Waiting for Monsieur Bellivier

by Britta Rostlund

  The sun had started to set, and it was drizzling nicely outside. Just to be on the safe side, I checked the church gate to see whether it mentioned anything about closing times. Even if no one would miss me, I had no desire to get locked in a cemetery. My ex-husband had our son that weekend. They were going up to Normandy. It was a long time since I had last experienced the kind of freedom I felt as I crossed the cemetery. Maybe I was even a little happy.

  I saw Judith Goldenberg’s grave from a distance. The three peonies were no longer there. Had Monsieur Caro already been released from hospital? I approached the grave and then turned away. One of the benches by the compost heap had been spared from the rain, which was strange considering it wasn’t beneath a tree or anything else that could have stopped the raindrops. As I sat down on the dry bench, I noticed a handkerchief at one end. Someone had wiped it down, and since it was still drizzling, it must have been very recently. Had someone been sitting there when I came into the graveyard?

  The flowers came home with me that evening. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to leave them on Judith’s grave. They were now standing in a chipped crystal vase on the kitchen table. If I’m honest, I hate broken things. Glasses which have cracked, even if it’s barely visible, I throw away. But with this crystal vase, it was different. It was like it had been made to look broken. In my melancholy, I had convinced myself that the flowers could be beautiful on a night like this. That they could be something for me to look at in my loneliness. But it felt more like they were mocking me. They had finally been allowed in. Like a missionary, one minute they had rung the bell and the next they were sitting at the table. Shown in but still not quite welcome. I had even given them a glass of water.

  Eventually, you had to ask the redeemed one to leave the table. I opened the balcony door. The rain would do them good, I convinced myself. Police sirens worked their way into the room. To begin with, I carried the vase outside and closed the doors. But then I changed my mind and swapped the vase for a mug. The vase would probably just blow over, and I wasn’t going to give the flowers the satisfaction of taking the life of such a beautiful object. A mug would be more or less fine. I locked the balcony doors and drew the too-long beige curtains which I needed to shorten, turned on the TV and slumped onto the sofa. I was alone in my apartment at last. My neighbour had let out the cat. I had let out the flowers.

  I poured myself a glass of champagne. Though it was only four in the afternoon, and though I had nothing to celebrate. I had spent the whole day doing ordinary things like washing, ironing and reading the newspaper. With a freshly topped-up champagne glass in front of me, I sat down at my computer to look up all of the Caros in Paris. There were a few. One of them lived not far from the cemetery, but he was listed as being an IT co-ordinator. I had trouble picturing Monsieur Caro in that role.

  Another Monsieur Caro lived in the Jewish Marais district. The fact that I dialled his number was more out of boredom and curiosity than it was concern. I wasn’t responsible for his suicide attempt, it was the flowers’ fault. They had a life of their own. Old people went to bed early, and suicidal old people might go even earlier, so I thought I may as well get it over and done with. As I dialled his number, I tried to think about something else so that I wouldn’t change my mind. I don’t know what I had expected, maybe that the ringing signal would die out in a dark, smoky room, or that a hoarse voice would hiss a ‘Hello’ down the line. Anything but a lively female voice, laughter and music in the background. I hung up. If I had found the right number, that meant Monsieur Caro must be back home and doing well, otherwise you wouldn’t invite people over and play music. Or maybe it meant he was dead, and his nearest and dearest had gathered in his apartment. Maybe his death had come as a liberation for them. But it was probably just the wrong Caro, I told myself, pouring more champagne.

  The phone call hadn’t brought me any closer to the truth, but nor had it taken me further away. I put the bottle of champagne in the fridge and tidied up after the weekend. Not because my son would soon be coming home, but because my ex-husband would likely take the liberty of coming in.

  My son hugged me. He seemed to be glad to be back. My ex-husband went around the apartment turning on all of the lights, as though he didn’t dare leave our son if there was any darkness around me. I sat with my son on my lap at the kitchen table, the man I had spent years with opposite us. My son smelled different. He would smell like mine again soon enough. My ex-husband talked about the hotel, the beach, and said that our son had gone to a disco.

