‘Do sit down, Mademoiselle.’
‘No.’
A very simple no, a no such as nobody would ever utter in Outremeuse, not even cold Monsieur Pain, a no which said no, because Frida Stavitskaïa had not come here to sit down, or to admire the neatness and cleanliness of a room where she had no reason to be. A no which hurt Élise and froze her blood, for she had never dared to speak like that, she was too afraid of hurting, of shocking, of causing the slightest offence.
For the sake of saying something, she asked, her lips trembling in a forced smile:
‘Are you a student, Mademoiselle?’
Frida, standing in the doorway and looking towards the stairs, did not feel any need to reply, since this was nobody’s business but hers. She merely repeated:
‘I should like to see the room.’
‘Go ahead, Mademoiselle. I’ll show you the prettiest one, which looks out on the street. The furniture is as good as new.’
She was so afraid of not saying enough that she felt like adding:
‘It’s the bedroom suite we had when we were married.’
For they had sacrificed the handsome furniture in solid oak, the bed which had been made to measure on account of Désiré’s size. Élise and Désiré now slept in an iron bed bought at an auction sale.
‘Metal mattresses, Désiré, are so much healthier!’
With her heart pounding, Élise pushed open the door of the pink room. Everything was pink, the lamp, the toilet set—a set they had had for their marriage too—and even the marble top of the washstand.
Frida Stavitskaïa, bearing down on the sharp point of her parasol, did not bother to go in.
‘This is the only one you have?’
‘It’s the prettiest, the gayest.’
She would have liked to explain everything at once, that the house had been cleaned from top to bottom, that the water from the Artesian well was the best in the street, that there was gas laid on, that the landlord had promised to put in electricity later on, that she had put the wallpaper up herself, and that there wasn’t a single bed-bug in the beds.
But Frida had opened another door, the door of the green room, which was smaller and where the sun came in only towards the evening.
‘How much?’
‘The big room, thirty francs a month, including light, with coal extra, as usual, but …’
Without offering the slightest encouragement, Frida waited for the rest.
‘This one is only twenty-five francs. Mind you …’
‘It’s too dear.’
That was all. She was going to go. She was going. Her face was expressionless. Her beautiful eyes, as bright and black as certain beetles, settled nowhere; they lived their own life and had nothing to say to this woman in the liberty blouse.
‘Listen, Mademoiselle, I’ve got another room, on the entresol …’
She talked fast. Whatever happened, she mustn’t let her go.
‘It’s smaller. It’s not so cheerful. The light comes from the north and the window looks out on the yard …’
‘How much?’
‘Twenty francs.’
For the first time, something vaguely resembling a human emotion passed like a scarcely perceptible breeze over Frida Stavitskaïa’s face. A regret? Not even that! She had simply paused for a moment. She accorded the room a brief glance, for a fraction of a second; perhaps she had thought that it would have been pleasant to live in, but she was already going downstairs.
‘I can’t afford more than fifteen francs.’
‘Listen, Mademoiselle. I’ll make an exception for you. You’re the first who’s been …’
To think that she had had to put up such a struggle against Désiré, that she had saved sou by sou, cheated on the smallest expenses, and counted the lumps of sugar, only to come to this!
‘If I let you have it for eighteen francs?’
‘I told you I can’t afford more than fifteen francs,’ the other woman repeated in a flat voice.
‘Well, then …’
Frida looked at her as if she had no inkling of the drama being played out.
‘When do you want to move in?’
‘Today.’
‘There’s something else I must tell you and it’s rather delicate. I’ve got a child, and some sisters in business. The whole of my family is …’
Élise blushed, faltered, spoke faster.
‘You understand; I can’t allow free access.’
Frida didn’t turn a hair; only her eyes had a questioning look.
‘I mean that you can’t receive anybody you like. It wouldn’t be decent for men to come into your room.’
Élise might have been talking to an inhabitant of another planet. Frida showed no indignation. At the most a hint of contempt turned down the corners of her mouth.
‘Very well. I’ll pay you now.’
And she took the fifteen francs out of a bag with an artificial silver clasp.
‘But come in here for a moment. You’ll have a cup of coffee, won’t you?’
‘No.’
‘There’s some on the stove. I’ll serve you straight away.’
‘I said no. Will you give me the key, please?’
It was all over. Élise had just time to go and fetch Roger from school, give him his dinner, and take him back to Sister Adonie before Désiré came home.
‘I’ve let a room!’
She announced the news straight away, she was so afraid of betraying her uneasiness.
‘Whom to?’
‘A girl … A Russian … She’s moving in today …’
She had not mentioned the rent and she was relieved that Désiré did not ask any questions on that subject.
In the afternoon she bustled to and fro, on edge, happy and yet not happy, she didn’t know why.
‘I’ve got a woman lodger, Madame Corbion.’
‘You’ll find that the women aren’t as easy to live with as the men. One day I’ll tell you about all the dirty tricks they’ve played on me.’
They were at table that evening, in the kitchen with the glazed door, when the key turned in the lock, and it created a peculiar impression, the first time, to see the street-door open when it was nobody in the family. Élise rushed out of the room and pulled the little chain which lit the gas in the lantern hanging in the hall.
