‘That was nice of you,’ I said, happy we were parting on a note of decency. But Mathilde only grunted.
After the handshakes and goodbyes, I waited with Tariq at the elevator. When I tried to get into it I found my left leg wouldn’t shift.
‘I can’t move!’
‘What?’
Slowly my foot came up from the carpet tiles. In the time we’d stood waiting for the elevator to come to the twelfth floor my shoe had become stuck tight by a piece of chewing gum.
From the lobby we walked out into the spring evening.
‘What a foul-mouthed old girl,’ said Tariq.
‘I couldn’t understand everything she said.’
‘Neither could I,’ said Tariq, as we headed for the Métro. ‘But don’t worry. I’ve got it all here.’
‘What?’
‘I recorded it on my phone.’
Fifteen
Place des Fêtes
I was so excited about seeing Clémence again that I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t do anything really. I did manage to speak to Hasim and tell him I wasn’t coming back. He shouted at me for a bit but then calmed down.
‘So what are you going to live on?’ he said.
‘I’ve saved some money. And I think I’m going home soon.’
‘All right, boy. If you come back, you know where to find us. Jamal says hello.’
‘Say hello back.’
Hasim wasn’t such a bad guy. He had this fear of authority, which I’d assumed was because his business was somehow shady, didn’t pay tax or something, but in fact I think he was just a law-abiding person who was always hoping for a break. Meanwhile, I’d built up a reserve supply of Jamal’s weed. It was powerful if erratic stuff and I usually needed only a little bit to be hammered for about three hours. I was wondering how I was going to pass the time till my Tuesday meeting with Clémence when Hannah asked me if I’d help her with some old woman she was going to see. Mathilde, her name was.
She lived in a cool part of town. We went on the Seven bis, which I’d always wanted to have a ride on. It wasn’t as clean as some of the lines, to be honest. The trains had orange seats and there was no announcer to tell you which station you were coming into, you had to work that out for yourself. At the Place des Fêtes even the benches on the platforms were orange – what you could see of them beneath the sleeping tramps or clochards. (Victor Hugo had told me that they’d got that name because they used to go into the old food market at Les Halles when the bell or cloche was sounding at the end of the day and they’d get given food that was otherwise going to be chucked out. I was starting to learn stuff in Paris, I really was. I could tell my father – if he ever asked.)
Anyway, up in the open air, there were big tower blocks and some shops with good cheap stuff in them and a huge Monoprix and a burger place. Almost the only thing missing was a Flunch. The lift in the building went really fast and the flat when we got there had a brilliant view.
Hannah seemed to be in a bit of a state. I saw her taking some pills out of her bag and swilling them down in a flower shop with water from a bottle of Vittel. I didn’t ask what the matter was. I’d once asked my stepmother if she was feeling okay when I saw her take a tablet and got a twenty-minute lecture about minding my own business.
It was painful to watch. Hannah was like an interviewer on television, but the old woman wasn’t playing. She just talked. I noticed Hannah struggling to keep up so I switched on the ‘record’ feature on my phone. Hannah kept trying to bring her back to the point, but it didn’t work. She was begging for some sort of big judgement on the past, but Mathilde didn’t see beyond what she’d done day by day. I don’t think the old woman was trying to be difficult, it was more that she just didn’t understand. I guess she’d never been to school. Or if she had, it was so long ago that she’d forgotten the whole business.
The other thing about old Mathilde was that she had a really disgusting vocabulary. Maybe when you get to be very old you don’t care any more, or perhaps she’d gone a bit crazy, like old people do. I was quite glad that most of it seemed to be flying over Hannah’s head. Anyway, I thought her life up there looked pretty good with this Monsieur Rashid bringing in her groceries and the caged bird and the television opposite her chair. If that’s old age, it doesn’t seem so bad.
