On his way out with them, he looked at Monika, who had been helping to serve the meal and was now gathering up dishes. She had an apron over her Sunday blouse—there had been an early Mass before his talk—and wore a pale charcoal skirt that was very tight at the hips and went to mid-calf. He could not stop looking at her. She nodded understandingly when she saw him with the legionnaires, signalling that he should meet her back by the kitchen door in an hour.
Except that it was almost impossible to get away, as military courtesy dictated that a man should drink as long as drink was being offered. Lukas was honoured among the legionnaires for his experience in battle; they had seen a few battles of their own. They suggested he watch out for the Reds among the Paris Lithuanians, and if any of them should prove to be trouble, Lukas could expect a few legionnaires with machine pistols to help him out. All he had to do was say the word.
It was good to drink with these men, who were straightforward in the manner of the partisans back home. The soldiers discussed the virtues of their way of life in the foreign legion, an option, they suggested, for someone with his experience, someone who might be able to lead men if he polished up his French. There were careers to be made in French Indochina or Algeria if one could avoid getting killed.
Even though a full two hours had passed since they entered the café, the men were not happy at first when he wanted to leave them. They had intended to drink with him all night. But they had become French in one way: when he said a woman was waiting for him, they understood immediately and released him from any further obligation.
Lukas lurched back down the rue St-Paul but did not find Monika at the kitchen door of the school. The whole building was locked up. He walked out guiltily to the rue Sully, where he found her on a bench near the metro station. She had a book on her lap but was looking at the trees that lined the river.
“I’m sorry,” said Lukas. “It was very hard to get away.”
“That’s all right. I expected as much and I was enjoying the day.” She looked at him as he flopped into place beside her. “Did the legionnaires do you in with their beers?”
“I’m a little drunk,” he admitted.
“Maybe we should go for a walk. It might clear your head.”
“Good idea. Just let me smoke a cigarette first.”
“I don’t remember you smoking when I saw you in Germany.”
“No. I smoked sporadically back home. I’ve taken it up again here. I think it helps me to relax and reflect, and it helps to pass the time.”
“I thought you were frightfully busy.”
“I am, but it’s a strange kind of busyness. Back in Lithuania, even though I handled the newspapers, I was in constant movement when the weather permitted it. Here, I’m sitting all the time. It makes me restless. Sometimes I feel as if I’m going to explode.”
“You just need exercise. Come on, let’s walk. It will sober you up, too.”
Monika was slightly maternal in this way, taking care of him, and he enjoyed being in her care more than he liked to admit. It was too soon to permit himself these types of feelings.
He butted the cigarette, rose, felt a little dizzy from the beer and then steadied himself.
They crossed the street and walked along the quay of the right bank, passing the bookstalls in the dappled light. The quay was full of people doing the same as they were. It all appeared so normal, so pleasant, as if the war had never happened. None of the buildings had any bomb damage. To Lukas it seemed both wonderful and slightly unjust that one place should be so lucky. Cities as well as people had destinies, and Paris was one of the lucky ones.
“What was it like when you arrived here?” Lukas asked.
“It was all excitement and light, even though the war was still on, but I don’t think about it very much anymore. When I was young I always wanted to visit Paris because my uncle was here and he seemed so sophisticated. He brought us Eiffel Tower souvenirs, and I kept one on my bookcase all through school. When I first got here I wanted to drink in every moment, but now it’s fallen into the background. Sometimes life here is very hard, for all the beautiful buildings.”
“Paris was the dream of a whole different class from the one I grew up in,” said Lukas. “I came from a farm, and Kaunas was already as big a dream as I ever imagined.”
“It’s important not to feel intimidated by Paris.”
“How is it possible not to be intimidated? Just look at this place.”
“Places aren’t as important as the people who live in them.”
“That’s right, but the two are linked. The people grow out of the place. They belong to it.”
“If that were true, no one would ever migrate. The Indians would still rule America.”
Lukas laughed. “I know I don’t make much sense, but some people have a stronger affinity to the land than others.”
“Are you homesick?”
“A little, but not as much as you’d think. I feel a sense of responsibility. I’m like a soldier whose leave has ended but who can’t get back to his unit.”
“But you’re in Paris—you should enjoy yourself a little.”
“I think I’m doing that. What’s your life like here?”
“I live with my mother and sister. I’m going to school at the Alliance Française in the evening to improve my French, and I have a new job in a pharmaceutical laboratory as a cleaner, rinsing the test tubes. I’ve applied to study nursing, and for that my French must be impeccable.”
“What do you like best about living here?”
“The slowness of things. Where we come from, the men drink vodka in shots, and once you sit down to eat you fall upon the food all at once. But everything in Paris is about lingering, about squeezing pleasure out of every moment. People sip their wine. The food comes in a stately procession, even if there isn’t very much of it and it isn’t very good. I like the way a cup of coffee can last an afternoon.”
“The Latin temperament. It’s all a bit new to me.”
