So I went up to the rue Saint-Dominique and eventually found a maison de la presse where I bought the largest newspaper they had. It was called Le Figaro. Then I went back to the sewing shop and perched myself on the windowsill of a building opposite and began to watch over the top of the open paper.
Her knees went up and down and the dark eyes moved, but her head stayed quite still. She seemed so absorbed by her work that there was no chance she’d look up and see me. Everything about her seemed delicate, the slim fingers, the pointed kneecaps, even the thighs, of which I could see a little when the blue skirt rode up. Her nose was quite sharp and her mouth was pursed in concentration. But although she was delicate, she wasn’t fragile. She seemed to know exactly what she was doing. I loved her.
The rhythm of her work began to suggest a tune to me. As I watched the gentle rise of her thighs beneath the blue dress and the exact movements of her hands, I started to sing to myself, very quietly. The words I put to the tune weren’t up to much, the first words that came into my head, but the song seemed sad, like the folk songs I vaguely remembered from my earliest childhood. Who can have sung them to me, where did I hear them? Perhaps from my mother, before she disappeared, and maybe she’d first heard them here in Paris in a concert hall or in a bar or maybe just in the street by someone homesick for the countryside.
For an hour or more I sat and watched her work. An older woman with glasses came from the back of the shop and put a cup on the small table next to the sewing pattern, but even then Clémence hardly hesitated and her eyes never left the piece of cloth under her hands. When it was dark, she finally stopped, as though the electric light of the lamp beside her was not enough. She stood up and raised her arms above her head and stretched. She went to the back of the shop and for a moment I lost sight of her, but I felt sure she must have finished for the day. Sure enough, in a few minutes she emerged, wearing the same knee-length coat and small hat on the side of her head. I was looking down hard at the trade figures or political argument or whatever was in the long columns of Le Figaro. There was no need to glance up because I knew which way she’d be going.
I gave her about thirty metres, then set off. We were soon on the open area of the Place Joffre, in front of the bullet-marked École Militaire, then I had to hurry not to lose her in the backstreets that led to her porte-cochère with the flaking paint.
When she got there, I hung back to give her time to enter the code, go inside and let the door close behind her.
Intending to go up to Bir-Hakeim, I strolled past a minute later. But as I glanced across the road, I saw that she was standing in the entrance, holding the street door open with her left hand. I caught her eye and stopped.
Her eyes met mine, as they had on the Métro. She lifted her right hand and beckoned to me to cross the road and come inside.
Behind the street door was another world. I was used to this from the doors in the medina, or the gate at Laila’s wall that opened up their park-like garden.
Clémence said nothing as she walked ahead of me over a cobbled courtyard, in the far corner of which was an open door onto a stone staircase. There was no lift. I followed her up two flights, where she unlocked a double door from the landing.
We went into a hallway with a wooden floor, then a sitting room, where she pointed me to a chair. She didn’t come in, but I heard the sound of a kettle and china next door. The sitting room had a window over the courtyard and a sewing machine on a table. The furniture was old and there was no television or music player or Wi-Fi router or anything electronic.
After a minute or so, Clémence came back and put down two china cups of clear tea and a bowl of sugar on a tray. She turned on two table lamps, but they didn’t give much light. She’d taken off her coat and little hat, I noticed, as she sat down opposite me in her blue dress and her pointed knees in their honey-coloured nylon covering. She took a cigarette from a small box on the table, lit it and blew out some smoke. She was sitting forward with her elbows on her thighs.
At last she spoke. Putting her head on one side, she said, ‘What do you want?’
I was shocked.
She spoke in French, and what she’d said was, ‘Qu’est-ce que tu veux?’ – not the vous that you’d expect on first meeting, but the familiar tu. So she was either being rude or she was treating me as an infant.
