by The Dogs
14
She opened the door quietly, hoping to get inside without being seen, but Aunt Raissa started screaming at her the minute she walked into the hallway.
‘So it’s you! You’ve deigned to come back? You’ve deigned to remember that it’s eight o’clock and that you left at six? Do I feed you so you can go for a stroll like a princess? I thought you were dead, run over! Not that I would have shed any tears over you . . . Well, where were you? Who were you roaming around with?’
‘I went for a walk. Alone.’
‘Alone? I know you girls!’
‘You know your girl!’
‘Do you want a slap?’ Aunt Raissa hissed.
Her thin, hard hands often slapped them, and while Ada and Lilla didn’t like it, they put up with it without rebelling, just as you put up with bad weather. But the contrast now between the scene that Ada had witnessed a few moments before and this shouting, her threats, her brutality . . . It was too painful, too sinister . . .
‘I’m not eight years old any more,’ she said. ‘I’m stronger than you. I’ll hit back!’
Aunt Raissa drew back.
‘Give me the money for the dress. They paid you, didn’t they?’
‘Yes, of course they paid me. Here’s your money . . . here . . .’
She stopped dead, terrified. She realised that she didn’t have her bag. And the eight hundred francs paid by the client for the dress she’d delivered? What had happened to it? Had she dropped her bag in the street while hurrying, or had she left it on the bench near Harry’s house?
‘I took out my sketchbook and pencil,’ she thought feverishly, ‘and then . . . I put everything down to look at the one they said was Harry . . . I must have left everything on the bench . . .’
Losing the money was terrible, but her sketchbook, her precious drawings . . . She dissolved in tears.
‘I’ve lost everything . . .’
She didn’t even feel any pain when she was slapped. She forgot her determination to fight back. She took the blows without a word, gritting her teeth, as she had in the past.
‘Go back to where you were,’ shouted Aunt Raissa, shaking her by the shoulders. ‘You slut, go back to the street or your hotel room! Go on! Get out and don’t come back!’
They were still standing in the narrow entrance hall. Ada was leaning against the door. She opened it and ran out. She had so often dreamed of getting away from that house, but without ever having had the courage to face real solitude, poverty and hunger in this strange city. But this scene, after so many others, was more than she could bear. It was better to be out on the street, better to die; she didn’t care!
Blinded by tears, she started running, clutching on to the metal handrail along the street. She glanced at the cafés and cheap hotels, terrified, wondering if they would let her spend one night without paying, or whether it would be simpler just to throw herself in front of the next passing car. The party at the Sinners’ must be finishing at this very moment, she thought. Why not rush over there and ask for help? She’d already done that once. No! What did she and those people have in common?
Suddenly, she heard someone walking quickly behind her. A hand grabbed her shoulder. She turned around, shaking with fear, still running, out of breath, and then she realised it was Ben. She hated him at that moment as much as she hated Aunt Raissa. She looked at him defiantly and shouted, ‘Let go of me! Go away! Leave me alone! I’ll never go back, never!’
‘Ada! That’s enough! Listen to me!’
They stopped. He held her firmly by both arms; she didn’t dare fight back because people were watching them from inside the café. But the street was empty.
‘Ada! Calm down. Do you want to end up spending the night in prison?’
She suddenly remembered that she was seventeen years old and what was at stake: arrest, reform school. She stood still and silent.
‘Ada, don’t look at me like that. I’ve never done you any harm, have I?’
He took her arm and forced her to walk.
‘Come on. Let’s get out of here. The whole street will be out. Come with me.’
‘Where?’
He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know. Are you afraid? Don’t cry,’ he said quickly, squeezing her wrist so hard that she let out a little groan of pain. What could happen to them that was worse?
‘I’m not crying,’ she whispered.
‘Ada, we already found ourselves lost once, all alone like this. Do you remember?’
‘Yes, but we knew where to go. We had a home.’
‘Any shabby hotel, any hovel or bridge over the Seine would give us more protection than any of the so-called homes we’ve had up until now. Even when your father was alive, it wasn’t a very safe house, sometimes even dangerous, Ada.’
‘Leave me alone, Ben, just go away!’
‘Do you dislike me as much as you did when we were children, Ada?’
Without replying, she turned a corner. They had no idea where they were going.
‘Remember the game?’
‘What game?’
