BEG ME TO FORGET

Giselle first heard the word paradise beneath a railway clock that had stopped at sixteen minutes past four.

Two women sat on the bench above her, sharing the heel of a stale rye loaf. The station had two names painted on enamel signs, one French and one German, though soot had blurred the lettering until both languages looked equally foreign to her.

Hunger had become the only map Giselle trusted. It told her where a crust might be left behind, where a stove might still hold warmth, where an adult hand was more likely to offer food than punishment.

She crouched beneath the bench with her knees pressed to her chest. Her dress had once been blue, but weeks of smoke, rain, and sleeping in places no child should have known had dulled it to the colour of old dishwater. Her bare toes hid under the hem. The soles of her feet were split from walking, and one heel had bled through the strip of cloth tied around it.

She was seven, though hunger had thinned her into something smaller, and grief had left an old, watchful stillness in her eyes.

Her father had gone out one morning in a brown coat and never returned.

For a while, her mother waited by the window. Later, the waiting shrank to the bed, and the cough began. It marked handkerchiefs red, then brought neighbours whispering into the corridor, then ended with a closed coffin, a grave without a stone, and adults discussing Giselle as though she were a troublesome object left behind in an empty room.

Poor little thing, they said. No relations. No money. Perhaps the convent. Perhaps the district home.

Their voices circled above her like black birds waiting for the last movement of a wounded animal.

After the funeral, someone took her to a woman called an aunt, though she was not one by blood and did not pretend to be one by feeling. She kept Giselle for six days, then sent her away with a slice of bread and a warning not to return.

After that came roads, carts, station floors, and trains whose destinations meant nothing to her.

Giselle learned the usefulness of being small. Adults overlooked small children. They forgot quiet ones even more easily.

That afternoon, hidden beneath the bench, she held the last crust someone had given her and listened to the women complain.

“At Steinbrück,” one of them said, tearing the dark bread with her teeth, “even the kitchen girls eat white loaves.”

Her companion laughed. “At Schloss Steinbrück?”

“At the castle, at Belle-Rive, wherever those people happen to be. They feed their dogs better than priests.”

“A place like that must be paradise.”

The word slipped through the slats of the bench and settled inside Giselle.

She did not know how it looked on paper. She knew only the shape it made in her mind: warmth, gold light, bread enough to eat slowly. A place where mothers did not cough themselves into graves, where fathers did not vanish down wet roads without looking back, where a child could sleep without keeping one eye open.

When the next eastbound train pulled into the station, Giselle climbed aboard.

Steam rolled across the platform. Porters shouted in both languages. Doors slammed, whistles shrieked, and the women with the stale bread disappeared into the crowd.

Giselle slipped behind a family carrying hatboxes and leather valises, small enough to be mistaken for part of their shadow. No one challenged her when she crawled beneath a wooden seat and covered herself with a forgotten overcoat. Hours later, a conductor found her, frowned, told her to move, and returned to collecting fares from passengers dressed well enough to cause trouble.

She travelled east by hiding.

She slept in luggage racks and under coats. She changed carriages whenever a uniform came too close. Once, an old soldier gave her an apple without asking her name. Another time, a woman slapped her hand away from a half-eaten roll abandoned on a table.

The days lost their edges. Stations became smoke, bells, iron wheels, unfamiliar voices. Still, one word remained beneath her tongue, small and sacred.

Paradise.

When Giselle finally reached Steinbrück, fever had lit a bright, dangerous shine behind her eyes.

The platform lay almost empty behind a curtain of rain. An enamel sign announced STEINBRÜCK in severe black letters, with PONT-DE-PIERRE fading beneath it in blue. Beyond the tracks, hills rose into the mist. Somewhere above them, hidden by weather, stood the castle the women had spoken of.

Giselle made it as far as the freight wall before her legs gave way.

Étienne Bonnay found her there.

He had come to collect two wooden crates of winter bulbs for the glasshouse at Belle-Rive. He was younger then, though grief had already carved hollows beneath his cheekbones.

His wife had been dead three months.

The cradle he had built with his own hands still stood beside the bedroom wall, covered by a white sheet he could not bring himself to remove. Some mornings he woke expecting to hear her moving in the kitchen. Some evenings he caught himself buying enough food for two.

At the station, instead of bulbs, he found a child pressed against the freight wall, barefoot and grey with cold, clutching a scrap of blue ribbon in one fist as though it were the last inheritance of a vanished kingdom.

Étienne set down his cap and crouched before her with the patience of a man approaching a wounded animal.

“What is your name?”

Giselle stared at him.

His hands were large, browned by soil, rough around the knuckles. Workman’s hands. Gardener’s hands. They were not soft enough to belong to anyone from paradise, but they waited in front of him and did not reach for her.

“Giselle,” she whispered.

“Giselle what?”

Her fingers tightened around the ribbon.

Her surname lay in the grave with her mother. Whatever remained of it had vanished inside her father’s brown coat.

Étienne studied her face, then her bare feet.

“Where are your shoes, little one?”

She remembered a pair too small for her, left beside a railway embankment after the blisters burst. She had walked away from them because shoes were useless once they hurt more than stones.

Instead of answering, she looked past him, towards the mist-covered hills.

“Is this paradise?”

The question changed his face. It did not make him smile. It seemed, instead, to strike some quiet, bruised place in him.

He picked up his cap.

“Come with me,” he said.

Étienne was a decent man, and decency, as he understood it, meant proper doors, official signatures, and authorities who knew what ought to be done. So he took Giselle to the station police.

There, she was placed on a chair so tall her feet could not touch the floor. A clerk pushed a bilingual form across the desk. A uniformed officer asked where she had come from, how long she had travelled, whether anyone had harmed her, whether she knew the names of any relations.

Giselle answered in scraps: a village with a church, a mother who coughed, a grave without a stone, her father in a brown coat, the train.

The men exchanged glances over her head.

One mentioned the district home. Another suggested temporary placement with the sisters at Saint Agnès. A woman brought Giselle a bowl of thin soup and told Étienne he had performed a Christian kindness. The proper offices would take over now. He need not trouble himself further.

Étienne looked at the child.

She had fallen asleep sitting upright, her chin against her chest, one hand still closed around the blue ribbon.

He left the station house.

Outside, the rain had thinned to mist. He passed the post office, crossed the empty square, and continued halfway down Linden Road before his steps slowed.

The district home. Temporary placement. The convent.

Proper words, all of them. Respectable words. Words for rooms where children disappeared politely.

Under the dripping trees, with the distant shunting of railway carriages behind him, Étienne turned back.

Before evening closed over the town, after three signatures, two witnesses, and a promise to present the child to the district physician, Giselle was wrapped in his coat and carried along Linden Road.

Her cheek rested against the shoulder of a man who smelled of damp wool, tobacco, and turned earth.

She woke once.

Through the trees, high above the valley, Steinbrück Castle rose against the dark. Its towers stood black beneath the clouds, but dozens of windows burned gold in the stone.

For one feverish, hungry moment, Giselle believed the women at the station had told the truth.

She had found paradise.

She did not yet understand that paradise had owners.