The Steppes of Paris

by Harris, Helen

  It was hardly a street at all; that was his first thought as he confronted the high wall in which it ended so abruptly only a few hundred yards away. There were about six apartment houses on either side, all of the same stolid mould, and then, immediately, a towering blank wall which ran from façade to façade of the two end houses and blocked off all perspective, views or passage. It rose to fourth-floor height at least, covered completely by a flourishing dark green ivy whose tentacles were just beginning to encroach on the adjacent houses.

  ‘No wonder,’ Edward thought, feeling his first inkling of sympathy for Mademoiselle Iskarov, ‘no wonder she had made such a point of not living next to the wall.’ The closer he came to it, the more overbearing it seemed; the last two houses looked grimly overshadowed.

  Number Nine, like all the other houses, was a pompous seven storeys of stone wreaths and stone fruit: pebbly grapes and fossil pineapples. Because he had been looking at Paris apartment houses for nearly three extremely long weeks, Edward noticed it had been built, like its neighbours, in 1901 and the architect was one F. AD. Bocage. Bocage! Small wood or copse? Edward felt a sudden warmth for the man who had covered his otherwise dull creations with his own bucolic symbols. That, surely, must be the explanation of the stone greenery up and down the street: Bocage’s trademark across Bocage’s facades. In the moment before he arrived at the front door and rang the brass bell coldly labelled “Ring then Push”, he indulged in a very brief but entertaining fantasy in which houses built by Monsieur Rat were adorned with rodents, by Monsieur Dubonnet with appropriate bottles and by Monsieur Lamour with erotica. It was the sort of joke which, if Guy and Roland had been there with him, would have gone on for days. It put him, as he rang then pushed the immensely heavy glass and green ironwork front door, in the first spontaneous good mood he had been in for a fairly long time.

  The lift was at the ground floor waiting for him so, as Mademoiselle Iskarov had told him her flat was up on the fifth floor, he took it and, as it rose, shivering and giving out a weird mechanical moan, he thought that he wouldn’t mind living in this building at all. Immediately, even before the lift had travelled another floor, he remembered that the flat he was coming to view was, of course, somewhere else entirely.

  The door was opened by a handkerchief. Or at least that was Edward’s first impression, as a muted honking noise behind the door gave way to a small woman obviously suffering from an outsize cold. Her face was almost entirely covered by a man’s checked handkerchief. Apart from her watering brown eyes, he could not see anything of her looks or even particularly of her age. He registered vaguely that she was wearing a rather fashionable and dramatic black and maroon knitted outfit, which did not, to his taste, go awfully well with her tinted auburn hair.

  He said, “Oh dear, I’m Edward Wainwright. It doesn’t look as if I’ve chosen an awfully good day to come.”

  After a severe spluttering cough behind her handkerchief, the woman let out a dramatic groan. “I completely forgot you were coming.” She hesitated, one hand on the edge of the door and the other still clamping her burka-like handkerchief to her face. “I’m afraid I can’t possibly come over there with you. I’ve got the most terrible cold.”

  “I can see that,” Edward answered, he was aware, a trifle ungraciously. “But can’t you give me the key and tell me how to get there? I mean, I’ve taken time off work specially to come over here and see it.”

  The woman eyed him up and down and, unexpectedly, considering her indignities of streaming eyes and spluttering, Edward felt at a sudden disadvantage for she was so protected by the handkerchief.

  “Come in,” she said, evidently not needing any further persuasion, which he couldn’t help but be marginally flattered by. “I’ll find the keys and I’ll explain to you how to go there.”

  She shut the door behind him and led him through an overfurnished hall, sneezing so explosively, he really did feel rather sorry for her.

  He said, “Gosh, I hope you’re treating yourself to a couple of days off work with this.”

  She nodded miserably and then said quite distinctly through the handkerchief, with surprising vehemence, “That lycée is the source of every sort of sickness.”

  She showed him into a huge living-room and said formally, “Please sit here. I’ll go and get the keys.”

