After the Barricades

By Jessica Stilling

Who was my mother?
This is a question that plagues Anna, a journalist living in New York City, after the sudden tragic death of her parents. Armed with a box of letters and a strange painting, Anna travels to Paris to learn more about the life that her mother, Bethany, lived in the city of lights in the late 1960s. There she meets Stefan, her mother's former lover whom she never knew existed. Bethany’s one year in Paris included May 1968, a turbulent time when student protests and labor strikes threatened to upend the very fabric of French society. Bethany, a blue-blood Bostonian, found herself in the thick of riots and rationing as she and her friends attempted to find their place in the world. At the heart of it all is the story of Bethany and her lover, Stefan, a quiet, unassuming man with a harrowing past and many dark secrets of his own.

About the Author
Jessica Stilling is the author of literary fiction as well as poetry and short fiction for various literary journals. Her articles have appeared in Ms. Magazine, Bust Magazine and she writes extensively for The Writer Magazine. She also publishes young adult fantasy under the pen name JM Stephen. Jessica loves Virginia Woolf, very long walks, and currently lives in southern Vermont where she writes for the very local newspaper, The Deerfield Valley News.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DX Varos Publishing
• Release date: May 9, 2023
• ISBN: 9781955065832

Book preview

I

April 2019

It was the protests that drew Anna to Paris, a city her mother knew well. After her mother’s tragic death, the funeral, and the reading of the will, after she’d cleared out the house and put all she could put to rest – that’s when her mother’s secrets came tumbling out of the woodwork like a stack of sweaters falling from the top shelf of a closet. It was the letters stashed away in her dresser. The paintings she’d never dared put up, hidden behind stacks of clothes and boxes of old books. So much of her mother, the woman who had raised her, came tumbling out, but her mother wasn’t there to explain herself. And so it was up to Anna, the journalist, to investigate.

She’d wanted to fly to the city of lights the month after the death of her mother, but life—her young daughter, her husband and his job, her own career as a journalist at World Citizen Magazine—made it hard for her to just pick up and leave right away. But then she was sent to cover the Yellow Jacket Protests in France and thought, I can use this time to really understand Mom.

Anna loved Paris. Her mother used to take her to this city when she was in Middle School. They’d wander the Champs Elysees and stare up at the Eiffel Tower. We’re such tourists, her mother used to say but Anna never cared. She loved the chocolate, and later, as she got older, the coffee. Walking the streets as the soft accordion music murmured into the night, watching the sharply dressed people sipping café au laits made her wonder why her mother ever came home to America. As a child, she’d return home to her private school on the Upper West Side and try to parody a French accent to all her friends.

But the year after her mother's death the protests started and Anna’s mother, an art historian who specialized in Protest Art, had always said that protests in France usually turned into riots. And riots turned into stories and stories needed journalists to tell the truth, so Anna had flown to Charles de Gaulle Airport to cover the protests. And because she was her mother’s daughter, she brought her family as well.

Anna covered enough protests to know what they looked like. Not that one was ever exactly the same as another. Egypt had been her first real story but that had been almost ten years ago. She was a young journalist then. Barely out of her post-college internship and it had been her first big assignment overseas. She remembered the young men in white linen shirts who chained themselves to stone statues older than New York itself. It had been the heat, the sticky sweat on her arms, the Egyptian sun beating down on her, that she’d carry with her everywhere. She’d met a kid there who was a student at City College in New York. I just took off, he’d said to her when she interviewed him in Cairo. Emailed my professors and said I had to be here for this. I had to see my country usher in a new era.

Anna had been at Occupy Wall Street a few months after Egypt. She’d walked around and talked with the mostly young twenty-something’s, though there were a few old timers. There are always a few old timers, holdouts from the sixties, is what her uncle Claude always said. The young ones told her about the price of college tuition and that there were no jobs, no good jobs, for them. Sometimes Anna wanted to sit down in the street and chant with them, but a journalist goes to report the story, to tell the people what’s going on so that they can make their own informed decision.

There had been other protests. She’d wanted to go to the Ukraine when there were skirmishes over Crimea, but her editor had decided to send someone more senior. But she had been there to cover the Parkland Shooting survivors’ protests. That had been the last story that Anna had been able to share with her parents before they died tragically in a car accident along the Long Island Expressway.

