Rue des Rosiers Read online

“My mother has that exact painting in her living room.” There’s a tipsy, slightly crooked look to the cloth and dish and bowl that the fruit is displayed on, as if the painter has almost but not quite figured out the rules of perspective. Something childish about it, less than dutifully perfect.

  “Nature morte,” Laura says, “that’s what they call still lifes in French. Dead nature. Such a weird expression – should landscapes be called live nature, then?”

  Landscape or still life, you don’t usually see living people in either. No beggars and no bosses. But maybe in the still lifes you do see the imprint of ownership, because those objects – the oranges or plates or rabbits – did belong to someone. As did the rooms that held them.

  “Oh, I’ve been meaning to tell you – François told me that during the war the Nazis used the Jeu de Paume as a storage facility for art they’d stolen from Jewish families. Other families too, I guess. He says there was a curator here who secretly kept exact detailed lists of the works that had been taken, and of the original owners, so that the art could be given back after the war. If you like, I’ll look up her name for you.”

  “Sure, thanks.” An exact count. Mene, mene. So all through the Occupation, the curator kept believing not only that the war would end, but that the Nazis would lose, and the owners come back, alive. Live nature. As if that hope would save them.

  Laila

  It’s quiet here. You’re tired. You’ve laid your head on my lap and, quick as that, you’re asleep. We found this place together. It was hidden so people like us wouldn’t find it, but we did. You have business nearby, you have to go soon, but for now we can rest in the quiet shade. Except for a sideways glance now and then, nobody bothers with us. A gardener in blue coveralls sweeps the sand path, wiping away the traces of pigeon footprints. He doesn’t look at us. He’s busy with his work. His business.

  I don’t know what your business is. Though I do: part of your business is finding more work. For you, for me too. And you’re selling things, I know that, a duffle bag with bottles of water, plastic toys, plastic souvenirs. What other business I don’t know. But for now you’re peaceful, your eyes closed, hands for once at rest.

  And I can sit and watch this square, which is a square, symmetrical, laid out in strict geometry. Divided in four by paths cut as exact diagonals: in each section, an identical fountain. Here on our bench there’s shade, shade also held under the arcades that wall in the square, their red brick trimmed with pale yellow stone. But there on the paths, on the four fountains, only sunlight. A bright quiet. Peace. A pigeon fluffs its feathers on the curlicued lamppost beside the lawn.

  I close my eyes, listen to the sound of the water. Open them. Each fountain has an urn at the top, then a basin; a stand, another basin; another stand, and at the bottom a shallow pond. The second basin so big you could take a bath in it. You’d like that, a bath. Me too, I’d like a long bath in hot water, and then a sleep in my own bed at home, the sound of my mother humming as she kneads dough.

  In this fountain water spills off the top urn and then the top basin, a little wind catching so it falls crooked there. But at the second basin, the water moves through narrow pipes spouting through the mouths of lions. Paris lions. My father told me that he saw the Lions' Gate in the walls of the Old City in Jerusalem once. The Lion of Judah, the Lion of Jerusalem. The lions carved into stone there centuries older than these. The ones here are worn so that each lion’s head has been changed to wear a slightly different look. Bored with us, maybe, or maybe curious. Patient. The water keeps spilling itself.

  Over years the water scours the metal of the pipe too, shaping it so it flows differently from each lion’s mouth. Lion of Paris. Lion of Jerusalem.

  Tell me why we’re here, Khalil.

  I want a country and you’ve given me this square.

  ~

  LUXEMBOURG

  sarah’s back at the luxembourg gardens, sober this time, solo, and in daylight. She can remember it only hazily from her first glorious dizzy expedition with Laura and Michael. Yesterday, as she and Laura were leaving the Jeu de Paume, Laura ran into her landscape-architect friend Charles, and quickly talked him into giving Sarah a tour of the Luxembourg Gardens. Sarah really is interested in landscape gardening, but she couldn’t help feeling like a problem child being handed off from one caregiver to another.

  Which she probably is. The family black sheep. The woman who can’t even spend the night with her boyfriend.

