A Lady in Shadows Read online

  “As you can see, all our wet nurses are healthy young women, and we place a great emphasis on clean and healthy habits. Plenty of rest, regular walks at a calm pace, a good diet, no alcohol or other sources of intoxication, no unnecessary excitement or bodily overexertion. It is one of the institute’s fundamental tenets that the constitution and viability of a child are deeply influenced by its earliest conditions, beginning in the womb, even. If your cousin is infirm, you would be wise to find a robust and conscientious wet nurse.”

  “Where do you get your wet nurses?”

  “Most of them have given birth here at the institute. A few we hire from the outside.”

  “Are they all . . . unwed?”

  Madame Palantine’s plump mouth became considerably narrower. “Some. But I can assure you that there is no indecency once they come to us.” She glanced at the watch on her bosom.

  “I am sorry to take up your time,” I said.

  “No, I am the one who is sorry,” she said, not very apologetically. “But we must maintain the schedule.”

  “Which is?”

  “Fifteen minutes for each shift, including our hygienic measures.”

  “How frequently are the children nursed?”

  “Six times a day during the first month, later we reduce it to five.”

  My brain could not help doing the math. That meant that each of the young girls had a child at her breast for nine hours or more a day. No wonder Evangeline had complained that it stung . . .

  “How can they possibly nurse so many children . . . ?”

  “Not everyone can. Those who cannot, we typically send on to infirm mothers like your cousin. Most grow accustomed, though. Lactation adjusts to the demands that are placed on it. We have even had the occasional girl who nursed eight and nine without difficulty.”

  It was a dizzying thought. Suddenly, I realized the source of my discomfort. The symmetry made me think of cows in long rows, ready to be milked. The female body transformed into a lactating organism, the children into entirely interchangeable milkers, with no relation beyond that of giving or receiving suck.

  I felt an urge to object to this unemotional factory-like suckling. How strange. I ought to applaud this more scientific and rational approach to child rearing, and yet I had to hold back a protest and remind myself I was not here to discuss nursing.

  “I am here on a different errand as well . . . ,” I said hesitantly.

  The effect was surprising. Madame Palantine’s entire demeanor changed, as if she was setting aside one mask and putting on another. Her courteous manner slipped, and raw calculation appeared in her gaze.

  “I see,” she said. “And when is it due?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The happy event.” Her voice was cold with sarcasm.

  My blush must have been positively crimson—it certainly felt that way.

  “Madame! I am not . . .” But the painful realization hit me before I could finish my sentence. I could not, in fact, know for certain that I was not pregnant. August and I had . . . it was possible that . . .

  Confusion robbed me of intelligent reply.

  “May I tell you something, mademoiselle? Young ladies are hardly ever sent here to engage a wet nurse. If you had been forty or fifty instead of closer to twenty, then I would have been more likely to believe you.”

  Really, I ought to seize upon her misunderstanding with gratitude. It was the perfect way to learn how Rosalba had been received when she came here. But I could not make myself do it.

  Instead I got up.

  “I am sorry to have inconvenienced you . . . ,” I stammered, and fled out the door.

  “As you like,” she said indifferently. “You know where to find us if you should change your mind.” She glanced at the watch on her bosom and tugged at the bell cord. Like automatons, the girls in the hall plucked the infants from their breast, held them over one shoulder for burping, then replaced them in their boxlike cribs, before proceeding to the next small scrap of living humanity. Everyone, even Evangeline, remembered to wipe off the nipple she had used, first with carbolic acid and then with hot water.

  I hurried down the corridor and back to the foyer. I hoped Fleur had prevailed upon . . . what was her name again, the rebellious wet nurse? Pauline. I hoped Fleur had persuaded Pauline to wait so we could question her. But Pauline had not been present during the interview with Rosalba. There had been only Madame Palantine, from whom I had fled like a coward, and “some doctor.”

