A Country Road, a Tree

by Jo Baker

  “Did you ever do this as a child?” she asks.

  He’s still not quite certain what they are doing. “Eh?”

  “Make a den.” She lifts a fold of canvas, glances inside.

  He takes a step back, squints at it. Oh yes. “No.”

  “We did. Once in a while. On a rainy day.”

  She ducks in underneath the canvas; he follows.

  Inside, the air is frowsty; the light glows through the fabric. Beneath them is the old rug, with its faded Turkish patterns. He arranges himself uncomfortably, draws up his knees, feels ridiculous.

  “You can work in here.” Suzanne blows on her hands. “It’ll be warmer.”

  “Yes,” he says. “I see.”

  She is pleased with herself. He smiles for her. It makes sense, of course it does, and it’s also utterly absurd. The two of them are hunched there in a tent on the rug, as though this is a game. As though later there will be nursery tea and bath and pyjamas and prayers and bed, and not just more cold, more hunger.

  “Do you want your book?” he asks.

  “Please.”

  “And coffee?”

  “Oh yes, please.”

  “It’s horrible coffee.”

  “Comme d’hab.”

  He scrambles out, unfolding his long limbs. He finds her book; he finds a cup and rinses it. He dawdles over these little tasks, leaving her tucked away out of sight. She keeps doing things for him unasked, her kindnesses weave a mesh of obligation. He stirs in saccharine and watches the ersatz coffee spin and then fall still. No question now of milk. He brings these things back to her, passes them through the opening of the tent and crawls in after them. He folds himself up, knees and elbows. It’s warmer, yes, inside the shelter, in their shared warmth. They are toe-to-toe. The fabric drapes above his shoulders. His neck is bent. He can feel her breathe. The world has closed down to this. To body and breath. Ridiculous.

  —

  He carries it with him like the stone in his pocket, cold and hard and unassimilated; it jolts against him with each footfall. He’s aware of very little else. James Joyce is dead.

  His stride takes him without thinking through the streets and through the fog, as it used to take him along the lanes and tracks and paths up into the mountains back at home, away from his mother and her blue scrutiny and all those domestic entanglements. It’s a January afternoon and it hasn’t been properly light all day. He passes braziers where men shuffle chestnuts, and the damp posters on the flank of a building, and graffiti, and the smell of drains, and the pâtisserie with one solitary galette des rois in the window, and the warm chatter from a café by the Métro Charles Michel—And so I told him he could go to hell, and Excellent idea, I was just thinking that myself and It really is the most extraordinary thing—that he realizes only afterwards was in German. The Boches. The Chleuhs. The Haricots Verts. And German is still and always beautiful.

  He finds himself where he should have realized he was going: the rue des Vignes; he stares up at the Joyces’ old apartment. The windowpanes reflect the fog and look opaque. This is the last place of their own in Paris: Shem’s books, he said, were still in there; maybe they still are. He recalls rubbed wallpaper, fingerprinted light-switches, the greasy brown telephone set: all of them polished by Joyce’s hands, grazed by Joyce’s shoulders, haunted by his breath. The people living here will have no idea that they’re buffering up against this extraordinary ghost.

  Because James Joyce has died in Switzerland. But it’s Paris that he’ll haunt.

  Police, gendarmes, coming round the corner from the rue Bruneau. It doesn’t do to be seen loitering. He steps down on to the road. He feels the weight of an arm on his, catches the click of a walking stick, a voice whispering in his ear. The inconvenience; what a panic over the latest bobard, he doesn’t believe a word of it, not a word. Can the world not get by without another war? His Wake may as well have been published in secret for all the notice it’s received.

  All that brilliance tied to a failing body, to be dragged round like a tin can on a string.

  He walks on.