  Until now. Until these Paris days, Paris nights, when she can.

  Charles is supposed to meet her in front of the Grand Bassin, which is a funny shape, an uneven octagon, two sides longer than the others. Sarah’s taken a seat on one of the little metal chairs sprinkled around the edge of the pond where the immaculate French children are sailing their wee boats on the placid water. Just the lightest breeze today, so the little multi-coloured sails are a bit lax. The stone lip around the pond takes an elegant slow curve to its rippled edge, but that curve seems a bit dicey for the toddlers leaning towards the water with its tempting ducks and wooden boats. The mothers are nonetheless nonchalant, smoking, flipping through magazines.

  Sarah moves her chair into the partial shade of a linden. She’s learned that linden is tilleul in French. As soon as she saw the illustration on a box of tisane de tilleul, Sarah knew what they were – no mistaking the distinctive heart-shaped leaves and their tiny frilled yellow flowers cupped by narrow yellowy-green bracts. That play between the vivid green of the regular leaves and the pale glow of the bracts, as if they had a special way of holding the light, which perhaps they do... The sun is playing off them now, a green ripple in the bit of breeze.

  Tilleul is another word in French that Michael claims he struggles with. Tea-yul: she can see how he’s buffaloed at the proximity of those l’s and vowels. Laura has persuaded them that they have to try tisane de tilleul instead of regular tea. Tisanes are infusions, and this one is made from the dried flowers of the linden. Another Parisian must, Laura claims, the kind of beverage preferred by women who are BCBG – bon chic, bon genre. Tisane de tilleul, visits to art galleries, all elements in Laura’s gentle but insistent campaign to infuse Sarah herself with savoir faire, to transform Sarah into a new category of being. Ugly duckling into swan. Wooden puppet into real girl. Statue into living woman. She’s a project. And learning more about landscape gardening is part of the transformation.

  Sarah would be resentful of the instruction, but Laura’s proposals always come with a tang of ironic appreciation that this isn’t how either of them were raised, it’s not how things go at home. There’s nothing condescending about Laura. She would be the first to admit that she has also metamorphosized herself, turned the girl from Saskatoon by way of Tobago into an honest-to-goodness BCBG parisienne. Laura hasn’t made any bones about how hard she’s had to work to make that sea change. She says she can hear her parents tsking – sucking teeth, she says, taking on their accent – in disapproval of her airs and graces. As if the change were a betrayal. And maybe it is. Though Laura knows they’re proud too, that she’s made something of herself.

  And she has. Laura has made herself a career at a fancy legal firm in Paris.

  Sarah’s the one who doesn’t even have a job.

  She looks out, away from her thoughts. The trees here at the Luxembourg, the lime trees in Place des Vosges, that big basswood in Mrs. M.’s front garden, those poor captive saplings caged near the Saint-Paul Métro stop, they’re all lindens, all genus Tilia, all in the Tiliaceae family. What’s in a name indeed. You know something by naming it, but common names depend on where you happen to be. She looked up Tilia taxonomy in her pocket tree guide. Though they’re not a citrus at all, linden are called lime trees in Europe because the Middle English word lind got twisted into lime. Lind from the Latin word for flexible, pliant, yielding. So the words lithe and lenient are from the same root; liana, those clingy woody vines, too. Because they’re so compliant, linden are great trees for cities: th
ey can tolerate all soils, various degrees of sun exposure, they can tough out air pollution, survive a fair bit of drought. Adaptable, pliant.

  If you were a linden tree, what kind of linden tree would you be? Mrs. M.’s basswood back in Toronto is Tilia americana, one of the larger varieties, fast-growing but not as long-lived as other species in the family. Bigleaf lindens, Tilia platyphyllos, grow more slowly, but according to Sarah’s book, they can last over a thousand years. Tilia cordata, littleleaf linden, also have that ability to endure. Littleleaf linden: Michael would probably get a kick out of that name too, all that bouncy alliteration. A linden by any name would smell as sweet – all the Tilia cultivars have beautifully fragrant flowers.