‘The one you made up . . . Or was it me? Running away in the middle of the night, all alone, while all the grown-ups were fast asleep.’
‘Idiot. I was eight.’
‘So what?’ he said. ‘Do people really change?’
‘Of course they do.’
‘Well, I never stopped dreaming about it. We were alone, abandoned, poor, but there was no one else in sight, not the people you hated, not the ones you loved,’ he said finally, more softly.
She stopped, fell on to a bench.
‘Ben, what’s going to happen to me?’
‘Ada, where were you? Who were you with?’
‘What do you mean? Are you mad? You believe Aunt Raissa now?’
‘Where were you coming from? I’d never seen you like that. Your hair was all dishevelled. You were pale and shaking. You looked as if you had come back from another world,’ he said gently.
‘I was coming back from another world. But I can’t talk about it to you, Ben, not even to you . . .’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’d laugh at me, and you’d be right . . .’
‘Just tell me if you were with another man.’
‘A man? Me?’
Her naïve outburst made him smile. He leaned towards her, took her face in his long, rough hands, and with the same cruel yet sensual gesture he’d had since childhood, pinched her cheeks so hard that she cried out.
‘Ever since I was thirteen years old,’ he then said very softly, ‘I’ve dreamt about you every night . . .’
She pushed him away.
‘Are you mad?’ she hissed. ‘What do you expect from me? I’m not in love with you.’
‘Ada, listen to me. You’re going to go back home now. Let my mother shout or hit you. Say nothing. As for me, I’ll find some work, I’ll sort something out, get a little money, and in a few weeks, or a few months, one fine day, we’ll just leave, without saying a word to anyone, and we’ll get married, Ada.’
‘What?’
‘We’ll get married, do you hear?’ he shouted. ‘All I need is enough money to pay for a hotel for a few days. That’s why I’m asking you to wait.’
‘But I’m still a minor.’
He replied in the same quick, passionate tone of voice that had fascinated Ivanov in the past:
‘I’ll arrange everything. There’s always some way or other. Your father isn’t legally dead. We can pretend to have his written consent. It’s easy. I can fix it. Do you really think anyone will quibble about it? Who cares about us? Oh, if Harry Sinner were getting married you can be sure that everything would be done just the way it should be, properly, according to divine and human laws. But us? Who cares about us?’
‘And you really enjoy taking the most tortuous paths, don’t you Ben?’
‘Tortuous paths? What do you mean?’
‘I mean that given a choice between two roads, one of them cl
ean and bright, the other full of difficulties and secrets, where each step forward is earned by shady, shameful deals, you would never hesitate.’
‘And I’ll tell you why,’ he said, smiling. ‘It’s because I’ve never come across those other roads. And again, who would care about us, who would cry over us if things turned out badly? We have no one.’
‘It’s true that no one would really care about us,’ said Ada, sarcastically. ‘They’d leave us to starve to death. Have you thought of that?’
‘Me? Starve to death? How?’ he shouted, teasingly. ‘Never, Ada! Never! Starve to death! Other people might. But if you only knew how many secret ways there are to survive – without stealing or killing, don’t worry! By trafficking, scheming, buying and selling, always being on the move, by lying!’
‘You’re just showing off,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders. ‘You never change, Ben. You think you’re stronger and more cunning than everyone else. They’d catch up with you and even on the gallows, you’d still be shouting, “Look at me! I’m better than you!”’
‘Idiot,’ he said, mocking and bitter, just as when they were children. ‘Haven’t you ever understood anything? Sure, I show off, I make things up, but when you start out by dreaming of all the things you can’t have, you end up getting more than you ever imagined, if you want it badly enough.’
‘Do you really think so?’ she murmured. ‘Really?’
She hid her face in her hands, then shook her head.
‘Sometimes I think you’re making fun of me and sometimes that you’re just mad.’
‘We ’re both a little crazy. We ’re not logical, we ’re not philosophers, we ’re not French, not us! Isn’t it just as crazy for a seventeen-year-old to dream of some mysterious man in the same way as when she was eight?’
‘Be quiet!’
‘I guessed right, then, didn’t I?’ he said quietly. He’d taken her hand in his and squeezed it hard. ‘Well, I’m not laughing, see? So don’t you laugh at me. Ada, I swear to you, in six weeks I’ll have found enough money to pay for the ring and the first few nights in a hotel. After that, we’ll get by. I can’t promise you anything else. We’ll get by.’
