Paris Echo

by Sebastian Faulks

  We left the square and passed between some modern buildings and a low-rise block of flats. At the junction with a busy road, she waited to cross by a café and I hung back. Then we were off again, and at the next crossroads, she turned left into the broad, tree-lined Avenue de Suffren. After a while, she seemed to slow down, checking the numbers on the buildings.

  The atmosphere had changed from the calm of rue Humblot. We were now near enough to the Eiffel Tower for the pavements to be full of tourists, mostly Japanese, or Chinese (I’m not good at knowing the difference). There was a shop with its name, Parapharmacie, in green lettering and a row of hire bicycles in their docks.

  The buildings behind were tall and grand, old Paris. As Clémence hesitated, I crossed the road and stood behind a tree. She went to the intercom at the entrance to number 38, a double chestnut door. I saw her heave her shoulders up, as though bracing herself, or breathing hard. She clutched her bag in both hands, then nudged the door with her hip. It opened inward. She looked round one more time, almost as though she was searching for me, glanced up to the sky, then stepped inside and disappeared.

  Twenty

  Jacques Bonsergent

  I took stock of my work and of how much longer I needed to spend in Paris. Although I’d finished my investigations one thing still worried me: the story of Mathilde’s family going to the seaside in Normandy. I wondered why Mathilde had included it in her memories of the Occupation when it had taken place so many years before. Presumably the archivists also thought it was relevant – or they’d have cut it.

  Old Masson, the slaughterhouse man, the butcher of Belleville: perhaps he was significant in a way I hadn’t understood. He was certainly from a memorable generation of men. According to the standard figures, the French casualties of the First World War numbered 1,358,000 dead and 4,266,000 wounded, of whom 1,500,000, including Mathilde’s father, were permanently maimed or disabled.

  These seats are reserved. 1. First. Before all others. Aux mutilés de guerre. One and a half million of you.

  Among more than five and a half million casualties. Perhaps this was the significance of the seaside boarding house. And this figure was what lay behind everything that had happened during the Occupation years: the official policy of Collaboration so proudly announced by the marshal (the same man who twenty years earlier had been the hero at Verdun); the self-seeking of some citizens, the indifference of others; the racial hatred and propaganda and the deportations to the death camps; the acts of heroism. Everything. Because the idea of another five million was not bearable. It was not thinkable.

  It was clear to me now that old Masson had been a tough, tough man. His journey to work would have tested even a youngster with both legs. From Couronnes to Convention, which was the station nearest to the old slaughterhouses, I counted 23 stops. There was only one change of line, at Pigalle, but with no escalators that would have been hard work for a man on crutches. And with one and a half million mutilés at large, of whom perhaps a third or more would be seeking work in Paris, he wouldn’t even have been guaranteed a reserved seat on the train. No wonder he drank so much.

  The next day, I decided to retrace Masson’s daily steps. Line Two took me overground past Stalingrad and Barbès, the Tati store and the little Africa of painful memory. At Sèvres–Babylone, beneath the Hôtel Lutetia, my eye was caught by a performance at the far end of the carriage. An old man with a thick white beard plied a pair of grubby-looking puppets above a black curtain he had rigged between the chrome uprights. Passengers seated nearby were studying their phones or shoes. The puppeteer was undeterred, apparently trusting in his story, which seemed to be both adventure and morality play. Among the puppets whose names I caught were Marius and Cosette.

  At Convention, I had a fifteen-minute walk to the site of the old slaughterhouses, now the Parc Georges-Brassens. Might old Masson’s trade union – or at least his able-bodied colleagues – have provided him with a ride by bus, or even by horse and cart?

  The entrance to the park itself was marked by two bronze bulls, face to face on rectangular pillars; inside, there were flowerbeds planted red and orange, a stone-edged pond and gravel paths under plane trees. It was an ‘amenity’, I thought, for the people in the blocks of flats that rose from the slope behind it; but however much it was now appreciated by women pushing children in their strollers, it was hard to picture the sheds where the animals had been rounded up each day, the hoses washing down the floors, the foaming red drains, the butchers’ vans loading the carcasses for the restaurant kitchens in Clichy or Saint-Germain.

