Lost Footsteps

by Bel Mooney

  She looked down again at Antoine Perrin’s penis, seeing it suddenly as absurd, not terrifying at all, and pulled back instinctively against the pressure of his hand. Feeling this he opened his eyes and looked at her. ‘Don’t make it necessary I take you to the police,’ he whispered, shaking his head with mock sadness. ‘Come on – dépêche-toi.’

  She heard that ‘toi’, and stiffened with rage, drawing back sharply. Then suddenly she was hitting him – all the anger and humiliation of years in each blow, striking out against her father, and her uncle, and the boys who circled her at school calling her names, and Robert with his packs of cigarettes and condoms, and the old librarian, and the border guards, and the interrogators in prison – even revenging herself on the German lorry drivers for the innuendos she couldn’t understand. She was flailing at him wildly with her small fists, shouting, ‘Lasaţi-mă în pace! Lasaţi-mă în pace! Lasaţi-mă în pace!’ relishing the harsh sound of her own language in that car, screaming at him to leave her alone, hitting out against all those who had used her, all her life, within the prison of her country and now out of it. But not any more, not any more. You could fight, you could cease to be afraid, you could say with your fists that all you want is peace, to be left in peace, with the one person that you love … Where is he? Where have you hidden him? Bastard!

  You could tell them at last you would no longer submit; you could smash your fists into the pitilessness of things.

  Antoine Perrin fell sideways, taken by surprise. His glasses were knocked off with one blow, and without them he looked like a lizard, his eyes blinking large and pale. He put up his arms to protect himself, but not quickly enough.

  Ana started to laugh. ‘You like pain? You like pain, hey?’ she yelled, in English.

  He covered himself with both hands, fumbling with his zip, while her laughter fell on him, as shocking as the blows.

  ‘You want to take me to the police station – well OK, Antoine, that’s fine. But look …’ she took his business card from her pocket, and waved it in his face, ‘… if you do I shall telephone your wife, Antoine, and make sure she knows what her husband is like. Do you want me to tell her? Do you? Shall we tell her the truth?’

  He tried to snatch at the card, but she shoved it back in her pocket, blocking his move with her right arm. Their eyes met for a second, hers wild and angry, his … confused. She saw how afraid he was and it was as if a secret voice spoke up in the deepest recesses of her mind, telling her, after all these years, that it was possible to take control. He was afraid – of her.

  Antoine Perrin’s shoulders slumped. He bent down to feel for his spectacles on the floor, picking them up carefully. They were not broken. He held them loosely in his hand, staring at them as if he had never seen them before. Then Ana saw his mouth pucker, slightly obscene, like a sea anemone, as he tried hard not to cry. ‘Ma femme … ma femme, elle ne m’aime pas,’ he whispered, putting up a hand to his eyes.

  Ana sighed. The souls of the damned do not deserve pity, snivelling white worms – like this man’s disgusting cock, like this man himself – dragged down to eternal suffering, pulled down to Dracul, and all because they colluded in their own fall, and so deserve it…

  Her limbs felt weak now. She bent and picked up the magazine, and handed it to him with a formal flourish.

  Hurriedly he shoved it into the pocket on his door, not meeting her eyes, then slowly raised the glasses to a face mottled red. Then he sat looking down, bony knees pressed together, thin white fingers entwined in a ball in his lap, nails blueish-pink where they pressed into his own flesh. His hair was wispy and damp with sweat. He was pathetic, yet she could not find it in her heart to pity him, and he was all the more culpable for that – for depriving her of compassion.

  After a long silence Ana said slowly, as if speaking to a child, ‘Now, Monsieur Perrin, we will go to Dijon. When we are at the station, I will give you back your little card.’

