Paris Echo

by Sebastian Faulks

  After a couple of minutes the cleaner came back. She lit two candles and I saw she was now wearing a short dress with bare legs. She wasn’t bad-looking in a way, but she still seemed a bit annoyed, as though she’d rather be mopping.

  She took a cell phone out of the pocket of her dress and checked some messages, then knelt down beside the mattress. I shut my eyes and waited. I felt something cold on my back. Oil. Then she began to rub it in with circular movements of her hands. After a bit she went down to the back of my legs.

  ‘How old are you?’ she said.

  ‘Twenty-three.’

  She didn’t say anything, just kept running her hands up and down my legs. She put on more oil and gave my butt a good going over and one of her fingers trailed over my tizi. No one had ever touched it before and it gave me a bit of a shock.

  ‘You no like?’

  ‘No, I like.’

  Then her hand worked further through, between my legs, and touched my balls, which also made me jump a bit, though I wouldn’t say it was unpleasant. My zib having a life of its own, I had a huge boner by now anyway. There followed a bit more shoulder-rubbing and working down my arms, which was quite boring.

  After about ten minutes, she said, ‘You turn over now.’

  About time, I thought, as I rolled on to my back, my zib nodding in agreement. I wasn’t expecting any compliments, but I thought she might say something. Instead, it was back to the oil and working along my shins. As she came towards the top of my thighs, I was beginning to strain at the leash, but then her phone went off and she stopped to answer it. She rubbed a thigh with one hand in a half-hearted way while she gabbled Chinese into the phone. Eventually the other guy got off the line and she turned back and, showing some sort of consideration for the first time, brushed her fingertips against my bursting zib.

  ‘You like?’

  You bet. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You want more?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is thirty euros more.’

  ‘What? I’ve already paid.’

  ‘Is extra.’

  ‘I haven’t got thirty euros more.’

  ‘How much you have?’

  My jeans were hanging from a hook on the door, so I stood up and went over. I felt a bit of a fool, what with the boner. I fished around in my pockets. ‘Fourteen … No, wait. With the coins, eighteen. I can bring the twelve later.’

  She let out a snort as I lay down again, but after a bit of chest and thigh work, she touched the zib again and it snapped to attention. To move things along, I began to think of Laila helping to undress Farida while Miss Aziz looked on. Just as I was getting to the good bit, when Miss Aziz began to undo her own skirt, there came the sound of a baby crying. The Chinese woman pulled her hand away and stood up quickly.

  ‘Wait. I come back.’

  After lying there for about ten minutes, listening to the baby howl, I put on my clothes and let myself out into the freezing street.

  That evening Hannah, the American, cooked some dinner in the apartment and invited me to eat with her and Sandrine. It was something called ‘meatloaf’ that she said her mom used to make. I was worried it would have pork in it, but she promised it was ‘ground beef with oats, some tomatoes and a couple of secret spices’. It was better than it sounds.

  Afterwards, I lit a cigarette and, to make conversation, told them a bit about my day. I didn’t mention the massage because I felt ashamed. I had wanted an epic experience with Laila, not an expensive fail with a working mother.

  ‘Do you mind not smoking in the apartment?’ said Hannah.

  ‘Sorry. Anyway, what’s your job? Are you a teacher?’

  ‘No, I’m a postdoctoral researcher. I’m here researching a chapter for a book. About Paris under the German Occupation.’

  ‘The Germans occupied Paris?’

  She passed her hand over her mouth. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why? When?’

  ‘From 1940 to 1944. Did you not know that?’

  ‘History’s not my subject.’

  My face was hot and I needed to get back into the game. ‘I noticed today there’s a station on the Métro called La Courneuve–8 mai 1945,’ I said. ‘Do you know what happened then? If you’re a historian?’

  This seemed a good gambit to me, so I was surprised when both women laughed, Sandrine making noises like a donkey.

  ‘It’s VE Day,’ said Hannah. ‘The end of the Second World War.’

  ‘Did you really not know that either?’ said Sandrine.

