Paris Echo

by Sebastian Faulks

  I knocked softly and heard a grunt and a rustling from inside. Tariq, in his boxer shorts and tee shirt, opened the door halfway.

  ‘I’m sorry. Is Sandrine asleep?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ I paused. ‘I don’t imagine you can help. Do you happen to know what the word “glaive” means in French?’

  ‘“Glaive”? I think it’s a sword. There was an old folk song my mother used to sing to me when I was a child that had the word in it. I’m not sure, but …’

  ‘That makes sense. Thank you.’

  He seemed to be in a hurry to close the door, so I left him and went back to the living room, where I continued the translation. There was plenty more of the poem to go before the identity of the strange Vision would be revealed.

  I went down the hall to the kitchen and closed the curtain, then listened at the door of the storeroom. There was no sound. I locked the front door and went to my own room. In bed, I read for a few minutes, then turned out the light.

  It was not anxiety about having two strangers in the flat that kept me awake. It was the memory of Aleksandr and of what he had revealed to me. I didn’t like to be reminded that there was a more full-blooded, truthful version of myself that I’d decided to kill off in the interests of a manageable life. I turned on the pillow and made myself think of work, of the research that lay ahead, of the lives of women in Paris under the Germans. Theirs was true hardship. My own problems were nothing that sleep couldn’t ease or wash away.

  Five

  Tolbiac

  Laila had never slept with a boy, she told me. That was normal for most girls at home, but it weighed with her. It was a big thing, this little thing – lying on her back, which presumably she did every day, and simply parting her legs. How hard was that? It seemed such a small gesture, but I did understand that it was somehow more than that for girls of her age. It was not so much the religious thing, it was emotional. That’s what she told me.

  Her family were different from the rest of us. Her father was a businessman who was meant to know important people like sheikhs and presidents. Laila never said so, but that was the rumour. He wasn’t a big deal to meet. He was quite short and spoke softly. He had thick grey hair and a moustache and expensive glasses that made him look clever. There was always luggage of his in the hallway, a briefcase and a couple of leather bags with airline tags, CAI, MAD, CDG. But he’d moved his family around with him and Laila had lived in Beirut and other places that were less strict than we were. He’d picked up some Western customs and he was rich enough to do what he liked when he was back home. They went to the mosque occasionally but that was about it. One of the things he’d done was have a tennis court built in their garden. There was a public tennis club in town, but your own private court was completely unheard of.

  In the old streets of the medina and the casbah you can never tell what’s going to be behind a door. A gate might open on to just a room, or it might give on to a courtyard with a fountain. Laila’s house, a mile along the coast, was like that but more surprising. Behind the white wall with its studded door was a garden the size of a small park with trees that had been there for a hundred years. The first time Laila asked me in there it was like going to a foreign country. For a start, there was the dog, Sasha. Most of the dogs in town had been poisoned or shot over the years. There were some police Alsatians, a mutt who guarded the synagogue and the very occasional stray, but nobody owned a dog, any more than anyone owned the cats that slept in the covered market. Sasha, who was large and hairy, was allowed to climb on the sofas and the beds. He nuzzled into Laila’s neck and she kissed him on the head until he jumped down suddenly, his balls swinging in front of her face, and chased a squirrel.

  Ah, Laila. I’d spent a lot of time thinking about her on the twenty-first floor of Sarajevo. When I’d got back to Olympiades after my first day at Paname Fried Poulet, Sandrine wasn’t there. I asked Baco, but she didn’t care. At least without Sandrine I got to sleep on the bed, though it was hard to drop off with the others doing their door-banging and arguing. I wasn’t hungry because I’d eaten some of the less weird-looking chicken pieces at work which I’d stuck in a piece of baguette and I was bloated from the days I hadn’t visited the can. I did wonder a bit where Sandrine had got to.

  The next day I was on the early shift and when I got back about four after work, I found Baco to give her some money for the room.

  She put it in a purse and said, ‘Your girlfriend leave a note.’

  As she handed me a piece of paper, she said, ‘What the matter, young man? You look …’ She made a face.

