After a few minutes, seeing me lost in thought, Julian said, ‘How much longer are you going to stay in Paris?’
I looked up. ‘My grant runs till the end of June, but I have a little cash saved up. The apartment’s not let again until September. Putnam said I might do some teaching back home next year.’
‘It’s certainly an interesting area, the Occupation. I’ve done a bit more research of my own.’
‘Hey, you stick to your Romantic poets with the long hair. This history stuff is mine.’
‘I was thinking of offering a guided tour. It would make me some pocket money. Les Années Noires. Four Years We Must Forget. Or rather not. It takes you round some nice parts of Paris. The Opéra, the Kommandatur in the building opposite, which is now Berlitz and Air Maroc. Then onto the Métro and over the river to Bir-Hakeim and the site of the Vélodrome d’Hiver and the grudging little monument to all those packed off to Auschwitz.’
‘Yes, but you’re going to need some human touches, I think.’
‘I can take them to Avenue de Suffren, near the Eiffel Tower, where the Tambour sisters lived. Germaine and Madeleine. Incredibly brave women. But some fool resister had left a briefcase on a train with documents full of names and addresses. Number 38, Avenue de Suffren was a death trap. The Gestapo had it watched it for years. Then we’d swing down to Sèvres–Babylone, to the Hôtel Lutetia, where the Abwehr set up shop, then up to Avenue Foch, where SS Security chose to put their headquarters because it was Marshal Foch who’d taken the German surrender in 1918.’
‘That’s quite a grudge.’
‘When I walk past number 84, Avenue Foch and look up to the little maid’s rooms on the top floor, where the SD used to torture their prisoners, I sometimes think I can hear the ghost of a woman crying.’
I said nothing.
‘You look sad,’ said Julian. ‘Don’t you like the food?’
‘What? No. I like it. What is it?’
‘Duck something.’ He looked at the small menu. ‘Pithiviers. Whatever that is. Tart. Pie. It’s not bad, is it?’
‘It’s great. No, it’s just that I was thinking. We talk so much about the importance of remembering. Of redeeming the lives of people who have gone before. Of educating children so they don’t make the same mistakes. What if that’s all just pious nonsense?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well. What, really, is the difference between the commemoration of an atrocity and the perpetuation of a grievance?’
Julian breathed in. ‘I think we know.’
‘Don’t just dismiss the question.’
‘I’m not. Only a few years ago the Serbs were massacring Bosnian Muslims to get their own back for the way the Serbs were beaten by the Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Kosovo in 1380-something! The whole Serbian identity is built on the myth of Kosovo Polje. Wouldn’t it be better if they’d just forgotten? Six hundred years is a bloody long time to brood.’
‘Sure is.’ I was beginning to feel a little worn down, but Julian carried on.
‘What happened to the ANZAC forces at Gallipoli in 1915 was the making of Australia. The anniversary became their national day. But it also preserved a feeling of anger against their British commanders. It made resentment a key part of who they are. Though Britain lost twice as many men as Australia and New Zealand.’
I looked down at the table, fearing I was about to lose the ground I’d gained earlier that evening. ‘That was great,’ I said, standing up suddenly. ‘I’m sorry, but I think I should be getting back now.’
Julian put his hand on my wrist. ‘I’m sorry. Was I … I didn’t mean to go on.’
‘Not at all. I’m just tired.’
‘Do you feel all right?’
‘Yes. Just tired. I got a lot … off my chest … Earlier on.’
‘I’ll find a taxi.’
Tariq had been all but invisible since the evening of his birthday party. The next day he’d offered his room to Jasmine, who’d previously been sharing my bed. I said yes and thanked him for his offer. Tariq took himself off at once, saying he’d be back when Jasmine returned to New York at the end of the week.
