Ahmed liked talking to Jim, but he was uneasy with liberals. He liked the way Jim carefully said “Akmed,” having learned that was how it was pronounced; and he was almost touched by his questions. What did “Ben” mean? Was it the same as the Scottish “Mac”? However, Jim’s liberalism brought Ahmed close to his mortal enemies; there were Jews, for instance, who wrote the kindest books possible about North Africa and the Algerian affair. Here was a novel by one of them. On the back of the jacket was the photograph of the author, a pipe-smoking earnest young intellectual—lighting his pipe, looking into the camera over the flame. “Well, yes, but still a Jew,” said Ahmed frankly, and he saw the change in Jim—the face pink with embarrassment, the kind mouth opened to protest, to defend.
“I don’t feel that way, I’m sorry.” Jim brought out the useful answer. In his dismay he turned the book over and hid the author’s face. He was sparing Ahmed now at the expense of the unknown writer; but the writer was only a photograph, and he looked an imbecile with that pipe.
Ahmed’s attitudes were not acquired, like Jim’s. They were as much part of him as his ears. He expected intellectual posturing from men but detested clever women. He judged women by merciless, frivolous, secret rules. First, a girl must never be plain.
Veronica was not an intellectual, nor was she plain. She moved like a young snake; like a swan. She put a new pot of coffee down upon the table. She started the same record again, the same coffee-grinder sound. She stretched her arms, sighing, in a bored, frantic gesture. He saw the rents in the dressing gown when she lifted her arms. He could have given her more than Jim; she was not even close to the things she wanted.
Jim knew Ahmed was looking at Veronica. He wondered if he would mind if Ahmed fell in love with her. She was not Jim’s; she was free. He had told her so again and again, but it made her cry, and he stopped saying it. He had imagined her free and proud, but when he said “You’re free” she just cried. Would the fact that Ahmed was his friend, and a North African, mean a betrayal? It was a useless exercise, as pointless as pacing a room, but it was the kind of problem he exercised his brain with. He thought back and forth for a minute: How would I feel? Hurt? Shocked?
In less than the minute it was played out. Ahmed looked at Veronica and thought she was not worth a quarrel with his friend. “Pas pour une femme,” Sartre had said. Jim was too active in his private debate to notice Ahmed’s interest withdrawn. Ahmed’s look and its meaning were felt only by the girl. She turned to the window, with her back to the room. Suffering miserably, humiliated, she pressed her hands on the glass. The men had forgotten her. They laughed, as if Ahmed’s near betrayal had made them closer friends. Jim poured his friend’s coffee and pushed the sugar toward him. She saw the movement in the black glass.
She knew that Jim’s being an American and Ahmed a North African made their friendship unusual, but that was apart. She didn’t care about politics and color. They had nothing to do with her life. No, the difficulty for Veronica was always the same: when a man was alone he wanted her, but when there were two men she was in the way. The admiration of men, when she was the center of attention, could not make up for their indifference when they had something to say to each other. She resented the indifference more than any amount of notice taken of another woman. She could have made pudding of a rival girl.
“The little things are so awful,” said Jim. “Look, I was on the ninety-five bus. The bus stopped because they were changing drivers. There were two Algerians, and without even turning around to see why the bus stopped where it shouldn’t, they pulled out their identity papers to show the police. It’s automatic. Something unusual—the police.”
“It is nearly finished,” said Ahmed.
“Do you think so? That part?”
In one of the Sunday papers there was a new way of doing horoscopes. It was complicated and you needed a mathematician’s brain, but anything was better than standing before the window with nothing to see. She found a pencil and sat down on the floor. I was born in ’43 and Jim in ’36. We’re both the same month. That makes ten points in common. No, the ten points count against you.
“Ahmed, when were you born?”
“I am a Lion, a Leo, of the year 1939,” Ahmed said.
“It’ll take a minute to work out.”