  ‘It’s my belly.’ I pointed. ‘Here.’

  She cackled. ‘You no go toilet? You eat baguette. I see in your room. That way no one go! Come with me.’

  She handed me a plate of greasy-looking noodles with bean sprouts and fried onions. Perhaps it was her way of saying thank you for the rent.

  ‘Eat this.’ She splashed on some chilli sauce. It tasted better than it looked.

  I read Sandrine’s note. ‘T, I have found a better bed. Come round if you like. There is food and the heating works. S.’

  She gave an address nearby, in rue Michal, and I set off. Soon after Sandrine let me in to the warm apartment, I began to feel a mighty stirring, and half an hour later I emerged from the internal bathroom.

  ‘What have you got against this woman?’ said Sandrine. ‘You haven’t even met her.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, hearing a key in the lock. ‘But she’s American, right?’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So she’s going to take one look at me and I think I’ve come to blow up the Eiffel Tower.’

  ‘Maybe she’s not like that.’

  There was no time to say more, as the landlady herself came into the room. Hannah was early middle-aged – Miss Aziz country, that no-man’s-land where they’re getting on but not quite your parents’ generation. I had the impression she was not that keen on men, or not this one anyway. I guessed she was a teacher of some kind. But the apartment had radiators in each room that gave out heat, unlike old Baco’s which were colder than the wall they were screwed into.

  Sandrine got Hannah to agree to let me stay the night, though she didn’t look that happy about it. I just hoped she wouldn’t go to the bathroom for a bit.

  In the middle of the night I climbed into bed with Sandrine. I thought she couldn’t still be infectious.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m getting in.’

  ‘No, you’re not.’

  ‘I’m sick of sleeping on the floor. And I’ve been at work. I’ve paid the rent at Sarajevo. For both of us.’

  ‘Big deal. I’m not going back to that tip anyway. Turn over, I don’t want your wretched little cock sticking into me.’

  ‘Couldn’t you just …’

  ‘No, get off. Why don’t you get one of the Chinese whores to do it for you? There’s plenty round the Olympiades.’

  In the end she did allow me to stay, half-hanging off the side, but it was better than lying on the floor at Baco’s.

  When I arrived next morning at Paname at eight, there was no sign of pockmarked Hasim, so I walked around for a bit to keep warm.

  One of the things I liked about Paris is the way they tell you the name of the street on every corner. At home, there’s the odd sign put up by the French in the Ville Nouvelle, but not at every junction. In the medina, people know where things are, they don’t need signs. Yet in Paris, even in Saint-Denis (which in places was a bit like the medina), you’re told where you are every few steps.

  Rue Bacon was a street name I couldn’t help noticing on my early-morning stroll. Had some spiteful Christian mayor stuck it in there to annoy the Muslims? Like Shellfish Synagogue or Porkchop Mosque? It was a quiet little street, in fact, ten minutes off the hubbub of the main market. There was a tree with pink blossom and a notice about a lost cat that went on for ages. ‘Don’t let this impostor into your house … H
e is not lost! He is an opportunist and a thief.’ I suppose it was meant to be funny, but in the photocopied picture the cat looked like he meant business.

  Hasim had opened up by the time I got back. I explained that I’d been there on time and he nodded in acceptance. The thing about Hasim was that he looked beaten. I suppose he was religious and submitted to kismet or the will of Allah or some such thing. He told me he was proud of his little restaurant (you wouldn’t call it a ‘restaurant’, it was a kitchen with a wipe-down counter and a few chairs in the room out front, but I didn’t tell him that) and that ‘Paname’ was a traditional nickname for Paris. It referred to Panama, the country where the canal and the hats come from, but he didn’t know why it also applied to Paris. Frozen fireballs.

  ‘And what about ‘Fried’, I asked him, where had that come from?

  ‘Everyone knows what “fried” means,’ he said. ‘Think of KFC.’

  I suppose Paname Fried Poulet with its striped cardboard buckets was as close as Hasim could get to the Kentucky brand without being run out of town by Colonel Sanders. The word ‘poulet’ was also a bit doubtful. I wouldn’t say that what we fried in that deep basket was definitely not chicken, but I wouldn’t swear that the odd bit wasn’t from some other vertebrate.

