Madame

by Antoni Libera

  ‘Thank you for letting me take up so much of your time,’ I said. ‘I’m very grateful. And you’ve persuaded me: I’ll find something else to study. I understand everything now.’ And I rose to go.

  ‘Pleasure,’ said Freddy. ‘I’m glad I could be of some use.’

  When we came out and Freddy switched on the light in the hall, Constant emerged from his study and joined us. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, your son did a good job,’ I said, spreading my arms in resignation. ‘He convinced me.’

  ‘I’m pleased to hear it. Very pleased.’

  ‘Why should he get caught up in it!’ exclaimed Freddy, as if summing up the proceedings. ‘It’s a madhouse! All that frrenzied rrunning about each time you want to go abroad, the agitation, the parranoia about people trying to escape . . . And I’ve spared you the worrst,’ he said, turning to me, ‘the stories about people who start going mad because they can’t take it any more and decide they really will get the hell out, and the consequences for them as well as for the ones who stay behind. The atmosphere of suspicion, the speculation – who’s planning something on the sly, who’s preparing the ground . . . And then, he’s gone . . . Will he come back? . . . or will he stay? . . . Will he, won’t he . . . he didn’t! . . . Who will it be next? . . . This one asked for political asylum! . . . That one stayed! . . . That one got married to get a passport!’

  ‘Do you mean,’ I interrupted, ‘Dr Surowa-Léger?’ I seized upon his words without thinking, startling myself no less than him.

  Freddy paused and looked at me carefully. ‘How do you know about that?’

  Fully aware now of the risk I was taking, I made the move that exposed my queen. ‘From my French teacher,’ I replied calmly. ‘She was her thesis adviser. And once, when she was talking about it –’

  ‘Surrowa-Léger was her thesis adviser?’ Freddy broke in.

  ‘I think that was the name. I’m pretty sure that’s what she said . . .’

  ‘And who is this Frrench teacher of yours?’ he inquired. ‘What’s her name?’

  Controlling my voice with difficulty, I delivered up poor Madame.

  ‘What?!’ Freddy cried in amazement, and then gave a nervous little laugh. ‘So . . . La belle Victoire . . . is a schoolteacher?!’

  I caught my breath. La belle Victoire – so that was what they called her! Perhaps, then, ‘Victoire’ wasn’t just a name for official or family use but was the name she was known by?

  ‘She’s not just an ordinary teacher,’ I explained. ‘She’s the headmistress. And a fairly unusual one at that: she’s supposed to reform the school and make it into one of those experimental outposts where everything is taught in French . . . Anyway, what’s so strange about it?’

  Freddy and Constant exchanged a meaningful look and a couple of knowing nods. ‘So she rreally did it,’ said Freddy, in a sad sort of undertone, more to himself than to us.

  ‘What do you mean? What did she do?’ I asked. The suspense was unbearable.

  ‘Oh, nothing, nothing . . . ce n’est pas important,’ he muttered dismissively. Then, clearly anxious to avoid further discussion of the topic, he turned to his father and said briskly, ‘Well, I’ll be going, too.’ And reached for his coat.

  I did the same. But when I realised that my gloves were not in their usual place in my anorak pockets but wedged behind the coat rack, I did not retrieve them. Instead, acting on some impulse, I stuffed them even deeper into their hiding-place and covered them discreetly with my host’s hat, which hung on a hook just above.

  On my way downstairs with Freddy I expected at any moment to hear the rasp of a bolt being pulled back, the creak of a door opening and Constant’s voice summoning me back for the forgotten gloves. But nothing happened.

  We came out into the street and the November evening. It was wet, dark and foggy. Freddy was silent, absorbed in his thoughts; and I somehow couldn’t bring myself to speak. In silence we approached the first crossroads.

  ‘I’m going this way,’ I said, slowing down. ‘And you?’

  ‘I go strraight, strraight on,’ he said indifferently, as if woken abruptly from a deep sleep.

  ‘Well, then, goodbye. And thank you again.’

  ‘’Bye,’ he said, and shook my hand. ‘And good luck.’

