The First Garden by Anne Hébert Page B

little schemer.”

I T’S NOT THAT SHE IS ill, but since Raphaël and Céleste left for Ile aux Coudres, she has shut herself away in her hotel room and refused to emerge.
    In the solitude and the night of rue Sainte-Anne broad sweeps of memory give way as she lies in the dark, surrendered, bound hand and foot to old images that assail her.
    The dead women make a noise in her throat. She names them one by one, and the companions of her childhood come as their names are called, from tall to short, intact and untouched by fire, wearing the same black serge uniform, white collars and cuffs, black ribbed stockings and laced boots, their short hair carefully bobbed every month.
    Alfreda Thibault
    Laurette Levasseur
    Jacqueline Racine
    Marie-Marthe Morency
    Théodora Albert
    Jeanne-d’Arc Racine
    Estelle Roy
    Corinne Picard
    Georgette Auclair
    Germaine Létourneau
    Marie-Jeanne Binet . . .
    All must be named aloud, and a witness must be present to hear them, the names of these children who were burned alive, and we must gather them to our hearts.
    Raphaël is no longer there to share her evocation of the little girls from the Hospice Saint-Louis. Now that it’s a question of her own life, she is alone, with neither pity nor compassion.
    A long string of little girls dressed in mourning surround Flora Fontanges’s bed on rue Sainte-Anne. The tallest, though, wears a blue smock cinched at the waist by a belt and she has curly hair. Her name is Rosa Gaudrault and she will be burned along with the children from the lower forms. She says “kitten, sweetheart, pet, my treasure, my lovely, my angel,” she laughs and talks very softly because the orphanage rules forbid giving the children any names but the ones inscribed in the register. At times she sings “the Blessed Virgin soon will come, with her long hair hanging down” and she is radiant as a bluebird in a black flock of starlings.
    â€œRosa,” says Flora Fontanges, holding out her arms in the night, and she weeps.
    Who would venture across the live coals except Rosa Gaudrault, who has already made the gift of her life and renews it continually?
    She is sixteen years old. She goes in and out, bringing children every time, passes through the flames and smoke, a wet cloth over her face. She calls them by name, begs them to come with her, she who is kind and good and has always thought of them as normal children with father and mother at their side and a normal house filled with laughter and warmth. She calls to them. Takes them in her arms. Pulls them outside. Goes back inside with a wet cloth that freezes along the way. She is calling still. Begging them to come outside with her. Even the firemen with their masks and long ladders do not have her courage and her daring.
    When they found Rosa Gaudrault the next day in the rubble, there were two little girls in her arms who had burned to death with her, covered with ice, a single branch, gnarled and black.
    â€œDead wood! There, there!”
    Fever overcomes her and makes her rave. She is writhing in the brand-new white bed with brass knobs at its corners. She is eleven years old. M. and Mme Edouard Eventurel have just adopted her and bought her a bed. She is a little girl who was rescued from the fire in the Hospice Saint-Louis.
    â€œIf the fever doesn’t drop I guarantee nothing,” says the doctor.
    There remains just a slim margin of life wherein she struggles, tormented by invisible flames that burn her and consume her. She begins to cry out again in a voice that is harrowing, insistent, that is not of this world. She begs them to take away the unbearable thing from the foot of her bed. She holds out her arm towards the chair on which her new clothes lie folded, cries out in a voice from beyond the grave:
    â€œThere, there! Dead wood!”
    â€œIf death should occur, wrap the body in a sheet soaked in carbolic acid.”
    They will do what must be done. In the