Presently she straightened up with the paper in her hand and said, “I can’t work it out. Ahmed, you’re going to travel. Princess Margaret’s a Leo and she’s going to travel. It must be the same thing.”
That made them laugh, and they looked at her. When they looked, she felt brave again. She stood over them, as if she were one of them. “I can’t tell if I’m going to have twins or have rheumatism,” she said. “I’m given both. Actually, I think I’ll travel. I’ve got to think of my future, as Jim says. I don’t think Paris is the right place. Summer might be the time to move on. Somewhere like the Riviera.”
“What would you do there?” said Ahmed.
“Sell magazine subscriptions,” she said, smiling. “Do you know I used to sell the Herald Tribune? I really and truly did. I wore one of those ghastly sweaters they make you wear. If I sold something like a hundred and ninety-nine, I could pay for my hotel room. That was before I met Jim. I had to keep walking with the papers because of the law. If you stand still on a street with a pile of newspapers in your arms, you’re what’s called a kiosk, and you need a special permit. Now I sell magazine subscriptions and I can walk or stand still, just as I choose.”
“I’ve never seen you,” said Ahmed.
“She makes a fortune,” said Jim. “No one refuses. It’s her face.”
“I’m not around where you are,” said Veronica to Ahmed. “I’m around the Madeleine, where the tourists go.”
“I’ll come and see you there,” said Ahmed. “I’d like to see you selling magazine subscriptions to tourists around the Madeleine.”
“I earn enough for my clothes,” said Veronica. “Jim needn’t dress me.”
She could not keep off her private grievances. As soon as his friend was attacked, Ahmed turned away. He looked at the books on the shelf over the table where Jim did his thinking and reading. Jim was mute with unhappiness. He tried to remember the beginning. Had either of them said a word about clothes?
She could go on standing there, holding the newspaper and the futures she had been unable to work out. There must be something she could do. In the kitchen, the washing up? The bedroom? She could dress. In the silence she had caused, she thought of questions she might ask. “Ahmed, are you the same as those Algerians in the café?” “Am I any better than that girl?”
They began to talk when Veronica was in the bedroom. Their voices were different. They were glad she was away. She knew it. Veronica thought she heard her name. They wanted her to be someone else. They didn’t deserve her as she was. They wanted Brigitte Bardot and Joan of Arc. They want everything, she said to herself. In the bedroom there was nothing but a double bed and pictures of ballet dancers someone had left tacked to the walls.
She returned to them, dressed in a gray skirt and sweater and high-heeled black shoes. She had put her hair up in a neat plait, and her fringe was brushed out so that it nearly touched her eyelashes.
Jim was in the kitchen. He had closed the door. She heard him pulling the ladder about. He kept books and papers on the top shelf of the kitchen cupboard. She sat down in his chair, primly, and folded her hands.
“You are well dressed these days,” said Ahmed, as if their conversation had never stopped.
“I’m not what you think,” she said. “You know that. I said ‘around the Madeleine’ for a joke. I sometimes take things. That’s all.”
“What things? Money?” He looked at her without moving. His long womanish hands were often idle.
“Where would I ever see money? Not here. He doesn’t leave it around. Nobody does, for that matter. I take little things, in the shops. Clothes, and little things. Once a jar of caviar for Jim, but he didn’t want it.”
“You’ll get into trouble,” Ahmed said.
“It’s all here, all safe,” said Jim, coming back, smiling. “I’m like an old maid, you know, and I hate keeping money in the house, especially an amount like this.”
He put the paper package on the table. It was the size of a pound of coffee. They looked at it and she understood. She was older than she had ever been, even picking Jim up in a café. There it is: money. It makes no difference to them. It is life and death for me. “What is it, Jim?” she said carefully, pressing her hands together. “What is it for? Is it for politics?” She remembered the two men in the café and the girl with the thick innocent throat. “Is it about politics? Is it for the Algerians? Was it in the kitchen a long time?” Slowly, carefully, she said, “What wouldn’t you do for other people! Jim never spends anything. He needs a reason, and I’m not a reason. Ahmed, is it yours?”