  I stopped. It was too shameful, I thought, to flee with my tail between my legs in this way. There were four other doors besides the infant hall. One of them was marked ARCHIVES, another ADOPTION OFFICE, and a third PRO PATRIA: PERINATAL with a hand-scribbled note below: UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS PROHIBITED. I hesitated between the archives and perinatal. But if Rosalba had been refused admittance, she would probably not figure in the archives. A conscientious doctor, on the other hand, might well be in the maternity ward even after six o’clock in the evening.

  I carefully opened the door. The room was much smaller than the infant hall, and thick curtains muted the light to a cave-like dimness. There were no box cribs here either. Instead there was what at first glance looked to be ten large kitchen sinks connected by a system of pipes. There was a gentle gurgling, and somewhere the low hissing of a gas flame. Five of the sinks were covered by glass lids partially draped with sterile-looking white sheets. The rest were empty.

  If it had not been for the sign on the door, I probably would not have guessed what this was, at least not immediately. But even though my career had, until now, brought me into more frequent contact with the other end of the life cycle, I had heard of the famous obstetrician Étienne Stéphane Tarnier and his so-called couveuse. It had been developed with funding from the French state because of a particular anxiety that had gripped the leaders of our republic since the ignominious defeat to Germany in ’71 and the loss of Alsace and Lorraine. The birthrate in France was plummeting while nations around us continued to increase, not least in the Kaiser’s newly militarized German Empire, and anything that helped more children survive childbirth was seen as a matter of national importance. In just three years, Dr. Tarnier had reduced infant mortality among the newborns at Paris Maternité by almost a third, due to this peculiar apparatus inspired by the incubators some farmers used for hatching eggs. Or if not with this particular apparatus—I did not recall having seen a picture of anything that looked precisely like this—then with something built for the same purpose: that of keeping precariously premature infants warm and protected while their little bodies fought to adjust to life outside the womb.

  As I bent to examine one of the incubators, a door was opened at the far end of the room and a figure appeared in the doorway.

  “Out!” If you can shout quietly, then that is what he did. “Get out of here right now, you idiot woman!” He took a couple of angry steps toward me, and in confusion I backed through the still open door behind me into the front hall. He followed. But it was not until he entered the hall’s far stronger light that I recognized him, and he me.

  “Mademoiselle Karno,” he said. “What are you doing here—beyond compromising the sterility of my perinatal ward?”

  It was Docent Althauser.

  “I didn’t know you were an obstetrician,” I stammered.

  “I am not,” he said. “I am connected to Pro Patria in my capacity as physiologist. Among other things, I have developed a more efficient incubator on the basis of the Tarnier-Auvard design. But it continues to be necessary, mademoiselle, to keep the risk of infection at a minimum. Only I and my personnel have access to the incubator room.”

  “I am so sorry,” I said. “But would it not be safer to simply lock the door?”

  “I suppose we shall have to from now on,” he said acerbically. “Until you came along, the sign was deemed sufficient to keep out intruders. And you haven’t answered my question, mademoiselle. What are you doing here?”

/>   Oh no. Would he reach the same assumption as Madame Palantine? I had solemnly promised Professor Künzli that I was a model of chastity and the least distracting woman in Varbourg. If he thought I was pregnant, I would be out on my ear in about the time it would take him to say “permanently dismissed.”

  “I have a relative who has just given birth and is considering engaging a wet nurse,” I mumbled. The ruse rang hollow and false even in my own ears now that it had been so easily discredited by Madame Palantine. But what could I do except repeat it? He might well ask the rest of the staff once I had left.

  “I see,” he said. Whatever assumptions he made, he kept them to himself at least. “Are you interested in perinatal treatment, Karno?”

  Relief washed through me. He had stopped calling me mademoiselle and I was once again his student, liberated from gender because of what he had referred to as my promising intellect. That I did not feel especially promising right now was another matter.

