Loving Modigliani

Afterlife: A Gothic Fairy Tale-5

“Goodbye, petite Jeanne. Now don’t you move. Stay right here.”

Reluctantly, I obeyed.

R

André had locked me in a closet, and I was running out of air. Someone was knocking outside with a syncopated rhythm: dum de dum dum dum. Frantic I pounded back, screaming let me out, let me out, then my eyes fluttered open. With relief I felt the sun on my face, breaking through a c***k in the wall. For a few moments, I lay very still in the soft bed until the dream subsided.

Fully awake now, I reached for Modi at my side—but he had already gotten up and was probably in the studio making us some coffee on the stove in his little Italian pot, singing snatches of Carmen. “La fleur que tu m’avais jetée,” but changing the lyrics to something silly or obscene.

Anticipating the taste of that hot sweet liquid, I struggled to prop myself up against the pillows. This time I was rarely nauseous upon waking, that came later in the day, but was always so lazy and sluggish that I spent hours and hours in bed. Any day now, any hour, I would be delivered—a thought that brought me both relief and dread.

I must have fallen asleep on my arm, for my right hand tingled, half numb. Trying to knead life back into my fingers and forearm, I noted the striped cuff of an unfamiliar dress buttoned snugly at the wrist, instead of my white flannel nightgown. How on earth did I come to be wearing that?

“Bonjour, Jeanne. Tu as bien dormi?”

There, on the ledge of the open window, a little boy sat swinging his legs, knocking the heels of his dirty bare feet against the wall. Dum de dum dum dum—I recognized it now. That was the rhythm I had heard in my dream. He looked no older than ten, with a shock of stiff red hair, a waxy face, and freckles butterflied over his cheeks and nose. His legs were pencil-thin, and his red shirt and blue trousers so faded and worn that they must have been washed a thousand times. I thought he had probably come to model for Modi, who sometimes brought urchins home off the street to pose for him. He loved their sunken cheeks and gap-toothed grins, and the way their eyes shone when he rewarded them with half an apple or a slice of hard cheese when his work was done.

I smiled, “Bonjour, mon petit. What’s your name?”

“Don’t you remember me?”

“Should I?” I studied his face. He did look familiar, though I couldn’t say where I had seen him before.

“It’s me. Pierre, the baker’s son. Pierre Giraud.”

I frowned. That was the name of a child who drowned in the sea at Cagnes–sur-Mer, near Nice, months ago, where I was staying with Modi. A fisherman had found the body entangled in his nets several days after the boy had gone missing. This was an unpleasant joke I didn’t like at all. How could he possibly know about Pierre Giraud?

“Pierre Giraud is dead, so that can’t be who you are—Modi,” I called, “What is this boy doing here? Come get your model, so I can get up and get dressed.”

Pierre shook his head gravely. “Modi isn’t here.”

His sober manner unnerved me. “Where is he then?”

He blinked at me. “You really don’t know?”

His head jerked aside; his eyes swiveled showing the whites, commanding my own eyes to follow. I gasped at the sight of a plain pine coffin placed crosswise at the foot of my bed. Huge, cumbersome, bare, with no flowers, the coffin filled the whole room, blocking the view of the doorway.

That coffin hadn’t been there when I first opened my eyes. Who had brought it here and where had it come from? Out the window, the bells of Notre-Dame-des-Champs clanged furiously, drowning out any possible reply. Then I remembered, like a stiletto through the heart, the funeral was today. I rammed the heels of my hands against my eyes, blotting out the images that rushed towards me from the black mouth of a tunnel. I had to push them back, to take things one at a time. Hanka had said that the cortege would be starting at ten from the Charity Hospital in Rue Jacob. So why had they brought Modi’s coffin here?

I had to get ready. Surely someone would be coming for us—Zbo and Hanka, or our dear friend, Chaim Soutine, who had been like a brother to Modi, and the undertaker, of course. They couldn’t expect me to walk in the condition I was in; they would have to send a car for me. I hated to be wearing this clownish outfit, but there wasn’t time to change. I heaved myself out of bed and searched the floor for my shoes, but couldn’t find them.

“My shoes!” I shouted, “What have you done with my shoes?” Then something tugged at my middle—shimmered like a spider’s skein shifting in a draft. A glinting thread looped in the air, connecting me to the coffin. And I remembered with a resounding shock: Yesterday my body was in the bed, but now it was in that box. It was me there in that coffin, not Modi.

“Jeanne, never mind about your shoes. You can’t go anywhere.”

“But my husband is being buried today!”

“You can’t, you see, as long as that’s still there,” Pierre said gently touching the thread. “But when it dissolves, you’ll be as free as I am. I can go anywhere I like.”

To prove his point, he shot out the window and then back to the ledge so swiftly, I hardly had time to take it in. “But for now, you mustn’t go further than it can stretch—it mustn’t break, otherwise….”

I plucked the thread, thinner now and more fragile than the day before. “Otherwise what?”

“I don’t know, but it’s bad if you do.”

“I am sorry, but I can’t talk to you now. I mustn’t be late.”