Anna’s editor knew about her planned trip to Paris when she assigned her the story on the Yellow Jackets. Honestly, Anna had been keeping up with French politics much of her life. Her mother had been in Paris during the May 1968 riots, revolt, revolution (it depened on who you spoke to which title to give that time of unrest). There had been speeches and protests, signs and fists raised, clustered students crying out in the streets. Tear gas and water hoses were sprayed. There had been a revolutionary frenzy that stayed with Anna’s mother, Bethany, her entire adult life. When I decided to get my PhD in Art History, it was the May 1968 Riots that made me want to study Art as Protest – or Protest Art – as so many people call it. And so even if Anna had not found the letters and the paintings hidden in the back of her mother’s closet, a testament to another time in her mother’s life, she would have wanted to come to Paris to remember her mother’s memory in the city that inspired her so much. Paris was the city where her mother had gotten her education on revolutionary activity. Paris was the city that not only shaped her mother, but Anna as well, and when she chose journalism over art—Anna was always more of a writer than a visual person—she knew Paris would help to educate her.

But Anna had heard about the Yellow Jackets well before she was sent to cover them. She’d sat with her mother at the kitchen table in her Upper West Side apartment and discussed the matter. You don’t understand the French, her mother had said, holding Anna’s daughter, Abby, on her lap—the doting grandmother. They don’t stand for injustice. You raise the tax on petrol, and they take to the streets. Threaten their pensions– the streets. Student tuition hikes and they’ll start manning the barricades. I tell you, Anna, in France when the people get pissed at their government, there are no candlelight vigils, there are no thoughts and prayers, there's tear gas and broken furniture in the streets. Her mother hadn’t told her many stories about her time in Paris in the ‘60s, at least nothing too specific. She’d had to go through her mother’s closet, after her death, to find the real stories, but her mother had never been shy about her time at the May 1968 Protests.

But the Yellow Jackets protests; Anna knew that they’d started when a larger tax on petrol was brought up by President Macron, but it had gone beyond the gas tax by now. Protest is sparked by something, Anna’s mother used to say. But it grows beyond that something into more. And so, it had been with the Yellow Jackets, and they’d been protesting, speech-making, rioting in the streets for weeks. The police had come in, then the riot squad. Hundreds of arrests had been made, a few people had been injured—though no one killed—in the riots. Storefronts had been set on fire. Piles of wood and plastic signs had been thrown onto the highway, to serve as barricades. And the French, Anna’s mother always used to say, Give them a reason, any reason, and they will build barricades.

But to be here, in the streets as the Yellow Jackets descend upon the Champs Elysees, to see hundreds, maybe thousands, of men and women in black, wearing the bright yellow vests that truck drivers and other municipal workers carried in case of emergency, was something more than just vaguely wondering what her mother had meant. She liked to think that maybe this was something like what her mother witnessed so many years ago.

Anna looked out; her notebook ready as she scribbled notes. A group of people sat hunched over a barricade on the sidewalk. They’d turned over some garbage bins and a few tables and chairs from a nearby restaurant. They threw what looked like bottles and cans at the police as they hovered behind the barricade. The police wore black uniforms that looked like they were made of metal and not cloth, like they were armed for war. The black military grade helmets and nearly human-sized, clear plastic shields made them seem like a mass of extras in a combat scene from some action movie. Anna had seen these before when she was in Bangladesh last summer. She’d seen it at the Parkland School protests and before that in Washington, DC. In some ways, protests looked the same no matter what country you were in, but the barricades and the way the police came at the protesters, with the Eiffel Tower in the distance, was a distinctly Parisian snapshot.

They have been coming at us all month, a man, more like a kid, he could have been eighteen, maybe twenty, said, hunched behind the barricades as the police rushed around them. Anna kept her cell phone on, taping this impromptu interview. She was good at getting the whole interview on tape, even during this kind of chaos. But Macron, he hasn’t made enough concessions. We are being asked to pay more and more in taxes, but we do not get the same services. And the cost of rent, of living, it all goes up, with each pay increase, we lose more in what we pay in utilities, and still we are not treated fairly, not at our jobs and not by the government, the boy said.

