This memory precipitated others: his approach with the bottle of champagne during the cocktail reception at the gallery; their conversation in the theatre during the intermission; her departure in the blue Peugeot; the Green-Eyed One’s remark about his reaction to my essay. (Had he read every one of them with such attention, I wondered; had he read any of the others at all?) And the silver-haired Marianne’s coy remark, with reference to Madame, that sometimes sex was relevant, and the enigmatic, teasing look on her face when she had made it.
No doubt of it: the director was making advances to Madame or was already having an affair with her. Moreover, he favoured an approach similar to my own: wordplay and allusion, quotations, secret signals woven into public utterances. (What had he thought of my essay, I wondered; had he understood its message? Had he noticed the allusions? Did he, too, like Constant and Freddy, know Madame’s other name? Did he know about ‘Victoire’?)
On the other hand, the events that followed this toast did nothing to confirm my conclusion. On the contrary, they seemed evidence against it. For the director paid her not the slightest attention; he didn’t even go up to her. To everyone else, Poles and Frenchmen alike, he was attentive and charming, discoursing affably and wittily, but he didn’t even glance at Madame, although he had several occasions to do so. This was all the odder because after quitting Freddy’s company she was alone and seemed unsure of what to do with herself. She was smoking, which I had never seen her do before, and she looked disconcerted and lost – in striking contrast to my memory of her at the gallery, talking to the ambassador. I had never seen her like this. It was as if some flame inside her had been extinguished, taking her strength with it. Her poise and confident expression did not give her wings; the cigarette, the elegant clothes – sumptuous jacket and stylishly narrow boots – did nothing for her. She looked small and wretched, downcast, unsure of herself.
I felt sorry for her.
Thirty-two years ago, I thought, watching her from behind the curtain at the entrance to the auditorium, somewhere in the Alps – in France? Switzerland? – she had seen her first ray of light. A cry, a breath, beating heart, misty images. Outside cold and snow. White. Blue sky, strong sun. Mountains. Savage, menacing peaks from an era before man. Inside warm and cosy. Happiness, innocence. Hope. The starting point. Infinity of time. The first day, on and on, as if it would never end. And then, suddenly, it takes off. Accelerates. Dizzying speed. Days, weeks, months. Millions of seconds. Impressions, experiences. Thoughts. Thousands of sensations. Flying. Racing. Faster and faster. Turmoil. A whirl. And suddenly far from home. No home at all, no friends. A room with a kitchen in the hallway in a wretched, debased country. A foreign homeland, rotten, putrid, foul. Counting the days. Like prison, counting the days to the amnesty. Until now; until this ‘here now’, this moment in this space, this glance at this Swiss watch (inherited from her mother?) and another drag on this cigarette. Thirty . . . thirty-two years! Hard to believe so few.
Once again I was tempted to go up to her, especially since the director had departed, throwing effusive farewells right and left as he went.
You’ve never had a chance like this! I thought excitedly. You have to do it now. And for God’s sake act normal. Don’t fawn or preen or posture, don’t pretend, stop playing a role. Just relax. Be yourself for once!
Myself? And who might that be? said the now familiar voice, cold and off-putting.
What do you mean, who? Someone ordinary. Natural, real.
There is no such person. Everything is pretence and disguise.
Everything?
Everything except pain. And death. And pleasure . . .
Madame cast another nervous glance at her watch, stubbed out her cigarette and made for the door. I emerged cautiously from behind the velvet folds of the curtain and followed.
Like Aschenbach following Tadzio, he thought, amused. Only now it’s the younger who is the pursuer, and the older who is being pursued.
When she pushed open the glass doors and went outside, Freddy suddenly shot out of the crowd of chatting people and raced after her, struggling into his grey coat as he ran. I hesitated. Then I, too, stepped outside and with pounding heart started after them.
Madame made her solitary way down the same path I had taken three hours before: the ‘inner route’ through the wide courtyard to the gate by the Classics Department. Freddy caught up with her after about twenty yards. For a few moments they walked along side by side; he was turned towards her, speaking intensely. Then she came to a sudden halt, pronounced a few curt words in a decisive tone, made an abrupt about-face and set off with an energetic step in the opposite direction, towards Traugutt Street. Freddy stood there for a moment, drooping; he looked stunned. Then, head hanging, he shuffled dejectedly away into the darkness of the courtyard.