  A bit of wind again in the leaves. It’s so quiet here. Peaceful. The city is speckled with these pools of quiet, and Parisians seem as drawn to them as she is. Refuge from the stink of the Métro, the noise of stalled traffic, horns honking, construction. No graffiti here, no litter or panhandlers. There is a middle-aged man in a rather jaunty fedora slumped in a chair in the shade who may be sleeping it off. Sarah can just barely hear the murmur of human voices at a distance. Sounds here are birdsong, the scratch of a rake against the gravel and dirt path. Someone is always looking after things – here, and at Place des Vosges. Public gardens for the public good. Public spaces that create public goodness. The clock on the palace façade has chimed the quarter hour and now the hour, discreet notice. A pigeon approaches, inspects the dirt around her sandals for crumbs. No luck.

  And then Charles is beside her, briefcase in hand, a natty bow-tie, ever so slightly askew, on his trim, striped shirt. He extends his hand. No cheek-kissing for Charles. He’s English. “Hope I haven’t kept you waiting. You’ve had to rent a chair.”

  “Oops. No, I just sat myself down. I didn’t realize I was supposed to pay.” She’s done it again.

  “Well, you’ve gotten away with it. I hope you and Michael are enjoying the apartment. François lived there on his own for a couple of years before we moved in together, so it should be quite habitable.” Charles digs into his briefcase, shuffles a few papers, hands her a creamy thick envelope. A list of gardens to visit. Because she’s interested in landscape gardening. And she is. She wants to open up the envelope right away. She’s begun to see how the gardens she’s browsed in work on people and how the people work on them. Begun to see what happens when what the gardens want bumps against what the designers want, and then what happens when they both bump against what the people who use them want. Her thumb strokes the paper and when she looks up, Charles is smiling at her.

  “I’ve jotted down some notes on each garden, just a few quick facts or points of interest, but it could easily keep you busy your whole stay. Though you may want to take some side trips too. Versailles, of course. And maybe Giverny, you know Giverny? Monet’s garden is there, the water-lilies garden. Both the house and the gardens have been restored. They opened to the public just a year or two ago. I haven’t gotten there yet myself, but I hear it’s quite something.”

  Monet’s garden. If she went there, she could see at least something of what Monet saw, that world made of light.

  Charles is walking briskly away from the pond, down the wide gravel path of the central allée, its trees as sternly disciplined as the children she’s been watching. She hasn’t been in Europe in winter, but she has seen illustrations of pollarded trees with their top branches lopped off, pruned so brutally that they look like elongated stumps. It’s hard to believe the trees could ever recover after having had so much taken from them. They’ve been pollarding in Europe for centuries, and it’s supposed to promote growth, but it’s difficult to picture how something can be so stunted and still live, much less thrive.

  To the side, a group of intense men who look to be in their sixties are playing a game of boules. Sarah listens to the quiet click of the balls. It reminds her of the sedate elderly gents and ladies in their whites on the exact green of the lawn-bowling centre just off Bathurst beside the Wychwood Library. There’s a gorgeous huge catalpa tree on the north side of the library that’s probably covered in pale orchid-like blooms right now, its scent haunting the sidewalks. For a moment she misses home.

  “I hear ice-curling is as popular in Canada as it is in Scotland.” Charles is grinning as they watch the boules players.

  “My dad likes to curl,” Sarah tells him. Big Abe on the ice in his giant Cowichan sweater with the moose parading across it, the one his mother knit him; Abe watching the lazy turns of his granite stones and calling sweep, sweep at his teammates louder than anyone else at the rink.

  “We’ve never had the chance to visit Canada. You and Michael are in Toronto, right? I hear High Park is interesting, I suppose you’ve been. And the city itself, I understand there’s an impressive canopy of trees, an urban forest.”

  “I used to work as a waitress at a rooftop bar in Toronto, 17 stories up. I remember looking south beyond the patio and seeing treetops all the way down to the lake.”

