A memory of one of the artist’s Waterloo Bridge paintings swirled through Peter’s thoughts. Blue factories in the distance huffing out blue and brown smoke, haze everywhere you look, the unifying world-haze, people and the things they make embedded in it. The haze connects everybody and everything. There they are, crossing the bridge in daily migration, the caravanserai of human traffic reflected on the surface of the Thames, while the river, its dumb nature and substance, sloughs underneath. Monet framed it on his canvas, the hidden fact of London—or Paris or Riga or Moscow—movement you can’t boil down to a political slogan. If I stood on the embankment of the Thames, Peter went on thinking, wherever Brother Claude had set up his easel, I’d see exactly what he saw.
Peter’s mental freedom was a fast-fading sensation; to take stock of his trouble, he had to clear his head and think, think, think. Was that, after all, the reason he quit Marseilles and came back to Paris? For a holiday from agitation? From informers? Maybe there was nothing he could do about it; his calmness attracted agitators from every direction. Even so, at times here, when he was blandly employed, Peter missed the activity, or noticed its sharp absence…One thought one minute, contradicted by the next in the next! Never troubled by doubt before, now he felt it every morning when he woke up, a plunge of ice water in his stomach. And after he slumped out of bed to get dressed, the fit of his clothes was wrong, the trim of his beard, the name he went by. Today he forgot he disliked potato soup; it usually reminded him of the paste he used to hang wallpaper.
Along with everything else in the world-haze, somewhere, something had to be solid and certain. In London, just a couple of years ago, it was in Jubilee Street, in the smoky air of the Anarchist Club. To the police, it was a heathen temple, rat’s nest, alien outpost, turbulent mosque. Peter’s crowd. But he had dodged the thundering proclamations, kept out of the debate. Those spiel-ers with the lung power and lack of inhibition who promised to deliver a new world minus the imperialism…which meant minus the imperialists, their friends, allies, and beneficiaries…which meant the ruling class, merchant class, and counterrevolutionaries among the working class on every continent, anywhere those sickening bedbugs could be flushed from cover, denounced, eradicated!
Oh, yes?
What about booting the Russians out of his homeland? If it took revolution in Russia to free Latvia, then Peter swam with the revolutionaries, his heart swollen with joy. Many times a special guest at the Anarchist Club, he had just as clear a purpose: to paint backdrops for the occasional skits and plays they put on and, while he was there, to demonstrate how to manufacture, plant, and detonate a nitroglycerin bomb. Anarchist entertainments.
Among the comrades, those scrappers, one man recognized who Peter was, separate from what he’d done. A friend. He was still in London, calling himself Gardstein now, George Gardstein. “Karl,” Peter said out loud.
“Monsieur?” Looking at him slouched there by the canal, M. Brassaud, the patron of the corner café and rightful owner of the chair underneath Peter, softened his voice but not his irritation. What satisfaction would arm-swirling rage get him from this slumped heap of surrender? Besides which, the gloss of sweat on Peter’s forehead in the cool air made the patron wonder if the man was ill. “Monsieur, the chair. Give it back to me.”
Peter hauled himself to his feet and picked up his tool bag. It rattled with his collection of brushes and tins of turpentine.
Behind him, Peter heard Brassaud grab up the chair and grumble, “Next time maybe you’ll order an aperitif so I can retire.”
Only half a block away, in rue des Vinaigrières, waited the afternoon’s job, repainting the door of a dress shop. The owner hired Peter on recommendation—not as a survivor of torture or escapee of Russian jails, not in honor of a veteran in the revolutionary underground; the dressmaker was no sympathizer. She hired him on a Frenchman’s good word. Peter’s last employer, a tailor in Montparnasse, had high praise for his talents with brush and paint, especially Peter’s skill at outlining street numbers in a second color. “Oh, he’s intelligent,” the tailor said of him, “but he’s a good worker.”
