‘No, no school for a while. That will be fun, won’t it? We can play together all day.’ This sounded much better, not like any kind of deprivation at all.
They each had one suitcase and a gas-mask.
‘You can bring a toy, if you like, there’s room for Tiger.’ Tiger, whiskerless and with half a tail, had slept with him all his life. He shook his head.
His father drove erratically, under a never-ending rain of exclamations and pleadings for care from his mother, down the long roads of the French countryside, through forests and cornfields; sometimes crowds of refugees clogged the highway, sometimes the road was all theirs.
As they travelled southwards the wheat gave way to maize, and the elegant eighteenth-century cháteaux of their friends turned into squat grey-stone castles with turrets and moats. Hussain was thrilled.
After four days they arrived at a romantic, little fortress halfway up a Dordogne hillside which was wooded with sweet chestnut trees. Their host, a middle-aged nouveau-riche, was flirting with Hussain’s mother on the gravelled terrace when a manservant appeared, empty handed; he coughed for his master’s attention, then said something to him in a low voice.
‘They’ve crossed the Loire! Incredible! The filthy Boches have crossed the Loire. Dear God, what have we done that you should punish us this way?’
‘We must be on our way immediately,’ his mother said, and within minutes they were back in the hot little Lagonda waving goodbye to the regretful industrialist and his wife from inside a cloud of white dust.
By the time Marshal Pétain signed his shameful peace with Hitler they were aboard a sardine fishing-boat on their way to Casablanca where, it was said, some units of the French army were organizing a counter-invasion.
His father at once reported to the office of the commandant of the French regiment which he would have joined earlier had he not obtained an exemption from military service on the grounds of his mental health.
‘My health is excellent. It is all a misunderstanding! I want to defend my country,’ he announced. He was put in jail while the commandant decided whether he should be prosecuted for desertion or for obtaining false papers.
Then Pétain ordered the army to disband, and after some show of reluctance, the HQ in Algiers enforced the order. His father was released, then re-arrested and taken away in handcuffs.
At this time, Hussain acquired a healthy contempt for authority. He also realized that he was not exactly French. One of the first actions of the collaborationist régime was to set up a committee to review all the naturalizations granted to foreigners in the previous twenty years, with the purpose of stripping ‘undesirables’of their French citizenship.
‘Don’t take any notice of that high-minded nonsense,’ his mother instructed him. ‘They don’t give a damn about the citizenship. What Pétain wants is to strip the Rothschilds of their money to run his stinking little government.’
In consequence, the French community in Casablanca divided into the pure French and the naturalized families. The latter, a group including Russians, Rumanians, Mexicans and a few Iranians like, themselves, urgently discussed the best destination if they were made stateless – Switzerland? Portugal? America?
‘Your father is a fool,’ one of his mother’s friends told Hussain, straightening his collar with a gesture of pity. ‘He wants to run with the stag and hunt with the hounds at the same time. Of course both will pull him down.’
‘You are the man of the family now,’ another vivid Persian beauty explained. ‘It will be up to you to take care of your mother.’
His father was transferred from prison to prison, and they trailed after him from one fleabitten hotel to another, from Casablanca to Algiers, from Algiers to Marseilles, from Marseilles to Clermont-Ferrand. His parents’naturalization was revoked, their property confiscated and their bank accounts closed. When the military authorities finally released his father from prison, Hussain was twelve years old, a fat boy who was silent and wary with adults and uninterested in children of his own age.
He accompanied his mother as she made new friends in every new town. ‘Friends are the greatest asset you have in life,’ she said. ‘You can have everything you want if you have the right friends.’
The adventure which his mother had promised him began, and they made their way to the Pyrenees, to a tiny village where the Resistance had guides who would take people across the mountains to Spain. Hitching rides in farm-carts, meeting generosity in one village and treachery in the next, they at last reached Lisbon with nothing in the world but the clothes they had worn for a month and one diamond necklace, which was stitched into the waistband of Hussain’s trousers.
