Paris Echo

by Sebastian Faulks

  Eight

  Colonel Fabien

  Allowing Tariq to stay on in the apartment for a trial period was not such a tough decision in the end. He was often at work in Saint-Denis till late, so some days I never saw him. I remembered myself in Paris at almost the same age and felt a flutter of anxiety on his behalf. I also thought a lodger, however callow, would be some company: there was a difference between the solitude I liked for work and its aching sister, loneliness.

  For reasons of self-preservation, I’d tried not just to forget Aleksandr but to kill him as a living memory in my mind – awake or dreaming. The strange thing was that on the days I did allow myself to picture what he might be doing, it was always loneliness that I imagined. His wife couldn’t offer him what I had. It’s not that I was conceited about my looks (far from it) or my conversation or my sexual prowess or wit or value as companion or anything at all. Except one thing. A perfect intimacy, you might call it. I knew that what we’d found couldn’t be improved on. And I knew he knew it too. So why had he cut me loose and chosen to spend his life in what could only be a form of torment, day by day, dwindling, shrinking into half a man without me?

  As for my own loneliness, it was something that I’d learned to live with, like insomnia or strep throat; it was, in the phrase I remembered hearing as a child, the cross I had to bear. But it needed watching and the occasional new remedy – so the alarm that sounded when Tariq’s trial week came to an end was familiar to me. One week’s lodging led to another, by which time he was more house-broken; and then to a third, fourth and fifth. He never guessed what proxy emotional function he was performing – but then he had a Paris room for free, so why would he care?

  It had been Jasmine Mendel’s idea that I apply for a position as a postdoc at my old college. When I returned from my two years in Africa, I had no idea what to do next. The experience had been exhilarating, but had left me feeling flat. For all the funds we’d raised, the information films we’d made and shown, the clinics we’d set up and the friends we’d made, I knew I couldn’t spend my life in this work. Other people could do it as well or better than I could.

  Jasmine had a spare room in her Harlem apartment, so I went to stay with her while I worked out what to do next. We sat up into the night talking. We agreed that it was not possible for the wealthiest countries to fund free education for every poor child in the world; but there was something they could do. Just as rich individuals in any country were supposed to pay more in taxes, so the leaders of democracies with universal schooling owed it to poorer countries to share their good fortune. This was not so much in drilling wells or wiping out malaria, it now seemed to me; it was more important that the leaders of developed countries should bring the benefits of knowing things, of understanding history, to their dealings with nations where most people had never had the chance to learn anything at all. That, we decided, was the very least of their duty: it was their baseline moral obligation.

  While I was in New York, doing voluntary work and waitressing in a bar, the United States, backed by Great Britain, invaded Iraq. Jasmine and I were shocked by the president’s ignorance and disappointed that British Mr Blair seemed to have no better understanding of the Middle East. We bemoaned the failure of Anglo-US privilege, calling it, after a book by our college favourite, Julien Benda, the ‘treason of the clerks’. Their education at Yale and Oxford had obliged these two men to know, to understand and to act accordingly; instead of which they’d sold their birthright in the name of a short-term political gain that had proved – predictably – to be a delusion.

  So I wrote to my old head of department at college, Barbara Putnam, and applied for a position. If I couldn’t change the politics of my country, I figured I could at least try to understand the lives of those who had gone before. To my delight, she accepted. She said she’d been on the panel when I defended my dissertation and remembered my ‘earnest clarity’. A little condescending, I guess, but it got the job done.

  On my next visit to the Centre Jean Molland, I made a new selection. The summary read: ‘Begins with an anecdote from childhood. Witness later has involvement with French and German security and at second hand with foreign agents in Paris.’

  This kind of direct connection was unusual. The other reason for choosing this woman was that there was no death date on her file, so that, although the recording had been made exactly eight years earlier, there was a chance she was still alive.

  MASSON, Mathilde, born 1918.

  File 1. LAAT/WTTJM/YS/1942/1074/416A

  Recorded: 27 February 1998.