ON THE MONEY he was earning, Peter could afford to maintain just one address, so he made it a habit to eat in different bistros in different quarters of the city. He always waited for an aisle seat close to the door. If, passing the bread, anyone haphazardly asked personal questions, or came at him snuffling like a pig after truffles, in each place Peter gave them a different story. His tablemates believed they were enjoying the company of Alois or Paul, a plasterer from Alsace-Lorraine or, vaguely, “the South,” not a foreign radical in the crosshairs of the secret police. With the limbs of a runner and a laborer’s muscles, he could still run fast if he had to, though lately a thickening at his belly and hips had become noticeable, and not only to Peter. At twenty-seven, could he already be a middle-aged man?
Peter kept his table talk brief and common in these neighborhood restaurants. He spoke a smooth French, barely accented, solid Russian, convincing German and Yiddish, clear English. In Le Barricou d’Or he was known as a native of Marseilles, and in Chez l’Ami he was Tomas Peter, a Swiss-German chemistry teacher. Around the Marais, where shopkeepers and waiters knew him as Paul Pavloff or Peter Schtern, he passed as a Jew.
And it was to the Marais that Peter strolled for his dinner after he finished work in rue des Vinaigrières. Stepping from the street into La Roulante des Rosiers, he always imagined entering the hold of a barge. Eight or ten tables with their pairs of benches crammed the narrow room, as if leaving space for full-grown customers were an afterthought. By early evening, La Roulante’s ancient tile floor wore a layer of tobacco ash, glued to it here and there by precious sloppings of soup or wine.
You’d think, by looking at the couple dozen men and women eating and drinking there, that they’d come there together for some celebration, singing at the table on the right, loud conversation on the left. Across the narrow gangway, two old men growled through a folk song about English knights—Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, goutons voir si le vin est bon…An old woman with a bandaged foot dragged herself from friend to acquaintance to stranger, begging a loan of twenty-five centimes to get her coat out of hock…a red-headed Italian girl leaked tears as she finished reciting a poem about suicide…at the end of Peter’s table, a quarrel broke out between a bricklayer and a carpenter over whose work is harder on a man’s health. And at Peter’s elbow, a pair of prostitutes resigned themselves to their luck, advising each other not to expect any trade within ten streets of des Rosiers, it being the start of the workweek; all the men with money to throw at pleasure were in better neighborhoods, where anyway the competition between streetwalkers was cutthroat…
Tumult all around, communication with the kitchen reduced to gestures and glances, intricately understood by everyone—Another pitcher here! Plate of chops! The pool of human noise ringed Peter like a moat and he sat placidly in the middle of it. These things, he thought, the human body’s burdens and pleasures, aren’t touched by revolution…
Meals at La Roulante had another advantage: his vegetarian diet didn’t rouse any real curiosity. The waiters assumed that Peter avoided meat on account of his nearly empty pockets; when he found work, the five francs a day had to stretch to cover rent, food, clothes (and his laundry, postage, and sometimes travel), common costs to workers like him. One difference between him and the others was that they bought the minimum of food to save their money for the maximum of drink.
The truth was, his plate of cooked carrots and parsnips, beet soup, bread, and cheese satisfied Peter in a way not much else did these days. He ate, head down, not entirely in self-defense, every now and then glancing slowly at the people around him. One glance, the seat opposite was vacant; the next it was filled by a young man in cheap but laundered clothes and a black peaked cap slouched à la mode on one side of his blond head. Peter had noticed him earlier, hovering at the door with an eager appetite. Now, between bites, Peter made the mistake of loo
king Black Cap in the face, which gave the—what was he? a student?—an opening to ask if there was anything on the menu that the cook didn’t ruin.
“The beet soup is good,” Peter said.
“It looks good. You recommend it?”
“If you like the taste of beets,” Peter said, leaning over his bowl.
Black Cap went on. “Looks like more of a vegetable stew,” he said, to no reply. He tried again. “What about the chops? Are they lamb or pork?”
“Haven’t tried them.”
Black Cap rose halfway out of his seat to get madame’s attention. “They’re probably horse.” He signaled his order to her, wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “She serves everything burned, looks like. Your soup and, what have you got there—carrots? That’s smart.”
Peter threw a glance toward the door. “Meat’s no good for my stomach.”
“No? You don’t eat it?”
“No.”
“Only vegetables, that’s interesting. And fruit?”
“That’s right.”
“Vegetables and fruit. Clean food, good for the stomach. You can trust her not to burn the carrots, anyway.”
