Paris Echo

by Sebastian Faulks

  It was good to get down there. By this time walking on the street for more than five minutes was suspicious. On the Métro the police could check your papers easily, so that’s how you travelled if you had nothing to hide.

  Armand was buried in the evening paper and he wasn’t looking round at all. It was as though he wanted not to meet anyone’s eye and that made it easier for me. We went about ten stations up the line, past Pigalle, though I don’t remember where he got off, maybe Jules Joffrin.

  He still didn’t look round, he scuttled off and I had to hurry to keep up. I knew he wouldn’t look back because that would have been suspicious. A German soldier got out of the front carriage, the red one. There were other Germans inside and Armand must have seen them. Up on the street, he kept moving fast with his head down, not looking back.

  We were in Montmartre, a part of the city I didn’t know at all, but I guessed he was going to meet Simone and the other people in their group. It was an odd-looking place he stopped at. It didn’t look like the normal apartment buildings in Paris, if you know what I mean. It looked a different colour stone, it looked foreign, Russian or something. This was in rue Damrémont, I think. The front door opened very quickly, I think he used a latchkey, then he was gone.

  There wasn’t a café in the right place this time, so I just had to walk up and down on the pavement opposite. It was dark by now and, as I said, I didn’t know the area and in those days a girl couldn’t be alone at night without people getting the wrong idea. Then there was the question of the curfew, and you couldn’t be out at all after that.

  So I walked up and down the street for ages, pretending to look into shop windows. A couple of men made remarks, but nothing much. As it got close to the curfew I knew I’d either have to go home or find somewhere to stay. I didn’t have the money for a room, but I went in to the nearest café-bar and asked to speak to the owner. I gave him a hard-luck story about how my husband had taken all my money and I couldn’t get home. I said I’d sweep and clean and wash all the dishes if he let me sleep in a back room or even on the floor. He went and spoke to his wife and she gave me a cloth and a mop and told me to get working. I said I’d start after curfew. If Armand hadn’t come out by then he’d have to spend the night. I knew he wouldn’t risk being seen.

  I watched the door of the building but no one came out. I just hoped he hadn’t gone out through a back entrance. Then I went back to the café and began to work. I swept the floor clean of all the ash and broken glass. It was made of red tiles, I can still remember it. Then I scrubbed it on my hands and knees and with each movement of the hard brush I imagined the floor was her face and I was tearing off the skin.

  What right had this woman to steal Armand? I didn’t go round Paris sleeping with different men, taking other women’s husbands. I wanted just one man. And I was the only one who understood him and knew how to look after him. I hadn’t asked much from life, he was all I’d ever had.

  The owner’s wife said I could stop cleaning because they were going to bed. She showed me a small sitting room in the back and said I could sleep on the couch. She was all right. She was a bit suspicious, but she could see I’d done a good job. She brought me a carafe of water and a glass and there was some bread and a small piece of ham left over at the bar which she said I could have. There was no butter, there never was.

  Although the couch was quite comfortable I didn’t sleep at all because I was frightened of sleeping past five in the morning, when the curfew ended. I got up and went back to the bar and polished some more glasses and wiped all the sticky stuff off the bottles and put them back neatly, then tidied the shelves. I watched the clock above the bar.

  It was still dark when I went down the back corridor and opened the door at the end. It wasn’t very nice, two footprints and a hole and a tiny sink and it hadn’t been cleaned for a long time, but I washed as well as I could in cold water and tried to comb my hair. At about two minutes past five I let myself out of the bar and on to the street.

  For about an hour I hung around opposite the building Armand had gone in, and this time the door did open. Two people came out. They were Armand and a tall woman and they began to walk quickly down the street, arm in arm.

  They went down into the Métro and I followed them but they weren’t interested in anyone else, so it was easy. They got out at Saint-Georges and walked for about ten minutes till they came to rue Milton, on the other side of the rue des Martyrs. Outside a small apartment building, they stopped and he kissed her on the lips. She clung onto him for a bit, then opened the front door with a key and went inside. A minute later I saw a second-floor light come on.

