Cradle to the Grave

Chapter One —

The dead smelled different now.

I had worked the laundry at Hôtel-Dieu for three years and I knew every variety of human odor the living could produce — sweat and infection, gangrene and fear, the particular sweetness of a wound gone wrong.

I knew them the way a baker knows flour. By instinct. Without looking.

But this was something else.

It had started in September. A sourness beneath the carbolic. Something fermented and wrong that no amount of boiling water or lye soap could touch. The sisters said nothing about it. The doctors said nothing about it.

The government said nothing about it, which meant it was the most important thing happening in France.

I wrung out a sheet and dropped it into the basket.

Around me the laundry room breathed steam.

Three other women worked in silence — Marguerite, who was fifty and had outlasted a husband and two sons to the war; Céline, who was nineteen and still believed the newspapers; and old Paulette, who believed nothing and said less. We had not spoken of the smell.

We had not spoken of much since October arrived and the wards above us began filling faster than they emptied.

La grippe, the doctors called it.

Just the flu.

I had a sister who was a nurse’s aide near Verdun.

Her name was Fleur and she wrote to me every week without fail, letters that smelled of whatever soap she could find and her own particular handwriting — looping, unhurried, as if she had all the time in the world.

The last letter had arrived three weeks ago. I had read it so many times the paper had gone soft at the folds.

I was not thinking about that now. I was thinking about the sheet in my hands and the basket at my feet and the twelve hours between me and my bed on the Rue des Bernardins.

I was very good at not thinking about things.

The wards filled from the top down.

By the time a patient reached the ground floor it meant the floors above had no more room, which meant the ground floor had no more room either, which meant they were laying men on pallets in the corridor with a blanket over them and a number pinned to the blanket and nothing else.

I passed them on my way to collect the morning linen. Some of them watched me go.

Some of them were past watching anything.

The sisters moved between them with the particular efficiency of women who had learned not to feel too much too quickly. I respected that. I had learned the same thing in a different classroom.

Ward C was the worst. Ward C was always the worst. It sat at the end of the east corridor and caught neither light nor air and the men inside it ran fevers that turned their lips the color of a bruise — not blue exactly, something darker, something the body had no business producing.

The sisters called it cyanosis.

I called it the color of a man the flu had decided to keep for a while before it finished with him.

I collected the linen from Ward C without looking at the men in the beds. This was not cruelty.

This was arithmetic. I had twelve beds to collect from and four other wards after this and Paulette’s back had gone out on Tuesday which meant her share fell to me and the basket was already heavy enough to make my shoulders ache.

I was at the door when I heard it.

Not a voice. Not a groan — I knew groans, I had a catalogue of groans, groans were ordinary. This was something else. A shifting. The particular sound of weight redistributing against a surface that was not expecting it.

I stopped.

Behind me, in the bed nearest the window, was a man who had been placed there this morning with a number pinned to his blanket and the particular stillness of someone the doctors had finished with.

I had collected his linen twenty minutes ago. His hands had been folded.

His eyes had been closed by whoever closed eyes in this place.

I turned around.

He was sitting up.

Not lurching.

Not gasping the desperate gasp of a man who had been wrongly declared dead — I had heard of such things, they happened, medicine was imprecise and war made it more so.

This was not that. There was no gasp. There was no desperate clutch at the bedsheet. There was no confusion in his face, no relief, no fear.

There was nothing in his face.

He sat in the bed with his hands in his lap and his eyes open and he looked at the wall opposite him with an expression I had no word for because it was not an expression at all. It was a face with the person removed from it.

My basket hit the floor.

The sound echoed in the ward.

Two of the living men stirred. A sister appeared in the doorway at the far end, looked toward me, looked toward the sitting man, and went very still in the way that told me she had seen this before and had been hoping not to see it again.

We looked at each other across the length of the ward.

The man with the empty face turned his head toward me.

Slowly. Deliberately. The way a compass needle finds north.

I picked up my basket.

I walked out of Ward C and down the east corridor and through the laundry room door and I did not run because running would have meant acknowledging what I had seen, and I had decided, somewhere between the door and the corridor, that I was not going to do that.

I set the basket down beside the wash basin.

I rolled up my sleeves.

I put my hands in the water.

Marguerite looked up from her wringing. “You’re pale,” she said.

“I’m always pale,” I said. “It’s October.”

She watched me for a moment with the eyes of a woman who had outlasted too much to be easily fooled. Then she looked back down at her work.

I stared at the water in the basin. Hot. Clouded with soap. Ordinary in every way that water could be ordinary.

Upstairs, in Ward C, something that had been a man was sitting in a bed with someone else’s hands in its lap, looking at a wall with someone else’s eyes.

I said nothing.

I never said anything.

That was the first mistake.