“A gioved’, amici miei . . .”
He climbed into the bus and always sat in back, resting his guitar on the seat beside him. As the bus passed over the railroad crossing, he waved to us.
When I think of the chords from Bordin’s Hawaiian guitar, I imagine a breeze blowing down a sunny, empty street toward the sea. I also recall my classmate Michel Karvé. We were friendly enough, Karvé and I, but there was something about him I couldn’t figure out. I’m thinking of the day when they gave us all a questionnaire: we were supposed to write down our birthdate and our parents’ professions.
Karvé seemed to hesitate a moment. He gazed pensively through the window. Outside, the winter sun bathed the Swiss Yard in a soft, hazy light. He opened his desk and looked something up in the dictionary. He closed the lid. Then he took the plunge. Under the heading “Parents’ Occupation,” he wrote, in a beautiful, meticulous hand: “Influence peddling.”
I checked my own dictionary to find the meaning of those words and I would have liked Michel Karvé to tell me more, but I didn’t want to be nosy.
I had met his parents several times, on our days off, at his home on Avenue Victor-Hugo. They struck me as very distinguished. Doctor Genia Karvé was a tall, thin man, whose light-colored eyes made him look youthful. His wife had strawberry blond hair, the face of a lioness, eyes as light as her husband’s, and the nonchalant, athletic demeanor of certain American women.
At first glance, the words “influence peddling,” which remained etched in my memory in Michel Karvé’s clear, precise handwriting, seemed to have little to do with this couple.
I had a better opportunity to observe them during a walk we took in the Bois de Boulogne. It was a Saturday afternoon in autumn. The gray sky, the smell of wet grass and earth . . . They were walking in front of us, side by side, and the elegant silhouettes of Dr. Karvé and his wife became associated for me with phrases like hunting party, pheasantry, pack of hounds.
We crossed through the Parc de Bagatelle, then reached the polo grounds via the road down below. It was growing dark. Something had struck me about Michel’s parents: they never addressed a word to their son, and seemed to be completely indifferent to his presence. I also noted the contrast between my friend’s clothes and those of Dr. and Mme Karvé. He wore patched corduroy trousers and an old blazer that was too large for him. No overcoat. Rubber sandals. At school, I had given him two pairs of socks, as all of his had holes in them.
Later, Michel and I were in the back seat of Dr. Karvé’s big black sedan—he took no care of the vehicle and its body was spattered with mud. Dr. Karvé was smoking behind the wheel. Now and then, he and his wife exchanged a brief word. It was about people that my friend surely knew.
“We’re going out this evening, Michel,” Mme Karvé said. “I’ve left you a slice of ham in the fridge.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Will that do?”
“Yes, Mother.”
She’d said it in a clipped, distracted voice, and didn’t turn around to face him.
Influence peddling. I’ve kept a sheet of blue letterhead with the name of Doctor Genia Karvé, “Ear, Nose, and Throat Specialist, 12 Avenue Victor-Hugo, Paris 16th, PASsy 38-80,” on which the latter, in a firm hand, had prescribed some medicine for me. He examined me one evening when Michel had told him I wasn’t feeling well. In his office, he had demonstrated the same courteous indifference that he usually showed his son and me. On the shelves of his library, I noticed signed photos of women, most of them in leather frames, and I inched closer for a better look.
“Those are patients as well as friends,” Dr. Karvé said with a shrug, cigarette dangling from the corner of his lips.
Influence peddling. The day after Michel had so strangely answered the questionnaire, we saw through our classroom window Dr. Karvé’s black sedan cross the Swiss Yard and turn left onto the driveway leading to the Castle. It was the first time Dr. Karvé had visited our school. Never had Michel’s parents come to pick him up on our days off. Like me, Michel took the bus to Porte de Saint-Cloud. Then the metro.
My classmate hadn’t blinked. He even pretended not to notice his father’s car. A few moments later, one of the school monitors entered the classroom, interrupting our English lesson.
“Karvé, the principal wants to see you. He’s with your father.”
Michel stood up. In his old blue smock and sandals, he followed the monitor with stiff steps, like someone being led to the firing squad.