  ‘Obviously not,’ I said, but it came out a bit defensive, so I tried to sound blasé. ‘These Métro stations, eh? What names! Barbès–Rochechouart. What a mouthful! Or is that a famous thing I should have heard of too?’

  ‘It’s just a junction of two streets with those names,’ said Sandrine.

  ‘Barbès was a revolutionary from Guadeloupe,’ said Hannah. ‘And Rochechouart was an abbess, the head of a convent.’

  ‘How on earth do you know that?’ I was truly knocked back.

  ‘I’m a historian.’ She smiled. ‘And ten years ago I lived here for a year. I was lonely. I had time to look into things.’ She was less scornful, a bit gentler than Sandrine.

  ‘And did this nun sail out and preach to this revolutionary?’

  ‘Not in person. I think Barbès lived in Paris anyway.’

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘when you’re on the Métro, you don’t just think: this is where I get off, nice café, or whatever, and I’ll be seeing my boyfriend any moment. You think about revolution and an old woman praying in a convent.’

  ‘I guess so. I’m afraid it’s too late to change now.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit tiring?’

  She laughed. ‘Yes. But it’s what gives depth to the day. It’s the silver behind the glass. Otherwise, life would be like being permanently on the Internet. Just one-dimensional. Click. Open. Shut. Click.’

  I didn’t have an answer to that. I felt this teacher-type had pretty much understood how my life was. Also, I didn’t want to irritate her in case she sent me back to Sarajevo.

  ‘Do you need any more help with your translations?’ I said, to remind her of my uses.

  ‘I’ll let you know later. Thank you.’

  I liked the implications of the word ‘later’. Warmth, bed, coffee in the morning. And I didn’t have to be at Paname until the afternoon.

  Six

  Aubervilliers–Boulevard de la Villette

  It was late by the time I’d finished trying to explain to Tariq (all because of the name of a stupid subway station) the nature of France as a revolutionary lay republic that viewed religion as an export only – preferably to its furthest colonies, like Indo-China. He looked interested when I mentioned Algeria, where the pied noir schoolteachers inadvertently gave the local Algerians ideas by talking about the glories of revolution. It was past midnight by this time, and I hadn’t the heart to send him off into the January night, so I said he could stay in the storeroom again.

  The next day, I began my work in earnest. After breakfast and a scalding shower, I left my lodgers to sleep on and went down into the empty Quail Hill street. To avoid two correspondances on the Métro and to stretch my legs, I walked to the Place d’Italie, where the city began to open up towards its southern boundary and the wide streets let light into the back of my eyes. On the train, with laptop, notebook and pens zipped into the shoulder bag against my ribs, I felt that for the first time in years I was doing what suited me best. At what point in my childhood had I known for sure that this detective work was what I’d been put on earth to do? I had, after all, had other abilities. I could play the piano to a half-decent level and had – once, anyway – played on the college tennis team. But in the end all those things had given way to the joy of setting out alone on a cold morning, awash with coffee, on a mission to redeem the lives of dead strangers.

  Looking back to my teenage years made me think about Warren. He was a funny brother for me to have – confident where I was ne
rvous, fair where I was dark; sometimes I found it hard to believe we were related. Warren was also, I think you’d have to say, good-looking – and no one had ever called me that. We were close as children but grew apart in our teens. I read hundreds of books from the library, haphazardly, and I guess this was when my vocabulary became a little ornate. I admired Southern writers like Faulkner and Eudora Welty and I had a long affair with English novelists, so much so that my teacher told me I’d started to write essays ‘with an English accent’. At college, I was up on American feminists, we all were, but for politics I really preferred the French, from de Tocqueville (partly because he seemed to be the only Frenchman in history who’d liked America) right through to Foucault. Jasmine Mendel and I had a special weakness for Julien Benda, who was a famous radical in the Twenties.

  While I was reading, Warren did vacation work in a canning factory and became interested in the business. I told him I could think of nothing worse than standing on a production line.