  “I’m considering specializing in obstetrics,” I said. While not actually true, it would sound right, I thought. What field could be a more natural choice for a female physician?

  The heavy folds around his eyes crinkled, and the same was true for at least one corner of his mouth. It was not much of a smile, but there was a surprising warmth to it.

  “Since it is you, I would be happy to offer a tour,” he said. “On the strict condition, of course, that you follow the appropriate hygienic rules—and promise not to touch anything.”

  Ordinary newborns seem frighteningly small and fragile. But the child I saw now was so tiny that every rapid flutter of breath seemed to me almost unnatural. The head was larger than the slight torso, the eyelids thin and blue tinged so that I had the thought that the chick-like creature down there under the glass lid could see us, or at least sense us, right through the barrier of the skin. A quick, flickering heartbeat pulsated visibly through the minuscule chest, a moth wing beating against a window.

  “How old . . . ?” I whispered.

  “Since birth? A week and a half. But it is probably more relevant to calculate the age of these tiny scientific miracles from the moment of conception. Counted like that, he is just over eight months old. So there is actually still another month to go before he should have been born under normal circumstances.”

  The little boy was naked except for a cap that covered his head. The rest of his frail body was covered by a thick yellowish-white coating that could surely not be fetal fat a week and a half after birth. Goose fat, perhaps? The incubator was about half filled with slowly circulating warm water—as constantly at 37°C as was possible, Althauser explained—and a tiny harness ensured that the infant kept his head above water.

  “We have re-created the primal sea,” said Althauser. “Is it not miraculous that the environment in which we grow to term to this day precisely mirrors the sea wherein evolution began? Mild, warm fluid with a saline percentage of point nine. It is almost the same for him as it was in his mother’s womb. Or in his case, actually better.”

  “And will he survive?”

  “It looks that way. In spite of all that his so-called mother has done to attempt to kill him.”

  “Kill him?”

  “Yes. After several failed attempts at poisoning with various quack remedies, she finally tried using a knitting needle. She was bleeding like a stuck pig when she arrived, and had she not come here, they would probably both have died. Believe me, however exposed his life is here in the incubator, he is safer than in his mother’s womb, and he is receiving significantly more care.”

  I was not used to seeing Althauser’s normally heavy and passive features express emotion, and certainly not of this kind—care, tenderness, protectiveness. It jarred with his normal pretense to be, like Claude Bernard, exclusively focused on the scientific idea. Certainly there was a scientific project—to improve the incubator and hence the premature child’s chances of survival—but unless my eyes were entirely deceiving me, there was also a real passion here, an emotion that included the little human creature whom he properly ought to register only as the object of the experiment.

  I do not know if this made him a less worthy scientist. It definitely made him a more interesting person, I decided.

  “Why did you call the project Pro Patria?” I asked.

  “Because we are making a great and vitally necessary effort for the fatherland,” he said. “You will be aware, I am sure, of the birthrate crisis?”

  I nodded. “I understand that it is causing concern in military circles.”

  “Not only there, Mademoiselle Karno. Not only there. I am, in fact, speaking at a gathering this Friday evening—a series of lectures that address precisely this problem. If you are interested in attending, I can introduce you to some of the project’s supporters after the event. I am sure you would make a good impression on them, which might be useful to you in your future endeavors.”

  He looked as if he would actually like me to come. It flattered me, and I thanked him for the invitation and promised to be there.

  Fleur stood at the edge of the lawn and pretended to admire a bed of perennials. With her slim, gloved hands, she tilted the flower heads one by one, as if this was the only way she could fully appreciate the colorful presentation of asters and chrysanthemums. Somehow it did not look entirely convincing.

  “She didn’t want to wait,” she said when she saw me. “But she agreed to meet you later . . .”

  That had to be better than nothing.

  “Where?” I asked. “And when?”

  “At Le Crapaud,” Fleur said hesitantly. “In Rue Vanasse. It is . . . a tavern. Not very appropriate for someone like you, I’m afraid. But she’ll be there between eight and nine tonight, if you want to speak with her. I promised her two francs.”

