Paris Echo

by Sebastian Faulks

  I used to sit by the window while my mother was making dinner. I watched Jean, the water boy, filling up his buckets for us. If it was dry he’d have to go to the Wallace Fountain at the end of the street. Louise used to joke that he was in love with me and always trying to catch my eye, but I don’t think it was true. I watched the old man opposite getting ready for bed and the young woman who worked as a secretary who used to smoke cigarettes and knock her ash out of the window. You weren’t meant to throw things down, but there were broken bottles and boxes and cigarette ends at the bottom that no one ever cleared up. When I saw these people in the street they didn’t know I knew all about them.

  It was my elder sister Louise who looked after me when I was young and Maman was out at work. Everyone said Louise was stupid and it’s true she was no good with spelling or numbers. Papa told her she’d end up working in a shop, like Maman, maybe on the haberdashery counter at the Samaritaine if she was lucky. They all thought Louise was backward, even Maman, who was just a country girl herself.

  But I didn’t care what they thought. I worshipped Louise. She had a black hat and a fox fur she’d got at the Clignancourt market. She was good at sewing and she made herself dresses from bits of material she picked up God knows where. She knew her way round. She knew how to find a whole camembert and a piece of steak for next to nothing. At the bar on the corner of our street we’d sometimes get given hot chocolate by the patron. And then there were the pictures. I always wanted to go and see a film at the Louxor, which was a sort of Egyptian building near Barbès, but it would have meant taking the Métro, which cost money. Louise found a side door into a picture house in Ménilmontant near where we lived. It opened into a back corridor and after the film had been running for a few minutes, you could sneak into the auditorium.

  Louise did get a job, but it wasn’t in a shop. She became a waitress in a café-restaurant in the rue des Francs Bourgeois, which was in a very run-down part of town, on the old marshes going down towards the rue de Rivoli. There’d been a lot of TB there and some of the houses had been pulled down. Louise couldn’t spell, but she could take the orders in her own way to tell the chef.

  Sometimes after school I walked up to see her. It took me a long time, but I never minded going through the streets on my own and nobody bothered me.

  One afternoon in December, I arrived when it was dark and cold. Louise had been there since the early morning and her shift was finished. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and have fun.’ She put on her hat and coat and we ran off down the street over the wet cobbles. It was a maze round there, very narrow streets and old houses with bits falling off. Louise led me into a red awning that said Café Victor Hugo. It was very old-fashioned and it had lights in coloured glass shades.

  The owner had a big white beard and sad eyes. His chin seemed to rest on his beard like a scarf. He asked if we wanted hot chocolate and Louise said, ‘This is my little sister, Mathilde.’ ‘Delighted, Mademoiselle,’ he said and I wasn’t sure if he was teasing me. I said to him, ‘Are you Monsieur Hugo?’ He smiled through his beard and said, ‘Of course I am.’ Then Louise said, ‘And some cakes, please.’ And Victor Hugo said, ‘Are you sure? They’re full price today.’

  He gave Louise a look and she said, ‘That’s all right.’

  The chocolate was boiling hot. Then Victor Hugo brought a plate with two slices of cake and some buns. I said to Louise, ‘What did he mean, they’re full price today?’

  And Louise laughed and said, ‘Sometimes he gives me them half price. And sometimes he gives me dinner for nothing.’ So I said, ‘Why?’ And Louise said, ‘I do things for him.’ ‘What things?’ I said. ‘You know. Things. When his wife’s not here.’

  That was when I discovered how Louise could always get steak and camembert. It started with little favours, I think. Later on she made a living from it. I suppose I looked shocked when she told me that first day. But she was so bright and gay about it. She laughed and said, ‘But you like the cakes, don’t you, Minouche?’

  I was anxious about Mathilde. Belleville, I knew, had always been a poor part of the city. Once, like Montmartre, it had been a village outside the old boundaries with vineyards on its slopes, but after the Franco-Prussian War it had been drawn into the new, enlarged Paris. While some slum buildings had been cleared, it remained border country and had been one of the first districts to take in immigrants, the Armenians and the Greeks arriving while Mathilde was still a child. Meanwhile in the Masson household, blonde Élodie had the looks, the admirers and the indulgence of her father, Louise was lively and able to look after herself, but Mathilde seemed to have nothing.