  ‘Listen, kid,’ he said, ‘I’m not standing on a line. When I’ve done business school I’m going into management, then maybe one day I’ll have my own company.’

  The way he put it sounded reasonable and I wasn’t sure enough of my ground to express how the idea appalled me. My father was proud of me for being what he called ‘philosophical’; no one at work, he said, had ever explained things to him in the same way.

  ‘But she’s so wordy,’ I overheard my mother say to him one time. ‘I can’t see how any man’s going to put up with that.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not all about men,’ my father said. ‘That’s what she’d say anyway. Being a feminist and all.’ Dad really was a very decent man.

  The working title of my postgraduate thesis had been ‘Work, Family and Gender: French Women in Occupied Paris, 1940-44’. My job in Paris now, as I had told Julian, was to develop it into a chapter for a book that my department head was editing. Five years earlier, Professor Putnam had herself published a biography of Jean-Pierre Timbaud, the secretary of the steelworkers’ union who had been shot by the Nazis, along with twenty-six other hostages, in retaliation for the murder of a German officer in Nantes in 1941. Putnam wrote with a popular swing that made some people suspicious, but her book had found readers outside the world of university subscription and its short fame attracted more funding to the department (the money, in fact, that had made her relaxed about taking me on).

  When I first read the Timbaud book, I’d been shocked at what little support the Resistance had had in France. ‘Killing Germans was unpopular with most French people,’ Putnam explained to us, ‘even among those who resented them. They shot at least twenty-five innocent French people in reprisals for every German officer killed.’

  I then read all Putnam’s papers on the period. They sure didn’t support the story of La France résistante. It was murky. When the Statutory Work Order was introduced in 1942, young Frenchmen of a certain age had three choices: to go and toil in German factor-ies for the Nazi war effort; to join the Resistance; or to disappear. For women the alternatives were less clear-cut. Men could be heroes; women had to survive, make deals, raise children. Only a few girls could take risks carrying messages by bicycle in the countryside; life wasn’t like that for the women of Paris.

  It was well known that for decades nothing had been published in France itself – no first-hand narratives and no analysis by French historians of the four years most people thought best forgotten. I remembered my amazement on turning to the back of the standard work on the period to look for the bibliography. There was none. At the time the book came out – in 1972, thirty years after the events it described – the author, a thirty-nine-year-old associate professor at Columbia, explained the absence by saying no work had been published in France for him to acknowledge, not a single book; he recommended a couple of novels for ‘atmosphere’ and that was it. His own information had come from documents in German archives.

  By the time of my own first visit to Paris, things were beginning to change. In the year before, President Chirac had admitted – half a century after the events – that the French government had been complicit in German anti-Jewish measures; but it was the conviction in 1998 of Maurice Papon, the prefect of Bordeaux, for crimes against humanity that proved the French state had not only authorised the deportation to Auschwitz of nearly 80,000 Jews, but had at times competed with the Occupier in a desire to purge more efficiently, as, for instance, when it volunteered French children and adults from the Free Zone to fulfil the Nazi train ‘quotas’. It was Papon’s conviction that had persuaded French historians to overcome their fear of bumping into ‘Papa’ in some town-hall document and begin their own investigations at last.

  Many of the books that started to appear had a political agenda of their own and most were written by and about men. For my own researches, I needed raw material – the gush of unfiltered experience. My college had provided me with passes to the library at the Sorbonne and pre-registered me with smaller organisations that specialised in the Occupation, Jewish history and women’s lives. I’d decided to begin at the Centre Jean Molland Mémorial Franco-Allemand in the Ninth arrondissement, a new venture under a German director, situated a few streets south of the Place Pigalle, near the museum of the painter Gustave Moreau.

  Twenty minutes after leaving the flat, I climbed the steps at Métro Saint-Georges and looked around in the bright morning air. It was a small, unexpected square with a statue to a well-known courtesan. Paris knew how to respect its fallen women; those down the hill, the plaque said, had been called lorettes after their local church, Notre Dame de Lorette.

