A cabin boy, the very same one who tried to enter your cabin last night and whom you dispatched with a slap across the face, interrupted your conversation. “Captain Plumet has invited you both to have breakfast with him,” said the boy, scarcely looking at you. When you made as if to follow him, Madeleine took you by the arm; she had something to discuss with you. Her proposition, delivered quickly and nervously, rendered you speechless with surprise. You knew, of course, that she despised her line of work and held a very poor opinion of herself, but it had never even crossed your mind that donning the habit of the Sisters of Charity would seem so marvelous to her. Madeline, simply put, wanted to be you, wanted to trade the whorehouse for the convent. “But in order to exchange passports we would need Captain Plumet’s help,” you told her. “It is already guaranteed,” replied Madeline. “I bought it at a very good price last night. Truth be told, it’s not a problem for him at all. They put him in charge of transporting three women, and three women will disembark at the dock.” “And Marie?” you asked. “She’s like a sister to me,” Madeline smiled. “She’ll shave my head to look just like yours.”
And so, my friend, you shall arrive in New Orleans with a new name, Madeline Dampierre, and the good nuns at the convent will receive a false Henriette Faber. Damned if this isn’t a true comedy of errors! Well, you wish them both the best of luck. Naturally, Plumet’s complicity came at a price, which turned out to be exactly the one you had expected. How simple it is to manipulate certain types of men!
Hours later, your head fuzzy and aching from so much wine, you went up on deck to take in some fresh air. The moon was full. When you leaned out over the gunwale to feel the ocean spray, you saw a line of dolphins following behind the boat. Their polished backs, bathed in moonlight, looked like enormous silver coins rolling edgewise among the waves. Surface. . . . Submerge. . . . Surface. . . . Submerge. What else is life but a continual cycle of abundance and scarcity? One way or another, you’ll sort things out when you get to New Orleans. Nothing could be worse than that retreat from Moscow in which nine of every ten who marched alongside you had died. And now you think again of your dream about Robert. Could it be some kind of sign? Oh, my beautiful and distant Hussar, what times we had together! How I missed you, how I wept for you! Rest in peace in my dreams. You will always be with me. For better or for worse, I owe to your death much of what I have been, what I am today, and what I forever will be.
ROBERT
1
THERE WAS ONCE A SWEET and lost time when the days passed so slowly that each one seemed to contain all four of the seasons. Now that old age has abbreviated my sleep and I tend to awake before dawn, when the street looks like a long black cat stretched out beneath my window, it is not unusual for me to attempt to conjure up the contours of one of those days. At times I try to reproduce the landscape of some extraordinary event, imagining it on a grand scale in which I appear inlaid like a blade of grass. At others, I trace the details of a beloved face, a beloved body—lately they’ve been Robert’s—in order to place them, first still, then in motion, within one of the intimate scenes guarded in my memory: the first waltz at a gala ball, a furtive caress in a box seat at the opera, or simply Robert and me, stretched out on one of his precious animal skins, drinking wine by the fire and talking about nothing in particular. I can spend hours bewitched by these tender reveries, until, still wrapped up in my daydream, I hear the Irish servant boy leaving the breakfast tray and the New York Herald outside my door. Soon after, Milly, my dedicated secretary and traveling companion, appears, with a steaming cup of tea, a slice of rye bread, and an ounce of light rum, forcing me to leave behind that splendid autumn in Vienna, 1805, full of golden leaves and military triumphs, or the sudden kiss that caused us to slip upon the icy cobblestones of a street in Warsaw, leaving us splayed on the ground next to a spur-stone, laughing like idiots until the cold against our backsides obliged us to rise, only to slip all over again. Today, this very morning, I saw him once more on the staircase of our lodging-house in Berlin, his new leopard skin slung over his shoulder, mounting the stairs with his back hunched and his head lowered as though bearing the weight of an actual flesh-and-blood animal, all just to make me laugh, to set the jubilant and celebratory tone occasioned by his promotion to captain. Once again I heard him say, between bites of sausage and swallows of schnapps, that after the next battle Lannes would have to give him a tiger skin, and, who knew, maybe a lion’s or even an elephant’s, and then we’d made love again, taking our time, my tongue traversing the trail of scars that mapped his body, taking in the inexplicable smell of his skin, like moss and fresh bread.
Are these silly vignettes just an old lady’s attempt at solace? Perhaps. But it would be so much worse to await the gray light of dawn counting sheep or the days I might yet have left on this earth. What’s more, how could I write about my life without first reconstructing it, using the dubious glue of memory to piece together the innumerable fragments of my past, scattered like the pieces of a Chinese vase thrown from a bell tower to the street below? In any case, at my age one no longer worries about seeming ridiculous, especially not here in New York where I have come to seek the clamor and tumult found only in the world’s greatest cities. Nowhere else but here, surrounded by masses of immigrants, by energy and hunger, trains, exotic music and violence, could I have rediscovered my youth, a youth spent on the battlefields of Europe. No other city on Earth is so like that which was Napoleon’s Grande Armée, army of armies, legion of nations. It was just a few weeks ago that, riding in a coach through squalid neighborhoods and outdoor kitchens, I smelled the stench of injured flesh mingled with the scent of borscht, and it was as though I were right back in the field hospitals in Dvina, Dnieper, Niemen. . . . This city fits me like a ring on a finger. I knew it from the very first day. It’s here—where one must live in the moment, run always at a gallop, and both love and hate with a soldier’s passion—that I will speak of the horrors wrought by war: blackened rubble, vast, anonymous graves, widows and orphans, cripples and blind men, but also mutilations of the soul. And yet, like certain parts of this roiling city, life on the battlefront has its beautiful side, its own poetry. At times it can be a joyous retreat where the hours stretch out like a clean sheet and one may lie down and rest and dream and sing and laugh, forgetting all about the hiss of shrapnel and the clamor of death. It is this small corner of refuge, a place that belonged to Robert and me, that I wish to speak of now.
How is it possible that I can no longer name the waltz that we, strangers just a moment earlier, danced together, beginning to know one another through the measured glide of our feet and the gentle pressure of our gloved fingers? How could I have forgotten the melody that accompanied my growing fascination with that Hussar lieutenant with the face of a Mameluke who, with no more introduction than a brief nod, had taken me by the arm, led me away from the sofa of timid debutants where Uncle Charles had left me, and planted me, rigid and blushing, among the other couples waiting for the music to begin? At this very moment, as I write by the frozen glass of my windowpane, I try yet again to tease the notes of that waltz from my memory. But, as always, I see myself dancing with Robert encased in the most pitiful silence, twirling like a music box ballerina to the one-two-three, one-two-three rhythm, surrounded by dizzying tulles and epaulets, the great ballroom of the Boulogne Prefecture decorated in full military pomp, with tri-color wall hangings, bronze eagles, regimental flags, drums, crossed swords, the vibrant green of the laurel crowns anticipating the glories of the new campaign. And me, fourteen years old, suddenly enraptured, melting at his strange elegance, at that mix of lofty arrogance and animal grace that I had seen only in engravings of classical marble statues.
I can, however, remember the music of Fidelio, the voices ascending upward toward the opera boxes while Robert, standing behind my seat, sank his fingers into my coiffure and caressed the nape of my neck. (And it’s not that I remember the music because the libretto of that particular opera in some way influenced my decision to pass as a man. The time when, imitating the brave Leonore, I would