  I went down the side street for about fifty yards, turned and retraced my steps to the corner. Freddy had vanished into the darkness and fog. I started back at a run.

  It was exactly ten minutes past seven o’clock in the evening when for the second time that day I pressed the white porcelain knob of the pre-war bell in its decorative surround recessed in the right frame of the door.

  Maximilian and Claire

  ‘Yes?’ came Constant’s voice from behind the door.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s me again. I forgot my gloves.’

  I heard a brisk, matter-of-fact ‘Ah . . .’ in reply, and then the sound of the bolt being drawn back.

  ‘Completely absent-minded, as you see,’ I babbled as I came in. ‘Freddy’s stories affected me so strongly that I don’t know what I’m doing.’

  ‘I told you,’ said Constant, shrugging and turning to the coat rack to look for my gloves. ‘I warned you.’

  ‘You know what struck me most about all this?’ I went on, throwing out the question like a lasso, trying to rope him in and hold him back from his quest.

  ‘What?’ He stopped in his tracks. The loop had caught.

  ‘That whole atmosphere of suspicion, and the paranoia about escaping. Honestly, I’d no idea things were as bad as that.’

  ‘Alas,’ he replied sadly, approaching the coat rack.

  I decided there was no time to be lost. ‘Still, what a small world!’ I sighed. ‘I just happen, in passing, to mention my French teacher, and it turns out that Freddy knows her . . . and you seem to know her, too . . . at least that was the impression I got.’

  ‘Do I know her!’ Constant exclaimed, laughing and once again interrupting his search for my gloves. ‘I’ve known her from the day she was born!’

  I froze. It was like suddenly finding a gold mine right in front of my door. ‘Really?’ I drawled in a thin, slightly bored, drawing-room-chitchat sort of voice. ‘That’s amazing!’ And then, offhandedly, ‘How is that?’

  ‘I knew her father well,’ he explained. ‘We used to go climbing together. In ’34 we did Mont Blanc –’

  ‘In ’34?’ I broke in.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Why?’

  ‘Oh, no reason – I just wondered,’ I said, desperately casting around for a plausible-sounding explanation. ‘In summer, of course?’ I added, in the knowing tones of one who was an expert in the matter.

  ‘Naturally in summer,’ he confirmed, ‘but what does that have to do with it?’

  ‘I just wanted to make sure I knew which expedition you were talking about,’ I said, alighting on the only thing that came to mind. As an explanation it was not spectacular, but it would have to do. Meanwhile I did some rapid mental arithmetic; ’34, I thought: so she was conceived by then.

  ‘In ’34 I went to the Alps only once,’ said Constant, for the record.

  ‘Do go on, it’s very interesting,’ I said, back to my drawing-room small-talk voice, as if I were more interested in Alpine adventures than in Madame’s father. ‘So you went up Mont Blanc . . .?’

  ‘He was a strange man. Like two people combined in one: a pedant and a rationalist, and at the same time a romantic, a dreamer. Scrupulous and reliable on the one hand – more than reliable: absolutely infallible, like a Swiss watch. If he made an appointment or a promise, you knew he would keep it, come hell or high water. He wouldn’t fail you even if the world was crashing down around his ears. And on the other, an idealist, full of the most extraordinary flights of fancy. Sometimes the two came together: for instance, he liked to make appointments a ridiculously long time in advance, sometimes in places that were completely unfamiliar to him – even though he had no idea what the future held, and
knew full well that it usually held surprises. And, like Phileas Fogg, he would always turn up precisely at the stated time – no confirmation, no checking of details, nothing.

  ‘I remember one occasion like that. One day in late November we bumped into each other in the street, here in Warsaw, and began talking. He said he was just off to the mountains, the Schwarzwald first and then Chamonix for some winter climbing. I said I was also planning a trip to the Alps, but to Switzerland, and not until the summer. He began asking me for details: he’d never been to the Swiss Alps and very much wanted to go. I told him what I knew at the time; my plans were fairly concrete by then, although of course I didn’t yet have all the details.

  ‘“So when and where can we meet?” he asked suddenly, out of the blue.

