by Mark Henshaw
He lay there thinking. About the photograph. About the night before—Omura. He tried to recall, exactly, what Omura had said, what he had been wearing, every floating gesture of his hand, every intonation of his voice. Most of it he could retrieve. But when he tried to recall what Omura had said to him after he had turned to walk back down the snow-covered path, he could not.
He leaned over, flicked the ash from his cigarette into the cup on his bedside table. Once again, he circled back. And once again he found himself teetering on the brink of the same abyss, staring into the same void. All he could see before him was the image of Omura and his little daughter walking down the path, away from him. He watched them recede into the falling snow, until they disappeared.
He lay in his bed, the smoke from his cigarette curling lazily towards the ceiling the only thing in the room that moved.
It had been winter when Jovert first saw the apartment. Early evening. The agent had been late. Jovert was forced to wait in the cold.
When he finally arrived, the agent, an astonishingly fat man, grasped his hand. He was wearing a voluminous olive-green suit. His cheeks were flushed. He had begun to sweat.
The Metro, the Metro, he said, pointing to the stairs.
The man would not look Jovert in the eye. Instead, his mad gaze seemed to bounce off him. Jovert watched it skid across the road and up the wall of the building opposite.
The apartment? Jovert said.
Yes, yes, the apartment, the man said. He spoke to Jovert’s shirt front, ran a finger around his damp collar.
Then they were inside, waiting for the lift.
The apartment opened directly onto a sitting room. It was larger than Jovert had expected. On the far side of the room, beyond two glassed doors, a small balcony. Two old, once elegant leather sofas sat facing each other. A frayed Oriental carpet, its reds and blues muted in the lamplight. Against one wall, an enormous, squat-legged cabinet, the dimpled grey surface of which looked as though it had been carved from elephant hide.
The advertisement had said: Apartment for sale. As is.
There were two bedrooms. A small, dated kitchen.
Then they were out on the balcony.
The view, the view, the agent was saying. Jovert nodded. He had heard it all before.
He had turned distractedly to look in the other direction. It was then that he saw it, the thing that would make all the apartment’s charmlessness seem irrelevant, temporary, surmountable. Two hundred metres away, suspended against the dimming, sickle-mooned sky, hovered the floodlit image of a golden-winged youth, fleeing, Nijinsky-like, across a dark and chimney-potted plain.
Of course, he thought, the Bastille Column. The Spirit of Liberty, Dumont’s gilded youth standing naked on top of it. He remembered a school assignment he had written about it. How the statue had almost toppled to the ground when it was being hoisted into place, the boy’s golden wings useless against its fall.
He stood looking at this magical form, at its newly polished wings, the boy’s triumphantly upraised torch, the broken chains that had once shackled him, the six-pointed star above his head. Here was a different kind of Icarus. Permanently frozen, improbable, ludicrous perhaps, but magical nonetheless.
Victor Hugo lived nearby, the agent was saying.
I’ll take it, Jovert said.
The agent stopped talking.
You will? he said.
Bewildered, he turned to look in the same direction as Jovert.
I see, he said.
But he didn’t, hadn’t, and probably never would.
Now Jovert was standing in the bathroom, leaning down, looking at his face in the mirror. He ran his hand across his stubbled chin. He pulled each eyelid down, examined the whites of each eye. He touched the wound where his head had hit the gutter. He pictured the impact, his head rebounding silently off the curb’s concrete edge, the broken-fleshed furrow slowly filling with blood, saw its first small overflowing, saw the first crimson drop drop to the roadway. The wound had crusted over now. He ran the tips of his fingers cautiously across its jagged surface.
He sat on the edge of the bath, undid the brace on his knee. The swelling had begun to subside but the bruising looked worse than ever. It reminded him of something by Monet.
Fifteen minutes later he was back in his living room, drawing the curtains aside. It was early, the sky churlish. Banks of cloud the colour of egg white hung low and flat on the horizon. In the guttered lee of the dome of St Paul’s sat a row of dismal pigeons.
He made himself a pot of coffee. He carried first it, then a cup, out onto the balcony. Below him, where the street curved around to Place de la Bastille, a solitary green-and-white street-cleaning machine was crawling along the curb. The monotonous drone of its engine floated up to him. A man, tall, thin, North African, wearing overalls and a cap, carrying a long green-bristled broom, was jiving along beside it.
It occurred to him that to see his inability to recall what Omura had said the night before—after he had turned to walk back down the path—as a gap, a void, was the wrong way to see things. What he should do was not to search for what had dropped out of his memory, but to look more closely at what had come so insistently to inhabit it—the image of Omura and his little daughter standing on the snow-covered path.