The police ran at them in riot gear, trampling over the barricades, kicking and pushing with those big plastic shields. The kid she was just interviewing ran as some others were hauled away, jumping over a barricade like an experienced pole vaulter. Anna, who had been crouching, was knocked back and on her side. A couple of officers started spraying something, maybe it was mace, around indiscriminately and Anna covered her eyes, cell phone still in hand and recording.  A few people cried out as they covered their eyes, a few more were taken away in handcuffs.

Someone roughly lifted Anna up to her feet, pulling hard on her arm. Anna dropped her phone and reached for her bright yellow press pass. The riot-gear clad officer barely acknowledged it, but he let her go with a swift push and Anna steadied herself on her feet and swooped to grab her cellphone.

Anna ran down the street, away from the broken barricades and toward what looked like the front of a restaurant on fire. The red awning waved in the wind, partly ablaze and inside, the wooden floor in some parts was burning as a few people, with buckets and what looked like a regular garden hose, tried to douse the fire out. Anna pointed her camera at the blaze, documenting it as the people worked inside it. She didn’t think they had time to stop for an interview.

She ran further up the street, past high-end shoe stores and over-priced boutiques. The clothing stores of major designers were closed today, no one was doing any shopping as hordes in ripped jeans and thin T-shirts ran around the street. Hoses were drawn on protesters, gas lingered in the air. Anna covered her mouth but still couched, nearly retching as something started to smell thick and pungent and she realized that if she didn’t get out this bitter, bluish teargas haze, it would get to her too.

Large groups and single stragglers ran around her, and Anna kept her camera on, she pointed it straight, trying to get a clearer picture as she ran off the Champs Elysees and to a less crowded side street. The remnants of the protest were still in the air, but Anna couldn’t smell the teargas as she sat down at a little metal table near the white brick wall of a corner café. Other protesters were there nursing bruised heads and bleeding arms. No one bothered her as Anna pulled up her recording and examined her footage. No one asked her to order something or get up and go away and so she took her notebook out and started jotting notes. She looked over her video footage and paused on something, a single image, right there in all the chaos there was a young woman, she looked to be about twenty-two, twenty-three years old. She stood with the protesters wearing a black turtleneck and slacks, black Doc Marten-like boots and that yellow vest. Her long light brown hair hung below her shoulders to the middle of her back and when the young woman turned around there was something about her face, not just her features but the look in her eye, which reminded Anna of a picture she’d seen of her mother in college.

It was like she was staring right back at her from fifty years away. Again, it was happening again. There was unfairness in the world, and they were rioting in the streets.

II

April 2019

The cafés in the Latin Quarter were buzzing with students, cigarettes in hand, sunglasses on in the moody half dusk, as they talked politics and the cinema. These passively chic students reminded Anna of her mother, who had been the kind of woman to don sunglasses in outdoor cafés even when she grew older and went out at night with Uncle Claude. Though there was absolutely no blood relation, Claude had always been uncle to her, ever since she was a little girl running into his arms when he and Aunt Mary Anne came to visit from their Greenwich Village apartment. He was the kind of friend, her mother used to say, who, ‘withstands the years and simply becomes a part of your life like a piece of good furniture you’ll never give away.’

We’re meeting over there, just down the street, Anna said as she walked with her husband Daniel, a tall man with light brown hair and frameless glasses, who carried under one long arm a cumbersome box that he rested on the sidewalk every time Anna paused to check her phone for the address of the café. Daniel had just gotten to the city the day before, a week after Anna, who had been here on assignment. He’d come with their daughter Abby and his mother, who’d agreed to watch the child as they did a little sleuthing.

It had been Anna’s idea to meet her uncle in Paris, where he’d moved after his divorce from Aunt Mary Anne. She’d wanted to meet with him during the week and a half she’d been here before her family met her, while she was on assignment with the Yellow Jackets, but she simply had not had time.

It had been so kind of Uncle Claude to agree to meet on such short notice, especially since he’d just visited America for the funeral of Anna’s parents. They had gone quickly. It was a crash on the Long Island Expressway with a drunk driver. Her father had died instantly, and her mother’s heart had stopped at the hospital. It was her mother who’d held out, she never woke up, but Anna waited for hours, pacing back and forth, already aware that her father was gone and wondering if her mother would make her an orphan in one night. In the end, everyone talked about how nice it was that they went together. Bethany and Trevor Johnson must have loved each other very much, they all said at the funeral. But Anna could have used one of them at a time like this.

