The Curtain Descends
I rolled over in bed this morning, looking for the soft underside of Jacques' arm, but he wasn't there. Of course. He's in Paris, and I'm back in Brussels. I hugged the soft feather pillow, missing him, missing Raoul, conflating the two men together in that half-trance between sleep and waking. I hung onto the echo of a haunting dream, a dream of Louvel.
He was the baby, our youngest, a tiny frail child subject to wheezing fits and bouts of croup that left him blue and breathless. Now, not quite so tall as our Phillipe, he is twice as wide. At twenty-one, he is first mate on a barge that travels up and down the Mississippi River between St. Louis and New Orleans.
His wife wasn't with him in the dream, nor was their young child. We sat here, around the burnished oak dining table, with Louvel sitting in Raoul's place. I looked around for Jacques, but he wasn't there. Nor was Anki, or any of the children.
"What's she been feeding you?" Martine asked sharply, as she unfolded her napkin. "German cooking obviously agrees with you."
He laughed, his massive shoulders shaking. "It's all muscle, Martine. Care to feel it?" as she looked away sourly. "Well, most of it, at least."
"Save that part for Marelda," she snapped, and her husband Jannecke looked to me with mute appeal, as if to say, did you intend to raise a daughter with razor blades in her tongue?
Helping himself to another mound of scalloped potatoes, Louvel turned to Phillipe and said, "Some day they'll find a way to take the claws out of the cat."
Phillipe said quietly, "Father knew how to keep the cat's fur from getting ruffled." Martine grew white and stricken, and wiped her face.
Then, as if transported by magic, we were on a railroad platform, waiting for Louvel's train. Martine cringed as he made a lavish demonstration of kissing her and poking her slender ribs. "None of you will come to America," he complained, waiting for the conductor's call. "I want you to see our house in Lemay, high on the bluffs. I want to take you on the barge. You've never seen a river so wide."
He embraced Phillipe for a long time, tears in his eyes. Phillipe's lanky arms crossed over Louvel's thick back, his narrow, pointed face hung over his wide brother's shoulder, and for a moment when he thought no one saw, Phillipe let his expression crumple into a twisted pile.
The train whistle screamed. Big and brown, Louvel leaned out the passenger car window and waved until the train went around a bend, carrying him out of sight, and it was like a little piece of Raoul went with him. As the train turned out of sight, the man in the caboose gazed vacantly at us, and his face was Erik's.
That was when I woke, and hunted for a warm side, an embracing arm.
Raoul smoothed my hair like fur, and rubbed my back until I arched, purring. It's only been a few days, yet my skin aches with desire and longing for everyone who is gone and far.
Apoplexy, the doctors said, caused by what they called a brain aneurysm. The wall of one of the blood vessels in Raoul's brain ballooned out like the tyre of a car, and then burst. The thin intense doctor at the hospital looked at me pityingly. "He felt nothing, Mme. de Chagny," he said. "No suffering at all. He winked out like a light," and when he snapped his fingers to make the point, it was as if a spear went through me. I didn't believe him.
Raoul had kissed me that morning, his last to draw breath on earth, and I turned my head away distractedly. The taxes were due, there was a broken pane of glass in the greenhouse, and Uncle Auguste's out-of-wedlock son was involved in some stupid dispute over the distribution of property. It meant a summons to Paris for Raoul, for yet another family council.
I tolerated his kiss without returning it. Forgoing carriage horseless or otherwise, he walked the two miles down to the Rue Henri Maus, and climbed to his second-floor office in Le Palais de la Bourse. His secretary said that he looked white and strained when he hung up his hat and coat, and mentioned that Raoul had complained of a headache. In his prissy, high voice, the man described how M. de Chagny had sat down at his desk, put his head down on that vast glossy mahogany surface, and collapsed.
Blown out of this world as if launched from a catapult, he died.
Downstairs something whistled, not a train, just a teakettle left on to boil too long. The maid will be up here with tea, I thought, and at once I knew what I was going to do.
Hanging in the back of my armoire was a large blue velvet bag with leather straps. I had never thought to conceal it from Raoul, although I had never revealed it to him, either. It had hung there for all those years, through spring cleanings and changes of gowns, ignoring the vagaries of mutable fashion. I caressed the soft surface, and inside felt the smoothness of leather, the thin crackle of paper.
I called the maid and told her it was time to pack my trunk. I was going to Grobbendonk, to visit Philippe and Anki before they embarked for London, and the first thing I laid in the trunk's cavernous mouth was that long-silent parcel.
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
The golden band weighed on my finger like a yoke of iron, but I resolved to bear it. I didn't know how Erik could know when his death would come. It was a puzzle with no answer, and the watery open sky that flooded the Rue Scribe did its best to wash those inconvenient questions away.
A gendarme smiled as he walked by Raoul and I capering in the rain like schoolchildren. My hair came down and drank the rain as if parched with thirst. I wrung it out in my hands and threw the handful of water at Raoul. Nothing remained of his evening dress save his linen shirt and dark trousers, sticking to him as if they'd been painted on, slick and wet. His top hat, coat, vest, and wallet were all gone, perhaps in Erik's apartment, or the lonely vault of a cell. With no money for a carriage, he walked me to my apartment, all the way to the Rue-des-Victoires-des-Notre-Dame, and to us both, the street ran with victory as freely as with the cold rain of early spring.
At the foot of the apartment steps, he kissed me all over my face and mouth and hair as the amused porter watched through the front door's cut glass. Raoul breathed hard into my neck, his face hot under the cold bath of rain. "I'm off for home. Philippe won't believe this! But he'll simply have to understand how it's going to be, from now on." Then up the street he ran, just as he'd run so many years ago up a sun-streaked country lane on the Côte du Nord , and my heart ran with him.
