by Jo Baker
In the morning, she slips out of his bed and into her clothes and out into the streets, threading through the bin men and the delivery boys and the market traders, back towards her own apartment and out of his way. There is a gauze of mist lying in the air and Paris is new again, and beautiful, after years of going almost unnoticed.
He has his work and it is important: she must not get under his feet. She has her own work to go to anyway, those fruitless hours with plump children in the bourgeois quartiers, plonking away on pianos that are far too good for them and of which she finds herself feeling jealous. She keeps her quiet hours alone in her own apartment too—she is finishing a new jacket, with little bone buttons, in anticipation of the colder weather to come. She goes to the market and she goes to the library; she takes herself off to see her friends. She keeps busy. She measures out her company carefully. A drop here, a drop there. She won’t make a nuisance of herself.
Whenever she goes to see him, she brings small comforts with her. A pastry to share, a bar of chocolate, some small item of needlework to soften the edges of his austerity. In the little kitchenette, there is usually only coffee and dust. She wants to make him comfortable. More comfortable than he can make himself.
The pale and wounded Irish man, his chest in bandages, strapped down by hospital sheets. She has been trying to make him comfortable ever since.
—
Nothing happens.
Late September days soften and cool and Paris is still lovely. The children walk in crocodiles in the street; confined for the day, their voices hang round school buildings in a haze: passers-by walk through clouds of rhyme and times tables, into billows of song.
There is a radio in the apartment next door; at the weekend, the thumping left-hand rhythm of popular songs, waves of laughter, jazz leak through the wall. The neighbour’s baby cries.
Someone comes to wrap the street lamps in blue paper; at night the cars go by half blinded with blackout strips. The rue de Vaugirard becomes a deep-blue river. It washes past his own backwater, the rue des Favorites. He closes the shutters, draws the blinds and lights a lamp, and pours just a drop of Jameson’s for himself, because it must be made to last. He settles into a book, or into his work, into the translation of Murphy into French.
Suzanne comes and goes. She twists her treacle-coloured hair back and stabs it with pins and throws him a brilliant smile. He’s always startled by that smile, as though a ball has dropped out of clear air and landed smack into his palm. The thing is, of course, to lob it back into play, but he’s often a fraction too late; she’s tidying away the newspapers, she’s heading to the kitchen, plumping up a cushion, she’s half gone already. But he knows she’s wanting something. It’s as though there is a cat around his ankles, silky and twining, but making him anticipate a stumble, expecting to do inadvertent harm.
He tries for her. He sets coffee warming on the gas ring, spreads rillettes on bread, fishes cornichons from the jar.
They eat in bed, their feet slipping together. She brushes shards of crust from the sheet. Her limbs are brown from the summer, her breasts and belly white where her swimming suit covered her; before he came to France he’d never seen a body patched like this, in a slow sepia exposure. Running a hand along her back, from tan to white to tan again, he feels grateful. She lifts her cup and sips her coffee. He turns away to hide his face. No point pinning this with words. Let it flutter by.
—
She goes with him to the Irish Legation, because his status here must be sorted out once and for all. And if you want to get something done, she says, ask a busy woman. She walks with him to the Place Vendôme through the drifting plane leaves, and she takes his arm. They pass the Opéra. It has gone dark. The building is shut up and locked tight, the windows shuttered, the gates wrapped in chains.
“Oh,” he says.
“We’ll go back,” she says, pulling him close, “when they reopen.”
“You think they’ll reopen?”
“Of course they will,” she says. “Eventually.”
Inside, the Legation is all polished wood and marble and dust-motes drifting in shafts of autumn sun. They join the back of a stationary queue. The Irish voices here, the conversations, tangle the air and make him breathless. He keeps his mouth shut, eyes down, to avoid the inevitable small-country connections, the friends of friends and cousins of cousins that there inevitably are in such places.
“I’m sorry, I—but you wish to remain?”
The clerk is a bluish-pale boy he has not dealt with before.
“Yes.”
“The two of you. Mr. and Mrs…”
“No.”
“But. Well.”
He watches the clerk’s expression, the questions that are not being asked. Why stay? What good will it do you staying here?
“We are processing exit permits right now…” The clerk looks at him a moment longer, then frowns down at the passport, picks through the pages; he purses his lips, peers up again. “Just let me, um.” He gets up unevenly from his desk, shuffles some documents together, tucks the passport in alongside them. “I won’t be a moment…”
And they’re left standing there at the desk together, in the light from high windows, with the smell of beeswax and tobacco smoke and with a parched, half-curled plane leaf at his foot that has tumbled in along with them. Her mouth twists up with impatience.
After a while, the clerk returns and hands the passport back. “He says you’ll need a certificate confirming your profession. That, along with your passport, should be sufficient for you to be granted leave to remain in Paris. Under the current dispensation.”
“How does he get one of these certificates?” Suzanne asks in her brittle English.
“By applying to us.”
She opens her lips. The clerk forestalls her: “We need a formal letter of application. With references.”
“How long will it take to process once you have the letter?”
“I can’t say. We have a good deal on our plates here at the moment.”
