Paris Echo

by Sebastian Faulks

  My mother was worried about me going out with any men at all. She cared a lot about modesty. She worried about me as an only child. My father asked about what other girls of my age did. My friend Yvonne Bonnet had been out with at least three German soldiers and she was quite proud of it. They’d given her presents – ribbons and combs and some bunches of flowers, nothing very much, but she liked to show them off. I was pretty sure she’d slept with them too, but I didn’t say that to my parents.

  Anyway, my father was a bit more easy-going than my mother. He said everyone was making up the rules as they went along, so there were no rules. Like most people then, he thought the war would soon be over. The Germans were sure to win and it was up to us to make sure we were their second-in-command in Europe afterwards. He’d had no problems with any of the Germans he’d had dealings with and he saw nothing wrong in planning ahead. He was impressed that Klaus Richter was an officer, and a major at that.

  In the end he said, ‘We’ve brought you up to behave properly. Now you’re twenty-two years old and we trust you. Of course your German is a proper officer, not like those men the Bonnet girl brings home. I think you should go and have a big dinner with champagne and then come home and tell us all about it. And if you can bring back a little something in your handbag so much the better.’ That was Papa all over.

  My mother tried one last time to stop me and talked about the Church, but I told her not to worry and I said I’d only go if he promised to have me home by ten. I was longing to be independent. I liked going to work on the Métro every day. I enjoyed wearing nice clothes and I spent time in the morning thinking about what I was going to wear. Most of my things were second-hand, but I’d saved up for a charcoal woollen skirt from our shop because we got a good discount. It was a question of putting the right things together, fabrics and colours, and I liked it if I got the occasional admiring glance from a young man. It didn’t mean anything and I wasn’t a flirt. It was just that I was young and I was glad to be living in Paris, even at such a strange time. I wanted to stretch my legs, to stretch my wings.

  When she talked about her clothes and going to work on the Métro I envisaged her again as the girl I’d seen coming down the steps at Stalingrad. Not as that girl’s grandmother or mother – but as one and the same person.

  After I’d finished the job, I moved the new file to the centre of the laptop screen. I called it ‘Shop Girl’. I had no idea why any of it was important, let alone a contribution to ‘history’. But my heart was full of longing for her and I felt relieved that she hadn’t slept with this Nazi.

  The next day I was on the late shift, so at about midday I took the Métro to Chemin Vert and cut down to the Place des Vosges. Then I walked right across the Marais, along the rue des Francs Bourgeois. It wasn’t my kind of place. It had dusty white stone buildings, expensive clothes shops and tourists. It was old, like the casbah, but not as much fun, less lively, and it was full of men holding hands – maricones, as my father would have called them. I went down a smaller street and I asked in a couple of falafel bars and an American diner what their rents and taxes were. The people behind the counters, one of whom was a Jew with side whiskers and a black hat, looked a bit surprised, but they gave me a rough idea or said to call back when the boss was in. By now I was feeling hungry (the fruit and bran on offer at breakfast at Hannah’s didn’t last the morning) and I thought that before I did my research into property rents I’d go to the favourite restaurant I’d mentioned. It was called ‘Flunch’ and it was just next to the Beaubourg building with its grim-coloured plumbing.

  And Flunch was a really good place. You went down some stairs into this white-tiled underground area where you could help yourself to pretty much anything. There was a grill bar and a hot-meal counter, a big range of desserts and litre cups of Fanta and Coke on draught. But the best thing was that once you’d got through the till there was a whole lot more free. So long as you’d got a main-course plate you could add spaghetti, frites, courgettes, rice, broccoli, meat sauce, as high as you could pile it, and the whole thing cost about what I could earn in one hour and a half at PFP.

  As I was waiting at the grill bar I noticed an old man with a big white beard who was talking to himself. He was carrying an ancient leather bag in one hand and he was finding it hard to balance his tray in the other. I was carefully pushing my burger to one side of the plate to make maximum room at the free counter when I got stuck behind him. He was trying to explain to the cashier that he wasn’t ready for his dessert or cheese yet (he seemed to be planning a five-course meal) and he wanted to eat his egg mayonnaise first before he put his main course on the tray.