‘I shall go to London and fight with de Gaulle,’ his father announced as soon as his strength returned after the journey.
‘You will not,’ his mother told his father in fury. ‘France has taken everything we have; that lousy country isn’t getting my husband as well. You will stay here. We shall go to America. The Americans don’t grant citizenship one day and demand it back the next.’
With pitiful self-importance, his father took the diamond necklace and exchanged it for three tickets on a liner to America. Hussain looked forward to living in a country which was full of elegant women in satin dresses who sipped cocktails.
When they arrived at the dockside they discovered that the ship on which their passages were booked did not exist, and the agency which had sold the tickets was nothing but a vacant room which, said the concierge, no one had ever rented.
Although she screamed and stormed at his father over little things, Hussain’s mother did not fly into a rage over this catastrophe. Her liquid brown eyes were alive with thought. It was as if their total destitution was merely an amusing riddle with which she could occupy her mind.
They returned to their shabby hotel. His mother washed and pressed her clothes, pinned up her hair in elegant curls, brushed Hussain’s jacket, made him polish his shoes and set out for the house of the wealthiest person of their acquaintance in Lisbon. She told him, ‘Never give money to anyone who asks for it like a coward. They don’t deserve it. People don’t want to see ruin at their door; they want to see courage.’
With the dazzling dignity born of centuries of lineage from the noblest families in Persia, his mother explained to the marquesa that they had lost all their money and that she intended to make a living for her family by dressmaking. She mentioned, with a gay little smile, that she was well acquainted with the secrets of Patou, Lanvin and the other giants of haute couture. The marquesa smiled, too.
‘First I will need a sewing machine, of course, and I was wondering if perhaps there is such a thing in your household, an old machine for which your maid no longer has any use?’
They left with a sewing machine and a commission to copy two of the marquesa’s favourite costumes in silk. There was a great deal of fine silk in Lisbon at the time; a whole ship’s cargo of the glorious fabric had been off-loaded by a captain who preferred to get a bad price for it in Portugal than be sunk by a U-Boat in the Bay of Biscay.
The city was full of such goods and while his mother sat day and night at her sewing machine, Hussain haunted the seamen’s bars, finding out where he could procure worsted, linen or crisp cotton at rock bottom prices. The marquesa soon became one of the best-dressed women in the city. Her friends sought out Hussain’s mother in dozens. By the end of the war she was employing a young Portuguese girl to sew for her, and Hussain had learned all he would ever need to know about buying, selling, marketing and clinching a deal.
His father sat in a café all day with one glass of fino in front of him, speaking to no one. His weak mind was dawdling towards insanity. Before they left the city he took his son to a brothel and propelled him into a narrow room which contained a sofa covered in poor-quality pink satin. On it lolled a delicious little whore, hardly older than he was, who wriggled towards him and pounced on his penis as if she were opening a box of chocolates. After half-an-hour of h
ard work Hussain’s penis had not stirred and she withdrew, red in the face and bad-tempered.
Hussain returned to the salon and thanked his father with what he judged to be the appropriate mixture of filial gratitude and manly bonhomie. Privately he assumed that sex was just another of his father’s foolish diversions.
The Paris to which they returned was a savage whirlpool of treachery and revenge, where the pickpockets and streetwalkers were being crowded out of the jails by hundreds of distinguished people accused of collaboration with the Nazis. Hundreds more were escaping to the country until the storm died down.
‘Why are they doing that?’ he asked his mother as they were pushed off the pavement by a crowd who had shaved the heads of two young girls and were spitting on them and tearing their clothes.
‘They were whores for the Germans,’ she told him. ‘Crazy French. They are not denouncing the farmers who fed them or the shopkeepers who served them – oh no. You can’t be a traitor if you sell cabbages. That’s their idea of honesty.’
‘You will see,’ she told him later, ‘they will give the Rothschilds back everything, but when we ask for our property – well, you will see. There’s no advantage to them in dealing fairly with us. French justice is only for the French.’