  Perrin heard a note of threat in her voice which was not there, and fumbled inside his jacket, pulling out a wallet. ‘Please,’ he whispered, ‘vous êtès très gentille… uh, I think the train fare will be expensive for you, I think it is too much, so I want to help you. Please…’

  He took out three hundred-franc notes, and passed them quickly, without looking at her. For a second Ana wanted to open the window and throw them away, watching them flutter on the currents of the breeze. But she snatched them from him, in case he should change his mind, and thrust them into her pocket.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, with dignity, adding coldly, as an afterthought, ‘thank you.’ Then she tapped the steering wheel, and said in a more gentle voice, ‘Now – shall we go to Dijon, Monsieur? I am in a hurry.’

  Thirty-Seven

  He was clearly glad to be rid of her at Dijon; the Peugeot accelerated away from the station as if the police were following. Ana felt in her pocket and found the business card he had forgotten to demand as her part of the bargain. She smiled a little to think that when he remembered he would be afraid.

  Let him always be afraid. Let him leap each time the telephone rings, to pick it up before his wife does. Let him wake up sweating when he thinks of my fists in the car. Let his wife open his briefcase and find his terrible magazine and know what her husband is. Let them, in their impeccable house, be as unhappy as I have been …

  She dropped the card in a waste bin, and went to get her ticket with Perrin’s money.

  Long fingers of moisture spread across the train windows as it gathered speed and left the city behind. The sky was grey and heavy with rain. Ana leaned her cheek against the window, soothed by its coldness, and did not move. As they covered mile after mile, gloom gathering over the passing countryside, she saw her own reflection distorted by the thickness of the glass, a ghostly doppelgänger whose head joined hers, whose eye met hers, yet whom she did not recognize. She – that person in the window – was the stranger, the alien, the one who (now) did not exist, travelling across France with no permission to be there. And the other person – the one inside Ana’s own head – was the one who belonged somewhere else and longed now (with an intensity which eclipsed momentarily even her need for Ion) for what was familiar: a sad, misshapen animal memory which answered to the name ‘home’.

  She had lost track of the days, but set herself to calculate, counting on her fingers. It was five days since she had left Bucharest, and so this must be Saturday. It was as if she had already been travelling for years: in orbit, drawn by the magnetism of loss.

  She closed her eyes and concentrated on images of Bucharest, walking, in her imagination along Magheru and into Jules Michelet. She saw the gypsies selling airline bags, holding them high in triumph; and the queues at the impromptu peasant markets, where onion and potatoes might be spread on bits of sacking, and the men in their conical hats took the dirty notes quickly as if, even during the transaction, the lei might be devalued. Then she thought of Doina in their tiny room, painting her cards, to be collected by Christian Luca, who filled the space with his ugly bulk, and yet who was kind. She missed them both. And with her memory of Doina came fresh grief for Radu, who had tried.

  Who could have known it would all go so wrong, Radu?

  Deliberately she thought of Michael Edwards … It was strange how the Englishman was now a part of her imaginings, belonging in Romania. She could see his face, thin and quizzical, with the curly hair he sometimes ruffled, so that it stood up, making him look younger. What did he know, for all his Oxford degree and career in the Foreign Office? What had he experienced? Once, watching him talk to colleagues with the ease she envied, or on the telephone to London or Bonn, her answer would have been ‘everything’. Now … she was not sure. And it was that doubt which made them equal. She remembered his face in the restaurant, as he listened to her story, and then the expression of horrified tenderness as he hesitated above her – and understood what it all meant. Though she knew little about the world, she possessed a knowledge he could never attain, and
in his humility she had glimpsed the possibility of love. Sick now with the surfeit of her obsessive thoughts of Ion, needing respite, Ana chose to think of Michael with an affection she had hitherto denied herself. She wrapped her arms around her own body, and sighed. The doppelgänger disappeared in mist.

  The Gare de Lyon was crowded and noisy. Ana watched the people alight from her train and walk briskly away, but stood on the platform without moving, transfixed suddenly by the realization that she had nowhere to move to. She felt in her pocket for the piece of paper on which John Nayagam had written the name of the Tamil organisation, and stared helplessly at it. Already, as the train had pulled through the southern suburbs, she had observed with mounting depression, the size of this city. She knew now that the first thing was to find a map, and work out what to do. Organization – even in the face of overwhelming complexity – was the only means of survival.

