by Rose Tremain
Didier shook his head. ‘No. I wasn’t there. I had to go to see my mother. Maybe she came in while you were sleeping?’
I pulled my blanket round me. I wasn’t cold, but I just felt in need of something comforting to hold on to. Didier looked a bit worried too. He walked a few paces from me and lit a Gitane and I could see his hand shaking as he held his lighter. Suddenly, I said: ‘What exactly is an existentialist, Didier? I’ve never really understood it.’
‘Perhaps we shouldn’t discuss this now, Louis,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you should go and see Alice?’
‘Yes, I will,’ I said, ‘but tell me roughly . . .’
‘Well . . .’ Didier sighed and then inhaled a lot of smoke and blew it out again. ‘The existentialists were concerned with what man makes of himself – in the absence of any God.’
‘Existentialists don’t believe in God?’
‘No. Of course not. They did not believe in God and they did not believe that good and evil have been defined and determined for us by God or any other Superior Being or by any political system. My father explained the logic of this to me when I was quite young. And so, to me, this philosophy is still precious and still relevant to the way I live my life.’
I had to ask Didier to say this again, because some of the words were difficult. Nobody talked about political systems in Le Grand Meaulnes.
When he thought I’d grasped the concept, he said: ‘Do you understand? Man acts alone. You, Louis, act alone. You are not compelled by some outside force.’
‘Yes, I am,’ I said.
‘No. You are free, as we all are free . . .’
‘No, I’m not. My “outside force” is my parents. I was “compelled” to come to Paris, for instance. I had no say in it.’
‘All right, you were compelled to come because you’re still a child – more or less. But does anyone force you to feel what you feel about coming to Paris? Do you think what you think and do what you do in the name of some group, organisation or belief?’
‘In the name of what?’
‘Let me put it simply, Louis. No one is the judge of your thoughts and deeds. Only you. You take full responsibility.’
I stared at Didier. I knew I hadn’t understood everything he’d said, and this really annoyed me. I promised myself to work harder on my French, to buy some more books from the bouquinistes with Hugh’s money – a book by Sartre, for instance.
‘Can we talk about it again?’ I said. ‘Will you explain it to me over and over until I understand it? I want to understand it. Has flying got anything to do with it?’
‘Flying?’
‘Your name, Didier-l’oiseau. Is that an existentialist name?’
Didier smiled. His hand was still shaking as he took the Gitane out of his thin mouth. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘in a way. Being alone, unattached, in the air, is the ultimate freedom, isn’t it?’
I didn’t know how to answer this. I just nodded, like I agreed with Didier, and then I went inside and down to Alice’s room. Her door was closed, so I opened it quietly and there was Alice lying in her gigantic bed, sweetly asleep as if nothing had happened.
I decided to go missing. I thought, Alice and Valentina can be the ones who worry about me.
I took the métro to Jussieu and came up under the green catalpa trees. I went to a café and had a huge breakfast of omelette and chips and coffee, and that feeling of being at the very centre of something came back to me while the noise of the café went on all round me. I asked my waiter if he was an existentialist and he said, ‘Non, mon petit. Ça, non,’ and smiled, as if I’d cracked a joke. Some students at the next table turned and looked at me strangely, like they couldn’t believe what they’d just heard.
I walked through the Jardin des Plantes, where a hundred lawn sprinklers were turning and the frogs were croaking in the artificial rain, then down the Boulevard de l’Hôpital to the Salpêtrière Hospital.
Somehow, because Didier had said it had a church, I hadn’t thought it was a real working hospital, but now I could see that it was and it was so enormous it had to mark out routes in different colours on a map to tell you where you were. It had courtyard after courtyard, all identical, and one of these gave on to a little wood or grove, where some of the patients were walking up and down in their dressing gowns. No hospital in England provides a wood for walking up and down in. Not many of them even provide a lawn. In England, you just have to get better tramping the linoleum corridors.