In the unlit apartment the gaslights sputtered at their lowest setting, while the remains of a coal fire rested cold in the grate. A dark shape sat at the kitchen table but didn't stir when I came in – Margot. Mama was sleeping noisily, her breathing labored. The plump older woman didn't stir, even when I sat down next to her at the unwiped table. A slip of paper sat in front of her, half-crumpled.
"Who sent the telegram?" I asked after a long silence.
"He did," she said, not looking at me. "See for yourself. The boy just brought it. It's plain as Mary's wide arse. I'm dismissed, and with no more notice than that." Tear-stains betrayed her face's hard defiance.
I rummaged around the apartment in my mind. How much money did I have remaining? There was a locked tin box under my bed with about three thousand francs in it, for the most extreme emergency. "How much..." I began, but she cut me off angrily.
"Oh, he paid. Is that what you think, that he'd have left me high and dry? Well, Miss Look-Down-Her-Nose, I don't know what you did to mess it up for yourself, but some of us can't pick and choose our situations as easily as others. He was good to me. No cheating, no 'Oh, nothing in the pockets this week, so I'll pay you the next,' no hands up under the skirts, either. Some of them think that just because you wipe their mother's bum you have to whore for them too. You and that prissy maid thought I was the intruder, but I liked it here, I'll have you know. You can't say I didn't do my job."
Suddenly my rain-soaked clothes lay cold and heavy on me, only slightly warmer than her words. "I'm sorry," I said feebly, casting about for something to say. "You did a superb job, caring for Mama Valerius." Margot doesn't know, I realized. None of it, not the threat to blow up the Palais Garnier, not Erik's rages, not his willingness to kill me and everyone else. I felt suddenly old and tired, as old as Mama, even. There was no point in telling Margot what Erik had done. Let her think kindly of him, even if it means she thinks less of me. She probably thought Erik was going to take me to Monaco, instead of some Turkish or Algerian prison.
I picked up the telegram, and she didn't protest. There it was, blunt and brutal. "Trip canceled. She left. Services not needed. Many thanks. Erik."
"Not even a proper letter," she said, wiping her eyes. "So distraught over you, that he couldn't even write."
There was no point in arguing, and anyway, she was probably right. "I'll write you a letter of recommendation," I said. "A glowing one you can take anywhere." She grunted, but not in an unfriendly way, so I went on. "Unless you already have another position, and don't need it, that is."
"No, nothing else right now," she said, her eyes wet and dull. "How would I? I didn't think I'd need it now, would I?"
"I can't pay you, because I will need to find a maid. But you can stay here, on the cot in Mama's room, until you find something else, if you help me a little, at least."
She looked surprised. "You'd do that?" and I nodded. Then she relaxed back a little in her chair, and said, "So you left him. Mind telling me why? And what you're going to do now?"
"There is someone else. And anyway, I didn't love him."
"Love," she snorted. "Don't get me started on love."
"All right," I said, not wanting to argue with her.
"Is this other one going to marry you?"
Everything at once felt very unsure. I knew with cold certainty that I would never set foot across the threshold of the Opera again, until I went to lay the burden on my finger down for the last time. Mama and I had enough to live on for a few months, if I economized carefully. Could Raoul's brother actually stop our marriage? I had seen him in the hallway, but he had never really spoken to me, that tall, broad man with icy blue eyes. Yet he had written those letters to the musical director, asking that I be cast in roles that showcased my voice and delicate looks. Raoul must have asked him to do it, I thought. It's not even that Philippe would have to expressly forbid us to marry. It just "was not done."
"I don't know," I answered.
Margot gave a disgusted sigh. "Your funeral," she said. "Let me guess. Young, pretty, full of juice, thick wavy hair. And not a sou to his name. Am I right?"
"Close. Except for the wavy hair. It's straight and whether it's still thick, well, it's cut very short, so I can't really tell. It used to be thick, long ago. I think he has more than a few sous, but his brother holds most of them, I think."
Heavily she rose to her feet. "Madame will be up soon."
"I'll come in and explain, when she's awake."
"No need," Margot said. "Before I settled her for her nap, she'd already forgotten we were going anywhere in the first place."
"It makes it easier, in some ways, doesn't it?"
She smiled, and I could tell she had once been pretty. "That it does."
o o o o o o
Raoul and I had danced on the sidewalk at mid-morning, and now it was late afternoon. Bathed, dried, dressed, I set off for Raoul and Philippe's town house. I had never been there, but knew it was on a little street near the Jardin du Luxembourg, one of those old buildings built before the reign of the Sun King, although purchased relatively recently by Raoul and Philippe's father before his sons were born.
My ordeal underground had made me brave. A week ago it would have terrified me to approach Raoul's brother or to visit Raoul at his own home. It was a brazen and indelicate thing to do, but the insecurity of my position gnawed at me. There was only one obstacle to our marriage as I saw it, and that was Philippe. If David had been of the fair sex, he would taken the tram to battle with Goliath as I did. We crossed over a glossy river fat with rain, and I cradled in my hand not five smooth stones but the words I planned to fling at him.
The little street whose name I can't recall was off the main boulevard, and so I walked. The worst he can do, I thought, is call for the gendarmes, and if he threatens to do that, I can leave. It's all based on humiliation. He will expect me to be craven and humble, like a servant, because that's how he sees me. He indulged Raoul with me, as one would a child with a new pet. A toy, a little lap dog, or a servant, that's what I am to him. But I won't be that, even if he doesn't acknowledge it. Even if he sends someone for the police.
As the word "police" crossed my mind, I stopped dead still on the cobbled street. The gate that led to the garden in front of the de Chagny townhouse stood wide open, and a police wagon stood there, its thick black horses stomping impatiently. Two officers in their crisp blue hats lounged, conversing, and a third walked out with an older man I didn't recognize. He was bald, and thin everywhere except for his belly, which looked like someone had stuffed a child's ball into his vest. But he was richly dressed and his manner was not only imperious, but angry as he gestured forcefully towards the officers.
