We got off at the end of the line, which was my old friend La Courneuve–8 mai 1945. Victor Hugo, I’d gathered by now, didn’t recognise the stops where a line had been extended, so for him Line Seven stopped at Porte de la Villette. Anyway, we switched platform and took the southbound train and he more or less got his performance back on track, with gunshots and fighting in the street, though this was hard to conjure up with no props for barricades.
For some reason the travellers on Line Seven south were in a generous mood and I collected enough money after Censier–Daubenton to pay for lunch at a Chinese restaurant near Les Olympiades – one that old Baco had once recommended. Victor Hugo said he’d never eaten food from China before. He seemed surprised that China had food. A waiter banged down a teapot and some small cups, then brought a pile of baskets with bits of steamed things inside. Some smelled of fish. One that was easy to recognise was a dish of chicken feet (rejects from PFP, perhaps). There was a bowl of rice and soy sauce in another pot. I tried to show Victor Hugo how to use his chopsticks, but he kept firing the food over the paper cloth. He did get a greyish bag of something up to his lips, but it burst and spread its gloop into his beard.
‘We must not despair, Monsieur Zafar,’ he said. ‘I shall approach like Napoleon at Austerlitz. I shall feign weakness to draw the enemy on, then take their centre by surprise. What is this sauce? A beef stock?’
‘Soy,’ I said.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Soya beans. Fermented, I suppose.’
‘How ingenious!’ he said. ‘And I can see that these are the feet of barnyard fowls.’
‘Yes, I wouldn’t have those.’
But he’d balanced one on his chopsticks and was nibbling at the end where the nail was.
‘And does the Chinaman take wine with his lunch?’
I picked up the laminated menu. It looked like a No. ‘Would you like some Coca-Cola?’
‘No, thank you.’
Some parts of the lunch were not too bad and it went better for Victor Hugo when he gave up the chopsticks and used the serving spoon instead. ‘Most ingenious,’ he kept saying as he took the lid off another small basket and sniffed its contents, but I didn’t think he’d become a regular at the Dragon Vert.
The sun was shining when we parted as the best of friends near the wavy-roofed pagodas of the Olympiades. I didn’t make a date to meet again, but I may have left the impression that I’d get down to Le Comptoir d’Issy one day soon.
What I was really wondering as the old man disappeared with his props was whether I’d be able to find Beijing Beauté Massage and reach the end without being interrupted by a howling baby. But that moment I noticed that my phone, which hadn’t been working underground, was vibrating in my pocket. I turned down the call, but listened to the message, which was Hasim telling me that if I didn’t get myself up to Saint-Denis he would perform a certain act on my mother. My grasp of his brand of Algerian Arabic wasn’t great, but I’m pretty sure what he threatened was illegal.
It was a warm day late in May and there was blossom on the trees, so I decided to walk for a bit. From the Place d’Italie I took Avenue des Gobelins going north, towards the centre of the city. You wouldn’t want to go south, obviously, or you’d get back to Maison Blanche and Maurice the lorry driver, with his giveaway paedo shirt-and-tie. How many miles had he put on the clock of his Iveco since I’d been in Paris? Back and forth with only French pop music for company – plus any young people he might have picked up at the roadside.
And weird Sandrine. Not that I really understood any of the people I’d met in France. Not just Sandrine, but Hannah, Victor Hugo, Jamal, Clémence … The only halfway ordinary guy I’d met was Hasim. It wasn’t that he and I were similar. I hadn’t screwed up my life by starting a terrible restaurant in a sad suburb attached to a city I didn’t dare go into. I wasn’t all hung up on religion and race and history and marriage and whatever else was making him look so down in the mouth. I liked the country I came from. I missed it. And as for Paris, I liked that too and I had no fear of walking down its Frenchest streets. But what I mean is, the way that Hasim’s mind worked was clear to me. Life had pissed him out of a camel’s cock, as he might have put it, but he had to make a living and a life in a two-room flat on the eighteenth floor in the frozen fireball of Medina-sur-Seine.