  The Centre Jean Molland was on a courtyard that opened from the street by way of a small lodge. Inside was the Parisian atmosphere I remembered – old stone walls with modern glass doors and fierce central heating; as I handed over my photograph and waited for my pass to be laminated, I began to feel at home.

  My ambition was to be led by the recordings or the documents I studied to make discoveries of my own, to find still-living witnesses of the period. If a young woman had been twenty-two in 1942, for instance, she would now be eighty-six. So it was still possible. I wanted to find someone who hadn’t simply been alive, but whose experiences might illuminate the whole period.

  On the second floor, in a warm audio room that smelled of new wood and paint, I sat down in a booth and called up the index of contributors. It gave brief details of each speaker, but it was not cross-indexed, so I couldn’t enter ‘food coupons’, ‘Germans’ or ‘childcare’ in the search box. It was clearly going to be a long trawl, one which would depend on perseverance and a little luck. After a half-hour of looking through the catalogue, I made a choice.

  LEMAIRE, Juliette, born 1920.

  File 1. LYAT/WBTJM/KR/1943/8754/235A

  Recorded: 9 June 1998.

  The Centre’s summary read: ‘Detail of life of young woman, working class. Relations with German soldiers. Live-and-let-live attitude of neighbours. Black-market restaurants. Involvement in Purge of 1944.’

  I turned over my cell phone, put on the headphones and pressed the on-screen Play command.

  Young Juliette Lemaire was a Parisienne who had lived in rue de Tanger and taken the Métro each day from the local station, Aubervilliers–Boulevard de la Villette, to her work in a clothes shop on the rue de Rivoli. I paused the recording and found the rue de Tanger on my Paris Pratique pocket map, but the Métro station had for some reason disappeared. It looked a bleak enough area at the northern end of the Canal Saint-Martin, near the Place Stalingrad. Juliette spoke French clearly, with only a slight Parisian accent, and seemed to have prepared, or at least thought carefully about, what she was going to say.

  I was at work one day when two German officers came in from under the arcade. It was raining. They said good morning politely and began to look round. My friend Sophie was working with me that day. There were at least six of us at any one time. You must understand, it was rather a big shop and quite fas
hionable.

  I was afraid of these men with their polished boots and grey uniform, but Sophie wasn’t like that. ‘They’re just lonely men,’ she used to say. ‘They have sisters like us at home.’ Monsieur Flandin, the owner, told us we should always be polite. There were no rules about what you could do. The only thing was not to make a fuss or an incident.

  The younger officer had a smooth, fat face and he wanted me to show him some dresses. I didn’t like him, he was like a pig with pink eyelashes. His skin was shiny. But with his uniform and his position he thought he was something.

  The older officer was tall and dark with sad eyes. Despite myself, I found him interesting. He had more braid on his uniform than the other one and looked as though he was in Paris because perhaps he was too old to be fighting the Russians. He came over to the rack of dresses where I was talking to his colleague. He bowed his head slightly to me and maybe I imagined this but I think he even touched his heels together. He introduced himself by rank and surname, Major Richter. He said he was looking for some gloves to take back to his wife when he was next on leave. In Rothenburg, I think he said.

  ‘Mademoiselle,’ he said to me, ‘would you mind trying on the gloves, so I can see what they look like? You have elegant hands, like my wife’s.’

  Sophie was already at the glove counter. For maybe twenty minutes, she pulled out drawer after drawer of gloves – kid, pigskin, fur, calfskin – and I had to try on each pair, then hold my hand up for him to inspect. Sophie was the supplier and I was the model for these two German men. I was not a shy girl, but I found myself blushing as the older officer looked down at my hands. He was very grave, he didn’t smile. It was as though he was weighing up an important military decision, or a work of art. His face was thin and dark but newly shaved.

  Eventually, he decided on a beautiful chocolate kid pair with fur lining and fur wrists and raised seams. He wanted to test the softness of the leather but waited till I’d put them down on the countertop. He held them briefly against his cheek, as though the skin on his fingers was too coarse to tell. They were expensive, but he had cash in his pocketbook.