Then a fourth policeman came forward, and with him was Raoul. I thought of turning around and running back to the main street, but then my own cowardice disgusted me. Raoul and I had talked on the way. We were not going to mention Erik, or the underground lake or the apartment, or the torture chamber where Raoul and the Persian man had almost met their end. I had fallen through a trap door on stage, hit my head, and wandered dazed down below until Raoul had found me. On the way back up we had become lost. The scabbed bruise on my forehead, from where I had deliberately banged my head on Erik's wall, would support my story.
But faced with the men in blue and the strange, angry man, and seeing Raoul with an officer's hand firmly on his arm, the whole story seemed weak and insubstantial. And where was Comte Philippe? Then it was too late to run, for Raoul had seen me. One of the police officers beckoned me over, and so I had to go.
"Your name, Madame?" he said.
"Christine Daaé, monsieur."
"The disappeared actress," another said.
"They're always disappearing," a policeman remarked, and someone laughed a little, then hushed.
The tall, angry gentleman pointed at me and said, "She! She is the cause of all of this!"
"Let me talk to her, Monsieur Comte de Chagny," another man with a kind voice said as he came up the walk. He wore a brown wool suit and a fedora pulled low over his face, and his teeth protruded. "Detective Mifroid, Madame," and he gave a slight bow. I bowed back, not trusting my knees to dip in a curtsy. "And why are you here?"
I looked around at all those men, feeling very small and unprotected. Raoul stood silently, shaking a little with fear, or some other emotion. Comte de Chagny? But that wasn't Raoul's brother. Detective Mifroid stood quietly, waiting.
"I came to see my fiance," I said as firmly as I could. "And to speak with his brother as well, the Comte Philippe de Chagny. I had some personal matters to discuss with them both."
The older, well-dressed man stuck his face into mine, and he was really enraged now. "You bagatelle," he spat out. "What business would one such as you have with my nephews? My nephew," he said, and then turned away, overcome.
Something cold grew inside me. "Comte Auguste, please," the detective said. "I must ask you to compose yourself. I know it is hard, but I must speak to this young lady here without interruption. So," Detective Mifroid said, and his voice was silky as the new cream that rises off the milk, "You came here expecting to meet Comte Philippe, yes? You expected him to be here?"
"Yes," I said, quavering.
"And if he were not here, Madame?"
"Then I would wait. He would have to come back, sooner or later." Raoul's face was white, tear-stricken, but he said nothing, and I saw that the fingers of the policemen who held him dug deeply into his arm. Auguste de Chagny's turned back was as accusatory as his face.
"Ah, but the Comte Philippe de Chagny is never coming back, my dear," Mifroid went on. "You see, he died last night."
Then Raoul sobbed, a long broken cry torn out of him with pincers, and I knew that it was true. "It can't be," I whispered, and the late afternoon changed from light to dark around me.
"Watch out, she's going down," one of the men said, and someone caught me. "Can't lay her on the ground, it's too wet," came another voice. "In here," and when I could see again, there I was inside the police wagon itself, where Mifroid brought some sal volatile up to my nose. I choked and coughed at the pungent smell, and then I was sick, leaning over and retching onto the pavement in front of everyone, not caring, just sick and terrified of what I had heard.
"Can you sit?" Mifroid asked, and when I nodded, he helped me up onto the hard leather bench, came around, and closed the door. We were alone with the smell of wet leather and ammonia. "You knew nothing of this?"
"Nothing whatever. How did he die?"
"He drowned, whether by accident or design we have yet to determine." He waited, watching my reaction like the wolf watches the lamb strayed from her mother.
The lake. It had to be, and once again Erik stood before me in my mind's sight, clothes dripping, covered with blood. "Where?" I bleated.
He looked sharply at me, his eyes saying, she can't be that naive. Instead of answering me, he said, "Madame, what did you come here to tell Comte Philippe?"
"That he should not oppose a marriage between Raoul and myself."
"By your ring, I took you for a married woman already."
"I'm not," I said, covering the ring with my right hand. "It has sentimental value, that's all. Raoul and I want to marry, and his brother objected. Because I'm not a high-born lady." Then I looked into his rugged face, and his teeth looked almost predatory, although his expression was still kind. That kindness undid me, and I started to cry, not so much for myself or Philippe, but for his brother. "Oh, poor Raoul," I said into the kerchief he handed me. After awhile, I choked back the remaining tears. "How did it happen?"
"I was hoping you could tell me. Perhaps you should start at the beginning, with your extraordinary disappearance of the night before."
I swallowed. Now I would discover if my story held any substance or not. I told him how at the finale of Faust I stepped backwards and felt something unusual, but kept going. I must have hit some kind of mechanism for the trap, because it opened behind me, and down I fell. "I banged my head forward as I went down," I said, and suddenly his eyes were all over my bruised face, scanning it.
I told him how I lay insensible for I didn't know how long. When I came to, I had forgotten what had happened, about Faust, about falling. I just wandered around down there, going from hallway to hallway, down stairs and through passages, until Raoul found me by those long rows of little cells. It didn't occur to me then that they might have found the Persian, and that he would have a different story. I was too frightened.
So I choked it out, in between sobs and tears. He must have believed me, at least in part, because he opened the door for me and said, "There's nothing here now but police business. I suggest you go on back home."
Raoul stood there forlornly as Comte Auguste glowered over him. "Can I speak to him?" I asked Detective Mifroid, trying to ignore the thin man's glares.
"I'm afraid not," Mifroid answered. "We have more questions to ask him."
"But here, correct?" said Comte Auguste. "We want no public scandal. And I will vouch for him," he said, shooting a look of hatred at Raoul so sharp it could cut glass.
Mifroid bowed. "You will understand that two of my men will remain here as well, and that if an order comes from the magistrate to detain him, I must do so."