  In charge of cooking was a man called Jamal, also Algerian, I guessed. Where Hasim looked so worn down by life, Jamal had a bit of spark in him. He was about forty-five, I think, and he wore an apron and rubber clogs to make himself look like a chef. He had a belly and a double chin with grey stubble on it. He had been brought up near Lille, he said, though he was evasive about it, and his first language was French. Occasionally, when he wanted me not to understand, he spoke some sort of Algerian dialect with Hasim.

  My basic work was cleaning the floor with a mop and wiping the surfaces with a pungent cloth. Hasim lived in fear of a hygiene inspection and he’d rather the food tasted of Javel than risk losing his licence. About nine in the morning two sacks of frozen bird bits were dumped at the back door. Soon afterwards came crates of sliced-up frozen potato from a wholesaler even further out of town. I think they came from Romania or Bulgaria, maybe driven in the back of an Iveco by a perve like Maurice.

  The ‘cooking’ first involved thawing out the meat in a low oven. My job was to go through the frozen sack, chuck out the odd foot and beak then arrange the rest on a flat mesh with a sort of trough below to catch the drips as the meat thawed and began to ooze. Jamal meanwhile prepared three bowls of different coatings. He had his own words for the stuff in the kitchen. On the board behind the counter out front, the choices were ‘American’, ‘Italian’ and ‘Oriental’. To Jamal they were ‘Farmyard’, ‘Mafia’ and ‘Nuclear’. He had a heavy hand with the cayenne, though there was one regular who asked for ‘Oriental Super’, which Jamal called ‘Anthrax’. The potato bits he cooked from frozen in a basket dipped in bubbling fat, most of which was collected from the trough. There was a sump beneath the fryer that I offered to open so we could drain it off and put new oil in. Jamal told me it was the age of the oil that gave the food its special taste and that Hasim would fire me if I touched the sump. Oil was expensive.

  I didn’t want to go straight back to Tolbiac after work that day. I wasn’t sure if I’d be allowed to spend another night at the American’s and I thought I’d stand a better chance if I arrived late, looking cold. Also, I quite fancied smoking a little kif, so I made for Stalingrad on the Métro, thinking one of the Africans beneath the tracks might deal me in. I had a few euros left in my pocket.

  At Place de Clichy, I jumped off and went across town on the raised outdoor section over Barbès–Rochechouart by the Tati department store, an area that also looked promising, I thought, if Stalingrad let me down. God, I loved the Métro. The speed of it, the weird names of the stations. Barbès–Rochechouart! I mean, what was that? And the views across the city …

  For some reason there was less activity than when I’d first been to the soup kitchen, with Sandrine. There was still a table, but no vat of hot broth, just a few bananas and some bits of baguette, which I now knew to avoid. There were only a dozen or so people lurking there. I asked a young guy if he knew where I could find some mild kif, but he didn’t seem to understand. I showed him a ten-euro note, and he scuttled off. A burly man in a leather jacket came towards me. I find these big West African faces hard to read. Like in Hollywood films sometimes you don’t know if the black guy is the loyal cop who’ll take a bullet for the boss or Mr Nasty who’s about to blow your fucking head off.

  As he began to speak I found that I was outside myself, watching, as I’d been that night at home when Tariq had gone into the sitting room to tell my father he was leaving. This Tariq looked a little scared as he listened to Mr Big African. He nodded his head like a kid being told off by the teacher. If he’d been a dog he’d have rolled on his back. The African was telling him that the whole place was about to be closed down. The police didn’t like it. There was going to be a raid any day and if he had any sense Tariq would stop waving his money around and get the hell out of it.

  I was back inside myself by the time I felt the last of his hot breath on my face. I thought of offering to buy a pink phone cover with a cat’s face, just to make the visit worthwhile (maybe I could give it to my new landlady). Instead, I went for a walk to try and calm down. I went up Boulevard de la Chapelle, then turned up rue de Tanger – Tangier Street – because the name reminded me of home. It was a shit road of modern buildings that someone had presumably stuck in to replace old ones. There was a better bit by a roundabout with rue Maroc (Morocco), another alley of soulless junk, before I came back onto a big avenue.