An old man came up to me and asked where the door to Anesthésiologie et Réanimation was. He didn’t say which he wanted, to be anaesthetized or reanimated. Perhaps, when you’re really old, you vacillate between wanting one and then the other? I told him I didn’t know, that I was a stranger from Devon – ‘je suis un étranger, du Devon’ – and he walked on, looking up and down and around with his little darting eyes.
I guided myself to the church and stood in front of it, staring up at the dome Didier had worked on. It was so vast, there must have been about a million slates on it, and all these black slates shone like fish scales in the sun. It was hard to imagine men up there, getting scaffolding secure. You just couldn’t see how or where they would start. But I tried to picture Didier and his father, looking small from here because they were so high, and then Didier’s father being distracted by whatever it was that came out of the sky . . .
What happened next? How far did his father fall? Did Didier fly through the air to try to save him? Did he fall, too, and survive except for something that happened to his eyes which damaged his sight?
I like mysteries. Unfinished knowledge. Most people have to be told everything straight away, get it all explained and wrapped up. But I like trying to work it out for myself, like in a chess game.
There’d been a boy at school who stole things – books, shoes, sweets, fags, T-shirts, tennis rackets, anything that came within his sight when no one was looking – and everyone said, ‘Oh, he’ll make a mistake and then he’ll be caught,’ but they didn’t try to catch him. But I worked out that if he was stealing tennis rackets and shoes he must be selling them somehow, or passing them on to be sold, so I let him steal my football, which was marked with the initials LL. Then I got the local paper every day and looked up when all the weekend car-boot sales were on and cycled to every single one of them until I found my football. And the rest would have been easy. Except I suddenly felt sorry for this fucking stealer. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t get interested in shopping him. The thing that had interested me was laying my trap.
My neck began to ache, staring up at the dome. But the idea was coming to me that Didier was a kind of hero – probably the most heroic person I’d ever known. I had to blot out of my mind the image of Hugh with his pile of bricks, because if I started to compare my father’s hut with this great fantastic dome I knew I’d feel something bad, like embarrassment or sorrow. I decided that the next time I had a talk with Didier I’d ask him whether he thought happiness was as small as a shrimp in a pool.
I went into the church. I didn’t know who Saint Louis had been, but he must have appreciated emptiness and space, because this was what there was most of in this building: air that had never been breathed and echoing walls and shafts of light. I sat down on one of the spindly little chairs. I seemed to be the only person there. Except then I heard a kind of rustling and whispering and I realised a Mass was going on behind a huge door in one of the side chapels.
I crept around. The side chapels were all labelled for different categories of worshippers – nurses, parishioners, lunatics, the sick – so that they could each have their own services, and not be upset by the sight of each other or turn the church into a centre of contagion, like the city gate in Belfort. The chapel in which the Mass was going on was the lunatics’ one, so I sidled up to the door to see if I could see any mad behaviour, but I couldn’t: everyone was sitting still and listening obediently to the priest.
Then a man in a battered old suit came creeping by me. His lo
ok was odd, as if he should have been in the lunatics’ side chapel. He shuffled round the floor to a stone pedestal where there was an ugly statue of the Virgin Mary, wearing a gold dress. She was almost life-size, like Sainte Estelle in Valentina’s novel, and this man climbed on to the pedestal and took her hands in his, like he was Father H about to take her away. He looked into her eyes, which were as bright as polished stones, and started a conversation with her. I hid behind a pillar and listened, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying or what she said back. After a while, he took out a hankie and shined up her face a bit and then he left.
It was still only ten o’clock in the morning. I sat down again and wondered how I was going spend my day alone. I decided to make my way to the Luxembourg Gardens and hang round the chess players, seeing if I could learn any new moves. I didn’t know how long they’d tolerate me, but I thought, when they’re sick of me, I’ll go back to the rue Rembrandt. But I didn’t plan to go into the apartment: I planned to go up on to the roof using Didier’s ladders and get him to show me how to hang slates as perfectly as the ones on the Salpêtrière dome.