‘But I don’t need you,’ she cried, tears of rebellion in her eyes. ‘I can make my own living! I can live by myself. I don’t love you. I’d leave you one day.’
‘Oh,’ he murmured, ‘I don’t give a damn about the future . . . I can’t think past the day when we’ll both go out, one at a time, after lunch, me to deliver a package and you to stock up on samples at Printemps department store, the day when we’ll come back as husband and wife!’
He burst out laughing. He laughed so loudly, so nervously, that tears streamed down his face.
‘Can you picture my mother’s face? Can you just see it? She’ll kick us both out right away, and by God, we’ll go! Don’t say that you can live alone, Ada. You’re still too young, too sensitive. And I’ll let you draw as much as you like.’
He helped her stand up.
‘Come on. Is there anything more wonderful than putting up with being treated badly, being humiliated and mocked, while slyly, secretly, planning our revenge? Because my mother will be absolutely furious! Come on, Ada . . . All my life I’ve been rejected and mocked, but I’ve kept on thinking, “One day I’ll get the better of you. One day, I’ll be the strongest.”’
‘And were you?’
‘I am now,’ he said, smiling.
Heavy drops of rain began to fall as the storm broke. She followed him home.
A few weeks later, he managed to get some money together and the documents necessary for their marriage. Everything happened as he had predicted: one day, they each left home to run their separate errands and met at the town hall. They returned to Aunt Raissa’s house a married couple. She threw them out. That very evening, they rented a hotel room and began their life as husband and wife.
15
On the Rue des Belles-Feuilles, at the Sinners’ home, the tea dance was to finish at eight o’clock.
Harry’s mother and aunts called these little parties ‘madcap afternoons’, the term used to describe them during their youth, in their native city. Whenever they asked: ‘Would you do us the honour of coming to our madcap afternoon with your daughter on the Seventeenth?’, people found a certain exotic, old-fashioned charm in such an invitation. (Years of living in France had not blotted out their foreign accent, but had refashioned it: they no longer rolled their ‘r’s the way Russians normally did, but pronounced them more gutturally, which gave a strange Parisian sound to their extremely refined, polite, delightful phrases.) Some even called it ‘Slavic charm’, in the most well-meaning way.
At eight o’clock, the hum of voices coming from the large green reception room where the buffet was set up grew much softer. Suddenly, fragments of conversation or a particular laugh were clearly audible where, a quarter of an hour earlier, there had merely been the noise of a hundred voices, footsteps and music. But it was only when the tired hostess was able to hear the song of a bird sitting in a tree in the garden (it had stayed on late, fooled by the light) that she allowed herself to hope that she could soon rest. She was standing in the doorway of the scarlet entrance hall, shaking the hand of everyone who was leaving while mechanically reciting the various polite phrases that you shower on guests as you say goodbye, just as a gardener generously offers his flowers every last drop from the watering can.
‘But I’ve hardly had a chance to see you, dear Madame . . . We must arrange to get together . . . Do send your esteemed Mother my very warmest wishes, my dear child . . .’ What she was really thinking was: ‘It must be nearly nine o’clock.’ But she had to make allowances for the latecomers, the perpetually absent-minded, the possessive men who had waited, in vain, for a certain woman to arrive and who refused to give up hope, the couples in love still outside on the stone balcony. She was a good hostess, though, and like most Russians, only happy when the house was bursting with guests. But tonight, she was eager to be alone with Harry, finally to find out.
He had come into the dining room an hour earlier with Laurence Delarcher; the young woman walked a few steps ahead of him and he was looking at her with the passionate concentration that his mother knew so well . . . Ah, from that moment on she had been filled with fear. She could read Harry’s face like a book; at least, that was what she believed. Like all mothers, she was simultaneously close, yet far from the truth: things that were staring her in the face went unnoticed, but she had foreseen what even Harry did not yet understand. To her, her son’s soul was an ancient parchment on which sometimes only a single word was legible, but that was enough to cast a dazzling light on to the entire scroll. What mother worthy of the name, she thought, would not be the first to recognise that demanding yet humble expression on her son’s face that was unique to love as yet unacknowledged? Remembering it, she placed her handkerchief to her heart and, in the light of the setting sun, bluish sparks shot out from the diamonds on her fingers.
