by Victor Serge
“Yes … What is it?”
“If you please, Madame … You’re wanted on the phone.”
The hoops of danger tighten without warning and you can’t breathe.
“Tell them I’m not here … I’ve gone out, I’ll be back late.”
“Yes Madame, very good Madame.”
But it was bad, very bad … Apprehension made short work of sadness. Nadine slipped on new clothes she had hardly worn, so that she’d be harder to recognize in the street. A green velvet toque pinned to her curls, she applied lipstick almost without checking in the mirror, straining to hear. The room was becoming more oppressive than a prison cell. At the far end of the corridor, the telephone whirred again. Nadine heard the chambermaid say, “Madame’s not back yet, Monsieur, no, not before midnight …” The word “Monsieur” stood out in black, buzzing letters. Who was it? Who could be calling? If Sacha, then he must have a serious reason. The other man didn’t know this number … A message from Sylvia? Has the hunt begun? The animal urge to flee coursed through her limbs like a torrent. She caught sight of herself in the mirror, her broad face narrowed into hard lines, a face warped by the magnet of escape. She rang for the maid.
“The gentleman has phoned four times, but I just told him the same thing, Madame, like you told me to.”
A good-looking girl from the Midi, the maid, with a hypocritically modest gaze. Wasn’t she peering a trifle too intently from under those long straight lashes? Servants are there to be bribed, it’s the ABC of the art! Nadine smiled crookedly. Say something natural, aggressive, to break the silence of the telephone and divert the girl’s attention … Nadine thought she was talking vulgarly, but really her voice sounded deranged.
“Have you had lovers, Céline? No? Well, you will. You’ll find out all about it. He’s my lover and I’m leaving him, do you understand? I have my reasons.”
“Yes, Madame.”
“I’m going away on a trip.”
“Ooh yes, Madame, it must be painful, Madame.”
Nadine opened her bag and pressed a banknote into the maid’s hand.
“And not a word. It’s nobody’s business but my own.”
“I’m sure it isn’t, Madame.”
Air, air, I don’t know what I’m doing anymore. The elevator. You never know how far down you’re going. Alone in the dark trench of the hall it all vanished: the room, the smoldering papers, the telephone, Céline, their hallucinatory exchange. Nadine stepped to one side and paused to appraise the street. Opposite the doorway, a flower vendor — chrysanthemums — was lowering her basket to the ground. A bus went by, then a couple, a very young couple talking fast and, it seemed, heatedly. The sidewalks were wet, glistening with swiftly alternating reflections of yellow and red from a neon sign. The street was calling: dive in and lose yourself.
Nadine walked quickly, with determination, wary of hailing a taxi straightaway. She needed to check the lay of the land. She stopped before the window of a shoe store: in the glass she could see behind her without turning around. Nobody, apparently, but Paris streets are so crowded at nine in the evening … Vaguely reassured all the same, Nadine turned the corner. Someone turned and faced her so quickly that she nearly bumped into the fellow. “Excuse me … Oh! You? Alain!”
As he took her arm his fingers squeezed her wrist, hard. His hand was hot.
“Well, what a piece of luck!” the voice sounded false to her. “What a coincidence! Are you in a hurry?”
He wanted to sound tender, but something held him back. Too frank — he couldn’t manage one of those intimate phrases that sounded so clear from his lips. Nadine was thinking: think quickly, act innocent, it’s logically impossible that he already knows. He’s not in touch with Sylvia, but he is with Mougin, with B, with R. Neither B nor R will find out for a while, and they may even be kept in the dark altogether, so as not to terrify the one or demoralize the other. The telephone was still ringing in her ears. She’d just said, “It’s my lover,” in an echo of her secret obsession. Now she said, “You called me?”
And as he was answering, “No, I don’t have your number,” she knew he was lying. So he knows. So, concealed not far from my door, he’s been watching. Probably with someone else who filled in while he dialed from the bar. The strong hand clamped to her wrist was upsetting Nadine who wished she hadn’t blundered into the first side street, with scarcely a light along it, even fewer passersby, and at the end a dark square lined along one side by the decrepit railings of a private mansion that looked abandoned. The hiss of tires made her turn. A black car came up behind them, sliding closer.
