Sister Adonie, so soft and gentle that she made you think of something good to eat, welcomed into her vast skirts with their clinking rosary the awkward chicks that were brought to her from every corner of the district, keeping a special smile for that Monsieur Mamelin who greeted her with such a splendid sweep of his hat.
While the mothers clutched their shawls around them and returned to the life of the district and the day’s cares at the other end of the courtyard, the door closed on a quiet, cosy little world, four white walls adorned with images, canvases, plaits and samplers, red wool on holland.
In her full black robe with its folds covering her feet, Sister Adonie did not appear to walk but to glide along a little way above the ground.
Through the two windows the Dean could be seen, short and fat and purple-cheeked, walking along the garden paths with little steps, reading his breviary and stopping in the middle of every patch of sunshine.
It was hot. The black cylinder of a monumental stove stood in the middle of the classroom, with a black pipe leading off to imbed itself far away in the glaring whiteness of the wall. The little cans of white coffee which the children had brought for their ten o’clock snack were warming side by side, and, in their oval boxes, their sandwiches were turning dry, the butter was soaking into the bread, the bars of chocolate becoming covered with tiny drops which would end up by forming a sort of lacquer.
Some of the cans were white or blue enamel. Others were iron, like those of Velden’s coppersmiths who, at midday, had their dinner on the pavement after paying the greengrocer two centimes for the boiling water they needed for their coffee.
‘Coloured cans are common,’ Élise had stated.
She had not said that above all they were more expensive. Common too, in her opinion, were those sandwich tins decorated with scenes from Little Red Riding Hood or Puss in Boots.
On Roger’s box, which was a discreet brown, there was nothing. Nor would Roger ever wear those check pinafores, pink for girls, blue for boys, which he hankered after so badly.
‘It’s workers’ children that are dressed like that.’
Why workers’ children? He was condemned to black pinafores, in sateen which would never wear out and did not dirty easily.
Bells tolled near by, in the tower which you could just see if you bent down; the Dean was going to sing a Requiem; there was a murmur of organ music, solemn echoes of a De Profundis; time flowed along, cheeks were red with warmth, eyes smarted, fingers mechanically plaited scarlet, yellow, green and blue ribbons of glossy paper which gave off a subtle smell.
Not long ago it had been winter, and, while Élise went round the junk-shops and the sale-rooms looking for second-hand beds and wardrobes, Sister Adonie, in the afternoon, used to light a wax-taper at the end of a pole. It always took her some time, in the twilight, to turn the taps of the two gas-jets which were high up. Looking up, the children waited with a secret anguish for the two ‘plops’, then the crude light, the nun’s huge shadow gliding across the screen formed by the wall, and finally the end of school and that special sort of giddiness which came over them on the frontier between the overheated classroom and the wet, dark world where their mothers were waiting.
Winter was over now. In a few days’ time, immediately after Easter, the stove with the pipe would stop being lit and school would be held outside, in the garden where the Dean read his breviary every morning; they would be able to watch the slow comings and goings of the old gardener as he pushed his barrow along, hoed or raked the earth, or stretched strings to sow his spinach and carrots straight.
Today was a special kind of day, neither winter nor summer, one of those days without a wrinkle or a ripple on it, which you remembered long afterwards, and while Sister Adonie was handing out the cans of coffee, while Désiré, on the stroke of ten, was knocking at Monsieur Monnoyeur’s door, Élise, feeling a little feverish, was watching the street, her hand clutching the edge of the curtains.
In the house in the Rue de la Loi, the new house as they called it, there was an atmosphere of expectant calm, and this calm enveloped Élise so closely that she felt imprisoned inside it, that she had the impression of being short of air, that occasionally, if she had obeyed her instincts, she would have rushed around haphazardly to avoid the anguish of immobility.
She had nothing more to do. There was not a speck of dust left in the dining-room, the furniture had been polished so brightly that the knick-knacks were reflected in it, the walls of the staircase, painted a pale green, had been washed with soap and water from top to bottom, the stairs sandpapered; there was nothing left to move, nothing to wash, polish or scrub.
At ten o’clock in the morning, Élise was dressed in her Sunday best and, without doing it on purpose, she was smiling her rather sad, rather worried Sunday smile, the smile which went with the pleated pastel-blue blouse, with the puffed shoulders, with the skirt in navy-blue serge which touched her heels at the hem and which, fitting tightly over her corset, went up to just below her breasts. Her fair hair formed a mass as big as her head, gathered together, rather far forward, in a heavy bun.
All alone in the silent house, in the street where nobody was passing, opposite the red wall of the Friars’ school where playtime had just finished, Élise felt almost frightened.
Perhaps this was because her work was over, that work which had lasted a whole winter or even longer, and which she had brought to a satisfactory conclusion alone, so tense that sometimes she had wept while carrying her buckets, while scraping the dirty woodwork, while collecting heaven knows where the furniture whose price she did not dare to confess to Désiré and which she had trundled home in a handcart, under cover of darkness.
Could Valérie, with her porcelain hands, have helped her? Could Madame Pain, who was always timid and complaining? So who had whitewashed the walls of the yard? Who had climbed the ladder poised unsteadily on the stairs? And who had painted the outside door, whose colour, when they had taken the house, nobody could have specified?