  ‘I was taken aback: I didn’t even know when I would get there, or where I would be staying. The only thing I knew was the name of the place I was going to, and that I had to be there at the latest by the fifth of August.

  ‘“Well, then, let’s say the sixth, at noon, in front of the train station. That suit you?” he asked, glancing at his diary.

  ‘I thought he was joking. But he wasn’t – he was quite serious. And of course I needn’t add that he was there, on the dot of noon.’

  ‘That is amazing,’ I said. ‘But tell me something about your Mont Blanc trip.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. The search for my gloves had by now been abandoned. ‘Now that’s a story that illustrates the other side of his nature. It began with an older friend of his, a well-known mountaineer with a fanatical love of the mountains. This man had one obsession: he wanted his child to be born on Mont Blanc. Not right at the top, of course – that would have been too much – but as near to it as possible: in the famous Vallot refuge, just below the peak. And in the winter of ’26, when his wife was seven months pregnant, he attempted to realise his dream: he dragged her up there. But nothing came of it. After a snowstorm that lasted a week and almost blew the refuge off the face of the earth, they decided to go back down and have the birth in the normal way. On the way down, in the blizzard, an ice-bridge collapsed. It was a miracle they survived and she didn’t miscarry.

  ‘In spite of this, or perhaps because of it, my peculiar friend became infected with the same bizarre idea: he, too, decided that he wanted his progeny to come into the world near the top of Mont Blanc. And as soon as he found out that he was to be a father, off he went to the Alps to see what conditions were like and prepare the ground. That was when we climbed Mont Blanc together.’

  ‘In ’34,’ I put in, just to make absolutely sure.

  ‘Yes, yes, in ’34. When we were setting out he didn’t say a word about any of this. It wasn’t until we were almost at the summit that he confessed what his true purpose was. I thought it was madness – especially since his wife (unlike that other, who at least was an experienced mountaineer) had no qualifications for that kind of thing, quite apart from being pregnant.’

  ‘And who was his wife?’ I asked, in a tone of polite, offhand inquiry.

  ‘Oh, she was a very interesting person. Out of the ordinary. A strong woman. Not physically – physically she was frail – but she had great strength of character.’

  ‘No, but what did she do, I mean?’ I insisted, as if I were not really very interested in what she was like, and thinking that sooner or later we were bound to return to the topic anyway.

  ‘She worked for the Centre de Civilisation Française. Do you know what that was? – and still is, I suppose.’ He gave a bitter little laugh, and added, ‘Although only in a sense.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know exactly.’

  ‘It’s an institution for the propagation of French culture and art throughout the world. Before the war it had the status of an academic institution: you could do a French university degree there. It was an élite place, very prestigious. They set up a branch in Poland in ’24, I think . . . I remember they had their offices in Staszic House, where the Academy of Sciences is – you know, that building behind the Copernicus statue . . .’

  ‘Yes, I know the one you mean: where the New World Boulevard ends and the Krakowskie Przedmiescie begins . . .’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. In the Gold Room, on the first floor, on the right.’ He smiled a nostalgic smile and seemed to lapse into a daydream.

  I waited politely until he might reasonably be considered to have had his fill of memories, and then plucked him delicately from his reverie with another question. ‘Well? Did they go?’

  ‘Go?’ he repeated, lost for a moment. ‘Oh, you mean my romantic and Claire!’

  ‘Claire?’ I asked, seizing upon the name.

  ‘That’s what he called her. Her name was Klara.’

  ‘Was she French, then, not Polish?’ My tone was still offhand, indifferent.

  ‘What Frenchwoman would have agreed to go on an escapade like that!’

  ‘So they did go, I take it.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. In September – to give her a chance to acclimatise.’

  ‘And did they succeed?’ I asked with a smile of disbelief.

  ‘Perhaps not quite in the way he would have liked . . . but still, the lady who is your French teacher today was indeed born in the Alps.’

  ‘You mean out in the open air, in the second half of January?’ I asked, involuntarily giving myself away. But Constant, if he noticed my slip, gave no sign of it.

