Читать книгу Dancing in the Baron's Shadow - Fabienne Josaphat - Страница 11

FIVE

Raymond knew he wasn’t going to get much sleep that night. He lay frozen on the mattress next to Yvonne, listening to her rhythmic breathing and the creak of bedsprings each time she shifted. He stared at the dark ceiling and let starlight bathe his half-naked body, the sheets rolled down to his waist. He was used to the city heat. When Yvonne opened her eyes and found him wide-awake, she barely lifted her head off the pillow.

“You should sleep,” she said.

There was concern in her voice. Also exhaustion. She needed sleep too, probably even more than he did. When the sun rose, she’d rush out of the house to her job laundering clothes, a job they both knew was more physically taxing than Raymond’s.

“Don’t worry about me,” he whispered. “I’ll be tired soon. You go back to sleep.”

She lay there, staring at him, until her eyes closed. He felt grateful. He didn’t want to talk to her, didn’t want to explain himself, and by now, she was used to him returning home from his brother’s house silent, stewing, rehashing threadbare arguments in his mind.

“God will provide for us,” she muttered as she drifted off. “Don’t give up hope.”

What does God know of our suffering, he wondered, or our hope? Hope was a luxury, nowadays. Haitians liked to believe that I’espoir fait vivre— where there is hope, there is life—and that you could survive on hope alone, but there was a breaking point. And Raymond had to admit that he could not survive as a taxi driver. Sometimes he wished he had stayed in the village, kept their parents’ house, and farmed the land. But the exodus of villagers to Port-au-Prince had swept him up. He needed to make a life for himself and his family, and there wasn’t much money in fixing up cars in Saint-Marc, nor in rice harvests. Breakneck inflation kept the working class on the edge of starvation while the bourgeois like his brother were starting to import luxury goods. There was nothing left for farmers to do. Yvonne could barely afford rice these days, much less meat. In the darkness, he shook his head, eyes still wide open.

What does God feel about all this? Raymond felt as if God had stopped listening, up there, wherever there was, but quickly regretted his blasphemy. Losing faith was not an option. After all, God had enabled him to be alive so far, and given him such blessings: a beautiful family with a devoted wife, gems for children. He turned to look at her sleeping face.

He silently thanked God for that day in the city when they’d met, and that he hadn’t had the heart to let her stand there in the rain. She’d just finished her shift at the Karibe Hotel. Her dress was soaked, and she had to get to her next job in Martissant. He flirted with her the whole way, because he liked the way her red dress clung to her small body, wet with rain, and how she never looked him in the eye when he joked with her, but instead looked away with an amused smile.

“What’s your name?” he asked. “Mine is Raymond. Raymond L’Eveillé.”

She laughed. “You’re chatty, aren’t you? And fresh too.” He pressed until she gave in and told him her name. He was there to pick her up again that night, surprising her as she walked through the hotel gates after another long shift.

“Let me give you a ride home,” he said to her.

“You just give out free rides, huh? You’re just generous that way?”

Lying next to her in the darkness, Raymond shuddered. Where had all their flirtation and joy gone? A few days after they met, he’d driven her to the Champ de Mars and bought her a fresco. They made love in his car. A few weeks later, he told her he wanted to marry her and she said yes.

“What are you thinking of?” Yvonne asked. So she wasn’t asleep.

He stared at the ceiling. The starlight outside his window spilled over his tired face and he held himself as still as he could, hoping she would leave him alone. She reached out in the dark and touched his bare chest. Her palm was hard but warm, and although he’d grown accustomed to the sweltering heat in the room, he felt flames where her fingers grazed him. She felt for his heartbeat.

“It’ll be okay, Raymond,” she said.

Raymond closed his eyes and felt his body sink deeper into the mattress, against the springs, and prayed for sleep to take him even as he felt disgusted by her words. Nothing was going to be okay and she knew it. Still, Yvonne curled up against him. Her breath melted into his ear, and he felt something inside unfurl. She leaned in, seeking his lips in the dark, but all he could do was squeeze her arm in response.

“What’s that sound?”

Yvonne stopped and listened, her head cocked against his shoulder. Raymond thought he heard a whimper. No, it was a voice. A woman’s voice, calling in the night. “I’m ready!” Yvonne’s hands ran across his chest, but as soon as she leaned in again to kiss him, the sound of soft knocks jolted them. She grabbed Raymond’s arm.

“Don’t—”

“I have to,” he said. “You stay in bed. I’ll go help her.”

Raymond scrambled in the dark to put his clothes on. In the kitchen, he called out as the knocks persisted. “You have to wake up, Madame Simeus! This is a dream; you’re not awake.”

He opened the door to find his landlady standing there, her coarse silver hair combed back into a chignon, mumbling incoherent words. She had smeared peach lipstick around her mouth and donned a pearlescent gown he’d never seen on her before. Her eyes were open, vacant, but deeply asleep.

“Will you take me to the dance?” she asked.

Raymond stifled a smile. He saw her legs uncovered where the dress stopped at the knee, her ankles scrawny, her feet in fuzzy white slippers. Madame Simeus, always so proud and indignant.

“Come, I’ll walk you back to bed.”

“I’m waiting for my date.”

“Right.”

He grabbed her arm and guided her back into her house as he’d done many nights before, thankful for the interruption, his eyes searching the darkness around them.