He nods, pockets his passport. “Right,” he says. Then, “Thank you.”
They turn away, and Suzanne tuts and shakes her head.
—
Outside, the wind blundering around the Place Vendôme has a new chill to it. He offers Suzanne his arm and she takes it, and they walk along, huddled together against the cold.
“When we get back, you must write to your publisher. They will send references. They will say what you are.”
“I shall,” he says, though he does not feel the confidence that this suggests.
“And then you will be in good standing here at last.”
He nods. “I hope.”
The words, in French, do not sound quite so unlikely, so uncomfortable. J’espère.
In the Tuileries Gardens, fallen leaves bundle across the gravel. The dust, as they walk, whitens their shoes.
—
He writes his letter of application; he writes with some discomfort to London to request a brief reference from Mr. Read at Routledge. He stamps the envelope and sends it. It seems dreadfully importune of him. As though he is asking the man to take part in a deception on his behalf.
But nothing happens.
Or rather, things keep on happening, but to other people. Nothing happens to him.
When he heads out for morning bread, there’s a green van standing by the kerb on the rue des Favorites. It’s the type of vehicle that the locals call a panier à salade. You get packed in, shaken up and spun round in them. They are police vans.
His shoulders stiffen. He does not have his papers yet.
But it’s next door. He sees the porte cochère shoved open and a flic stepping over the sill on to the pavement, and a young man stumbling after, his dark hair rumpled and his shirt misbuttoned, straight from bed. A second policeman comes after them. People stop, stand back, so as not to become entangled. He finds himself amongst the bystanders, watching, without ever having meant to watch.
The young man gets into the back of the vehicle, looking baffled and angry; the door is shut on him; the officers get in too, one in the back, one in the front, and the van rumbles away over the cobbles, and that is that.
“Who was it?” a woman asks near by.
“Foreigner.”
“What has he done?”
“Don’t know.”
“Where will they take him?”
Another woman leans past him to answer; he smells her breath. “The Préfecture, the Santé, maybe.”
“Seems a shame, doesn’t it?”
“It’s what they’d get up to, left to themselves, isn’t that it?”
He keeps his own mouth shut. And he does nothing. It all seems at one remove from him, untouchable: someone has been lifted clean out of the everyday. And from that moment on, these people become ubiquitous, unmissable: the shabby-smart, the hounded, the dispossessed. When overheard, their accents vary, but there is a definite type: educated, thoughtful, softly spoken, terrified. They are the jetsam of half a dozen different nations; they’re fragile and exhausted. They’ve been washed up here by the floods at home.
Sometimes, like bus drivers raising a hand to each other in passing, he sees the moments when they notice each other: there is an uneasy snag and tear of the gaze, an urge for companionship, but an undertow of fear. Who would want to be associated with, who would want to belong to this community of un-belonging?
—
The autumn is gentle at the start, and things go on as normal, more or less. He tries to work, to make it matter that he be here. He plays a bit of tennis with Alfred Péron; they meet at cafés or the Pérons’ apartment to work on his translation. Mania greets him warmly and does not seem to mind Alfy wasting all this time on his Irish friend. Alfy has become a trusted companion in futility. They inchworm through the text of Murphy, sipping coffee or wine, smoke spooling round them, deep in the problem of turning his own particular English into his own particular French. There is about as much point to this as there is to the completion of a crossword puzzle: there is from time to time the pleasing shift and click of a problem solved, but that’s the sum of it. Once they’re done, all they’ll have achieved, he suspects, is a book that, having gone unread in English, can now go equally unread in French.
The heating still functions; there’s still hot water when he turns the tap and scrapes a razor; in the day the lift still churns up and down; there’s still the sound of the neighbours’ wireless set coming through the wall, tuned to Le Poste Parisien, and now and again that baby cries. He’d like to see Joyce, go out drinking with him, lose himself in the wash of booze and talk, but the Joyces are all out of town, and then they’re back again, and then they are away, and though a message is left it has not yet been returned, and it’s impossible to keep track of them.
“The sheets need washing,” Suzanne says.
“I know.”
“They’re starting to smell.”
“I know.”
“They feel greasy to me.”
“Yes.”
“Do you think the line will hold?”
Her thigh over his thigh, her hand on his chest, his scar underneath her thumb a purplish, ragged line: this damaged man is also the boy she recalls in tennis whites, starfished for a ball. The space between those moments sometimes seems just a tick, a tock. Sometimes it seems vast.
“What?” he asks, but he had heard her.
“Do you think the line will hold?” she asks again.
He rolls away and fumbles for a cigarette. He had been thinking, by association with the sheets, washing line, seen linen billow and snap. But she means Maginot. “I have no idea.”
“They put too much faith in it,” she says. “I think.”
“I daresay.”
“The generals go on as though it’s the answer to everything. For them it’s the last war all over again. But it’s not the same war, is it? So that damned line is not the answer.”
He lights up the cigarette, draws on it, then offers it to her. “It might be the same war. More or less.”
“Times have changed,” she says. “Things have moved on, haven’t they? The world goes faster now. The war will too.”
He watches as she takes a sip of smoke. Her lips, with the dip of a seagull in flight.