Yet her tone of voice suggested neither of these things. It suggested kindness. She wasn’t asking what I wanted in the way shop assistants say, ‘Can I help you?’ It was more like an offer: tell me what you want and I’ll give it to you. Perhaps it was more even than that, something like a philosophical question as though the words ‘from life’ or ‘from me’ were understood.
It sounds impossible now I look at it that one question could say so much. But at that moment in her tone I swear I heard a kind of fondness.
My short life to this point had not included anyone speaking to me in this way. It had so far been about trying, and hoping and being frustrated and thinking that frustration, really, was the nature of being alive – attempting to have happiness and finding that there was some glitch in the basic rules of existence that made it impossible.
I picked up the tea cup. The drink was very hot, and sweet, made with a bunch of mint, leaves and stalks, like we have it at home.
We heard the clock ticking. I thought about how to reply, of what to say, of all the things I might try to ask of her.
In the end, because it was the only thing that seemed possible, I told the truth. I said, ‘I want to watch you.’
But that’s not really what I said, because obviously I spoke in French too. What I said was: ‘Je veux te regarder.’
And the ‘te’ was like jumping from a cliff. The sound of it hung there.
She didn’t blink, just said. ‘Comme tu veux.’ As you wish.
Then she leaned forward and held out the cigarette box to me. I took one of the unfiltered cigarettes and lit it with a table lighter. It was not like being at Hannah’s.
Some time passed then. I couldn’t say how much, perhaps an hour, perhaps much less. She talked. I didn’t ask her questions, but her low voice filled the room. It was all stories from the past, but they didn’t sound like history, like Hannah telling me things. Her father, a town called Annaba, her mother, her sister, back in Paris, a strict school in rue de Vaugirard … I didn’t really listen, I just looked at her, both exotic and familiar. Her dark hair shining a little when it caught the light from one of the low lamps. The big dark eyes which were like a deer’s. I don’t mean she looked like an animal, I mean there was something dutiful and patient in them.
At some point during this hour I was able to listen and concentrate on what she said. ‘… in the apartment where we’re sitting now. It’s all so long ago. A policeman – a man my friend knew because he’d seen him often in the street, usually on Avenue Bosquet – came and knocked on the door at two in the morning. The policeman asked to see his papers and told him to get dressed. He walked with him, down this little street here, on to the boulevard and then only a short way from here to an arena, a well-known place where they had sporting events under a glass dome painted blue. He did what he was told because he had nothing to fear. He wondered what sporting event could be taking place in the middle of the night.
‘It was the strangest event that Paris had ever staged. The seats of the auditorium were all taken. There were families with grandparents, families with small children, married couples and people all alone, like my friend. Some lay down, some spilled over from the seats on to the sports area. But there was no entertainment. For five days there were no bicycle races on the wooden track, no football, no clowns or jugglers, no boxing. Nor was there any explanation of what they were doing there. Paris policemen barred the doors. There was no water and nothing to eat. The thousands of people in the velodrome, the old and the young, the rich and the poor, had one thing in common. On their coats they had a yellow star.
‘When the police began to move them
on the fifth day, a few were already dead from lack of water. The officers herded them all into the same green-and-white buses that might on any other day have taken them to work. They took them to a camp in the north of the city, a place called Drancy. The bakers, the dressmakers, financiers, old people, good-for-nothings, lawyers, road menders, the young brides, the office clerks and the children. And from there they put them on trains that took them to the east, to Poland, where they could more easily be killed.’
Ten
Ternes
Two months into my work, I felt I was making progress. The problem was that keeping the personal and professional apart was proving more difficult than I’d expected. So much of what I saw and thought – on the street, at home in the flat, working in the archive – seemed coloured by some sort of memory-filter made up of the person I myself had been ten years before.