  In the cold, in the fog, his feet measuring out distances, he tugs at his cuffs, turns his head against his collar. Still, faintly, there is the scent of the old man’s pomade and cheroots and lemon soap. There’s a song in his head, “The Salley Gardens,” sung in that astonishing quavering voice, and the taste of whiskey at the back of his tongue, and, and, and—that thrill in the blood at finding himself favoured, at being accepted into that charmed circle. Of being useful to a man like that. And then the sick lurch of the hand-me-down coat, and the favour by proxy.

  He rubs his hands over his head; the hair stands up in fuzz.

  He walks on.

  But Paris isn’t Paris any more. He walks past the closed shops and the stripped trees, and a confiserie with a display of pasteboard confections, an étalage factice, and the quiet, skinny kids on their way back home from school, and the off-duty German soldiers strolling past in their good coats, and the lean women with their shawls and baskets and their pinched looks, and the potholes in the road and the red banners hung like washing from the balconies, and the nervy scavenging dogs and the flights of shabby pigeons and the sandbags stacked on the pavement, where policemen stand and watch him pass. Let them ask for his papers. He has papers. He doesn’t care who sees them.

  He walks on.

  It is a cold world, and Joyce has turned away from it and finally woken from the nightmare.

  And with Shem gone, everything is different. After Joyce, what is the point of writing? What else is there to say?

  —

  He keeps a tally in his head; he keeps an eye out. Neighbours, acquaintances, familiar faces: he ticks them off when he spots them in the street, in the boulangerie queue or in a café. There are so many people, too many people to keep track of—the shop girls and the young curé and the old fellows who play boules on the square, and the new mother with the child strapped into a second-hand baby carriage, who has that anxious jostling air because the baby’s needs are so much more urgent than her own. And the two ladies at the pressing whom he passes, and the office-bound functionary. This, for the moment, is something he can do. He can notice. He can keep a kind of reckoning. That, and one cigarette, even now that cigarettes are rationed, for that shabby-smart old fellow, the sale métèque who’d asked him the time on the Place Falugière. He’s saving it for when he sees him again.

  It’s easier with friends, with people he actually knows. He can ring them up. He can call round to their apartments; he can drop by their haunts. No, no, he can’t stay, no, he won’t take anything. He happened to be passing and thought he’d look in and say hello: so, hello. No, really, he can’t stay. No, really. Well, maybe just a small one.

  Alfy has been demobbed. He is back teaching at the Lycée. Still the sturdy cheerful presence that he always was, but his cheeks hollow now and his eyes haunted, after the defeat. Always ready for a drink, a chat, sometimes a game of tennis; but also always glancing discreetly at his watch. Yes, they must get together and make some headway with that translation; how has he been getting on with it alone? Himself, oh, busy, busy. So busy, really; it breaks his feet; never a moment’s peace. Will have to dash, because. Has to go and meet someone. Right out of the way; pretty much the opposite direction to where you’re going. Wherever you are going. So he’ll make his farewells now.

  Alfy’s not necessarily lying, but there’s a lot of flannel here, a lot of bluff. Something is not being said. And since Alfy clearly prefers not to confide, he doesn’t really feel that he can say anything more than a platitudinous Take care. They part at the corner; he watches till Alfy reaches the next crossroads, and turns away. No backward glance.

  Well, that was Alfy, and he was, for that one moment, there. He marks his friend off, on the tally in his head.

  Tick.

  —

  He walks on, all the way to Mary Reynolds’s house on the rue Hallé. It is calm and dim and co
ol after the bright street, and she draws him inside as though these are the first steps of a dance. He follows her into the shadows, with her pale nape and the cornsilk of her cropped hair. She pours him a fine, offers him a seat. She puts on a ’78 and he melts into the chair.

  For a while they just listen, sip. But he must know how she is faring, so “How are you getting on?” he asks.

  She laughs, shakes her head. She had thought that she’d get so much work done here, back in Paris, that’d she’d just hole up at home and make her books. That there’d be nothing else to do. But the reality is that she is getting nothing done; she can’t bring herself to do it. She can’t make it feel important any more: it has no context, it makes no sense, it just doesn’t matter.

