by Roman Payne
Saskia was my entire world when we lived in Paris. I lived for her pleasure, for her happiness. Every caprice she had, it was my joy to indulge her. Whatever she saw in a shop window that made her eyes light up, I would go in and buy it for her. The money Juhani had paid me was just about finished. It was now the end of August, and the white nights of Petersburg were long past and Russia was forgotten entirely. We still had twenty louis, although with our nights at the theatre, restaurants and cabarets, I knew this would not last through autumn. Still, I kept my cheerful constitution. I kept it in my head that I if we could stumble on two-thousand louis, we would be able to travel and could live on this money for the next ten years. I was preoccupied with this idea. Saskia could have gone to her bank in England for money, but she would have had to go alone. Saskia could also draw on her income in Italy, and I was free to enter Italy. But the cost of the voyage; well, we didn’t have enough money left to both travel together to Italy.
As for Saskia, I knew that she felt actual, physical pain when she was away from me. She confessed this to a doctor she visited, as she said ‘at random one day.’ He was a general practitioner who lived and worked a few apartment houses down from us. I had told Saskia that morning that I would be gone the entire day, meeting with a friend of Juhani who was a travel agent in Montmartre. I hoped to arrange a small advance from Juhani so we could live together without being dependent on her income, without hiding. I also hoped to get Juhani to advance us tickets for Florence to leave immediately. You will soon see why I gave up hope in finding her friend Adélaïse in Paris. But first…
While I was away in Montmartre, Saskia missed me and didn’t know what to do without me. She told me after the event that she went to the doctor to tell him about her pain—I was very touched by this! The doctor didn’t prescribe her anything. He simply told her: “If it causes you physical pain to be away from him, then simply do not be away from him!” Saskia thought this was logical, and even laughed at herself for not thinking of it before. She confessed this merry story to me once I returned from my mission, and the two of us laughed together and we rolled on the floor and I gave her a million caresses and swore to her that we needn’t be apart ever again.
There were only two dark clouds in our sky: one was that Saskia was stubborn in her search for Adélaïse and she didn’t want to go to London or Italy until we found her. The second cloud was that I didn’t yet have word from Juhani about an advance, and it was rumored that Andrea had heard about our concubinage in Paris and was coming to investigate himself. How could he not hear about us? Saskia and I were on everybody’s lips at the theatre: the new mysterious couple in Paris. Le tout-Paris1 believed that we were lovers, it amused itself by gossiping; and you can believe that gossip in the city of Paris is gossip to be devoured the entire world over…
As for our finances, we no longer had enough even for Saskia to go alone to London…
“I’m glad we don’t have enough money to send me to London,” she told me one night, “I’m finished wandering alone without you.”
“Better we starve together?”
“Yes, better we starve together.”
My hope rested always on Juhani sending word from Madrid that he would advance me money, after which I would book us tickets to Florence leaving immediately. I told Saskia it was pointless to stay in Paris, since she didn’t want to return to the Île Saint-Louis to look for Adélaïse. Saskia was forever haunted by the words of that old broom-woman who claimed she was being followed, talked about, etc. So she asked my advice on other ways to find her friend. Our efforts weren’t needed, however, as we soon learned a hint about the whereabouts of Adélaïse.
1 LE TOUT-PARIS: (Fr) Literally: ‘The all-Paris’ or ‘everyone in Paris’ is a French expression used since the 1600s to mean the ‘High-Society’ of Paris, or at least the affluent, fashionable crowd.