Keeping a safe distance behind, I followed her.
When she came out of the gate she turned right, toward the Krakowskie Przedmiescie. The street was deserted. The sound of her heels on the pavement echoed in the cold, crisp night air. She vanished around the side of the Philosophy Building. I quickened my pace, stopped at the corner and peered around it. She was walking towards the pedestrian crossing, in the direction of Obozna Street. I passed the Philosophy Building and ran up the flight of steps leading to the church; from there, hidden behind the plinth supporting the figure of Our Saviour bent under the weight of his cross, I could observe her without all this skulking and rushing about. She crossed to the other side of the Krakowskie Przedmiescie, cut across Obozna Street and went on in the direction of Staszic House – towards the statue of Copernicus.
Where are you going, woman?! he cried to her silently. To the old quarters of the Centre? The Gold Room on the first floor? To the ghost of your mother, who brought you into this world thirty-two years ago today? A worthy and commendable act of piety, indeed, but at this hour the place is closed. The day is over. It’s night.
The woman, instead of replying, vanished behind the statue. A moment later the entrance of Staszic House was lit with a golden glow. This was no miracle, however, but the headlights of the blue Peugeot, nosing slowly out from behind Copernicus. A car door slammed. Then the car shot forward like Jean-Louis’s Mustang and raced, in defiance of the speed limit and several other rules of the road, towards the New World Boulevard.
In order to see where it was headed – straight on along the boulevard or right or left on Swietokrzyska Street – I had to lean quite far out over the balustrade. It certainly hadn’t turned left (east, to the Saska Kepa and Praga districts) or gone straight (south, to Mokotow), because I would have seen it. So it must have turned right – west, to Ochota and Wola. I hung there, the whole upper part of my body suspended precariously in space, wondering where they could be going. And then I saw Freddy, who had emerged from the gate by the Classics Building and was plodding with a heavy, weary step in the direction of New World Boulevard.
Poor fool, why did you let her get away? he thought regretfully.
I caught my balance and slid down from the balustrade. As I stood up I glanced involuntarily at the statue of Copernicus. With a compass and a model of the solar system in his hands, he was looking up at the sky, clear and lit by the full moon. I followed his example and looked up, trying to find Virgo and Aquarius and locate Venus. Instead, my eye met the eye and face of Our Saviour, towering over me. His bent head seemed from my perspective to be turned slightly towards Copernicus, as if he wanted to say, Stop your stargazing and come with me. The index finger of his right hand pointed north.
Is Golgotha north? he wondered, trying to picture the map of Jerusalem. North-west, I believe.
And that was when it hit me. Of course! How could I have missed it! It was the only place they could have gone!
At this hour of the night, in the capital of this ‘privislansky krai’ – ‘province-on-the-Vistula’, as the tsars used to call Poland – governed by the enlightened system of people’s democracy, almost all the bars, restaurants
and nightspots were long closed. Hotels and diplomatic residences were under strict and permanent surveillance. None but the ridiculously naïve or the completely desperate, or those who actively sought contact with counter-intelligence, would go to a hotel with a diplomat. The diplomat’s residence, assigned to him by the Polish Housing Office, was an even worse idea. (The situation was the same for all foreigners posted here who had unofficial contacts with the natives.) The only place that might be relatively safe and discreet (and not always) was a Polish citizen’s private residence. In this case the residence was located, as I knew, in a four-storey building on a small housing estate that did indeed lie in north-west Warsaw.
Trusting to the ‘faith and sensibility’ inspired in me by the figure of Our Saviour, I descended the steps of the church and set off, like Madame, in the direction of Obozna Street. I did not, however (feeling hostile, just then, to ‘reason and sense’), turn towards Copernicus but went past him to a parking area where there was a stand for ‘automobile-type hackney carriages’, as taxis were officially known then.