  “My mum worked as a waitress but she had to retire. Thirty-five years on her feet and her legs are spoiled. Is that where you’re working now?”

  “I work for a garden centre.” Worked. She isn’t working now.

  “Right. I think Laura mentioned something of the sort. How is that suiting you?”

  She looks at Charles. “I lost the job just before we left. Got fired, in fact.” She looks at him again, but Charles’ face is steady. “That’s why I’m here with Michael. I’m at loose ends.”

  “Did you like it, then?”

  “I liked the work. I like getting my hands dirty.” She holds both hands in front of her. “We’ve been here two weeks, and I’ve actually got fingernails again.”

  He laughs, a genial sort of snort she wasn’t expecting. “Is that a plus or a minus?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Well, I don’t get my own hands dirty often enough. My mum had a backyard vegetable garden in Liverpool. That woman could grow a cabbage in a teapot.”

  Liverpool has to be farther north than Winnipeg; they’d have even longer hours of summer sunlight.

  “Let’s just follow the allée here, and I’ll start my spiel. After Good King Henry was assassinated in 1610, Marie de Medicis, his second wife, was so down in the mouth that the only thing for it was to move out of the royal residence at the Louvre. So she had the Luxembourg Palace and the Gardens designed after her childhood home in Florence – the Pitti Palace and its Boboli Garden.”

  The Pity Palace, perhaps. So strange that the model of a French garden was built by a homesick Italian princess.

  “The gardens have grown and shrunk over time, especially when Haussmann was busy reorganizing the streets, but a lot of the original design is still intact, and it is a model of the garden à la française. The French are that keen on formality, symmetry.” Charles purses his lips in imitation of the moue, that pouty discerning French face, and Sarah can’t keep from smiling. Charles fait la moue. “I’m not as partial to the French garden as I should be, living here,” he says. “There are times when it feels too much like an act of will, working against nature rather than with it. I’m more fond of the English style.”

  Maybe it’s that the English style allows more of what the garden wants, not just the designer.

  A toddler goes racing past them. The mother looks up from her magazine, gets up from her wooden bench and somewhat reluctantly pursues him.

  “D’you like the double-sided benches?” Charles asks. “I think of them as Janus benches.”

  “Two-faced benches. I think I saw them in Place des Vosges.”

  They’ve reached the wrought-iron fence that borders the park. Sarah puts her hands around the bars. “We were so drunk the last time I was here. I have a foggy memory of wandering round and round here after we finished dinner, following Laura on some wild goose chase. We couldn’t get in, it was all locked up.”

  “I’m glad you’re seeing things more in focus this go-round. Sa
rah, did you know we have beehives in the Luxembourg? There’s been an apiary and beekeeping school here since 1856. The apiary is just up the walk, at the corner of the garden. There’s a plan afoot to repopulate Paris with beehives. And not just in parks; there’s talk about using the roofs of some of the big department stores, hotels, even the Opera House. And they’ve already got good evidence that bees are happy here, productive, too. Gobsmacking, isn’t it, urban bees?”

  They come up on a cluster of square wooden hives behind a pale wooden fence, the sun so brilliant that the hives’ tented roofs seem white in its light. A little city of hives. The hives are perched on metal platforms of some sort. Their wooden walls have been polished to a beeswaxy sheen by age and weather. And those pitched roofs on them – like straw rice-paddy hats or pagodas topped by knobs that probably are handles for lifting the roofs off to access the honey. There’s a larger structure to the left, a gazebo that seems to have come directly from a fairy tale except that it’s housing a cluttered bunch of equipment, mostly more wooden boxes for hives. She tries the handle of the gate. It’s locked. Another locked gate.

  “Yes,” Charles says, “I meant to get us the key ahead of time. We can just go into the little building over there, and I’ll fetch it so we can get a closer look.”

  There are painted stencils of bees at the tops of the gate posts. The bee outlines look as though a very clever child has drawn them, flat and slightly crude and perfect, and Sarah suddenly needs them, needs to have them stencilled as a border along the walls of her room back home, they’re so much the shape of what she wants.