In the drunken haze of the birthday evening, I’d hadn’t thought much about his embarrassment over General de Gaulle. The conversation moved on in his absence and it was a while before he returned, pale-faced, from the bathroom. Who was I to judge him anyhow? Back in my freshman year I’d had plenty of de Gaulle moments of my own, and they’d just spurred me on. It was less a ‘love of learning’ than a desire not to be shown up that had made me sit an extra hour in the library and grind things into my memory.
Reluctance to laugh at Tariq’s ignorance was part of a deeper shift I felt starting to take place. I couldn’t put it into words yet, but there was some sort of tectonic rumbling … I sighed. There was no time now to think about some reshaping of my life’s foundations. I had work to do. It was a question of laying out papers on the table in the living room, making plans, cutting, pasting and starting again, as I began to shape my chapter.
There was the sound of a key in the door and Tariq came in, carrying a small backpack.
‘Are you okay?’ I said. ‘Where have you been?’
‘I went to see an old friend. A Chinese woman on the twenty-first floor of the Olympiades. Has Jasmine gone?’
‘She left this morning.’
‘I liked her.’
‘I could see that.’ I found myself smiling as I settled back to work.
When Tariq had had a shower, he came back and sat down in the sitting room with a can of Coke. I looked up reluctantly from my table, over the top of my glasses, but he didn’t budge.
‘Good party, wasn’t it?’ he said.
I took off my glasses. ‘Yes. It was a good evening.’
‘I liked your friends.’
‘Thank you.’
‘So that’s the guy you’re always having dinner with.’
‘Julian? Not “always”. Sometimes.’
‘But he’s not your boyfriend, right?’
‘No. I told you.’
‘He takes you out?’
‘He always tries to pay, if that’s what you mean by “taking out”.’
‘And what do you talk about when you’re on a not-date with him?’
‘Why do you ask?’
‘I just wondered. I saw him … Looking at you.’
‘We talk a lot about my work.’
‘Is that all?’
‘The other day I did tell him about … More personal things. We talk about the past, mostly. He’s done some work in my area as a matter of fact. He’s made some suggestions.’
‘Like an extra researcher?’
‘In a way.’
‘And does he try it on with you?’
‘God, no.’ I laughed. ‘It’s not like that between us. He’s a Brit who talks about the pubs being open and having another cup of tea.’
Tariq squeezed the empty Coke can with an irritating noise. ‘Do you think he’s maybe … laughing at himself? Living up to some idea you have of him?’
‘A little bit, I guess. But he’s still not … It’s more complicated. Believe me. Now I need to do some more work, so if you could …’
‘Is it?’ said Tariq, standing up.
‘Is it what?’
‘Complicated?’
I put on my glasses again and opened the Masson file.
That evening I had an e-mail from Julian with a poem attached. It was called ‘The End and the Beginning’, and it was by a Polish writer called Wisława Szymborska. ‘This is what I was trying to say the other day,’ Julian had written. ‘But obviously she puts it better.’ The poem was about how, after every war and every atrocity, the mundane act of clearing up has to begin. Bridges need to be rebuilt, bodies are buried, life continues. After a few years, some people can still recall the reasons for the disaster, some are starting to be bored by the subject. It ended:
Those who knew
what was going on h
ere
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.
In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.
It was good, I thought, and seemed somehow universal. But it was not the last word. It made me more determined still to visit Natzweiler, the concentration camp in the Vosges mountains – a trip I’d been postponing for a while. It was a camp for men, but I knew that Andrée Borrel had been murdered there, along with three other women of SOE who had parachuted into France. It was the only Nazi concentration camp on French soil and interesting for that reason; I also wanted to pay my respects to Andrée, a woman after all described as ‘the best of us all’ – a phrase that had haunted me since I first read it. An Internet search showed it was reachable from Strasbourg, though there seemed to be no railway station nearby and no buses. I’d have to hire a car.