As Anna and her husband ventured closer to the Seine, toward Saint Germaine, she checked her phone again for the address. The buildings seemed more familiar, like they’d been when she was a little girl and her mother had taken her here, holding her hand as she offered her coffee. Yes, coffee to a twelve-year-old, her mother, who had had Anna a bit late in life, belonged to a generation that believed coffee was as harmless as water to a growing child.

There it is, Anna said, pointing to a tiny café with a black awning. It was called Le Café Saint Germaine, but underneath the lettering were very faint gold smudges spelling out Le Jardin de le Ville, a remnant of an earlier time. It was a charming little place and the café had tiny salt-and-pepper shakers and little metal tables and chairs facing the street. That’s the address, Uncle Claude will be here soon, Anna announced as they settled into a table near the sidewalk.

When the waitress approached Anna ordered a café au lait in English because she got tongue-tied in French and Daniel nodded to make that two. I’ll be right back, the waitress replied in English, and Anna regretted the fact that she’d never learned French. As a little girl, she’d heard her mother on the phone with people from work at the university, fluidly switching to French as if no change had been made. Her mother spoke French more often than English some days and perhaps it was the prevalence of the language in her mother’s life that made it so that Anna never actually felt the impetus to learn it—she knew enough of it to get by here, but mostly she relied on the kindness of the French stranger—who usually had a robust English vocabulary.

So, they’re sending you to the protests again? Daniel asked, looking across the tiny table. She’d just gotten a new assignment. You already covered Egypt twice, and everything in America, Venezuela, now you’re doing it again?

Apparently that’s my niche, Anna said. Better than the obituary column.

True. But they don’t seem to be employing your speed-reading skills.

My speed-reading skills got me the job; it’s reporting they want now.

These times, Daniel shook his head.

I was raised on ‘these times.’

Her mother used to spout the political dogma of ‘these times,’ and the 60’s, whenever the PTA did something she didn’t approve of or when the Westchester Community Secretary was found to be embezzling money from the treasury. She wasn’t a diluted pseudo hippie, her mother donned nice, polished outfits, she did her hair and wore make up to her job as an Art History professor, but there was a wild streak, a streak that did not stand for injustice, which reared its head. A streak her daughter had inherited, exhibiting it most clearly when she decided to run off to the Middle East to be a reporter just out of grad school. Her mother, for all her rants on freedom, had not been a fan of that decision but in the end she’d let her go. Her mother always let her go in the end. 

In any event, Claude has great taste, Daniel said. Very nice café.

He always did. When I was little my mother used to ask him to help her pick out all her outfits when she went to important faculty dinners.

And how did your mother meet him? Daniel asked.

During the Riots of May 1968. He was a Communist.

A Communist, wow, Daniel said, shaking his head. That’s dangerous stuff.

It wasn’t that bad, my mother used to say that a twenty-something college kid in France is a different kind of Communist than a KGB officer. He had an underground newspaper or something. He wrote pamphlets.

I see, Daniel replied just as Anna looked up to find her Uncle Claude, a tall man with thinning black and gray hair wearing a T-shirt and jeans as if he were fifteen years younger than the calendar said.

There you are. It is so nice to see you, Uncle Claude greeted them, kissing both of Anna’s cheeks as she stood to meet him. His face looked windblown and there were creases in his skin that made him seem like a used version of the younger man she’d grown up with. I was so worried, when I moved back to France, that I’d never see you again. And then with your parents…I’m still shocked.

I’m shocked too. I guess that’s why I’m here. But not seeing me again? That’s not going to happen, Anna replied. I’ll visit at least once a year. And you should make sure to visit as well, stay at our apartment, we have extra room.

Ah, of course. And tell me, how is the little one? he asked, his accent, even after three decades in America, was distinctly French.

Abby is back at the hotel with Daniel’s mother. She needed rest, Anna replied. And really, I don’t even know why I came. I mean there are the letters—

Stefan Terre, Claude recited the name that had been on those letters she’d found in her mother’s closet after the funeral. I remember Stefan, but your mother, she told me never to bring him up when we moved to America. She saw him every once and awhile, but when we returned from Paris in our twenties, the first few years, she didn’t want to talk about him.

