They both seem to see him standing under the shower, his hands all over his body as he thinks of the girl – this girl who can’t be very far from her.
I washed ‘myself’, she says.
I washed myself. And when I finished, I dried ‘myself’ with the towel.
What colour is your towel?
It is a blue towel.
What kind of blue?
Dark blue.
What kind of dark blue?
Like the night.
* * *
Never before has he used English to speak like this, to reveal himself like this – and never before has he felt so transfixed by her, and her language, and the strange momentum of words.
* * *
Carry on.
Then I go to my bedroom and I open my cupboard.
So you ‘opened’ your cupboard.
I ‘opened’ my cupboard and I took my clothes.
Describe your clothes.
I took a green T-shirt and a jean, a pair of jean.
Jeans.
And my pullover, what is dark blue, also like the night. And my socks.
There’s a long, in-held breath between them as he sees her come to understand what he is telling her. He is describing the clothes he is wearing now.
His happy day is today.
Go on, she says, as if neither of them knows this. What else?
Also, he says, I took my – what must I say for it?
What?
Mon slip, my boxing shorts.
Boxer shorts. Underpants.
Underpants.
She looks away, and he thinks he has gone too far, and that he will be asked to leave – but instead she says:
And what colour are those?
Blue. Those are blue.
Like the night?
Like – the day.
Hannah
A marble rolls its emerald fire across her belly.
Pierre
And what did you do then?
I dressed me. Myself. And I left the room.
Was the sun shining?
No, the rain was raining. ‘It’ was raining. My hair got wet. My hair was – sprinkling?
Sparkling.
Sparkling.
She adjusts her seat, shifting her weight forward almost undetectably. But at that moment he starts to believe that one of these days she might actually belong to him.
And then?
Then I went to the Métro, to the Odéon station, and I catch the train – ‘caught’, I ‘caught’ it – all the way to Lamarck-Caulaincourt.
And you came here?
Yes, I came here. And the rain, it was still raining. I arrived at your address and pressed on the button, on number six, and I came in the lift and you were waiting, and you said to me that I have stars inside my hair.
I did. You do. And then what happened?
I’m not so sure.
They are silenced, it seems, by their arrival in the present tense.
VIII
Hannah
It is only then that she realises her phone has been buzzing on the glass table – stuttering away from them in a slow arc towards the bevelled edge.
They both stare at it.
Please, he says, I do not mind. You must take it.
Not knowing what else to do, she answers the phone.
It is Dragan, one of the Serbs, the one who does most of the talking.
Monsieur Levi?
* * *
She moves through to the bedroom, shutting the door behind her.
Je vais venir cet après-midi. Est-ce que ça va?
She doesn’t know why she’s lying about the caller, or why she feels the need to lie in front of Pierre. Perhaps she is trying to maintain the illusion of being in control and autonomous.
Me and Filip want to see you before we go. Who is this Levi?
I have a student with me.
We are outside. We can climb onto your balcony if you don’t come out.
But I’m halfway through a lesson!
Cancel it. We want to talk.
What the hell is there to talk about?
We only want five minutes.
Pierre
He moves fast to the line of notebooks and flips one out from the far end, a charcoal book with a pale grey spine. He already knows she numbers them and is sure she arranges them chronologically. Since there’s no time to remove the other notebook from his bag and return it, he slides the new one in next to it, drops the bag on the floor under the table and pulls the sliding doors apart – the roar of Paris arriving all around him.
* * *
On the balcony are two pale blue wicker armchairs and a pot plant with a floppy velvety red flower that needs watering, but he barely registers these. Below him he sees two figures – black hair sleeked back, jeans, scuffed boots, tight leather jackets – and recognises them as the pair of young men he saw trying to get into her apartment block before. The one is pushing a phone into his back pocket while the other balances the camera on his shoulder and smokes. As they look up at her balcony, he steps back, out of sight.
* * *
Pierre’s family story is still sitting inside him like a dark wet toad. He has been planning it obsessively, trying to prepare for every turning and potential hazard. He knows his story has to get her attention. A girl like this could have anyone, anyone she wanted. And already she is hemmed in from all sides. By the man on the phone, perhaps by the two men downstairs. Yes – he has to shock her with a new experience, a new truth. Most importantly, he must make her care about him. Deeply. When she has heard his story, she must start to see him in a way she has seen no other man before.
* * *
I’m sorry, but we will have to postpone.
Hannah has stepped right beside him, her eyes glowing with what looks like anger. She doesn’t go towards the edge of the balcony, as he did.
Is something wrong?
I had an appointment I had forgotten about.
But – my story. I have it prepared for this lesson.
I’m sure we can get to it next time.
Is it because of those two men on the pavement?
She stares at him then, looking surprised, almost afraid – but still she doesn’t glance down towards the street. Pierre understands then that Hannah already knows about the two men, and that it was probably the men downstairs and not ‘Monsieur Levi’, the dying man, on the phone.