  The third file of Mathilde’s testimony took me through her schooldays and some early menial jobs working as a cleaner and in a bottling factory. There was not much about dresses or treats or visits to the movies any more. She talked of work and money and the long hours and of her father’s failing health. Élodie married a plumber and moved out of Paris to an apartment in the suburbs. Louise continued her fast life between Belleville and the Marais, still a blighted neighbourhood.

  In the fourth file, things changed with the arrival of the Germans. At first, it seemed to unify the Masson family, giving them a focus for their discontents. Then divisions began to open up. The father was unyielding in his hatred, but Mathilde and Élodie went with the popular view that if even France had been defeated, then surely no one could resist: German victory in Europe was inevitable and therefore best not delayed.

  The big development came in 1942, when Mathilde, at the age of twenty-four, found her first boyfriend. He was a young man who worked in a shipping company with offices near the Opéra. Mathilde’s voice became quite different when she spoke about him. She slowed down so much that I could understand all she said without using the Pause and Rewind.

  Of course Armand was more educated than me. At first I was afraid to say too much because he listened so carefully. He always assumed that other people were as clever as he was and what they were saying was important. And he’d sit there nodding his head gently up and down behind his glasses.

  This made me nervous. We went for a walk in the park at Belleville and I hardly opened my mouth. Slowly I got used to him. I never dared take him home in case Papa was in one of his rages. I wanted him to meet Louise, but I was worried that he’d disapprove. Armand had this way of seeing through people.

  After a while, I got to trust him. I told him a few little things about my life so far, being the youngest and all that, and he didn’t laugh at me. He said he admired me for getting on with my life. I didn’t know what he meant. What else was I supposed to do? He told me he thought I was beautiful, which was a lie, but I didn’t mind him saying it.

  Armand was very against the government and the Germans. He said Marshal Pétain was an old fool and that the prime minister, Monsieur Laval, was evil. I said the marshal had saved France twice and was a hero. And we had a free zone with no Germans in it, not like other countries they’d invaded. Surely that was the marshal’s doing? But Armand wouldn’t be shifted.

  He said, ‘Don’t let’s argue. Just promise me you’ll never talk to a German,’ and I said, ‘I promise.’

  One day Armand gave me a beautiful scarf. It looked expensive and it was wrapped up in tissue paper by the shop. You have to understand I’d never had anything new before. Everything I’d ever worn was handed down from my sisters or bought second-hand.

  Towards the end of the month, when he’d been paid, he used to take me out in the evening. There wasn’t a lot you could do because the food was rationed. I told my parents I was seeing a girlfriend from work, then I’d go and meet him in Pigalle where we listened to a singer in a bar. Armand sat there in his work suit and tie. He couldn’t dance, he was a hopeless dancer, but I didn’t mind. I used to like watching him, sitting there in his glasses, nodding in time to the music.

  What I felt about Armand was the same thing I felt about that scarf. They were mine and no one else’s. I can�
��t explain how fierce I felt about him. Because I’d never had anything of my own before.

  The next year, which must have been 1943, we decided that when the war was over we’d get married. Armand said things were starting to go against the Germans, especially now the Americans had joined in. I was confused because most people I knew thought the Germans were sure to win.

  It was about this time that Armand sometimes started to cancel our dates in the evenings because he had other meetings. He didn’t tell me what they were. I asked him if they were something to do with the Resistance and he looked shocked and put his finger on my lips. But I had my suspicions.

  There were a lot of posters up at that time. They showed the American Uncle Sam and the English leader in Jewish skullcaps, making the war drag on for their own purposes. The posters were put up by the government, who wanted the Germans to win as soon as possible, so we could all eat again. Every time I went to get my papers renewed in the big building opposite the Opéra there’d be a new poster. Some of them told us to trust the Germans, with pictures of happy children being carried by a blond soldier. On the Métro, the first carriage was reserved for the Germans and the last carriage was for the Jewish people with the yellow star stitched onto their coats.