Why? Anna asked. She’d read the letters. Her mother had been so young, so emotional in those letters. Anna knew things had happened during the protests, things had happened to so many people then, but she didn’t think it was only political, her mother’s connection to this man, nor did she think it was as simple as a broken heart. "Why keep those letters? And the painting? And never mention him, not once."

Since your mother cannot say, it’s up to him to say, Claude replied.

I never knew, not until she passed, when I went through her closet, that the man who painted all those pictures in our house, was someone she knew so well. And the picture in the closet, the one she hid for so long, I remember it from when I was young but then she put it away. Why was she hiding it?

The painting in question wasn’t so much a portrait as a capturing of a moment. One second and snap, this red-haired boy, whoever he was, became like a photograph. He sat at a dilapidated wooden worktable staring forward and wearing all black. There was something about his face, something about his life, which moved in a blur around him. I remember Mom hanging it up once when I was little. I asked her who it was, and she said she’d never met him. But look at the name in the corner, Stefan Terre. The writer of those letters. It’s so silly, hunting down this man. It’s crazy. I don’t know why I did it. Daniel, you should have stopped me, Anna said, glancing toward her husband half-jokingly. Her husband smiled guiltily. 

You came to better understand your mother. At a time like this it’s what a daughter should do, Claude said understandingly. Anyway, he went on, getting down to business as they all took seats at the table. I spoke to his daughter and she’s going to meet us here.

Really? Now? Anna asked, half getting up to look around. I didn’t realize it would be so soon. I wasn’t even sure you’d be able to locate him let alone his daughter.

I grew up in France, I know how to find people here. And it’s a lucky thing they’re in Paris at all. Just a few years ago he and his whole family were living in Israel.

Really, Israel? Anna replied. I wouldn’t have thought that reading his letters.

Anna knew there was a lot she didn’t know, there were so many holes in every story her mother had told her about her time in Paris as a college student. She remembered when she was in junior high in the late 90s and going through a 60s-inspired counter-culture phase, she’d asked her mother to tell her about her time in the May 1968 Riots and though her mother had given some vague details, information she could have found on the internet, she’d never said anything concrete. She’d heard of the marches through the streets that had led all the workers of France, not simply the students, to go on strike. She’d heard about the police beatings and the tear gas, the excessive arrests and the barricades made of cement bricks, smashed furniture and turned over cars, but as to what her mother had been thinking, what she’d been feeling, that Anna had never been able to decipher. She’d seen the historian, even the revolutionary in her mother, but she never really knew the 21-year-old Radcliff girl who wanted to study Impressionism because growing up she’d been in love with Monet. 

The waitress returned, bringing with her the café au laits. She looked down at Claude who nodded graciously, and Anna wondered if there had ever been a time when he had not been charming. I’ll have one also, he said, and the waitress smiled.

I want to know what she did here, Anna went on, glancing out at the city. The protests had died down last week and this part of the city had not been much affected. Still, Paris bustled by cars whizzing in the street a block away, the two- and three-story buildings with their wrought iron door knockers and ivy climbing up the old, eighteenth-century walls. The city was pinkish; it had a gentle, reddish hue as if it was perpetually sunset. She tried to picture Paris as it was in the late ‘60’s, she tried to see it through the fuzzy film of the pictures her mother kept in a box in her study, they had frayed, papery edges and creases from where they’d been folded and set in wallets.

A lot happened in Paris, Uncle Claude went on and though he’d been there as well, though he and Aunt Mary Anne and Anna’s mother had all been there together, none of them would tell her about a thing beyond the general facts and obvious observations. She knew there was more.

The ‘68 Protests brought down all of France, Claude went on. At least for a little while. First the students started protesting, I was there, I was your mother’s resident Communist friend. But your mother, she was happy here.

I just wish I knew more, Anna said. Like who Stefan was? Who is that boy in the picture?

I was too busy running around with the Communists to see it all. I was heading committees, writing pamphlets, rioting in the streets while your mother had her own interests. We entered the movement in different ways, but we wanted the same things.

A woman entered the café, looking lost. Her long black hair was thrown up in a messy, though elegant, ponytail, she wore sunglasses, and Anna could tell that she had an olive complexion as she looked out, a pensive stare on her lips, if not in her eyes.