"Of course. I see," said Auguste, although it was clear that he didn't.
o o o o o o
I didn't see or hear from Raoul for four days. The newspapers mentioned Philippe's funeral, his interment at the family cemetery, and how the principal suspect was being held at the family town home "for his own protection, pending the determination of the investigating magistrate." Once I thought I spied from the window Monsieur Mifroid's sharp-nosed face strolling languidly up the street, but my eyes didn't focus well at a distance, and when I squinted again, the man was gone.
Then one letter came from Raoul, and then another. He was not going to prison to await trial, it seemed, but he was to remain in Paris until the magisterial verdict was rendered, and both of us knew that meant he would be watched. He maintained his innocence, and I wrote to ask him why he didn't ask for the testimony of the Persian to clear his name. Then I tore that letter to pieces, knowing without being told that his mail would be intercepted and read. In any case, if the police talked to the Persian, that would tear the integrity of my own account to shreds, because the whole story of Erik's kidnapping would come out.
And why not? Over the long years I have asked myself that, but all I knew in those bleak and bitter days was that great hands of shame came up from behind me, stoppered my mouth, and shoved their hard questing fingers so deep into the soft flesh under my heart that I could not contemplate them without stopped breath. There was so much bitter shame there – over opening my legs to Erik in the big curved mahogany bed, or going back to him repeated times, of taking Margot's help and reveling in the freedom it bought me, or lying to Raoul by silence.
And now this monstrous death hung over us. I confess, I had hated Philippe at times, even though he wrote those early letters pleading my artistic case, even though he smiled his cool remote smile and raised his walking stick to me if he happened to pass me in the halls, on his way to "take supper" with Sorelli in her boudoir. No one told me what had happened to him in those days when Raoul and I hung suspended in a thick gel of waiting, but I could guess. He had heard of Raoul's descent into the bowels of the Opera, and had gone after him, probably to restrain him and bring him to the surface. I could hear in my imagination his clipped tones, his perfect French flying like a swarm of hornets from his lips, If some renegade actor has taken her, leave her to him. How many times has she betrayed you before?
Irony of ironies, that poor dead Philippe should know me so much better than his brother.
I hated him, and that simply added another brick of shame to the wall which barricaded my tongue. The second letter from Raoul was one long wail of bereavement, where he wrote page after page of memories of his beloved brother. When it came to me, it had been crudely cut open and then resealed, so the police had obviously read it. So many letters have been lost over the years, but not that one.
I keep it still, and on the twentieth anniversary of Philippe's death, Raoul and I read it out loud to each other, and he cried then before me in a way he never had before, not even when Isabeau had died. He cried and held me, and I knew that some wounds really never healed on this side of the grave. Some crooked paths never could be made straight, and of all the crimes I suspected Erik of committing, none seemed so unforgivable in those wretched days as the drowning of Philippe de Chagny.
o o o o o o
Margot left, to serve as a nurse for the wife of some attaché from the Netherlands. I wondered if she curbed her sharp tongue, and if she managed to secure a letter of reference from Erik after all. He must have said something highly complimentary for her to secure that position.
Mama Valerius cried for Margot for a couple of days, and then seemed to forget about her entirely, as if she had never been there. I tried to make custard for her, but she spat it out and complained that it "wasn't right."
Then came a stroke of providential luck. In the hallway one evening I saw Adele, with her cheap feathered hat perched on her glossy black head, and she dragged a cardboard suitcase that looked as if it would come apart any second. She turned away when she saw me.
"Wait," I said, and stood in her path.
She shifted uncomfortably. "Mademoiselle, I'll miss the last omnibus."
"You were living upstairs," I remarked, not moving.
"Yes, caring for the Aubergines on the fourth floor, but they're moving to Lyons." She tilted her head upwards a little, as if to say, what do you care?
"Adele," I said as warmly as I could, "Margot's gone. I want you to come back. You won't have to live in the garret upstairs, instead, you can have the cot in Mama Valerius's room. I can't pay you any more than I had before. I don't know how long it will be, either, but I need you ... and I am sorry."
She set her suitcase down and before I knew it what I was doing, or considered how unseemly it appeared, my arms went around her and her head was on my shoulder. I realized that she was only a little younger and a little stockier than me, and how only a few thousand francs separated us in our respective positions.
When Adele walked in to Mama's bedroom, Mama raised herself up and in a mildly irritated voice said, "Where have you been? Were you on holiday?"
o o o o o o
I have already written of Raoul and our meetings in those days when the police kept him under constant surveillance. When I finally saw him at last, sweating and terrified as we sat over coffee at a small crowded cafe, he whispered, "They've spoken to the Persian," and my heart jumped so hard that the rich golden cafe au lait almost flew from my throat.
"When?" I choked out.
"It was quite coincidental. They were interviewing people at the Garnier Opera, and his name came up as a 'suspicious person,' as someone who'd in past been found wandering around below cellars."
"How do you know this?"
"La Sorelli came to the house while Uncle Auguste was napping, so he didn't drive her away, and thus I managed to speak to her for a few moments. She's resigned from the ballet corps, and is leaving for Zürich, in order to work there. She fell on my breast and wept so copiously I feared she would wake him, and Christine, then I can tell you with certainty he would have set the dogs on her. Uncle Auguste had been going through Philippe's papers, and had just discovered that Philippe had bought her a small villa in Louveciennes, down in Seine-et-Oise, as well as transferring funds to her for its maintenance and staff."
I smiled a bleak little smile in spite of myself, remembering Erik's words, When he buys you a villa, make sure it's in your name. Raoul's face clouded. "I hardly see what's so amusing about that."
"It's not," I said, apologetic. "He can't take it from her, can he?"
"I don't think so. But don't hinder my story. La Sorelli mentioned that the Persian had been questioned, but as she put it, he put up such a credible portrait of a madman that they decided to leave him alone."
We looked at each other, the same thought in our minds. "You don't think..."
"Perhaps he did, and that's what made them doubt his sanity," Raoul answered. "But he's a foreigner, in disgrace in his own country, and it is an incredible story. I remember trying to communicate some of it to that inspector I spoke with myself, on the night you disappeared from the stage."