  My friends used to laugh at them, we called them the ‘Sunflowers’, but Armand told me not to. He told me Colonel Fabien and other men who’d shot dead German soldiers were heroes. And I said they weren’t heroes to the families of the hundreds of innocent French people the Germans killed in revenge. Armand said there was a better way of getting at the Germans now. He showed me how to fold my Métro ticket twice longways, then once across at an angle. It made a ‘V’ for victory sign. When we got off the train, we dropped them on the platform. In places like Belleville or Couronnes, where the Communist party was strong, you’d see hundreds of Vs on the ground. The Germans never knew who’d done it and it undermined them. It began to drive them mad.

  Nine

  École Militaire

  Apparently the woman in the photography book told Hannah in a dream that her name was Clémence. When Hannah told me this, I didn’t jump right in and say, ‘Well, I know where she works and where she lives!’ After all, Hannah was shocked when I told her about the other girl, the one I’d seen at Stalingrad. Just the coincidence of the Métro stations sent her off into her little world of ancient history. So I wasn’t going to tell her about the sewing shop in the rue de l’Exposition. I just said, ‘Clémence? Nice name.’

  Up in Saint-Denis, old Jamal had done me proud. He kept the weed coming and I was able to go out on my break and have a puff most days. It didn’t interfere with the foot-and-beak-sorting or the surface-wiping. Most of the time I was plotting how to get down and see if I could talk to Clémence, as I now thought of her. The more time passed, the more I became convinced that she held a key. To what exactly, I couldn’t say, but I had this feeling she could help me find out more about my mother.

  All I knew about her, Hanan, beyond the bare facts of her French pied noir father and Algerian mother, was that she was a bit older than my father and that she’d been in her mid-thirties when I was born. At some point I’d picked up the idea that something bad had happened in Paris when she was young, some trauma, but I had no idea what. You’d guess there might have been bullying or rough treatment because she was half Algerian, but that’s only a guess and it might have been something else altogether. In a very remote part of my memory there was an idea that her mother, my grandmother, had met with an accident and it was this – a parent’s death – that was my mother’s trauma.

  The trouble with my hunch that Clémence might help was that whenever I got down to the rue de l’Exposition the shop was closed. I’d been in Paris long enough to know that most things were shut on Monday. Then there was the Christian weekend. For instance, the family bistro nearest Hannah’s flat in Butte-aux-Cailles opened in office hours on Tuesday to Friday (even though there weren’t any office workers to eat there because there weren’t any offices). On Saturday and Sunday when the families were at home, it was closed. It was also shut all day on Monday.

  One morning, I got to the sewing and mending shop at about ten o’clock. A man was coming out and locking the door behind him. I asked if the shop was open.

  ‘No,’ he said, sounding puzzled. ‘It’s Thursday.’

  ‘I know. But …’

  He looked at me oddly, as if I should have known that Thursday was impossible. None of this put me off, it just me made me keener to see her.

  At Hannah’s flat in rue Michal, things seemed to be quite settled. Her timetable was regular – leaving at about nine and returning late afternoon from her studies – so I could plan my visits to the bathroom for when she was out. I took my shaving things and toothpaste back to my room after use and made sure I didn’t leave my stuff in the sitting room. In fact, I only shaved every second day, to get rid of a black smear on my upper lip, which was one reason I was surprised to see my reflection with a beard in the Métro carriage window.

  In the bathroom, I spent a fair amount of time staring at myself in the mirror. I tried to surprise my face, to catch it unawares, so I could see what I looked like to other people. Once or twice I got close to that complete separation from the image that I’d had at home, when the Tariq in the mirror spoke to me. In those eyes I could still read a glorious future – if only other people could see it, too, I thought – and understand how deep and soulful and downright valuable this guy was. Someone to be treasured in his brief and brilliant time on earth. I roughed up my hair or flattened it with water. I tried a trace of mascara that Hannah had left out on the edge of the basin.