She caught the undertone, the northerner’s belief that the Latin’s way of life was decadent. “I used to think that the Germans were industrious, but now I wonder what good it did them and who cares about their industry. I’m not talking about laziness. Look, the working people in this city put in long hours. I work full-time and study nights to make some kind of life for my mother and myself. But my free time is very sweet, especially now, when the weather is fine.”
They walked for a long time, past the islands in the Seine and the Louvre, and were coming up to the Tuileries park.
“I could go for one of those afternoon-long cups of coffee you talked about,” said Lukas.
“The café in the park here is very expensive. Maybe we should go to some student place by the École des Beaux-Arts, across the river.”
“The legionnaires were stuffing francs into my pocket. I think we can afford a cup of coffee in a fine setting, just this once.”
The scene in the park was like something out of a painting, the French children sailing boats in the fountain, the older couples walking in their stately manner, arm in arm, the lovers passing time on the benches. Lukas found it, as Monika had said, very pleasant. The café in the shade of the trees was agreeable too, with a waiter in a white apron who brought them the two cups of coffee with all the flourishes. The cost was the same as two meals in a workers’ restaurant, but some expenses were worth it.
“How is your head now?” Monika asked.
“Clearing at last.”
“And what do you plan to do next?”
He didn’t know.
He had passed up the chance to go back to Lithuania with Lozorius and was feeling a little sorry now that he had. The émigré government was supposed to be approaching the Americans about supporting his return to Lithuania, but he didn’t know anything about that. His lecture tour to America itself had been cancelled because he could not get a visa. There was no way to get in touch with the partisans in Lithuania except through a le
tter drop in Poland, and that avenue of communication worked very slowly. He had heard nothing from Lithuania since his arrival in Sweden. If he chose to go back to Stockholm, he would need to renew his residency papers there as they were only issued for three months at a time.
“I’m stateless, with two more talks to give this week and no plans after that. In the long run I’ll go back to Lithuania, but I don’t know what I’ll be doing a week from now.”
“You could stay here for a while longer.”
Monika was studying the children with their sailboats in the fountain and he looked at her in profile—the fineness of her chin, the fullness of her lips. She was like a part of the city, a human manifestation of ease and beauty. How was it possible that a city made a woman even more beautiful in this way? The French had the best sense of douceur de vivre, the sweetness of life.
“I would like to stay here, but I don’t know how it would be possible.”
“Remember when I said my uncle was in the diplomatic corps before the war? He still knows some people here. He told me you made a good impression on him and he asked me to speak to you about something.”
She had become very still. His head was totally clear now and he felt as if he perceived her more intensely than ever before.
“The Deuxième Bureau might be interested in you, and the French have a tradition of helping refugees. I could speak to him if you think you might like to stay here.” The Deuxième Bureau had been the name of the French military intelligence before the war, now changed to the SDECE.
Lukas weighed the proposition. It did not take long to come to a conclusion. He was marooned, and who would have guessed that exile so far from home could be so good as this?
“I think I would like it very much if you spoke to him,” he said.
There was an awkward moment. He lighted a cigarette and smoked it, and they made a couple of attempts at conversation, but they could not find it in themselves to spend what remained of the afternoon over their cups of coffee, so Lukas paid the bill.
“Do you still have time to walk?” Lukas asked.
“I do.”
They crossed the Seine at the Pont des Arts and began to walk along the narrow sidewalk toward the boulevard St-Germain. At one especially tight spot a car was coming, and he fell behind her. The street was empty and the shadows were already beginning to lengthen. As he stepped back, his hand brushed hers, and thinking it was a sign of some kind, after the car passed, Monika turned around to look and see what he wanted. He was right up close to her, not having expected her to turn, and in this proximity it seemed as if the right thing to do was to kiss her.
She did not seem startled, although he had surprised himself. The touch of her lips was so pleasant that he wanted to kiss her again. She did not seem startled the second time either.
SIXTEEN
PARIS
JULY 1948
LUKAS LINGERED in Paris, sleeping in a Lithuanian radio repairman’s shop by night and hoarding his dwindling cash reserves. Monika urged him to be patient, as her uncle tried to get him a meeting with someone from the SDECE.
The world that her uncle operated in, one of back-channel French contacts, moved very slowly. And even after it began to move, it sputtered to a stop again because few seemed to be very interested in Lithuania, let alone the Lithuanian partisans. And those who were interested had their own reasons. The French, it turned out, were not all that different from the British.
Wheels turned within wheels in France: the Communists had been important in the French underground, and they resented the concept that “resistance” could be attributed to anyone but them, or that the enemy could be anyone but the Nazis, as they called them here, to distinguish them from the Germans. It was confusing as well to the French that the crime of collaboration could be extended to those such as slayers, who worked for the Reds. Weren’t the Reds anti-fascists? If so, Lukas had to be an anti-anti-fascist, which made him a fascist.
And who could tell, as far as the French were concerned, which of these émigrés from the East was a former ally of the Germans? Hadn’t some of the Lithuanians greeted the Germans with flowers in 1941? It would have been preferable if they’d greeted the Red Army with flowers.