Next week we can do a double lesson. How about that?
What about this Saturday?
I’m going to London for the weekend, she says. I’m sorry, Pierre, but we will have to make up the lesson another time. And we really will, I promise.
IX
Hannah
Agreeing to teach Dragan and Filip was one of her first mistakes on arriving in Paris. They were there from her second lesson at Language Works, swinging in counterpoint on their chairs. She noticed at once how handsome they were. One of them alone she might have been able to consider an object of desire – were they not her students – but together the effect was slightly overbearing.
Halfway through the lesson, as they continued to murmur what felt like obscenities between them, she said that if they weren’t interested in participating, it would be better if they left the room. They seemed surprised and hurt but were immediately compliant. Some of the other students tried to reward her with suitable expressions of commiseration as the two young men walked out, but some rebellious part in her was sad to see them go. The room became far less interesting the moment they had left it.
But there they were after the class, waiting in the corridor, anxious and over-apologetic, asking how they could make it up to her. They were cousins, it emerged, originally from Belgrade. A few years earlier, Dragan had moved with his father to Paris and now Filip had joined him. They were both studying film at the American University of Paris and their dream was to go to Hollywood – and for that their English had to be ‘perfect’.
Your English c
ertainly won’t improve if you can’t listen to a word I say in class, she told them.
We were distracted, Dragan admitted.
Dragan appeared, at least at first, to be the more confident – or perhaps he was only more confident with his English.
‘Distracted’? A good word.
Dragan glanced across at Filip, who granted some signal of assent, and she understood then that it was Filip who had the greater status.
It is that you are too beautiful, Dragan said.
He said this with such a show of helplessness that she had to laugh – and they laughed with her. It was a relief to laugh. She didn’t want to cause a scene during her very first week. It was important to start off at the school as she meant to carry on: bright, professional, beyond reproach.
What we want is extra lessons, Filip said. You will teach us?
You can teach us together, Dragan added. So we can pay double.
By that point Hannah was more than usually worried about money. She could only afford to live in Montmartre because Santiago was sub-letting his apartment so cheaply, and following the renovation of her apartment, she only had enough to sustain herself for three months, and that was only if she lived off cheap wine, bananas and ginger biscuits.
As long as you don’t snigger, she said.
Snigger?
Laugh. The way you did today in class.
We’re sorry, Dragan said, but we do laugh a lot.
Mainly because there is nothing to laugh about, added Filip.
* * *
She held their first lessons in the back room of Le Refuge. By the fourth lesson, they had made it into her apartment. Dragan peered into her bedroom and commented on the size of her bed, the quality of her linen, while Filip followed behind with an old Sony camera perched on his shoulder like a black parrot with one blinking red eye. When she asked what the camera was doing there, Filip told her he took it wherever he went: when you were a filmmaker, you were constantly on the lookout for memorable images, and they were making a movie about being students in Paris. She told him that whenever they were in her apartment, it had to be turned off – and at once he obliged.
For the sixth lesson, she decided to take them for a walk – exactly as one might a pair of restless hounds – and they ended up at the Cimetière de Montmartre, at Truffaut’s grave. There Dragan tried to kiss her while Filip was filming the graves. She left the cemetery without saying goodbye.
By then she knew more about them: they had grown up in Belgrade in the shadow of the war, during which Filip’s father had established contacts from within the ruling party and made a considerable amount of money by smuggling petrol in from Hungary and Romania. Far from being ashamed of his father’s criminal past, Filip admired it. It showed that he was master of his fate. According to Dragan, who had been living with Filip and his father since the previous autumn, there was a photograph in the sitting room of Filip’s parents on a fishing trip with Milošević.
When they held their seventh lesson at Le Refuge once again, Dragan touched her leg under the table, and then Filip did, and she ended the lesson early. Since then, they have been trying to get back into her apartment. She met them once at the Cimetière de Montmartre to terminate the meetings, but they were stoned and a bit incoherent and wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Hannah knew she could report them to the language school or even the police, but what had they done, exactly? And hadn’t a part of her wanted it? Why else did she continue to see them? Why else did she hesitate at Le Refuge as their hands explored her – while continuing to correct their grammar, her face quietly glowing? When they said goodbye outside the café and Dragan kissed her goodbye, his thumb found its way into her spine – and did she not lean into him slightly, trailing his touch like a cat?
What renders her most vulnerable with the two Serbs is not that she desires them – which she might theoretically, but not quite in practice – but that they desire her. After a certain point, she has no will at all. She can hand herself over to a man just as she once handed her uncle’s car over to the road outside Birmingham – leaving it to spin off alone through the traffic.