They had evidently shown Michel’s questionnaire to Dr. Genia Karvé. What had father and son said to each other in our principal’s office? It was later, much later, that I looked into it. I had been out of touch with Michel for quite some time and had no idea what might have become of him or his parents. There was no longer a Dr. Genia Karvé on Avenue Victor-Hugo.
Influence peddling. I questioned various people and searched through old newspapers, whose smell reminded me of that autumn Saturday when Michel and I had gone walking in the Bois de Boulogne, with his mother and father. On the way back, Dr. Karvé had stopped the car in Neuilly, at the corner of Avenue de Madrid.
“Well, we’ll let you off here. We have to meet some friends nearby.”
Michel had opened the door without a word.
“Don’t forget . . . the slice of ham in the fridge . . .” Mme Karvé had said in a wan voice.
For a moment, we had stood there, staring after the car as it sped away toward the Saint-James neighborhood.
“I don’t have any metro tickets,” said Michel. “How about you?”
“Me neither.”
“If you like, you can share my slice of ham.”
He had burst out laughing. That part of the avenue was dark, and we stumbled over a pile of dead leaves in the middle of the sidewalk. The closer we got to Avenue de Neuilly, the better we could see. Lights in the windows and blazing restaurant façades. Now the dead leaves coated the sidewalk in a matted layer, sticking to people’s heels. Their bitter odor was the same as that of old newspapers when you gingerly turn the brittle pages, one by one, going back in time, trying to find a picture, a name, someone’s buried traces.
A brief article, a single column at the bottom of the page. The Karvés had appeared in court. Perhaps Michel knew. The trial had taken place two years after his birth. They had discovered, at the Karvés’, furniture, paintings, and jewelry of dubious provenance. The “couple” had been sentenced to prison time, suspended, and twenty thousand francs in fines for “receiving stolen goods.” The report specified that on that occasion, Mme Karvé was wearing a form-fitting turquoise dress and a white leather belt, but never once, I had to admit, did they use with regard to the doctor and his wife the term “influence peddling.”
Were these the same people that I had met, whose graceful silhouettes glided through my memory?
I ended up in a bar on Avenue Montaigne, once frequented by the worldly, horsey set, where a former regular might have been able to enlighten me: for fifty years, he had rubbed shoulders with “everybody.”
I uttered the name Mme Karvé, and a tender look flashed in his eyes, as if the name brought back his youth, or that of my classmate’s mother:
“You mean Andrée the Slut?” he asked under his breath.
Michel and I were sitting opposite each other in the café on Avenue Victor-Hugo, facing the building where his parents lived. Since the start of the Easter holidays, he had not set foot at home. One of our classmates, Charell, had taken him in.
He was still wearing his old blazer that was too big for him, his patched corduroys, and a shirt that was missing several buttons.
“Okay, now you can go,” he said.
“You’re sure you won’t change your mind?”
“No. Go on, I’ll wait for you here.”
I stood up and walked out of the café. I crossed the street, and as I passed the threshold of number 12, I felt my heart pounding. I had forgotten which floor it was and checked the list of tena
nts, posted on the mahogany door of the concierge’s lodge.
Doctor Genia Karvé. Second floor, right.
Instead of taking the elevator I decided to climb the stairs, stopping for a long pause at each landing. At the Karvés’ floor, I stood still for several minutes, leaning against the banister like a boxer against the ropes, just before the start of the match. Finally, I rang the bell.
Mme Karvé opened the door. She was wearing a hounds’-tooth tailored suit and a black blouse that nicely complemented her blond hair. She didn’t seem surprised to see me.
“I’ve come to collect Michel’s things,” I said.
“Ah, I see . . . Do come in . . .”
He must have telephoned to let her know I was coming. Or was she simply so indifferent to her son’s fate? We crossed the foyer. A golf bag was lying on the floor.
She opened a door at the beginning of the hallway.
“Here it is . . . His things must be in the closet . . . Excuse me for a moment.”
She gave me a winning smile and vanished. I heard Dr. Karvé’s voice, fairly close by. He spoke for a long time but no one answered. No doubt he was on the phone.