  On a long loop, uphill and round, among the municipal planting, I was hoping for some sense of the past, of the place where Mathilde’s father had worked; but in the empty benches, the blanched concrete of the apartment blocks behind and the occasional smack of a runner’s foot in the dust there was only the thin texture of the day.

  I was making for the main gates when I stopped. In my nostrils was the strong smell of horse. I turned and sniffed, then followed the aroma towards the edge of the park. I expected to see a riding stables somewhere along the way, tucked in behind some trees. I listened for the sound of clopping metal shoes. But although I passed an area with coloured swings and slides and a ‘crèche maternelle’ built in the same playschool style, there was no sign of anything to do with horses.

  Eventually, beside the street, I came to the former stables, where in old Masson’s day the creatures had been brought to wait for the final stage in the journey from pasture to table. I remembered reading how local people had complained about the smell of horse at Vaugirard, much worse apparently than that of dead cows or pigs or chickens.

  Yet no horse had been brought here for almost fifty years. Beneath a pitched glass roof, the handsome iron-framed building, open on all sides, was now a market for second-hand books. There were some collector’s items, but most were uniform editions of the works of Rousseau or Voltaire, rescued from old houses and for sale by the metre as interesting wallpaper. In a second stable were illustrated comic books, some still current and some that time had frowned on, like the colonialist elephant, Babar, or Bécassine, the dumb Breton girl. Whatever their warmth or weakness, the books were discussed by dealers and the buyers only as curios; it was not part of the transaction that anyone would read them.

  As I walked home later from the Métro, I hoped that Tariq would be in. He’d have no answers, no explanation to the riddle of the horses, but he was someone to talk to. And I still believed his ignorance of the past made him in some way more receptive. It was only a day or so before his birthday party that I’d told him so. ‘I like your stories of the girls you see on the Métro. The encounters you’re always having. I think maybe it’s because you have so little baggage. You’re not always making connections, saying, Things must be this way because of what happened during the Commune, or whatever. You just ricochet through life like a pinball in a machine. You see things for what they are today. It’s a gift.’

  ‘Really?’ he replied. ‘I assumed it was the drugs.’

  But Tariq wasn’t there; and it had never been part of our arrangement that he’d leave a note. So for some hours I did what I always did, deciding what most needed my attention – reading, writing, tidying, e-mailing, planning ahead.

  None of it distracted me. I could concentrate neither on the meagre information I’d found concerning the Natzweiler camp nor the salad of lettuce, lentils and roasted walnuts I made for dinner. I could think only of horses.

  I had sensed the presence of animals that weren’t there. Smelling was not quite as bad as seeing or hearing, which would have been delusional – or psychotic. But even so … Could there be such a thing as temporal synaesthesia – a condition in which you confused not two senses, like sight and smell, but in which different eras became merged? Could it be that my brain, made hyperactive by the shortcomings of the present, had actually experienced, through smell, the richer past?

  And if so, I thought, pushing my hand up
through the front of my hair, did that mean that I was going insane?

  Moving the half-eaten dinner to one side, I began to type into the search field of my browser. ‘Chevaux’. ‘Parc Georges-Brassens’. ‘Manège’. ‘Equitation’. For some minutes it coughed up only things I knew. I noticed that my hand was shaking as I typed ‘Parc Georges-Brassens pony rides’. Low down on the first page I saw the word ‘poneys’. The French spelling. I clicked the link and found a blogger who confided that the Parc Georges-Brassens was his ‘third favourite’ public space in Paris. This faint praise was followed by the disclosure that small children could be offered pony rides on certain days of the week. The last time had been three days earlier. It was a pungent animal to be detectable after almost seventy-two hours, but there was an old photograph of three children in hard hats on three small ponies and in the absence of any better explanation it would have to do.

