The Steppes of Paris

by Harris, Helen

  He had liked the idea of being near the Jardin des Plantes. Judging from his admittedly brief exposure to Paris parks, he doubted if it would be of any use for any of the normal purposes of parks: jogging, lying on the grass, relaxing. But the location was promising and the rent well within the limits sanctioned by the accountant, Monsieur, it turned out, not Rat but Rapp. He was a bit discouraged to see that the house seemed to be the most run down in the whole road; next to it was a building site, still at the early stage of being a rubble-filled pit, and it looked as though this house might any day follow suit. Dispiritedly, Edward rang the front door bell and pushed the dark green front door, which had clicked open in response. He found himself in a small, dark but very strong-smelling entrance hall. Someone had been boiling vegetables in the vicinity for a number of years. As instructed, he climbed the ill-kept round staircase to the third floor and rang the bell of the left-hand flat. Almost at once, the door sprang open, as though the flat owner had been listening to his footsteps coming up the stairs, and Edward was confronted with one of the most grotesque human beings he had ever seen.

  For some seconds, he was unable to decide if the person in front of him was a woman or a man. Its clothes, not to mention its physical attributes, indicated clearly that it was a woman: a tight-fitting green skirt and a peach blouse filled with a fairly hefty bosom. It had light red hair, elaborately styled and set. But there was something in its bold stance as it stood, legs slightly too far apart, on the threshold, and continued to hold onto the door handle with one large hand, which was unmistakably male. Its voice, when it spoke, put an end to any doubt.

  “You’ve come to see the flat, I take it?” he asked in a scratchy but not unpleasant tenor. “Entrez, Monsieur, s’il vous plaît.”

  Edward hesitated on the landing. “Are you Monsieur Comblat?”

  The person laughed, a high-pitched, strained trill.

  “Madame or Monsieur, whichever you prefer.” He took a step back and beckoned again to Edward to come inside. He added confidingly, “I prefer Madame.”

  Ninety-nine per cent of Edward wanted to stay out on the landing. But some tiny perverse hunt for a story persuaded him to go in. Besides, it was a bit difficult at that stage to think of a polite reason not to.

  The small flat looked as if the owner had no intention of moving out in the near future. It was stacked from floor to ceiling with records and yellowing back numbers of distinctly odd magazines. A tailor’s dummy sporting garish theatrical make-up dominated the living-room.

  After a guided tour in which he successively mocked each of the cluttered rooms with a disproportionately grandiose commentary, the owner explained cautiously to Edward what he had in mind. He wished to let the flat but not completely, as it were; he had just got a new job which was going to involve a lot of touring – he was, he informed Edward airily, in “le showbusiness” – but he wanted to hang onto his Paris base. What he proposed was that Edward rent the flat, complete with all his trappings and weird magazines, but at an exceptionally low rent, on the understanding that every fortnight or so he would be free to come back and spend a couple of nights there to “recharge his batteries”. Edward declined the offer to stay and reconsider his decision over coffee, which followed his prompt refusal. He gave Monsieur Comblat an unnecessarily wide berth in the front hall and still shuddered at his hard, vindictive handshake halfway down the stairs.

  He was so very relieved to be out of the house and safely in the street again that he didn’t take note of where he was going. He found himself walking beside the railings of what was presumably the Jardin des Plantes. Suddenly he was shocked by a perfectly hideous, inhuman cackle. Only after a moment of extreme alarm did he notice the netting of a big aviary beyond the railings and realise that inside was the zoo.

  After that, he thought that whatever the second flat had in store for him would be an anti-climax. He was tempted, in fact, to give it a miss altogether. He was tired and he couldn’t believe that Paris had anything worthwhile to offer him, that weekend or at all. But the flat was almost on his way back to the hotel and he thought that he had nothing better to do with the rest of his afternoon.