‘Give me your suitcase, Mademoiselle Frida.’
‘No, thank you.’
She carried it herself. She had not said good evening. Élise did not dare to follow her upstairs. And the lodger was no sooner in her room than she bolted the door.
They heard her coming and going overhead, for the entresol was just above the kitchen.
‘She can’t have had any dinner.’
Élise listened. What could the foreigner be doing? Where did she have her meals?’
‘Where are you going?’ asked Désiré, who had settled down in his wicker armchair and opened the paper.
Élise went upstairs. Feeling rather nervous, she knocked no the door.
‘It’s only me, Mademoiselle Frida.’
The door did not open. Silence.
‘I just came to ask you if you needed anything. The first day, you know …’
‘No.’
Standing helplessly on the landing, Élise did not know how to say good night, and, to the syllables which she stammered out, she received no reply. For two pins, she would have wept as she went downstairs.
Désiré took his pipe out of his mouth and half raised his head.
‘Well?’
‘Nothing. She doesn’t need anything.’
That was all. She cleared the table. Désiré, who had tilted his armchair back, puffed at his pipe, while Roger fell asleep over his bricks.
Élise opened her mouth. No. What was the use?
Soon they would be going to bed in the ground-floor room whose glazed double doors opened on to the yard. It was not a real bedroom. It was the old dining-room. They had to get used to the iron bedstead w
hose bars stood out as if they were drawn in Indian ink, to the hanging space which had taken the place of the mirror-fronted wardrobe which they had put in the pink room, to the deal table covered with a honeycomb towel which did service as a washstand.
Désiré did not suspect that this room itself would one day be abandoned to a medical student from Vilna, that the iron bedstead would go right up to the whitewashed attic, and that in the evening, to save on their coal, the lodgers would settle down in the kitchen, in his armchair.
He still had his corner. He sank into it, haloed in smoke and tranquillity.
‘Madame Corbion was telling me this afternoon …’
He was obviously reading a fascinating article, for he paid no attention to what she was saying. Fortunately for her. She changed her mind. It was no use explaining to him that according to Madame Corbion, who had experience of them, women students were worse than shrews.
‘You don’t want to put Roger to bed?’
Soon from the next room, Désiré’s voice came to her:
‘There were two lovers
Who dreamed of distant loves …’
She cocked her head to listen, not to the murmur of the lullaby, but to the silence upstairs.
‘There were two lovers
Who bade their parents farewell …’
CHAPTER TWO
ÉLISE had had her suspicions. She had even promised herself to speak about it to Léopold the next time he came.
‘You’ve got to understand, Léopold … I’m sorry to have to say this to you, because what you do is none of my business … But next door! … They know who you are …’
She had not dared, and perhaps the real reason for her silence was not the fear of offending him. Now that she lived in the Rue de la Loi and left the door ajar all the morning while she did her rooms, and now that he for his part no longer needed to ring the bell nor fear the appearance of the landlady’s scowling face, Léopold came along more often to sit down in the kitchen.
The first-floor windows were wide open, and the dust was flying in the rays of sunshine which seemed to be sucking it out like smoke. Élise was tidying the pink room which she had just let to a Jewess from Warsaw, Pauline Feinstein, whom they already called Mademoiselle Pauline.
She was leaning out of the window, watching for the coalman, when she caught sight of Léopold turning the corner and passing the hairdresser’s window with his shoulders slanting sideways.
She always wondered whether Léopold knew where he was going, dragging one leg and walking obliquely with his head down and his eyes fixed on the pavement, so that it was a miracle that he had never been run over by a tram. However, he left the pavement, always at the same place, like a blind man, crossed the street diagonally and, after a moment’s hesitation and a furtive glance at Élise’s house, plunged into the darkness of the pub next door.
He did not stay there long, just long enough to have a drop or two, standing at the bar in silence, and there he was at the door, still hesitant and suspicious, growling like a dog sniffing at a place before venturing inside.
He crossed the threshold, touched the door, pushed it open, saw the empty passage and the glazed kitchen door standing ajar, and heard the soup on the boil. Élise finally came out of one of the upstairs rooms and leant over the banisters, holding her bun in one hand.
‘Come in, Léopold. Sit down. I’ll be with you in a minute.’
It was understood between them: she went on with her work, going to and fro while her brother, sitting in Désiré’s wicker-work armchair, drew on his old pipe with its disgusting gurgle.
Even if she sat peeling vegetables beside him, he said nothing and, after a lapse of time fixed by some rule known to him alone, he went off as he had come, with a vague:
‘’Bye, my girl.’
Élise came downstairs and disappeared straight away.
‘Excuse me, Léopold. It’s the coalman.’
She carried her buckets out on to the pavement, came back for her purse, opened and shut a succession of doors, washed her hands, and finally settled down to strain the soup.
