by Bel Mooney
Ana shrank back against the wall. They looked like off-duty soldiers, she thought, and began to sweat. The noise rose to the pitched roof, supported by green pillars like crutches, and drowned the dull echoing rumble of the trains. One or two of the young men saw her and called greetings, harmless enough, offering beer and company, because she was alone and the station at night was no place for a woman. But they were soldiers, she knew it, and fear melted her spine, making her clutch her bag to her chest until it hurt. ‘C’est après-midi! C’est après-midi! Venez, venez!’ The old woman shambled off, cackling loudly, and the men made a path for her, grinning nervously as though with some shameful, primitive fear of witch-women. Ana wanted to call to her to stay, not to leave her there alone. But the woman went on her way, dragging her bags, and the men held their noses ostentatiously as she passed.
Ana rose quickly, and made for the waiting room. There was a hoarse cry behind her, and she began to run, tears starting in her eyes. But when the hand fell on her shoulder, and she turned with wide, panicky eyes, breathing heavily, the tall young man was smiling through stained, gapped teeth. With an exaggerated bow he held out what was in his hand, ‘Votre livre, Madame!’ She stared at him, and took the Eliade without a word. His friends were laughing, not at her, but with a general sense of tipsy pleasure, because their leave had been good. But she was discomfited, and turned away without saying thank you.
The air of the waiting room was thick with smoke, although a sign clearly banned cigarettes. It was much larger than it appeared from outside, the leg of its L–shape hidden from where she had been sitting. Here five men lay asleep, three on the floor in sleeping bags, two stretched out on the rows of chairs. One of them was snoring loudly. There was a smell of human flesh; stale and rancid. An old man sat slumped in the first part of the room, his head down, muttering to himself. Standing by the door, glad of its protection, Ana stood with her back to the room watching the soldiers gather in a corner a little way off, waiting for their special train. Paradoxically she was glad they were there; the station was almost deserted now: emptiness reclaiming its spaces as midnight approached, and the last trains departed.
She saw the man in the mobile kiosk, Buffet Nord, begin to lower his shutter for the night, and realized how hungry she was. Rushing across she pointed to a sandwich wrapped in cellopane – white bread filled with egg and tomato – and asked the price. The man was surprised; sometimes there were tarts hanging around the station but she did not look like one of them. He picked up the sandwich, held it in his hand deliberating, then pushed it towards her. It was not fresh, he could not sell it tomorrow, he had closed his till, he wanted to go home – and so he waved aside the ten-franc piece she held.
The smells and snores mattered no longer. Ana ate with savage enjoyment, and then, ignoring her thirst, leaned sideways across the next two chairs and fell asleep.
At 1.30 a.m. she was wakened by the sound of voices, and dogs barking in the distance. She did not know where she was and sat up with a jerk, fully roused by the mysterious jabbering sound of the walkie-talkie the man at the door held in his hand. He was standing holding the door open with his back, calling laconically, ‘Allez, allez, s’il vous plait!’ The old man stumbled out, and the sleepers pulled themselves up, grumbling quietly. The two with sleeping bags took time to roll them, so that the man in the brown leather jacket called again, ‘Allez!’, more impatiently now.
He looked at Ana curiously as she rose stiffly, and bent slowly to pick up her bag. Then she froze. Outside, on the concourse, stood three men, two of them young and in paramilitary security uniforms. Their trousers were tucked into army boots, their heads were almost shaven, and each held two thick leashes. She saw three rottweilers and one alsatian; and in that instant heard the voice again, smooth and sadistic: ‘Who knows? It was impossible to tell – once the dogs were pulled off his body. They can tear someone apart in a few minutes, as you can imagine …’
The dogs barked as the homeless men shuffled past; the sound echoed eerily, and Ana began to tremble.
‘Vous voulez quelque chose, Madame?’ asked the security supervisor, instinctively courteous to a woman his own age whom, moreover, he recognized as being from his own class.