He spent much of the rest of the day moving from his balcony to the kitchen, to the sofa, to his bedroom, smoking cigarette after cigarette, thinking about this. About the letter, the accident. Omura. He picked up the photograph from his bedside table, put it down, picked it up—stared into her eyes.
As the day wore on, he became more and more convinced that later that evening Omura would appear outside his door once again, unannounced and uninvited. In his present frame of mind, Omura was the last person he wanted to see. He decided he would go to watch the Bastille Day fireworks after all. Besides, he had just remembered—it was his birthday. He was sixty-three.
Chapter 3
THAT evening, at nine, Jovert picked up his keys from the kitchen table. He put on his coat, gathered up his crutches, and stepped out into the corridor. He could hear the clack-clack-clack of a typewriter coming from the floor beneath him. As the lift descended, the sound rose for a moment, then drifted away above his head.
On the darkening street, the same mist-like rain. It had been like this for almost a week now. Clumps of people were moving beneath the saffron-haloed streetlamps. He joined the slow tide drifting Bastille-wards in the cataracted light.
Ten minutes later he was standing under the awning of Le Bar l’Anise. Chairs knelt like penitents against the polished rims of the tabletops outside. Through the window, he saw that the café was still only half-full.
When he opened the door, the sudden sound of people talking, laughter, a glass breaking, flooded past him. A group of men at the far end of the bar looked over at him, nodded. He recognised some of their faces. They were former colleagues, from Special Operations Branch—riot police, anti-terrorists, bomb disposal. Normally they’d be padded up like armadillos. Now, in civilian clothes, they appeared almost weightless. He saw them take in his crutches, saw them filing this piece of information away, for later, for tomorrow, for when he wasn’t there
. Did you see Jovert? On crutches? Not sorry. Some people never forgave you. Besides, you retire. Things change. You’re no longer one of them. It was almost a treacherous act to leave. More treacherous. He was surprised how quickly the phone had stopped ringing. If it ever had.
He chose an empty table by the window and ordered a bottle of Gigondas. Daudet, the owner, tall, thin, thin-faced, in his fifties, with bulging, hurt eyes, came over.
Daudet was an old acquaintance. Two years earlier his only son had been killed in a freak car accident. There had been a police investigation. A gun found hidden in the glove compartment. There was some issue about what his son had been up to. Jovert had helped it go away. There was nothing to find, in any case. A gun—hidden? Not hidden? Who knew whose it was? It could have been anyone’s. Unregistered, untraceable. No criminal record. Nowhere to go.
A year ago, he’d heard that Daudet’s wife had died. Of grief, cancer, resignation? He didn’t know. He remembered her—vivacious, dark-skinned, part Dutch, part Indonesian. A mole above her right eye. She had always been friendly to him: Hello, Mister Inspector Jo-Jo. You like a table? How is business? If only she knew.
Now he looked around the bar. Gone were the shadow puppets from the walls, the gamelan music, the advertisements for Bintang beer. Only the name had remained unchanged. Le Bar l’Anise. Some people never knew.
So, Daudet said, picking up one of his crutches. Citroën?
Jovert laughed.
No, he said. It was a Fiat.
Ah, les Italiens. And let me guess. He didn’t stop.
No, he stopped, Jovert said. He stretched out his leg. It’s nothing really. A scratch. It could have been worse.
Yes, Daudet said. He could have been Swiss.
He gave a short laugh, flicked his tea towel over his shoulder. He leaned down and picked up Jovert’s bottle, topped up his glass.
We don’t see much of you these days, he said. I heard you had retired.
Jovert nodded.
You know, I never thought I’d see the day. Jovert, Inspector of Police, retired. It’s hard to believe.
He shrugged. What could he say. He had never thought he’d see the day himself.
Life, Daudet said, and walked off.
At midnight, the fireworks start without warning. Five or six booming explosions, like mortar fire, echo around the square. For one frightening, chaotic moment—it is as though a trapdoor has suddenly opened beneath him—he is back on the streets of Algiers, in a police car, hurtling through the labyrinthine darkness, his arm outstretched against the dashboard. He can see figures running. Cars overturned. Buildings on fire. A man reaches out to them as they pass; his face is imprinted on Jovert’s brain. Beseeching them to stop. His splayed hands burst up in front of the car like two white pigeons. Thibaud swerves to avoid him. All around them, there is artillery fire.
Thibaud is saying: What if she’s not there? What if she’s already left?
He strikes the steering wheel with the palm of his hand.
This is crazy, crazy. Merde.
Then he is back in the café, listening to the last thunderous report dying away. This, he knows, is just the prelude. Four or five eerily quiet seconds pass. He can see the crowd gathered on the pavement. The rain has cleared. Suddenly, the curved darkness above them explodes. Dozens of splintering spheres of light burst silently overhead. A moment later, like an afterthought, a muted, antiphonal boom, boom-boom echoes across the square. He can feel the reverberations through the floor, see the minute tremblings of the window pane.