  My name is Mathilde Masson. I was born in Paris in 1918. Papa had lost his leg in the war. He’d got through Verdun but then he was in the wrong place when a shell landed. He was in hospital at the Front, then they sent him back to Paris after the war ended. But he hadn’t seen my mother for nearly two years before I was born.

  I didn’t know about this as a child and I don’t know to this day who my real father was. My sister Louise said she knew there was something wrong the moment Papa came home. He refused to pick me up or play with me. He didn’t look at me or speak to me till I was six.

  His left leg was cut off above the knee. They let him have his job back, but standing up all day hurt the stump of his leg where it rubbed. He worked in the slaughterhouse at Vaugirard. From the age of seven it was my job to massage the stump in the evening. I used to rub it with oil or put powder on where the blisters had burst.

  There were three sisters, Louise, Élodie and me. When I was about twelve, Papa told us we were going away for a few days. We were amazed. Holidays didn’t exist in those days. We were a poor family and we lived in Belleville, a poor part of Paris. By then Louise had started a job, so she didn’t come. It turned out the trip was organised by a veterans’ association. This must have been 1930, a time when most men under forty were veterans. My father was given four days off work.

  We borrowed a suitcase from Monsieur Barrault, who lived on the top floor. That was for us girls – Élodie, who was sixteen, and me. My father had a bag of his own. Élodie and I wore our best clothes and had one change each. We went on the Métro to the Gare Saint-Lazare and took the train for the coast. It took hours and hours. We stopped at a station in a forest in Normandy and bought some bread and a cheese from a man on the platform. I remember thinking how quiet it was out in the country. You could hear the birds singing, that’s something we never heard in Paris, if you don’t count the odd seagull.

  When we got to the station there was a horse and cart to take the suitcases, but we had to walk. Papa was allowed to sit up by the driver and there was room for one more. He chose Élodie.

  Maman and I walked for half an hour to reach the boarding house. Our room was at the top, with two beds and a wardrobe. There was a bathroom at the end of the landing and we could see the sea from the window. We were told that dinner was at seven but we could use the big sitting room downstairs at any time. Ellie and I sat down and pretended to read the magazines.

  We looked up when we heard someone come in. It was a man, but he didn’t look like a man. He had a suit with a collar and tie, but his face was all wrong. He had one ear and some hair, but no nose and just a few teeth stuck into the middle of a hole. He said something we couldn’t understand.

  Papa came in with Maman. Papa was on his crutches with his wooden leg banging on the floor. He said good evening to the man with no face. The room began to fill up. There were men with no legs and one with an empty sleeve pinned up smartly. There was a man pushed in on a chair with wheels. But mostly it was their faces. Some had no eyes or lips. Others had faces that had been torn up so much that the bits were in the wrong place.

  Just before seven, the woman in charge came into the room. She was about thirty-five, but she wore a widow’s black clothes. ‘We’re honoured to have the heroes of France as our guests,’ she said. We went through when the bell rang and found our table in the dining room. The waitresses were young women in blue overalls, not l
ike the waiters I’d seen in Paris. They brought some soup out from the kitchen and put it down on the tables. You could hear the sound of the spoon on the china and a lot of slurping noises. Élodie kicked me under the table, but I didn’t catch her eye. My father said something like, ‘You’d think they’d show more respect.’ Élodie and I both had the giggles, so I looked round the room to try and stop it.

  Most of the grown-ups were married, like grown-ups everywhere, but I didn’t think I’d ever find a man to marry me. I was illegitimate, I was poor and I wasn’t pretty. Not even one of the men with missing faces would want to spend his life with me. I was only twelve, so perhaps it was odd to be thinking like this, but Louise and Élodie felt it too. That’s what we talked about. We even talked about Jean, the boy who brought up the water from the yard at home.