  A couple of times I looked through the cabinet to see if it would tell me anything about her. It was too much to expect morning-after pills and sex toys. I knew that. What I didn’t expect to find was five different kinds of lip moisturiser. What is this thing with women’s lips? Laila was always at it too. I’ve had chapped lips only once in my entire life.

  Sometimes when I was walking through Saint-Denis to work at PFP or back from Tolbiac to the flat, or when I was going to a movie at the underground multiplex at Châtelet–Les Halles, I’d wonder if the way I looked at all the girls I saw was really normal. At least once a day I’d see a girl or woman, someone between the ages of about seventeen and forty, who I felt this awful longing for. Not as bad as the Stalingrad girl with the short dress over grey tights and the leather bag, who I ought to have married by now if the world had any sense. And not quite the same sense of – I don’t know what you call it, destiny, perhaps – I’d felt when I saw Clémence. But it was upsetting, because if I caught their eye I was pretty sure they felt it too. I wanted to lean forward in the train (it was usually in the Métro) and say, Natalie, Suzanne, Brigitte, let’s get off here, buy dinner and take it back to your apartment. Let’s stop pretending. You know I’m right. We haven’t got a whole lifetime to throw away. I’ll get some wine.

  What was this machinery of the world, this great clanking, invisible, interlocking thing, whose only job was to screw it up for me, make sure I never even got to talk to her?

  And then there were all the others – the ones I thought about in a more down-to-earth way. A middle-aged Parisian businesswoman tapping at her cell phone, a plump schoolgirl with pink hair and slashed jeans, a Muslim mother in her headscarf picking over the vegetables at the market in Saint-Denis … What probably made it worse was the fact that at home I’d hardly ever seen a woman naked. There were pictures in the soft-porn magazines which with some difficulty you could get hold of at home. The odd glimpse in an American movie. I imagine there was porn on the Internet in Morocco, but without a laptop there was no way of seeing it. I couldn’t afford a laptop and neither could anyone else I knew, except Laila. There was a computer room at college but all the machines had a filter. And there were Internet ‘cafés’, dark little rooms in the medina where you could go and look at a screen with headphones on. A boy in my year said he had s
een films of housewives in full niqab hard at it, but it was far too risky in a booth where anyone could walk in, and he was a bit of a bullshitter.

  Presumably it was my age. I guessed that by the time I was forty or something I wouldn’t be obsessed like this at all. And yet … suppose that once I’d had a few girlfriends, drunk deep from that well, it might turn out that I wasn’t squashing the desire but only feeding it. Then I’d become like one of those smug men of fifty with grey hair and a belly who have a mistress and a wife and are open to other offers. Then, far from fading away, the urge would have taken over my life. I’d be a monster.

  Trouble is, I’d never actually been alive before, so how was I to know what I’d feel at forty or fifty? This was, so far as I knew, my first attempt at living on this planet and I was making the whole thing up as I went along.

  The next time I went to the rue de l’Exposition, one afternoon after I’d done the early shift at PFP, I saw Clémence sitting in the window. She was wearing a blue dress and was working a machine with her feet while at the same time squaring up pieces of material under the needle with her hands. I know nothing about sewing, but it looked to me as though she was not just mending a dress but actually making it. Sometimes she stopped and looked down to a table by her elbow, as if to some instructions.

  What was I supposed to do? Go in and say, I’ve seen you in a book, but somehow you haven’t aged in sixty-odd years. And in a dream you told my landlady your name. Now I wonder if you’d like to talk to me about my mother, who lived in Paris as a child and as a young woman – though I don’t know where.

  It wasn’t that I was shy. At home, a lot of life takes place on the street and all children speak to strangers. We’re brought up like that. And look at the way I’d found myself work in Saint-Denis – I just talked to lots of people I didn’t know until one of them offered me a job. I’d never quite understood shyness anyway. What was the worst thing that could happen? Some stranger you’d never see again might tell you to fuck off? Was that so bad? But I wasn’t sure how to approach Clémence. And maybe the reason was that I didn’t really want to talk to her anyway, I wanted more to look at her.