The Arab restaurant was a long thin room stretching back from the street, where they had a few tables with plastic covers, and plastic chairs, and a television over a counter playing Arabic music, and a small Moroccan woman underneath playing patience, and a half-lit hovel of a kitchen behind, from which her husband, who lived in a haze of smoke and walked with a limp, would bring food to the four or five customers who’d been coming there every night for twenty-five years, and appeared to be the only justification there was for continuing to keep the place open.
The old man gave him a grunt of acknowledgement when he came in. “Quelle jolie surprise,” he croaked in a broken, smoke-scored voice, “quelle jolie surprise,” and had him sit down and brought him some mint tea unasked.
“Amis sont partis,” the old man said, standing in front of the table with a bowl of sugar cubes, “partis. Tant pis. Humph …” and he shrugged.
He drank his tea slowly. The old woman, playing cards at the other end of the room at her counter, raised her eyebrows in friendship, then began cursing the hand of cards spread out before her.
The old man came back with another cup of tea and a piece of paper with a telephone number on it.
“Fawad,” he said. “C’est Fawad.”
Fawad’s telephone number.
After his tea he shook the old man’s hand. He waved at the woman playing cards. She raised her eyebrows, shrugged, sucked a lungful of tar from the cigarette hanging off her lip, and began dealing cards.
He put his bag on his shoulder, went round the corner, avoiding Rue Oberkampf, and descended into the metro.
The tunnels were full of the sounds of somebody playing drums. Some hawkers were selling sunglasses and scarves. It smelled of nuts down beneath the ground.
It took thirty-five minutes to get to the 16th arrondissement. When he resurfaced above ground it was getting to be evening. There was a fine mist of drizzle in the air. Behind him, over the river, the lights of the city were coming on. The gold dome of the Invalides shone like a child’s painted sun.
He made his way towards Avenue Victor Hugo. Across the road from Bernadette’s, the lights of the flower shop shone out into the early evening, intensified by the mirrors and the marble and the glass of the chandeliers. The door was half-opened. It was strange to see the place open at this hour. He stopped and poked his head in. There were large plastic sacks of dirt in a stack just inside the doorway.
“Salut, Madame, it’s Edward,” he shouted in.
There was no response.
He put his bag down and walked into the interior of the shop. The buckets in which the flowers for passing trade were kept on the pavement were lined up against the back walls. The floor around them was wet, where Madame must have dragged them in and spilled the water. On the long counter where she usually cut and wrapped the special orders, rows of pots were spread out, with seedlings recently planted.
He called out Madame’s name again.
There was no response.
The cash register, he noticed, was turned off.
The statues of the naked white goddesses watched him serenely as he walked around.
The profusion of plants, which screened off whole sections, the clutter of noble furniture, and the sound of dripping water from two fountains made the room seem much bigger than it was. But it took little time for him to realize that he was alone.
He made his way around the displays, poking his head into the side rooms and vestibules, round the divisions made by shelves full of trays of seedlings.
At last he went to the back of the shop, where it curled round the inner courtyard and lengthened into a thin corridor without any windows. There was a kettle and sink. The temperature seemed to drop. The walls, he noticed, were thick and rough, and ended in a series of shelves stacked with packets and implements and rolls of wire and string. And he noticed, where before he’d assumed there to be only shelves, that one whole wall was in fact the back of a door, that was slightly ajar. As he approached he could see a dim light rising from beneath, up a series of steep steps that wound immediately downwards in a tight spiral.
He opened the door further and shouted down, “Hello?”
“Hello,” came back the voice of Madame.
He waited, and then walked down the stairs.
Beneath the floor, where he descended, there opened up a large cellar, at least two or three feet under the ground. It was illuminated along the ceiling by rows of fluorescent lights, joined by metal pipes that housed the electric cables. The cellar must have stretched the whole length of the shop underneath. The walls were made of arched bricks. The floor was set with paving stones. The whole space was washed white and was completely empty but for a large stack of plastic bags—the same as upstairs—stacked five high against the back wall, which Madame was heroically trying to move to the stairs.
“Welcome to my cavern,” Madame said, leaving the plastic bags and standing up and brushing her hands down her skirts.
“Do you need some help?” he asked.
“In effect, yes,” Madame said.
As he helped her haul a couple of bags of compost she explained that she’d never use the cellar at all if she weren’t so cramped upstairs, but what was she to do?
He told her he had no idea this space existed.
Few people did, she said, and that now he knew her grand secret.