It was now late autumn. Every morning brought ice to the streets of Paris. Saskia and I were poor, and we lived only for each other. We no longer had money to go to the theatre. We drank wine at home together, and we ate only once a day, only at dinnertime, and only in inexpensive bistros. We feared the looming day when our rent would be up and we would be required to pay again. There was still no response from Juhani. I was afraid, and rightly so, that he was away travelling who-knowswhere, for who-knows-how-long…
Saskia seemed happier than ever just to be in the present moment. She stopped asking me about the home where I grew up, and about the birthplace of my father. I was under the illusion at this time that she cared more about me than about her fortune. We dressed warmly every night, and after dinner we took long walks together around Paris. Eventually came that singular night—that fateful night that all the events in Paris had been leading up to—that night that convinced us to leave Paris once and for all…
It was the six month anniversary of the first night Saskia and I had met. Unlike when we met, the moon was only half-full and waning; but we would drink anyway. We would spend more than usual: splurge on the theatre and go to a more expensive bistro afterwards to celebrate. We were greeted by a character while we were leaving the theatre whom we knew already, he was a silver-haired man of sixty, though still very handsome, named Monsieur de Charmolit1.
M de Charmolit obliged us to go to the souper he was hosting near the theatre. Although we had a special occasion to celebrate in private, we agreed to go for one drink. The souper was in a noisy hall on the quai of the Seine. We drank some champagne and then agreed to leave to find a quiet restaurant for the two of us. I went to the coat-check with Saskia to help her retrieve her coat and scarf. And when I came back alone to the table to say goodbye to M de Charmolit and his friends, I noticed a new face sitting with them: the Maltese ambassador to England!
1 MONSIEUR DE CHARMOLIT: The name ‘Charmolit’ is rather comic, being a conjunction of the French word ‘charme’ (‘charm’ in English), and ‘au lit,’ which means ‘in bed.’
He paled when he saw me. The color soon returned to his face and he left the table of Monsieur de Charmolit and came to have a word with me in private. I stopped him and said in hushed-tones, “If you want to settle this once and for all, we can take two pistols and go down to the Seine.” He waved his hands…
“None of that! None of that!” he said, “I don’t have a problem with you anymore, son of Solarus. I handed my problem with you over to the English and Maltese governments. Try to set foot in those places, you’ll be arrested and maybe executed. I hear you will also be executed if you try to come near your fatherland, your capital city of Tripoli… that is, you will be tried and executed if the fortune-hunters don’t kill you first to claim their prize.”
“So I’ve heard as well,” I told him, feeling regret about my past. One part of the story that I left out when I was telling Saskia of my escape from Malta was my arrival in Tripoli. I didn’t want to mention Tripoli or Libya to Saskia because I didn’t want her to know I was from there. Before I went to Alexandria, I first went to Tripoli thinking I could settle there. It was night when I arrived and I met a beggar on the steps of a temple. He recognized me as the son of Solarus, and he warned me to leave the city unseen, as soon as possible, for the police had been after me for years. I did leave Tripoli, as I took the beggar’s words as an omen, having them be the first words spoken to me upon my arrival. Though I didn’t think about that beggar since. Now I had the same warning from both a beggar and an ambassador, so I had no reason to disbelieve them. I looked at the gentle face of the old ambassador. I had no more quarrels with him. I told him I was sorry for the errors in my youth, adding that I couldn’t help myself… his wife was very beautiful.
“And she is still as beautiful as she was then, my son of Solarus. It is because of my wife’s beauty that I forgive you for being a bit ‘dizzy’ that night. I’m afraid it’s out of my hands now. England and Malta consider you a traitor. They won’t forgive you as easily as I did. But Tripoli, it seems, has you on the list of top criminals. T
hey have a desire to kill you that outshines all the rest. I would watch out for Tripoli if I were you… that is where your family comes from, is it not? Anyway, I hope you can stay out of the nets they’ve laid for you.”
I thanked him, said goodnight, and walked solemnly to the door where Saskia was waiting for me. We exited into the street and started walking together down the quai of the Seine.
“Do you have a preference for a restaurant?” I asked her.
“I liked that place we went last summer. Chez Lefèvre, remember? The place with the sad waiter who spent the evening drinking and smoking.”