  Like the hall, the living-room was crowded well beyond the point of cosiness with dark bulky furniture, overloaded bookcases and dressers and standard lamps trailing a tangle of flexes across Oriental carpets. At first, as in any house he might have found himself in, Edward got up to look at the view from the living-room windows, but since it was only a mirror image in the form of Number Ten, Cité Etienne Hubert across the street, he turned his attention back to the living-room. It struck him as an inappropriate backdrop for someone as relatively young and dynamic as Mademoiselle Iskarov; it must surely be the family home. She was distinctly too old, though, however old she was, still to be living at home with her parents. Edward began to examine the contents of the living-room considerably more closely. Whereupon it dawned on him, belatedly, that a high proportion of the objects in the room were indeed Russian: there was a silver samovar and some old photographs of bearded men in boots and smocks on one of the dressers; some of the pictures turned out on proper investigation to be icons and, yes, all the books in the bookcases were in Russian.

  When Mademoiselle Iskarov came back, she had changed her handkerchief. She had also, Edward was astonished to notice, combed her hair and pulled her knitted top and skirt into shape so that he could see, whatever her indeterminate age, she had a well-endowed if round figure.

  She held the keys out to him. “I’ve written down the address for you. It’s not difficult to find. It’s off the rue Saint Dominique. You can either go up the Boulevard de Latour-Maubourg or Avenue Bosquet. Bosquet is less direct but more pleasant, I think, less –” she hesitated and squared her shoulders, “less designed for victorious military processions, you know.”

  Edward laughed. “I know exactly.”

  He unfolded his map and Mademoiselle Iskarov pinpointed the rue Surcouf. It all sounded excellent: two bedrooms, a good-sized sitting-room, the rent was reasonable. Edward thought what a pity it was that if the flat were even halfway decent, he would still feel obliged to turn it down because of his scruples about mixing work connections and housing.

  As Mademoiselle Iskarov showed him to the front door, he thought he heard a very faint noise somewhere off the hall. Through an open doorway, he thought, but wasn’t certain, he caught a grey blur of movement. He must have looked concerned for Mademoiselle Iskarov raised her voice to call something in Russian in the direction of the open doorway and she explained to Edward: “My grandmother.” While they stood at the front door and clarified the final details of locks and keys and concierges, Edward became clearly conscious of a quavering voice holding forth uninterruptedly from the unseen room.

  He had his hand above the ground-floor button of the lift when he heard the door of the Iskarovs’ flat flung open. With one of the worst pronunciations of his name he had yet heard, Mademoiselle Iskarov called, “Mister Wenwright! Mister Wenwright! Please stop!”

  Edward pushed open the lift door and said, “Yes?”

  “You don’t cook a lot with curry, do you?” she panted and then, seeing the exasperated bemusement on his face, explained, “Our last tenant was an American follower of Hinduism. He made the most awful mess of the kitchen. The neighbours complained of his smells. We had to tell him to leave. Well, he was mad too.”

  “No,” Edward answered shortly. “I don’t.”

  “Very good,” said Mademoiselle Iskarov. “Then, if you wish, you may rent our flat.” And, in a flurry of horrible coughing, she vanished behind the front door.

  The appropriateness of the rue Surcouf was obvious as soon as he turned the street corner. The Iskarovs’ flat was only two or three houses along, in a low, by Paris standards, shabbily off-white house. Its neighbours wer
e a similar house and a small, workaday baker’s shop. He had come via Mademoiselle Iskarov’s recommended route, walking along the bustling commercial length of the rue Saint Dominique. The neighbourhood seemed to him much closer to what he was looking for than anywhere else he had yet been. Behind these façades, he could imagine muzzled poodles and simmering tripes à la mode de Caen, but not marbled stairwells or bidets on silver-gilt paws. When he identified the house, he felt almost frustrated that somewhere so eminently appropriate had to be out of the question because of his scruples.

  Standing in his future living-room, he abandoned them. For everything about the flat delighted him: it consisted of three partially inter-connecting rooms, with double doors between them, like a jigsaw puzzle or some elementary set of children’s cubes. He walked through them, enjoying the clever satisfactory way the living-room led into the elbow-shaped kitchen, and from the further bedroom you could look back at the living-room windows. The flat was on the ground floor; overshadowed but not gloomy, it took up the right-hand side and half the back of a small, dingy courtyard and the left-hand side was occupied by someone whose name on the letter-box was Dupont. Edward found it all thoroughly cheery and authentic and congenial. He grinned at the lingering curry smells in his kitchen and the burnt-out joss sticks by the front door and felt positively grateful to the American “follower of Hinduism” for having had himself evicted at such a timely juncture. A straight choice between this flat and the marble pudding was no choice at all.