  “Does it have to matter?”

  “I’m used to it mattering.” She shrugs. “And then everything is such a fag, these days! Just the bare essentials take up so much of one’s time and energy. Living is a vocation now; life’s an art. One must carve it out for oneself every day.”

  She moves to lift her glass; her long earrings catch the light. At least she is good at it, at this carving out of life. She does it with conviction.

  “Any news of Marcel?”

  Her face puckers up, half smiling, half a frown. “He’s quit,” she says.

  “Quit?”

  “Quit work.”

  “No.”

  She nods in contradiction. “It’s not that he can’t work—it is simply that he has decided not to.”

  “And that’s that?”

  “That’s that. All he’ll do now is chess.” She has heard it far too often, has got it by rote, is bored of it. “Art has become shop-soiled. You can buy and sell a picture or a sculpture, but you can’t own a game of chess.”

  The purity of that. That’s something.

  “Yes, he’s right, of course, I know,” she says. “But where does it take you, in the end?”

  Through a complex web of potential, towards an endgame that is at once foreseeable and shifting, into silence, stillness. “It’s rather beautiful.”

  “It’s a shame, is what it is. He was in Marseilles for a while, and Sanary-sur-Mer. He’s still planning to go to New York.” She lifts a shoulder. “I’m staying here.”

  She parts her lips to say something more, but then the needle shifts into the hiss and fuzz at the centre of the disc, and she goes over to lift the arm and slide the record away. She has no notion of what an indulgence it has been to him, the music. More so even than the glass of brandy.

  She speaks over her shoulder: “Would you abandon your home because you had house guests who wouldn’t take a hint? I’m not leaving. They can go.”

  “You’re right, of course. It’s dreadfully bad manners.”

  A delicious smile. “Shocking.”

  —

  When he leaves, she kisses him on both cheeks. He catches the scent of her powder, feels the coolness of her hair. He should be glad that she continues just the same, when so much else is changed; but he can’t quite work out why he’s so unnerved by her. Her words have stuck with him like ink on the skin, smudging in and creeping along tiny creases.

  “You take care of yourself, now,” she says.

  “And you,” he says. “God bless.”

  Stepping back into the street is like coming out of a matinée. Dazzled, heady with brandy, he ambles along, chewing on their conversation, her gestures, that cheeky defiance, all the way home.

  But where does it take you, in the end?

  I’m not leaving. They can go.

  Later, he lies awake, his back turned to Suzanne’s soft breathing, his toes twisted in the sheet, his shoulder denting the ticking and his ear pressed into the pillow. He can’t sleep: he is haunted by absences, by things unsaid. He can’t keep account of everyone; he can’t accommodate it all.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  PARIS

  Summer 1941

  It’s strangely cool for August. The sky is grey; the city is grey. There are grey-green uniforms on the café terraces around Odéon; German officers swing out of shops with little luxuries; they walk three abreast and take up the width of the pavements. Paris is a luxury they have allowed themselves; they indulge in it. They fill the city with their grey.

  He makes his way through all of this as if it is not real. The occupiers are silent images projected upon the city. They slip over him without touching. He holds his own pictures, his own images of Germany, in his head: the cool spires, the mist and stillness of early morning, the fug of beer-halls, strong paint-spattered hands, a crook’s smile.

  Remember this. The Germany you love.

  He takes out his cigarette pack, touches the tip of his last cigarette. This morning—in one of the Jewish neighbourhoods—the police made a mass arrest. They have taken hostages for the new French State. He is scanning through that tally in his head, for friends who might have been at risk. He must go and check on the Léons, at the very least. He puts the cigarette packet away and turns the other way down the rue de Vaugirard, and it seems quite ordinary, workaday, but normality is now a skin stretched thin and it can split at any time.

  He’s walking briskly, urgent with concern for his friends, when a young woman brushes past. She does a little half-skip to make headway. Her body doesn’t quite fill her dress and she has no stockings on, but she’s swinging along the pavement as though she’s glad to be alive. Charming, that, if quite deluded.