I felt myself grow pale. "Raoul, if they question me in depth, I don't know how I'll hold up. The thought of it terrifies me."
"Christine, don't lose your head. My uncle has told me that since there were no marks on my poor brother, no bruises on the neck, no bullet wounds, his clothing all in order and not disarrayed, no signs of a struggle whatever, they will find it hard to blame me." He laughed bitterly, then grew softer. "I think Mifroid believes your story. I overheard him tell another detective that most convincing mark on your face was consistent with slamming it into the side of a trap door.
"But that I could overpower Philippe ... as if in any struggle I could ever have hoped to best him. I learned long ago not to wrestle with him," and then his face grew first red, then white, and he bit his lip so hard that I feared he would draw blood. "I cannot believe he is gone. I wake up and think I hear him in his room, moving about or snoring. What shall I do without him?"
That was a day when he was tender, but on so many others he was bitter, or he made himself scarce. He went to hear the Holy Mass every morning, trailed by a policeman in street clothing. His life had been so regular, but now I never knew if he would come or go, leave or stay. Some days the post would bring a brief note, on others I would receive a long missive full of embittered regret. While he never said outright that he wished he had left me in Erik's grasp, I wondered, and told myself every day to not wait for the post, to not look for his beautiful cultured hand on the thick cream envelope, to not stifle the crushing disappointment that followed if nothing appeared.
Then one day the mail brought another kind of letter, one with poor scrawled letters on thin cheap paper, and my heart paused for a second inside, because I feared that Erik himself had written me. But the return address was unfamiliar to me, some street over on the Left Bank that I didn't recognize. Trembling, I opened it, and read:
My dear Mademoiselle Daaé
Forgive my poor command of written French. Had I spent more time learning from my tutor in Tehran rather than running from him, you would not now be laughing at my poor spelling and penmanship.
I will skewer the bird with the arrow, as my father would say, and come straight to the point. I have seen Erik several times, and he declines steadily, burning with fever. He reminds me of my duty to notify you through L'Epoque of his flight from this earth into the bosom of our mutual father Abraham, but the last time I saw him, he was greatly weakened and cried for me to bring him to you, that he might see your face one last time before he died.
The ox gores me from both sides, Mademoiselle. That you would be willing to once more come to Erik even after his death is more than I think than a man could ask of any frail woman. To see once again the face of the man who threatened so vehemently to end all our lives no doubt taxes your patience beyond any human limit.
But I ask you anyway to consider it – not in the name of my faith, which was weak in my youth and is even weaker now, nor by the name of my country which has forsaken me, and certainly not in the name of Erik. Instead, I ask you to at least consider this, in the name of my poor dead sister, whom Erik loved, and whom I abandoned to her fate.
I leave it in your delicate hands. When you see the words, "Erik is dead," I beg you to come. He may still live, he may not. In his condition it is hard to tell, and even a day or two can turn the tide.
In my country we have a story, a very beautiful one. Birds from all over the world decided to find the king of the birds, what you might call the 'firebird' or the "fenix." They flew from mountain to mountain, higher and higher, and at each mountain more grew discouraged and dropped behind, to go back to their own homes.
Finally, on the peaks of the highest mountain in the world, where the air was so cold and fine that their wings would scarcely work, and their hearts almost burst in their chests, they sat and panted, exhausted at the end of their journey. This was the highest mountain, there was no other, unless they could fly straight into the fiery heart of the sun. But where was the firebird?
They looked around, and each of them glowed with a light most uncanny, and at once they knew. They were the firebird, all of them together. And together they melded into one, and were drawn up into the heavens in a sheer sheet of flame.
Come, if you can, Mademoiselle Daaé, to that mountain under the earth. I will be there too.
Yours most truly,
and then there followed a name written in a strange curling script, unreadable.
o o o o o o o o o o o
Just after dawn, the Plaza surrounding the Opera Garnier was deserted, save for a few vendors setting up their stalls, and a few women coming home from a long night's work at the factory table or from between the sheets. The summons had come, "Erik is dead," and I answered.
Using my great iron key, I opened the Rue Scribe gate, almost daring a policeman to grasp me by the arm. With my kerchief over my head, wooden sabots, and one of Mama Valerius's rusty black skirts hiked up around my waist, I could have easily passed for one of the women who scrubbed the floors.
An old man dozed on a chair near the stone archway. He stirred when I walked past, and instead of a honey cake, I offered him two sous. Black and ragged stumps of teeth showed when he smiled. Then his eyes closed again, and down I went into the narrow blue-lit corridor. My clogs slipped on wet stones. I had brought nothing with me except for those few coins for the ferryman.
I thought I would feel more, fear, disgust, anxiety, anything. The heavy rusted gate barred my way, and I struggled with the skeleton key, chipping a nail as I forced it to give way. When I passed the first archway where the steps forked, some above and some pointing below, my empty stomach clenched. There was no rail on the stairs, and I hugged the far side, as if something would leap up, something that looked like Erik but only more rotten, more bloated. More dead than alive.
The broad walkway around the lake gleamed wetly, the same as it had when Erik took me out for one of our sojourns around the fifth cellar.
Did Phillipe come through this gate without a key? Had Erik left it open as a lure, a trap? "There are some mice in my trap," he had said. "I'll see if they're worth letting go, or if I should snap their little necks."
There was a flat dock, and tied to it his black wooden rowboat. Even though he was dead, I called his name several times and the echoes returned to me like a letter undelivered and unopened. Then I clutched my throat, for the door to his apartment stood open, and from it emerged a strange, repellent odor.
Desperately wishing for some camphor and a handkerchief with which to cover my face, I entered his wide front room. Sheets, linens, papers lay strewn on the floor and over the backs of overturned chairs. The fire had gone out. The smell which had assaulted me was a dreadful mixture of mold, damp, of rotting meat, of human waste, all gone uncleaned. The habits of childhood took over, and I headed straight for the kitchen, to turn on the water.
