The Steppes of Paris

by Harris, Helen

  To his relief, and slight surprise also, Mademoiselle Iskarov didn’t try to detain him. She accompanied him to the hall cupboard to retrieve his coat and to the front door.

  At the door, they both stopped uncertainly.

  “Well, thank you very much,” Edward repeated. “I did enjoy this evening.”

  “So did I,” said Mademoiselle Iskarov. She had one hand on the lock but she didn’t unlock it. She was waiting for something.

  “It was very kind of you to go to so much trouble,” Edward ventured.

  Mademoiselle Iskarov smiled tartly; he was heading in the wrong direction.

  “And it was nice to meet your grandmother.”

  Her smile became perceptibly sourer. Something in her attitude spelt it out; face upturned, she was waiting for him to kiss her good night. Promptly, almost in self-defence, his hand shot up to shake hers instead. Her smile vanished. As she extended one hand to meet his ungracious gesture, her other was already opening the front door. Before Edward could think up some propitiating goodbye line, which might make up for his churlishness, he found himself, by the sheer force of her displeasure, being propelled out into the liberating dark.

  In a pulsing, Latin American night club, Edward found himself incongruously dressed in heavy winter clothes. It was stiflingly hot and he felt sweaty and even a little sick. Somewhere, in the explorative excitement of arriving in a new country, he had eaten a pretty dicey dinner. He thought he would be OK, if only no one asked him to stand up. But his outlandish clothes had begun to attract attention; he was dressed, to his profound embarrassment, in a pair of enormously baggy cords and a brightly lozenge-patterned Shetland pullover he hadn’t worn since he was at least fifteen. The people around him, all of whom were ultra-developed and deeply tanned and dressed in very little, started to point him out to one another, openly giving him incredulous looks and giggling. Obviously, the thing to do was to find the toilets and take off as many as possible of his embarrassing layers. Only he couldn’t get up. He tried to once, tentatively, but his head spun round or the room spun round, one or the other, and all the ultra-developed dancing couples flew up into impossible horizontal and upside-down positions like a flamboyant surrealist painting. He clamped himself to the seat of his chair with sweaty hands. The horizontal and upside-down smiles had been truly revolting. His main concern became to avoid a repetition. A woman who, even upright, had contrived to keep her perpendicular smile, started to manoeuvre closer to him. She was dancing, nominally, with a short, dapper man but every time they turned in the right direction, her mascaraed eyes signalled vigorously to Edward over her partner’s low shoulder. Edward looked coldly – except how could he do anything coldly? – in another direction. Only he couldn’t have been looking hard enough because he could still see her. She was herself not tall but her body had compensated by thrusting out tremendously in various directions; she had large active breasts which were carrying on a command performance under her bright dress, and an energetic bottom of substantial proportions. Putting all this apparatus into play, she was closing in on Edward. He sweated even more. Inside his head now, the samba music was pounding relentlessly. The woman broke away from her partner and made for Edward, raising her dancing arms to reveal twin copses of dark, matted, underarm hair. It was an unmitigated relief to wake.

  His head was still pounding and he had an overwhelmingly urgent thirst. As he stumbled to the bathroom, unable to find any of the light switches along the way, he realised that being sick was actually a possibility. He bent over the wash-basin, gulping water from the tap, and then stood there for a time, unsteadily, waiting for the possibility to recede. As he returned to bed, it filtered through to him dimly that in the morning he was going to have an all-time hangover.

  He did, and as he lay in bed, wishing he could disown his body, memories of the evening before contributed to his overall queasiness. He thought he had total recall of the dinner but it seemed so improbable that he wondered if he didn’t still have to disentangle it from the nightmares of the intervening night. Mademoiselle Iskarov was after him; it seemed so extraordinarily unlikely. It filled him with a new and sweaty panic. He stayed in bed for most of the morning, only going once, carefully, to the kitchen to make a pot of tea. For any number of reasons, bed seemed an eminently safe place to be. As he lay there, weakly monitoring the state of his symptoms – reeling head, dry mouth, uncertain stomach – he replayed the evening anxiously again and again, hoping he would discover that he had got it wrong; that this wild idea was only the product of alcoholic paranoia. But it wasn’t, and as, around midday, he timidly got up and restored himself a little further with a shower, he realised that he had to devise a strategy to deal with it.