  ‘Do you want coffee?’ she said.

  ‘Coffee? I haven’t had my soup yet,’ the old guy said.

  The cashier only seemed to speak the lines she’d been programmed to say – do you want coffee with that, have you got a voucher – so I thought I should try to help. Eventually we managed to get the old man’s piled-up tray past the till. I hadn’t the heart to tell him about the free food on the other side.

  He stood there looking about him with a lost expression. ‘I can’t see a waiter to tell us where to sit,’ he said.

  ‘You just sit anywhere.’ I took us to a vacant place.

  One of the things that was great about Flunch was that it was so clean. There weren’t any silly women feeding dogs at table, something that had really freaked me out at first in Paris. Also, there were plenty of people like me there, pale-skinned people from the north of Africa, as well as black-skinned men from what looked like Senegal or the Ivory Coast.

  ‘My name is Victor Hugo,’ said the old guy, wiping some mayonnaise from his beard. ‘I appreciate your help, young man. I haven’t been here before. I tried to reserve a table, but they told me it was impossible. And what’s your name, may I ask?’

  ‘Tariq Zafar.’

  He shook my hand. ‘What a fine name. Are you a Mohammedan?’

  ‘My parents … In a way.’

  ‘I think there are many of your co-religionists in this restaurant. And many others who work in the neighbourhood as masons and builders. I like to be among such people when I eat. People who put down cobbles in the street.’

  Although he seemed a bit soft in the head, he was very interested in everything going on around him. He was struck by the advertisements for Flunch itself, which said things like, ‘Votre anniversaire? Il faut fluncher!’ in bright colours. He made himself chuckle a fair bit by chanting, ‘Je fluncherai, tu fluncheras, il aurait dû fluncher, elles flunchèrent’ and so on.

  The clothes worn by the women also seemed to fascinate him and he asked me to explain what lay behind their choice of jeans or dress or miniskirt. I told him I wasn’t qualified to say, though on the Métro I’d often wondered the same thing myself. Take my Stalingrad girl, for instance – Juliette, as I now called her. When she washed and dried her hair in the morning, put on some mascara, then decided on that combination of short skirt with boots and loose coat or jacket and strode along the platform at Rambuteau or sat on the seat with the skirt riding up her thigh as she checked her phone, the clean hair falling over her cheek, did she know what an awful effect she had on the boy opposite? Had that been her thought process when she got dressed that morning? To make me and others like me suicidal with frustration, to spread despair through the city?

  From this, we moved on to the question of women in general.

  ‘In your religion a man is permitted many wives, I believe,’ said Victor Hugo. ‘I have always thought that a most sensible arrangement. And you are allowed by your holy scripture to sleep with your friends’ servants, too.’

  I had a mental picture of Laila’s housekeeper, Farida, when Victor Hugo said, ‘But not with your own servants, I understand.’

  ‘Certainly not,’ I said, picturing my parents’ bad-tempered cleaner.

  He was struggling with his wine bottle, so I unscrewed it for him with a snap. His eyes widened, but he said nothing.
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  ‘We have a lot to learn from other faiths,’ he went on, as he sipped the wine. ‘We are a lay republic, as you know, Monsieur Zafar. But people are still intimidated by the teaching of the Catholic Church. I find such things absurd and hypocritical. I believe in God, but not in the Church. God sent great men – writers and musicians and scholars – to be his prophets on this earth, men such as Molière and Racine, who are touched by the divine, but he did not send the parish priest. My wife and my mistress are on the best of terms. Indeed, they are going to the Comédie Française together this evening while I complete some urgent work at home. I adore them both and there is enough of me to go round.’

  He put down his knife and fork, drained his wine glass and said, ‘I think I’m ready for the coffee now. Will you join me?’

