How to Behave in a Crowd Read online

  “It would be nice to meet the president on my next one,” Daphné said, by which she admitted without actually saying the words that she wished those two old Indian women dead.

  “Do you like him?”

  “Not particularly. But I’ve never met a president. I don’t get to have that many new experiences, you know?” She laughed a little and then translated what she’d said in German and laughed again. Her laughter was the same in both languages.

  “Why do you want to learn German, little man?” Daphné asked me. “It is such a hideous language.”

  “It’s pretty when you speak it,” I said, which I didn’t think was actually the case, but the father always said that those who believed German was an ugly language had probably never heard a kindhearted person speak it. I tried to remember other things the father used to say in defense of the German language, but nothing else came to mind.

  “It’s so rigid,” Daphné said. “It’s not a playful language. German puns suck.”

  “Well I was thinking I could be an interpreter or something,” I said, ignoring her criticisms.

  “For whom would you interpret? There are not that many German celebrities people care about outside of Germany, have you noticed?”

  “I hadn’t thought about that,” I said, after trying to come up with names to prove her wrong.

  “And most Germans know their language is useless anyway, so they all speak English nowadays.”

  “You don’t think German is useful at all?”

  “If you plan to live in Germany, it is most definitely useful,” Daphné said. “Or if you fall in love with a German girl.”

  “Did you fall in love with a German boy?”

  “I did,” she said, “a long time ago. That’s the only reason why I speak this horrible language.”

  “Was it your husband? People say your husband was a Nazi.”

  “I suppose those people you’re talking about still haven’t registered how old I actually am. I was already old when the Nazis started rising to power. My husband had died. He couldn’t have been a Nazi even if he’d wanted to, poor Thomas darling. Not that he would’ve wanted to be a Nazi, of course, that’s just a way of speaking. He was a German deserter from the First World War, that’s how old I am. But maybe they don’t teach you about the First World War in school anymore.”

  “They do,” I said in a senseless attempt to defend my education, given I knew next to nothing about the First World War. “The First World War was with the trenches and the Second with the concentration camps.”

  “How specific,” Daphné said.

  “They do spend more time on the Second World War,” I admitted. “We watched Night and Fog in history class.”

  “Well that didn’t tell you much about the Occupation, did it?”

  I’d fallen asleep during Night and Fog. I always fell asleep when we had TV time in school.

  “Forget about it. I didn’t mean to say you were poorly educated,” Daphné said. “I apologize. Entschuldigung.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “What I meant to say is that teachers probably make it look a little too easy nowadays, am I right? Especially around here. People take pride in the fact that there were a lot of famous members of the resistance in the area, but at the time, it didn’t feel like it, I can tell you that much. Doesn’t mean the rest of us were Nazis, but people have a great ability to go on with their lives no matter what, and I happened to be quite busy back then, with work, and my second husband dying on me. The Germans didn’t come down here before 1942, but when they did, they came to my bar—I tended the bar at La Fontaine, did you know that? They came to La Fontaine because I spoke German, and I served them, what else could I do? I don’t think that makes me a collaborator. They tipped better than the French. They were the ones with the money, I suppose.”

  Daphné had started telling her story, pausing after each sentence to translate it into German, but she got carried away at some point and went ahead in German. Reversing the order of the languages seemed to happen quite naturally for her, but not having the French version first made it harder for me to pick up new German words and match them with what I’d just heard.

  “Didn’t you meet a nice one?” I asked in French, hoping to put her back on the right track.

  “Of course I met nice ones. You always meet at least one nice person in a bar, but that’s neither here nor there. They’d ask how René was doing—René was my second husband—and when he died, they brought flowers and drank and tipped double. But they were still the enemy. That never once slipped my mind. Even when I laughed at their jokes.”

  “What was their best joke?”

  “How old are you now?”

  “I’ll be fourteen soon,” I said.

  “I suppose that’s old enough. So they had this joke about nuns. One morning in the convent, Mother Superior comes down to the commons to announce what the nuns will have for dinner that night. ‘Tonight, carrots!’ she says, and all the nuns are really excited and go, ‘Ooooooh!’ but then Mother Superior specifies, ‘Grated!’ and all the nuns go, ‘Boooooo!’ ”

  “That was their best joke?” I said.

  “It was a pretty good one in the forties,” Daphné said. “Risqué.”

  The tea had infused too much and tasted like coins dipped in grenadine. I considered gulping the whole of it down and excusing myself—it was going to be dinnertime at home. Daphné must have felt her grated carrots joke hadn’t won me over.

  “Don’t leave me just yet,” she said. It was obvious she’d hoped to have come up with a reason why I should stay before she’d be finished saying “Don’t leave me just yet” in two languages, but she hadn’t, and I politely waited for her to figure one out.