It was odd. He and Jamal both spoke French as their first language, but they hated the country and the old-style French people they called ‘fils de Clovis’ (meaning, as Victor had explained, that they were descended from the first divinely anointed king of France, white man Clovis). They also hated the Jews, which was the main reason Jamal disliked the idea of the Marais. It was not that they’d actually met any Jews, because there were none in Saint-Denis or in any other part of the banlieue. I’d once asked Jamal why this was and he just grunted. ‘They can’t live here. It would end badly. They know that.’
At the top of Avenue des Gobelins, as part of my decision to know and understand more, I made an effort to take in my surroundings. I could see a tall, domed building on what looked like a hill – and a hill, or a butte as the locals call it, is a rare thing in Paris, so I thought I’d make for it. I took a few random turns and the streets became narrower and one or two had cobbles, I was proud of noticing. At one point, on rue Cardinal Lemoine, the road fell quite steeply towards the Seine. I could see over to the other side of the river, past where my favourite Flunch must be, near the Beaubourg thing, then on past the Opéra, up, up, as the ground rose towards Pigalle, over Montmartre and right up to the tower blocks of Saint-Denis and Sarcelles, which loomed over the city in the mist. I thought of all the boys my age with no work or college, in drug gangs, wearing English football shirts, looking down on the closed city they were barred from, as if waiting for their time to come.
The building with the dome looked like a Christian church and it was called the Panthéon, but it turned out to be kind of empty. The leaflet said that famous people’s ashes were inside, but I could only see a few marble statues and a pendulum swinging on a long wire that hung down from the ceiling. I was about to leave when I saw people going down some stairs into what was called a ‘crypte’.
This turned out to be a warren of cold underground chambers where the lights shone on various tombs. Most rooms had a chain across the doorway, so it was hard to make out the names carved in the stone inside and there were only a few placards to tell you who was who – the majority being soldiers or important politicians. Trying hard to concentrate, I did notice a few street names (Jaurès, Gambetta), but what brought me up short was a chamber with three white tombs in it, one of which had the name of Victor Hugo. There was nothing to say who he was, though the dates beneath his name were 1802–1885 and I made a mental note to tell my new friend that some statesman or inventor shared his name.
After the Panthéon I walked on until I came into a park next to rue de Vaugirard with gravel paths among the trees. It had children playing in sandpits and lots of bored-looking young mothers, sitting on the benches, rocking a pushchair to and fro as they chatted to a fellow childminder or checked a phone in the palm of the other hand. There were couples mooching along between the lawns and flower beds beneath the scabby trees. Everything seemed to move at half pace and the afternoon hung heavy. It made me feel unhappy and alone, so I got out of it as fast as I could.
After walking for maybe fifteen minutes down the rue de Babylone, I veered towards École Militaire and before long I found that I was in the rue de l’Exposition. This wasn’t planned in any way, I barely knew where I was, but my feet were drawn to this narrow street. I bought a Figaro from the usual place and perched on the wall. The shop was open, but the sewing machine in the window was not in use. I saw the woman with glasses who had brought Clémence her tea at the counter with the clothes rail behind.
It was about half past four, so there was at least an hour before the shop might close. The man I’d spoken to before came out with a bunch of keys and loo
ked both ways up and down the street as though someone he was expecting was now running late. He looked at his watch and set off towards rue Saint-Dominique. I waited for an hour, but no one went in and no one came out.
Eventually, I crossed the street and pushed open the door. Although I didn’t feel shy, I felt I should try to be polite. The woman behind the counter at the back of the shop was wearing an apron. She took off her glasses and settled her hair, which was a dark orange colour.
‘I was wondering if you could help me, Madame. I’m looking for the lady who works here.’
‘Who?’
‘The one who sits at the machine in the window and makes dresses.’