I somehow clambered over the coffin and ran barefoot through the studio. The door was wide open, and a chill wind blew up from the bottom of the stairs. As I tottered down the first ramp, past the door to Ortiz’s flat, the thread twanged at my navel with a low thrum, and Ortiz’s dogs began to howl. Pierre came out on the landing above me, shouting at me to come back, but I just kept going. Two flights down I halted—the thread would yield no further. One step more and I felt it would snap and anything might happen. I stared at the wooden steps spiraling down and my mind whirled with them.

Small fingers cold as seaweed fumbled for my hand. Pierre stood beside me on the stairs, peering up at my face. “Come back upstairs, Jeanne.”

With leaden legs I climbed back up, clutching the boy’s hand, past Ortiz’s door and the howling dogs and into our studio, where I plopped down on a chair that for once did not wobble under my weight. Outside, the bells had ceased tolling, but the walls still tingled with their solemn vibration.

“I want so much to see him again,” I sobbed.

“You will, but not now,”

I buried my face in my hands.

Cool lips touched my cheek, a hand brushed a strand of my hair from my eyes.

“Why don’t we go up to the roof?” he asked. “You might be able to watch the funeral pass by from up there.”

I had not been on the roof in over two years–it was dangerous to go up during the bombing—but before the Germans had begun shelling the city, Modi and I sometimes went up to enjoy the view or look at the moon. To get up there, you had to step out onto the ledge along the big studio windows, then scramble up an iron ladder fastened to the wall, used by workmen when they had to replace a broken roof tile or sweep the chimney. Modi and I would sometimes picnic up there at sunset, drinking beer or marc and nibbling pâté I had snitched from my mother’s pantry. Sometimes he would toss bits of stale bread down towards the courtyard, and the fat gulls straying from the Seine would snatch them away in midair.

“Come on!”

Pierre leaped out onto the ledge and tugged me out beside him. My head spun when I looked down at the courtyard, where Madame Moreau was mopping the flagstones with bleach. The odor made me queasy. I craned my neck to look up at the roof and tweaked the string at my navel. “You are sure this won’t break if we go up there?”

“Nah, it isn’t that far.”

I reached for the rung, which I could not grasp, but instantly, almost effortlessly, there I was poised on the crest of the roof still holding Pierre’s hand.

From the Eiffel tower and the Madeleine to the Luxembourg Gardens and the Louvre, Paris lay before us. To the north, the grand boulevards were crammed with people, carriages, and motorcars like scuttling little beetles. The elms and plane trees in the Luxembourg Gardens had shaken off their leaves: spindly skeletons in tidy rows on the wintery lawns. Everything appeared in such sharp detail – the icy sparkle of water in the fountain, the frozen statues with pigeons on their heads. Inside the East entrance, the dark hatted heads of the ladies strolling there looked like rows and rows of pillboxes.

For the first time in ages, I felt free and elated. I stood on the top of a chimney pot and spread my arms wide, as the biting wind blew my hair every which way. Despite my bare feet, I didn’t feel cold at all. “It’s just like flying,” I cried.

Pierre jumped up beside me and spread his arms, too, as the wind ripped through us, whistling between the buildings. My red-striped dress flapped and crackled like flames. I laughed when the satin bow round my neck blew away and was snapped up by the beak of a crow.

“Well, you might not actually be able to fly once the string is gone, but you’ll have all sorts of fun,” said Pierre, hopping down from the chimney pot and perching himself on the edge of the roof to dangle his legs over the courtyard. “You can go wherever you want, climb to the tops of mountains, even to the tip of the Eiffel tower. You will be able to walk straight into the Palais Royal and pull the guard’s nose. Nobody and nothing can stop you then. And you’ll know the answer to everything you don’t know or didn’t know before but always wanted to.”

I climbed down and sat beside him. Madame Moreau had gone back inside to cook herself a pot au feu. The smell of onions and beef wafted up to the roof, and I realized I hadn’t eaten in a very long time, but I wasn’t the least bit hungry.

“How do you mean the answer to everything?”

“Things you never understood before will suddenly start making sense. Well, for instance, arithmetic problems from school like why zero from zero is zero, or why robins’ eggs are blue, or where your lost puppy or mitten ended up—but also big questions too, ones that grown-ups think about. Do you have a big question?”

I pondered a minute and shook my head. “There is nothing I really wanted to know, that I can think of. Except perhaps how to speak Russian. I always wanted to learn to speak Russian and read Tolstoy and Pushkin.”

He nodded. “Then you’ll be able to.”

“How can that be?”

“I don’t know. It just is.”

Clouds scudded over our heads as we sat in silence a while. What was my big question? The only things that had ever really mattered to me were loving Modigliani and making art, and before that my parents and my brother. I had a baby daughter but I was not a good mother. My eyes stung as I thought of Giovanna. What was my child doing now? Was she out in the cloister, perhaps for her daily breath of air? I hoped one of the younger nuns had taken her to heart, and that she wasn’t being mistreated. I rubbed my arms, thinking how chilly it must be in the convent.