It was all over. Probably it was because she had finished her work that Élise felt empty, that her knees were trembling, that her hands, which she had had to rub with pumice stone after all that rough work, shook helplessly at times.
From that window to which she kept coming back in spite of herself, and where she felt ashamed of keeping watch, she could see nothing human except two legs and two feet in red carpet slippers resting on a straw-bottomed chair.
She could not see the rest of the man who sat there day after day outside the house, but she knew that he slept in a ray of sunshine, so thin that his clothes hung on him like the old clothes which are hung on sticks in the fields to scare away the sparrows.
Two fat, common women, who kept the pub next door, an old woman and a young one, put him there like an inanimate object as soon as the weather turned fine, and moved him around as the sun moved across the sky.
Élise did not talk to those neighbours. When she went out, she tried not to look their way. It was from the woman who ran the dairy-shop that she had learnt that the man, whose name was Hosselet, had lived in the Congo, from which he had brought back the sleeping-sickness. He had become so light that either of the two women could carry him like a child.
No, Élise had no regrets, she was not afraid. She knew that she had been right, that she had had to do what she had done.
It was the street, to which she had not grown accustomed yet, that baffled her, those houses about which she knew nothing, those windowless walls of the Friars’ school, that dark green door where, at half past eleven, a friar with a wooden leg would station himself to supervise the pupils’ departure.
Why should she feel sorry that she had left the Rue Pasteur, where she had had two flights of stairs to climb? What had she lost?
‘You’ll see, Valérie! Once I’ve found my lodgers …’
A student had gone past a few minutes earlier, a tall, dark young man, very smartly dressed, wearing an orange velvet cap with a long peak.
He was one of Madame Corbion’s lodgers, a Rumanian.
‘Just imagine, Madame Élise …’
Why did Madame Corbion, who had a child of the same age as Roger and dyed her hair red, insist on calling her Madame Élise?
‘… Just imagine, his parents send him three hundred francs a month and he still manages to run into debt!’
Madame Corbion used cosmetics, without even trying to disguise the fact.
‘I assure you, Désiré, she’s a respectable woman. Her husband was an officer.’
The Rue Pasteur was less than a hundred yards away; the Mamelins’ old house was the second on the left, just round the corner. Yet how far away it all seemed!
When the student had gone past, never thinking that somebody was looking at him, Élise had thought:
‘That young man would take the pink room at thirty francs; he wouldn’t be particular about the price of coal or anything else, but he’d probably insist on free access, because I’m sure he spends his three hundred francs on women.’
She would have to get used to it. She would get used to it. Already, if anybody uttered the word Poles, it meant for her young men who had very little money, fifty to eighty francs a month, but who were none the less proud for all that. Soon she would be like innkeepers and restaurant proprietors for whom the world has a different meaning than for the ordinary run of mortals. If a car happens to pass, slow down and stop, it is not a car with tourists in it; it is three meals at so much a meal, wine, coffee and liqueurs, or else it is a grumpy old couple, two meals with no wine or extras.
‘You see, Madame Élise, the Russians are poorer, but they don’t expect so much. And there are some of them who are still a bit wild.’
There were no students in the Rue Pasteur, and not a single window displayed the yellow notice which Élise could read through her own window-panes and which she had fastened there two days before with sealing-wax.
‘Furnished room to let.’
She had added an s in ink: furnished rooms.
Three weeks before, at the same time, Élise had gone out of the house in the Rue Pasteur with Roger to sit on the bench in the Place du Congrès. Straight away, she had automatically looked up at the Lorisses’ loggia, sure that old Madame Lorisse would be there, or her daughter, or the two of them, doing some embroidery and keeping an eye on the old man and the dog.
They were rich people, people of independent means. Well, as soon as Élise turned in their direction, smiling discreetly, Madame Lorisse would nod her head and give a little wave of the hand, and Élise knew perfectly well that that gesture meant:
‘There’s the young mother from next door taking her child out for a walk. She deserves credit for bringing him up in a second-floor flat and keeping him so clean! How thin she is! How tired she must be! How proud and brave she is! We must show her our esteem and smile at her son with his thin little legs. There you have an excellent person who deserves our consideration.’
Élise for her part, after stroking the dog, made a mute reply.
‘You can see that I am touched by your solicitude! You understand me. I do what I can, even though I can’t afford anything but the bare necessities of life. You are the richest people in the street and yet you wave to me from your loggia. The proof that I am not ungrateful and that I know my manners is that I stroke your dog, which frightens me so badly every time it goes near Roger and, with its mania for licking his face, could easily give him worms. Thank you. Thank you very much. Believe me, I do appreciate …’
Élise walked along. She knew who lived behind every door. The door of the magistrate’s house opened a little way as she approached.
‘How is the dear child? Isn’t he sweet! He’s got such expressive eyes, Madame Mamelin! How I envy you! How happy you must be!’
What did it matter if Madame Gérard was a sometime cook whom the magistrate now called his housekeeper but whom he seemed to be in no hurry to marry?
