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me.
    Yet in my final hours I am indeed distracted, and it is nothing from my own hard life that haunts me, but rather a woman I barely knew, a person on the edge of all my living. It seems im-proper, it is not right. If I am to be in this world a little longer, then I should wish to dwell on my husband, Thierry, or the son who looked just like him and fell beneath the German rifl es, or my only daughter, who disappeared so many years ago into the countryside of France. I should wish to think of them, yet I do not. Even my granddaughter cannot hold my attention, though she comes to see me daily. For half an hour every morning she visits, speaking brightly and fl uffing up my pillows, rubbing the cool balm into my hands, which are the color of a pig’s liver, the texture of bark, swollen now as thick as sausages. Merci grandmère, she whispers when she leaves. Merci.
    She is good to me. She is grateful. I raised her after her mother 40
    The Secrets of a Fire King
    fled with the Resistance, and she has not forgotten. In her grati-tude she has brought me to this hospital, the best in Europe, to die in a room that is not my own. I watch her depart, delicate in a dark blue dress that rustles lightly against her calves. She, of course, does not remember Madame, who died when she was still a little girl. She does not remember the years of hard work or the blue jars glowing. It is only I who remember, but I do this with such clarity that I sometimes imagine myself back in the small glass building on the rue Lhomond, Madame in her black cotton, Monsieur scribbling on the board, the scent of cooking earth thick around us. As if my life had not yet happened. As if time, after all, were of no lasting consequence.
    It is strange, it is most disturbing, yet it is so. I run their images through my mind like beads through my fingers, working something out. Madame was a small woman whose hands were often cracked and bleeding from her work. She had a habit of running her thumb across the tips of her fingers, again and again, lightly.
    They were numb, she said once, absently, when I asked her. That was all, a small thing. She would not remember it, and out of so many things that have happened in my own life, why I dwell on this is a great mystery. Still, I would like to call her here, to this room with its walls of green tile, its single window masked by a thin yellow curtain, a pale sea light washing through the air. I would like to ask her what happened to her hands before she died.
    Long before she was famous in the world for her mind, Madame was famous in the market for her shopping. That is how I fi rst knew of her, as the woman who stood baffled before the butcher, uncertain how many people she could feed with a joint, as the woman who bought fruit blindly, without pausing to test if it was too young yet, or too ripe. The things any ordinary house-wife knew she did not understand. In the market they said she was unnatural, working side by side with men, leaving her small daughter in the hands of others. At first, I must admit, I was no different in my opinions. When the fruit sellers gossiped, I nodded in agreement. When she walked by on the street, in such deep conversation with her husband that the world around them A Gleaming in the Darkness
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    might not have existed, I stared boldly, along with all the others.
    She did not go to church at all, a scandalous thing, and in the evenings, when I knelt on the hard pine boards of my little room and prayed, I wondered how she lived without that ritual, that comfort.
    It was not until the day she came for the key that I began to see her differently. Up close she was more human, and more frail. We were similar in size and looks, she and I, two slight women with gray eyes and ash blond hair, and I felt an immediate affinity with her, despite the vast differences in our ages and our lives. I took her to the room full of windows, a rude and dusty space, abandoned for decades, which would become