The next day, back in rue Michal, Hannah asked if she could listen to the recording. We sat together at the table in the sitting room. Every now and then I’d stop the playback and rewind. Sometimes this was to reassure Hannah that we’d got it right, sometimes it was because I hadn’t heard it the first time and needed to listen again.
We came to the bit about the boyfriend, Armand, and this woman he was in some sort of Resistance group with. Simone her name was. I tried to translate for Hannah. ‘It drove me mad to think of that bitch sucking his cock. He had a lovely cock, it was very hard and it had a special taste. It was mine to suck and I used to stroke his balls and make him cry with pleasure when I bent over and let him lick—’
‘God, Tariq, stop it for a moment. Did she really say that?’
‘Yes.’
Hannah was red with embarrassment.
I said, ‘I think she was jealous.’
She began to laugh. ‘I think you could say that.’
‘I don’t know if “cock” is really the right word,’ I said. ‘At home we call it a zib. But I’ve heard “cock” in American films and I think—’
‘Yes, you’re probably right. Is there much more of this?’
‘Quite a lot more.’
Maybe the phone would reach the end of its recording capacity soon. That was my best hope.
I pressed ‘Play’ again. Mathilde’s voice said, ‘At night I used to lie there thinking of her putrid …’
I stopped it again and said, ‘I’m not sure about that word.’
‘What was it? I didn’t catch it.’
‘Chatte.’
‘Oh dear. Maybe we can use a word in your language for that too.’
‘All right. Qooq should do.’
I began to translate again. ‘… her putrid, hairy qooq. And him … fucking, I think we’d have to say, her disgusting chatte. Or qooq. And …’ I stopped. ‘I’m afraid it starts to get a bit rough here.’
‘Give me an idea.’
‘I don’t think you’ll want to use it in your book.’
‘Probably not. But I don’t want to be squeamish.’
I was beginning to sweat a bit. ‘It’s about Simone’s breasts and her … Her back parts. You know there’s a lot of pig stuff and merde and er … stuff I don’t even understand myself. To be honest.’
But I wasn’t being honest. I understood it, I just didn’t want to translate. Old Mathilde really wasn’t keen on Simone. A bit of me admired her passion, but really, some of the things she said.
Finally, Hannah stood up from the table. ‘All right. I think we’ve got the point. Can we go to the last bit now? When she was talking about how she reported Simone to the police? There was something there. About how she went back a second time?’
I was dreading this bit even more than the sex parts or when she’d referred to Armand as ‘un vrai petit con’. (I tried to explain that ‘con’ here maybe just meant really stupid rather than being another version of ‘qooq’ or ‘chatte’.) I had the impression that Hannah felt protective of Mathilde, that she really liked her for some reason. Not because she was a nice person, but because she was her special find. Or maybe just because she was a woman and she thought women always had a bad time.
I found the section and pressed Play. ‘They didn’t give me enough money, the police. They were supposed to give me more than that. Marshal Pétain had asked everyone, every schoolchild in the country, to inform. I didn’t even know you got money for reporting an enemy of the state, but when I told people back at the factory they said the police had short-changed me.’
‘Wasn’t there something else?’ said Hannah.
‘Yes, there was.’
I found it in the end.
Her voice was tired by this time and it sounded scratchy, but the words she said still came out quite clearly from my cell phone.
Mathilde said: ‘Next time I denounced someone I made sure I got the full amount.’
Hannah asked me to stop the recording there. Then she went into her bedroom and shut the door.
When I arrived at the entrance to Clémence’s building, my problem was that I didn’t know the code and there was no chance that four random numbers would work again. I went across the cobbles and looked up at the façade, hoping for a sign or a light, but of course the apartment was on the courtyard so I don’t really know what I was expecting to see. I had some of Jamal’s best in my pocket and not for the first time I wished I’d brought my sebsi, the little pipe I used at home. Instead, I rolled it all into a paper, lit up and smoked it quickly. There was no one else in the cobbled street to catch the smell.