It was exactly as she predicted. The Avenue Foch apartment belonged to a family of the haute bourgeoisie whose deeds were judged to be perfectly legal. Of the Shahzdeh bank accounts there was no trace. In due course a very small sum in compensation was granted to them.
‘Give me the money!’ his father demanded, swaying as he stood up. ‘I will make us rich again. I feel lucky, I shall go to the casino …’ His mother simply ignored her husband. Realism had become a conspiracy between her and her son.
In the angry city, there was no sugar, no coffee, no toilet paper, no soap, no petrol, no clothes.
‘Naturally, they denounce everybody,’ his mother said. ‘What else is there to think about? Only hunger. If you can’t have a full stomach you can always enjoy the execution of some petty official who used to eat too much.’
Hussain ran into this maze of deceit like a hungry rat. His mother went from the house of one friend to another, drinking bitter coffee and gossiping. Hussain accompanied her and listened. This woman wanted tyres for her automobile, that one needed a bigger apartment for her family, another had a daughter getting married and not so much as a metre of net for the wedding veil.
There was a bar in the Rue St-Antoine where the racketeers gathered. They made a pet of Hussain, now a chubby adolescent with a fat backside and cheerful blackbird eyes. He had an air of trustworthiness which was partly due to his ignorance but increasingly a function of the fact that he was trustworthy. What he promised, he delivered. If he could not deliver, he did not promise. There was no side to him, no pretension. Not for him the silk Italian ties and the alligator shoes, the pimplike accoutrements of his profession. He looked almost like a school-boy, not quite deserving of his long trousers; thus even his sexual deficiency worked to his advantage.
Of course, there were bad types who thought they could put one over on the kid. Hussain sold a car for one of his mother’s friends and was attacked in the labyrinthine passages of the St-Germain Métro by two men who stole the money. The same night the man who had bought the car was also attacked, and his face slashed from temple to chin with a cut-throat razor. The scar needed thirty-two stitches, and ever afterwards advertised the loyalty of Hussain’s friends.
As well as blackmarket goods, Hussain dealt in influence. A carte grise for a stolen vehicle? ‘I’ve heard of a man who might be able to help. Give me twenty-four hours.’ A good name for a cabaret dancer who performed for the Nazis? ‘Naturally, Mademoiselle did no such thing. People will say anything. I think I know someone who can help …’ Paris became a vast mosaic of needs and supplies, set in a symmetrical design by his avid memory.
His methods were so subtle he was nicknamed le p’tit gentilhomme. To bribe a minor official, he would sit with him in a small bar in a part of town where the man was not known, and explain directly what he wanted. His watch would be on the table in front of him, as if he were timing the conversation. Hussain’s watch was the only ostentatious thing about him; its heavy gold bracelet strap winked in the sunlight on a bright day. A few minutes of polite conversation, some enquiries into the man’s personal life and his own needs, then Hussain would pay and leave. His watch remained. If the man could not help, he would run after Hussain and return the watch. This happened only once.
Ceaseless activity made him thinner. By the time Hussain celebrated his twentieth birthday he still had a soft-bodied fleshiness, with chubby cheeks and bright eyes, but he had acquired a certain elegance. He looked like what he was – a master fixer.
His father’s last refuge from reality was religion and the old man passed his days in the coffee shop by the mosque behind the Jardin des Plantes, sitting at a hammered brass table staring blankly ahead. At last he died, and Hussain bought an elegant apartment on the Quai d’Orsay.
‘This is much too grand,’ his mother protested. ‘Whatever you are doing, it can’t be honest. A boy of twenty shouldn’t have such money. Hussain, promise me what you are doing, it isn’t bad?’
‘Of course not. All I do is bring together people who need things with the people who have them. There’s nothing wrong, what could be wrong? I’m providing a service.’
‘I had no idea you had so much money.’ His mother looked in wonder round the empty room, savouring the luxury which she had resigned herself never to enjoy again. The soft blue light from the Seine streamed in at the long windows, highlighting the delicate plaster mouldings around the ceiling.
