Free The Secrets of a Fire King by Kim Edwards Page A

woman in the world, that’s what I want to know!”
    “Madame is as poor as we are,” I explained. “She and her husband live in simple rooms as small as ours. She does not work for gold, but for knowledge.” I paused, pouring heated milk into their cups. “I think,” I said, “that if someone offered her a thousand francs, she would not spend one centime of it on herself, but would use it to buy another mountain of dirt, or a new laboratory, or something fine for science. She is trying to do something good for all the people of the world with her work.”
    “Well, then, she is crazy,” my son said. In a dozen years he would be killed in the first great war, but on that morning he was only a small boy with his dreams. “Why, with a thousand francs I would buy a castle, and eat pastry and candy at every meal!” It was not only my son who thought this, that Madame was a little crazy. All the shopkeepers still wondered at a woman who worked so hard for no money at all. They saw her daughter, cared for by the grandfather. They saw the family staying home on Sun-A Gleaming in the Darkness
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    day mornings, and they shook their heads, predicted disaster.
    When they spoke like this I felt myself growing angry, and I became famous among the fruit sellers for my defense of Madame. A genius, I would say. Leave her alone, she is doing things of which we cannot even dream.
    I do not dream, I am awake, though the nurses think that I am sleeping. Like the famous scientists who did not notice a cleaning lady stooped low to sweep away their dust, these young nurses do not remember that a woman, even old, even dying, might have keen ears. They cluster sometimes at the foot of my bed, gossip-ing about their boyfriends, their liaisons, the new clothes they will make from bits of silk and lace they have been hoarding.
    They do not see that I was once like them, with blond hair that fell to my waist, washed once a week and dried in a the soft sweet light of the sun. Sometimes I want to rise up in this bed and tell them everything, the bicycle paths edged with flowers and the young men with their glances, and all of it yielding to the years of hard work, the children, the two fearful wars to end all wars, and fi nally to this bed, where I listen to their soft laughter. The world turns and turns and is always the same.
    Yet one day, to my surprise, it changes. The chief nurse, who is older than the others and smart as well as pretty, comes in.
    Usually, she scatters the rest of them away. She knows about old ears. When she speaks in this room she speaks to me, telling me stories of her childhood in Breton, wrapping my hands in cotton so soft it feels like a breeze from the ocean she describes. Today she is serious, however, distracted, wrinkles spanning her wide forehead. Something has happened. She does not speak, but instead turns on a little radio. Immediately the nurses quiet down.
    I listen too. The signal crackles, full of static, and the announcer describes the bomb that was dropped upon Japan. No ordinary bomb, but a weapon so strong it lit the world with light that blinds, with fire that burns everything but the shadows it creates. This atom bomb will end the war, they say, and that is good. Yet the nurses, for once, stay quiet. They leave, after a mo-48
    The Secrets of a Fire King
    ment, even the smart one, silenced. They forget about my hands, which burn in their bandages, as if the fl ames have reached me even here, half a world away.
    And in the silence I remember her jars, lined up on the rough boards, glowing softly in the dusk. There is terror now, yes, but truly the beginning was magnificent to behold.
    I discovered the jars one day when my daughter had a fever.
    I nearly did not go to work at all, but late in the afternoon her fever broke, and I hurried out to do what I could. By the time I reached the glass building on the Rue Lhomond, it was dusk.
    The room was dark, and I realized that Madame and Monsieur had gone