The first car in line was an old Warsaw model, already quite rare, with its humped back and heavy, bulging front adorned by an equally heavy, clumsy-looking oval-shaped missile. The idea of riding in it was distasteful. I didn’t like Warsaws; they crawled along, jolting and juddering, and they reeked of petrol. But I had no choice: the Warsaw had priority. I tugged at the doorhandle, slid inside and gave the address.
The ancient driver in his dark leather cap yanked twice on the handle of the meter.
‘Night rate,’ he announced.
‘Yes, I know; I’m prepared for that,’ I said, discreetly touching the left-hand pocket of my trousers, where I kept my money. Having assured myself that it was still there, I asked chattily and with a note of insincere concern, in revenge for his low assessment of my means, ‘So, this antique Warsaw is still holding up, is it?’
‘Warsaw! This ain’t no Warsaw, mate!’ he snorted, amused. ‘This is your original Pobyeda! Vintage 1953. She still remembers Stalin – well, his funeral, at least.’
‘A Pobyeda?!’ I exclaimed, with inward delight – for pobyeda, I should perhaps explain for the benefit of those who have forgotten their obligatory school Russian, means ‘victory’ in that language.
‘What d’you think it was? Didn’t you see the Russky letters?’ He tapped on the glass of the instrument panel, pointing to the letters ‘TAHK’ next to the fuel gauge.
I looked at the dashboard and saw that, sure enough, everything was in Russian. There was even something faintly Cyrillic about the shape of the Arabic numerals on the speedometer. To the right, the middle of the dashboard had been designed to look like a radio, with chrome slats of the kind used to conceal speakers and, in the centre, the long, thin metal silhouette of a skyscraper topped by a spire (like our Palace of Culture) with a red star on it, evidently meant to resemble a vertical frequency scale with the dial at the top.
The sight of this Soviet emblem, together with the expressive outward form of the made-in-the-USSR instruments and the details of design that recalled the period of the ‘cult of the individual’, affected me like the taste of a Proustian madeleine.
I was transported to a time I remembered from my earliest childhood. But now I was no longer an innocent tot who saw only the surface of people and things and had no idea of what went on beneath; I was who I was: a young man in his final year of school, raised in a Radio Free Europe atmosphere, brought up by people with an outlook similar to Constant’s. I knew what the hammer and sickle really meant and what kind of world was symbolised by the red star. And this was probably why the contraption in which I was riding through the city’s dark and deserted streets was transformed in my mind, for a brief moment, from an ‘automobile-type hackney carriage’ into a menacing security-police car racing to a night raid – a raid in which someone would be arrested. It must have been in a car like this that Max had been taken away. Who knows, perhaps it was this very one, before its reincarnation as a taxi?
And now they’re going after his daughter, he thought with a shiver of dread. Ricardo is behind the wheel; Mr Jones is in the back. Only Pedro is missing . . . The holy fire still burns! The old times are returning! They’re pursuing Victoire, imprisoned in the Duchy of Warsaw in a blue Peugeot and fleeing to Golgotha in January with Mr Janvier; they’re driving a Russian Pobyeda.
The needle of the speedometer was creeping up to ninety.
‘Well, what d’you say to that?’ said Ricardo. ‘None of your old Warsaws could get up to this speed.’
‘Is the gauge really reliable?’ I asked sceptically, pointing to the speedometer.
‘What d’you mean, reliable?!’ he snarled, offended.
‘Well, the radio looks as if it’s real, too,’ I explained placatingly, ‘but it’s not.’
‘Oh, that.’ He was mollified. ‘That’s something else – that’s Russian-style crap. My vpyeryod! “Forward, comrades!” and all that. They have to be leaders in design as well. But it’s the engine that counts, and I’m telling you, mate, this one’s tough as old boots. And you know why, son?’
‘Well, why?’
‘Because it’s German!’ He chortled delightedly. ‘A Pobyeda!’ he guffawed, mimicking the Russian pronunciation of the name. ‘It’s an Opel!’ He changed gear. ‘They took home the whole factory, lock, stock and barrel! War spoils, see?’