It was getting dark when I finally returned to the apartment. I could tell from the faces of Alice and Valentina that they wanted to yell at me, but they didn’t because an unknown man was with them and the three of them were sitting in the salon, making charming conversation.
Valentina was wearing a white dress and long silver earrings and the sling for her broken arm was made out of a silk scarf with a field of scarlet poppies on it. There was some writing on it, black and stick-like, which I thought said ‘Ypres’. I hadn’t known they made women’s scarves that commemorated First World War battles, but you never know what the fashion industry is going to think up. Trying to be a fashionable woman must be exhausting. Later, I realised the word on the scarf was ‘Yves’ and the ‘St Laurent’ bit was lost to sight.
The man was Grigory Panin. He looked like some crazed American writer of the kind my father read – Kurt Vonnegut or Joseph Heller – with bushy hair and lined cheeks and a jacket of hairy tweed. In fact, he was a crazed Russian writer. Valentina explained that he was here to give interviews about a new book that was coming out in France. She said: ‘I have known Grigory for a long, long time, haven’t I, Grisha?’
Grigory Panin said: ‘I apologise, but my English is sorrowful.’
They talked about Paris, about the price of things, about laser printers, about meat, about the guys in the métro selling yo-yos that unravelled on threads of light. After a while, they all went out to a meal in a restaurant, but I wasn’t invited. I thought it might have been because of Grigory’s sorrowful English, but Alice said later, ‘You weren’t invited, Lewis, because you behaved totally irresponsibly, going out on your own like that.’ I refrained from saying that I’d spent half the night on the water tanks, waiting for her to come home. Grown-ups have one rule for themselves and another for their children and this has never been fair, since the beginning of time.
They left me a piece of pie and some salad for my supper and I ate this watching TV. The only interesting programme I could find was one about the survivors of the destruction of Caen in 1944. The whole city was virtually demolished and thousands of people died because the British forces stopped for a tea break, when they could have pushed on and taken Caen from the Germans in about half an hour. And during the tea break, the German tanks began to move in on the city.
I’d never really felt bad about being British before, but now I did. I don’t know why we’re all so fucking besotted by tea; it’s lamentable.
They interviewed some French sisters who had lain hidden in Caen half a metre underground for seventeen weeks. The sisters said General Montgomery maybe ordered the tea break because he wanted to save British lives. But they didn’t seem to bear the British a grudge, I don’t know why. They told a story about how they found some love letters sent to a British infantryman in the place where they were hiding and kept them for forty years until they tracked the infantryman down in Great Yarmouth, by which time, alas, he was too old for love.
Sergei watched this programme with me. He sat there quivering and staring at the screen and I stroked his neck. When the programme told us about the fatal tea break, he let out a whimper of pain. From time to time, he turned round and looked at me longingly and so I fed him little crumbs of my pie. When the pie was finished, we were still both hungry. I thought, I wonder what there was to eat in that cellar in Caen for all those days and days.
At about midnight, while I was working on Le Grand Meaulnes, I heard Valentina on my stairs. She came in, still wearing her white dress and her poppy sling and smelling of wine. I said coldly: ‘Did you have a nice dinner with Grigory?’
She sat down in her usual place on my bed. Her nose was shiny but her lipstick was fresh and bright. ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘that poor Grigory. All he talks about is how bad things are in Moscow. You know, there was so much hope there in ’89, but the hope has gone. He says some mornings he wishes he had died in the night. Can you imagine how that feels?’
I thought, when I’ve gone from here, when I find myself back at Beckett Bridges School without ever having touched the most amazing person I’ve ever met or even tasted her lipstick, I may know how it feels. But all I said was: ‘What’s his book about?’
‘Oh, Russian history, long before the Revolution. I doubt anyone here will read it. I don’t think he will get good sales.’
She patted her hair and looked around my room at my clothes all thrown into piles.
‘Is Grigory your lover, Valentina?’ I said boldly.
