.

      “The voyage was doomed from the start,” I began, and p’tit Pierre sighed with pleasure. “A week off the Java coast the ship was swept by plague and all the sailors died.”

      “The stench was terrible,” p’tit Pierre agreed. “All the sailors died but one.”

      “And this is his story.”

      

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