Over a cloud of outbreath, she says, “They’ll go round, won’t they? Load up in their Volkswagens and just motor on through.” A pause. “Perhaps you should have stayed in Ireland.”
He blinks at her, then rolls his head away and looks up at the ceiling, where a cobweb trails in the draught. He is not necessary here, though here is necessary to him. “Do you think so?”
“It won’t go on like this for ever, nothing happening. It won’t last. The drôle de guerre. It’ll stop being funny soon enough.”
“It’s not really funny now.”
“The Legation would help you if you were to leave.”
Mr. and Mrs., the clerk had said.
“I can hardly breathe back there in Ireland. I certainly can’t write.”
“Well then.” Eyebrows up, lips pursed. “You must stay, whatever comes.”
He takes the cigarette back and smokes it.
She sits up, swings her legs out of the bed. “If I strip the bedclothes,” she says, “would you take the sheets down to the pressing?”
—
Two streets away from the apartment, on the Place Falguière, one of those strays asks him politely for the time; he stops, consults his watch, tips it towards the other fellow, who nods. He also offers a cigarette. Eager thanks; a match is struck; he offers out the flame: the old man dips his head towards it.
To the rusty crown of a once-black bowler hat, he says, “You’re not from round here, are you?”
The old man looks up at him from under the brim, made wary. “What makes you say that?”
“Your accent.”
“You’ve got quite an accent there yourself.”
“It’s not me that worries me.”
The old fellow grins, reveals quite the worst teeth he’s ever seen. “Maybe it should be, my friend.” A phlegmy sound, which might be a chuckle. “We’re all dangerous, we’re all contaminated. We’re all sales métèques as far as they’re concerned. And if they lock you up now, when those Nazi lads get here you’re dinner. Kaput.”
He baulks at the hard words, casually used: dirty foreigners. “I’ll have my papers soon.” His own voice sounds confident.
The old man lets smoke go, touches a thread of tobacco from his pale tongue, wistful. “I had papers once.”
“You don’t any more?”
The old fellow shakes his head. “All obsolete; all gone.”
“Can you get new ones?”
“There’s nobody left to grant me them. I have no country now; no rights. No one will hear me.”
“Oh God.”
The old man nods, drags again on the cigarette and it crumbles to a coal. He lets out an appreciative huff of smoke.
The urge to assist is visceral…the oldest hath borne most…but what can he do? This is massive and abstract and there is no way to get even a fingernail into it. He peers into the cigarette packet, shakes it, taps: there are three cigarettes left.
“Here.” He hands the packet over. He waves aside the thanks.
The old fellow fumbles the pack away before the offer can be retracted. “God bless you, sir.”
“God bless you.”
He turns away, rounding the corner on to rue d’Alleray, chewing at the inside of his cheek. The weather’s turning; it’s getting cold. Things can only get worse. His fingertips find the round limestone pebble from the shore at Greystones, smooth and cool as a mint between his fingertips. He lifts the stone and slips it between his lips. He watches his feet swing out ahead of him in his scuffed-up, exhausted boots, and sucks on the stone, while music rises and swells inside his head, the sad loveliness of the Winterreise.
Wundlicher Alter!
Sol
lich mit dir geh’n?
He has an answer for his mother now, at least: no use whatsoever.
CHAPTER THREE
PARIS
Winter 1939–40
Alfy is made strange by uniform, his flesh somehow transfigured, made more solid; his kepi rests on the café table, between the half-empty glasses, beside the half-full ashtray. His fingers play with a coaster, a cigarette smokes between his knuckles. He keeps his voice low and his eyes averted, as if he is himself abashed by his new state, by the thick green greatcoat around his barrel body. He is doing what he can do. He has enlisted. The professor will be shovelling out the stables for the cavalry.
Cavalry. It makes his eyes fall shut, his head shake in slow negation, just to hear it, just to think of it, obsolescent, an insane word for a modern war. For dear Christ’s sake: cavalry. It may as well be Calvary, for the sacrifice and slaughter that shadow it.
“I wanted to ask you,” Alfy’s saying. “While I’m gone, if you could keep an eye out for the family, for Mania and the boys.”
“Of course.”
“I know,” Alfy says. “I know you would anyway. I just needed to say the words. And if I don’t come back…”
“Ah God now, Alfy, don’t.”
“Because it doesn’t look good, if we are to be honest about it.” Alfy tilts his head, taps his ash into the ashtray. “So. If I don’t come back…”
“Alfy, no—”
“Consider them family, would you? Mania and the boys. That’s all I wanted to say. Would you do that for me, if I don’t come back?”
“Of course. Count on it. But do me a favour too.”
“Anything, my friend.”
“Come back.”
Alfy flashes his big grin; they part with a hand clasp, a kiss on the cheek. At the street corner he glances back at the stocky, uniformed figure, and his throat aches at the parting.
Alfred, his old friend, his new brother, leaves for his regiment; he, though, returns to his notebooks, to his desk, this pointless, circular work. Maybe he should try to enlist. He could shovel dung as well as anyone. It would be more worthwhile than this.