I suppose that at that age – twenty-one – I was a rather solemn girl. My parents were true Americans, descended from German and Irish migrants, the Kohlers and the Slatterys, generations back. They lived in Massachusetts, where they had the advantage of being white and employed; my father worked for a company that imported Japanese porcelain, my mother in healthcare administration. Even as a kid I noticed that not everyone had a timber-framed house with a porch and a small spare bedroom in back; by the time I went to high school, I was aware that having incomes from two parents was also an advantage. In class I met children from the projects near the steel mills. Most of them had only one parent and hardly any seemed interested in learning; to hear them talk, you’d think their life was already pushing them towards gangs and crime.
Our high school was no great shakes, but – so long as you had some back-up or encouragement at home – it gave its students a chance at least of getting the grades they needed for college, and the more I read about the world, the more it seemed clear to me that even this education put me in a minority. What chance would I have had if I’d been brought up in a refugee camp or a village in Africa with no school?
At college, I joined marches against violence against women and organised book sales for African famines. Jasmine (affectionately, I liked to think) called me ‘God’s little soldier’. By the time I arrived in Paris in the fall of 1995, I still hadn’t sorted out what I really thought – or rather, I knew what I believed but not how to shape a life to reflect those beliefs. Perhaps I had been more confused than I knew – dangerously so maybe, I now thought: a mixture of unresolved contradictions.
‘I know what you mean,’ said Julian Finch when I cautiously referred one day to the way my past seemed to hang over me. ‘There’s no city in the world where you’re so aware of your younger self.’
We were in a restaurant on the Avenue des Ternes, a room with crimson banquettes and platters of shellfish, where he’d invited me for lunch. It was a sunny day in March and the sidewalk trees were coming into leaf.
‘You did seem desperate that summer, I remember,’ he was saying. ‘I didn’t know you well and it wasn’t my place to ask, but I knew you’d had trouble with your Russian poet.’
‘Playwright.’
‘He had a poetic air. I felt responsible. You were young. I’d introduced you to him at that library event.’
‘No, I’d already introduced myself.’
‘But it was difficult. You were such a mixture. So grown-up in some ways, confident and firm in your feminism, but somehow vulnerable. Or so it seemed to me.’
‘You didn’t say so at the time.’
‘Of course not. You have to respect someone else’s beliefs. Partly because you want to, and partly because you don’t want to put your foot in it. And then there’s the distance you have to keep with the student–teacher thing.’
I began to laugh. ‘You really mustn’t blame yourself for my Russian.’
‘But he made you unhappy.’
‘Not at first. I became unhappy when he went back to St Petersburg.’
Julian nodded. ‘And was he your first?’
‘First what?’
‘First real … First proper …’
‘No. The only one. “First” implies there were others after him.’
I hadn’t slept with a man for nearly ten years; the fact was, I hadn’t even kissed one – though I didn’t say so to Julian.
‘I see.’ He picked up the menu. ‘Now. Food. In a place like this, we should order the old-fashioned things. That’s what they care about. Pot au feu. Tarte tatin. Please don’t say you’re going to have the sea bass.’
‘Why not?’
‘Sylvie ordered it in every restaurant we ever went to. Sometimes it took her twenty minutes staring at the menu before she knew that what she wanted was the sea bass.’
While we ate (not sea bass, unfortunately), I told Julian about the Mathilde Masson files and how I was worried about Mathilde’s ‘future’. ‘She wants to be tough. She has this in-your-face accent and attitude. But I fear the worst.’
‘And you think she might still be alive?’
‘There’s no death date on the file. Though the Jean Molland’s not always up to date with its housekeeping.’
‘Would you like me to find out?’
‘Can you?’
‘Maybe. I know Leo Busch, the director of the centre.’
‘The German?’
‘Yes. And I’ve met his French counterpart, too. A nice woman. Florence Something. I could ask them, if you like. It might be confidential, but I can always ask.’
‘I’d appreciate that.’