Chez Lefèvre was nearby. I didn’t speak to Saskia on the way. All I could think about was my conversation with the ambassador… ‘The beggar said that police have been looking for me for years,’ I thought, ‘And now the ambassador says that I am on the list of top criminals. Fortunately, I never need to return to Tripoli again… But wait!’ a horrible thought then passed through my mind, ‘When I left Tripoli for Alexandria, I stopped in our village to see if my mother still lived there. Our house, the house of the old fisherman and his wife, was in ruins…’ At the time, I believed that fisherman and his wife had died of old age, and my mother took whatever money she had and went to live in Florence. With tonight’s warning from the ambassador, I wondered if perhaps the police didn’t find my mother and arrest her. Perhaps they arrested everyone in our house and left the place in ruins… ‘Impossible!’ I decided, ‘That is a thought too ugly to imagine. No, she is alive and happy and living in Florence.’
Inside Lefèvre’s there was a crowd. It wasn’t like that pleasant night in summer when we were alone except for the chef and the waiter. Guido wasn’t there this night, and we didn’t see the chef. We took a table in the back, I ordered apéritifs and champagne. We drank our apéritifs; and fueled by the alcohol, I decided to tell Saskia what the ambassador had said, to admit that it was Tripoli where my father was born, where my mother was exiled from, where I had lived as a young man, and why I should do all I can never to go back there. Before I could speak, however, she started fidgeting and staring around her, muttering broken phrases in connection with a nearby table. I looked at the table that had caught her attention. I didn’t see much of interest there. There were three people dining silently together: an old couple, obviously married, both carrying solemn expressions, together with their daughter, who also looked solemn and didn’t speak. The girl was half turned away and I couldn’t see her face. The old man looked very sad. I saw he wore French military dress with a few medals of honor on his chest. Seeing their sad faces made me forget about the ambassador. When the champagne arrived, Saskia and I toasted to six months of companionship dating from the night I almost died. We drank, and Saskia said to me, “That girl at the table keeps staring at you.”
“She’s probably jealous because you are more beautiful than she is.”
“I don’t know. She is very beautiful.”
I looked then to see her face closely; it is then I recognized her as the girl I met that day long ago on the Île Saint-Louis. “It’s that girl I told you about,” I whispered to Saskia, “Sarah Lingot.” The girl looked again at me, uneasily, and I raised my glass to her and her family; then I stood up to go reintroduce myself to Sarah. After her parents showed their approval for her to be speaking to me, she asked them to be excused so she could come meet Saskia at our table. Saskia introduced herself to Sarah and for the first time Saskia treated another woman in a friendly manner in front of me. The two girls joked and laughed, and Sarah said to me, “You were looking for someone when you were on Saint-Louis, no?”
“Yes, I was. We were, and still are… it’s Saskia’s friend, a girl about your age named Adélaïse… she is said to have lived on the island with her parents—or her mother at least—before and after she went to school in London for some years…”
“Are you sure her name wasn’t Adélaïde?, rather than Adélaïse… because some of my friends told me about a girl-friend of theirs named Adélaïde who went to England for school a long time ago. It must be the same person. They said she came home to Paris last spring, but she was different than before… moody and unhappy with everyone around her. Then, they said, she met a couple of strange people and left with them for Italy. They were going to go somewhere in Tuscany eventually, but Adélaïde wanted to stop in the north somewhere—in Milan, or Verona, I think…”
“Verona?!” asked Saskia, “Are you sure?! And are you sure her name isn’t, rather, Adélaïse?”
“No, I’m not sure… not about any of it.”
