the desolation, the growing-up, the loss, the coup de foudre. Grateful for the mystery of why Loup feared fathering our child, for the rain, the lightning, the hot sun and the ironing of his shirts.
I retrieve my pinned-fabrics and recommence the task of hand sewing. Conscious that this is a labour of love: perhaps unconscious that I am stitching love into each hour of solitude. Despite what Loup says, I stay loyal to my bespoke designs. Each is unique. Each has a character of colour, of stitch or weight. Some are reversible, with a wintry weft, of velvet and wool. Others are wispy, almost transparent delicacies of silk and old lace. My embroidery is far from traditional cross-stitch, and probably doesn’t deserve the title. But it has a power to absorb… I immerse myself in a distant memory of Isabelle Huppert in ‘La Dentellière’. Enthralled. Thirty years later, those threads still hold, and I stitch along with the embroiderers, knowing that I will never attain their perfection, but that is not why I stitch.
Today I am working on a reversible silk and cotton throw. I have reconstructed it out of cut out sections of vintage scarves and dresses; some that I paid dearly for in a local antique brocante, where each piece of French lace smells of opulence and pleasure. The others, which I discovered in a country opportunity shop at home in Victoria, smell of Presbyterian practicality; the faded prints disguising their foreign fetish. I select some motifs from the op-shop cotton dress with a cinched-in waist and a billowing skirt: on a background of olive green, black and white drawings of Paris swirl as I imagine the svelte wearer caught in an updraft over a street vent on Boulevard Saint-Germain. More likely, she is hanging out the washing on her unrefined country’s only claim to fame, a Hills Hoist. On yet another windy day on the Cape. I rummage for a Hermes silk scarf, and with satisfaction I dismantle it’s haute couture with the scissors.
Cutting into and sewing fabrics back together is an important ritual: an accidental metaphor for patching my old life together with my new foreign life; a search for the sensual within the mundane. Or of pairing two contrary cultures. Chain stitch fascinates me; it flows better than cross-stitch, which of course is implied in its name. Each barren loop poises in the air, waiting to receive the pierce of the needle as it brings home the thread and secures the next link in the chain. Blanket stitch is my bane, but I have come to rely on it, and edge fastidiously each motif of fraying silk, spending hours just on one small piece. At the moment I am edging a heart, with two lovers in a Montmartre café scene and the Sacre Coeur in the background. That’s somewhere Loup and I will never go together… I’m not too disappointed, enjoying as I do to take a map of Paris and then ignore it… getting lost, avoiding the landmarks. For Loup, Paris holds no allure and he does not share my delight in deconstructing the clichés. It is enough for him to be a passenger passing through Charles de Gaulle Aéroport.
I am concentrating on the blanket-stitching around my heart, cursing as the needle slips over the shimmery silk, when there is a banging on the door. We have a white blind over the glass, so that some light can enter without the street seeing in.
I don’t want to answer.
But I am stuck, because to get to the spiral staircase and escape upstairs, I have to shimmy past the door. I can see the outline of two people, men. I am afraid, because I think it might be the pair of irate builders who came here last week whilst I was alone, loudly gesticulating, threatening Loup with vengeance. For what, I could not tell.
I hastily pull the half-sewn wrap around my bare shoulders. The knocking continues, accompanied this time by a loud voice, insisting,
‘Madame, c’est urgente!’
Pins stick into my shoulders. I fear for my daughters. Of the nightmare I had last month…. something grotesque. I fear for Loup. I am frozen.
Bang, bang, bang.
I worry that the glass of the door will break. I worry that the kitchen looks untidy. I pull the wrap more tightly over my chest, and wish that I had gotten dressed. Sharpness pricks at my left breast.
I open the door.
‘Bonjour Madame,’ says the older of the gendarmes with a disarming gentility,
‘May we come in please?’
‘Ahh…yes, oui, excusez-moi Officers, viens, entrez…’
‘Excusez-moi’, I say again, as it seems to be the only thing I can say…I mix up all my French pronouns, tu and vous. I push my fabrics and sewing box aside and offer the uniformed men our only two seats. They remain standing, as if sitting would seem too relaxed. We form an odd trio around my neatly cut out hearts and needles and threads.
‘You are the wife of Monsieur Zorn, is that correct Madame?’
Seeing me slump, the Gendarme quickly adds,
‘Non, non, Madame, you need not worry, it is not your husband’,
‘Alors, then it’s Pascal?’ I ask too quickly, ashamed.
‘Madame, you should sit down’ says the younger one, himself sitting down, so that I mimic him, shivering despite the cramped kitchen, the steamed cotton competing with the pipe smells, the three of us, and the slanting sword of the midday sun down the courtyard wall.
‘Oui,yes, it’s concerning your brother-in-law Pascal.’
‘Non, non, non!’
Alarmed by my shivering, the young officer asks if I have anyone who can come and sit with me.
‘No they’re all at work,’ my feeble reply.
Please God don’t let it be true over and over again, before the Gendarme had had a chance to tell me what had happened.
‘What has happened to Pascal?’ I cannot find the right French words.
‘He kill himself this morning, ce matin.’
At first I think they mean he tried to kill himself. Again. But then the officer keeps talking. Perhaps as a way to pardon my refusal to comprehend.
‘He was a very unhappy man. You know he unhappy Madame?’
‘Oui, yes…Jean-Loup knew…oui, we tried to help…. mais Pascal …je ne sais pas…
Please God don’t let it be True…what should I do, should I call Loup, his sister…? They’re all at work….’
Teeth chattering. So cold in this hot room.
‘Non Madame, better not to tell them at work…nous vous conseillez pas de précipiter …you should not ring them… it is too dangerous… they might have a car accident on way home…. your husband, he works far from here, non?’
‘Yes, he sometimes works far away… has a long drive home.’
‘Si, and the sister of Pascal, Odette, she also will have too much shock to drive après. You need be brave, you tell family tonight when all are home. You cannot tell this tragedie on telephone. You must all be together.’
‘What about Pauline, Pascal’s other sister in Strasbourg, does she know?’
‘Non Madame, it is better she hear from Odette. Odette is oldest, n’est ce pas?’
My mind cannot conceive why Pauline would not know. Her apartment overlooks the family house in Strasbourg. Where Pascal lives.
‘You are Australienne, Madame Zorn? Peut-être it is a good idea to call and speak with your maman, that might help?’
Both officers are visibly troubled, and the older shakes my hand with tenderness when they leave. I cannot remember how I spent the rest of that long afternoon. I know that I did ring and woke my mother. And my brother, who had spent a lot of time with Pascal, rang me and we spoke at length. We had all formed a sudden and deep affection for Pascal. The shock was greater, because he