  The tourist agency was closed. Ana hesitated for a moment, then retraced her steps to the main concourse, where people swirled in a current of activity, some carrying suitcases, some bearing backpacks, others dressed well for an evening in Paris. She saw a man run across in front of her, dive into the relais over on the left, and rush out again, a magazine under his arm. She guessed a bookstall would probably sell maps of the city, and was drawn by its lights, as well as the display of chocolates and sweets in front of the counter. Now she had reached her destination Ana was afflicted by a strange lethargy, wanting to loiter as if to protect herself from the enormity of what lay ahead.

  She looked down at the covers of women’s magazines, Glamour, Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan, wondering who those women were, with their consciously tousled clouds of gleaming hair, made-up eyes, and slicked smiles. They made her feel small, dirty and ugly – as if those unreal images on shiny paper recognized her for what she was: a nobody with nothing but a Romanian passport, and a few remaining dollar bills and Swiss francs which must be changed, and must be made to last.

  That money was in the pouch around her neck. In her pocket she had the francs left over from Antoine Perrin’s ‘gift’ – which she had counted again and again on the train. She liked the notes – the blue and ochre fifty, and the pinkish-mauve twenty, bearing elegant heads of de la Tour (of whom she had never heard) and Debussy (of whom she had). There was a sea behind Debussy, wild and beautiful, with rocks in the foreground, and a little ghostly image of him, another doppelgänger, visible in the white panel when she held it up to the light. Then there were the ten-franc pieces, silver and gold, with the words Liberté Égalité Fraternité engraved around the rim, and the date, 1990. They were so beautiful Ana felt you could wear them as jewellery – so different, these notes and coins, from the tattered and dirty currency of home. Yet she had no knowledge of exchange rates. Already Deutschmarks, Swiss francs, US dollars, and French francs merged in her mind into the monetary equivalent of Babel, and she thought sadly that at least with lei you were safe in the knowledge that they had no real value at all.

  She was in the corner of the shop now, where the street maps were on display. She picked up the Plan de Paris and flicked through the pages, watching the arrondissements flash before her eyes. So big … so big … where do I begin? … how can I begin …? She turned it over to discover the price – 30 francs. A teenage boy reached across her for the comic books; he was eating a chocolate bar noisily. Ana’s stomach rumbled. She stood with the compact street guide in her hand, thinking of food, until the boy moved away. There was a crowd around the cash desk; nobody in the secluded corner where she stood. Trembling slightly Ana glanced quickly around, then stuffed the small book inside her jacket, immediately picking up a coloured guide and turning the pages intently. She saw the Eiffel Tour and Notre Dame, against an impossibly blue sky, and then, over the page, grotesque gargoyles of Notre Dame in close-up, their empty mouths leering in mocking condemnation – of her, now a thief.

  Outside the station she began to walk even faster, then to run, until she reached the parapet which overlooked the junction of Boulevard Diderot, Rue de Bercy and Rue de Lyon. She leaned there, gulping air, still expecting footsteps in pursuit. But there was nothing except the roar of traffic all around, and the voices of people calling to each other as they made their agreed rendezvous at the station. Neon lights burned into her brain: Azur Hotel in blue, Gold Star in red. All around she could see restaurants in which people sat beneath coloured glass lamps while waiters in crisp white aprons bore armfuls of food, and glasses were filled and refilled with profligate generosity. Ana had never seen so many restaurants, bars and cafés in such a small space. She stood for thirty-five minutes, paralysed and fascinated, while the neon winked overhead, and the evening rush of the station gradually quietened.

  Ana had not thought where she would sleep that night, but now, suddenly exhausted, she turned and went back into the station. The orange snouts of the SNCF engines were like monsters with red eyes; they seemed to be watching as she walked slowly to and fro, observing for the first time that this railway station was remarkably short of seats. She could see nowhere a weary passenger might rest. And in truth she quailed at the prospect of a night on the platform. Consciously – with the memory of Antoine Perrin’s hand on her breast – she had kept herself awake on the train, and could not bear to fall asleep in public, not knowing who might be watching.