“Let’s cross,” Nadine said. “And let go of me. It makes me nervous. You know we mustn’t meet in the street, it’s against the rules.”
She felt better when he let go of her wrist. Two women and a man were walking toward them. Alain made no objection to crossing the street: since it was a two-way street, the black car could not hug the curb along the other sidewalk. The fear in Nadine’s body and soul redoubled: the dark presence of the car triggered her reflexes, the muscles think faster than the brain. Long ago, at the age of thirteen, Nadine had fought among partisans defending the ford across a river, fully aware that if the horse-men on the other bank were to pass over, death and torture would pass over with them. The great scythe, flagellation. Nadine knew in those far-off days that if captured she would be raped, flogged, possibly strung up. She had seen women and children her own age dangling from the trees in their undershirts with glistening, dirty flesh, offering swollen tongues and weirdly purpled breasts to the flies. Prone near the water’s edge, shielded by a screen of rushes, her belly pressed against the damp grass, the child Nadine took careful aim at a tall silhouette emerging from the facing bank — a centaur — and when it fell apart like a broken toy, the man tumbling off while the startled horse reared up in the shallows, the child Nadine joyfully cursed the defeated enemy. “You won’t be the one to pass over me, you horned devil!” Such schools build strength for the future. She had a jewel of a Browning in her handbag. She casually undid the clasp with the tips of her fingers. (If he notices, too bad!) The appetizing display of a dairy shop shone brightly on the sidewalk. Nadine halted at the edge of that light. The black car overtook them. Past the dairy, a dim bistro belched out loud voices. A ragged chorus in the back room joined in the song’s refrain — idiotic but loaded with jollity thick as a heavy wine:
One little lady in white,
In white!
In white!
Oh, oh, oh! Ah, ah, ah!
“Somebody’s having a good time,” Alain murmured, with a sad little snicker.
Nadine felt utterly remote from him, as though he’d never held her in his arms. The enemy. She was forced to playact, to cloak the hardness in her voice.
“Listen my young friend, you’re not behaving seriously! It’s not safe. You know we’ll see each other tomorrow!”
“And you know we won’t, not tomorrow, not ever. Your husband is a traitor.”
The rest of their brief exchange was as hackneyed as the lines of a bad play. “Are you crazy? What are you talking about!” “He confessed it to me himself, this morning.” “You’re crazy. It’s impossible, I don’t believe you.” “Ah, so you don’t believe me, you don’t believe me … Have you seen him?” “No.” This lie revived Nadine’s sincerity. “No? Then you don’t know yet! Listen, Nadine, listen darling, my head is spinning, I can hardly believe it myself, it’s as if the earth and the sky were both quaking at once. Him of all people! If only this were a comedy of errors! I went straight to Mougin, and he knew already. Your husband is a traitor. You can’t possibly go with him.” The refrain about the little lady in white, in white, in white submerged the young man’s unhappy voice. “I shouldn’t suffer on his account,” thought Nadine. “He really is a big kid who knows nothing, understands nothing, doesn’t have an inkling …” To place her hands on Alain’s temples, to plant kisses on Alain’s eyelids, to say, “My poor love, it’s too terrible
, calm down, don’t judge so fast. Sacha will never become a traitor, he’s suffering worse than you, worse than the dead, his conscience is screaming … And that’s his only crime.” She looks at him with moist eyes.
“Beautiful Alain …”
But she also registers that the black car has come to a halt fifteen steps away. That no one is getting out, that fortunately there are people around and farther off even a policeman, his short cape hanging in stony folds. She pulls herself briskly together, as though to transmit a message learned by heart, and Alain is familiar with that gesture of hers since they used to work together.
“I don’t believe you, Alain. You’re telling me an incomprehensible story. I’m going to find out about these … these idiotic rumors. Someone may be plotting against Sacha … We’ll meet tomorrow. Now go away and simmer down.”