  “Fleur, won’t you come too?” I said in a rush of mild panic. “Please?”

  “If you wish . . .”

  “I think it would be better if there are two of us,” I said, knowing perfectly well that the only thing it was “better” for was my delicate nerves. Rue Vanasse was rather less than salubrious, from what I had heard. I had never been there myself.

  Footsteps crunched on the gravel path behind us. I half turned and to my surprise saw Docent Althauser hurrying toward the gate, wearing his overcoat and hat and carrying his cane. He hesitated for a moment and threw us both a probing look. Then he raised his cane in greeting, tipped his hat, and strode on.

  Fleur stood, surrounded by the scarlet, lemon, and fiery orange splendor of the asters, observing his departure with sparrow-bright eyes.

  “Who was that?”

  “One of my teachers from the university,” I said. “Apparently he works here as well.”

  Her eyes had become narrow slits. There was a small juicy snap when the flower head she was holding separated from its stem.

  “What is his name?”

  “Althauser.”

  “Does he always carry that cane?”

  “Fairly often. Why?”

  “No reason. I just think I’ve seen him before.”

  “Here? When you were here with Rosalba?”

  She hesitated. Looked down at the flower head in her hand as if she was wondering what it was doing there. It was one of the red ones, dark and liverish like venous blood.

  “It must have been,” she said.

  Having stood outside Le Crapaud for fifteen minutes, it began to dawn on me that Fleur was not going to turn up. I was already intensely uncomfortable. I had fielded several calculating looks, two awkward attempts at conversation—“So, mad’moiselle? How’s it going?”—and a single, definitively insulting offer, in spite of the fact that I had put on my least distracting university garb. Other than my face—and even that was half hidden by my veil—not a centimeter of my skin was exposed.

  The same could not be said about the other gentlemen and ladies out for the evening. Several men strolled about with rolled-up sleeves and open-necked shirts and their hats
pushed back on their heads, some with their jackets slung over their shoulder, others apparently entirely devoid of such an article. And as for the ladies—well, “ladies” might not be quite the right word.

  Inside Le Crapaud someone was subjecting the most popular melodies of the day to accordion and violin, and I could hear singing and loud conversation. The front of the building had been decorated with a mural of sorts, a garish and very warty toad with an anatomically improbable tongue arching above the door and a couple of the windows to capture what at first glance looked like a fly but on closer inspection turned out to be a scantily clad fly-winged nymph. She had the toad’s pink tongue looped several times around her waist and did not appear to appreciate it. I completely understood how she felt.

  If only August had been with me . . .

  I took a deep breath, or as deep as my corset permitted, and entered the den of the toad.

  The smoke from the men’s pipes and cigars hung heavy and blue above the tables, and I even saw a few women smoking. A middle-aged, broad-bosomed woman in a black wig—it sat crooked on her head—puffed on a long skinny chalk pipe, and a somewhat younger woman with bright red lipstick held a cigarette rolled in pink paper in her black-gloved hand. Between the tables, three or four couples were milling around to a cheerful polka tune. One of the men had unbuttoned his shirt to the point where we could all see his somewhat soiled undershirt. Sweating and red cheeked, he swung his partner in the dance, and I suddenly felt a completely unexpected stab of envy.

  They were enjoying themselves. They did not care what it looked like, what they looked like. Sweating and laughing and hollering along to the refrain, he grabbed his girl around the waist with both broad hands and raised her high into the air, and she flung her head back, laughing uproariously. Some might call it loose manners and reckless abandon, but this was exactly what I envied: their ability to abandon expectations and conventions and demands for propriety. I had never had even a moment’s freedom like that, at least not in public. The memory of what I had done with August in private returned and warmed not just my cheeks but also several other parts of my body. Compared to that, the dancing here suddenly looked quite innocent.