‘I don’t know what you mean. There’s me and Monsieur Fournier. No one else works here.’
‘But I’ve seen her and I had tea at her apartment.’ I wanted to say what Clémence looked like, but I thought it might be a mistake to describe her to an orange-haired old crone who was denying her existence.
‘I’m sorry. Perhaps you’ve mistaken the shop.’
‘Her name is Clémence. Does that name mean anything?’
‘I’m afraid not. I need to close up now, Monsieur. Goodbye.’
It was starting to grow dark and I had been out almost all day. At my age your legs don’t ache, you don’t clutch your back and groan like Jamal after a long day at the fryer, but just at that moment I did feel an odd fatigue. It was all I could do to move my feet down the street or calculate which was my nearest Métro station. École Militaire, probably. But Bir-Hakeim would take me direct to Place d’Italie on Line Six. And so on my way there I inevitably went down a small street – rue Humblot, I noticed it was called – with a maroon-coloured street door whose paint was flaking.
I looked up at the building and wondered if one of the lights was hers. But then I remembered that her apartment was on the far side of the courtyard with no window onto the street. I looked at the keypad let into the stone beside the locked doors. How many four-figure combinations can be made by the digits 0–9? I expect there’s a formula to work it out.
The chances of my finding the right four by chance were next to none. And to my exhausted mind, those odds precisely represented my chances of ever opening a door on to a happiness that life had so far at every turn kept closed to me – the girl coming down the steps at Stalingrad, all that and more.
In anger more than sadness, I pressed four numbers at random.
A woman’s voice came through the metal grid. ‘Hello.’
‘Hello,’ I managed to say back.
‘Who is it?’
‘It’s Tariq.’
Then there was a pause. I thought I could hear someone crying.
I said, ‘Can I come in?’
‘Not today.’
‘Can I come another time?’
There was a further silence. ‘Hello?’ I said.
‘On Tuesday.’
‘At what time?’
‘At this time. At six.’
Fourteen
Belleville
I was appalled by the development in Mathilde’s story and surprised there was no mention of it in the summary of the audio file, no health warning from the Centre’s archivist. If I’d come across the incident in the first week – when my identification with Mathilde was so great – I might have excused her cruelty. But it was too late now. My reading into the lives of female agents and résistantes, many of whom ended up in camps where they were tortured or killed, had hardened my attitude.
The following day, I had an e-mail from Leo Busch, the Centre’s director, telling me that the documentation I’d submitted was in order. He’d been in touch with Mathilde Masson, who told him she’d be happy to receive a visit from an American researcher. Busch warned me that the old woman was not in the best of health and that her willingness to be visited might have less to do with an interest in history than a need for company. They’d spoken on the phone and Busch had found Mathilde difficult to understand; quand même, nevertheless, he wished me the best of luck with my researches.
In reply to another e-mail, Busch gave me the address of the building where Mathilde had grown up; so the next day I took the Métro and emerged from Belleville station onto the boulevard that ran along the old city boundary. I began to walk up the hill, where a funicular had once connected the heights of Belleville to the Place de la République down in Paris proper. As I climbed between the Chinese restaurants and cheap supermarkets, past graffiti-covered alley walls, I tried to picture the hill in Mathilde’s time – traffic-free except for horse carts, with native Parisians and a handful of Armenian immigrants, their shoeless children playing at the roadside while the parents were at work in nearby factories. It was hard to imagine things I’d seen only in films about the early life of Edith Piaf.
When a loop brought me down to the address Busch had given off the rue des Couronnes, it became easier. Although the building was much less slum-like than I’d imagined, quite elegant in a modest way, I knew enough of my subject’s life to be able to picture her stern face as she pushed open the street door at the end of a day’s work and went upstairs, dodging Madame Gauthier and her cat, breathing in the smell of whatever meat her father had picked up from the slaughterhouse.