Hussain now worked with his telephone; his deals were becoming bigger and bigger. In the French colony of Algeria, the communist FLN guerrillas had ambitions beyond bombing banks and assassinating individual administrators. They wanted war, and he spent much time eating couscous and drinking mint tea with men who were looking for guns. He derived the peculiar pleasure of revenge from supplying, through Beirut, French army-surplus arms to the Algerian revolutionaries.
His contacts – it was no longer possible to call all of them friends – were his lifeblood and he socialized relentlessly. In the evenings he would take his mother, always the picture of elegance in black crépe, to Procope, on the Left Bank, and watch her enjoy seeing Kirk Douglas or Vivien Leigh, or the Aly Khan. He would tell her she was still more beautiful than the Aly’s mannequin wife, which was almost true. Then, entertainment over, he would escort her home and begin alone a night-long circuit of clubs and cabarets.
In the small hours of the morning, when the bakers’shops were already perfuming the air with the aroma of the day’s first croissants and baguettes, he would reach Le Bambou, a little dive with a fabulously perverse atmosphere which always inspired those of his contacts who nominated sex as the sweetener they preferred.
The entire room was panelled in bamboo, with bamboo stools at the bamboo bar and bamboo mugs for some of the special cocktails. It was a high room, and at one end of it there was a scaffolding of bamboo with cagelike alcoves for the girls. Each girl had a telephone in front of her on a bamboo table. Clients could call up the hostess of their choice from the bar, and she would undulate down to dance with him. The lighting was a mixture of blue and ultraviolet, and some of the girls dressed so that their underwear would glow through their clothes in the ultraviolet beam.
Hussain sometimes bought cocaine or opium from the Bambou’s owner, Philippe Thoc, and often brought men there: the Germans and British in particular would sit with popping eyes trying to decide which girl to call. They were mostly Asian or Eurasian, with two obligatory Swedish blondes.
One evening he entered Le Bambou and failed to get his usual delighted greeting from the manageress, Ayeshah. She was sitting at the bar with a face like thunder, a slender figure in a white ribbon-lace dress. The waiters, the barman and the hostesses were shooting nervous glances at her.<
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Hussain’s experience was that other people’s trouble was often his business, so he approached her.
‘Why are men such idiots?’ she demanded. Women often treated Hussain as if he were not really a man at all, sensing his complete lack of sexual interest.
‘Which particular man is an idiot?’ His eyes were frank and friendly.
‘Philippe. Imbecile! You know there’s a Chinese proverb – once a man has tasted the poppy he has no use for love? Well, I don’t think Philippe has any use for anything. Love, money, his future, our future …’ She glared around the room, her foot in its black velvet shoe twitching with annoyance.
‘He can’t see what’s in front of his nose,’ she went on. ‘I can’t keep these girls long, now. Remember Pan-Pan?’
‘The one with the long legs, who wore her hair in a chignon with a long fall?’
She nodded. Hussain always remembered women’s looks in detail. ‘Well, she’s going to strip at the Crazy Horse. And Helga, too, last month. I can’t keep a blonde two weeks now. This city’s too hot. It’s jumping. Paris is the centre of the world Hollywood-sur-Seine! And Philippe says we are quite happy how we are and why change it? Paris is the centre of the world right now. It’s just a great big playground full of film stars and aristocrats, in their furs and their diamonds and their fancy cars. They have everything, they’ve done everything, they’ve been everywhere, they’ve met everyone and they’re absolutely bored so they still chase every new thrill they see. How can anyone not want a piece of all that?’ She scowled. She was in a vile temper, but instead of diminishing her beauty the malevolence added an unearthly aura of fascination to her features. Her French was heavily accented and inclined to break down completely under emotional stress.
Three men in expensively tailored, grey suits with lapels an inch or so wider than elegance required came into the club and stood at the bar. Hussain raised one eyebrow in their direction. ‘Know them?’ he asked her.
‘Who are they?’
Pearls Page 44
