I turned to look into the window and noticed my eyes had big black circles under them. I looked like a panda. And it was not just the colour, there were rings and flat pouches full of … What? Fluid? ‘Experience’? There were two deep lines between my eyes. I had a beard, which on the corners of my chin had grey patches.
Looking in the mirror was one of my favourite ways of passing the time and I enjoyed imagining the life that lay ahead of a young man who any reasonable observer would have had to admit was quite unusually beautiful. But not this time. This was not the guy who’d looked back at me in the bathroom at home and told me to leave. This was someone older, someone bent by the glass to the rough age of sixty. And I mean ‘rough’.
Turning my head back into the carriage, I saw a woman I knew standing by the doors, holding the upright support. She caught my eye. I wasn’t sure if it was me or the older man in the convex window that she was acknowledging, but I felt such a voltage of recognition that I couldn’t move.
Every day thousands of women go into this underground world and lose themselves. I’d watched them. They’re without gravity, briefly, being anyone. Then they go up and reconnect with their lives and who they are, or who they think they have to be. But for a few minutes every day they’re almost anyone. And of all this throng of nameless girls and women that I’d gazed at day after day on the hopeless Line Thirteen, only this one spoke to my loneliness.
Then, in a moment it became clear. I remembered how I knew her. She was the woman in Hannah’s book of photographs.
Her head was turned away as she looked towards the other side of the carriage, and I was able to stare at her dress, which was made from some black material that held the line of her thigh as she strained upwards to read something. Then as she rocked with the sway of the train, I could see the outline of a button or strap beneath the fabric at the top of the leg. The neck of the dress was high with a loose neck. Her coat was open and I could see a row of beads and a fur scarf or wrap. Looking away, trying to read the station names, she couldn’t have known I was staring. I could picture every detail of her skin – her breasts, her belly, the pull of the muscle in her upper arm where she held the rail. And that face, those eyes. No one could have failed to be intrigued by what they held.
Without catching my eye again, she crushed her shoulder bag to her ribs and got off the train. I waited for a few seconds, then jumped off as the doors were closing. We were at Place de Clichy, and she headed for the correspondance. At Charles de Gaulle–Étoile, she changed again, walking fast through the tiled tunnels, and I was only just able to get into the same carriage. I’ve watched enough cop films but never concentrated on the technique. I wished I’d had a newspaper or even a book to hold up in front of me.
After Passy, we were up in the open air, on a bridge across the river. It was still light with a fading winter sun – on our left was the Eiffel Tower, to the right was what looked like a coal barge lying low in the water. At the next stop, Bir-Hakeim, the woman got off. Same as at Stalingrad, you had to go down from the raised outdoor platform to reach the street. I followed about ten metres behind and noticed that she tossed away her ticket at the top of the steps. It didn’t flutter, but fell straight and when I got alongside I saw she’d folded it lengthwise, then across, to make a ‘V’.
Down on the street, she turned without hesitation and began to walk south, beside the elevated track. She walked quite fast (it was cold) with only a slight swing of the hips at the top of her long legs. I now felt easier about following her, as I could do the movie trick of looking into a shop window if she checked her stride. Not that there was much to see on the Boulevard de Grenelle. We went past the red awning of a big café called Gitane, then she went left into a narrow, cobbled street. There was a closed Indian restaurant, and a battered street door painted maroon. She entered the code on a keypad and used both hands to push open the heavy door. I must have been following too closely, because as the door was grinding shut, she glanced back on to the street and her eyes met mine. She didn’t smile, but neither did she look away. The maroon door kept slowly closing, and all the time she stood there in the black dress and the high fur collar and her legs like a dancer’s with the feet angled like a clock showing five to one.
For about an hour afterwards, I think I must have just wandered about. Winter afternoons in Paris, I was discovering, have a special feeling. The air is damp and works its way into you. Everything seems out of reach – though this may be something to do with having so little money. Although I could afford a Coke or an espresso in the Café Gitane I hadn’t got enough cash to order the plat du jour with extra frites and linger in the fug.
