With My Scarf Tied Just So
Hannah Rahimi
The apartment next to mine was rented to a man who designed abattoirs
for a living. Because this was France, he explained to me in French about
something I can translate only as a killing box. If I understood him
correctly, he wanted me to know that Jews and Muslims use the same
killing box, at different angles. Jews turn it upside down, while Muslims
angle it to Mecca. One box, rotatable. I thought he was implying some
profound insight into the various religions of the world (different gods,
same killing box?), but actually he wanted to discuss the particulars of his
vocation and nothing more.
I was twenty-six. I was the kind of Jew who didn’t know which
way her people turned their killing boxes. I was the kind of meat eater
who liked to forget there was a killing box.
I lived in Paris that year, in a part of town that felt like a
mausoleum. I am of the opinion that half of Paris feels like a mausoleum.
If you board a bus in that half of the city you will find yourself among the
geriatric set, complete with moth-eaten fur and an orchestra of canes.
They are a particular kind of old, these old Parisians. I don’t mean to
sound cruel when I say that they are something akin to death on legs.
And their old courtyards, their churches, their cobblestone laneways are
like dead organs in formaldehyde: perfectly preserved, but to what end?
Parisians suspect it. All year they asked me, But why did you
come?
I came to study opera with a giant and take a lover the way
French people take lovers in movies. I wanted all the usual things: to
gnaw on a baguette while walking, achieve sophisticated orgasm, suck on
hand-rolled cigarettes, and exhale witty rebuttals to existentialism with
my scarf tied just so.
I know.
By giant, I mean simply that my singing teacher was as well
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known as a person can be in a dying art. Parisians knew him. People who
knew what bel canto was knew him. The lessons went well. He coaxed my
soprano into nimble, finicky waters until I excelled at the parts of
vivacious tricksters in Mozart operas.
Despite the morbidity of his occupation, my neighbour the abattoir
designer was really very harmless. He liked to watch soccer in his room
and drink whisky. Often when I went for groceries he would call down
to me in the street and ask me to fetch two bottles of Glen Campbell.
He always paid me back for the Glen Campbell and tended to round up
to forty when he didn’t have exact change. As a rule he stayed inside on
evenings and weekends, slowly turning up the volume on his television.
He may have been harmless, but he was certainly sad. Or rather, I don’t
know what he felt: what I know is that he made me sad. In general,
people do not like to see other people not leaving their rooms. Why?
What business is it of ours? I find it hard to believe the sentiment is
altruistic.
Here is how I could tell when my neighbour was drunk. He had
a cat named Jane. In French the name takes the soft j of je t’aime and
rhymes with something between fan and faun. Jane. Always, after having
drunk a certain amount, he would begin to talk to his cat flirtatiously.
His terms of endearment came through the wall from his kitchen into
mine. Ma belle Jane, he’d say in the coquettish voice of a lover. Qui est
la plus belle du monde? C’est toi, ma petite Jane. Viens ici, ma chère.
Viens, viens. If she didn’t come, he’d accuse her of teasing. If she did, he
would demand nuzzles, purrs, leg rubs. It was a very thin wall, the one
we shared. At least twice an evening I would hear pellets clattering into
a bowl, often on the heels of new ice clinking into a tumbler. I suspected
him of trying to buy her love in kibbles.
At first I found comfort in this nightly ritual. My neighbour’s
cloying cadences would drift across the table where I laboured over my
meal, and I would listen, amused and even charmed by this silly private
spectacle. I don’t like to eat dinner on my own. A solitary breakfast is
another matter — no one to cool your coffee with inanities — but by the
end of the day, when even the sun has given up, I always remember that
time is nothing but a great bully, nudging you toward the abyss with each
click of the clock. At that point I will take a voice through the wall if I have to.
I think we don’t like to see other people not leaving their rooms because
it brings to mind a set of associations: the tang of an unwashed body, for
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one; mouldy food in and out of the fridge, and the attendant pests —
ants, flies, mice, even rats; sheets grey with flakes of body; bathtub rings;
semen stains. Things on the edge of turning — they unnerve us.