“It isn’t mine,” said Ahmed.
“Why didn’t you tell me it was here, Jim? Don’t you trust me?”
“You can see we trust you,” said Jim.
“We’re telling you now.”
“You didn’t tell me you had it here because you thought I’d spend it,” she said. She looked at the paper as if it were a stuffed object—a dead animal.
“I never thought of it as money,” said Jim. “That’s the truth.”
“It’s anything except the truth,” she said, her hands tight. “But it doesn’t matter. There’s never a moment money isn’t money. You’d like me to say ‘It isn’t money,’ but I won’t. If I’d known, I’d have spent it. Wouldn’t I just! Oh, wouldn’t I!”
“It wasn’t money,” said Jim, as if it had stopped existing. “It was something I was keeping for other people.” Collected for a reason, a cause. And hidden.
None of them touched it. Ahmed looked sleepy. This was a married scene in a winter room; the bachelor friend is exposed to this from time to time. He must never take sides.
“You both think you’re so clever,” said the girl. “You haven’t even enough sense to draw the curtains.” While they were still listening, she said, “It’s not my fault if you don’t like me. Both of you. I can’t help it if you wish I was something else. Why don’t you take better care of me?”
1962
WILLI
WHEN THEY need technical advice in films about the Occupation, they often send for Willi. There are other Germans in Paris with memories of the war, but they are uninterested or too busy. The students are too young. They don’t know any of the marching songs. To tell the truth, these young people cannot be depended on to sing and march; they don’t take to it seriously. Willi, whose job it is to drill them for the film, loses his patience. They like the acting, and seeing the movie stars, and clowning around in uniform, but they don’t give their best.
“When I think I was ready to die for you!” Willi says.
Willi is short and thick and very fair. His eyes are cornflower blue. The lashes are stubby and nearly invisible. When he has been in the sun all day trying to work a squad of silly kids into some sort of organized endeavor, the whites of his eyes go red and his face looks as if he had dipped it in wine. Actually he never touches wine. Another thing he dislikes is cigarettes. He is unhappy when he sees a young girl smoking.
In the old days, he says—he must mean in his puberty—health was glory and he was taught something decent about girls.
Willi was a prisoner of war in France until the end of 1948. He dreamed of home, but when he got there one of his sisters had an American boyfriend and the whole family were happy as seals around a rich new brother-in-law, a builder in Stuttgart. Willi thought, The French had us four years but didn’t learn a word of German, and if one of them could stick a knife in our back he did. He doesn’t like the French better than he does the Germans; he just despises them less. Back home was the ever-richer brother-in-law. Willi couldn’t fit in, and presently he came to Paris. He must be in his middle thirties but looks twenty-five. He looks his age when he is puzzled, or doesn’t understand what took place, or has lost control of a situation—has given someone else the upper hand.
The film business is occasional, but an economic pillar. He is paid fairly well for what he does. He sometimes meets a girl and hopes something will come of it—he is still looking for that—but he has never been sure he had the right girl.
When Willi was released from prison camp, and after he became disgusted with home, he thought he might join the Legion. He is glad he didn’t now. Willi’s friend Ernst did join; he was sick of being a prisoner and it was the only way out. They often talk about those days and what went on. Their decorations had been torn from them by enemy soldiers with private collections, but Ernst and Willi made each other decorations saying “Mother” and “Home Soon” and that kind of thing. Ernst was in the Legion in Indo-China and Algeria. He has had a troubling life; although he is a good soldier, he has all his life been part of a defeated army. The Legion was a total waste; they didn’t teach him a trade. Also, they are slow about his pension. Ernst is in Paris waiting for the pension. It begins to look as if he might wait forever. Every time he goes to the pensions office, they tell him a document is missing from his file. When he comes back with the document, they say he has come on the wrong day. Ernst is going to be in trouble if the pension doesn’t come through very soon; he has no residence permit in France. He hasn’t been given one, because he has no income, no fixed domicile, and no trade. The wars are over; Ernst can go home. He doesn’t want to go home. If he leaves France, he is sure he will never see the shadow of a pension. Everything depends on his turning up at the pensions office on the right day with every document assembled in the file.