  The idea of lunch was repugnant but he thought a walk might do him good so he set out into an exceedingly wintry afternoon to breathe in a lot of fresh air and to walk off, if possible, some of his impotent exasperation.

  He walked up to the Quai d’Orsay and followed the gloomy river round to the Quai Anatole France. The sky was bulging with low, deep-grey clouds and, across the river, the trees of the Tuileries looked, he thought, singularly stark and claw-like. Taking a perverse pleasure in his bad temper, he crossed the river by the Pont Solférino to walk under the depressing trees. One thing was clear, of course; he was not going to co-operate. Whether or not Mademoiselle Iskarov made a habit of going for men ten years her junior, he had certainly at no time had a taste for the older woman. In fact, far from thinking a taste for older women was a sign of sexual sophistication, as a number of his friends did, Edward had always considered it distinctly dubious. As far as he was concerned, older women meant your mother and he knew he was not that way inclined at all. He would have to adopt a policy of total avoidance, which naturally would not be easy. There were bound to be sulks and probably scenes along the way but he didn’t see what other alternative he had. It was, of course, highly unfortunate that Mademoiselle Iskarov should be his landlady; they were obliged to have a certain number of unavoidable dealings. And he must take care not to alienate her to such an extent that she started to take sharp, landlady’s reprisals. It seemed just too much bother to move again, after all that house-hunting, but he did briefly consider it. While he was considering it, and the welcome weight of arguments was stacking up against it – the bother, the awkwardness of explaining to Henry and Mai why it was he had decided to move again – a grey figure approached him out of the empty park and said something which he missed.

  “Pardon?” he asked automatically.

  The figure, a deeply sad-faced man in a raincoat and a floppy brown hat, seemed to be trying to interest him in a small brown packet.

  “Have a look,” he was saying. “It’ll cheer you up. Ça va vous remonter le moral.”

  “I don’t need cheering up,” Edward said huffily. He walked a little faster.

  To his distaste, the man laid a hand on his sleeve. “No, look,” he said urgently. “They’re not the usual junk. Looking won’t cost you anything.” From the packet, he pulled a black and white postcard on which an unspeakably fat middle-aged man was doing unspeakable things to a small blond boy.

  Edward pushed the man’s arm away. “Fuck off!” he bellowed, so loudly that the man took fright and scuttled away between the bare trees. Edward quickened his pace towards the sanctuary of the tourist buses parked around the Louvre. For several hundred yards, he detested Paris.

  On his way back, reinvigorated by the freezing afternoon and by his indignation, he stopped in a café at Saint Germain for a coffee and an experimental omelette. His insides were ready for it. As he sat over a second coffee, flipping at speed through the pages of the boring Saturday papers, he put a lot of his panic down to the hangover. Now he was fully restored, he wondered a little how he had managed to get so worked up about it. Pursuit by Mademoiselle Iskarov wasn’t such a nightmarish prospect. In some murky corner of his brain, he was even passingly flattered that he was capable of arousing the desire of a worldly-
wise Parisienne of thirty-six years of age. But, above all, he felt nonchalantly confident that he could cope. What had seemed earlier that day like the start of an appalling persecution now seemed more of a joke.

  He passed a cinema where they were showing a film he hadn’t yet seen and, on the spur of the moment, he decided to go in and see it since there was a programme starting in fifteen minutes. As the auditorium lights went down on the icecream advertisements and the voice of the Duponts’ macaw was heard, he decided what his first move would be; he must make sure he was as busy as humanly possible, fix up lots of social engagements, so that when Mademoiselle Iskarov next rang, he would be either busy or, even better, out. Although the seats on either side of him were empty, he squirmed round at the last minute just to check there was no one at all dodgy in the row behind him.

  He had not expected her, frankly, to make her next move so soon. She must, he thought grinning, when he heard her voice on the phone, be desperate. She telephoned him on the Monday night straight after the dinner and she called him “Edouard”. He had had no chance at all to fix up any social engagements, even if he had any means of doing so.