  He found the rue Guynemer for the second time on his flapping Plan de Paris. It ran alongside the Luxembourg gardens and until he saw its stern, shuttered houses, he thought it might be rather an agreeable place to live, lying as it did at almost the dead centre of the map. He was greeted by a small but visibly ferocious old lady, dressed in a raincoat and holding a furled frilly umbrella. For a moment, he thought she was going to tell him that the flat had already been let; she was only waiting for him to arrive to go out. But it turned out that, although she had given him her address over the phone, the flat to let was actually off the rue Guynemer, a few minutes’ walk away. She didn’t allow Edward so much as a glimpse of the inside of her own flat. She whipped the front door shut behind her and double-locked two locks at the top and bottom of the door. As they bustled over to the other flat – the old lady’s heels rapped severely on the pavement – she cross-questioned Edward about his credentials, shooting sharp sideways looks at him as they scurried along. She appeared displeased that he was a journalist. She repeated several times, approvingly, that the previous tenant had been a gynaecologist. She asked Edward which paper he worked for and, when she hadn’t heard of it, to tell her the French equivalent; was it Figaro or Le Monde?

  The flat was desolate; it was at the back of another sombre apartment house like her own, high ceilinged and spacious but almost without natural light. Its rooms, which all opened off to the right of a long, sinister hall, looked out onto an adjacent blank wall where a scrawl of etiolated ivy only underlined the bleakness. The room smelt unpleasantly of mothballs and the furniture was mostly hidden under opaque plastic covers, two of which, the old lady informed him, she would ask him to keep on to protect the better armchairs. The bathroom finished him off; it was a skimpily partitioned slice of the hall, without a window, into which were crammed what looked like half a bath with an indecent little step to sit on, an antiquated washbasin, a bidet and a monstrous water heater which, when the old lady switched it on momentarily to show him how the system worked, started to pant horribly with steadily mounting hoarse breaths. The old lady chose this moment of maximum horror to tell him that there had been a misprint in the advertisement. The figure given for the rent was too low; where they had put a five, there should of course have been a seven. Edward turned to her, pleased with his outward calm. “I know plenty of more cheerful cemeteries where I could stay for a lot less,” he said.

  Later, in the evening, he went out to find something to eat and some entertainment if he could. He found himself drifting back towards the Marais where he had had dinner the night before. The streets which had been closed and silent had somehow or other come back to life. They were full of the most exuberantly un-Parisian people bustling to and fro and the shop window shutters had been raised to reveal equally un-Parisian displays of seven-branched candelabra and silver tasselled shawls. He found a shabby North African restaurant in a backstreet which was pleasingly unlike the smart expense account sort of place he could have been eating in. Although half the items on the menu were unintelligible to him – Brik à l’œuf, Merguez – he managed to have a reasonable meal amid the high-pitched Oriental music and the constant coming and going of the owner’s acquaintances for what seemed to be free glasses of mint tea. He took as long as he decently could over his dinner to stay in the restaurant’s social embrace, although he was forced to give up on a deathly sweet pastry which seemed to set all his fillings jangling like alarm bells.

  Afterwards, he couldn’t find any entertainment he wanted to see on his own. With Roland or Guy, he might have gone to jeer at somewhere like the Crazy Horse but on his own it seemed profoundly sordid. He walked back to the hotel through the party-going crowds of a Saturday night, feeling like the classic outsider from French A-level, and Sunday, when he couldn’t make any business appointments to red
uce the time available to stew, was even worse.

  On Thursday or Friday of the following week, as he came back into the office from some specious errand he had invented to make himself seem busier than he yet was, Marie-Yvette told him he had had a phone call from Mrs Hirshfeld. She handed him the number and added, “It was something to do with a flat.”

  Edward’s heart plummeted. The last thing he wanted was for the paper to get involved in his accommodation arrangements. The more elusive his Paris flat became, the more convinced he was that it would be his only hope of redeeming his time here. Above all, he didn’t want that slender possibility appropriated by the paper too, so that his single remaining chance of displacement was removed.

  He went into his office and sat there for a while, feeling disgruntled and also apprehensive, before he lifted the receiver and dialled Henry’s home number.

  The phone was answered by Dinh. While she was fetching her mother, Edward prepared a polite explanation of why he could not take up Mrs Hirshfeld’s proposition, whatever it might be. Her bright, “Hi, Edward” interrupted his train of thought.