It worked. Hot water came out of the tap. Erik may have been a madman on most days, but he insisted on hot water, and was scrupulous about his person. If that fetid smell soaked his rooms, it was because he had been incapable of cleaning himself. Under the sink on a shelf was a ceramic dish full of soft lye soap.
"Erik?" I called as I walked into his bedroom. It was empty, the organ covered with a sheet, the coffin bed still full of half-charred fragments of papers covered with musical notation. I wanted to kick the morbid black bed frame. "Erik, where are you?" What am I asking for, I said to myself. He's supposed to be dead. But someone was there.
Idiot girl, a voice inside mocked. If he's dead, who posted the advertisement?
The Persian, I told myself.
Some friend, to leave everything in ruins. To leave him in this state. Who goes off and abandons a dead man in his apartments, knowing that it could take days for someone to find him? Then I paused, stricken. Who indeed?
The door to my room stood half-open. My nose, more used to the smell, spasmed as a fresh wave hit me. I heard a small stirring from within, and stopped, terrified to go any further.
He wasn't dead. But he's ill, I thought, terribly ill, and he needs help.
"Erik?" I called, and was answered by a soft moan, then another shift, and a loud thud as something fell over.
Into my room I ran, and almost cried at the pitiful, horrific sight which greeted me.
He had fallen from the bed, dragging the dark-stained sheet with him. It stretched across the length of the bed, darkly foul. He lay on the ground, crumpled and naked, his shoulders shaking. His breath sounded clogged, as if he were breathing through water.
"My God," I whispered, half to myself. "Who did this to you? Who left you like this?" and then fierce shame burned me. I had.
Avoiding an empty glass which had rolled onto the carpet, I slowly approached. "Erik? It's Christine. Can you speak?"
Half tangled in the foul sheet he raised his head, and against my will I began to cry.
o o o o o o o o o o
I wouldn't be able to lift him back into bed, so I dragged the mattress onto the floor. He cried out when I left for hot water and rags, then clung to me like a child as I sponged him off. His wounded thigh hadn't healed at all; instead it raged angry red and dripped foulness, and the smell from that open laceration was worse than any soil he had left on the bed sheet.
I tore a pillow case into strips and bandaged that seeping hole as best I could, then wrapped a blanket around him and half-pushed, half-rolled him onto the mattress. Around him I wrapped the ribbon-rose-embroidered quilt, because he shivered so terribly. It doesn't matter, I told myself, if the quilt is ruined. It comforts him. He held it tightly, rubbing his face against it, whispering.
Inside his wraps he sweated, half-conscious, saying my name, sometimes mumbling in barely-understandable French, sometimes in a strange language that could have been anything, Russian, the language of the Persians or of the Turks, or perhaps just some tortured syllables of his own, drawn from deep inside.
His regular but raspy breathing told me that he slept, and I gathered the filthy linens, surveying the apartment as I went. It looked ransacked, as if someone had been through it systematically. His violin lay abandoned on the floor near the fireplace, the neck broken. I kicked aside a clump of stuffing pulled out of the slashed-open cushions of the long couch on which Raoul had lain.
There was really no reason to do so, except an ingrained sense of economy, so I rolled up my sleeves, tied up my skirts, and began to scrub the dirty sheets in the lake. That was where the Persian found me, rubbing the stains with the same lye soap I'd used to wash Erik's poor flesh, pulling the heavy sheets around in the murky lake water.
"Don't just stand there gawking," I said. "You can help me here."
"So it is you after all. I wasn't sure," he hesitated. "You look ... different."
"You're used to seeing me in gowns. Think of this as just another costume, Monsieur Daroga. I saw your advertisement. Now, please help me twist this sheet. It's very heavy."
He touched it tentatively, as if it would contaminate him in some way, but he grabbed the wet end and twisted, making sure not to splash his boots or long black cloak.
"Is this how you treat a friend?" I said, as we wrung one sheet after another.
His beautiful green eyes narrowed. "And what of yourself?"
The heat suffused my face like a slap. "You were there that last night. I would think you of all men would understand. Anyway, you simply decided to show up? You'd done your duty by placing your advertisement, so why bother now?"
How I wish now that I could have taken back those bitter words. He winced, then composed his face into a smooth brown mask, but his eyes glittered with anger. "It is you, Mademoiselle, who does not understand. I have been here almost continually from the time Erik's illness grew grave." He laughed bitterly. "From the time when he could no longer threaten to throw me out of his house, or strangle me, or drown me in the lake, that is. If these rooms were not kept up to your specifications, it was because my servant would not accompany me down into these depths, for fear of the ifreet which he was sure lurked down here. I am not skilled in the fine details of housekeeping, and like most of Erik's life, his rooms are full of odd devices and secrets that I have not mastered."
"I'm sorry," I said, looking at his worn black shoes, so carefully polished.
"I went out for supplies," he said, gesturing towards the several large packages he had set down. "That detective, the one with the bad teeth, followed me for awhile, then seemed to lose interest, although it cost me several hours. Panic struck me, for fear of what might have become of Erik in my absence, and for the first time in many months I prayed, and here you sit." He picked up his bundles, leaving me to carry the wet sheets.
Erik still slept, each breath rattling in and out as if it passed through water. The Persian looked at him a long time, face full of pain, until I pulled him gently by the sleeve into the living room. "Can you light the fire?" I asked. "It's not an ordinary fireplace. I looked, but can't make out what to do."
"The cursed thing," he answered. "I can get it going, but there are these valves here that control the flow of air, and every time I think I've gotten them right, it blows out after a time." He fiddled with it, and soon the fireplace roared into heat and light and warmth.
So the Persian cooked some broth of dried beef, and I hung the wet sheets in front of the fire, across the backs of broken chairs. He made tea for us as well, and I hugged mine close to my face, breathing in the fragrant tangy sharpness.