  “Oh, hello, Mademoiselle Iskarov,” he replied warily.

  “I thought I told you to call me Irina,” she said petulantly. “Are you always this proper?”

  She had a great knack of casting Edward in roles he wanted to shed.

  “Wait and see,” he said provocatively, knowing, of course, even as he said it, that it was just the kind of repartee he should refrain from if he didn’t want to encourage her.

  She gurgled with laughter. “I was ringing to ask if you liked music?”

  Edward hesitated; obviously a loaded question yet hardly one he could answer with a blanket “no”. “Any particular kind of music?” he asked, trying to maintain the same level of jokey detachment.

  “Russian music,” said Irina, and there was something heartfelt in the way she said it, an endorsement, an emotional underlining, which made Edward answer quite spontaneously, “Well, yes, what I’ve heard.”

  “Would you like to hear some more?” Irina asked enticingly, as though she were offering him to remove layers one by one.

  “Who, how, what, when, where?” asked Edward.

  Irina giggled. “Who: a Russian choir, how: beautifully, what: oh my God, I couldn’t tell you the names of composers of that kind of churchy music, when: Thursday night, where: the Russian cathedral, St Alexander Nevsky. And who with: me and my Great-Aunt Elena.”

  “Gosh,” said Edward. It certainly didn’t sound like a second seduction bid. He wondered whether Irina had got over his rebuff at the front door and decided to pursue a purely Platonic friendship, or whether she was just biding her time. Certainly, not even Irina, with her ever-present panoply of eccentric elderly relatives, could conceivably invite him to come and sit in a church alongside her and her great-aunt if she had any ulterior motives. “It sounds very interesting,” he said guardedly.

  “But you’re not free on Thursday night,” Irina said unexpectedly bitterly. “Enfin, it was just an idea.”

  “Hang on a minute,” Edward protested. “I am free on Thursday night. I would like to come actually, if you don’t mind.”

  “You would?” Irina exclaimed. “Well, then, I don’t understand you at all. You seemed utterly unenthusiastic about continuing our acquaintance when we parted on Friday but now you agree to come and sit in a smelly church with a load of old fogies and listen to depressing religious music.”

  Her trill of laughter broke Edward’s throttled silence. “Don’t worry, Edouard,” she said. “I’m only teasing you; I’m very pleased you want to come.”

  She embarked on directions and Metro stations and street names. They arranged to meet on Thursday at eight o’clock at the ticket windows of Metro Courcelles. The concert didn’t start until nine but they would have to collect Great-Aunt Elena first from her apartment on the Boulevard de Courcelles and she was a slow walker.

  Edward recovered from the telephone call over a large gin. He didn’t see quite how Irina had done it but she had led him cleverly into saying and doing at every turn the exact opposite of what he had intended. As for her devastating frankness, he felt it was more than anyone could be expected to put up with in the long run.

  For the next three days, he contemplated what he had let himself in for. At work, the main focus of interest was a visiting freelancer just back from an assignment covering the refugee story in Vietnam and Kampuchea. He was using their office as a base from which to extract follow-up information from the respective embassies. Habitually someone who worked on the move, he was indifferent to the territorial boundaries of office life and roamed in and out of the rooms, regardless of their occupants. Marie-Yvette and Aurore, and most especially old Monsieur Marchais, found him rather a hindrance but Edward welcomed his intrusions. His name was Geoff Burr and he too seemed to enjoy impressing young Teddy, as he rather off-puttingly called him, with his anecdotes from the great outdoors. Eventually, he so liked talking and Edward listening, that one early evening they went out drinking together.

  It didn’t take long before Geoff’s anecdotes had roused Edward to a state of acute dissatisfaction. “God, if only you knew,” he ventured, “how incredibly pissed off I was about getting sent to Paris.”

  Geoff looked at him from a huge distance comprised of genuinely different lifestyles and alcohol. “Ah, it’s not that bad, is it?” he said.

  Edward spluttered. “It probably isn’t as a place to come back to after what you’ve just been telling me about. But imagine a year here. Or two.”

  Geoff took an enormous swig at his vin rouge. “Your time’ll come,” he said uncertainly.

