A Coffin For Sparrows: Prologue
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The life Camilo Durand created for himself and his family in the 15th arrondissement was as quiet as a funeral. It was marked by the same tasteful white blooms in the window boxes as a funeral, flowers growing upright around the front door as if placed with love by mourners. One-hundred-year-old houses waltzed up and down the streets like coffins with windows onto the lives inside, each more quiet and unassuming than the last. This suited Camilo just fine. He knew a thing or two about funerals. Despite his dignified professional life as a translator and precis-writer for the United Nations, in another life he was dead of a car accident in 1967. That life came to a sudden yet quiet end, having bled out on a snowbank after flying through the windshield.
Today, Camilo was alive and well inside his little coffin of a home. Lautaro Shina laid in Camilo's grave instead, his casket lowered into the earth in 1989 never to be seen or heard from again. Camilo, once a meek and bookish man, took on Lautaro's character. His sharp looks, the steel of his gaze behind his dainty round wire frames. It was a clever trick, as if no one would have noticed the difference between Camilo and the tall, imposing Shina, a tiger in the shape of a man. Any resemblance was an amusing coincidence, a quirk of the light catching the faded remains of tattoos or scar tissue.
Each morning, the Durand household rose at 5:00 a.m. Camilo and his wife Katrine kissed once chastely before she crept downstairs to make coffee and breakfast. He went straight to the bedroom down the hall. Their four-year-old daughter, Amelia, slept in a room painted froggy green to match the color of her favorite animal. She was notorious for trying to open the door at the first sound of her father's steps down the hall, throwing back the white sheets and froggy green comforter of her big girl bed and crawling out to make her escape. Camilo always caught her before she could reach the door. Amelia delighted at being caught if it meant he scooped her up and carried her downstairs. She determined some time ago that her father's arms were the strongest of her parents and therefore best suited for carrying her where she needed to go.
Breakfast and coffee by 6:00 a.m., then showers, teeth brushing, and dressing for the day. Some members of the household were easier to dress than others. Amelia frequently found a way out of her dress at least once before it was tugged back on by one of her parents. Camilo always managed to get her hair braided whether she liked it or not, even with a toothbrush in his mouth or a shirt draped over his arm.
Katrine, known by neighbors for her sense of humor and lively spirit, could be mistaken for Alyena Tatarinova if one saw her on the street. Her neighbors didn't know that name. It wasn't a name that people were allowed to know, redacted from public records and unspoken by those who didn't engage in funeral-making as their principal occupation. Those who recognized the way she laughed, the precise way she moved when looking for the opportunity to close her hand around a man's throat, they understood. Most of all, they knew to walk in the other direction.
She worked a part-time job at a small law office. While Katrine enjoyed the three-and-a-half years she spent as a homemaker and full-time mother, Katrine now served as a legal clerk and tended to various administrative duties alongside the office secretary, Elizabeth. It kept her busy for three days out of the week and some evenings as needed. Some days she just sat around the office, making coffee and chit-chatting with Elizabeth about television programs or family holidays, or how their children were doing in school. Amelia always gave Katrine such stories to tell.
The Durands did not need the income from a second job, of course, but it was nice to have an outlet and something to do. Dressed smartly in a blouse (usually pastel), skirt (knee-length), and sensible pumps (brown or black leather), Katrine saw Camilo off at the door with a kiss at 7:15. Then she gathered up all of Amelia's things and dropped her daughter off at preschool on her way into the office. Camilo, dressed much like one imagined a funeral director would in his chunky black sweater, dark gray trousers, and black coat, drove into the city by 8:00 and out of it at 5:00. Then he picked Amelia up from preschool to take home before Katrine left the office at 6:00.
At the end of the day, the Durands reconvened at the kitchen table for dinner. Camillo often cooked; he had an adventurous palate and a hefty collection of recipes amassed during his twenties, although he rarely spoke of his own cooking with any pride. Katrine still liked to handle making their meals when she had a particular recipe in mind and Amelia could be corralled into the living room to finish her practice sheets from school. After dinner, once the dishes were done (typically by Camilo), the family would sit down to finish their glasses of wine and watch evening television. News programs, dramas, the occasional documentary special. Amelia took the opportunity to crawl all over her parents whenever they sat still, seemingly allergic to the idea of rest. She sat on her father's lap while she played with dolls or sprawled across her mother to ask a hundred questions about whatever they were watching.
Soon, Amelia was ushered into the bathroom for a bath. Ushered, sometimes chased in a thwarted escape attempt, but always clean and in her pajamas by 8:30. Katrine read Amelia a book until the four-year-old, despite her insistence that she was quite awake, fell asleep across her mother's lap. Finally, in the room where it all began, Camilo and Katrine returned to bed with another kiss. This kiss was sometimes considerably less chaste than the ones that came before it, depending on the tightness of sweaters or the lengths of skirts that day. The 5:00 alarm was known to cut the romance short on school nights, but they made time to talk about their days.
The Durands were happy. Life functioned the way life was supposed to. Their house was modest but contained joy inside its pleasant little rooms. Amelia went to a nice preschool. She made a few friends there and got through the day with little incident, give or take her tendency to steal or try to open locked doors when the teachers were looking away. The family all loved one another, and each had a role to play in this production. Father, mother, daughter, something sweet and simple for the family portrait above the mantel.
This was what Camilo Durand believed to be true of his marriage with Katrine Durand, in their little coffin of a life.
But the dead sometimes have other plans.