The room, in fact, was the original cellar, she told him, and had been reinforced as an air-raid shelter during the war. She had once found a few old coins and some spoons and what looked like the wheel from a model car in various nooks and crannies. It was, he had no doubt noticed, completely impractical, and why the workmen who delivered the sacks of compost had decided to stack them right at the back was a complete mystery to her, but here she was, a little old lady (she was hardly that, he protested), with nobody to help her, and how glad she was that he’d happened to come along, and perhaps, in fact, he could come more often, she suggested after they’d been talking a while—to help her out, perhaps three times a week, paid of course, unless possibly he was working somewhere else—how presumptuous it was for her to assume … ?
But no, he told her, it was not presumptuous at all. He told her that he had been going through a difficult time, but that now he was optimistic that things would turn for the better, and from the way he smiled—sheepishly—she felt comfortable asking if his optimism had anything to do with the flowers he had bought from her the week before. He confessed that it did, that in fact he was living nearby with the recipient of those flowers—Bernadette, he told her (“Ah, what a lovely name, for a lovely lady no doubt,” she said)—and that he would be glad not to have to travel into the city to work. She realized, he assumed, that he had no papers (“Papers, what are papers? Paf!” she said). How much less likely to be picked up if he stayed in the quartier, where the police were so few. She couldn’t agree more, she said. The state was a brute. She apologized for the madness of her countrymen. Were we not all human beings under the same sun—or moon, as the case now happened to be?
And so he had good news when he got back to Bernadette’s a little later, after she herself had returned from the cheese shop in Saint Germain: flowers, every night after work, of which the bunch of azaleas bursting from the water jug on top of the television would be the first of many.
“This is going to be very nice,” she said, and went over to rearrange the stems.
So she was pleased?
She was.
And he said that he too was pleased—to have a job already, without even having to look, and so close by. Best of all he wouldn’t need to travel at all.
She looked up at that and he knew she was disappointed and he shrugged.
She turned back to arranging the flowers.
She said that it was all right.
No, he told her, it wasn’t all right. He told her that he knew the burden that his caution placed upon them. That it made no sense. He’d lived with the possibility of being picked up all hi
s time in Paris, even before he met her, and all his life before that with the tyranny of chance.
She said, “I told you it was all right.”
But he told her again it wasn’t. He told her, “It’s easy to be indifferent when you have nothing to lose,” and how in the last few months before his episode he’d been more free than at any other time. Whatever he had, he’d chosen himself. That perhaps was why he’d been afraid to choose her.
She moved away from the flowers.
“So now do you choose?” she asked cautiously.
“Yes,” he said.
“So then I choose you back,” she said.
They were now standing at the window against the kitchen fixtures, and he reached out and took her hand. She gave him a tired, happy smile.
Then he told her he’d stopped by his old house. That Denis was gone. He’d almost forgotten the rent money, which he wriggled to get out of his pocket of his jeans.
“A gift from the past,” he said.
He told her that the Refuge was still closed. Nobody was left, though the old man from the Moroccan restaurant had given him a number for Fawad.
She asked him if he was going to phone.
He said that he didn’t know. What for? To try to put that world back together? The Refuge was gone. That life was gone.
She said, “But it’s only gone because it’s gone. Make it again. Isn’t that what Mamadou did, the first time? He came straight back.”
“Why? It will only get broken again.”
“And then somebody else will make it again. And on and on, and in that way it will never stop, it will go on forever.”
He folded the piece of paper into a neat square and put it under the telephone.
“Let’s see tomorrow,” he said non-commitally, though inside he felt lucky to be falling in love with such a wise person.
His employment with Madame la Fleuriste was nothing like the hard work which he was used to. Every now and then there were early mornings, meeting the delivery trucks from the flower depot at around six a.m., before the quartier woke up and cars came out and the traffic turned the roads to glue. Sometimes there was heavy lifting—bags of compost as on the first day; pallets of seedlings from the truck; plastic pots stacked like ice cream cones; terracotta moulds packed with newspapers and balanced between multiple layers of plywood, like baking bread. Sometimes, when business was brisk he’d help out thinning leaves, cutting stems, pre-cutting ribbons, plastic and paper wrap. Other times he’d go round with Madame la Fleuriste on the three or four large deliveries she did every week, from the back of the old van she had parked in the back—of metre-high floral constructions in faux-stone urns, which he carried for her into the drawing rooms and lobbies of the neighbourhood’s great residences.
But a lot of the time there were long periods where not much was to be done. Madame would work away at a small order, or prepare bouquets for supply to the local fruit shops and chemists, and they’d listen to the radio and talk, while he paged through the magazines and papers she bought each morning, and sometimes help her with the less complicated tasks.