I’d drunk half the bottle of wine and had no plan to work in the afternoon; out on the avenue, I could see the spring light already starting to fade. I was more than happy to listen as Julian told me a little about his life without Sylvie. (‘Being single has some advantages, though to be honest, not as many as I’d imagined. I do miss her.’) I just hoped that he wasn’t expecting me to reciprocate. There was nothing I wanted to tell him about the intimacy of my connection with Aleksandr and the sharing with him of both my noblest and most shameful private thoughts. What on earth had led me on? Was it a greed for sensation, a hunger to be known better, to become so close to someone else that I would melt into his flesh and disappear? All of this and more, I thought, the ‘more’ being in part a sense that such passion (‘love’, if that was the word for it) was approved by others – held up as a goal that everyone should aspire to. I had been deceived. Knowing him so intimately hadn’t taken me to a higher plane of being, still less brought me peace of mind. Instead, it had created a second person inside me, a sort of Dido full of operatic yearning, who, when Aleksandr left me to go back to St Petersburg, cried out to heaven at my abandonment. In the years that followed, it didn’t matter how many days of quiet work or evenings of friendship I enjoyed. Nothing could calm the pain of the inner bitch sister, permanently on heat, hysterically aggrieved.
Or so it had seemed in my more balanced moments – when I could use humour to gain some distance from this demented person. At other times, I was caught without a defence. It wasn’t only at night, when I had surrendered to sleep, but by day, on a street corner, that I might be taken unawares by a sense of loss that obliterated all reason. Once when I was walking in the park at home, I called his name out loud among the trees, then sat down on the grass and wailed. I worried at that moment that I was losing my mind.
‘By the way,’ I said. ‘I have a new boyfriend now. A young Moroccan who lives with me.’
‘You dark horse.’
‘It’s a little like having an exotic pet.’
‘Sounds messy.’
‘I’m training him. We take it one week at a time. And he knows I’ll kick him out if he gets out of line.’
‘Young men make insatiable lovers.’
‘He doesn’t think of me that way.’
‘He’s how old again?’
‘Nineteen, twenty, somewhere round there.’
‘He thinks of you that way. Believe me. Unless he’s gay.’
‘No, he�
��s not. But, boy, is he ignorant. He knows nothing. It shocked me at first. Now I find it kind of intriguing.’
‘Are you making yourself responsible for his education?’
‘Not in any regular way.’ I looked down at my coffee. ‘It’s strange. We’ve become kind of friends. I’m like his mom and his older sister as well as his landlady. And he does interest me. I think that knowing nothing makes him in a way more open to experience.’
‘That doesn’t sound possible.’
‘I know. But he has no clutter in his head. When he sees something, he doesn’t try to figure out what it means, using kinds of precedent or comparison. He just thinks, What’s this? Will I enjoy it?’
‘But you don’t really think of your own education as “clutter”.’
‘I sometimes think I’ve read too much. I see too many trees up close. Sometimes I’m maybe missing the shape of the wood.’
Then we talked for a while about British support for the French resistance, much of which was focused on Paris through a secret network of agents under the code name ‘Prosper’. Julian was enthusiastic about their story, but I was beginning to feel tired.
After lunch, Julian went up Avenue Mac-Mahon to take the Métro home, but I kept walking towards the Place des Ternes. It was by no means a charming part of town, but even this street had its half-closed dramas. In one of Barbara Putnam’s papers I’d read how, in 1942, at the Brasserie La Lorraine on the Place des Ternes itself, some of the agents of the Prosper network used to gather and drink on the terrace. They belonged to the Special Operations Executive, a British spying and sabotage organisation that was secretly built up in Nazi-occupied Europe. Meeting in public was in breach of their orders and in defiance of every norm of safety and common sense; they even sometimes spoke in English. Their excuse was that they were lonely – nothing more. And by 1943, the Prosper network had been betrayed by its French air transport officer, who had told the Germans where every secret flight would land and who’d be on it; all that was left to the careless English visitors with their drinks on the terrace was the knock on the door, a rendezvous with German counter-intelligence at 84, Avenue Foch and the cattle truck to a concentration camp out east, where they would be killed.
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