Michel’s bedroom was so small that you had to wonder whether it was originally a storage closet. The window was disproportionately large. I rested my forehead against the pane, which let through only a crepuscular light. Yet it was two in the afternoon, and outside the sun was shining. The window overlooked a rear court narrow as a pit.
Why, in that vast apartment, which Michel had once shown me when his parents were out, had they given him this tiny room? Michel claimed he’d chosen it himself.
No sheets on the cot, only a simple plaid blanket. Michel had asked me to bring it. I opened the closet and in the navy blue sports bag from the boarding school I arranged his clothes. A few old pairs of socks, a bathing suit, a handkerchief, two sweaters, three shirts. The shirts were patched, like his corduroy trousers, and strangely enough they had a famous dress designer’s label on the inside collar. They turned out to be his mother’s old blouses. Michel’s parents dressed him in their castoffs, and his blazer, too big for him and frayed at the edges, had belonged to his father and also came from a well-known haberdasher on Rue Marbeuf.
I could still hear Dr. Karvé’s droning voice on the telephone. Now and then he burst out laughing. The door, left ajar, swung open and Mme Karvé appeared in the frame.
“So . . . How are you making out?”
She enveloped me with her smile. The light bulb in the ceiling cast her face in a harsh light, bringing out the freckles in her skin. Today I have a better sense of why that woman moved me so: a mix of frivolity and languidness that in my mind I associate with France in the eighteenth century, with satins, crystal, and the color they call “Fragonard blond.”
“Did you find all of Michel’s clothes?”
“Yes.”
She gazed at the sports bag.
“I should have given you a suitcase . . . Do you really think Michel never wants to set foot in this house again?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Anyway, let him know that he’ll always be welcome here.”
I picked up the sports bag and slung it over my shoulder.
“Here, take this . . . It’s for Michel. A little pocket money . . .”
She handed me a rumpled hundred-franc bill.
“He’s always been like that,” Mme Karvé said in a distant voice, as if convinced that no one would listen and she was talking to herself. “When he was little I’d take him to the Pré Catalan and he always ran away and hid . . . Sometimes it would take me an hour to find him. Poor little Michel . . .”
She walked ahead of me into the hallway. Dr. Karvé was still on the phone, making emphatic statements in a foreign tongue.
I was already on the landing. She hesitated a moment before closing the door.
“Good-bye . . .”
She held out her arm.
I should have kissed her hand, but instead I shook it.
“Good-bye. Genia is busy in his office, but be sure to tell Michel that his father sends him a big hug . . . And so do I . . .”
I went down the stairs, eager to be back in the open air and sunlight.
Michel was waiting for me at the café, arms folded. I handed him the plaid blanket and sports bag, whose contents he rapidly verified.
“You forgot ‘Happy Days Once More,’” he said.
This was a drawing cut out from an old magazine that he and I had discovered in the back of the storage closet in the Green Pavilion. The magazine dated from the same month and year we were both born, July 1945, and the drawing was an ad for Antonat port wine. A blonde woman in profile, wearing a kerchief, is sitting in a small boat. On the horizon are a lake, mountains, a white sail. And above it all, in tall, narrow type:
HAPPY DAYS ONCE MORE
The nostalgia and sundrenched mildness of those words and the drawing intrigued us both. Bordin, whose opinion we had solicited, had plucked a few languorous chords from his guitar. Michel wanted to write an entire novel, inspired by the woman with the kerchief, the lake, the mountains. It would be called Happy Days Once More.
“I left it in my bedside drawer,” he said, disappointed. “But never mind . . .”
“Would you like me to go back up and get it?”
“No, no . . . It’s not worth it. I have it here, in my head . . . The main thing is that I write that novel someday.”
He laid the hundred-franc bill flat on the table.
“Your mother said that if you wanted to come back . . .”
He pretended not to hear. Outside, on the opposite sidewalk, Dr. Karvé was walking among the dapples of sunlight, dragging a golf bag. Mme Karvé emerged from the building moments later. She was wearing dark glasses that contrasted with her blond skin tone. The doctor opened the rear door of his car and wearily tossed the golf bag onto the back seat. He sat behind the wheel. Mme Karvé, still nonchalant, slid in next to him. The car started up gently.