  ‘Well, yes, the time of year wasn’t very propitious. Which, frankly, was just as well: I hate to think what would have happened if it had been summer. As it was, the whole thing was kept more or less within the bounds of common sense.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that she didn’t give birth on a mountaintop, in the clouds, in temperatures of twenty degrees below zero, but in some village down in the valley, in an ordinary house, with a doctor.’

  Pity, I thought: it would have been appropriate, given the icy cold that blows from her. A fitting birth for the Ice Queen.

  ‘Your peculiar friend must have been inconsolable,’ I remarked, wondering how to set the snare that would get me his name. ‘A propos, what was his name?’

  ‘Max. Maximilian. Like Franz Joseph’s brother. And Robespierre, too, of course. An ideal name for him.’

  ‘Because he was so radical, or even fanatical?’

  ‘Not quite,’ Constant replied. ‘He was a maximalist. In all sorts of ways. He wanted to take everything to its extreme, to carry things through to the end. I can see how that could be fascinating in a man. Perhaps that was why she was so much in love with him.’

  ‘You mean his wife?’

  ‘Mmm . . .’ A strange sadness seemed to overtake him. ‘Come, I’ll show you something,’ he said, turning and leading the way to his study. I followed, discreetly unzipping my anorak.

  The study was small, about ten feet by twelve, and stuffed to overflowing with books and papers. Here and there, poking out of the disorder, were startling objects from another world: a pickaxe, gleaming silver in the light; some hooks; something that might have been a safety-lamp; blue-patterned climbing ropes and a green safety-helmet. On the floor under the window stood an enormous wireless set with a ‘magic eye’ in the middle, its white keys like teeth bared in a smile; along the shelves, in front of the piles of books stacked there, were dozens of stones and pieces of rock. The only real piece of furniture was a drop-leaf desk with a decorative shelf (which held the telephone) and rows of pigeonholes, drawers and little nooks and crannies. The desktop – that is, the inside of the leaf – was fitted with a leather-bound blotter, and in the upper right-hand corner, next to the border by the hinge, was a round recess, presumably for an inkwell.

  On the desktop, supported from below by two extensible rods, sat a typewriter, its cover off and a sheet of paper with a carbon in the roller. In the light cast by the desk lamp that sat beside the telephone on the little shelf, the name Erika, in flowery script, gleamed on its black-lacquered surface. Constant p
ushed it aside, opened the middle drawer with the little key protruding from its lock, and from that tabernacle within the desk’s altar took an old, dark, cloth-covered album with worn edges. He unwound the rubber band that held it tight, turned over a few pages and held the open book up to the light of the lamp.

  ‘Look,’ he said, ‘here they are. It was taken then, up there.’ I came closer and looked. ‘It’s signed: the fifth of November. Thirty-two years ago,’ he added, and fell silent.

  The old photograph, small and almost borderless, showed a slim man and a dark-haired woman against a background of snowy peaks. The man was wearing a windbreaker and an outlandish beret; she had on a thick sweater and sunglasses pushed up over her hair. He was gazing upwards, squinting slightly; she was looking at him and smiling. If it had been undated, if the paper on which it was printed had been newer, and if I hadn’t been told in advance what it was, I would probably have thought it was a photograph of Madame. Those same intelligent eyes, the same line of the nose, the same shape of the lips. The one difference was that while Madame’s features were sharp and severe (there was something birdlike about her), her mother’s were soft and gentle, and her look was almost tender. It might have been because she was expecting a child, but not necessarily. Perhaps Madame had inherited her coldness and severity from her father?

  ‘You said she had great force of character?’ I asked, picking up the thread I had purposely left trailing during the earlier conversation.

  ‘Oh, yes. She may have been physically frail, but in spirit she was tough and courageous. She bore hardships calmly and cheerfully – she could laugh and joke even when there was very little to laugh about. You know how women are afraid of labour . . . how nervous they are when they’re expecting . . .’

  ‘Umm, yes, I’ve heard something to that effect,’ I muttered uncertainly.

  ‘Well, then, imagine what it must have been like, on top of that, to be faced with a complete change of conditions: new surroundings, a different climate, being far from home, the uncertainty of an unknown place . . .’