‘Too many rings . . . She always wears too many rings,’ her sisters-in-law would say. But jewellery shouldn’t be locked away in the darkness of a safe. Her sisters-in-law had such a boring, masculine way of dressing. Harry’s uncles encouraged her to buy jewels: she owed it to herself and to the family name she bore, and it flattered within them a secret, Oriental delight in owning valuable possessions that you could feel in your hands, press to your breast. She shared their way of thinking. Even tonight, it was a consolation to see the dazzling brilliance on her stubby, pale hands. And she needed to be consoled . . . How sad she was tonight. She could sense that Harry and the young woman had spoken to each other of serious matters, said things that would perhaps affect the future. Oh God, her son was still so young! She sighed to herself in Russian: ‘God, oh, God!’ At times of extreme emotion, she couldn’t find the words in French; she suddenly made mistakes when she spoke – she, who had learned French from a Parisian since she was three years old.
‘I am
so sorry you have to leave at such a early hour,’ she would say, time and time again, or she would murmur emotionally: ‘Where is . . . well, where is mine son?’
Her sisters-in-law knew about this weakness and on several occasions had reminded her – acrimoniously – of the famous Jewish story of the wife of a rich banker who is giving birth and whispers in a faint voice: ‘My God, I’m in so much pain!’ But her husband will only come when she calls him in Yiddish, because when she does that, he knows that it’s important and that the child is about to be born. But her sisters-in-law had disagreeable and scathing minds. Besides, they knew no Yiddish, thank God. They hadn’t been brought up in the ghetto. Nevertheless, it was undeniable that when upset, it was hard to remember all the rules of French grammar and syntax; they were so difficult.
A few couples still lingered out on the balcony, relishing the coolness of evening. Where was Harry? Was it possible, my God, that he might be considering marriage? He was only twenty-one.
‘Oh my son, my only child,’ she moaned to herself, ‘I love you so much. Yet marriage is a happy thing. But what do we know? How can we tell? What does God have in store? What will tomorrow bring?’ The unconscious, instinctive memory of all the tribulations of the Israelites shot through her mind. She remained standing, in exactly the same spot, automatically reciting her elaborate goodbyes; she looked like all the other women around her, but her magnificent, shiny dark eyes were wild and desperate and she turned her head nervously in all directions, as if she were trying to catch the scent of the wind, wondering from which side disaster would strike. Because if this marriage actually came about (‘God forbid!’ she thought to herself in Russian, at the same time secretly touching the expensive wood of a table to ward off ill fortune: two lucky charms were better than one, and she had a broad enough mind to borrow superstitions from a variety of cultures), if they really got married, who could predict with certainty that it would make Harry happy? And she wanted to take no chances where he was concerned. She had the extraordinary certainty that some mothers have that he was not destined to be happy. Quite the opposite: she always felt that people were going to harm Harry, hurt him, humiliate him . . . Any marriage carried risks. Any marriage was easy to make, but difficult to protect against danger, like those candles that are lit on the eve of certain holidays, in Russia, on the church porch: despite the snow, despite the wind, they always managed to get the flame to light, but then they had to keep it alight amid gusts of icy wind as they walked home through the dark streets. There were only a few who ever managed it. She herself had been happy in her marriage, even though she now recalled with regret all the moments of jealousy, all the vagaries of conjugal life . . . But most importantly, she and her husband spoke the same language, more or less understood one another, while this young woman, though certainly pretty and from a good family, this young woman was a foreigner. And how was it possible to understand the soul of the French? This girl had such fair hair and rosy cheeks . . . For a moment, Madame Sinner imagined the children who might be born of this union between her son, who had such a dark complexion, and this pretty blonde, and this calmed her. But would the girl’s Catholic parents agree to it? She was already suffering in advance, her heart bleeding at the thought of Harry’s humiliation if they refused. (Ah, may God preserve and protect us!) ‘Why is it that the minute Jews fall in love, love becomes synonymous with fear?’ she wondered. She couldn’t stand still any longer. She wanted to see him. She made a show of taking one of the ladies by the arm and saying quite loudly, ‘No, no, you’ve only just arrived, I wouldn’t hear of you leaving . . . Come and have something to eat . . . some ice cream; it’s so hot! Yes, I insist, you can’t refuse, come along!’