“They’re going to Mortefontaine,” Michel told me.
And his voice harbored no blame, only a kind of regret.
As we rode in the metro, I tried one last time to dissuade him. He had falsified his birth certificate with whiteout to make himself three years older. Yes, his mind was made up. After that, we took the train to Athis-Mons, where the recruiting station was located.
IV.
Of all our teachers, the one we surely pleased the most was Kovo. Sport was the preferred discipline of our principal, Mr. Jeanschmidt, and we devoted three afternoons a week to it.
Often, Pedro would sit in on Kovnovitsyn’s classes. He and Kovo were great friends. They had similar interests. Word was that when the school was founded, by Pedro’s two older brothers, Pedro had served as gym teacher.
Field hockey was the school’s traditional sport. Pedro himself chose the teams and supervised their training. But we also had an in-ground swimming pool at the edge of the great lawn. And deeper into the park, we came to the running track, the pole-vaulting area, the volleyball court, the two tennis courts, and finally the fitness trail. Kovo and Mr. Jeanschmidt called it the “Hébert trail,” after a certain Hébert, the architect of a physical education method to which they both subscribed.
The plans for that “Hébert trail” had been drawn up by Jeanschmidt and Kovo a good ten years earlier. A military-style training course, filled with various obstacles: walls to scale, ropes to climb, leg lifts, barriers and hoops that we had to cross crawling forward on our elbows, pommel horses for vaulting and acrobatics . . . Very early in the morning, in the spring, we would do what Kovo called an “Hébert course,” before proceeding at a run to the flag-raising ceremony.
Those daily outdoor activities bore fruit. Our field hockey team had reached the Junior Nationals and our pole vaulters could challenge the French national team. Kovo got Jeanschmidt to agree to extra hours of gym, at the expense of other classes. And I think Pedro was right to grant hi
m this privilege. For most of us, sports were a refuge, a way of momentarily leaving behind the difficulties of living, especially for our classmate Robert McFowles.
Kovo admired McFowles. At fifteen, he was captain of the hockey team and was equally gifted at skiing, swimming, and tennis. Bob and I had shared a room one year in the Green Pavilion and become fast friends.
He ended up getting himself killed, at around thirty, in a bobsled championship in Switzerland, but I’d had a chance to see him before then. I even happened to join him on his honeymoon. He had just gotten married to a local girl from Versailles and, not knowing where to go for their wedding trip, he had chosen a hotel near the Trianons for the month of August.
It was very hot that summer, and McFowles and his wife sunbathed on the hotel’s main lawn. Anne-Marie—the brand-new Mme McFowles—wore a bright red bathing suit, while McFowles’s was imitation leopard skin, which reminded me of Valvert. We liked those Tarzan swimsuits, and most of us wore them beside the school’s swimming pool, a strange pool filled with black, stagnant water that we dyed with methylene blue to make it look Mediterranean. And we jury-rigged the ramshackle diving board as best we could.
Bob McFowles had met his future wife a few months earlier at a ski resort. She was working as a hotel receptionist. Love at first sight. Their wedding had been celebrated in Versailles, where Anne-Marie’s father owned a shop on Rue Carnot.
A girl of average height, with blond hair and big blue eyes. Her timid grace reminded me of certain eighteenth-century portraits, like the one of Louise de Polastron. Anne-Marie was every inch a Frenchwoman, and it made for a harmonious contrast with Bob McFowles’s slightly unpolished demeanor, his height and heavy, lanky gait.
Bob’s only family was an American grandmother, one Mrs. Strauss, the creator of the Harriet Strauss line of cosmetics. Back in the Valvert days, he would spend his Christmas and Easter holidays with her on the Riviera, and for the long summer vacation she would take him to America. For the rest of the year, Bob never left school, not even on our days out. Every week he received a letter from his grandmother, his name typed in red on the fawn-colored envelope.
Such Fine Boys Page 3