  “You could be a spy,” she ended up saying. “That would be more interesting than interpreter. I thought about becoming one, during the war, but I didn’t know where to go or who to offer my services to. I thought if they needed more spies, they’d find me, ’cause people knew I spoke German. But no one ever came, so I guess they weren’t looking for spies in my corner of the world. But it’s easier in times of peace, I would think, to make your ambitions known. You probably just have to send a letter to the DGSE and say you want to join their intelligence service, and they schedule an appointment. You would need to learn another language or two though, on top of German. Spies are polyglots. Maybe learn Arabic. Or Russian. I know a Russian lady who could be your conversation partner.”

  “My father knew many languages,” I said. “Do you think he could’ve been a spy?”

  “Your father? Your father’s German was so precious, dear, it was like talking to a doily. When he spoke to me, I couldn’t help but picture that horrible Fragonard painting, you know? The rosy-cheeked girl on her swing? All the pink taffeta and the layers in her dress? He would’ve needed to update his vocabulary and structures a bit if he’d wanted to make it into twenty-first century espionage, believe me.”

  I could picture a book spine that said “Fragonard” in brown letters on our living room shelves, where the art books were, but not a painting by him. If I could have, I would have been even more pissed at Daphné’s words.

  “And even leaving his German aside,” she went on, “your father wasn’t a double-life kind of man. He always looked so overwhelmed with just the one.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, I saw him around. It seemed every situation made him uncomfortable. Wouldn’t you say? Bumping into people, ordering a coffee…I mean, you can’t be unsettled by a postal worker giving you a choice between regular and express mail and be a spy at the same time. It simply doesn’t figure.”

  “Maybe that was part of his civil-life persona,” I said.

  “Maybe,” Daphné said. “Vielleicht.” She didn’t believe it for a second.

  “There was no need to say it in French first,” I said, more angrily than I’d wanted. “I know how to say maybe in German.”

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sp; “I’m sorry if I offended you, mein Herr,” Daphné said, but she wasn’t. She thought I was overreacting.

  “At least he loved German,” I said. “At least he didn’t just use his knowledge of German to get better tips from a bunch of Nazis.”

  “Oh yeah? And what did he use his precious knowledge for?” Daphné was done translating now. “Business meetings? Dinners? To bore an old lady stiff with his Goethe quotes just because she was nice enough to encourage him the first time?”

  Drool started accumulating at the corners of Daphné’s mouth as she spoke ill of the father, and I thought it was unusual considering how often she’d had to pause over the course of our conversation just to moisten her lips or sip some tea in order to go on.

  “Are you all right?” I said.

  Daphné said something in German, or maybe it was French and I just couldn’t make sense of it—she could barely articulate. Her features, her whole face, seemed to be pulled down toward the ground by an invisible flesh magnet.

  “Let me call 911,” I said.

  I left my argument with Daphné out of the story I told the paramedics. Not that they asked anything—I guess a stroke at Daphné’s age was nothing unusual. They congratulated me for calling them so promptly. My mother did too, when I came home. She was convinced it had been too much emotion for Daphné, having a nice lively guest like me at her house instead of the routine nurse or a fellow old lady, and that it must’ve been the thrill that had caused her stroke. She told me I was a kind soul. I thought maybe she would reinstate my Internet hour, but she didn’t mention it. She called the hospital every hour to get an update on Daphné, and when I woke up the next day, she told me that the doctors had been able to remove the clot in her brain and Daphné would only be partly paralyzed. She seemed to think it was good news.

  “What a bunch of pricks,” Denise said. “They only want to keep her alive to break some kind of record.”

  Denise had resumed meeting me on the staircase. She’d offered no explanation for her absence the previous days and didn’t mention Porfi.

  “You shouldn’t have called 911,” she went on. “You should’ve just let her die there. Poor woman. I’m sure she would’ve preferred that.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “She sounded pretty excited for her birthday.”

  “She has to pretend she is, with the kind of parties the mayor has been throwing her. Can you imagine? Having to be grateful all the time? What a nightmare.”

  Denise was looking nowhere in particular, pulling hangnails off her fingers with her teeth. She usually flicked the little bits of skin down the stairs after tearing them, but that day she’d decided to swallow them. She asked what else was new and I told her about Leonard’s writing his dissertation on us.

  “So you guys are gonna be famous?”

  “No one reads sociology dissertations,” I said.

  “But dissertations get published, right?”

  “Berenice sold like forty copies of hers, I think. Aurore is supposed to edit her manuscript for publication, but I don’t get the impression she’s doing much of that lately.”

  “To be a character in a book,” Denise said. “You must be pretty thrilled.”

  “Leonard says it’s not really about us but about processes and strategies and language.”

  “That’s just like when writers say one of their stories is about coming of age in a post-capitalistic world as well as an exploration of what it really means to get an education when all it is is a self-aggrandizing account of their first trip to a whorehouse.”

  “That’s a very specific example,” I said.

  “Well I just made it up.”

  I wanted to tell Denise I was responsible for Daphné’s stroke, that Daphné had compared my father to a Fragonard painting and that I’d gotten upset, but it seemed like a silly reason to almost kill someone, even by accident.