"I shouldn't have said what I did," I repeated. "I assumed you hadn't been here at all, that you'd abandoned him."
"It was not I who abandoned Erik."
"You blame me for not staying with him."
He looked towards the ruined bedroom. The door was left open, so that we could hear him if he stirred. "I discouraged him from pursuing you, from loving you. He didn't listen."
I should have congratulated his concern for my welfare, but instead it piqued me that he should have dissuaded Erik from me. Confused, I said, "Why did you say that?"
"I didn't think at first that you could love him, and feared for everyone concerned should he have discovered that truth."
"You presume a great deal," I said, stirring more sugar into my tea to keep my hands from shaking. "How do you know I didn't love him? Because he was ugly? Because he wasn't as beautiful as you?"
We both sat there, shocked. There was something in the air in those darkened, littered rooms that made me reckless and loosened my tongue. "Mademoiselle Daaé," he began, but I cut him off, trying to keep my voice low for the sake of Erik in the next room, but sharp nonetheless.
"That's always been your difficulty, hasn't it? You never thought that anyone could love him. That's why you didn't fight for him for your sister, wasn't it? When even you couldn't deny that he loved her, it was too late. Or was it? You could have helped her escape. Weren't you the chief of police then, or something close to it?" I set my teacup down and took his hands in mine, feeling them tremble with deep emotion. They were lean and strong, powerful hands, yet his skin was delicate, soft. "Do you know so little of a woman's heart?"
"It is not true, Mademoiselle," he said quietly. Never before or since have I seen a man compose himself so thoroughly in so little time. His hands quieted, and that seamless brown mask smoothed over his features once more. "I knew there were those who could love Erik."
It was a concession, and his carved-ivory manner told me to press no further. "What happened here?" I asked, looking around the demolished room.
"It was like that when I came – the door wide open, everything overturned, and Erik lying groaning in bed. I do not think he caused this devastation himself, for I asked him, and all he would say was 'Why would I destroy my own home, after working so hard to build it?' They even burned some of his music and his manuscripts."
"He did that himself when he was first packing, planning for us to leave."
The Persian put his head in his hands, and then a cry came from the bedroom. Brushing past him, I flew in to meet Erik's open eyes, wild with yellow fire, as fierce as the red which spotted his face. "You're here," he gasped out, in between shallow panting breaths.
"Since last night," I said softly. "Don't you remember? You had fallen out of bed."
His hand clutched the sheet like some thrashing, wounded thing, and he felt the floor, then my leg up through my skirt, until he gripped my arm, surprisingly strong. "I don't know. I'm thirsty."
I raised his poor head and spooned some of the broth between his cracked and fleshless lips. He rolled over onto his side and spoke a little in a language I couldn't understand, so I called for the Persian. "Is it your own?" I asked him, but he shook his head, not recognizing it.
Then Erik slept with his head on my lap, and the Persian rested the dying man's long, slender white hand in his own wide olive one.
"It's not long now," the Persian said, staring at the skeletal face whose skin stretched tight and flushed over the poor sick bones beneath.
"Don't say that. He'll hear you."
"It is the truth. I pray he makes peace with his god, his Isa."
"He had no god, so he said."
"Every man does," the Persian sighed. "Whether he wishes it or not, his god finds him and pursues him."
"What of yours?" I asked.
He said nothing, just held Erik's hand.
Sometime later, Erik stirred, then vomited all the broth he'd taken in. He lay gasping and moaning with thirst. The Persian got up to make more tea for him, laden with sugar. "Don't give up," I whispered to Erik after the Persian was gone. I washed his mouth as best I could, then pulled him to me, almost crying out from the burning touch. "I'm sorry," I said, tears falling loosely now.
He opened his eyes, but seemed not to see me. Either the fever had driven him to blindness, or he was already half-looking into that other world. "I didn't kill that one," he said. "She was already dead. The joke was on me. Already dead, and cold as ice. Not like the others," and he shuddered, deep long shivers. I shook with him, because I feared for his soul, and for the nameless dead.
Leaning down, I whispered into his ear, "Erik, tell me. I'm not a priest, but tell me."
He seemed to hear me, for he rolled his eyes upwards and gasped, "All of them, all their blood, all their breath gone, I can't remember. Oh, God, don't let me remember."
"Are you sorry?" I said, shaking him a little. "Please, be sorry. It's all. It'll be enough."
"One fought me. They never would fight me, not the men, but that one did. Why couldn't he have stayed away? The women, the women fought like cats," and then he called for water. The Persian came into the doorway, but I held my hand up, stop, and he did.
"Not that dead one, though," Erik went on. "She didn't fight, not her." Then he stared at me wildly. "Christine, you're here? It's the fever, it can't be you. You're gone, or dead. Are you dead like her, like them all?"
"No," I said, trying to soothe him, "I'm not dead, and I am here. You're not dreaming."
"Mama," he said. "Christine, Mama's here too." He clutched my dress, hard. "I love you," he said, but whether to myself, or to his mother whom he saw behind his dim eyes, I never knew.
The Persian had crept over by our side, tea in hand. "So you did something right," Erik said to him in between gasps. The dark man hung his head a little, as if ashamed. Then Erik almost smiled, the cheerless grimace of a skeleton coated with a thin varnish of skin, and almost too low to hear said in kindly tones, clutching the Persian's sleeve with his bony clawed hand, "Thank you."
I grabbed the tea from the Persian as fast as I could, spilling a little in the process, for that big brown man who had pulled me from the edge of the Opera roof top, who had led Raoul to my prison and almost lost both their lives in the process, that man of deep emotions and contradictions which I could not fathom, began to shake with uncontrollable tears.
The Persian didn't even look up when I left the room.
I wandered through the apartment while the Persian cried and Erik made occasional soft answers. Into his sepulchral room I wandered, kicking aimlessly at the piles of rubbish on the floor, until I saw it in a corner, almost entirely buried under newspaper. I pulled it out from the pile and smoothed it off, its red tooled-leather cover only a little damaged from where it had been scuffed about on the floor. Inside the red notes sat silently, waiting for the touch of a hand to bring them to life, but they would wait in vain, for that touch would come no more, at least not from Erik.
