En ce moment, je joue au théâtre avec des acteurs très jeunes, qui ne I’ ont pas connue. Et tous les soirs, je salue. Quatre fois, cing fois, six fois. All bout de la sixième fois, je regarde les visages, dans la salle. Parmi ces visages, il y en a toujours un, un peu pâle, entouré de cheveux noirs, qui sourit. Une jeune fille. Il y en a toujours me. Et pendant un court instant, je pense: ’Tiens, Pascale est venue, ce soir. Elle aurait pu me prévenir. C’est très bref.
Jesus.
I’m delaying things now as you can see, reluctant to move forward. Tiens indeed. After dinner we - Beth and me, Laurent and his friends - walked through the Marais till we came to Les Bains Douches. It looked from the outside like what it was, an old swimming pool. Except there was a man on the door checking names and a gaggle of beautiful people offering themselves up for his approval. We had no problem, the guy on the door even favoured Beth with a small bow and a Bonsoir Mam’selle.
It was a vision of the very near future. Inside a year there would be places like this in London, New York, Berlin, but right then there was nowhere cooler on earth than Les Bains Douches, nowhere where the new worlds of fashion and music and film were more inseparably intertwined, creating what . . . ‘The Eighties’, I suppose, with all their flash and filigree.
I loved it. I was in raptures. I could see everything ahead of me. I was talking to a friend of Laurent’s, he said he was sure he could find work for a cool guy like me, making music for films. I wanted it all, to swallow it whole. I wanted to live here forever and I was so grateful to Laurent, so in awe of his command of this world, and so coked off my face that, later that night, when we were sat there on a banquette, watching Beth dance to Grace Jones, and Laurent leaned over and said, ‘You mind if we share?’, I didn’t even hesitate, just nodded like I’d known all along that this was the price on the ticket.
I mean, I should say I knew she liked him, and it wasn’t as if I forced her. It’s only that when she looked at me, like she was asking if I was sure this was OK, I just smiled again, a smile I hope to Christ has never passed my face again.
It was simply managed. They left together. I stayed on for an hour or so, maybe more, you know how time flies when you’re with M. Cocaine, and I had my new friends to talk to, my new career to plot. Then I came back to the Ile de la Cité. Rang the bell and went up and straight away Beth left the big sleigh bed and joined me on the floor. In the morning Laurent went to work, and Beth cried in my arms and said not a word.
That was the end of us. It wasn’t the real end, of course, there was a coda, a tailing off, the same old sad decline, but that was the end. Of course.
And I did at least receive my rewards. A month later I had a job as musical director for the first ever French punk-rock movie, and I was living in an attic flat of my own, on the rue de la Roquette. I saw Laurent from time to time. Once at the Palace he leaned over to me, said, ‘You still see that girl? You know she really liked you, man. She told me I could only fuck her in the ass, said the other place was strictly for love.’
There are things, you know, you prefer not to hear. More than that there are lessons you prefer not to learn. Like this one: that some things, when they break, they stay broken.
That’s enough. I have, as I mentioned, been drinking, and if I stay in any longer I will become maudlin, listen to more records I shouldn’t. Instead I shall go out, take a petite tournée around the bars. I’ll see if there’s a girl who would like some new shoes.
<
* * * *
THE REDHEAD
CARA BLACK
W
e must never let the new generations forget what happened here during the Occupation, in their own neighbourhood, the horrors, the deportations,’ Monique, the lycée teacher, said, her eyes sombre. ‘Your presentation on the Resistance will be so welcome . . . Your work is so important.’
Lucien had just handed the young brunette their Resistance Association pamphlet and smiled. ‘We’re proud to speak with your students,’ he said. ‘That’s our mission here.’
They stood in the small Association office overlooking Canal Saint Martin, with the carved woodwork ceiling, a non-working marble fireplace, and second-hand file cabinets. Mina, a widowed great-grandmother, sat at the worn metal desk affixing address labels on envelopes. Lucien combed back his white hair with his fingers, then gestured to her. ‘Mina and I do what we can. We’re the old-timers and have been doing this work for years. Call and we’ll arrange it.’
Lucien showed the teacher out, opened Le Parisien and sat down. Outside the window, bicycles sped along the cobbled Canal Saint Martin quai; an arched metal bridge spanned the dark green strip of water framed by the blue-washed sky.
‘Tant pis!’ Lucien’s age-sported finger stabbed at an article on the newspaper’s second page. ‘The redhead’s publishing her “Resistance memoirs”.’
‘Her lies, you mean,’ said Mina, shaking her grey-haired head. ‘As if she’d admit being a Jew who slept with a German soldier!’
‘According to this,’ Lucien said, ‘she implies we killed him.’
Mina dropped the volunteer labels on the desk.
‘But how can . . . ?’ The words caught in Mina’s throat as she remembered that rainy July night in 1943. The Wehrmacht’s marching jackboots echoing on the street, below in the damp, dripping cellar, bricking the soldier’s body in the wall by sputtering candlelight. The image of his pink cheeks, the blond hair flashed in front of her.