  He mumbled, “Oh, hello, Mrs Hirshfeld. I was told you telephoned while I was out. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to speak to you. I’d just gone off for a bit to deal with some bureaucracy.”

  Her laugh was high and concise like a wind chime. “Don’t worry, Edward. Have you found a flat yet? Henry told me the other day you were still looking, you were having a lot of problems.”

  “I’ve sort of got something in mind,” Edward lied.

  “You have? That’s great. Where is it?”

  Edward thrashed around. “I haven’t seen it yet. It’s just the estate agent told me this morning she had something a bit more promising sounding. I’m afraid I don’t remember the address exactly.”

  Mrs Hirshfeld marked an infinitesimal pause. “Well, take down this number anyway,” she instructed him. “It might not be what you want. But I think it is worth looking into.”

  The number, she explained, belonged to another teacher at the school where she taught art. By a complete coincidence she had been talking to this other teacher in the staff room a few days previously and she had happened to mention that a flat which she and her family rented out was standing empty. It was the last chapter of a long story involving an unsatisfactory tenant. Anyway, she, Mrs Hirshfeld, hadn’t given it another thought until a couple of days ago Henry had quite by chance spoken at dinner about Edward’s difficulties and she had remembered Mademoiselle Iskarov. She had spoken to her about it again that morning when she went into the lycée and it seemed the flat was still vacant and the Iskarovs, who only let it via personal contact and not through advertisements, would be happy for Edward to come along and have a look at it.

  Drearily, Edward took down the address and then the difficult name as well. Mrs Hirshfeld spelt it out, “I-s-k-a-r-o-v”, and then she added enthusiastically, as though it were a recommendation, for some reason preferable to teaching maths or gymn or biology, “She teaches Russian.”

  Edward decided he would wait for a few days in the hope that the choosy Iskarovs would have found somebody else by the time he rang. He had to ring, of course; his initial brief temptation to lose the piece of paper with the address and the telephone number was not an option. If Henry didn’t think to ask why he hadn’t been to see the flat, the Russian teacher was bound to.

  That weekend he had too much to drink; on Friday night in an Indonesian restaurant and on Saturday night in an Afro-Caribbean night club. He had spotted the club just a few streets away from his hotel and put its closed door and red light bulbs in the category of places to steer well clear of. But he had already drunk enough to have shed a few preconceptions as he walked back to the hotel on Saturday night and, seeing the door flick open to admit a group of loudly protesting West Indians who had been beating on the locked door, he gave way to a moment’s fatalistic curiosity and followed them inside.

  Downstairs, where the air was thick with heat, tobacco and other smoke, and the insistently thudding rhythm of a five-piece band, white customers were in a self-conscious minority. Edward bought another drink and squeezed into a seat rather too close to the pounding “Soleil du Sénégal”. Although hardly anyone looked at him and no one spoke to him, he felt peculiarly pleased to be there. Resolutely turning their back on the European city outside, the West Indians were creating a concentrated version of what they were homesick for; more tropical than the tropics themselves.

  The address intrigued him. Finally, the following weekend, he could not put off any longer contacting Mrs Hirshfeld’s teacher friend. He had seen two more impossible flats in the course of that week, and a third which was to all outward appearances perfectly acceptable but, he knew, totally wrong. It was in a large, beige, slab-like block built, according to the date stamped at the bottom left-hand corner of the façade, in 1927. Its entrance hall and stairs had marbled walls which looked like cross-sections cut through an immense pudding. As you climbed the stairs, you could identify darker veins which looked like trickles of a syrupy sauce. Unless he could find an alternative fairly soon, he saw he would end up living there.

  As he ran his finger over the seventh arrondissement on the map, trying to find the puzzlingly named street in which the Iskarovs lived, an unmistakable sensation of defeat settled over him. It had been ridiculous to suppose he could set out on a worthwhile journey within a stationary city. He might as well reconcile himself to living inside the pudding, where he would spend a pampered, stifled, utterly pointless year. For he had no intention of renting anything from a colleague of his boss’s wife.