  To Edward’s concern, there seemed to be something in his uncertainty to do with Edward’s suitability for that life. To prove himself, there being no other way in a Parisian bar, Edward drank enormously and as the evening progressed, he was more and more affected by an upsetting vision of himself as a dreary, desk-bound hack, eagerly inhaling Geoff’s whiff of the great outdoors.

  Later, they went in search of a restaurant Geoff remembered where, he said, you could eat the best soupe à l’oignon in the world. As they wandered unsuccessfully through the redeveloped Halles, it seemed to Edward that the distinction between the inside of bars and the street had disappeared; he was just as much indoors in these pedestrian precincts as at any of the numerous marble table-tops they had visited in the course of the evening. He tipped his head back to glance at the purplish-orange night sky which he now abruptly perceived as a ceiling.

  “Hang on a sec,” he heard Geoff’s voice from an unexpected angle. “Are you feeling OK, Teddy, my boy?”

  They never found Geoff’s restaurant but ended up instead in a rather seedy establishment where Geoff claimed to recognise a waitress. With the food, Edward’s emotions settled somewhat and his jealousy of Geoff now, unbearably, planning a trip to West Africa, subsided to a pressing impatience to follow suit.

  When they parted, Edward climbing carefully out of Geoff’s taxi on the corner of the rue Surcouf, Geoff, who was leaving Paris in the morning, gave him a large, vague wave. “See you in Phnom Penh, Teddy, my boy.”

  Edward tried not to register the depressing domesticity of his front door, his back copies of Le Canard Enchaîné beside the lavatory, and his toothbrush in its glass. He remembered to down three coffee mugs of cold water and went straight to bed, to dream, hardly surprisingly but nevertheless unfairly, of aeroplanes and take-offs and bumpy landings on air strips cut out of impenetrable jungle.

  By twenty past eight, he had even wondered whether the whole thing was an elaborate punishment set up by Irina and she was going to leave him standing out of pique. He had been waiting at the ticket windows of Metro Courcelles for nearly half an hour. He had got there early, not to make a good impression on Irina, he assured himself, but simply because he couldn’t yet judge his journey time with any degree of accuracy. It wasn’t a very busy sta
tion and the home-going solid citizens of the eighth arrondissement gave him sideways glances of beady suspicion. He had mentioned to Marie-Yvette, not in any spirit of boasting but just so that someone at the paper should know he had an active social life, that he was off to an engagement on the Boulevard de Courcelles and she had wrinkled her nose and said, “Ah la la! So you’re starting to move in all the right circles, I see.” He felt himself a conspicuous, visibly alien figure on the draughty station. From watching successive waves of passengers emerging, he lazily drew up a list of characteristics which marked the species Parisian male: bottle-green overcoats with a pleat in the back, hunched head and shoulders, worry lines. And the women, not so many at this hour, all came trotting smartly through the exit, tight-lipped, diamond-hard, bristling, and bringing gusts of perfume which seemed to Edward, rather than seductive, more like the defensive odour sprayed out by a skunk. Irina, he realised, would stand out among them too. And when, finally, at almost half past eight, she did emerge, hurtling from the exit, her appearance had something arresting, quite dramatic about it, which temporarily prevented him from expressing his annoyance.

  “Edouard!” she gasped. “I’m so sorry.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Irina put her hand on his arm. It wasn’t clear if she had done it as an endearment or simply to help her steady herself. “So stupid,” she panted. “I was all ready. I was waiting for a friend who was coming over to sit with Babushka and he didn’t come. I don’t know what to do. I rang the bookshop where he works and I rang his apartment, which I hate doing, but he wasn’t anywhere. I don’t know what’s happened; if he’s forgotten about it or if something’s gone wrong. I couldn’t reach you. I was going frantic.”

  “Can’t you leave her by herself?” Edward asked, aghast at the thought of such a constraint on one’s liberty.

  “Of course I can,” Irina answered scornfully. “How do you suppose I go out to work every day? I lead my life. It’s just sometimes she gets these – ideas and it’s best to have someone there to discourage her from trying to carry them out. Of course, she can hardly walk at all so it’s not really a risk but all the same I feel better if she’s not on her own. I just hope he shows up.”