It was six o’clock, the appointed time, and I was in the right place. But what on earth was I doing? Going to see a woman who looked like someone I’d seen in an old photograph book. Was that a good way to spend a Tuesday evening in early summer? There was more to it, though. Something I had to understand. There was also the sense that she lived in a world that was denied to me, and to which she alone had a key.
As I ground out the stub-end of my smoke, I looked at myself in a shop window for a few moments, turning from side to side. My face grew older as I watched. The man in the glass shook his head as if to say, ‘I don’t believe you, boy. Are you really going to do this?’
Then I turned back because I heard the street door grinding on its hinge, and there was Clémence standing on the threshold. I watched as Tariq crossed the road and as she kissed him lightly on the cheek.
When I’d had this sense of watching myself before – talking to my father at home or to the man beneath the railway arches at Stalingrad – it had lasted a few minutes as a complete switch or transfer. This time, it was intermittent. For the next hour I was in and out of myself.
Upstairs in her apartment, she sat me down in the same armchair. I took a cigarette from the offered box and she leaned over me with the table lighter, then went to the kitchen and came back with mint tea, hot and sweet, just like the time before.
‘I have to go out in an hour,’ she said as she sat down. ‘I have people to meet.’
‘You sound anxious,’ said Tariq. He used the ‘tu’ form: ‘Tu as l’air un peu inquiet.’
‘It is a little fraught, I suppose. It always is. And you?’ Et toi?
‘It’s nice to be here again.’
‘What do you want? Really?’
‘Just to be here. To watch you. And to listen. If you’d like to tell me things.’
She smiled and pulled away a shred of tobacco from her lower lip. ‘Of course.’
I said, ‘I went to that place you told me about. Drancy. Where they kept the people before putting them on the trains.’ (I hadn’t been there or anywhere near it. I’d only looked at it on Hannah’s laptop. But I wanted her to think well of me.)
‘That was good of you. What did you make of it?’
Tariq fumbled for words. ‘I think if I’d owned the place opposite, the Hôtel Vouvray, I would have let people stay for free. And maybe I’d have lent them binoculars so they could see their children or their parents in the yard when they did the roll call. Wave to them. Get a message to them.’
Clémence smiled again. ‘Maybe.’
‘Tell me more about yourself,’ said Tariq.
The room was full of smoke and the lights were very low. Clémence leaned forward to the table and took a cigarette, then she sat back in her chair, kicked off her shoes and put her feet on the table.
I had severe couch-lock. I’d blasted in a bit more kif than I’d meant out on the pavement there, and I knew I couldn’t move a muscle for a while. So I just sat, looking at Clémence’s long legs, the pale colour of her calves and the darkness higher up, and the sweep of her hand as she gestured. And hearing her voice was as good as listening to the sweetest music from home I could imagine, played through the best hi-fi in Paris.
When you’re as stoned as this you don’t take in precisely what’s said, it’s more of an impression. What I remember is patchy, but it was something like this.
‘… as a little girl at school in rue de Vaugirard. The teacher was a nun, an old woman in a grey habit with a headdress and glasses. There were so many girls in class and in the afternoons they’d take us sometimes to the Jardin du Luxembourg. Walking in a line, two abreast, it took ages to get there, Vaugirard is such a long street. We were Catholic girls and we knew all the saints and kept the feast days. Life was very ordered, and at home my father was kind and my mother was strict and that was the way it was. Of course I would have liked a brother or sister, but a sad look in my mother’s eyes when I raised the subject made it clear that that would never happen. Somehow we had a sense that this life was almost perfect as it was. We wanted it to stay the same for ever. The cakes with sugar on top from the baker at the end of the street on Friday afternoons. Mass on Sundays in the big church so I could wear my new hat. And lunch afterwards with neighbours and the doors open on to the terrace. Even my mother was laughing. But I was afraid. I was scared of other countries. Wars. I was afraid that the life we’d made might not survive. We couldn’t take intrusion from other people. Other ways of thinking, other peoples, other gods.’