  I looked at the man I had once loved, and all I wanted was for him to leave us in peace. He made my son feel like a stranger. But he continued to talk about how good our son was getting at swimming, how we would have to buy new trunks for him and about how they had shared a double bed at the hotel. He said that last part just to reiterate that they had been alone on their trip. Why ever that was important for him to put out there. He asked how I had been and I said that I’d missed my son, that I’d done the washing and ironing, relaxed and taken it easy. Not that I had been to the cemetery, fought with a bunch of flowers, thought about death, drunk champagne and prank called an old man.

  ‘Do you have La Vache Qui Rit, Monsieur?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The cheese.’

  ‘Aha, I should do.’

  Mancebo scans through the cheeses in his refrigerated section. The two girls wait patiently by the counter. He would guess they were about ten.

  ‘Yes, here we are. One pack?’

  The two girls nod shyly.

  ‘Do you know the fun thing about the packaging?’

  The girls look at one another and then shake their heads. Mancebo is in a great mood this morning. He half sang all the way to Rungis, and the traffic flowed smoothly. Having two sweet girls in knee-length dresses asking to buy cheese as his first customers of the day just puts him in an even better mood.

  Mancebo immediately thought of his daughter, Nadia, when he saw the two girls approaching the shop. Hadn’t she worn a similar dress when she was younger? I need to call her, Mancebo thinks, maybe tonight, if I have the energy and if she’s home. London’s nightlife usually tempted her out several times a week. That worries Fatima. Mancebo doesn’t know why.

  ‘If you look closely at the cow’s earrings, you can see the entire picture in them.’

  Mancebo isn’t sure they understand.

  ‘The cow’s earrings have a picture of the entire packet on them, the one you’re holding in your hand.’

  Even now, he isn’t convinced they follow. They look at the cow on the packet and then at one another. One of the girls bites her lip. The other places the right change onto the counter.

  ‘We’re having a picnic today, but we didn’t have anything to put in the sandwiches.’

  ‘Aha, I see.’

  Mancebo puts the cheese into a white plastic bag, but he stops before he hands it over to them. He looks at the girls, and without knowing where the idea has come from, he grabs one of the Chinese notebooks and drops it into the bag.

  ‘Here’s a little present, too. No, two,’ he says, adding another one.

  The girls’ faces light up, one of them even curtsies, and Mancebo blushes. They run out of the shop, and he watches as they stop outside the patisserie to look into the bag. Mancebo smiles, he feels proud. What does he need sixty-nine notebooks for? If they can make someone happy, why not?

  Someone else who is cheery today is Tariq, who comes charging into the shop. This time, he doesn’t startle Mancebo.

  ‘Morning, brother. Everything OK?’

  ‘All fine,’ Mancebo says.

  ‘Yeah, couldn’t be otherwise. Richer, and a relatively cool morning.’

  ‘Yes, but I heard the weather forecast before …’

  ‘No, stop, I don’t want to hear it. Don’t ruin my good mood. But you know what, if it gets warmer, do you know what your cousin’s going to do? Get some air conditioning. And not a day too late. Yes, brother! W
e can sleep over in the cobbler’s,’ Tariq says, heading off to his abode, his territory.

  Something is happening over on the other side of the boulevard. Mancebo pushes back his coat sleeve, glances at his watch and gets up. He grabs the window-cleaning fluid and an old rag, and calmly goes out onto the pavement. This is what he has learnt, to behave sensibly, to act ice-cold, even if, deep down, he wants to rush around so that he doesn’t miss a thing. The writer locks the front door and then pauses, not for long, just a few seconds, maybe not even that, but long enough for Mancebo to detect a slight hesitation, a reluctance to leave the apartment. Maybe I’m wrong, Mancebo thinks, since he can’t quite explain what gives him that feeling. But suddenly, the writer jogs down the stairs as breezily as usual, maybe even more so. It’s almost as if he’s compensating for the pause he took at the top of the stairs by picking up the pace on his way down. But when he reaches the pavement, his hesitation is back. He slows down, as though he would otherwise be too early to a meeting and therefore wants to cut the pace.