  “The cool thing is,” Denise said, still processing the news about Leonard’s dissertation, “once your whole family is famous, you can build a career on that and write biographies for each one of them, not just Simone. And then you’ll get famous both for being in your brother’s book and for your own work as a biographer. You could write biographies of everyone you know after that.”

  “I see what you’re getting at,” I said. “You want me to write your biography too.”

  “That would be one very short, very boring book,” Denise said, and I felt a wave of cold rush through my body.

  “Would Porfi get his own chapter?” I asked.

  Denise looked at her watch.

  “Nine minutes,” she said. “You held out nine whole minutes without mentioning Porfi. I’m impressed. I thought you would harass me with questions right away.”

  “Did you fall in love with him yet?”

  “Honestly, I’m not sure I would recognize him on the street,” Denise said. “He’s so shy. He can’t stand up straight and look at me. Although I guess there’s a bit of progress: last time he spoke to me, he looked at my shoes instead of his.”

  “That’s good,” I said.

  I thought about what Porfi had told me about people not liking Denise. Maybe Porfi was more embarrassed about being seen with her than shy.

  “You should go out for coffee with him,” I said.

  “Why would I do that? I don’t like coffee.”

  “It doesn’t have to be coffee, you know? Maybe he’s ill at ease courting you at school, maybe he wants the romance to stay private.”

  “There’s no romance to speak of.”

  “But you like him.”

  “He’s nice, I guess. He keeps asking if there’s something he can do for me. He really wants to show me how good he is at repairing stuff, but I can never think of anything that he could help me with, so I asked him if he knew how to pick a lock and he said he did. I told him to come down here one of these days, open that door for you.”

  Denise turned her face to the door at the top of the stairs.

  “Except I didn’t tell him it was for you. I told him I was interested in knowing what was behind it.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m always sort of embarrassed to admit I’m not interested in anything. I mean, I’m used to it, and I’m the person who should be most bothered by it, right? But when other people ask what I like and stuff, I feel like I should spare them the truth, that they couldn’t bear it if they knew how little interest I had in life. And Porfi’s so eager to find a way to make me like him, I feel like I have to pretend that there’s something he could try, you know? Give him a glimmer of hope.”

  “Maybe if you keep pretending things interest you,” I said, “you’ll end up really caring about them.”

  “That’s what my therapist used to say.”

  “And what does he say now?”

  “He’s clueless. I tried all possible meds. He says I should attempt meditation. That sounds like what you recommend when there’s no hope left at all, don’t you think?”

  “I think if you’re still able to lie to people in order to protect them, there’s hope,” I said.

  “You should write for French TV.”

  “You don’t want to go to Paris anymore?” I asked.

  “Of course I do,” Denise said.

  “Are you lying to me right now?”

  Denise looked at me like I’d asked a trick question when she was literally the only person on Earth who could’ve answered it.

  “I’m not lying,” she said. “I do want to go to Paris. I’ve never been.”

  “Have you thought about things you’d like to do while we’re there?”

  “We could go to a couple bookstores I guess. Porfi said he wanted to hit the Eiffel Tower.”

  “Forget about what Porfi wants. Bookstores for you. What else?”

  “Maybe we could hang out in Juliette’s neighborhood,” Denise said tentatively, like she was ready to discard the idea right away if I found it ridiculous.

  “Do you know where she lives?”


  “Well I don’t have her address or anything, but there’s an interview on her website where she talks about how much she likes this one café on the Saint Martin Canal. I thought maybe we could check it out. Maybe she’ll be there.”

  “That sounds great,” I said, and it did. If we saw Juliette, we could finally ask her if she’d been an actress in the Let Them Sea video or a real kid who’d never seen the ocean.

  “What do you plan on doing in Paris?” Denise asked me, just before the bell rang.

  “I thought I would go see what the DGSE buildings look like.”

  “The intelligence agency? What for?”

  “I’ve never seen a spy,” I said. “I just want to see what the people who walk in there look like.”

  “Well those who just walk in through the front door will probably not be spies,” Denise said.

  “I know,” I said. “But maybe one of them will.”

  Denise was unconvinced but humored me anyway.

  “Whatever you want,” she said. “You’ll be our Paris guide, we’ll just follow you around.”

  We got up to join our respective classrooms and I noticed as I walked down the stairs behind her that Denise was wearing perfume. The air carried whiffs of orange blossom after she’d passed through it.

  “Do you think Porfi will let me watch how he picks a lock?” I asked.

  “He’ll do anything I ask him,” Denise said, unfazed by the power she’d just recognized in herself.

  On the second anniversary of the father’s death, I received a letter from Rose:

  Dear Isidor,

  it said,

  Two years already and the memory of your father’s sodden death still haunts me.

  After you left, my parents figured we had made love and you were not a penpal…it is ironic I think because you actually are! But I didn’t tell them that. I guess I am the only one who writes anyway, you never answer (and it’s fine, I mean, I’m writing to express sympathy and share your pain about your father) but anyway if you ever want to write me a letter, you better not do it here because they have me on close watch! They were really mad at me for lying to them, so if I were you I wouldn’t come back to my house next time you runaway.