It wasn’t clear to me exactly where young Clémence had lived, which arrondissement, because, as she said, the rue de Vaugirard goes on for ever. You couldn’t say exactly when, either, except it seemed to be a long time ago. Something about the way she spoke made me think of black and white films. Maybe it was a particular movie I’d seen one lazy afternoon recently – one in which a class of schoolboys is being taken off to exercise by the PE teacher, walking briskly along the rue de Vaugirard, and two by two they disappear down side streets, into shops, till there’s no one left following the teacher as he marches on.
At some point I think that Clémence was singing, a sort of folk song or lullaby. The language was a version of French, but not the one I’d learned as a child and not the one I’d been speaking all day. It was a mixture of what seemed like peasant French with bits of Spanish, Italian and Arabic. That’s what it sounded like to me, anyway. It was perfect kif music, nonsensical and haunting. I watched as she wiped away a tear.
As the effects of the drug began to wear off, I became aware that she was talking about a different country now. The dream of a Catholic city in black and white had given way to somewhere in Africa. I couldn’t say which country, though it was somewhere on the north coast, by the sea.
‘… the white buildings of the bay. The arches of the viaducts built up into the old town on the hill. The stepped alleys of the casbah and the palm groves of the boulevards along the sea … And friendships in the villages they’d built up over generations, the families who’d come once from Angers or Toulon with the local farmers and the clerks, the Arabs and their quiet women. In the schools near the port the children of the settlers studied with the local boys and girls, learning the history of a country that they’d never visit, revolution, rights of man and rule of law, the rise of science and the writers who had entertained the world – Le Misanthrope, Les Misérables, La Comédie Humaine … And then the world wars and the intrusion of another world, of another Europe … Then civil wars, the killing of the children and the women and the massacres of entire villages … And all that was left was the belief in a god who wasn’t there. That was all they could think of to hold themselves together. And now we have the war that never ends. But for a while – before I lived – there was a time when the springs in the hills ran through the wells of the casbah, through the bars and terraces of the big hotels below and out into the bay where the boats came in, unloaded, set sail again, all day until the sun went down.’
Looking back, I’ve had to join up some of the bits
and pieces here, but the images are clear in my mind. And then Clémence was singing again, in the same mixed language as before, a story of a shepherd on a hill and a child who never came home.
When she’d finished, she stood up and looked at her watch. ‘I must go and change,’ she said. ‘There’s not much time.’
‘All right.’
‘I’m me.’
‘What?’
I was puzzled. What she’d said, in French, was ‘Suis moi.’ As far as my slow brain could tell, that meant ‘I’m me’. She’d just dropped the ‘je’ at the start, as people do.
But who is that? I wanted to ask.
She shook her head as she went to the door. ‘Non. Suis-moi.’ She beckoned.
Then I understood. ‘Follow me’. Suis-moi. Of course. Even Hannah would have got it.
Tariq put out his cigarette and went down the hallway after Clémence into a dimly lit room with a brass bed under a lace coverlet. There was a threadbare rug on the parquet.
She pointed him to a chair then went through a door and closed it behind her. He heard the sound of a shower running.
He looked round the room. Above the stone fireplace was a painting of a saint. On the mantelpiece were two candles and some old porcelain. Over the bed itself was a crucifix. Light came from a bulb under a ceramic shade hung on a flex from the ceiling and from a dim lamp by the bed. There was an old wireless on a side table and the curtains were drawn.
The door from the bathroom opened and Clémence appeared in a dressing gown. She sat down at a table in front of a mirror and caught Tariq’s eye in the reflection.
‘Can I stay?’ he said. ‘That’s all I want to do.’
‘Of course,’ she said.
He gazed over as she rubbed some cream into her face and neck, then drew mascara along her lashes. She combed her hair, then rolled a dark lipstick over her mouth, leaning into the reflection of the mirror on the table.
Paris Echo Page 19