As I was tidying away my papers for the night, I came across the photocopy of ‘La nuit de décembre’ by Alfred de Musset, which I’d never finished translating. I quickly read myself back to the point where I’d stopped: the poet followed everywhere by someone who looked exactly like him, not so much a double as an alter ego … How this figure had watched him as a child, a student, a lover and so on, sometimes benign, sometimes frightening – an apparition at his father’s deathbed and a companion on his travels through Europe.
The next part of the poem was more confessional. It concerned the memory of a love that had been lost. The poet was alone on his bed, imagining the warm absence of his lover. He gathered up some physical mementos, strands of hair, some letters – the ‘débris d’amour’. He looked at the relics, the eternal vows of a single day, ‘tears wept by eyes which tomorrow will no longer recognise them’.
Without the presence of the double, the poem became suddenly fierce. I stopped reading and put it to one side. There was only a page or so left and I thought I might try to finish my translation on the train to Strasbourg.
In the early evening of the next day, feeling a little housebound (what my old Lyonnaise landlady liked to call ‘casanière’), I decided to go for a walk in the city. I thought I remembered Julian telling me that de Musset had once seen his alter ego coming towards him in the Tuileries Gardens. Or was it the Jardin du Luxembourg? There was another famous poem, by Verlaine, called ‘Colloque sentimental’, about the ghosts of two lovers in a ‘vieux parc, solitaire et glacé’, an old park, lonely and frozen. Perhaps I’d been thinking of that. I quickly looked the poem up and found that it was only a few lines long. The two ghosts walk towards each other asking if their love had ever truly existed. ‘Do you still see my soul in your dreams?’ The last line was: ‘The night alone heard their words.’ This poem also seemed too powerful for comfort and I pushed down the lid of my laptop on the open file.
At any rate, I’d go to the Tuileries because I’d never been there before. It was not part of the Left Bank I’d gone looking for as a student, nor of the place of slums and factories that I’d recently been frequenting. It belonged to a part of the city where space had been no object to the monarchs and emperors who’d laid out the vistas. Emerging at Louvre–Rivoli, going up the steps, I pictured Major Klaus Richter doing the same thing: getting out of the first-class German carriage at the front of the train, spotting the leggy Juliette with her handbag worn bandit-style on its long strap and the carefree swing of her hips as she climbed the steps and set off down the rue de Rivoli. Beneath the arches of the street, down the long colonnade, I could all but see the hanging Nazi flags that brushed her shoulders.
Inside the gardens there were busts and statues celebrating the Romans who’d invaded Gaul – an influence so important to France, but quite unknown in my own country, or in Tariq’s for that matter. None of the inscribed names meant anything to me and I doubted whether they were familiar to the others who passed the stone beards without a second glance.
I walked down an avenue of horse chestnut trees, the dust grey-white on the hard ground. On my left was a silver-birch plantation and a notice that told me it had once been the site of a ‘manège’ or riding school. It was twilight, but the gardens were still full. From being the private pleasure ground of kings, the Tuileries had become, in the French way, a garden for the People. I sat on a bench and thought of those who’d trodden these paths. The enchanting Gilberte Swann as a child chasing a metal hoop, adored from afar by the young Marcel of Proust’s novel … Mathilde Masson and her keen Armand, who’d sat together over their rationed picnic, perhaps on this same bench, as he told her he was part of a Resistance group.
A slight, dark-haired woman of about my own age, dressed in a similar sundress with bare legs, walked across my eyeline towards the children’s play area, where she leaned over and lifted a small child up into her arms.
I had come to the Tuileries for gentle exercise and peace, but found my mind raging with thoughts that wouldn’t quite connect. In a narrow avenue, behind a screen of pleached hornbeams, a young married couple posed for wedding pictures, the photographer hurrying them to catch the last of the light. I stood up and breathed in hard. It was time to go.