I stood for a long time opposite Mathilde’s home. Oddly enough, I had no desire to go inside, to pry further, but I did wonder about the sisters. Did they in the end think themselves lucky to have an apartment at all, to have two parents when so many children had lost a father on the Western Front? Did they hate being poor? Did they dream of ‘love’ and ‘escape’? Until Armand had come along, the only male, beside the father, who seemed to figure in their lives was Jean, the young man from the Alps whose job it was to carry up water from the fountain in the courtyard to the eighteen apartments inside. Boys from the Alps were the strongest, Mathilde said, accustomed at home to carrying milk churns hung from yokes across their shoulders; and sturdy Jean had been the subject of remarks between the girls. In the end, only Élodie had made it to the suburbs. Louise had taken her self-prescribed cure for loneliness, while Mathilde had found a chance of something better stolen from her; the girls had been like insects beneath a stone, protected by ignorance from understanding their position. As I put these thoughts into words, I knew I’d put quote marks around ‘love’. I wasn’t sure whether this was proper – a good professional habit to stop me undervaluing the role of work in women’s lives – or whether it showed a growing conviction that love wasn’t real enough to base a life on.
For a little longer, I gazed at the old building, the brick and stone washed in sunlight that seemed indifferent to the past. I heard a seagull overhead, then went down the slope of rue des Couronnes, across the boulevard and into rue Timbaud opposite. I hoped this might have been the journey to work taken every day by Mathilde – though in 1942 her walk to the factory wouldn’t have taken her past rows of burka shops. Outside the cafés, the men from the Maghreb smoked and argued, drinking tea and Fanta; and for all the female clothes on sale, there were no women visible. So unexpected was the lurch into a different culture that it took a moment or two before I fully registered the name of the street: Timbaud, like the trade unionist shot for his Resistance activity, the subject of my own professor’s book. In Paris, where almost every street name was a nod to history, this could hardly be coincidence. Later I’d check that, before it was renamed, this had been the rue d’Angoulême, the site of Mathilde’s factory. As the narrow descent opened up into a square, or triangle at least, I saw an old metallurgical works, now converted into an industrial museum or maybe loft spaces. Among the memorial plaques to workers’ international struggles was one to the memory of Jean-Pierre Timbaud. With its Café des Ingénieurs, or Engineers’ Café, the area had a post-industrial feel, and I became certain that this was where Mathilde had worked six days a week before her afternoon walk in the Buttes-Chaumont on the Seventh. How much on a cold winter Monday must she have looked forward to the factory’s whistle on the far-o
ff Saturday. How fiercely had she urged her life away.
Then I walked on through a part of town I’d never visited. I had a feeling I was near Père Lachaise cemetery and thought I might wander like a tourist down the chestnut avenues, among the tombs, but I took a wrong turning and found myself on Boulevard Voltaire, one of those wide Paris roads whose raison d’être is to connect more interesting places. Among the travel agents and the peeling plane trees, the immobiliers and photocopy shops, there was still, even here, the occasional porte cochère that might have led onto a courtyard with a history to conceal. I remembered how when I’d first come to Paris it exasperated me to think that I’d never have the time to push open every door and see what lay behind. What then had I hoped to find, I asked myself as the traffic barrelled along beside me. A door, a key – one life that by its individuality would open up a world.
By now I was outside a shop called Wash-Wash, a launderette, I guessed, for visiting Americans. ‘Sans rendezvous!’ it told the passer-by: no appointment necessary. But it turned out, when I looked more closely, to be a place for cleaning motorbikes. And what was the turnover in that? How many messenger boys or grey ponytails or Vespa-riding clerks made a note in the diary to head down to Wash-Wash on Boulevard Voltaire on a Sunday morning? It would have been a good place for Armand to meet Simone and other members of his circuit, somewhere quite forgettable. Or for me to meet Tariq. ‘Is that sans rendezvous?’ he’d ask with that wide-eyed look of his. ‘No, Tariq, very much avec.’
Paris Echo Page 17