  In the next half-hour I learned more about the country I was living in than in all the years of my life up till then. It all made sense the way old Victor Hugo told it. From the Frankish kings and the divine anointing that made them the chosen ones, through the Revolution that had established the Rights of Man for all the world and then the desperate times when only a few good men could keep the flame of freedom alive – like the one (I didn’t catch his name) who had escaped from the Siege of Paris in a hot-air balloon, carrying the spirit of France with him, a little flame that must never go out … And the French Revolution, he said, was ‘the greatest step forward taken by the human race since the advent of Christ’. And it was the duty of France to bear this burden for all the world.

  By the time we’d finished the coffee and agreed what an excellent restaurant it was, I found that I’d also said I’d spend the afternoon with him. More than that, I was to be his colleague or assistant in whatever ‘work’ it was he did.

  ‘My business is underground, Monsieur Zafar. On the metropolitan network. I hope that suits you.’

  ‘I love the Métro.’

  ‘Then we shall amuse ourselves.’

  We walked to Hôtel de Ville station before going below ground. Having jumped the barrier in the usual way, I had to wait while Victor Hugo looked for his pass in the pockets of his big coat. I guessed it was some old citizen’s travel permit. He looked ill-at-ease in the rubber-wheeled wagon with its farting pneumatic doors. He seemed to flinch at the automated announcement that told us which station was coming up next. The male announcer’s voice said the name twice. At first he had a questioning note, ‘Châtelet?’ as we began to slow down, and then, as we came into the station, he seemed to grow more confident as he said, ‘Châtelet’, in a told-you-so way.

  At Concorde we got off and followed the correspondance to the green line, going south. I had a quick suck on a spliff while I waited for the old man at the end of a tunnel.

  ‘This is more like it,’ said Victor Hugo. ‘My favourite line, the famous Line Twelve. Mairie d’Issy to Porte de la Chapelle. This is the real Paris, Monsieur Zafar.’

  Victor Hugo put his hand into his bag and pulled out a large piece of black cloth, about two metres long. With his back to the door into the next carriage, he wrapped the cloth round the two metal uprights that standing passengers hold on to. He fastened it with a stretchy luggage clip sewn into the seam so it made a tall narrow screen. Victor Hugo was now hidden behind it, bar the toecaps of his boots. As we left Assemblée Nationale, he took out some ragged puppets from his doctor’s bag and began the show, sticking the puppets over the top of the black cloth.

  It started as a cops-and-robbers thing. One mangy puppet was chased by another, who wore a police hat. Victor Hugo did the voices with the cop squeaky and the robber a bit deeper and somehow sounding the nobler of the two. It was better than the beggars’ speeches you usually got on the Métro, when a young man told you the story of his life, ‘I’m looking for work. Yes, I know you’ve heard it all before, but I only need a one-euro coin from each of you.’

  The people in the carriage stared at their cell phones or their books while Victor Hugo did his performance. Many of them had headphones and gave us only a glance.

  After a bit of dialogue, the robber puppet gave the cop a blow on the head. Then the robber took off his mask and became an ordinary citizen. He’d gone straight, that was the idea. Then there was a female with hair made of mop ends and rouge on her cheeks, who I took to be a hooker, and her baby, whose cries Victor Hugo imitated in an old man’s falsetto. People began to move down the carriage to get away from us.

  Round about Sèvres–Babylone, a new male puppet appeared. It had a plastic wine glass attached to its hand and took over the baby. I thought this new one might be an innkeeper, but at this point Victor Hugo produced a hat from his doctor’s bag and sent me down the carriage to collect any offerings.

  I don’t want to be unkind to the old man. He hadn’t got much to work with and he gave it all he’d got … but the show was really shit. I managed to collect two euros and forty cents.

  We were now passing through Volontaires and there weren’t many people left on the train.

  ‘It’s time to put away our people, Monsieur Zafar,’ said Victor Hugo. ‘We can resume the story tomorrow.’

  ‘Isn’t it over yet?’ I said.