We entered the housing estate where Madame lived. I didn’t want to drive too near, so I told him to let me out just past the bus stop where I had alighted several months back on my reconnaissance trip. The meter said forty zlotys and fifty cents. I took the money out of my pocket and handed over two bills with the Peasant Woman, and then, when he was putting them away, added another five in coins.
‘Keep the change,’ I muttered.
‘Thanks a lot,’ he said. (A 10 per cent tip was considered very respectable indeed.) ‘Cheers, mate!’
He drove off, leaving me in the darkness. I set off down a path I had cleared once already, carefully noting every parked car. Would it be there? Yes, there it was! Or, strictly speaking, there he was – for Peugeot was clearly a masculine name.
It stood directly in front of the building, on the right, dark, empty and silent. wz 1807.
That’s rather careless, he thought. Not very prudent, leaving a trail like that. Downright reckless, in fact. Don’t they care? Aren’t they afraid of the ever-vigilant, ever-curious building superintendent, who’d spill everything he knows at the slightest prodding even if he’s not in the pay of the security services? Love of comfort will be their downfall – even Lenin said so. Are their brains so addled by the film that they’ve forgotten where they are? Do they imagine they’re in Montmartre or Deauville, instead of a city where, in May ’55, ‘in response to the aggressive policies of the West and the Cold War scheming of German revisionists’, the Warsaw Pact was created? He should really have taken the trouble to park somewhere else.
I looked up at the windows. Her light was on, and though the shutters were closed, in the big, four-paned window a fairly wide crack was clearly visible between them.
My heart pounding, I made energetically for the familiar entrance of the building opposite. Here, without turning on the light in the stairwell, I went up to the third floor, took the tortoiseshell opera glasses from their case and with trembling hands raised them to my eyes.
For less than this Acteon was turned into a stag and torn apart by dogs, he thought, amused; but it was a grim kind of humour. He didn’t feel in the least like laughing – although what he saw wasn’t ‘that most terrible of all things to be seen on this earth’, as Zeromski put it in a memorable scene in Ashes.
When I had adjusted the focus and could see the crack of light and beyond it the room, a fragment of picture on the opposite wall presented itself to my eyes: the thin grey spire of a church. I knew that shape and that brushwork. It was a print of one of Buffet’s better-known Parisian scenes: the steel-grey corner of t
he Boulevard St-Germain with the spire of the church of St-Germain-des-Prés shooting up into the sky, and opposite it the legendary café Aux Deux Magots, mecca of bohemian Paris and existentialism, favourite roosting place of Simone de Beauvoir.
So for her it was something of a cult after all! The atmosphere, at least – that rather melancholy Left Bank atmosphere in the reign of Sartre.
But I did not have time to dwell on this, for something quite different now claimed my attention. A light went on in the kitchen, where, as it turned out, the window was not shuttered, and Madame appeared, with the director behind her. She still had on the deep scarlet jacket and the scarf; M. Janvier, on the other hand, had discarded his jacket and bow tie and unbuttoned his shirt collar. Madame took a bottle of champagne from the fridge, handed it to M. Janvier and took two flutes from a wall cupboard while the director busied himself with the champagne. But before she had time to hold out the glasses the cork shot out, sending an arc of foam straight onto the lapel of her jacket. She jumped back, flapping her hands about and laughing, and he at once rushed up, all apologies, and set about blotting the stain with his handkerchief, talking all the while. These measures must have been ineffectual, however, for after a moment she persuaded him to desist and began to undo the gold buttons. Then she took off the jacket and disappeared somewhere with it (presumably to the bathroom). During her absence the director poured the champagne. When she came back, jacketless, he presented a glass to her with a courtly gesture and, raising his own, said a few words.
A birthday toast, he thought, staring at the scene in a daze. I wonder what he said? They stood immobile for a moment, looking at each other. They’re going to kiss now, he thought, and froze in a horror of anticipation.
But they didn’t. They merely clinked glasses, took a small sip and left the kitchen, turning off the light. A moment later I glimpsed their silhouettes through the lighted crack in the shuttered window of the other room.
Madame Page 37