  Mancebo forces himself to turn his back on the action. To his joy, he can still see the outline of the writer reflected in the shop window. Mancebo sprays some cleaner onto the pane of glass and starts rubbing it with the old rag. The writer pauses with his face turned to the cobbler’s shop. Maybe he’s reading the sign for the opening hours. A lorry stops right in front of the shop, and Mancebo’s heart starts beating more quickly. A traffic jam will stop him from being able to do his job. He glances around in desperation. If he wants to see anything, he’ll have to move away from the shop, go maybe twenty metres or so. He doesn’t dare.

  If the writer spots me, it’ll be obvious that I’m spying on him, Mancebo thinks, scratching his head and studying the traffic further down the boulevard. He can’t see an accident, but the traffic is at a complete standstill. It might take time to clear, and time isn’t something he has to spare right now. He has no choice. Mancebo peers around and then squats down. It’s not enough. He gets down onto all fours and tries to spot the writer’s feet beneath the lorry. He can see shoes of all colours, a lot of flip-flops, moving like a shoal of bright fish on the other side of the road. But in the middle, like two brown rocks, one pair of feet is standing still. The lorry starts to move. Mancebo is brushing himself off as the writer steps into the cobbler’s shop. He rushes inside to grab the binoculars and gets himself into his safe position behind the till. Two girls come into the shop and peer at Mancebo, who is squashed in behind the counter.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, unable to hide his disappointment at having customers.

  ‘Hi,’ the girls say in unison.

  The taller of the two gives the other a shove.

  ‘Do you have any notebooks for us, Monsieur?’

  At first, Mancebo doesn’t understand, and his eyes flit between the girls and the cobbler’s shop. Then the penny drops.

  ‘They’re just for people who buy something,’ he hisses, but he immediately regrets his ill-tempered outburst.

  That was stupid. It would have been easier just to give them each a notebook. Now their visit is being drawn out. The girls seem disappointed, but they head deeper into the shop just as the writer comes out of the cobbler’s with a box beneath his arm. He climbs the stairs to his apartment, unlocks the door and drops the box inside, then quickly heads back down again.

  Mancebo never normally turns his back on his customers, and he is convinced that the girls have their pockets full of sweets. Though not so long ago he read an article which claimed it was pensioners who did the most shoplifting. He doesn’t know whether to believe it or not. A bottle of Coca-Cola has appeared on the counter, and next to it the correct change. Two sweetly fascinating girls are waiting for a present.

  ‘Aha, are you going on a trip?’

  Mancebo feels guilty about his behaviour. It isn’t their fault that they came in at the exact moment the writer decided to visit the cobbler’s. They run off happily with their drink and two notebooks.

  One child after another comes into the shop that afternoon. Business is brisk, and Mancebo hands out lots of notebooks. The children mostly buy soft drinks and sweets, but he also sells the occasional packet of biscuits. Mancebo doesn’t have time to document the day.

  After he brings in the fruit and vegetable stands for the evening, and after Tariq rushes through the shop up to his apartment, Mancebo sits down behind the counter, takes off his watch and pulls out his notebook. It takes him a few minutes to jot down everything that happened during the course of the day. He is careful to be objective and wonders whether he should mention the moment of hesitation he thought he saw. After writing and rubbing out his words a number of times, Mancebo eventually decides to add his observation to the report. You never know what might be of interest, and if it isn’t, then it won’t do any harm, he thinks. Before he shuts up shop for the day, Mancebo counts how many notebooks he has left. Fifty-three.

  That evening after dinner, once Mancebo has smoked his one and only cigarette of the day, Nadia calls. She knows that they always eat in the apartment below. It’s Amir who picks up the phone, because Fatima tells him to. They exchange a few words. A handful of brief remarks about the weather, the family’s health, how the shop is doing. Then there’s silence. At both ends. There are fifteen years between the two siblings; they barely even grew up together, considering Nadia was in such a rush to leave her family home and Paris. After a few trips to London, she decided to put down roots there. ‘London is more international,’ she liked to say in defence of her decision to live in a different country to her parents. Amir had been six when she left.