  The next morning, Maman took me and Élodie down to the beach. We were sitting under an umbrella when the man with no face stopped and raised his hat. His name was Jérôme. I don’t know if that was his first name or his second. He was trying to make conversation, asking us where we lived and so on. Maman didn’t know whether to look at him or not. If you stared, you could see that one of his eyes, the right one, was almost normal. It was a nice eye. The other one was mostly covered by skin.

  We understood that he was asking our names. By now Maman was flustered. It wasn’t just the way he looked, but he was paying attention to us when my father wasn’t there. And there was something that made me think he might not be poor like us, and that was awkward too.

  Élodie whispered to Maman that he was asking if he could take her for a walk along the beach.

  Well, she was sixteen and she looked more. None of us could say how old Monsieur Jérôme was, but most of the soldiers there were only in their thirties. He held out both hands to Élodie and she let him pull her up off the sand.

  My mother smiled and waved her hand. She just wanted to see the back of him, I think.

  Élodie looked back and made a funny face. She was slim but she’d always had thick calves. After a bit, I saw him hold out his elbow for her to take, and she slipped her arm under his. I felt jealous of Ellie. It showed you could change your life. Someone else, a stranger, could come along and just walk you away.

  That night at the boarding house the dinner was fish, which we never had at home. Maman asked if we should have some wine and in the end Papa agreed. I didn’t like wine. My other sister Louise had given me a taste when the patron of our local bar gave her a glass one day. Louise was always being given things for free. When the girl came at the end of dinner to mark off our wine bottle she found Papa had drunk it all.

  In bed, I whispered to Ellie, asking about Monsieur Jérôme. She said she couldn’t understand what he said, but maybe it would get easier. The sun was bright again the next day when all of us went down to the beach. My father had borrowed a woollen bathing costume which came down to the knee on one side and covered his stump on the other, with a bit of costume flapping loose. He said I could help him into the water.

  I rolled down my stockings and left them with Maman and Ellie. I was wearing my dress because I had no costume. It was difficult for Papa to walk on the sand because of his crutches. We reached the smooth bit where the tide had been, but this was worse for him because the end of his crutches dug in even more. He kept swearing as he hopped along. He got down to the water leaning on my shoulder. He had quite a slight build, not heavy, but I was small too. It was the first time I’d felt seawater and I was afraid. It was cold and there were bits of weed swirling round in it. We managed to get a bit deeper in, then my father’s foot landed on a stone and he swore and nearly fell over.

  He said, ‘We’ve got to get out deeper, I’ve got to get my stump in. That’s what the surgeon told me. Salt water.’ I liked the feeling of the sand on my feet, but my dress was soaking by now and I didn’t want to be swept out to sea.

  Papa’s thigh was hard against mine and the fingers of his hand were very strong from his work as they squeezed my upper arm. Now it was up to my waist so I knew his stump must be in the salt water.

  ‘Turn me round,’ he said, and we managed to get ourselves back facing the beach. Maman and Élodie were waving at us from beneath the umbrella. I felt Papa’s other arm go up as he waved back.

  I could feel his body shaking against mine and I thought he must be crying. The seagulls were squawking above us and I was afraid. ‘Look at me waving,’ he said. ‘The stupid whore. Look! Yes, it’s me. Here I am waving back, you whore.’

  He wasn’t crying, he was laughing. A wave knocked me forward and I lost my footing. I grabbed my father as I fell and he toppled over with me. I swallowed salt water and came up spluttering. My father was thrashing and shouting, but he couldn’t stand up.

  Back on my feet, I needed a moment to breathe before I began to haul Papa up. Eventually he managed to pull himself into a standing position.

  The next day Élodie helped him, and he stood in the sea for half an hour and he didn’t fall over. Ellie was annoyed when Monsieur Jérôme came by and she was still in the water.