It also may be connected to the way the buildings look the same. I expect there’s a reason for this and Hannah would have told me what it was, along with the dates of the architect. But what it means to most people – the ones like me, who don’t know all the history of everything – is that whether you’re in the wealthiest bit of the Sixteenth or the scuzziest part of the Nineteenth the chances are the buildings will have black slate roofs and pale stone fronts, balconies on the second and fifth floors, heavy street doors with number codes and so on. They’re never tall, they’re never short or squat, they seem to have been planned to fit the street. It’s so not like the medina at home, where they were thrown up any old how, or even like the Ville Nouvelle where you have the feeling the French wanted to build as fast as possible.
But in Paris on a winter afternoon, when the sun’s gone down … Clerks and shop girls and doctors and schoolkids and poor old people who can’t afford the rent all go into the same building, where the same modern lift’s been driven up through the old stairwell, there’s the same parquet in each apartment and pretty much the same smell of cooking in the hallway. When you’re sleeping on the floor of Baco’s back room on Sarajevo’s twenty-first, you’d give anything to be entering one of these heated immeubles. Boy, had I wanted to be part of that way of living, to have my anonymous room in an anonymous apartment in a building just like all the others in the Nth arrondissement. At the same time, there’s something odd about a city where two thirds of the buildings are the same. You’d think all the inhabitants would at least be looking for a change, for some action outside. The one thing those buildings of Paris suggested to me, I thought as I rambled on up the river that cold afternoon, was the ability to keep secrets. That’s what they looked designed for.
Maybe I wasn’t thinking too clearly, as I walked between the elevated railway and the black river on my left. Maybe I was in some sort of shock from seeing the woman in the photograph made flesh in the Métro carriage. It had made me forget the surprise of seeing myself so much older reflected in the window. Normally that would have made me stop and think for a minute or two at least. Anyway, what brought me back to myself was a monument set on the quay.
Suddenly I was face to face with a life-size group of figures made of bronze. They seemed to represent a family in despair. It was dark and I couldn’t see too well, but it looked like two parents holding a baby, two grandparents with another kid, a girl with a doll and then another woman, perhaps a grown-up sister, lying down, resting her head on a suitcase. They had a refugee look, all of them. I shone the torch from my phone on it. The metal had gone green, and the result was a bit tacky, like they’d economised on the materials. Underneath was an inscription: ‘THE REPUBLIC OF FRANCE IN HOMAGE TO THE VICTIMS OF RACIST AND ANTI-SEMITIC PERSECUTION AND CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY COMMITTED UNDER THE AUTHORITY OF THE SO-CALLED “GOVERNMENT OF THE FRENCH STATE” 1940–44. LET US NEVER FORGET.’
The ‘D’ had fallen off the ‘DES’ in front of ‘CRIMES’. It was a bit puzzling. The inscription seemed to be making a big statement but in a small way, like admitting to something without really owning up to it.
It was hard to know what Hannah thought of me. I think she despised me for being a teenage male, but was a bit ashamed of that because I was an African – hardly a small minority in Paris, but a minority all t
he same (I’d given her the pied noir/Algerian/Berber/Bedouin story when Sandrine was still there). She probably wanted to prove that she didn’t have an instinctive prejudice against people like me, but she couldn’t keep a look of horror from her eyes when she saw my shoes in the hallway or even worse in the living room. Yet I occasionally had the feeling she enjoyed some present-day company in her peculiar life, which seemed otherwise to be all about the past and dead people.
As Sandrine had predicted, she eventually said I could have a trial as her lodger. The rules about the bathroom and so on were pretty strict and it was clear that if I put a foot wrong I’d be back on the twenty-first floor of Sarajevo before you could say ‘Tang Frères’.
But I was so relieved that I decided to make a real effort.
‘Is this Julian Finch your boyfriend then?’ I asked when we next had dinner together.
‘What? Certainly not. He’s someone I knew ten years ago.’
‘So he’s a sort of historical figure too.’
She laughed, something I hadn’t often seen her do before.