Here, over here, Serine, Uncle Claude called, standing up and smiling as the woman nodded and marched purposefully toward them.

Anna, Daniel, this is Serine, the woman I was telling you about. She’s Stefan’s daughter.

Guilty, the woman said, her hand on her purse strap as she gave the table a tight smile. It’s nice to meet you. I’m so sorry for your recent loss, she went on, offering first Anna and then Daniel her thin, delicate hand. I’ve heard stories about your mother, and when Claude asked me to come, when he explained what had happened and who you were, I wanted so badly to see you. I have wondered about your mother just as you must have wondered about my father. He never spoke much of this American Bethany from his past, but he kept a painting of her in his closet and one time when I asked about it, he said, ‘It’s from another life, that’s all, another life.’

Bethany…so few times had Anna heard her mother called Bethany. And yet it was her name. Your father talked about my mother? He had her picture?

Not all the time, but yes, the spoke of a woman he knew in Paris, a young girl who shepherded him through the turmoil of the ’68 movement. She inspired him to start painting again. You see, my father had done a single show as an art student that had garnered a lot of attention. He was a very popular and up and coming artist for a couple of years. Then he just...dropped out. Gave it all up, worked in a factory and then at a café for a while, he did not paint again for the public until he met your mother.

I hadn’t realized he was a gallery-showing painter, Anna mused.

He was by the time I was born. Never the most famous artist in the world, but people knew him, your mother once helped with one of his New York shows when I was a child. She met him in the City, he gave a talk at Columbia, it was just after the Towers….

I never knew any of this, Anna replied. I was in college then, why didn’t I know? Anna asked herself, trying to picture that life, that Paris from the 1960s encroaching on the life Anna had shared with her mother decades later.

My father moved back to Paris three years ago, after my mother died, he said he could no longer stand the desert.

Is your father from Paris? Anna asked and Serine gave her a pensive look.

No, not exactly. But he lived in Paris for a long time. I believe he was 16 or 17 when he moved here, and he left soon after the May ‘68 riots. A friend of his set him up first on a kibbutz and then he bought his own farm; mostly we grew corn in the Hula Valley. The farm brought in some income, but it was his art that afforded us a better lifestyle. He painted in his studio, I rarely went into it, and sometimes my father left for showings, but mostly he was home. He liked his privacy and spending time with his family. But after my mother’s passing…I suspect my father got lonesome for other days.

The waitress arrived, setting Uncle Claude’s coffee down as she glanced at Serine, who held her hand out. Rien pour mois, merci, she said, and the waitress left.

So, what did your mother say about her time in Paris? Serine asked, switching seamlessly back into English.

Very little, Anna replied. She told me she’d studied Art at the Sorbonne, but only one semester counted since the school closed during the riots.

My father used to talk about that. The very first painting he showed when he returned to the art world was of the riots.

My mother wrote a book, it’s out of print, but a couple of years after she returned from Paris, while she was in graduate school, she published a book of essays and observations on the movement.

Yes, Serine said. I’ve read the book. Not many personal details, but very informative.

A twenty-something man in a Yellow Jacket vest ran across the idyllic street, right into oncoming traffic. He put his hands up for the cars to stop, and they did, with a wave of horn-honking and halting of breaks. He started gesticulating and shouting in French. Serine looked down at the table, but Anna watched the kid look into the faces of the people still in their cars before sirens blared from down the street and the kid ran off.

And we’re taking part in history now, Daniel interjected. Look at all the protests just in France alone….

Yes, I know, I’ve seen it on the news, what’s going on, Serine replied. My father was known as The Protest Painter. Serine took her sunglasses off for a second and Anna could see her eyes. They were bright and dark, eyes that might hold sage, desert wisdom. You know, the rest home my father’s in, it’s only a few blocks away, if you’d like to see him.

A wave of nervousness at actually meeting this man washed over Anna. Then she glanced at Daniel and said, We’d love to go.

Claude took a long sip of his coffee, as did Daniel and both men stood up as Anna put some money on the table, stopping Claude when he tried to pay for his own. If you’re going to go, then I should head home, Claude said, half bowing as they turned to leave. He was your mother’s great story, go with Serine, not with me. Perhaps I’ll stop by his home to visit some other time, Uncle Claude went on as they stood before the street, Daniel lugging the large box onto the sidewalk as they began to part ways.