‘Oh, please let me sleep here. On the station … please!’ Ana blurted, forgetting to speak French as she gazed in horror at the dogs.
‘You are English? You have missed your train?’
She nodded quickly. ‘Yes – and I have no money for a hotel tonight. Please permit me to sleep here?’
He shook his head. ‘Not in the waiting room – it is against the regulations. But…’
‘Please, Monsieur.’
There was a fresh outburst of barking, and she jumped. He shouted something to the security guards, who moved on immediately.
‘Why … are there dogs?’
‘We have to clear the station – for cleaning. And sometimes there are people …’ He shrugged, making a negative gesture with his hands. Then he smiled at her, with irrepressible gallantry. ‘But you, Madame … that is different. Come with me.’
She hesitated.
‘Come! I will show you a corner. Sometimes in the summer we have to let people stay – there are many young travellers then. Or if they are very old or very young, sometimes refugees – you understand?’ She nodded, and he added, ‘We must be just. Always we must be just.’
Opposite Platform 19 was a small area, hidden from the rest of the concourse by a construction of tall green barriers – as if repair work was going on beneath. A sign announced it as for relaxation: a row of blue plastic seats and a spout for drinking water were the evidence of this. There was graffiti on the walls and a strong smell of urine, but Ana sat down gratefully.
‘You are cold? I think it is cold …’
She shook her head, thinking how little people like him could possibly know about cold. ‘I will sleep here – thank you.’
‘And in the morning – you will find your train …’
‘Yes.’
He turned up the collar of his leather jacket, shifted his feet a little, then obeyed the crackle of his walkie-talkie, and walked away, bidding her goodnight. As he told the others a few minutes later, he was unwilling to leave her there. He was honest: it was not just that he was naturally inclined to be generous, but because she was so good-looking – with something vulnerable about her he loved in a woman. ‘Merde,’ he said. He would have been tempted to invite her back to his place – just for kindness, nothing else – if Maxine had not just moved in, and been so damned jealous.
Thirty-Nine
Very early the next morning Ana made the long walk to Place de la Nation, and began to carry out her plan. Beginning in the south – because that part was narrower and looked therefore quite easy – she would take each street in turn, filling it in with pencil on the detailed plan of the arrondissement, thus systematically working through. She did not allow herself to be daunted by the scale of her task; street by street it could be accomplished, and she had no alternative but to believe there would be someone to recognize the photograph. If Franklin was working in a kitchen, she reasoned, it was surely likely that at some stage Ion would have come to see him. She buried the secret fear that this was not necessarily true, that in any case Ion was not a particularly memorable child.
She had walked the length of Rue de Lagny, and covered the small streets that ran off south to Cours de Vincennes, when she realized her first mistake was to assume that the restaurant she sought must be Asian. How stupid! John Nayagam had told her that the Swiss needed to employ migrants as cheap kitchen staff; why should it be different with the French? She must ask at every single restaurant and café.
After a while she stopped her lengthy, stammering explanations to indifferent waiters, asking for the manager, and generally wasting time, and refined her approach to a simple, ‘Je cherche ce garçon. S’il vous plait, I’avez-vous vu?’ The answer was always the same. Sometimes, she thought, they hardly bot
hered to glance at the photograph she offered on the palm of her hand. Other times there was real interest, and the picture was passed round among the staff, to be returned at last with a regretful, ‘Non, Madame.’ Occasionally a waiter would flirt with her, joking that he wished she was looking for him, or that she should be wanting a man a little older than that – and she would turn away with such dignity and disappointment that the man would feel oddly ashamed.
By midday she had filled in a good many of the roads south of Rue des Orteaux, and allowed herself to rest in the corner of a large, noisy café. She ordered oeufs sur le plat for 15 francs, and ate greedily. Then she wiped her plate totally clean with the bread, and picked up all the crumbs from the table on a moistened finger, oblivious to the smiles of two elegantly dressed young women drinking kir nearby who had never seen anyone eat so quickly. She stared at the street plan, making her coffee last as long as possible. Her shoulder ached from the bag, and her legs were already tired.