With each burst of light, a vast sea of upturned faces is lit up. It is like something primitive, he thinks. This primeval noise, these sky-shattering eruptions of light, the transfixed human mass beneath. The building façades on the opposite side of the square flicker on and off, as insubstantial as opera sets.
As he turns away from the window, someone bumps his table. A small red archipelago of wine spills from his glass. He looks up. A young woman is leaning across his table, her hand pressed flat against the window. She is wearing a close-fitting black dress and dark glasses.
I’m sorry, she says.
She barely glances at him. But then she turns back, takes her glasses off.
Don’t I know you? she says.
I don’t think so, he replies.
She frowns down at him, as if she is searching her memory, trying to place where she might know him from. He begins to feel uncomfortable. Perhaps she does know him. It is possible. He had been an Inspector of Police for thirty years. He had met thousands of people. He’s sixty-three. She looks back over her shoulder.
Merde, she says. Ne-poussez-pas. Don’t push. There’s a table here.
She turns back to him.
Maybe you’re right, she says.
Then she leans across his table again. Perhaps it is the effect of the wine, or the combination of her black dress and the darkness of the café, but with her suspended above him like this, it is difficult to tell where her body ends and the night sky begins. It is as though he is looking through her into the star-clustered heavens above. It is only intermittently, when the sky lights up outside, that he can see this odd inverted horizon for what it is—an outstretched arm and a body clad in black.
He found himself wondering about this young woman, what her life was like. Was she a student? Did she work? Where did she live? Did she have a lover? What was he like? Or she. And why was she here alone? He thought about the photograph. Mathilde. Not that they were the same: they weren’t. This girl was younger. Still, he thought, change a few details, a time, a location, and this young woman could easily have been her—the daughter he had never known.
He watched her raise her hand to shade her eyes. She seemed to be searching the fugitive shapes of the buildings opposite, moving intently from one to another. He followed her gaze. Through the plane trees he could see the packed balconies. On one, a group of young people were singing, boys and girls with their arms around each other. He could see their mouths moving, the cans of beer in their hands. A good-looking boy—someone he could imagine a girl like her with—was keeping time with a bottle of champagne.
But there were so many balconies it was impossible to tell where exactly she was looking. His gaze fell distractedly to the crowded street, and to the moment which, in retrospect, seemed inevitably to be there, waiting for him. Standing on the pavement, standing so close that he could almost have reached through the glass to touch him, was Omura. He was wearing the same suit, the same spectacles, as the evening before. His umbrella hung from his arm. He was staring into the momentary darkness above him, his head tilted so far back that his hat was balancing precariously on the edge of his collar. At any moment Jovert half-expected it to fall end over end to the ground.
He leaned back into the shadows, watched as Omura took off his glasses and wiped them clean. He saw him retrieve a small notebook from his coat pocket and begin to write something into it. Another constellation of light lit up the square. Two old women as thin as circus dogs stepped unsteadily back, their handbags raised above their heads. One of them half-stumbled into Omura. He barely seemed to notice, merely stepped aside, continued writing. Then he glanced down at the pavement, looked around, fo
lded his notebook and put it back inside his coat pocket.
As Jovert reached out to pick up his glass, the young woman who had been leaning over his table pushed herself away from the window. Their eyes met once again. She smiled.
Au revoir, Monsieur, she said.
Au revoir, Mademoiselle. He raised his glass.
When he looked back into the street, Omura was no longer there.
Half an hour after the fireworks had finished, Jovert reached for his crutches, stood. Daudet was busy polishing glasses behind the bar. He nodded to him over the remaining crowd, and left.
The air outside was thick with the smell of exploded fireworks. Jovert stood on the curb for a second or two, adjusting his grip on his crutches, then levered himself cautiously across the intersection. Ahead of him, thickets of people lingered on the pavement. Talking, laughing, negotiating the remains of the night. Here and there they spilled out onto the roadway. Jovert was forced to step off the curbside from time to time to get around them.
Outside Le Soleil Noir another group. All young. Some drunk. A young man in jeans and studded jacket was looking at him with a kind of cool detachment as he approached, as though he were some kind of exotic insect. The young man turned back to his friends. Jovert was close enough to hear him say: No, no, you’re wrong. It was at Serge’s.
A young woman at his side grasped his sleeve.
Frédéric? she said. She leaned into him, tugged at his arm. Frédéric, there’s someone here, someone who wants to get by.
But instead of moving aside, the young man brushed her hand away.
Wait, he said sharply. Can’t you see, Solange, I’m talking here.
He glanced at Jovert.