Don Juan Triumphant. Whoever the vandals were who had ransacked the apartment (and once more the British spies came to mind), they had left this unburnt, unmolested. I brushed it off and wrapped it carefully in my thick knitted shawl.
What triumph for you now? I thought, as I slipped back into my old bedroom where Erik lay on the floor. The Persian looked up at me with a face wet but resigned. "He's unconscious, and I cannot rouse him. And his breathing ... I have never heard anything like it."
Erik took in great gasps, then almost nothing, and in between he seemed to stop entirely. "I have," I said. "You've never seen a person die? That's hard to believe."
"I saw those whom Erik strangled with the lasso, or with his bare hands. But not in illness, not like this."
"I know this sound," I said, and put my hand on the bird cage of Erik's chest, the sharp wires of ribs that restrained the soul laboring to get out. "I've watched my parents, and Professor Valerius die." Then the full sorrow of it crushed me, and I looked at the Persian in terror. A life was going to end before us, and soon. "I'm afraid," I said.
"Of what?" he said gently, with that odd calm which follows a burst of tears.
"It all went so wrong."
"I know," he answered, and I didn't know whether he referred to me, or to himself.
The minutes flowed into hours. Unconscious, Erik could drink no more tea, so the Persian and I drank the sweet brew ourselves even though it had gone cold. Then, overcome with exhaustion, I laid down next to Erik for the last time, and the Persian eased his big frame near him on the other.
Tears without sobs leaked slowly down my cheeks, and I must have slept. The Persian's heavy arm, long enough to span the both of us, rested on Erik and myself as the dark man snored, and Erik's chest rose and fell in those odd arrhythmic gasps. I reached around and clung to that strong muscular arm, and when Erik's periods of quiet in between breaths were longer than the breaths themselves, I shook the Persian awake.
He didn't need an explanation. Erik's side where the Persian had lain was warm, but while the side near me was cold, Erik didn't shiver. We waited anxiously for another breath, and I counted the seconds. When over a minute had elapsed, the Persian's eyes met mine. All at once Erik sucked in a great gulp of air, his lungs gurgling and full of fluid.
There was nothing else to be done, so both of us held him as he gasped a few more times. Then we waited in vain for another breath, but none came. It was finished.
From my finger I took Erik's soft lustrous ring, and placed it on his own hand, pushing it a little to get it over the knuckle. The Persian sat, dazed.
Presently I said, "I don't know what to do now."
"We can't just deliver him up to the Paris morgue." Then the Persian's voice grew very soft. "Look at his face. It's as if he sleeps."
It was true. Erik's face had softened into relaxation, even though the skin stretched tight across the mouth. "There's no more sorrow for him," I said. "I won't believe that he's gone to the fire. He was sorry, I know it. I could tell. Anyway, how could God make him this way, and then damn him for it?"
"I know," the Persian said, as Erik's body cooled.
"We have to dress him," I said after awhile. "He'll become stiff, and then it will be impossible."
"Why?" the Persian asked. "In my country, we use only the simplest shroud."
Then I knew that there would be no cemetery for Erik. He would not rest in hallowed ground. There would be no coffin, no marble tomb, no funeral Mass. My heart convulsed. He could not be laid like an animal into the earth. "Because it's not dignified," I answered. "You don't have to do it. I can care for him from here."
"No," he said quietly. "We'll do it together."
So together we washed Erik's wasted body, then dressed him in the evening dress he preferred, laying him out in his black swallowtail coat. I lit candles and placed them at his head and feet. In a cupboard I found a large sheer tablecloth wonderfully embroidered.
"This," I said. "This will be his shroud," and I threaded a needle, to sew him inside it.
He lay clothed in white, and I still didn't know what we would do with his body. Moving him was difficult, even though his frame had become so terribly wasted.
"I know," said the Persian after awhile. "The men of the North were set to sail in their ships, and lit like torches. We cannot light such a fire down here, but perhaps this will suffice." Then he left, refusing to tell me what he had in mind. "Some Persian superstition," I thought, and then I knew. It wasn't his customs which he considered. It was an ancient one of my own, from centuries before.
An hour later he called for me. He had found an awl, and drilled several holes in the bottom of Erik's black wooden boat. Then from the salt crock he had scraped the crusted, rock-hard salt from the sides, and shaped them into plugs which fit snugly into the holes. At first I stared at them, confused. We were putting him in the boat? To go where?
I protested, but he pleaded with me in soft tones, saying over and again, "Trust me. This would not disgrace him."
We carried Erik's body to the boat, and together we pushed the boat into the water, carrying its inert white bundle. The Persian tied Erik securely to the seats, and then we shoved the boat out onto the water. Slowly the boat drifted out to the center of the lake, and then I understood. The salt in the holes slowly dissolved as we stood and watched, and I prayed.
It filled with water, and down he went into the black and greenish murk. There he would remain until the water itself and whatever eyeless fish which roamed those depths eroded his flesh and merged him with the elements.
We stood there a long time after the boat had gurgled its way down into the depths of the lake. Finally the Persian sighed and said, "We're both criminals now."
"We have been so for months," I answered, then gave him a long glance. "Or for years." The dim cellar seemed vast and empty now that Erik was gone. I had to leave, to get out of there, or be swallowed entirely by that vacuum of dark.
"True," he said, and once again I felt his arm around Erik and myself in the dark, although he stood well away from me, and then the feeling passed. Gathering my shawl and its secret burden close to my breast, I left the Persian standing there on the lakeside as he stared into his own version of the black, of a life where Erik was not.
I never saw him again.
(... continued ...)
P.S. A/N: Thanks, Jennie, for the idea of the dissolving salt plug for Erik's funeral boat.