Alain, too, looks at the black car for a long moment (though in truth, none of this occurs in a measurable time); he turns his head, sees the police officer, maybe estimating the numbers of passersby, some of whom may be waiting for an agreed-upon signal. The bistro door swings open to disgorge a clutch of raucous couples, still flush with partying. A man’s hand cups a heavy female breast swathed in silk the color of wine lees. “In white, in white, in white, a li’l laaa-dy!” Nadine seizes the moment, and almost shouts: “Go away!”
Turning on her heel, she marches off as fast as she can without breaking into a run. Rapid footsteps multiply behind her, she hears the click of stilettos on the paving stones, gropes in her bag for the tiny Browning, not much, better than nothing, at least make a noise … It’s only one of the party couples. They stagger against the wall, the man’s mouth glued to the woman’s neck. Flat pasty faces surge forward under a streetlight, bearing down on Nadine. No question about this bunch! The Browning keeps them at bay. Nadine hovers for a fraction of a second, opposite the policeman. Here they won’t dare. The flat faces waver. A laugh of deliverance rises in her throat, just like long ago when the singing bullet toppled the rider at the ford into the green waters of the Ural river. A stone falls into this stifled laughter as into a black puddle. What if the policeman were a fake? Easy enough to arrange. He has the florid, affable face of a wine lover, but what does that prove?
This street is a bit brighter, livelier. A bus is pulling away. Nadine leaps onto the back step, hampered by her carrying case and her bag, and loses her balance as she fumbles to unhook the chain. Someone grabs her elbow, heaves her up, makes room for her. “Easy, Mademoiselle, you could spoil your looks that way … It would be a pity, you know!” The gentleman’s chivalrous smile fades as he sees that it’s not a little black purse she’s holding in her hand but a little jewel of a revolver and notices wildness in her hard blue eyes. Confidentially he whispers, “I’d put that toy back in my purse if I were you.” Nadine, her bag snapped shut, bursts out laughing. “My word! You love him that much, Mademoiselle, and he’s a bad lot?” She sees a plump clean-shaven chin, a pair of soft, brown, cynical eyes, a gold-striped tie. “No,” she rejoins in a truly detached voice, “still women can be such fools! It’s over.” The bus irrupts into the vivid lights of the Place du Havre.
* * *
At the hotel in the rue de Rochechouart, Nadine introduced herself to the porter with aplomb. “Madame Noémi Battisti.” The porter was busy with clients, but he inspected her obliquely, with a disagreeably lackluster stare. “Room 17, fourth floor to the left, take the elevator, Madame.” Nadine affected the same indifference, but her cagey, alert glance had a furtive charm. “Of all the lying little hussies with knobs on,” the porter crooned to himself, “this takes the cake or my name’s not Gobfin. Monsieur Battisti sports a fine pair of horns!”
Sacha kept the door locked. He opened it for her.
“Why do we have to stay in this flophouse, Sacha? The porter looks like a tubercular stool pigeon, which he certainly is, or a part-time pimp — which he probably is.”
Sacha laughed and took Nadine into his arms, without energy.
“The world is full of small-time scoundrels, why not enjoy them? It’s reasonably clean and it’s cheap. And the area is crowded with people every night. If they’re after me, they’ll probably start looking on the Left Bank or around the Étoile.”
The symmetry of Nadine’s features blurred, as though he was seeing her through running water. “I don’t care what you say, that fellow gives me the creeps … And the women, tittering behind every door. A sordid house full of sordid affairs …”
“Women’s affairs,” he shrugged.
Nadine turned away from him and lobbed her bag onto one of the twin beds, so awkwardly that it fell open and the Browning slid onto the yellow counterpane. As he moved to put it back, Sacha was struck by the fingerprints smudging the blue steel. “So you were playing with that, were you? Anything happen?”
“I was scared. Well, not really scared, but now I am. And the face of that pimp undertaker downstairs, and those threadbare carpets in the corridor …”
“Pimp I grant you,” said Sacha, straight-faced, “but undertaker, now, let’s not exaggerate …”
Nadine rubbed her hands over her face forcefully to wipe away the sensation of the black street, the black car, the dangerous enemy faces floating up at her. Her eyes reemerged, wider, ominously blue.