Please, see us again before we go, Anna said to her uncle, hugging him.

I will, most definitely. And it was nice seeing you again, Claude went on, waving at Serine before he shuffled down the street. Anna watched her uncle leave, wondering if he might be avoiding this man.

The home is only a few blocks away but with that box we should take a taxi, Serine suggested before her arm immediately shot out and a white cab stopped in front of them.

It was a short drive to the address Serine gave. The driver hummed to the jazz playing on the taxi’s radio as Serine explained that her father had chosen this rest home because it was near the apartment he’d kept in Paris for many, many years. Like returning home he said, Serine explained as the cab stopped and she paid the driver. But it’s a nice rest home and they have an Urgent Care Center right in the facility with a doctor on call. My father has had skin cancer twice; and they found a lump in his throat, they think it might be more cancer. He needs a doctor on call, she said. He’s been getting sick a lot lately. She looked down at her hands and Anna sensed an undercurrent of worry, though she did not expect Serine to explain her concerns to near perfect strangers.

It’s right there, Serine instructed, pointing to a white structure that stood four stories high and seemed to have one foot in the eighteenth century and another in the wholly modern world of glass sliding doors and metal callboxes.

Serine walked in first, nodding to a man in a gray security uniform before approaching the desk. She spoke in hurried French, using more words than Anna knew. She wished for a moment that her mother was here to translate and then remembered—as if she’d ever forgotten—that her mother was gone. Moments like this, lapses in her new reality, had been happening regularly in the last few months. You just need to sign in, Serine instructed, pointing to a clipboard with a long sheet of lined paper after she’d signed in herself. Anna could not read what the clipboard said, but she signed her name on a line, stepping over so Daniel could do the same.

There we go, Serine said, smiling as she led them to a staircase, which they ascended to the third floor. The rest home had a lived-in feel, like coming by for dinner at the home of a busy colleague. Most of the older people congregated on the second floor, in a single, all-purpose room with a TV and craft tables, a lounge area and large windows that let in the sunlight.

It’s nice here, Anna observed as they ascended the stairs, noting the framed still-life paintings and posh red carpet of the third story. Finally, Serine stopped in front of a door with a brass 24 on it.

My father picked it out, Serine replied, knocking twice before taking a key from her pocket and slipping it into the lock. He could have lived anywhere with the money he made from the sale of the farm, but he wanted to be in this neighborhood, she explained, opening the door and letting them in.

It was dark in the room. A single lamp radiated a heavy yellow glow, and the bulky maroon curtains were drawn, though a sliver of light fell through a crack in the panels, resting on a wooden bed with a dark blue comforter. Anna noted the Turkish carpet on the floor and the dresser littered with tiny knick-knacks, some of them standing up, some fallen over, as if they’d been left by a child. There were paintings on the walls, some of protests, faces and fists raised valiantly and another of a large cement wall. They were abstract, almost cubist and Anna remembered prints of some of these paintings sitting in her mother’s study. As she walked closer, Anna could make out old pictures—dull, aged photographs with worn edges in blackening metal frames. There was one of a tall, middle aged man with black hair holding a little girl on his shoulders and another of that same man standing arm-in-arm with a tall, thin woman with long black hair and doe eyes.

A boom came from the corner and Anna turned to find an old man coughing. The coughing continued for several seconds, and the old man grasped the chair he was sitting in for support. Papa, are you all right? Serine asked and he shrugged her off. The elderly gentleman said something in French Anna couldn’t make out before he stopped, took a deep breath and seemed much better. The old man, when she finally got a good look at him, had shoulder length white-gray hair and yellowish, wrinkled skin.

Papa, Serine said, these people are here to see you. She coaxed the man gently before speaking to him in French. English had not roused him, but French did the trick. Remember, I told you they were coming. This is Anna and her husband, Serine went on in English, most likely for their benefit. Anna is Bethany’s daughter.