After hearing this story, Saskia sat pensive for a long time, not moving. I looked over at Sarah’s table and noticed an empty bottle of champagne, as well as some open gift-boxes. I asked Sarah then what they were celebrating on this night. She told me they were celebrating the retirement of her father who just finished a long and honorable military career. I remarked again to myself how strange it was that he and his wife looked so sad. Saskia interrupted our conversation to ask Sarah how she knew this girl—“Adélaïde,” as Sarah called her—went to Tuscany by way of Milan or Verona. Sarah repeated again that she didn’t know any of it for certain, but that her friends told her that after she came back from England, there came a day when she started frequenting an older couple: a man and a woman, whom they called “strange,” and that one day they stopped seeing her in public except in the company of this couple. “Then suddenly,” my friends said, “she left her home and family. It was rumored that she went to Italy after this couple suggested she come with them…”
Saskia was sure by Sarah’s account that her friends were talking about Adélaïse… the fact that their first names were practically identical, that both had gone to private school in England, and that Sarah said this girl left for Northern Italy, the place where Adélaïse surely imagined Saskia was living still… “She would have gone to look for me,” Saskia said to me later that night, “just as I came to France to look for her. We were such close friends, she simply must be in Italy…”
When we left Chez Lefèvre, we said goodbye to Sarah’s parents, congratulating the father on his retirement and his military career. We promised Sarah we would come visit her on the Île Saint-Louis. We then left the restaurant and walked home. Saskia remained pensive the entire way back. At home, trying to cheer her up, I suggested that some more champagne would do her good. She wasn’t eager, but she said she would be fine to drink some. It was now cold in Paris, and since ‘maid’s quarters’ on the top floors of Parisian apartment houses usually retain the extreme cold in winter, as they retain the extreme heat in summer, we stored our cool wine and champagne that autumn in our garçonnière. So I went up to the sixth floor to get some champagne.
As soon as I climbed the staircase, I found a young woman collapsed on the floor in front of a shabby apartment door. It appeared she’d fainted, or was only just sleeping. Once I’d revived her I asked what she was doing collapsed in front of a door, she started to cry. She said to me that her boyfriend lived in the apartment before which she’d collapsed, and that he hadn’t contacted her for several days after she had told him she was weak from illness and hunger. She told him she had no money for food, and didn’t know anyone else in Paris, or what to do… So having no news from him, she finally walked to his apartment that evening, determined to either find him or else to wait for him. She’d been there for several hours, she told me, waiting… then finally she collapsed from sickness and starvation among other things, though mostly from sadness. And she didn’t wake up until I came and found her. I told the girl not to worry; that I would get her some food and a doctor. “In the meantime,” I said, “you can sleep safe from worry in our spare room on this floor.” The poor soul cried in gratitude and followed me to our garçonnière where she collapsed on the bed and went straight to sleep. I shut the door quietly and locked it so she would be safe, and hurried down the back stairs to see about finding a doctor.
There was a brass plaque in front of
a nearby building stating that a doctor had his business there, perhaps he lived there too. Although it was night, I rang and roused the doctor from sleep, begging him to come out to assist a young woman who needed him. He came right away and was friendly, saying that he didn’t mind waking up if there was an emergency, and asked me what was going on. I recounted the story of the sick and starving girl to him. What happened during this time, Saskia told me later that night…
Having waited for me for a long time, to come back to our apartment with champagne, she finally grew worried and went to find me. She climbed the stairs; and since she now had a key to our garçonnière, she unlocked the door and saw the sleeping girl on the bed. Of course, she became angry—and confused. At first she closed the door without waking her, locked it again, and started pacing back and forth in the hallway in front of our garçonnière, as she tugged her hair in fury. She then decided to get to the bottom of the matter and reopened the door to the room, looked for me behind the door, and then yelled at the girl to wake up and explain to her what she was doing there. The girl was feverish, and so tired, that she didn’t wake up to Saskia’s shouting. Saskia yelled at her that she was a stupid girl. Furious, she then slammed the door and sat down in the hallway near the door and sobbed in her hands. That is how the doctor and I eventually found her there. At first, we didn’t see Saskia. The hall was dark, and we went straight into the garçonnière to attend to the sick girl. I finally found Saskia in tears when I came out alone to light the lamp in the hall. I went to her on my knees to ask her why she was crying.