‘Eh? I don’t believe it, Lucien.’ Mina pulled the sweater tighter around her thin frame.
Jews hid in the quartier to avoid deportation; in coal bins, in attics, in cellars. And in this one cellar, bad luck had it, Lucien’s mother, then the concierge, had hidden their Hebrew school teacher. But La Rouquine, their comrade who lived upstairs, hadn’t known. She’d arranged a rendezvous in the cellar with her lover. Her jackbooted soldier in Feldgrau, the green-grey hue that still sickened Mina.
‘Read that, Mina.’
Mina adjusted her glasses and read ‘nicknamed La Rouquine for her red hair, the author, widow of the former Interior Minister, reveals her exploits with the Resistance on Canal Saint Martin and new theories about her father’s wartime disappearance connected to the suspected murder of a Wehrmacht sergeant. . .’
Mina stifled the fear welling inside her. ‘Our names aren’t there, Lucien. Relax. That happened in wartime, more than sixty years ago. He was the enemy. What does a dead Nazi matter now?’
‘Keep reading.’
‘La Rouquine insists on setting the record straight concerning a Wehrmacht sergeant who, she claims, allowed Jews to escape and was murdered by Resistants ignorant of his true sympathies.’ Mina’s voice wavered. ‘La Rouquine will show the press Resistance hideouts in a network of cellars including the murder site, in her words, of “a noble” German, following her book launch on Friday.’
Mina crumpled the newspaper.
‘As if he were a Resistance sympathiser!’ she snorted. ‘He was her lover. It’s a publicity stunt, this web of lies. She can’t accuse us . . . mon Dieu, Lucien, she slept with him!’
‘Her word against ours. And she’s respected, reputed to receive the Légion d’Honneur. No one will believe us.’ He shook his gnarled fist. ‘The Association will be ruined, a scandal . . . prison, your grandchildren will know . . .’
‘Prison? We’re old. It was wartime. You make no sense.’
‘La Rouquine suspects we killed him. She’s made him out to be a hero, she’ll accuse us.’
‘He was her lover,’ Mina said. ‘And why after all this time? She knew where to find us, to confront us.’
‘Don’t you see? She’s planned this for years. Strikes out on the offensive, as usual, to bolster the grand illusion she’s a Resistance heroine,’ Lucien said. ‘Her politician husband died, no one’s left to protect her or her lies. She figures we’d never dare accuse her since . . .’
Mina stared at him. ‘Tiens! A German soldier
bricked up in a basement wall during wartime poses no threat to us. Let him keep mouldering.’
‘But you killed him, Mina,’ Lucien said.
Mina trembled. Why did he bring that up?
‘Or have you forgotten murdering the soldier like everything else that happened that night, Mina?’
As if she could forget.
‘But h ... he attacked. It was him or me, Lucien!’
She’d tried to push it away after all these years. The real reason, the haunting past. Mina thought of their years of work supported by donations now at risk. But La Rouquine wouldn’t pursue this, she wouldn’t dare unless . . . something else incriminating lay in that cellar.
The telephone drilled. Lucien sat up startled. ‘The flics already! Questions . . .’
She had to act calm.
‘They won’t necessarily link this to us,’ Mina said. ‘Let me handle it.’
She picked up the receiver of the old black rotary dial phone, the tattooed numbers on her arm visible.
‘Resistance Association, bonjour.’ She listened. ‘A murdered Feldwebel. . . Sergeant?’ Mina’s wrinkled face sagged. ‘Sadly, many of our members who could provide insight have passed . . . concerning this memoir? Monsieur, the war spawned countless stories and rumours ... I have no idea ... an interview? We’re very busy . . . next week . . . call back and we’ll make an appointment.’
‘Who was that?’
‘A reporter sniffing a story,’ she said. ‘We’ll leave it alone, he’ll go away.’
‘La Rouquine won’t let it go away. You can’t bury your head in the sand now.’
Mina noticed Lucien’s stricken face. Once he’d been young, the ringleader of their Resistance youth group, and wore wooden-soled Occupation-made clogs like the rest of them. At the beginning, their meetings were innocent, Mina remembered. Politically ripe, they met with their friends after Hebrew lessons at Saturday-shut, collecting money for the Spanish Civil War, for the children in Madrid, determined to open people’s eyes. Lucien and the others came from families living in one room like hers. One bag of coal a month for heat. Always the smell of leather seeping from the factory on the heels of the cold. The one metal courtyard spigot, the only source of water for the five-storied building, carried up worn winding stairways. The toilet on the palier, in between floors, the buckets rimmed with ice on January mornings.
Now he was a frightened old man afraid of secrets. More afraid than she was.
She stared at him. ‘What aren’t you telling me, Lucien?’
‘They’ll find them.’
His tone sent a shiver up Mina’s spine.
‘Them? What do you mean?’ A quiver of unease ran through her.
‘Him. That’s what I mean, Mina. We have to check the cellar, make sure there’s no trace of him,’ he said, his thin mouth set in a determined line.