  However, if only for the sake of good manners, he had to go through with it. Once he had located the Cité Etienne Hubert, a blunt cul-de-sac off the Avenue Duquesne, he tried telephoning. There was no reply on Saturday morning and he was considerably relieved. He spent the best part of the day wandering the grimy northern reaches of the Boulevard Barbès and La Chapelle. Henry had let drop in the office that those neighbourhoods were the closest you would come to the Third World in Paris. Edward thought maybe he could write a piece about them; a spoof travelogue as a rather dismal private joke. But the misery, bitterness and hostility he thought he could read in the inhabitants’ faces were not conducive to a jokey treatment. Besides, he was propositioned too often for comfort by some spectacularly stomach-churning prostitutes. On the Boulevard de Rochechouart, he came upon a loathsome rubber doll in a brightly lit glass case; when a passer-by inserted a coin, the doll’s vacant eyes and lumpen breasts rotated mechanically for thirty seconds. A surreptitious coin dropped as Edward approached drew an immediate small crowd.

  In the late afternoon, he tried the Iskarovs’ number again and he was a bit put out then that there was still no answer since viewing the flat would have been a convenient way to fill in the time before the evening.

  On Sunday morning, there was again no answer. By then, it seemed clear they had gone away for the weekend. Edward didn’t try again and spent most of the day, it was wet and cold, reading on his bed: a couple of hours each of Theodore Zeldin’s The French, Richard Cobb on France’s war record, and Borges. Consequently, he was more than slightly indignant when he rang one last time out of boredom at half past six and was immediately told by the woman who answered the telephone that they had been waiting for him to ring for days.

  “Come over and look at the flat now,” she suggested. “I’m not busy.”

  Edward leant across from the bed and lifted a corner of his lace curtains. Long ropes of rain were slapping against the window and it was almost dark. He said, “I think I’d rather see it in the daylight, if you don’t mind.”

  To his irritation, the woman at the other end positively snorted. “There is electric light there, you know.”

  Edward thought, ‘If you’re not going to bother to be polite, I really don’t see why I should either.’ But, mindful of the constricting connection with the Hirshfelds, he ad-libbed, “It’d be difficult timewise to
o tonight. I’ve got a dinner appointment later. Could I come and see it during the week?”

  There was a clatter at the other end and then a long silence as though the receiver had been accidentally dropped,

  “Hello?” said Edward. “Hello? Hello?”

  He was wondering whether or not to hang up and also whether or not to bother to redial afterwards when the woman returned.

  “I’m not teaching on Wednesday or Thursday mornings,” she informed him. “Or on Friday afternoon. Could you make any of those?”

  “Wednesday morning would be fine,” Edward said. “What sort of time?”

  The woman gave a gusty sigh, as if contemplating many weary hours filled with a round of unwelcome chores. “Eleven?” she suggested.

  “Fine,” Edward agreed. “Fine, I’ll be there. Eleven o’clock on Wednesday. Number Nine, Cité Etienne Hubert.”

  “It’s the last but one house in the street,” the woman said. “On the left, the last but one.”

  Edward reflected, as he dressed against the rain to go out and get some dinner, that the Russian name and Mrs Hirshfeld’s enthusiasm about it seemed distinctly irrelevant. The woman had sounded to him like a typical, hard-hearted Parisian bitch.

  He made sure to mention to Henry where he was off to on Wednesday morning although, to be fair, Henry didn’t seem in the least interested. He asked the taxi for the Avenue Duquesne, since the Cité Etienne Hubert was such a small street, and being in good time, he got down at the southern end of the avenue and strolled up.

  It was a grey day and there was little difference in colour between the weighty apartment houses on either side of the wide avenue and the sky. The brightest things in the streets were the yellowing autumn leaves, which were just beginning to fall, and reflected a cheering yellow radiance off the pavements as he walked along with his head bowed. Until he reached the corner of the Cité Etienne Hubert, everything ran along predictable, ornate Parisian grooves.