“They were singing: One little lady in pink, in pink, no, in white, in white … I thought it was all over … For me, anyway …”
She finished more quietly: “ … and that I’d never see you again … Phew, I feel better …”
The matching lamps on the bedside tables glowed a seedy intimacy surrounded by hostile shadows. Sacha turned on the ceiling fixture: three anemic bulbs nestled in pink glass tulip shades. The room filled not so much with light as with a pinkish-yellow haze. Nadine sat on one of the beds, her head turned away. He saw an artery flutter along her neck and her hair tremble. He could see her from the back too in the mirror, the droop of the shoulders, one arm twisted back, one hand laid flat on the bedspread … He read fear in that neck, those shoulders, that arm, that hand, something worse than fear for all he knew. Overcoming his unfocused anger, he tried to sound as positive as possible. “Come on now, Nadine, we have nothing to be afraid of right now … Did you run into anyone?” (Suspicion, within him.) “Come, you and I, we’re old friends, you can tell me anything …”
“I want us to change hotels, I insist we change. Is it too late tonight?”
“Were you followed?”
“No.”
“I promise we’ll do whatever you want — but tomorrow. Why can’t you trust me? When have you ever known me to be reckless?”
What must be feared above all, in the struggle, is panic. Our nerves preserve the imprints of animal fears, of human fears, accumulated over millions of years. A moment comes when they disobey our will. We no longer know what we are.
“Have you had supper, Nadine? I’ll order something from room service.”
“No. Who could care about supper?”
D went to check the door; an old household lock, a small inside bolt, the flimsy wood would give way at the first shove … “And you expect us to sleep here?” asked Nadine as if she couldn’t believe it. “Could you sleep here?” “Why not?” He drew her to the window and opened it. The empty street below was punctuated by the halos of streetlights; higher up, a vast glow suffused the misty sky, iridescent with flickering light. Nadine leaned out into space with a pleasurable feeling. D upbraided himself: you don’t open a window at night without turning the lights off first. Now he did. Fifty feet down, shadowy doorways provided excellent observation posts. The beige carapace of a car crawled by, a puddle of grayish light marked the entrance to the hotel. D put his arm around Nadine’s waist. “I had a fright,” she said. “I was silly. Look down there. We could fall, and it would all be over in few seconds …”
“Where do you get these notions, Nadine? It isn’t like you. We battle on, we persevere, you know we’re right. Besides, it wouldn’t be over
in anything like a few seconds. Just imagine the ambulance, the hospital, the blood transfusions, the injections, the inquest, the hairline crack in your spine that leaves you paralyzed for life … That was a really idiotic thing to say.”
“I know. It’s hard to end it. Give me a cigarette … You’re always so sensible.”
She was calmer now, as though returning to reality.
“I met Alain. Mougin knows. They’re looking.”
She related the encounter in detail. (Alain, Alain, he felt wounded by the name. Who? Alain? Impossible, surely, but why impossible? We are free agents. He sniggered: Now pay the price …)
“We’ve lost a few days’ head start, that’s all …” concluded D, his voice steady. “I’ve sown some clues to make them think we’re going to London.”
“They won’t believe anything you want to make them believe!”
Fair enough.
“Close the window, I’m cold,” said Nadine.
Worries thickened inside him: dark waters overflowing their banks. With the two little bedside lamps back on, the room felt more congenial. And there was something appealing about the maid who brought in their tray of consommé, cold chicken, and weak tea. “You’re Italian, aren’t you?” Nadine asked with friendly interest. “Yes, Madame. You can see it, no?” “We’re from Piedmont,” said Madame Noémi Battisti, seriously. “Don’t overdo the Piedmonts, what with our garbled Italian,” D teased later. “Remember Sorrento?”
“I do,” said Nadine, and she looked at him with her beautiful eyes full of wonderment.
“We’re starting a different life, Nadine.”
(More accurately he might have said: We are ending one whole life.)
“Are you happy with the name I found you — Noémi? A primitive woman’s name. I can see you bathing, as in Sorrento … It will happen.”