Yes, yes, the old man said in English, all of a sudden very welcoming. He smiled at them as if he were a pet devoted to anyone who would pay him the least bit of attention. He struggled to his feet and smiled, his face contorting so that it did not look happy as much as grotesque. Still, it was a kind gesture and Anna approached him, shaking his papery-skinned hand before taking the seat he offered her near his plush chair. I don’t have much in the way of sitting room, but please, take the bed if you like, he offered Daniel with a raspy voice. And please, put that cumbersome package down, it must weigh a ton. My daughter, she can stand, he joked, laughing to himself.

Papa, do you remember, I told you Bethany’s daughter was coming? Serine explained again, taking that condescending tone the young have with the very old. Do you remember what you told me about Anna’s mother? Bethany? Serine explained at, more than to, her father as if he spoke a different language. The old man looked at her, confused for a second.

Yes, yes, of course, of course. And I must say, he went on, very seriously, how very sorry I was to hear about your mother. My daughter gave me the news when my old friend Claude telephoned her. If I had known in time I might have tried to make it to the funeral, but it was too late when I found out and I am very sorry. She was such a wonderful woman. I had not painted in a long time; I’d given up until I met your mother. It was she…even after she left, she has been my muse.

Thank you, Anna replied. She scanned the cream-colored walls. Two pictures hung above the dresser, one a painting done mostly in the Cubist tradition. It was of a boy with large blue eyes and a mound of curly blond hair. The other was a more impressionistic piece and if the first painting had been done by a man, with its strong, straight, solid lines, this painting had to have been done by a woman with its smoother, more flowing touch. It took Anna a moment to recognize her mother so young. She was like a child in that picture, soft and gentle and wafting on a spring breeze. Anna wondered if this portrait had been done during the time when her mother had been with Stefan, the man she rarely spoke of, though part of Anna had always assumed that he’d lived forever in the back of her mind. Anna knew that her mother had had a life before she was born—yes, she’d loved her father; no, she hadn’t pined for anyone else, not in that way, but still, Stefan had obviously been with her in her innermost thoughts, and there her mother was, on his wall, a testament perhaps to the fact that the feeling, at least on some level, had been mutual.

I have always admired your work. My mother put some of your paintings up in our home, but I never knew she’d known the artist, Anna said, pointing at the wall. That’s my mother?

Yes, he replied. That one was done by a friend of mine. She painted it just before Bethany returned to America and finished it after she’d left. She sent it to me, and I kept it, maybe I shouldn’t have, but I wanted something to remember her as she was.

And who is the other one? Daniel asked politely, pointing behind Stefan’s head.

That was a friend of ours. He was a nice boy, a very nice boy— Stefan said after a second of silence. I usually don’t do portraits. Your mother, she made me The Protest Painter. I painted the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War protests, I’ve painted works inspired by the fall of the Eastern Bloc and if I weren’t so old and feeble I’d tackle these Yellow Vests, Jackets, Undershirts, I don’t even know what they’re called.

Anna does the same thing, because of her mother. Only she doesn’t paint the stories, she writes them., Daniel offered.

I’m a journalist, Anna elaborated.

She’s covering the Yellow Jackets? Daniel looked to Anna to see if he’d gotten the name right.

Jackets, Vests, I’ve heard both. My magazine calls them Yellow Jackets so that’s what I’m sticking with.

Yes, once again the world is changing. And you are covering it, how fitting, Stefan said, turning to Anna. So, you have it in you as well? he went on, eyeing Anna as if they shared something no one else in the room could know—the secret of the protests, the rush of the crowds, the thousands of voices all together in a single fight. Only those who had known it, really known it, understood the draw. So, you have come to ask me about your mother? he went on, coughing.

Anna looked at him for a moment, realizing how odd it seemed that she had come only a month and a half after her mother’s death to meet this man her mother had never bothered to introduce her to, this man who’d lived only in the back of her mother’s life, though she’d let other parts of her past, like Aunt Mary Anne and Uncle Claude, remain at the forefront where old friends came by for dinner and children huddled around the adults on holidays. It’s just that I have some things…some questions now that she’s gone, I feel like there are things about her I have to know.

I understand, it is usually the case that we do not realize the gravity of situations, of people, until they’re gone. You see those times in history, revolutionary times, they are conducive to love affairs that start passionately and end longingly, Stefan explained, the rasp gone from his throat as his voice took on a calm, ordered aura. He walked—perhaps it would be better to say he hobbled—toward a tall wooden dresser. Stefan rummaged around inside the