Already a kind of amnesia about Eastern Europe was setting in. One forgot about the place altogether, or muddled it so that Ukrainians, Estonians and Byelorussians were all the same, no more than renegade Russians. And to be Russian was to be Soviet. Anyone who opposed them was an old-fashioned white, a reactionary of the kind that filled Paris back in the twenties.
Lukas was confused by French politics and perplexed by this hostility to his nationality. People in France sometimes seemed angry with him because he insisted that his people existed. As one man in a café said to him, “All of you people from nowhere insist on your nationality more than anyone I know.” Lukas’s people were an inconvenient people.
Until they became convenient.
Forces that were as far removed from Lukas as the stars needed to align in his favour, and on June 24, 1948, they did. The Soviets closed down road entry to West Berlin to the British, French and Americans. The Soviets intended to starve them out, but the Allies began an airlift of food and fuel into the city. The operation was chaotic at first, with plane crashes, fires, and logjams of bread, gasoline and small-arms ammunition. To have someone from behind Soviet lines might be a good thing after all, and so Lukas became useful and the French noticed that he existed.
The transformation of his fate happened very quickly. Where initially his interviews had started late, making the point that he was an afterthought, or were cancelled altogether, making the point that he was expendable, suddenly higher officials in more pleasant offices were meeting him on time. The gnomes who peopled these offices began to consider him useful.
Soon after the airlift to Berlin began, the French government gave Lukas a visa, a generous salary and a room in a small residential hotel off the boulevard Montparnasse. Since his French was not particularly good, they registered him in a course at the Alliance Française on the boulevard Raspail, and there he spent four hours each morning working on his grammar, his future imparfait. He was promised further training in ciphers, radio, Morse code and skydiving, but those courses would come only after his French was good enough.
There had been a great rush to sign him up, so much so that he thought he might be back in Lithuania within weeks, and then the gnomes disappeared and there seemed to be no hurry at all. The bureaucrats had put him in a drawer and they would open it when they needed him. Every week an envelope with cash awaited him at his hotel desk, and his room and his courses were paid for. So he began his French domestic life; he had not lived so normally since before the war.
Late one afternoon, Lukas walked out and strolled along the street before the shop windows, studying the tins of food in the displays, the incredible variety of items he had never imagined. Prunes in Armagnac were familiar enough, but chestnuts remained a romantic mystery to him. They fascinated him because a childhood poem had mentioned the scent of chestnuts roasting in the streets of Italy. The Jambon de Bayonne, the dried ham hanging in the charcuterie window, fascinated him as well, for the meat was not smoked and he did not see how it was possible for meat to dry without going bad unless it spent some time in a chimney. He had never seen sea urchins or oysters, eaten asparagus or artichokes. Even the horse butcher provided him with a kind of dark fascination.
He walked through the Luxembourg Gardens. It seemed that everything cost money in Paris, but the park was free and the exotic palm tree in front of the palace by the fountain was a reminder of the unlikelihood of his existence in France. From there he made his way down the boulevard St-Michel and across the Seine toward the Bastille, to the small apartment shared by Monika, her mother and her sister in the Marais district, a decidedly less exotic part of Paris, the former Jewish neighbourhood now filled with working people and immigrants from Eastern Europe.
Dinner was always
rushed. Monika’s cheerful mother hurried them along through a light meal because she would soon have piano students in the apartment all evening. They ate bread and butter, and a bowl of vegetable soup on the side—not cabbage soup, because it made the apartment smell bad and some of the students did not like it. Lukas brought slices of ham to put on their bread.
Monika’s sister, Anne, was a university student studying chemistry and working in the evenings as a receptionist at a clinic, and she was always in a rush, like the other two. Lukas divined that one of the young medical students at the clinic was interested in her, and she returned his attentions.
After dinner, Lukas rode back across town with Monika on the metro, and this trip to the Alliance for her evening classes was filled with talk of their day. He had a few questions about French grammar— such as why they needed two past tenses, the imparfait and the passé composé. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have only one? And why one set of verb past tenses for speech and another for writing?
She laughed at him then and asked him if he knew how strange their own language was—how it had two plurals, one for numbers from two to nine and another for ten and above; how it did not distinguish between a hand and its arm, a foot and its leg; how it had no word for “bidet.”
Monika had lived long enough in Paris and her uncle long enough in France that the place seemed ordinary to her, whereas to Lukas it was still exceedingly exotic. Monika was his guide in this world, and the possessor of a larger constellation of friends, a group of Lithuanian castaways. All but the ones who had been raised in France were in transition, and had been for years, dreaming of America, Canada and Australia.
Monika kissed him in the corridor of the Alliance before she went into class. They kissed often these days, whenever they could. He settled in to wait for her in the Alliance student café. He was happy to have spent time with her and her family, happy to expect her in two hours, and glad for the book, Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de Nuit, to practise his French.
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