  When he rang the front door bell of Mademoiselle Iskarov’s flat to return the keys and to tell her, to his surprise, that he would like to rent the flat, there was at first no answer. He rang the bell again and waited for a long time. Maybe in her scatty way she had gone out and forgotten about him? Or maybe she was bombed out of her mind with the French equivalent of Night Nurse? He began to scribble a message on a sheet of his pocket notepad. On the other side of the door, there was an undeniable rustle. Remembering the possibly crazed old grandmother, he shouted, “It’s me, Edward Wainwright. About the flat.”

  Mademoiselle Iskarov’s voice answered him. “You can’t come in.”

  ‘What now?’ thought Edward. And what on earth was going on inside? Mademoiselle Iskarov was in no fit state to have got herself into any compromising situation. Maybe the aged grandmother had run amok?

  He shouted, “I’ve brought the keys back.”

  “Put them in the letter-box downstairs,” Mademoiselle Iskarov replied in a muffled voice.

  “But I have to talk to you,” Edward protested. “I want to rent the flat. We need to discuss arrangements and things.”

  “Good. I’m very pleased you’re going to take it,” came Mademoiselle Iskarov’s voice. “But I’m afraid I can’t let you in. We’ll discuss it all on the phone.”

  “Why can’t you let me in?” Edward exploded. “It’ll take three minutes.”

  There was a very long pause, such a long pause that he wondered if he hadn’t blown it. Goodbye, rue Surcouf.

  “I realise you’re not feeling well,” he added placatingly. “But, really, it won’t take any time. I’d just like to have it all settled before I go back to the office.”

  Behind him, he was aware of inquisitive footsteps coming to the door of the flat opposite.

  Lowering his voice, he said, “Listen, I don’t want to be a pain. So long as it’s definite I can have the flat.” And lastly, a bit guiltily, he asked, “Nothing’s the matter, is it? You are OK?”

  Inside, there was a noise which was either a cough or a laugh. “I can’t let you see me in this condition,” Mademoiselle Iskarov answered. “It is too disgraceful.”

  Edward had fairly serious doubts as he walked away down the Avenue Duquesne about whether he ought to get any further involved with this family. Considering he had seen Mademoiselle Iskarov in her full-blown “disgraceful condition” only an hour beforehand, he found her sudden onset of vanity largely comic but also faintly disconcerting.

  A month after his arrival in Paris, Edward moved into the rue Surcouf. He didn’t have much to move; he prided himself on travelling light. A taxi ride liberated him from the lace curtains and the dribbling shower and he found himself and his two suitcases inside his own front door, with an angular void to fill.

  He did have a low patch immediately after moving, but it was short-lived. The door-slamming certainty of being settled in Paris, which the flat in the rue Surcouf represented, provoked another sad little flurry of comparison with all the other places where he might have been. The Duponts’ macaw, which warbled advertising jingles from their window-sill – “Orangina – à la PULPE d’orange” and again and again “Felix Potin – on y revient” – caricatured the narrow domestic horizons he feared he was now confined to. He had never had any time for domesticity. He hurried through the necessary procedures to take over the flat and the uninteresting but essential household purchases. Much as he liked the flat, he didn’t put up any pictures or do anything to improve the decoration, beyond taking down the last of the American’s unnerving posters. That would have been too frank an admission of long-term residence. He concentrated on ignoring the things which triggered the worst of his wanderlust: the slanting sun stripes falling through the shutters first thing in the morning, which should have been from a real sun, the Portuguese concierge’s wife singing a throaty folk melody as she washed the flagstones of the courtyard. He viewed this as a reverse Pavlovian-dog training and he was quick to learn. Relatively fast, he reverted to resignation, for the primary obstacle which had stood in the way of his embarking on Paris life was gone. Without any more flat hunting, he was free to make of the city whatever he could.