‘The handsomest child in the district, Madame Mamelin. I keep telling Monsieur Dambois so.’
The proof that everything was a question of breeding was that in those days Élise would suddenly cross the road, if she had time, as soon as she caught sight of fat Madame Morel, although the latter was an engineer’s wife, a former waitress with a shrill voice.
‘Come here, little Roger. Come and get some chocolate from old Madame Morel.’
Then Élise’s smile would say:
‘Thank you! I thank you out of politeness, because that is the correct thing to do. But we don’t belong to the same world. The Lorisse ladies would not wave to you from their loggia. Everybody knows that you were brought up in the gutter and that you are the most foul-mouthed woman in the district. I say thank you but I feel embarrassed when the neighbours see you stopping me in the street.’
Those people lived only for their stomachs, both husband and wife; they were fat and flabby, with wet lips and shining little pigs’ eyes. It was Madame Morel who had shouted at the green-grocer in front of everybody:
‘You’re a thief, Sigismond! You’ve palmed off some rotten carrots on me again!’
When the greengrocer was not even called Sigismond! That was what she was like.
‘Say thank you to Madame Morel, Roger. Give her your hand. Not that one. Your right hand.’
After Morel’s, there was the house with the white door where Monsieur Hermann lived, the first violin at the Théâtre-Royal, who was always so well dressed and had ash-blond hair as fine as a woman’s. And further on there was Julie Pain’s ever-open door.
‘I’ll be with you in a moment, Élise.’
For Julie was never ready!
Godard’s the butcher’s … The Place du Congrès, so neat and regular, with its four corresponding terraces, its benches, and the No. 4 tram describing an harmonious curve …
No! Élise had no regrets and never would have any. She was not like Désiré, who had turned his head away—she knew very well why—when, in the evening, when the last piece of furniture had been taken away, he had locked up the two empty rooms in the Rue Pasteur before giving the key to the landlady.
She would get used to it. She was already used to it. She was beginning to smile at her neighbours on the right, the Delcours—the eldest son was a house-painter and looked rather like Arthur. It was a pity that the house on the left was a pub, but nobody ever went into it, except an occasional carter who did not even stop his horses and came straight out wiping his moustache on the back of his hand. The fact was, those people probably lived largely on the pension Hosselet received on account of his service in the Congo and his sleeping-sickness.
Élise went to see to the fire. The same perfect order reigned in the kitchen as in the dining-room which they called the drawing-room. She felt like going upstairs to have a look at the bedrooms, but a mysterious force drew her into the front room, behind those curtains where she would not be caught watching for anything in the world. What would people think?
How wonderful it would be if, at two o’clock, when Désiré came home, she could let him eat his dinner without saying anything, and then, trying not to tremble, finally announce:
‘Incidentally, I’ve got a lodger.’
And now, at eleven o’clock, just after a tram had gone along the Rue Jean-d’Outremeuse and the sick man had been moved along the pavement—there were people who could find that upsetting and who, because of that, would hesitate to ring the bell—now here was a woman stopping in front of the house, in front of the window with the carefully draped curtains and the brass flower-pot cases which contained asparaguses from Coronmeuse.
‘Dear God, how ugly she is!’
For a moment life came to a standstill. The woman had disappeared. Élise’s heart had stopped beating. Finally the sound of a bell rang out, echoing through the whole house, which had never seemed so empty before; Élise had not had time to break the spell which rooted her to the floor before the bell was rung again, violently, hard enough to pull the chain off.
‘Come in, Mademoiselle.’
The visitor did not smile, did not say good morning, did not apologize; she came in as if she were already at home, or in a place which belonged to nobody, and she looked uninterestedly at the spotless walls and the brass ball at the foot of the banisters.
‘Where is the room?’
Roger, full of warmth and well-being, was dozing beside Sister Adonie’s big stove, and Désiré was waiting for the moment when he would finally be alone in the Rue Sohet office to take off his jacket and unpack his sandwiches, for, like a true Mamelin, Désiré was always hungry.
‘Dear God, how ugly she is!’
This swallow who had come such a long way to be the first to settle in the Rue de la Loi house was Frida Stavitskaïa, born on the shores of the Black Sea, in a suburb of Odessa.
Because she was the first to cross her threshold on an unusually calm morning, Élise would always see her as she appeared to her at that moment, dark and thin, with an emaciated face in which a wide, blood-red mouth and two huge eyes stood out sharply.
How could a human being, a woman who wasn’t twenty-two yet, get herself up like that? Her tightly plaited hair formed a bun as hard as a stone on a neck which was yellow and probably unwashed, and a flat hat, which no servant-girl would ever be seen wearing, had been carelessly put on top of it. A shiny skirt failed to conceal either the absence of any hips or the big feet which anybody would have taken for men’s feet. Not a single touch of white, not a single trinket, not the tiniest jewel or family souvenir to relieve the strict poverty of the high-necked dress which recalled the uniform of some Puritan sect.
But it was above all the absence of any smile, even the vague smile which you give to anybody, to the beggar who greets you in the street, which disappointed Élise.
She would have liked to show the visitor into the drawing-room whose door was open.
Pedigree Page 24