She shook her head. Her arthritis had kicked in, she was on blood pressure medication. No way would she budge.
‘You’re panicking over nothing,’ she said. ‘I need to go home, cook for my great-granddaughter’s bat mitzvah party.’
‘So you want to take the chance when La Rouquine shows up with the press . . . ?’
‘Non ... I don’t know.’
Fearful and confused, she had no answer. With a sinking feeling she knew the past had come back to haunt them. But then, had it ever gone away?
Lucien dialled a number on the phone. Mina stared out the window at the budding plane trees lining the quai. Could anyone ever get away from the past?
He slammed down the phone, interrupting her thoughts.
’Get your bag,’ he said. ‘According to the concierge’s daughter they’re doing electrical work in the cellar. It could mean they’re opening the walls.’
Mina’s shoulders twitched. She dreaded the five-minute walk she’d avoided with painstaking care all these years, the street full of memories. Now it looked like she had no choice.
Out on the quai Mina’s misgivings ballooned as they turned the corner into rue du Faubourg Saint Martin. Her hands trembled seeing the wrought-iron balconied sand-stone apartment building, like all the others except for the deeper blackened patina of soot. Next door stood the old Lévitan warehouse. Now a remodelled publicity firm but during the Occupation, the German warehouse storing looted goods from Jewish deportees’ apartments.
They stood in the now deepening twilight in front of a crowded café. On the boulevard’s pavement around them Indian men clustered in conversation, an African woman in a bright yellow headdress pushed a stroller. The new immigrants of the tenth arrondissement, but in their day it had been Russians, Poles and Lithuanians.
‘There’s people everywhere,’ she said.
‘We have to check, Mina,’ he said.
‘And if we find something, what would we do?’ She pulled his arm. ‘Let’s leave, Lucien. We’ll deny everything.’
But he hit the numbers on the digicode and the door buzzed open.
‘Ah, Monsieur Lucien, long time no see,’ said a young woman with a baby on her hip standing at the concierge’s door. ‘Maman’s shopping, desolé.’
Startled, he stepped back then recovered.
‘Ça va, Delphine,’ he said, greeting her with kisses on both cheeks. ‘Just getting things from storage. Don’t worry, I remember the way, we’ll see ourselves out.’
‘Careful on the stairs, one of the lights went out,’ she said, nodding to Mina. ‘They’re steep.’
She meant for old people like you. Mina thought.
‘Merci’
He led the way past the wirecage elevator. In the back. Mina saw the rear cobbled courtyard with green garbage containers by planter boxes of delphiniums and pots of geraniums.
Lucien opened the cellar door, leaned on his cane, took one step down.
Mina stopped. ‘But this is ridiculous! My back’s gone. I won’t go down there again. I can’t.’
‘You came this far, Mina! Don’t make it so difficult.’
Lucien clutched his cane, staring at her.
‘This feels wrong,’ Mina said.
‘It’s simple,’ said Lucien. ‘It was always the plan. We made a pact.’ He switched on the cellar light.
‘A pact . . . what do you mean?’ asked Mina.
Lucien ignored her. ‘Ready?’
She stood, not budging. ‘What pact?’
He leaned forward, lowered his voice. ‘Years ago our group made a pact never to reveal what a happened. Or to let anyone find the body.’
’But everyone’s gone except us.’
‘That’s why I must keep my word.’
She’d never heard about this pact. . . what did it mean? Dread filled her but before she could ask more he’d gone ahead. She clutched the railing as Lucien proceeded down the narrow stone stairs. Dampness and the smell of mildew and rotting wood assailed her nostrils. And it took her back to that time so long ago but still vivid today.
Sixteen years old, her hands browned with shoe polish and sore from stitching leather uppers on wooden-sole shoes - doing the piece work her parents took in to survive and put food on the table. She walked in public always anxious an official would demand her papers and discover she’d folded her jacket lapel over her yellow star.
Lucien shone the flashlight over the arched stone walls branching into tunnels under the building. Flaking stucco powdered the beaten earth floor. Electrical wires and tools were set to the side. Lining the walls were caged storage areas for each apartment, holding plastic bins, children’s bikes, chairs behind the wooden enclosures.
‘It didn’t look like this before,’ Lucien said in alarm. ‘That’s all new.’
‘When did you last come here?’ Mina asked.
‘Years ago,’ he said. ‘It’s Maman’s old storage. I rent it. They never ask questions.’ Lucien shuffled ahead. A bare electric bulb cast stark light over their faces.
‘Number 38, that’s it.’ Lucien reached under the enclosure, rooted in the dirt, pulled out a key
and unlocked the padlock. He opened the door of a warped wooden shed to a musty smell.
Mina saw the cobwebbed foot-pedal sewing machine in the corner. ‘You kept that, Lucien . . . here?’
His father had been a skilled tailor. ‘Eh. I had no room in my place. When I came back from the camp, that’s all that was left.’ He shrugged but Mina caught the wistful look on his face. Lucien’s family had been deported and he was the only one who returned.
Paris Noir [Anthology] Page 6