  ‘No, no. The entire story takes three days from Mairie d’Issy to Porte de la Chapelle and back again.’ He was dropping the grimy puppets back into his bag. ‘You can join me tomorrow if you like. It’s good to have a helper. I start at nine thirty, when the morning rush has died down, otherwise there are people standing here, in our performance area.’

  The train was pulling into Vaugirard station. ‘I remember watching the horses being led into the slaughterhouse,’ said Victor Hugo. ‘Just above where we’re sitting now. It was a fine sight. But the other butchers didn’t like it. They said the dead horses made too much smell and it put people off their work. I loved a horse steak myself. Now it’s a park.’

  He seemed to think it was a tremendous joke and chuckled away into his white, scarf-like beard, a little tear of mirth rolling down his beaten-up boxer’s cheek into the moustache. ‘A park!’ We got off at the end of the line. I made for the northbound platform to go back into town while Victor Hugo headed for the exit.

  ‘I shall be at the table by the door at Le Comptoir d’Issy, just up here, from nine in the morning,’ he said. ‘I shall expect to see you. Until tomorrow, Monsieur Zafar.’

  It seemed to take ages for a train to come and I was starting to feel a bit spaced out. This may have been from Jamal’s weed, which was unpredictable, I’d found. There was also something about being with Victor Hugo that had unsettled me.

  When you’re young, when you’re a child, you’re quite used to not understanding things. Gravity, how to read music, how planes stay up, computer code … Everyone’s been a child, everyone starts out ignorant. But you don’t fret about any of this because there are things that seem more important, like how am I going to pass this exam and why can’t I sit up late and drink beer. You’ll get round to knowing the hard stuff one day. And yes, my life was none the worse for the fact that I wouldn’t be able to rewire a house. There were people to do that for you. Outside the gates of the medina you could see them lined up in the morning. A painter with his pots, an electrician with his rolls of wire and the plumber with his taps and rubber piping all attached to his rickety bicycle. They sat cross-legged on the kerb outside the café drinking mint tea, hoping for work. And I knew that my father, Mr Wise Guy himself, would go to his grave with no idea of even how a simple transistor radio worked.

  My problem in Paris that day with Victor Hugo was that it struck me I was going to be twenty any moment, and some of the knowledge gaps could no longer be forgiven. It was starting to be a cop-out to say, I live my own life and I mind my own business.

  And that was why as I sat in the empty station at the end of the line, I became aware that knowing so little was starting to make me feel sick.

  Eventually the train rattled in and I sat down alone in a dusty carriage. There was nothing much to look at. Above some seats
near the door was a notice that said these places were reserved, then gave a list of who was entitled to them – in order. First were the war-wounded, the mutilés de guerre. Then aveugles civils (people blinded by heredity or illness, not by enemy fire, presumably), then pregnant women and those accompanied by children of less than five years old. I wondered why Parisians needed to be reminded of simple manners and why this was the first time I’d noticed the announcement. Then I wondered what conflict the men might have been wounded in. Had France been in a war recently? I felt another spasm of my new discomfort – the shame of not knowing.

  The carriage door was pulled open at the next station by a man of about forty with a briefcase. Normally you lifted a latch and the doors powered apart automatically with a hydraulic belch. (Or did I mean ‘pneumatic’ belch? God, I didn’t know anything.) The door latch on this bit of rolling stock had no spring, it was like the closing of an old iron gate, and the man had pulled the doors apart with his own hands. Someone further down the carriage was smoking, knocking his ash onto the slatted wooden floor. When I got out at Sèvres–Babylone to change lines, I had to walk along beside the train. Most of the carriages were green, but towards the front there was a red one: First Class. Its windows were cloudy, but it seemed to have only men inside, a huddle of overcoats.

  Then, instead of taking the correspondance and heading east, I decided to go up and get some air to clear my head. At the end of the platform was a door with the notice ‘Au delà de cette limite votre billet n’est plus valide’, beyond this point your ticket is no longer valid. As I climbed the steps on the other side of the barrier I saw a drift of abandoned tickets, many of them folded into the familiar ‘V’ shape.