Nicolas was also awake, staring at his notebook, holed up in the darkness of his study, and hoping that if he couldn’t sleep, at least he could work. The manuscript was tucked away in its usual spot, and as usual it seemed to blaze and crackle like a glowing fire in the room. Maybe that was why he felt slightly feverish.

Eve had finally fallen asleep after starting to fold clothes and precious little things. They were slowly preparing to leave for the Dominican Republic. Amélie was at her side in her crib. Nicolas, on the other hand, hadn’t been able to sleep since he’d started working on the book.

In the glow of the lamp, Nicolas peered over his notes. He bit his nails at the thought of Jean-Jean reprimanding him for writing the book, for unearthing such sensitive information in the first place.

And yet he couldn’t ignore the anarchic nudge within to challenge all of this, to change the world around him when everyone else was being coerced and corrupted. Sometimes the sleeping anarchist in him would just wake up in the middle of a lecture. His students would sit there in shock as the words poured out of him. When they began to gasp or grow awkwardly still, he’d know to rein it in quickly. He hated that look of resignation on their faces. Resignation sickened him.

Molière! he thought sadly. Where are you? Molière, his former pupil, who had been the opposite of resigned when he reached out to Nicolas. “I’m now an archivist in the prisons of Port-au-Prince,” he’d said with a quiet smile. “I remember what you taught me about justice.” And Molière presented Nicolas with what would become the backbone of his book. “You said there were many ways to start a revolution, Maître. Remember? Well, here. I thought you’d want to know about the disappearance of a certain Dr. Alexis.”

Three days now of trying to reach his young source and still no word. Nicolas tried not to panic when the last phone call led him to a relative who announced sadly on the other line: “Molière is gone. He has disappeared.”

He heard a pop outside the window. Nicolas jumped and peered through two louvers. Something had hit the shutters, something thrown. A stone, possibly. His eyes adjusted gradually, and he could make out the branches of almond trees swaying eerily over the hood of his car. A distant streetlight cast a bright glow on the sidewalk. Nicolas pushed the louvers wide open and looked at the fragile stems of garden roses that held their weight against the quiet breeze and the sleeping anoles.

Nothing moved in the night. He must be getting paranoid. Probably just blind bats dropping cachiman fruits on the house midflight. Then, just as he started to close the shutters, a shadow streaked through the garden. It headed for the gate. Nicolas’s blood ran cold. He opened the shutters wide again. Yes. A silhouette was stepping over the bougainvillea bushes. A man.

“Hey!” Nicolas shouted.

The intruder reached the wall surrounding the property. The gate was padlocked, and he tried to hoist himself over the edge. Nicolas fumbled around under his desk. His fingers found the release and the hidden drawer popped open, revealing a space where he kept his notebook and a blue pouch. He unwrapped the fabric with trembling hands and emerged from under his desk with the Colt .45. The thing seemed to grow heavier each time he held it, especially when he cleaned it under Eve’s reproachful eye.

As he left his study and rushed past the bedroom door, Eve’s head popped out, her eyes panicked. “I heard something. What is it? Why aren’t you in bed—”

“Get back in the room and stay inside!” Nicolas pushed past her as she gasped at the gun he held, running to the front door, bumping into the console table and rattling lamps and framed family photographs.

With a grunt, he unbolted the door and ran to the veranda. The warm midnight air coiled around his knees and ankles. He stood there in nothing but his robe and a pair of leather slippers. He caught his breath and stopped for a moment, looking. Was the man still here? There he was, pulling himself over another part of the wall. Nicolas raised his gun to eye level. “Stop! I’ll shoot!”

The silhouette fell over the other side of the wall, landing with a thud.

“La police!” Nicolas yelled. “Police! Au voleur! Thief!”

Heart pounding, he shouted with all the air left in his lungs. He had to alert the neighborhood! He had to scare off the intruder.

A car door slammed, and an engine sped off furiously into the night. The dogs of the neighboring homes howled and barked in concert. Windows lit up, silhouettes ushered behind curtains, residents carefully avoiding exposure. Nicolas looked around to be sure that there was no one else stalking the house. His hand was still wrapped around the handle of the Colt, his finger resting against the trigger guard, as he’d been taught to do.

As dawn lit up Turgeau, the police came to inspect the garden. Nicolas was annoyed when they said the crime had already been committed, so they wouldn’t come out till curfew was over.

“I don’t think the intruder or his accomplices would stick around for you to come inspect my garden,” he said. “I’ve already looked. No one is here!”

Eve tried to placate him, and he kept quiet, allowing them to look for evidence. Maybe the intruder had dropped something. Maybe he was trying to break in. Who knew?

The neighbors asked questions Nicolas was unable to answer. Nothing was stolen, nothing was missing, no door was broken, no harm was done, and there was no conclusive report to be written. His next-door neighbor, Monsieur Pierre-Louis, a retired airline pilot, called him over to the fence that separated their two houses.

“Neighbor, is everything all right?” he asked. “You know we should look out for each other. If you need anything, let me know.”

Nicolas nodded thankfully. Yet, as the officers left and the neighbors shook their heads in sympathy, Nicolas was filled with a fear and unease he knew would haunt him for days. Who was the true suspect here? When he invited the police into his home, when they took their time wandering the grounds, staring into the windows of his study, were they really searching for clues about the intruder or were they curious about something else? Nicolas shook his head in regret. He shouldn’t have caused a scene, shouldn’t have called the police. If he wanted to get his family safely out of Haiti, he would have to be smarter than that.