The park was beginning to empty as I walked towards the eastern end, where it joined the courtyards of the Louvre. Here the gravelled paths gave way to a green lawn on which were hedges of box and yew. As I walked between them in the first moments of night, I heard rustlings from inside the foliage, then saw male arms and legs sticking out. Everywhere I looked the bushes were alive. A few feet in front of me, two men crawled out, then stood, adjusting their clothes.
Behind the lawn was the museum, a nation’s cultural identity in colossal stone; beside it was the glass pyramid, a grand projet grasp at immortality by a president whose name I couldn’t bring to mind. On the grass there were scores of abandoned fast-food cartons and bags, half-litre polystyrene cups with lids pierced by plastic straws, among which the satisfied couples were beginning to pick their way towards the rue de Rivoli.
Nineteen
Filles du Calvaire
I never quite knew if Victor Hugo was telling the truth, so back at the flat I did an Internet search into the Paris events of 1961. There was plenty there. Things in the Algerian War were out of hand, with massacre and torture on both sides. Some wild Algerians had brought their struggle to the streets of Paris and had killed about a dozen cops in the course of the year. So the government called in Papon, who’d been a district torturer in Algeria, rounder-up of Jews at the Vélodrome d’Hiver in 1942 and later on was convicted of crimes against humanity. Just the man. He introduced an 8.30 p.m. curfew on all 150,000 Algerians in and around Paris and sent in police squads to Algerian districts to rough up anyone of ‘North African appearance’. He told his men to be ‘subversive’ and that he would cover for them. A demonstration against the curfew was planned, but police blocked every station and road into the city centre. Despite this, about 30,000 Algerians were able to gather and protest. The police, many of them old Vichy militia men who’d escaped trial in 1944, grabbed as many as they could and bussed them off to detention centres where they shot some, tortured some, and knocked out others with truncheons or pickaxe handles. Then, from bridges all through the city, including one at police headquarters near Notre Dame, where Papon was watching, they tied their hands and threw them into the river.
Most of what I read stressed how hard it was to know the exact numbers, since it had all been denied at the time and the police archives were still closed. There’d been a few campaigns and books by journalists in recent years, but the biggest source of information on the numbers seemed to be ‘citation needed’.
Although I could now more or less understand all this (something I couldn’t have done in January, when I first arrived), I knew there was no chance of finding out the truth. I had no real basis for
thinking that either of my grandparents had been involved. I had nothing more than an unreasonable suspicion – or maybe just the hope of bringing their story to an end in my mind.
I decided to concentrate on a matter that was easier to deal with. I chose a day for my flight home and bought the ticket. For all that I had learned in Paris, the thought of home was exciting. I had already begun thinking of the covered market and the spice shops in the medina just behind, where the red powder was trowelled out of sacks and put on scales with brass weights. I had missed the cakes in the café at the Rif cinema and I particularly missed the fried-squid shack on the steep hill up to the casbah. I was starting to think about our house as well, not so much the people as the view from the roof terrace over the sea between the shirts flapping on the line.
Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t feeling sad or beaten. Paris might have exhausted me, but it hadn’t got the upper hand. No. My meetings with Clémence had changed my life for the better. I’d also learned so much from Victor Hugo. He’d told me about what he called the destiny of France. According to him, it was the historic duty of his country to be a light and an example, the guardian of freedom for the world. In his version of events it was the French not the Jews who were God’s chosen people. He believed in a god, he said, but not in the clergy. ‘Whoever teaches about the invisible world is a priest,’ he told me. ‘All thinkers are priests.’
It’s only fair to admit that I’d also benefited from the example of my stern landlady. I was more impressed by seeing someone who actually lived in a serious way than by my father telling me to work hard while pouring whisky down the throats of his would-be business partners. In all the long months I’d spent in the city of Paris I’d discovered through the people I’d met – through Clémence, Hannah and Victor, through Hasim and Jamal, through Juliette at Stalingrad and even a little through Baco and Sandrine and the cleaner in Beijing Beauté Massage – how many different ways there were of being alive.
Paris Echo Page 23