What I was really wondering was whether she had sex with this Julian guy, or at all, or whether she was too old, or maybe waiting for a man who’d marry her. I had the idea from movies and TV that American girls were not like Laila or Wasia and Kashira and my other friends at home, that if they liked you they’d do it without a second thought. My favourite bit of an old US comedy show was when a New York girl listed the names, one after the other for a long time, of all the boys her room-mate, who protested that she was a virgin, had ‘put out for’ on a first date.
But I couldn’t square that with how serious Hannah seemed to be. She was small, slim, with exactly two grey hairs in the dark brown-black. She seldom wore make-up and was usually dressed in jeans, unless she was going out to meet this Julian, when she made a bit of an effort, putting on lipstick and a skirt. She was no looker, no Laila, that’s for sure, but when she was anxious she had a cute way of pushing her hand up through her hair at the front.
It was a bit awkward when she returned to the subject of my unintended joke.
‘Sometimes I think I do have better friendships with dead strangers.’ She’d opened a bottle of wine earlier and was now pouring a second glass. ‘Sometimes I feel closer to the subjects of my research than I do to actual people I know at college or in my home town. Does that seem strange to you?’
Know who she reminded me of? Miss Aziz. When she was trying to make us ‘think for ourselves’ towards the end of class. She used to lure us into discussions by saying more and more crazy things till someone just had to join in.
Hannah held the wine bottle towards me. I don’t like wine, but it seemed unfriendly to say so, and I let her pour some into my empty water glass.
‘What do you think, Tariq?’
Was she drunk? Not on two glasses, surely? I’d had so little wine in my life I’d no idea what it took. Maybe two was enough.
‘What do I think about what?’
‘Does it seem strange to care more about dead strangers than people you know who’re alive today?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Go on! You must have an opinion. Think about it!’
What I thought was: I have a bedroom in a warm apartment with my own radiator. I do buy some groceries and I do try not to leave my stuff around, but that’s about all I contribute. And if by way of rent the landlady needs some conversation …
Really, I wanted to tell Hannah about seeing the woman from her photograph book, and how I’d followed her. But I thought she’d laugh – tell me I was imagining things. Or maybe boot me out for being some sort of stalker.
‘Go on, Tariq! Throw me a bone here!’
I coughed. ‘All right. I’ll tell you something. The other day, I was going up the steps to the Métro at Stalingrad and this girl, this woman, was coming down the other way. I felt we’d met before. Maybe in some other life. No, that’s not right. I felt she was my other half, the person I was meant to spend my life with. No that’s not right, either … I can’t explain.’
‘Go on.’ She was smiling, but not in a mocking way.
‘She seemed to speak to me – not as the guy I am, who makes a mess of things and works in a shit fried-chicken place. I felt she was meant for me as the man I could become, as the man I deep down already am – an older, better man beneath all the clumsy, unimportant stuff of being young and useless and being me.’
Hannah said, ‘I think I’ve had moments a little like that. And what did you do?’
This was a surprising response. I’d expected her to laugh. ‘I went for a walk to clear my head.’
‘I can’t remember where Stalingrad is.’
‘Boulevard de la Villette, La Chapelle, round there. Not very nice area. Top end of the canal. I went down rue de Tanger, I remember, and rue Maroc. The names reminded me of home. I saw a shop that sells rat traps.’
‘Tanger,’ said Hannah. ‘That rings a bell. I think I came across it in my research the other day.’
She reached over to a large notebook on the table. ‘Yes. Here we are. Juliette Lemaire. One of the spoken testimonies I listened to. She sounded such a nice woman. She lived in rue de Tanger with her parents.’
‘Poor Juliette. Maybe it was better then.’
‘Well, they were quite short of money. But I think it was respectable. And here … She took the Métro every day from Aubervilliers–Boulevard de la Villette.’ She looked up from the book. ‘I checked and it doesn’t exist any longer.’
‘Let’s look online. If the Wi-Fi’s working.’
I used my phone and eventually we got there.
