“Well then, I’ll drive you to the station, Chmara.”
He pulls me by the sleeve. He’s acting familiar, but also deferential. We pass through the crowd of dancers. Still the pasodoble. Now there’s a steady, blinding downpour of confetti. All around me, a great deal of laughter and movement. I collide with Fossorié. One of the tanned blondes, the one whose name is Meg Devillers, flings her arms around my neck.
“Oh, you … you … you …”
She doesn’t want to let me go. I drag her for two or three meters. In the end, I manage to break free. Pulli and I find ourselves at the top of the stairs. Our hair and our jackets are covered with confetti.
“It’s the Scintillating Soirée, Chmara.” He shrugs his shoulders.
His car is parked in front of the Sainte-Rose, at the side of the lakeshore road. A Simca Chambord, whose passenger door he ceremoniously opens for me.
“Step into my jalopy.”
He doesn’t start the engine right away.
“I had a big convertible in Cairo.”
And then, point-blank: “Your luggage, Chmara?”
“It’s at the station.”
We’d been rolling along for some minutes when he asked me, “Where are you bound?”
I didn’t answer. He slowed down. We weren’t going over thirty kilometers an hour. He turned to me and said, “… Travel …”
Then he was silent. Me too.
“One must settle somewhere,” he finally said. “Alas …”
We were driving beside the lake. I took a last look at the lights, those of Veyrier on the opposite shore, and the dark mass of Carabacel on the horizon ahead of us. I squinted, trying to see the cable car. But no. We were too far away from it.
“Will you come back here, Chmara?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lucky to be leaving. Ah, these mountains …”
He pointed at the saddle of the Aravis mountains, distantly visible in the moonlight.
“They always look as though they’re going to fall on you. I’m suffocating here, Chmara.”
This revelation came straight from his heart. I was touched, but I didn’t have the strength to console him. He was older than I was, after all.
We drove into town on Avenue du Maréchal-Leclerc. Close to the house where Yvonne was born. Pulli was driving dangerously, on the left like the English, but fortunately there was no traffic in the other direction.
“We’re early, Chmara.”
He’d stopped the Chambord in the station square, in front of the Hôtel Verdun.
We walked through the deserted station hall. Pulli didn’t even need to get a platform ticket. My bags were still in the same place.
We sat on the bench. No one else around. There was something tropical about the silence, the warm air, the lighting.
“It’s funny,” Pulli said. “We could be in the little Ramleh station …”
He offered me a cigarette. We smoked solemnly, without saying anything. I even think I blew a few defiant smoke rings.
“Did Mademoiselle Yvonne Jacquet really leave with Monsieur Daniel Hendrickx?” I asked him in a calm voice.
“But yes. Why?”
He smoothed his black mustache. I suspected that he wanted to tell me something deeply felt and decisive, but it didn’t come. His brow was furrowed. Drops of sweat were surely about to run down his temples. He looked at his watch. Two minutes after midnight. Then, with an effort: “I could be your father, Chmara … Listen to me … You have your life ahead of you … You must be brave …”
He turned his head left and right to see if the train was coming.
“Myself, at my age … I avoid looking back at the past … I try to forget Egypt …”
The train was coming into the station. He followed it with his eyes, hypnotized.
He wanted to help me with my luggage. He passed the suitcases to me one by one, and I stacked them in the corridor of the train. One. Then two. Then three.
We had a lot of trouble with the wardrobe trunk. He must have torn a muscle heaving the thing up and pushing it toward me, but he worked in a sort of frenzy.
The guard slammed the doors. I lowered the window and leaned out. Pulli smiled at me.
“Don’t forget Egypt, and good luck, old sport.”
He said those last two words in English, which surprised me, coming from him. He waved his arms. The train lurched into motion. He suddenly noticed that we’d forgotten one of my suitcases, a round one, by the bench. He grabbed it and started running. He was trying to catch up with my carriage. At last he stopped, panting, and made a broad gesture of helplessness. Then he stood very straight, still holding the suitcase, under the lights of the platform. He looked like a sentinel, getting smaller and smaller. A toy soldier.
Villa Triste Page 14