  Three years ago, Mancebo and Fatima had gone to visit their only daughter. They took the train under the sea and, just two hours later, arrived in the country where they drive on the wrong side of the road. That was Mancebo’s first thought. The second was that Nadia was right. London was, in many ways, more international than Paris. Mancebo had liked the place.

  After his brief conversation, Amir hands the receiver to Fatima. If he hadn’t, she probably would have snatched it from him anyway.

  ‘My child!’

  They exchange more words than Nadia and her brother had. The conversation is mostly about Nadia’s new job. She has found herself a position as a town planner in the county just outside of London where they live. A good, well-paid job. Fatima is proud. Their conversation is coming to a close, Mancebo can hear it in Fatima’s voice. She’s getting breathless, as though she had been running. Adèle yawns and raises her hand to show that she says hello.

  ‘Wait! I want to talk to her.’

  Fatima’s heavily made-up eyes stare at her husband in surprise. It’s the first time he has asked to talk to his daughter over the phone. They’ve occasionally exchanged a few words, if he happened to pick up when she called, but that’s all. Mancebo gets the information he needs through Fatima. She hands him the receiver and everyone falls silent to hear what Mancebo has to say. Even Adèle seems to perk up to follow the approaching conversation.

  ‘My daughter!’ Mancebo starts, but those words don’t feel like his. In his uncertainty, he is making use of Fatima’s vocabulary.

  ‘Hi, Dad.’

  Mancebo doesn’t quite know what he wants to say. In truth, he doesn’t have anything particular to talk about. But he had been thinking about calling her today, and then she rang. Funny coincidence, he thinks, considering she doesn’t ring very often, just a few times a month.

  ‘Is everything OK, Dad?’

  She sounds worried. Maybe she suspects something is wrong, given that her father wants to talk to her.

  ‘All fine, better than usual actually.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. Was there anything particular?’

  For the first time since the day Madame Cat set foot in his shop, Mancebo has to struggle not to tell everything. The words are on the tip of his tongue, demanding to stretch their wings and make a break for freedom. Of course he has something special to say. It’s thanks to his new
job that he feels better than he has in a long time. Mancebo doesn’t know why he has such an urge to tell Nadia everything, but not the others. Maybe it’s because she lives so far away, which provides a certain security. Nadia is quicker than Mancebo at leading a phone call. Something she inherited from her mother.

  ‘Have you won the lotto too?’

  Nadia laughs. Mancebo hadn’t thought she knew about that, and her words come as a surprise, a shock even.

  ‘Aha, so you know about that?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. Mum called after work yesterday, right after Adèle checked the ticket.’

  ‘Aha,’ Mancebo says.

  ‘It’s good to hear you’re doing well. And the shop?’

  Mancebo wants to hang up. Something else is weighing on his mind right now, he just isn’t quite sure what.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s going.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Is it warm in London too?’

  Mancebo tries to round things off. Eventually, he hangs up and heads into the bathroom, mostly so that he can have a few minutes to himself before the tea and biscuits. He needs to work out what it was about his call with Nadia which ruined his good mood. Emptying his bladder, splashing a little water onto his face and sitting on the edge of the bath for a few minutes is enough. The revelation that Fatima talks to Nadia without his knowledge is proof that the world might not be quite as he imagined.

  He has always taken it for granted that Fatima told him every time she spoke to Nadia, but clearly that isn’t the case. That, in turn, suggests that there are probably other things that Fatima doesn’t necessarily lie about, but which he never hears of because no one ever tells him. Like the fact that she goes out and about in the mornings when he’s in Rungis, and that she visits the tobacconist.

  Mancebo looks down at the cracked bar of soap in his hand. Is it cracked because no one uses it? Though if no one uses it, it must still come into contact with water on the edge of the bath? In which case, how can it be so dry that it’s cracked? Adèle and Tariq shower, don’t they? He thinks about that for a while, and then scratches his head. These questions about the soap are manageable, and that makes him feel a little better.