  I’d printed out my rail ticket to Strasbourg and now filled in some details of my driver’s license online to save time at the car-hire desk. I made sure I had the right clothes to wear – a linen dress, light cardigan for the evening, comfortable shoes for walking – and two books to read on the train. Then I had a shower and washed my hair.

  A cup of chamomile tea, I thought, would ready me for an early night, but I found my hand still shaking when I poured the boiling water. I wished Tariq would come back. I wished Jasmine had still been there. Perhaps I could call her in New York – the timing would be fine.

  But it was neither of these people that I most wanted to talk to; nor was it my parents or my brother or my professor or any other of my friends and colleagues at home or in Paris. I saw suddenly – with a clarity that almost blinded me – that the person I most wanted to see, and the only person I would ever need to see again, was Julian Finch.

  ‘Le numéro que vous avez demandé n’est plus attribué’, said the recorded message on his phone. The number you have dialled is no longer recognised. Please hang up and try again.

  There was the sound of a key in the door.

  ‘Tariq. Hi. Where have you been?’

  ‘Oh, you know.’ He smiled hazily. ‘Hanging out.’

  ‘Have you been smoking?’

  ‘Jamal gave me a whole lot and I need to get through it before I take the plane. But don’t worry, I won’t smoke here.’

  ‘Doesn’t look like you need to.’

  Personally, I was high on certainty. Julian would be able to explain and support: today and in the future, as far into it as I could see.

  ‘Listen, Tariq, I’m going out for a bit.’

  ‘Where to?’

  Normally, I would have told him to mind his own business, but the release of energy that came from admitting something so long denied had made me light-headed. ‘I’m going round to Julian’s apartment. I couldn’t get hold of him on his cell phone so I’m going over there.’

  ‘Really? Why are you doing that?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Didn’t he text you or anything?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘He’s gone back to London. He told me to tell you that he said goodbye. Something about de Musset.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘He said, “Tell her de Musset needed me.” He left his French cell phone behind.’

  ‘When did you see him?’

  ‘About five days ago. We met for a drink. I meant to mention it, but I’ve hardly seen you, and—’

  ‘You met for a drink?’

  ‘What’s so odd about that?’

  ‘But Julian’s my … My friend.’

  ‘Yes, but he asked me if I’d keep an eye on you.’

  ‘He asked you to what?’

  ‘Nothing. He’s staying with his sister, he said. Do you know her?’

  ‘No, of course I don’t know his English sister.’

  ‘He left a number for emergencies. A landline.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘I think it’s in my other jacket.’

  ‘Well, go on.’

  While Tariq went to his room, I tried to understand the change that had taken place in my life.

  Tariq came back into the sitting room, looking uneasy.

  ‘Have you got it?’

  ‘I think I must have left my jacket in a bar last night.’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Tariq.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He turned to go, then stopped. ‘He said to give you his love.’

  Two days later, Tariq left for Morocco.

  And the following day was the one I’d booked for my visit to Natzweiler. To be sure to arrive within the opening hours of the concentration camp, I had to leave Paris early in the morning.

  Bastille, République … The famous names went by on the Métro; then Jacques Bonsergent, which was, depending on what you knew, either the place where you acknowledged a young wartime resister executed by the Germans or an area with a coming club scene. A few months ago, I would have admired one way of living and despised the other. Now I was not so sure. I’d looked up the names of the puppets, Marius and Cosette, and found that they were characters in Les Misérables, a novel I’d never read on account of a vague prejudice against musical theatre. So there it was: I hadn’t read the most famous novel of the nineteenth century. Nor had I known till Julian told me that the rue de la Goutte d’Or was the setting of another nineteenth-century novel almost as famous as Hugo’s. I hadn’t even checked whether Georges Brassens was a painter or a singer. You couldn’t know everything, I thought, as my train arrived at the Gare de l’Est; and that being the case, there were after all no polarities of enlightenment and darkness, there were only degrees of ignorance.