The conversations between Élise and her brother were completely unlike those they had with other people. It was as if they were waiting, by tacit consent, for a certain atmosphere to surround them, for a warmth to envelop them, for a contact to be made, for the silence to become profound enough for the tick-tock of the alarm-clock to seem like the pulse-beats of the house itself. Then, and only then, Élise sighed:
‘Oh, poor Léopold. I don’t talk about this to anybody, least of all to Désiré. If you only knew how women …’
Was it because she did not dare to be more explicit that she left her sentence unfinished? Was it because she and her brother had no need to be explicit? Or was she still preparing the atmosphere with a preamble of vague words, words which did not tie up with one another?
‘I’ve got three lodgers now. Well, you know, I don’t mind doing Monsieur Saft’s room, for all that he smokes in bed and throws his cigarette-ends all over the place. But the women! … Last Friday, I nearly spoke to Valérie about it. Luckily I remembered in time that she has a smell too. Once I had to sleep with her, and it turned my stomach.’
Léopold gazed at the reddening disc of the stove, and now and then you could hear the gurgle of his pipe. He let his sister go on talking. Élise did not bother to find out whether he was listening to her or whether he was thinking of something else.
‘The first time I did Mademoiselle Frida’s room, I didn’t think I’d be able to finish it. How a woman, a girl, can have so little pride in herself is beyond me. As for me, the thought of leaving another woman to make my bed and empty my slops …’
Poor Élise! The day she was talking about—it was a month ago now, but she could remember the smallest details to the extent of suffering from them—that day had probably been the richest in misfortunes in the whole of her life. She had worked so hard, calculated so carefully, worked everything out to within a centime or so, and suddenly she had found herself face to face with a reality so different from her dreams that she had felt herself weakening and had wondered whether she ought not to begin all over again.
The smell of another woman, of a stranger, when she had pushed open the entresol door after Mademoiselle Frida had left for the University; the sight of that unmade bed, still warm and damp, and then, on the filthy grey surface of the soapy water in the basin, those little balls of dark hair floating about.
That time, Élise had opened the window and, since there was nobody there to see her and she did not need to smile, the corners of her mouth had dropped in a grimace of weariness and disgust.
‘Mademoiselle Pauline isn’t any cleaner, and I don’t think she ever washes herself all over, but possibly because her room is bigger and there are two windows, the smell isn’t so obvious. If you could see their powder-puffs, Léopold! Madame Corbion was right, you know, when she told me about women students, and she was right too when she said that all Russians are still savages to some extent.’
Léopold emptied his pipe by knocking it on the edge of the coalscuttle. Élise was afraid that he was going to get up already, for he did not usually stay much longer, but this particular morning, he sank back into the armchair again and heaved a sigh.
‘Am I boring you, Léopold?’
He grunted. That meant that she could go on.
‘I don’t know why it’s you I tell all my little troubles to, even those that only women can understand …’
She did not interrupt her work for a single moment, or stop looking through the glass panes at the street door, which was letting in a thin ray of sunshine. She peeled an onion and put it in a frying-pan, walking backwards and forwards between the stove and the table.
‘You know, those people haven’t the same reactions that we have.’
Now things were going better, and Mademoiselle Frida had been practically tamed. All the same, Élise still felt aggrieved at the memory of the Russian woman’s f
irst day in the house. She had arranged that room so lovingly and now you could scarcely recognize it! Why had her lodger removed the tablecover which was spotless and as good as new? On the deal surface there was nothing but a pile of books, and on the dressing-table a broken comb, a toothbrush reddened by an unfamiliar toothpaste, and some little bits of cotton-wool.
Élise looked up and noticed a gap: the gilt frame containing an enlarged photograph of Valérie had been taken down, and so had the two little pictures with white lacquer frames showing a lily-pond and some deer in a forest.
On the black marble mantelpiece, there was nothing left, neither the embroidered mats, nor the vases, nor the big shell from Ostend: knick-knacks of no particular value, it was true, but which brightened up the room.
A photograph had been slipped into the frame of the mirror: a single-storeyed wooden house—a real savages’ house—and a family lined up in front of the door, a fat woman with grey hair, a younger, very ugly one, holding a baby and leaning to one side, two little girls and a fifteen-year-old girl who was none other than Frida.
No men. Élise did not know that old Stavitsky, a country schoolmaster, had been in a Siberian prison for the past five years.
Anxious and vexed, she hunted around for her vases, her souvenirs and the portrait of Valérie. In the wardrobe she found nothing but a dirty chemise, with no embroidery, lace or inset, a pair of stockings with holes in them, and some slippers which she would not have dared to wear to do her housework.
Anxiety engulfed her. On the landing there were two doors, the lavatory door and the door of the cupboard where she kept her buckets and brushes. It was behind this latter door that she found her possessions, thrown in anyhow.
‘Would you have behaved like that, Léopold? If you’d seen that bare room!’
She had not said anything to Désiré. She had found time, before going to fetch Roger from school, to run over to the Rue Puits-en-Sock and buy a few flowers, carnations they were, lovely hothouse carnations she would always remember. She had done that with a bitter taste in her mouth, as if to overcome at any price the despair which was stifling her, to push her goodwill to the limit. She had chosen the most precious vase in the dining-room, a narrow vase in iridescent crystal, and she had put it on Frida Stavitskaïa’s table.
Pedigree Page 25