  She examined the Polyvend machine, fingering her coins and noting the price of chocolate bars and popcorn, walked to and fro again, then wandered back outside, to her place on the parapet. Her hunger was growing. She imagined what it must be like to walk into a brasserie, and to sit and be treated with respect by waiters who knew you could afford to buy anything. It would be like being with the film crews at the Intercontinental…

  Curious, drawn like a moth to those lighted windows, Ana descended and crossed the road. She stood watching in astonishment as waiters heaped iced platters with oysters and giant prawns from the outside counter, pungent with lemon, parsley and the salty smell of the sea – until a voice broke her reverie, ‘Vous voulez quelque chose, Madame? She shook her head hurriedly and turned away.

  There were hotels each side of the Rue de Lyon, and others down side streets; looking up at their lighted windows Ana wondered if she could possibly afford to spend the night in a cheap room. There was defiance in the thought, and a sense of burning boats. She had some money left, but she had not worked out how much; she had to believe that she would find Ion the next day, or maybe the day after … and then? She knew it depended on the people he was with, but in any case realized that the only thing for them to do was declare themselves refugees, ask for political asylum, and then trust to fate. There was no alternative. Unless she was to discover that Ion had already been taken care of by the state … Ignorant of procedure, Ana pushed the thought aside. Tomorrow the Tamil organization would help her; there could not be many Tamils in Paris – they must know of the boy Franklin, and then it would be easy. But for now, she had to rest.

  She stopped and glanced down the narrow road to her left. There were many small hotel signs jutting from the walls of the Rue d’Austerlitz; no neon here, or stars of quality. Ana walked from hotel to hotel, studying prices on the small boards in each window. At last she found the cheapest room, at 100 francs, a little less than the amount she had left over after buying her ticket from Dijon.

  The hall was tiny and dark, the reception desk a small hole in the wall on the right. An elderly man sat behind it, his brown, lined face framed like a portrait by Rembrandt, one hand bent into a wizened claw. He smiled, revealing yellow teeth. ‘Out, Madame? Une chambre?’

  Timidly, Ana nodded – adding, ‘Pas chére – s’il vous plaît.’

  He murmured assent, adding that of course times were hard, that hotel rooms in Paris were expensive, but here they tried to be reasonable. Ana understood none of it, but the tone was good-humoured, so she smiled and nodded. He pushed a small white card across the ledge, and asked her to fill it in. She saw the words, Fiche d’Étr
anger, and hesitated, wondering if she would have to show him her passport. But he waved a hand casually, saying, ‘Ça ne fait rien … plus tard, plus tard, Madame!’ – and handed her the room key.

  Ana took it, and was about to turn towards the winding stair, covered in threadbare red carpet, when she stopped and asked, ‘Avez-vous quelque chose à manger … ici? S’il vous plaît, monsieur?’

  He looked at her and saw for the first time the hollows of her face – particular cavities of weariness and fear that he recognized, like the hunger in her eyes. Her clothes were shabby; the hands were red and uncared for. He was Hungarian, this man, and had been imprisoned during the war at Vernet, the camp for aliens in which those who had done nothing to harm France were treated worse than Nazi prisoners-of-war. He was still interred when the Maginot Line broke, the Germans marched on Paris, and the French handed Vernet over to the Gestapo. Still at night he would wake sweating, racked by dreams in which he was beaten again and again, until the guards gave up for weariness – their bodies cracking before his own. His hand had been broken and never treated properly … The one doctor who attempted to treat the prisoners well had been humiliated so much by his superiors he resigned and went to the front …

  With such knowledge, he had developed – he sometimes boasted, sitting in the dingy Hungarian Restaurant just off the Rue Barbes, where they would chorus drunkenly beneath the woven wall-hangings of home – a sense of it in others. There was no need to ask questions, he said: you could smell fear and oppression on your fellow animal – pas de probleme.

  ‘Vous êtes … Italienne?’ he asked, breaking his own rule, despite himself.