“They’re boiled.”
“Does she fish them out in time?” He ignored Peter’s silence and plunged ahead. “You’re right, meat’s heavy on your insides. I should have ordered the beet soup.”
“It’s the best thing she makes,” Peter said.
“You can look forward to healthy years on that kind of food.” The room noise swamped him, so Black Cap repeated the point.
“Yes.”
“Good food, good life. Bad food…Maybe it’s better not to be born at all.” He abandoned the thought behind an apologetic wave. “Sorry. No politics in here.”
“That’s not politics. It’s philosophy.” Peter reached down the table for the loaf of bread and accidentally knocked the arm of the working girl sitting next to him. “Pardon me.”
She returned his smile, with genuine sweetness. “I’m no peach. A little tap won’t bruise me.”
As his plate of chops was passed along to him, Black Cap picked up his conversation with Peter again. “No, I’ll order the soup and carrots next time, if it’s as good as you say. Does she ever make it with cabbage and sour cream, à la russe?”
Maybe the boy was lonely. His accent wasn’t Parisian. His stab at sociability struck Peter as forced and clumsy. Maybe Black Cap was slumming. Or was he a police informer? Callow, open, curious, harmless, the kind of personality that’s attractive to the Sûreté, not to mention the okhrana; Russian secret policemen, even more than French ones, fall head over heels for appealing characters like him, and they pay better…that is, when they can’t blackmail or threaten the family at home. Either way, the okhrana can turn callow boys into poisonous rats overnight. Peter offered him a smile, lifting his glass, taking a last sip of wine. Is this Black Cap trawling for radicals, he wondered, or is he sitting here because I’m here?
Peter leaned close to the working girl, whispered to her, “Can you come with me?” Then he abandoned his spoon in the half-empty soup bowl and got up to pay.
“What,” said Black Cap, “can’t trust the cooking after all?”
“You have it.”
The cashier was madame’s baby-faced, gray-skinned older sister, who also kept a droll eye on the regulars. “They get what they want here, don’t they?” he observed.
She shrugged. “Everybody comes back.”
“You’re lucky. You hear the voice of the people.”
She agreed. “One franc, twenty centimes.”
Outside, in the street, the girl told Peter her name was Claudette.
“Is it?” Peter said.
“If you want to ask for me next time.”
She took his hand and started to lead him around the corner. He told her his name was Paul, offering his arm to lead her back the other way. “No,” she said, digging in her heels. “My room is over here.”
“I want to get out of the Marais.” Camouflaged with you on my arm, he could have told her, as a strolling couple in the boulevard crowd.
Under her reddish curls, the girl gave him a sly look. “How long will you take?”
“You should come home with me,” Peter bargained. “I want you for the whole night.”
“I’m your extravagance, is that it?”
“If you’ve got the money it’s no extravagance. Come home with me.”
“Where?”
“Montparnasse.”
“Too far, too long. No. I work here. It’s near my room and I don’t have to pay for the Métro.”
“I’ll buy your ticket. And one for the return.”
“But my hotel’s so close.”
“Your pimp, too, I’ll bet.”
“I work for myself,” she lied.
“You can decide, then. How much would you earn on a Monday?”
“If I go somewhere else tonight how will I know?”
“Whatever it is, you can make just as much, more even, in Montmartre, around there, Montparnasse. My neighborhood.”
“I don’t think so. Why?”
“You’re much, much prettier than the girls I see walking the Marché every day. You know who I mean, the ones at the fountain. Something shines out of your face, believe me. You could be an artist’s model.”
She stood back from him and gave Peter the kind of look she got from men a hundred times a day. His workman’s clothes (hectically stained), his clunking tool bag, his fingers flecked, dirtied with white, green, black, and guessed Peter’s angle. “You want me to work for you!”
“No!”
“Are you Arab,” she kidded him, “or Corsican?” Peter jerked his face away from her hand. He shook his head, a signal for her to read: he’d stop talking until she stopped clowning. “You can take those lightning bolts out of your eyes,” she said.
“I’m not angry at anybody.”
“Good.” She slipped her hand back into the crook of his arm. “You’ve got artists for friends, then?”