  Neither Henry nor Mrs Hirshfeld made any further reference to the role they had played in helping him find his home. They had him to dinner a second time about a week after he moved in and, although he arrived thanking Mrs Hirshfeld profusely for her thoughtfulness, she did not take him up on it.

  He had not expected to be left quite so much to his own devices. Of course, he didn’t want to be overseen either. But Henry’s completely laissez-faire managerial style left him pretty much on his own. Henry was kept busy with his weekly Letter from Paris and it was obvious that any really big stories which broke Henry would cover. In the first few weeks, Henry took Edward along with him to meet the best press officers, the most useful sources. But once the introductions were over, Edward didn’t really have that much to do. He felt it would show a lack of initiative to speak about this to Henry. All he had to do, Henry would surely think, was go out there and find the stories. But Edward wasn’t yet well enough acquainted with Paris to know where to find her weak spots. He went to press conferences and dealt with urgent calls for information from the paper’s other bureaux. He tried not to cross swords with eccentric old Monsieur Marchais, about whom Henry had warned him. When Monsieur Marchais came in for his querulous couple of hours compiling what he called his “Rubrique Culturelle”, Edward would more often than not invent an errand and wander out. It seemed to him more than once that he was wasting his time here on the work front too. He hadn’t expected the cinema drama of shrilling phones, chattering telexes, sweat-glistening men rushing in with shouted news of world-shattering events. But he hadn’t, frankly, expected such slow motion either. He observed Henry, contentedly going about his worthwhile business of telling it how it was, setting the record straight, and after a while it struck Edward that, for all his apparent nonchalance, Henry was observing him too. The neglect, the casual address was deliberate; Henry was waiting to see what Edward could generate for himself. Edward had no intention of following in the footsteps of his predecessor, one Howard Knapman now at the Wellington bureau, who seemed to have spent his idle hours here elaborating a multi-coloured index card system of Paris contacts. He wanted to show Henry that he understood and was worthy of the blind eye that was being turned to him. But, first of all, in order to land the scoop which would cause Henry to congratulate him, he had to get his bea
rings. And Henry seemed prepared for him to spend as long as it took to get them.

  He had more leisure time than he had anticipated. In London, he would have filled it, no problem, drinking with his friends and he would have been temporarily happy doing that. But here he didn’t have any friends. Moreover, he had not yet seen a way of ever acquiring any. If one thing was clear to him about Paris, it was the city’s mollusc-like nature; its hard and shiny lips clamped shut on its salty inner workings, it excluded disdainfully all foreign bodies. The house in the rue Surcouf illustrated this principle in microcosm. Edward liked the house, he continued to like it. He came home to it along the rue Saint Dominique sometimes repeating “Surcouf, Surcouf” to himself like the yapping of a little dog. But inside the house he was totally ignored. After nearly a fortnight, he had still not spoken to any of the other residents, apart from the concierge, whose French was so rudimentary it was hard to consider what they had a conversation. He had seen Monsieur and Madame Dupont going in and out, a wizened pair with sour, mistrustful, elderly faces. Once he had seen Monsieur Dupont on a sunny Sunday morning cruelly taunting the macaw by offering it scraps of food held just beyond the reach of its beak. The residents of the other flats he had barely seen. There was a middle-aged spinster lady living above him, who came down smartly to complain the day he celebrated the arrival of his first delayed month’s salary by buying a stereo cassette player and renting a TV. She made almost no noise at all, although once or twice Edward heard her little pop-eyed dog giving shrill, strangulated barks overhead. Otherwise, the house was unusually quiet. It was enough of an event to hear voices in the courtyard for Edward to slip sheepishly over to a window and snoop outside. Sometimes it was just the macaw giving a particularly life-like eulogy to “Rasoirs Bic”. Sometimes it was Monsieur or Madame Dupont exchanging parsimonious civilities with the concierge. Once, it was an itinerant knife-grinder braying out an offer to sharpen anyone’s knives. Edward spent a good many evenings just sitting in the atmospherically lit living-room, savouring the freedom of his flat and speculating with nothing like urgency how he was going to fill future evenings.