‘There were originally two stations,’ I summarised from the first hit. ‘Rue Aubervilliers and Boulevard de la Villette. They joined up in 1942. But in 1946, “to honour the Russian victory at the Battle of Stalingrad, a section of the boulevard was renamed Place Stalingrad”. And that’s when the station changed its name, too.’
‘So it’s the same place.’
‘Yes.’
There was a silence. Hannah seemed to be lost in thought.
Thinking I was still meant to be making conversation, I said, ‘Were the French on the same side as the Russians in that war?’
‘Some were, yes. But most were on the other side.’
‘That sounds complicated.’
‘It was. Later on, more people changed sides.’
But she seemed distant now, as though she wasn’t concentrating on my adventure any more but had lost herself in the loops of the past.
‘She was nice, you say, your Juliette?’
Hannah looked back at me. ‘Lovely, I think. Though I have only her voice to go on.’
‘Do you think she was beautiful?’ I was thinking of my Stalingrad girl.
‘Maybe. But what’s that got to do with it?’
‘But do you?’
‘Well … She certainly had admirers. And something in her voice. Modest but a little bit confident.’
Eventually I heard back from Laila, saying ‘You lucky boy! We have exams soon. Miss A has vanished. Off sick, they say, but maybe she’s gone back to the Home Planet! Najat has got a boyfriend, would you believe? He’s TWELVE!! Billy says he’ll beat him up if he comes anywhere near the house. Saw your stepmother in the medina yesterday, but she hurried on before I could talk to her. Hope you are having a great time. Send me more pics. xx L’.
I read it several times in case I’d somehow overlooked the words ‘I miss you terribly’ or, ‘Here’s a link to some pictures of my qooq’. But the words stayed the same. All I could take out of it was whatever was intended by the xx. More than x, obviously, but presumably not as much as xxx. After a few days, certain I wasn’t going to get anything more out of the message, I deleted it.
Twice when I’d been on the early shift at Paname, I went down to Bir-Hakeim afterwards, at exactly the same time as on the first day, and stood opposite the maroon door. I never saw her. Of course I didn’t know if she�
��d actually been working up there near Stalingrad or whether it had been a trip to see a friend or buy rat poison.
So then I thought I’d try and catch her first thing in the morning. And one day when I was on the late shift at Paname, I got up very early and went down to Bir-Hakeim. I picked up an old newspaper on the train and was stationed opposite the maroon door by half past six.
Having nothing else to do, I read the paper. It all seemed to be about politics and trade and war. As an economics student, even a lapsed one, I ought really to have been interested, but to tell the truth it left me cold. It was maybe the first time I’d read a newspaper properly and I didn’t think I’d be doing it again in a hurry.
The door did open from time to time, and out came old men or children or people in jeans and trainers with ear buds. People came to the door – builders, deliveries … After a time I thought that perhaps this wasn’t where she lived anyway. Maybe she’d been making a one-off visit to a friend who’d given her the code to buzz herself in.
Then at a quarter past seven the maroon door opened inwards and a familiar figure stepped out. She was wearing the same coat, which fell to just below the knees, and a funny hat. Pillbox … Is that the word? It looked like something old-fashioned, quite smart but not twenty-first century, more like the period of the war when she’d been photographed.
To my surprise, she didn’t turn left and head up towards Bir-Hakeim. She turned right and walked quickly down some small streets, with me following, till we came into the big open area at the bottom of the Champ de Mars, with the Eiffel Tower away to our left. I noticed what looked like bullet holes in the stone walls of the École Militaire as we walked past. She didn’t take the Métro there either but turned up left, then right into rue de Grenelle and finally down a narrow side street. I was twenty metres behind her when she stopped and went into a shop. I waited a minute, then walked past. It was a sewing and mending shop – in the window were the words ‘Retouches. Transformations. Tous vêtements’ – very small, and I could see her at the back, behind sewing machines and a rail of hanging clothes, talking to someone and hanging up her coat. So this must be where she worked. I noted the name of the street, rue de l’Exposition, as I headed home.
Paris Echo Page 9