  Just inside the station was a Marks & Spencer deli, where I bought a ham and mustard mayonnaise sandwich to eat on the train. The shop name made me remember what I’d once been told by my brother: that these sandwiches were made for the retailer by the American Heinz corporation in a factory in an English town called Luton, known for its population of Muslim immigrants. A small number of families made up the workforce, Warren said, looking after one another, bringing in their cousins to cover holiday breaks. But were they happy, I wondered as I paid for the sandwich, to be handling ham? The Indian Mutiny had been started by Muslim colonial soldiers unhappy that the bullets – or possibly the rifles – they were handling had been greased with pork fat. Or was it Hindu soldiers and cow fat? And if so, then …

  Stop it, I thought. The urge to connect everything is going to drive me crazy; I must try to focus on the present.

  On the concourse of the Gare de l’Est, I looked for the platform number of the Strasbourg train and found my seat with ten minutes to spare. I settled by the window, sandwich and Evian to hand, and opened my book.

  It was impossible to concentrate. I looked at the landscape, forcing myself to pay attention, to study it as a naturalist might. Mostly flat, only slight undulations … A parallel motorway with boxy little cars of near-identical design … Wind turbines, a silver-birch plantation … Green wheat fields with lines of chalk showing through the earth … Deciduous trees with balled rooks’ nests.

  Everyone else in the carriage was either asleep or playing with their cell phones. The man next to me had a cowboy jacket that gave off a smell of cheap leather.

  The further east we went, the hillier the ground became. Now there were orchards of pears and apples and inclines that grew steeper, the first foothills of the Vosges.

  Andrée Borrel and her three SOE colleagues had been brought here, perhaps on this very line, from a prison near Paris – Fresnes, I was pretty sure, though had there been a diversion through Karlsruhe in Germany? Sometimes in the course of these deportations there were moments of lightness. Freed from their solitary cells, the women were able to play cards, smoke and swap stories. They at once resumed both their service identity and their lives as ordinary people, chatting, laughing in the relief of camaraderie. No one really knew what was happening, not even the Germans who guarded t
hem and sometimes joined them at whist. No one knew what awaited them at Natzweiler. It had a gallows and a gas chamber, but it was not an extermination camp and only a minority died there – those marked ‘Nacht und Nabel’, Night and Fog, distinguished by a yellow badge that meant they were not expected to return and could be worked to death. As for Andrée and her three friends, the processes of Nazi logic were perhaps still unresolved at this point in their journey.

  Glancing round the carriage, I strained to hear the four women, talking in low tones, punctuated by inappropriate laughter. Professor Putnam had urged us to believe that death was not a locked door, but that earlier lives were permanently present and available. But the extent to which I felt these women near me now was beyond historical empathy and I thought I should try to rein it in.

  What was known about Andrée Borrel? Very little – though I had collated all the mentions of her I’d found in published books and in documents from archives I’d visited. Photographs showed a determined face, between stolid and beautiful, depending on the light. She had left school young and worked in a dress shop, then behind the counter at the Pujo boulangerie on Avenue Kléber near the Étoile. It was too smart an area for Mathilde or Juliette, but it was not far from German military headquarters and I wondered if Klaus Richter had ever bought a cake or croissant from her. Andrée hated the puppet Vichy government and loathed having Germans in her country. She joined a Resistance network in the south, but, when it was uncovered by the Germans, escaped to London, where she was trained by SOE. Photographs showed her in the uniform and cap of the FANY, an army nursing unit that gave military cover to SOE operatives. On being dropped back into France, she found herself at once sharing several weeks of dangerous activity with her English circuit leader, Francis Suttill. It was he who had described her as ‘the best of us all’. She had fallen in love with the circuit’s wireless operator, a man called Gilbert Norman. When the Prosper circuit was betrayed and broken, she was sent to a prison outside Paris, where she kept her spirits up by writing letters to her sister on cigarette papers and persuading guards to post them for her.