When three men deep in animated conversation at the next table finally rose to leave, Ana leaned across and snatched the bread they had left, shoving it in her pocket. The smiles of the young women faded and they stared at her, then at each other, talking in whispers. Ana did not notice; she had begun to wonder where she would sleep that night, and the thought increased her loneliness and exhaustion. She would not return to the Gare du Nord, and could not recall seeing any seats at all on the Gare de l’Est. She wondered if perhaps she might slip into a church before it closed, and hide in a dark corner where no one could see her …
At last she rose to leave, and wandered up Bagnolet. It was the doubling-back on herself that was the most wearisome aspect of her task; retracing her steps to be sure she missed no side road, no run-down cul-de-sac. And the repetition of her question during the hours of the afternoon became wooden and boring, containing none of the urgency she felt. As she held out Ion’s picture again and again it seemed as if that fuzzy, faded image of a boy with dark hair falling over his forehead had little to do with her; it belonged to a stranger, whom, by some whim of providence, she must find. She fancied she might pass him on the street without recognizing his features; at other moments, every passing child – girl or boy – looked just like him.
Once she stopped by a playground and stood transfixed, watching children playing on a wooden structure, like a fort. Then, glancing around she noticed the empty sandpit churned up by children’s feet, and leading away from it, clearly visible, a trail of little footprints in damp sand which gradually faded away. She held on to the railings with both hands, leaning her forehead against the cold black metal, eyes closed so tightly that she seemed to see an after-image of little feet in the red darkness.
By five o’clock she was accustomed to the sight and smell of food. It would never have seemed possible to her that there could be so many cafés and restaurants in one country, yet alone one part of one capital city. How little they knew in Romania, she thought, so that even their dreams fell so far short of the reality which the people she passed in the street took for granted. Brasseries, bars, small cafés, Turkish, Chinese and Indian eating houses, French bistros and the more expensive restaurants with crisp white tablecloths and folded napkins – she entered them, and gradually her hunger faded with the growth of a strange revulsion at the profligacy of it all. The world had become an organism afflicted by perpetual greed, its mouth opening constantly to shovel in food, sustaining a soul reduced to saliva, stomach juices and shit.
She saw one restaurant throwing out fruit she would have queued for in Bucharest, and quietly asked if she could take two apples. The young sous-chef looked at her in surprise; she did not look like a beggar, and he could not understand why she should want the old fruit. Feeling a natural flicker of contempt for those who ask, he handed her two golden apples, slightly shrivelled and flecked with black – then offered two soft oranges and a banana as well. The banana was blackened, but Ana was grateful, and put the fruit in her bag. She could not keep her eyes from the plastic sacks stuffed with waste.
It was after five now. Ana had been walking since 7 a.m., and her hip-bones ground in their sockets. Her neck and shoulders ached. Darkness shading the streets like her pencil, lamps lit in upstairs windows, made her think of sleep, but that thought brought its own sense of defeat. She went to a call box, fumbled with her coins, but at last managed to get through to the Tamil office. She had a vague hope there might be news, and decided anyway she would ask Skandarajah if she could sleep on the floor there. He was a good man, she sensed that. She knew he would say yes. But the man who answered the phone spoke poor French, and kept repeating, ‘comment?’ She tried English, which was somewhat better, but the message was unhelpful in any language: Mr Skandarajah was not there, and he did not know when he would be back.
She had turned along Rue de Bagnolet, heading East, when she saw the belfry of a church, jutting above the buildings. It quickened her footsteps; she thought of sitting just for a while – unless perhaps she could lie down in a dark corner and wait until morning.