  Armand turned and walked down the hill. I slumped to the ground, with my back to a wall. I stayed sitting for a long time. Eventually I managed to stand up and dust myself down. I’d been sitting against the wall of an infant school. I looked across the street to take a note of the number above her door.

  The next day I went to the prefect of police in Belleville and reported an enemy of the French state living on the second floor, at number 12, rue Milton, Ninth arrondissement.

  Thirteen

  Censier–Daubenton

  Hasim had second thoughts about a new restaurant in the Marais when I told him how much it was likely to cost in rent and taxes.

  ‘I think it’s just that area,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of cheaper parts of town, I’m sure. Near where I live in the Thirteenth, for a start. Or somewhere out by the Périphérique.’

  ‘You can’t charge enough in those places. It needs to be somewhere that people pay a lot. Saint-Germain des Prés. They charge tourists eight euros for coffee there.’

  Business plans were not my strong point, so I left him to it. I was beginning to be sick of PFP. Although the money wasn’t bad, the shifts were long, Hasim was depressed and the work was revolting. The many hours there also prevented me from searching for whatever it was I’d come to Paris to discover.

  There was no doubt that I’d been quite lucky to find both a job and a place to live. Maybe it was because I didn’t try too hard. This was a part of my character that annoyed my father. ‘You just drift along expecting things to fall into your lap. You’ve got to engage with life,’ he told me. For some reason, things tended not to have a big impact on me. I wasn’t scared to ask the shopkeepers of the Marais about their overheads and I’d volunteered to deliver fried-chicken pieces to the frightening cités of the banlieue, because I trusted to my own luck. If some bad-ass gang leader threatened me, I’d just run. I was quick enough on my feet. Maybe this was something to do with being nineteen, though I was beginning to wonder if I ought occasionally to worry a little more. Not as much as Hannah, who seemed on the edge of a nervous breakdown from listening to a sound recording, but just a bit. The only thing that made me feel really uneasy was how little I’d been able to imagine my mother and her life in Paris. Had she lived among the North Africans in Saint-Denis or in some other ghetto? I didn’t think so. Her father was a Frenchman, and I pictured them in one of those typical immeubles, a little shabby, on the fifth floor with a balcony.

  I wished now that when I’d left Clémence’s apartment that afternoon I’d made some arrangement to see her again. At the time I wasn’t thinking straight at all. I’d stumbled out onto the street with my head whirling. It was partly the nature of what she’d told me. To think that those events had taken place just across the road from where we sat in her old-fashioned salon drinking mint tea. That the people who herded them in and locked them up, then put them on buses were not Germans with guns and dogs but the gendarmes they saw every day on the street. I decided that I needed to find out more. Feeling a little self-conscious, as though my father was watching and applauding, I embarked for the first time on some ‘research’. Only on the Internet, admittedly – but I read that later in the war the velodrome had seen recruitment rallies for young men who wanted to work for something called the Milice, which as far as I could make out was a force of uniformed thug
s put together by the French government to do the Germans’ dirty work. So … No more family picnics at the velodrome watching the cyclists whiz round the banked wooden track. It was no wonder that a few years later they pulled the whole place down. You wouldn’t want those memories to spoil a big sporting event. Frozen fireballs.

  But more than what Clémence had told me, it was the way she spoke that had shaken me. The strange familiarity that was almost tenderness. And I couldn’t put it all down to Jamal’s weed, because I hadn’t smoked for a few days. (We were waiting for a new consignment from Jamal’s man. He lived out in some high-rise in Sarcelles where Jamal wasn’t keen to pay a call.)

  Meanwhile, it was getting close to my birthday and I thought I should mark the day. It wasn’t that I was proud of having clocked up another year of not having slept with a woman. (Twenty I was now. It was getting to be ridiculous.) No. It was more that I thought I should ask Hannah out to say thank you for having let me stay in her storeroom all this time. And it was a chance to go somewhere a bit less greasy than PFP and to give Hannah a break from the permanently closed restaurants of Butte-aux-Cailles and wherever it was she went during the day to listen to her old ladies.