  She falters, slows. He peers past her to see what she has seen.

  There’s a hulk of grey-green on the corner. A knot of soldiers. For the time being they’re occupied with some lad who’s failed to show sufficient respect: he’s jostled, barked at; some German, some ugly French. His cap is sent spinning into the gutter. He scurries after it, ducks to scoop it up, then darts off down a side street; he’s gone. And then, amongst the soldiers, a fist knocks against an arm; a head jerks, a chin juts; eyes swivel round and watch the young woman approach.

  An arm swipes at her. “Mademoiselle, your papers, if you please.” And she can’t refuse or turn away. She has not that right.

  He’s in a rush, but fear slows time, so that one could feel the sluggish thud of one’s own blood as the papers are presented, shaking, and thick fingers receive the document. She is addressed in heavy French; the comments underneath are in German. He watches, approaching, as she blinks back and forth from one face to another.

  He is passing her now, and her eyes follow him round, watching as she might watch someone else’s balloon drifting free up into the air.

  His hands flex, grip. His thin boots plant the pavement and he is past her, and he has done nothing and is still walking on, and he can hear her voice crack with frustration: her papers are in order, she has to get home, she’s expected, her mother will be worried. These arrests, you see. And the heavily accented voices, the suggestion in French that they meet later to clarify the issue, perhaps over a drink. The German, muttered underneath, is a more intimate suggestion.

  And he just keeps on walking. Against all instincts. Because what good would it do to intervene? What use do you imagine you could be?

  No use whatsoever, Mother. No use to anyone at all.

  He rounds the corner, teeth stinging, his jaw is clenched so tight. He blunders straight into another man.

  A fumbled readjustment.

  “Ah, excuse me—”

  “Oh, hello—”

  And it is Paul Léon himself, his light summer jacket neatly buttoned over a pristine shirt and a blue silk tie. He looks as though he has stepped straight out of those satellite years before the war.

  “Paul.” They shake hands. “Thank God. I was just on my way to see you.” He touches Paul’s elbow, exerting gentle pressure, steering him away from the checkpoint.

  They cross the road together and continue in the direction Paul had been going, but now on the far side of the street. They pass, with the expanse of cobblestones between them, the knot of soldiers and the young woman. She is re
ally arguing now; her voice is shrill and insistent and the soldiers are getting fed up, shuffling; it’s not exciting now that she’s scolding them like a furious little sister. He sees the papers offered back and her grab them and stuff them away. She stalks off.

  “I was worried, when I heard about the round-up,” he says.

  Paul’s lips compress. “We plan to leave.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault, my friend. We’ll leave as soon as the boy’s got his bachot.”

  “When’s that?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  He nods. Good.

  “Though I have to say, we’re not best pleased. Lucie particularly hates these déménagements. There is so much to organize, and it is so disruptive for the children, and for our work.”

  “I know,” he says, though he knows he does not really know. Work is one thing, but children are entirely another. How one could look a life’s worth into the future and consider the prospect good enough to throw small people out to flounder round in it, to pin exams to them and think that it will matter. Instinct is powerful, he supposes. Blood and spunk and all of that, it pushes against sense. Love, perhaps.

  “I still expect to see him,” Paul says.

  It takes just a moment. “Do you?”

  He tries to see Joyce here, now, a blind man with a stick, feeling his way along through Paris under occupation. Outraged at the inconvenience of it all.

  “I knew he wasn’t well, but it just didn’t occur to me that he would die.”

  “Fifty-eight,” he says. “It’s not old.”

  “I thought maybe we would have another book from him,” Paul says.

  “Really?” He can’t imagine what this book would be.

  They approach the junction with the rue Littré. This is where Paul must turn, it seems, because he slows and offers out a hand.

  “Ah well,” Paul says. “It’s good to see you, my friend.”