Halfway through the year, I met a jazz musician, a Frenchman, who
wanted to move to New York and take a lover the way Americans take
lovers in movies. (Which way is that? Bombastically, he said.) He was the
kind of foreigner who could hold his own in a philosophical debate in
English but didn’t know the word for fork, shoe, glasses, rain. I was the
kind of foreigner in French who had studied and mastered the myriad
cuts of beef. I hated to be in a restaurant without understanding the
menu, and there was always, always beef on the menu.
It didn’t take us long to learn that lovers are lovers no matter
what the country, desperately vaulting from the wanted to the got and
back again. The orgasms were not so much sophisticated as precise.
It was around this time that I began to detest my neighbour’s
infatuation with his cat. It repulsed me to hear his voice go limp with
need as he cajoled and overfed poor Jane. One night my lover was sitting
in my kitchen, eating the meal I’d prepared. (Was I happy to have a
dinner companion to keep the bully at bay? Yes, if only I could have had
my coffee in peace the next morning.) When he complimented (in
French) the tenderness of the boeuf bourguignon, I told him (in French),
That’s because most people make bourguignon with bavette but I make it
with aloyau. To which he replied, You are the something of somethings in
the kitchen, and when I didn’t understand half the sentence we switched
to English and he said, To taste this meal is to glimpse beyond the
shadows of the cave. I told him, That’s because I make it with sirloin.
The night my lover went Platonic over dinner, he heard my
neighbour for the first time, the usual drink loosening his tongue into
the usual supplications at the moment I was trying to light an apple tart
on fire. The woman at the bakery, who liked to instruct me in the necessities, had told me it was really the only way to eat apple tart: drizzle
brandy and set a match to it. But fifteen matches later the tart remained
drenched in liqueur, staunchly inflammable, and so we ate it in sodden,
bitter slices. When he heard the neighbour’s soft tones through the
kitchen wall, my lover looked up from his tart, delighted. He is amoureux?
he asked me. He was snobby about all things love. For all that he wanted
an American lover, he believed that French was the only language in
which to discuss such matters. He is amoureux?
Sure, I said. Amoureux with his cat.
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It took two languages and some miming to convince him he had
understood correctly. In love with his cat? He took the news very badly.
Got up from the table, insulted the apple tart, and sputtered (in English)
about my neighbour: hideous, outrageous, disgusting. Finally, having
scoured his mental dictionary for the proper terms of judgment, he
hissed, This man is … he has … he has profaned love. Then he spat into
the sink, downed a glass of wine, and, in need of a corrective gesture,
ushered me to the bedroom.
He might have spat because he didn’t like the tart but I don’t
think so. The scene dismayed me. It gave me pause to hear a version of
my own thoughts in my lover’s mouth. Such revulsion, such vitriol, and
for what? I felt suddenly protective of my neighbour, whose joys in life
were reduced to the bottle, the screen, and the cat. What harm had he
done? Jane would never go hungry. For all we knew she thrived on the
attention. What irked me most, however, was that word: profaned. The
utter arrogance of the pronouncement, as if he were the expert. As if any
of us are.
Here is what I should have said the night my lover got on love’s
high horse: If this is love profaned, then show me love sacred.
The other thing that happened around this time was that a soprano and
her understudy got mono and the giant offered me up as a replacement.
I took my stage debut as a maid in The Marriage of Figaro, whose
moment of glory comes in the form of a breakneck aria sung while
escaping out a window.
For the curtain call I had to curtsy in keeping with my role. The
applause swelled nicely but nonetheless there is no combination sillier
than the curtsy and the clap. Squatting like a frog in an apron while
tone-deaf philanthropes try to one-up each other with their bare hands.
If you ask me, it is the sound of people trying to convince each other that
they are not in fact sitting in a high-end mausoleum. But that is neither
here nor there. What really struck me was the fact that Mozart no longer
meant something to me. Where once I had heard twists of agony, sweet
and fleeting cadences, now there were only pleasantries. How devastating: staged pleasantries.
