Child, Lee – The Enemy

‘I saw her last week. We had fun. Better that last week was

the last time.’

‘I would have wanted whatever extra time I could have

gotten.’

‘It was always going to be an arbitrary date,’ I said. ‘I could

have gone yesterday, in the afternoon, maybe. Now I’d be

wishing I had stayed for the evening. If I had stayed for the

evening, I’d be wishing I had stayed until midnight.’

‘You were in here with me at midnight. I feel bad about that,

tOO.’

‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘I don’t feel bad about it. My mother wouldn’t,

either. She was French, after all. If she’d known those were my

options, she’d have insisted.’

‘You’re just saying that.’

Nell, I guess she wasn’t very broadminded. But she always

wanted whatever made us happy.’

314

‘Did she give up because she was left alone?’

I shook my head. ‘She wanted to be left alone so she could

give up.’

Summer said nothing.

‘We’re leaving,’ I said. ‘We’ll get a night flight back.’

‘California?’

‘East coast first,’ I said. ‘There are things I need to check.’

‘What things?’ she said.

I didn’t tell her. She would have laughed, and right then I

couldn’t have handled laughter.

Summer packed her bag and came back to my room with

me. I sat on the bed and played with the string on Monsieur

Lamonnier’s box.

%Vhat’s that?’ she said.

‘Something some old guy brought around. He said it’s some

thing that should be found with my mother’s stuff.’

‘What’s in it?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘So open it.’

I shoved it across the counterpane. ‘You open it.’

I watched her small neat fingers work on the tight old knot.

Her clear nail varnish flashed in the light. She got the string off

and lifted the lid. It was a shallow box made out of the kind of

thick sturdy cardboard you don’t see much any more. Inside

were three things. There was a smaller box, like a jewel case. It

was made of cardboard faced with dark blue watermarked

paper. There was a book. And there was a cheese cutter. It was

a simple length of wire with a handle on each end. The handles

were turned from dark old wood. You could see a similar thing

in any picerie in France. Except this one had been restrung.

The wire was too thick for cheese. It looked like piano wire. It

was curled and corroded, like it had been stored for a very long

time.

‘What is it?’ Summer said.

‘Looks like a garrotte,’ I said.

‘The book is in French,’ she said. ‘I can’t read it:’

She passed it to me. It was a printed book with a thin paper

dust jacket. Not a novel. Some kind of a non-fiction memoir.

315

The corners of the pages were foxed and stained with age. The

whole thing smelled musty. The title was something to do with

railroads. I opened it up and took a look. After the title page was

a map of the French railroad system in the 1930s. The opening

chapter seemed to be about how all the lines in the north

squeezed down through Paris and then fanned out again to

points south. You couldn’t travel anywhere without transiting

the capital. It made sense to me. France was a relatively small

country with a very big city in it. Most nations did it the same

way. The capital city was always the centre of the spiderweb.

I flipped to the end of the book. There was a photograph of

the author on the back flap of the dust jacket. The photograph

was of a forty-years-younger Monsieur Lamonnier. I recognized

him with no difficulty. The blurb underneath the picture said he

had lost both legs in the battles of May 1940. I recalled the stiff

way he had sat on my mother’s sofa. And his walking sticks.

He must have been using prosthetics. Wooden legs. What I

had assumed were bony knees must have been complicated

mechanical joints. The blurb went on to say he had built Le

Chemin de Fer Hurnain. The Human Railroad. He had been

awarded the Resistance Medal by President Charles de Gaulle,

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