  In my wanderings I’d gone just off the Boulevard Haussmann one day, into the rue Vivienne. It was too expensive for me, but right in the middle I’d spotted a wine bar whose blue awning said ‘Vins, tapas, espace d’art’. I didn’t drink wine and I knew nothing about art, but I liked tapas. We had them at home sometimes (there were a few Spanish places in the Ville Nouvelle that Laila and I had been to after lectures) and the good thing about tapas was that they were cheap – olives, hard cheese on a stick, fried squid rings and little grey anchovies. Even the omelette with potato bits that Laila loved was not expensive. Hannah was sure to be on some sort of diet, too, so if I had a smoke first, then drank Coke it really wouldn’t cost much. I could ask Jamal and Hasim and maybe tell my landlady she could bring a date to make up the numbers.

  The next time we were both at home, I suggested it. ‘You can ask your boyfriend,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t have a boyfriend,’ said Hannah.

  ‘What about that man you’re always having dinner with, Julian?’

  ‘He’s not my boyfriend. He’s a Brit. He’s just an old acquaintance. But you should ask people. It’s your party.’

  ‘I don’t know anyone in Paris.’ Baco? Not a party type. Clémence? The masseuse from …

  ‘What about your friend Sandrine?’ said Hannah. ‘Remember her?’

  ‘I don’t know how to find her,’ I said. ‘It’s weird, she was part of my life, night and day, for a really important week or so and then … Nothing.’

  ‘Life’s like that, I’m afraid. Some chance meetings shape your whole existence. Others have no meaning at all.’

  ‘She didn’t even leave an e-mail.’

  ‘There’ll be more encounters like that,’ said Hannah. ‘Random. If you don’t like it, you can always believe in an afterlife, or an endless number of lives, in which case these people will turn out to have a role. Their purpose will become clear. Or you can just let them go. Say thank you to your god or your destiny for having met them. Then … Gone.’

  Not sure where she was going with this conversation, I said, ‘Anyway, I’m asking the people from work, Hasim and Jamal.’

  ‘Will they come?’

  ‘Probably not.’ It was starting to look like the smallest party in town. ‘But you can ask anyone, Hannah. Think. Who in the world would you most like to see?’

  ‘I guess it would be Jasmine Mendel. She’s my best friend. I was at college with her. I think I told you.’

  ‘Send her an e-mail.’

  ‘I don’t think she’d fly over from New York for tapas.’

  ‘I’d buy dessert as well.’

  A great deal of my day in Paris, I think it’s fair to say, was spent just wandering round. That’s why I felt sorry for the young men from the high-rises who dared go only as far as the Gare du Nord and strike a few poses before scuttling home. But there was nothing to be frightened of in Paris. You could go anywhere you liked – all the smartest bits, the most Catholic or old French, places called Faubourg or Royal, it didn’t matter. You couldn’t afford to buy anything, but you could still walk along and gaze through the shop windows and read the menus of restaurants that charged 125 euros for dinner. This freedom was one of the things I liked most, and because I’d never been to a big city before it took me by surprise. In the movies I’d seen, New York was full of gangsters, alien invaders or explosions. There probably were films of people going shopping and meeting friends in a bar, but I’d never seen one of those. And my idea of Los Angeles was of a place of guard dogs where the lawns had a notice saying ‘Armed Response’ and you had to be worth a million dollars to get a cab into Beverly Hills. Either that or a drug district where you got murdered. So to be able to wander free down some streets that even I’d heard of, like the Champs-Élysées, was a thrill. And I discovered cinemas that didn’t just show superheroes or cartoons, but films with men and women doing ordinary stuff. Some of these were boring, I admit, and some of them were filthy in a surprising way – you’d suddenly get a close-up of a druggy man’s zib or a woman cutting a bit off her qooq (these Catholic directors like to shock you, I think). I wouldn’t say I enjoyed any of the films that much, but I’d never seen anything like them at home and I felt glad they were there – for me and a few others in the afternoon.