The giant knew. He found me in the green room afterwards,
kissed me mournfully on each cheek, and said, Perhaps you are more
suited to contemporary opera, his tone implying that the term was
oxymoronic.
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The next morning I was making coffee when I heard a cry from the street.
True anguish, I detected with my operatic ear as I plunged my French
press. When I took my coffee to the balcony to see for myself, there was
my neighbour on his balcony with his hair to the heavens and a pyjama
shirt over jeans. The cry had been his. Ai ai ai, he was saying now. Ai ai ai.
Viens ici, ma chère.
What happened? I asked.
She flew, he said, and scuttled his fingers across his palm to show
how Jane had done it, scaled the balcony and run along the narrow ledge
until she reached a windowsill, where now she lay with her back to us,
sunning herself.
Jane, he called. Jane! His voice teetered like a dreidel nearing the
end of its spin.
With all the dignity of a lioness, Jane lifted her head and slowly
swivelled to look at us over her shoulder. I’ve never been one for
understanding animals. Most of the time their expressions seemed
designed to trigger the food-giving instinct in humans, without any real
emotion or thought of their own. Have you ever gazed into a dog’s eyes?
Pure eyeball. But the look on Jane’s face was completely identifiable.
Reproach. Undeniable, unflinching reproach, and not only toward my
neighbour, but to me as well.
What a cat. She was regally fat, with gleaming caramel fur and a
moon face with the features all scrunched in the middle into an accusatory
scowl. My neighbour and I stayed there, pinned by her stare, until she
looked away, stretched, and stood. He let out a sob. Jane, he implored,
but she arched her back imperviously. Then she jumped.
Two storeys she jumped, legs splayed like a cat in a cartoon, until
at the very last minute she tucked them in for an elegant landing. But
still. Two storeys. In the noise of the street I couldn’t hear any cat sounds.
I didn’t even know what a cat scream would sound like, what cat bones
breaking would sound like. These were sounds beyond my sonic reach.
And if I were to measure my sonic reach? Canes on the cobblestones. Flirtations through the wall. Staged pleasantries.
By the time we made it to the street, Jane was gone. My
neighbour clutched his head and scanned the block. After a moment I
glimpsed her in the distance, limping her way between indifferent legs. At
first I thought to cry out, but on the heels of this impulse came another:
silence.
My allegiances had shifted from man to cat. I don’t know why it
hadn’t happened sooner. It was only in that moment that I understood
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the extent of Jane’s desperation. To jump and take off running — she had
no less than fled. And how long had she been plotting her escape? How
long had she waited for the balcony door to open?
After a moment, my neighbour caught his breath as if to speak,
but nothing came, and I wondered if he, too, had seen her; if by holding
his tongue he was letting her go.
I left him in the street, scratching his head and saying, Ai ai ai, ai
ai ai, an inebriated baboon in half pyjamas. I could not speak to him, for
anger and for pity.
But back in my apartment, sipping cold coffee, I felt my stomach
smoulder with inklings of an ulcer and something else. For the cat had
looked at me too.
I felt the need to take some decisions. That’s how the French say
it — to take a decision, as though the decision hangs there waiting like
ripe fruit in the ragtag garden of thought. I decided to leave. I wanted to
go home.
It felt wonderful to want something.
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About the Author
Hannah Rahimi grew up in Toronto. She earned
a master’s degree from Concordia University and
is currently pursuing an MFA at Purdue University
in Lafayette, Indiana. She has published short
fiction in Cosmonauts Avenue and Drain
Magazine.
The narrator in “With My Scarf Tied Just So” sharpens our vision of the
world. A reproachful cat, a neighbour who designs abattoirs, a
judgmental lover – this is not the Paris of travel brochures. A gorgeous
story designed by a watchful eye, uncovering delicious vulnerabilities and
the hidden truths we love.
— 2016 RBC Bronwen Wallace Award jurors
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