  My mother just sat on the sand, looking out to sea. She came from the Auvergne, she was one of seven children. At the age of fifteen she was sent to Paris by her father to try to find work. She was living in a maid’s room at the top of a big building near the Gare de l’Est when she met my father. He said she was almost starving. She was working as a cleaner in a cheap hotel. She looked on Christ as her saviour in the next world and on Papa as her saviour in this one. He had taken her out of the tiny maid’s room and married her. I remember that second day sitting beside her on the sand, watching Papa lean on Ellie in the sea and wave to us. Maman’s face lit up when she saw it and she waved back. I hoped Papa wasn’t calling her a whore.

  That evening I could see that Papa had been drinking. His face was red and he seemed sad. Ellie and I had both put on our best dresses and brushed our hair for dinner. It was the last night of the holiday. The main course was pork. Papa didn’t seem to like it and began complaining that it was too tough to chew. He called over one of the girls in their overalls and told her to bring wine. He’d already finished one bottle.

  After dessert, the Widow came into the room and tapped the side of a wine glass with a knife. She was wearing a smart black dress. She made a speech about what a privilege it was to have the heroes of France in her hotel. And Papa stood up and said, ‘Why don’t you give them something they can eat, then?’

  Then he stood up holding a piece of the pork with its bone and said, ‘How do you expect a man with no mouth to chew through this?’

  Then he gave this demonstration of what a bullet does and how it spins when it hits a bone and can tear your face off as it’s trying to find a way out. And if it’s a machine gun there’s another bullet following.

  And the Widow was saying she was only doing her best and she’d lost her own husband and it was a special week.

  Then Papa said something like, ‘It’s special so that no one has to look at us for the rest of the year. So you can get us all out of the way in one go.’

  The Widow was upset and a man who was not so badly wounded came over to our table and put his hand on my father’s arm. Papa pushed him away. He said when he’d been lying among the dead men at Fort Vaux in Verdun he’d dreamed he’d survive long enough to have dinner with men who weren’t mutilated. And with beautiful women.

  Then he sat down.

  Mathilde Masson’s French had a strong Parisian flavour and she spoke more quickly than Juliette Lemaire. Every few minutes, I had to stop and replay the recording; even then I wasn’t certain I had understood every word. Juliette seemed to have rehearsed what she was going to say, but Mathilde’s story had a headlong quality, as though she didn’t much care what people made of it.

  The Centre Jean Molland summary showed there were six Mathilde Masson files, of which I’d heard the first. I thought of skipping ahead, but decided that if the Occupation story was as good as the summary s
uggested, I needed to understand the background.

  I pressed Play on the second file.

  It was difficult for Papa. It tired him out to stand all day at work in the slaughterhouse and it irritated his stump. When he came home after a long journey on the Métro he used to take off his wooden leg and sit at the table in his shirt while my mother made dinner. We always had meat because he could get it for almost nothing at work. He used to bring back cheap cuts for other people in our building.

  The widow Madame Gauthier could only afford baked endive with a sprinkling of cheese unless he gave her a piece of tripe or something. She lived in hope, the old girl. At ten to six, when the shop was closing for the day, she used to shuffle out and pick a few things off the display and the shop owner would let her have them cheap if he was going to throw them away. When she came back into the building she’d slow down outside our door on the first floor, make sure we’d heard her. She coughed loudly or called upstairs to her cat. The cat never came, it was just her way of letting us know she was there.

  ‘Give her something for God’s sake,’ my father used to say when he heard Madame Gauthier outside. Then Maman used to tell one of us to carry up a piece of meat wrapped in newspaper, the nastiest offcut she could find.

  Louise said our mother couldn’t stand Madame Gauthier because of something she’d said when Maman was pregnant with me. When the bump began to show, she passed Maman on the stairs one day and said, ‘I see you’re keeping in practice, Madame Masson.’

  Although our place was cramped, there was food and there was a bedroom for Papa and Maman, though the rest of us had to share. There was a living room that looked over the street and a small kitchen at the back that looked over the courtyard with the water fountain. The backs of the next-door buildings all looked down over it. You could see through the windows of the apartments and hear people shouting. If someone left a window open you could sometimes hear a wireless.