“Yes.”
“Famous ones?”
“Notorious.”
“Who? Who’d pay me? How much?”
“Two or three francs for a couple of hours. I think that’s the going rate. With food and drink thrown in. Drink, for sure.”
“I can make the same here,” she said. The slight wobble in her voice made Peter doubt that was true.
“Can you keep it? Some? Any? How much?” He made his proposal with earnest charm. “What you might earn tonight in the Marais, gamble it against what you might make tomorrow in Montparnasse, for work that won’t make you an old woman before you’re thirty.”
“I won’t be an old woman.”
“A face in a painting doesn’t age,” Peter suggested gently. Then he replaced pretty persuasion with ironclad facts. “Anyway, it won’t stop you from making money however you want.”
“Are you an artist, Paul? You talk like one.”
“Yes. I paint.”
A Storm in the Blood
Five
WITH THE PAVEMENT of Montparnasse under his boots, Peter’s tension drained out of him. It trickled down from his neck, through his arms, and from his hands. Up the steps of the Métro, Peter’s walk slowed with a looseness in his limbs. He didn’t say a word to the girl for the whole ride from Saint-Paul to Pigalle, but not because the judder and rattle of the carriage would have forced him to shout; at each stop, Peter silently watched the ones who got onboard, where they sat or stood. Between stations, he kept his head down.
Once they had turned the corner of rue Danville, he livened up. He was this woman’s escort and scout, pointing out local characters by the nicknames he’d given them: Treasure Trove, an old woman who trawled the gutters for lost jewelry…The Flies, a trio of young women, gaily drunk, usually singing, none of them ever spotted on her own…The Monument, an ex-army officer in his frayed uniform, medals on display, who planted himself outside the cemetery in the morning a
nd in the Café Sebastopol at night, delivering patriotic speeches and entertaining the clientele with his own lewd verses of the national anthem…They were all out on the street tonight: The Pygmy, Didier’s Egg, Madame Aubergine…
“No sign of The Amorous Pinhead,” Peter said, turning his key in the door. “Maybe we’ll see him at breakfast.”
Even with the light from the landing, she couldn’t see very far into his small room, and disobeyed him when he told her to wait outside until he switched on the bedside lamp. Her foot made contact with something that collapsed when she kicked it. A splash of electric lamplight showed her she’d knocked over a stack of unframed watercolors. Stepping over them, she said, not exactly surprised, “You didn’t lie to me.”
Except for the brushes soaking in jars and a collection of tins and little boxes, Peter kept his place tidy. Her eyes slid onto a panel of freshly hung wallpaper next to the bed, the same brown floral pattern that covered the other walls.
“It was shabby. If I can fix something, I don’t stand on ceremony,” Peter said. “I’m working my way around the room.” He picked up one of his paintings to show her, a small still life of flowers in a blue-and-white vase. Daisies, buttercups, scarlet poppies, the air of summer.
Peter’s girl admired it with a musical hum. Each one he handed to her won the same reply—his street scenes, landscapes, one of a pond and water lilies, which he told her outright was his amateur copy. “Don’t ask me.” She shrugged. “Art should be pretty. Your paintings are pretty, so they’re good.”
“You think so, Claudette? They’re ‘pretty’?”
In the teeth of a lecture on the beaux arts, she unbuttoned her short jacket and then her blouse. Her bare shoulders had gentle power in them; the curve of her thighs, the youth of her skin, the rude tufts of hair in her armpits acted on Peter. He caught the sharp scent of her when she raised her arms to untie her hair.
A roughhouse shove tipped Peter backward across the bed. The girl bent to untie his shoes, slipped them off his feet, then lay next to him. Before he could frame a correct thought about fair wages for streetwalkers, modeling for artists, or anything else, her mouth was on his, his hands on her hips. The moment sank into its physical purity, the same stuff as the shimmer of light on the canal, slipping past him as fast as Peter could grope for a hold on it. From the taste of her mouth, his attention slid to the sight of her wide shoulders and small breasts, the soft angles of her face, until his pleasure took solid form as she arched her back and pushed herself against him and stayed there awhile, long enough to grind the spinning wheel of his senses into a fixed memory.
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