She turned and stared at me, speechless for once. I looked away from her and opened my musical box and the tune, Le Temps des cerises, began to play softly from my bedside table. Part of me was amazed that I’d asked this question and another part wasn’t.
After a while, Valentina said: ‘You know, darling, it’s none of your business, but then again why shouldn’t you know? He was my lover, off and on, for a long time. He has a wife in Moscow, Irina. And Irina is an alcoholic, so, you see, poor Grisha does not have a beautiful life. Far from it. I am very fond of him, but he depresses me. When he is around, I find myself remembering so much that I would really rather forget.’
I looked at Valentina. I thought, Grigory Panin’s hands have held her breasts, his tongue has sucked on her red lips . . . ‘I see,’ I said.
‘So there you are, Lewis. One does not go through life without lovers. No one does. You will see.’
‘Shall we do some Meaulnes now?’ I said. ‘I’m in the middle of the bit where Meaulnes has returned from his adventure. He’s met Yvonne de Galais at this crazy party. He’s fallen in love with her, but she says to him, “We’re too young, it’s no use.”’
‘Oh yes, all right, darling. Off you go.’
So I began. This bit was near the beginning of Chapitre XVI, Frantz de Galais. The musical box went silent because it needed winding. I read: ‘During all this dreaming of his, the night had fallen and he had not thought about lighting the torches. The wind blew open the door that communicated with his and whose window overlooked the courtyard. Meaulnes was about to close it, when he saw that there was a glow in this room like the light of a candle. He put his head through the half-open door. Someone was there, someone who must have climbed in through the window and was now walking up and down . . .’
As I read on, I could tell Valentina was impressed. My translation skills were definitely improving. There were clumsy constructions, things that didn’t sound as if a proper writer had written them, but I was well into the book, and the further I went, the easier it was becoming.
I was almost at the end of the piece I’d prepared, when we heard footsteps on my stairs. I stopped reading. I hoped the footsteps didn’t belong to Alice. Valentina didn’t move and didn’t look round when my door opened and Alice came into the room. I put my translation notebook and my copy of Le Grand Meaulnes under my bedcover and closed my musical box. Alice stood in the
doorway and said: ‘What’s going on?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
Valentina tried to take charge. ‘Come and sit down with us, Alice,’ she said. ‘We were just talking about my poor country, Mother Russia . . .’
But Alice was furious. ‘Lewis should be asleep,’ she snapped. ‘He’s been looking exhausted.’
‘I’m not sleepy,’ I said.
‘Maybe not, but your light should be out. Whose idea was this?’
‘Alice, Alice,’ said Valentina, still trying to soothe her, ‘Lewis has been alone all day . . .’
‘That was his own choice, Valentina. He must go to sleep now.’
She was wearing a white nightdress Hugh had bought her from Laura Ashley. In the dim light of my room, she looked exactly like an angel in a bad mood.
I knew Valentina would leave then. I wondered whether Grigory was staying in the flat and if she would go down and undress and get into his bed and he would enfold her in his suicidal arms.
She got up. I was afraid that, in front of Alice, she wouldn’t give me her good-night kiss, but she did, and I could smell drink and Russian cigarettes and perfume all mingled in that single touch. Then she went away and Alice-the-Angel began her tirade of anger about my disappearance that morning. ‘If you do that again, Lewis,’ she said, ‘I will send you home.’
When Babba came the next day to clean my room, she found the pillowcase in the wardrobe in two minutes flat.
‘Louis, what you got here?’ she said. ‘You been doing voodoo in your bed?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
She then looked at the sheets and tore them off the bed. ‘I better take these home to wash. You don’t want Madame to see this or hear what they say at the laundry?’
‘Thanks, Babba,’ I said. Then I added: ‘Perhaps I could buy you something in return, a toy, to give to Pozzi . . .’
She looked suddenly sad. ‘Pozzi,’ she said, ‘he’s crying and crying, Louis.’
‘Why? What’s happened?’
‘That man came.’