  I was shaken by the African under the tracks, I admit, and I wasn’t concentrating on where I was going or on my surroundings (I never do, much). I did notice a green shop that dealt in ‘dératisation’ and ‘désinsectisation’, two words new to me – though the huge pictures of rats and cockroaches in the window, along with the traps and bags of poison, made it clear what it was for. Maybe I should make a note of the number to pass on to Hasim – perhaps they’d come and de-rat and de-roach, then give him a certificate.

  Soon I was back at Stalingrad station and it was now late enough to start heading back to Sandrine’s new flat and take my chances with the American. I was in a funny state of mind, I must admit, having seen myself beneath the tracks, then had those reminders in the street names of the place I’d left behind.

  It was cold, out there on Avenue Flandre. Suddenly, I was starting to cry – which was something unheard of for me. I fought it back, swallowing and coughing, ashamed of myself. But this city just wasn’t the Paris of cafés and girls I’d seen on television and on the Internet. And I was so lonely.

  Then, as I was climbing the steps to the platforms, I saw a young woman coming down the other way. She met my eye, and held it for a moment. She had a coat that was unbuttoned, beneath which she wore a short woollen dress with leather boots to the knee and grey woollen tights. Her hair was half-covering her face as she leaned forward. The dress slipped a little up each thigh in turn as she took the steps down. I caught a glimpse of dark lipstick. A leather bag on a long strap was slung diagonally across her front. In the moment her eyes met mine I knew she was the other half of me, and I could never rest, or truly live, until I had her. I knew she knew it too.

  As she went past me, she tossed her ticket down on the steps, and I noticed she had folded it several times into the shape of a ‘V’. Then she was gone.

  Although it was dark and there were at least eighteen stations on the way, it was still quite early when I reached the Place d’Italie. I’d taken the pink line that goes north–south from La Courneuve–8 Mai 1945 to Mairie d’Ivry. Even for a Métro fan like me, these station names sometimes seemed a bit much. What was so great about a single day, 8 May 1945, that it had a station named after it?

  It was too soon to arrive at Sandrine’s new place looking cold and homeless. On the other hand, I couldn�
�t face going back to the twenty-first freezing floor of Sarajevo. So I thought I’d take Sandrine’s advice and go and find a Chinese hooker.

  The problem was, I’d never done this before, nothing like this existed at home, apart from the big hotels on the bay where the Gulf Arabs and the Russians went and fucked themselves blind on whisky and cocaine. I wasn’t sure if I was looking for a red light or a lady with a poodle or what. And would she laugh at me for being young, and would she have syphilis or AIDS and would my zib rise to the occasion? After half an hour of going up and down the streets near the Olympiades, I was so cold I had to take a chance on a shop called Beijing Beauté Massage. It didn’t say it was a brothel, but it looked a bit like it. It had paper flowers in the window and a price list of different treatments, one of which, the half-hour Swedish, I could just afford. At least it would be warm in there.

  The metal-framed door let out a ring when I pushed it open. There was no one at the reception desk, but after a moment a Chinese woman in an overall came out with a bucket and a mop and asked me what I wanted.

  ‘A massage, please.’

  She went behind the desk. ‘Which one?’

  I pointed at the list. ‘That one. Half an hour.’

  ‘Thirty euros.’ She held out her hand and I paid up.

  She pushed the mop and bucket to one side with her foot and said, ‘Come.’

  She led me through a door at the back, down two steps and into a dark room with a mattress on the floor.

  ‘You lie here, I come back.’

  So the cleaner was the masseuse?

  I said, ‘Do I take my clothes off?’

  ‘Yes. Then lie down.’

  ‘All of them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She sounded a little angry. I’d never had a massage, but in movies there’s a table with a hole for your face and hot towels and windy music. I lay down on the mattress. At least the sheet was clean, though with no clothes on I was still cold.