Pierre
Hannah is walking one step ahead of them and they keep plucking at her – at least, the one does, the other follows with the camera on his shoulder, filming everything. It’s like a dance, a performance piece from some avant-garde theatre group: the beguiling woman and her two persistent clowns. Only, there’s nothing funny about the scene. They seem to be enjoying tormenting her.
They circumvent some scaffolding and cross the intersection at the post office. At one point, Hannah dodges a crocodile of schoolchildren on some outing, but the pair adjust to her as if they have been rehearsing this manoeuvre for days.
It is not that Hannah looks afraid – more like someone trying to climb out of tight clothes. Now and again, she says something almost loud enough to hear. She doesn’t use the voice Pierre heard in the apartment, which was suppliant, discreet, agitated. Now she sounds full of derision and flair, as if she has drawn confidence from the streets.
Hannah
Outside a theatre advertising a new production of Pinocchio, they press her into a corner across from the ticket booth, Dragan still talking in that edgy banter of his that probably comes from being stoned, and Filip looming into her like a surgeon with his enormous blinking instrument.
It will only be a short film, Dragan is saying. Just a few hours of your time. Why can’t you agree to it?
We can make the film in your apartment, says Filip.
Yes, you won’t even have to go anywhere, sniggers Dragan.
Are you crazy? I don’t want to see either of you again.
But we have been very good. Haven’t we, Filip?
What about the boy on the balcony? says Filip, still peering at her with his camera. Is he a student of yours?
Perhaps we can film them together, Dragan says.
That’s —
And there he is! adds Dragan, swinging the camera around to Pierre as if Pierre has arrived exactly on cue.
So this is the boy she likes to fuck?
Pierre is standing there, breathing deeply, as if he’s been running. But he hasn’t been running – he is furious.
Hannah?
He might look smaller than the two Serbs, but there is a rage in him that the other two register at once. It is a rage with more force behind it than anything either of them could conjure up, assuming they had the inclination.
Are you all right? Pierre asks.
This feels like a bad dream, where every citizen of Paris has become a student, a predator. He must have followed her here and observed everything.
What are you doing, Pierre?
I saw you. I thought —
He looks at the two Serbs, but already they are sloping off with knowing smiles, slowly shaking their heads, the camera slumped, leaving their fallen teacher to her fate.
As they withdraw, the troupe of schoolchildren descends, chattering like a flock of starlings. Their teacher, bursting from a blue dress, her hair an explosion of red, reprimands them good-naturedly as she wades through them towards the ticket booth.
We will be seeing you, Dragan says.
We will be phoning you, says Filip.
They slide Pierre another glance – but he is staring ahead, his face stubborn, apparently oblivious to everything but her.
I can’t believe you were following me.
I was – walking in this direction. Who were those —?
It’s none of your fucking business!
She wipes at her cheek and realises she is weeping with rage – or is it also, in part, gratitude?
I am from Africa, he says inexplicably.
What?
The story I prepared. My story. It is that I am from Africa.
What the hell are you talking about?
Why don’t you want to listen to my story?
She steps around him then, and around the children, who are to
o intent on the ticket booth even to look at her.
When she thinks she is free, she starts walking fast in the direction of her apartment – but again he is at her shoulder, delivering the story that has been building up inside him, a gloomy torrent that she has no inclination to hear.
I was brought here to France, he is saying. I was given to a white family to be adopted. Don’t you want to hear any of this?
Not now, Pierre. For God’s sake – please!
When the supermarket appears before them, she enters, hoping to shake him off at the turnstile – but still he is there, trying to reach her with his talking, garbled and urgent, yet in sentences that sound surprisingly intact.
Whenever I close my eyes, I can see them. Even in the streets of Paris, or coming out of the Métro, always, always, I am carrying them in my head —
What the hell is this? she says to shut him up – as they pass the mounds of carrots and beetroots and turnips and other torn-up, raggedy plants.
They come when we are still asleep, before the sun is up —
I don’t have time for this.
When they look at you, they don’t see you, they have too many ants – ants inside their heads. Boys, they are boys mostly, most of them blind.
Please, Pierre. You aren’t making any sense. Can’t you just —
They are the Interahamwe!
The who?
He stares at her with disbelief.
You don’t even know who they are?
What are they? Spirits? Phantoms? What?
They are the walking dead, yes, but they have guns. They are children with guns who can kill hundreds every week. The Interahamwe are the Hutu militias that are coming from Rwanda.
What are you saying, Pierre? That you are from Rwanda?
They have stopped at the bread – stacked rolls and baguettes, a fragrant abundance – but neither of them is aware of this, nor of the people who have paused their trolleys to stare at them.
I am from the Congo, he says, he almost yells at her. They come and they ask for money, and if you give, they kill you, and if you don’t give, they kill you. My father’s genitals they cut out and they throw them in the yard for the dogs to eat, my mother and my sisters they rape —
I can’t —
The White Room Page 8