  Trying to get up the courage to tell Hasim I wasn’t going to work at PFP any more was difficult. For some reason I thought they’d want to keep me on and they’d make a fuss and maybe threaten to report me to the police for having no papers. But if I failed to turn up to work one day, that might make them feel more like getting rid of me. So early one morning, when I should have been on the Métro to Saint-Denis, I zipped over on Line Six, Direction Charles de Gaulle–Étoile, and switched onto Line Twelve down to Mairie d’Issy.

  It took me a moment once I was up in the open air to get my bearings. I’d expected an end-of-the-line banlieue, a ghetto of one nationality, maybe Colombians, Poles – Pygmies for all I knew, with every shop offering weird meat and money orders home. In fact, it was at a junction of five streets, open and bright, where most of the people could have passed for French. I spotted Le Comptoir d’Issy, a slightly upmarket place, and when I pushed open the door, I saw the figure of Victor Hugo sitting by the door, next to the coat stand, with his old doctor’s bag in his lap.

  ‘Monsieur Zafar, good morning. Allow me to buy you some coffee before we set off. I thought you’d be back. Curious to know how the story goes on, are you?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I have a fancy for Line Seven today. The travellers of Line Twelve are starting to know my tale too well. We shall have to change at Madeleine. Are you familiar with it? The church?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never mind. We change again at Pyramides and then we can take our time as we travel to Porte de la Villette. I am considerably further on in the story than when we last met. I shall endeavour to fill you in while the train is stationary.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m sure I can pick it up as we go along.’

  There was the usual going through the pockets of his overcoat as Victor Hugo searched for his Métro pass while I waited on the other side of the barrier (I’d recently taken to buying tickets from my wages), but we got there in the end and were able to set up shop in a clean carriage leaving Pyramides.

  It turns out I’d missed too much of the story to be able to make much sense of it. The character with the wine glass, the innkeeper as I thought of him, seemed to have turned out a thoroughly bad man. The policeman was back on the scene, still pursuing the criminal-turned-hero.

  At Opéra, old Victor began to tell me another tale. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was part of the puppet story or not.

  ‘The Opéra, Monsieur Zafar. It was the building in Paris that Adolf Hitler most
coveted. He spent only one day in Paris after the Germans had occupied it. A simple tourist’s Rundfahrt, as he himself might have said. But it was the Opéra he instructed his architects in Berlin to imitate.

  ‘Of course, this was before the ceiling had been redecorated by a Russian Jew. The Opéra itself was considered the high point of the redesign of Paris by the vandal Baron Haussmann, who tore down the old streets and replaced them with vistas that all looked the same. The Opéra itself smacked of the Teutonic, so it was not surprising that it was the place Herr Hitler most admired.’

  There was quite a bit more of this while the train was held. Eventually, he got back to his story about the ceiling. ‘So, forty years ago, they decided to smarten up the Opéra inside. They commissioned an elderly Russian painter called Chagall. For months he lay on his back on top of a scaffold, for all the world like Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, painting away. And for months he went to the same café for lunch in his paint-spattered overalls. One day, the patron finally said, “I see you are a decorator, Monsieur.” And Chagall nodded. The patron said, “And what is your speciality? Outdoors? Masonry? Walls?” And Monsieur Chagall thought for a long time, then said, “Ceilings.”’

  Victor Hugo was still chuckling away into his beard at the Gare de L’Est and seemed to have lost interest in his own tale. He was talking a lot about the sewers of Paris, which he called the ‘intestines of the Leviathan’ and a new group of threadbare puppets he’d pulled out of his bag called ‘Les ABC’. Every time he used the word ‘ABC’ he gave me a dig in the ribs, to signal some sort of joke, and eventually I understood that it sounded the same as the word ‘abaissé’, meaning ‘debased’, I suppose, or ‘low grade’. Well, they’d certainly come out of the bottom of the bag.