The last time Willi worked on a film he got a small part for Ernst. It wasn’t easy, because Ernst is brown-haired and slight. He is not a German military figure. Willi got the job for Ernst by saying he had been a German officer, which isn’t true. He was too young—about sixteen when he was taken prisoner in 1944. In the film, Ernst plays an S.S. man who has to arrest a Jewish couple on the street outside their own house. This is what the scene is like: The husband, dressed like a modest middle-aged professor in a movie, and his wife, dressed as a humble professor’s wife, are stopped by the two S.S. men (one of them Ernst) as they arrive at their door, arm in arm, one late-summer afternoon. The husband carries a folded newspaper and a loaf of bread.
Ernst has been told to push the professor, while the other S.S. man (a chemistry student) is to hold the woman by the elbow.
Ernst mutters to the actor, “I’m sorry,” and gives him a push.
“Explain it to him in German,” says the director to Willi.
“Don’t apologize,” says Willi quietly. “He doesn’t mind being pushed. He expects it.”
“If he expects it…” But Ernst says “I’m sorry” again.
If he fails a third time, they certainly won’t use Ernst in the picture. It would be a pity, because Ernst is trying, and he does need the money. Willi understands: Ernst has too much respect for the professor. Ernst wouldn’t hurt a fly. Somebody must have hurt a fly once, or they wouldn’t keep on making these movies. But it wasn’t Willi or Ernst.
“Give him a good push,” says Willi, laughing suddenly, “and you’ll get your pension tomorrow.”
Ernst gives the professor such a push that the poor man falls against his wife. “The bread!” she cries, but it is too late: the bread has fallen on the dirty pavement. She and the professor bend down to pick it up. She keeps her arm around him. She puts the bread inside the folded newspaper and takes the parcel gently from the man. Ernst and the chemistry student have nothing more to do. The couple walk off between the two S.S. men as if they had always known this was how one afternoon would end.
“It’s marvelous, that bit about the bread,” says the director.
The star of the film, the French Resistance heroine, thinks it was overdone. They shoot two versions, one with the bread falling, and one with the professor losing h
is spectacles. Now Ernst has the hang of it and knocks the spectacles off without saying “I’m sorry.”
The Resistance heroine is Italian. She glances at Willi, but she smokes and swears, and Willi can’t bear that. Her skin is a mess. She looks as if she’d had smallpox. Someone tells Willi she was once a Roman prostitute.
He likes the young girl who has the part of the professor’s daughter. She is a Parisian of sixteen who has spent her life, until now, in a convent school. She runs down the street screaming behind her parents. Willi thinks she does it well. She seems to him pure and good. He has already noticed that she is chaperoned, and that she doesn’t smoke. But if anyone gets to the girl it will be Ernst. Ernst has more luck with girls than Willi. He is in trouble, and girls will listen to that. Willi has nothing to complain about and lacks conversation. He knows that some weakness in his behavior makes him lose the upper hand, but he is not certain where it begins.
Two years ago, on another film, Willi met a girl who looked like this one. She had blond hair, short as a boy’s, and wore a heart on a gold chain around her neck. She was calm and gentle—it is always the same girl, the one they told him once he was going to have to defend. The blond girl invited Willi to her parents’ flat one afternoon when no one was home. She lived in an old house with high ceilings. He remembers looking out the window into trees. She was proud to be entertaining a man, and she brought him ice and whiskey on a tray. When he refused, she sulked and sat as far away from him as she could. She crossed her legs, looked out the window, twisted and untwisted her gold chain.
The Cost of Living Page 29