Saint-Germain-de-Charonne was situated at a quiet opening of roads; there was no one about. Relieved, Ana walked up the steps, expecting the door to open at her touch – when she would be led, she believed in her exhaustion, to a place where she could rest. And pray – she would pray too, because that seemed to her to be valid.
But the door was locked, and she walked around searching for another one in vain.
She entered by the side gate, and found herself in the small graveyard behind the church. A notice announced this would close at six; wearily Ana thought she would spend the last fifteen minutes wandering, as she decided what to do next. Although it was quite dark now the graveyard was illuminated softly by lamplight, and Ana could see quite clearly. In any case, she had never understood why anyone should have fear of the dead.
Walking up the main avenue, she bent to pick up a red gladiolus lying on the path, only to discover it was made of plastic. She beat it on her hand, then laid it on a slab of newish grey granite. The older family tombs were like little houses: tall, and with doors of ornate ironwork, usually incorporating the universal symbol of the winged hourglass. She read the names, wondering if the Lalandes, the Ricards, the Malfroys and the Girards knew she was there – if they were watching from whatever heaven they were lucky enough to inhabit. A bird whistled faintly in a corner of the graveyard behind her, and his song was taken up by another, and another, in a final chorus before the night. Ana was glad of the sound, evidence as it was of life present all around her, surviving (despite everything) with mindless joy.
She turned and looked up at the massive buttresses that supported the back of the church, and wondered how old the building was. It was not as beautiful as Humor or Voronet, but then, she doubted there were many buildings in the world as beautiful as Humor or Voronet. Perhaps the Sacré Coeur …? But the thought of Paris, and the splendours she had read about but not yet seen, depressed her again. So big …
Looking at her watch, she wondered who came to lock the gates, and walked up the main avenue, heading for the northern gate. It was then that she noticed, on the left of the path, the dilapidated ‘house’ of Families Choismier et Fichot, more neglected than any other tomb she had seen. There was something unbearably melancholy about the cracks in its walls, and the way the rusty iron door hung across at an angle, one hinge long broken. It was empty inside except for a deep pile of dry leaves, blown there over two or three years and swept out by no one. The two families must have died out long ago; there was no one left to care for this monument.
‘We have things in common, little house – so maybe I should make you mine,’ Ana said aloud, inexplicably entertained by the thought.
She looked around quickly. If she left the graveyard she would have no alternative but to wander, until perhaps she found a public lavatory to sleep in, or a doorway. She quailed at the thought, not because she was afraid of privation – how could she be, with what had gone before? –
but because she could not bear the intensity of her isolation among crowds. She needed to feel safe walls around her.
Without hesitating she ducked down, squeezed past the door, and sat down on the cushion of leaves. Nobody could possibly see her; it was unlikely that the caretaker would search the tombs for intruders. She had the bread and the fruit – it would be sufficient. When the time came for sleep – which she knew would be very soon – she could rest her head on her bag and curl round, just fitting the space.
So – Monsieur Fichot, and Madame Choismier, and Mademoiselle Fichot-Choismier, or whoever you were, do you mind me resting here? Of course not, I always thought the dead meant well, and that they alone knew how we could be happy, if only we plucked up the courage to ask. And what would you say to me? Would it be that the chief lesson we have to learn is that of absurdity? By that token Romanians would be the wisest people in the world, with lonescu as our prophet. For we have knowledge bred in us: that were we to penetrate the iconostasis, were we to lift our heads at last to look into the face of God, we should see an ape grinning back at us, gibbering promises and scratching his fleas. And when we flee in horror, we flee into the path of the rhinoceros. Knowing that, how can we forgive ourslves for failing to see that our tragedies are inconsequential?
Oh no …forgive me, forgive me …
Why talk to these Fichots and Choismiers, whoever they were? Probably fat bourgeoisie, red-faced with too much wine, greedy and forcing their daughters to marry brutal men. Mamă, Tata, it would be better if I spoke to you, because I know you are there. If you are not, then I am completely alone, and nobody deserves to be that solitary, there are not enough sins …