She already knew of his interest in painting—from their brief interactions in the previous year, in the days when he stopped by on his way to Bernadette’s and so intrigued her with his remarks on what he’d recently seen in the museums or bookshops she had told him of. She was not surprised to learn, when the topic of conversation shifted to his home, of his previous employment in Accra as a signwriter, which is what led her, after a few weeks, to suggest that he undertake a small commission for her, right here in her shop—a tropical scene, she suggested, on the three walls of one of the side rooms. What she had in mind was a forest, something to go along with the plants she stored there—verdant, brimming, dangerous, secretive, like the forests of Rousseau’s tiger paintings, she said—had he not seen one in any of the museums? (Yes he had.)
For a week then, instead of helping with the flowers, he painted—a forest as she’d asked for, covering the walls, as high as the sky-coloured ceiling, and in which, if you looked closely, there were camouflaged birds, their feathers the colour of leaves, monkeys the colour of bark, butterfly wings in the shadows, eyes in the undergrowth like speckled pebbles.
“This is too beautiful,” Madame la Fleuriste said when she saw it complete. She stood in front of it and laughed out loud.
“But no tiger?” she asked.
“No tigers in Paris,” he said.
She walked around looking at the details.
“Too beautiful,” she said. “There must be more,” but not—she said—for the shop. She said, “This is not for the world,” and would he consider doing the next painting not in the shop, but downstairs—in the cellar, he could paint what he wanted, they would clear it out, clean it, it would all be undertaken just as he directed.
“But why down there?” he asked.
“Let it be something that needs to be found,” Madame said.
“Or not found, but hidden,” she later suggested when he started planning the commission and it occurred to her that the cellar, insulated by three feet of stone from the ears of the world, would be a perfect venue for a reincarnated Refuge de l’Ouest (of which he had told her much over the previous weeks), where its old patrons, dispersed around the city, could meet from time to time, hidden beneath the flagstones of Paris’s wealthiest quartier.
And so in the space of a few months Le Refuge Clandestin was established in the cellars beneath the florist. The walls of the narrow staircase leading down from the rear corridor of the shop were painted to resemble the flow of water falling down a chute. The water was painted in strands, like a twisted plait, of which the topmost extended up into the corridor above, where it resembled a scrape mark against the white paint, and gave no hint what lay below.
In the staircase itself, tumbling into the cellar, the water was interspersed with images of flowers that stuck to the strands like burrs, and larger images of the paraphernalia of the shop—the marble figure of a naked lady, stately and oblivious to her descent into the underground cavern, a piano, its keyboard unraveling like a scarf, upended tables, a radio, magazines, birdcages and books, and right at the bottom, a bathtub containing a figure, calmly waving, unambiguously that of Madame la Fleuriste.
The staircase now ended in a small specially constructed space, separated from the rest of the cellar with a thin drywall, and which contained the ordinary contents of the shop’s stores, stacked tightly up to the ceiling. The only signs of anything out of the ordinary were the small angels he painted, surrounding the room at the junction between the walls and ceiling, figured identically to those in the paintings of the medieval galleries of the Louvre, but for their mischievously grinning West and North African faces.
In the Refuge itself, which you entered through the false back of a cupboard behind a pile of compost bags, the fluorescent lights from the ceiling were taken out, and replaced by many small standing and table lamps, which they bought one afternoon in the secondhand shops in Saint-Denis. Each cast a thin low-wattage pool of light, no two the same, so that when the Refuge was full the room was illuminated in shifting patterns, as the light flowed between the movement of the people, and as a result of which the images on the walls and ceiling shifted in and out of visibility, and appeared to be moving themselves.
The Refuge Clandestin was simply furnished with what could be easily obtained. Aside from the lights, it had three tables with chairs, a small sofa with a Moroccan-style leather table, two large beanbags, and at the back, a counter made of crates and an old door, from which food and drink were served, and where they stored the music that was always playing when every fortnight or so, always on a Saturday, the room was in use.
Over the course of a few weeks the survivors of the original Oberkampf community were able to reestablish contact. Fawad the Algerian was the first, who was in touch with Fawad the Moroccan, who had heard that two of the Senegalese contingent had found a situation in the 11th, who in
turn had kept their links with Janetta, who being Beninoise was able eventually to contact a few of the West African contingent.
Nobody knew of the new Refuge other than those who were invited, and those who came as their guests. Given the small size of the Refuge, and the need for discretion, numbers were kept low and people signed up for alternate weekends. Simple plans were established to allow the participants to enter the premises, through the florist shop, without attracting attention. In some cases they borrowed Madame’s small truck, and so passed for a crew from the depot making a late afternoon delivery. Others came dressed up as foreign dignitaries, others as tradesmen, one or two as customers. Madame would always keep the shop open until the last of the guests were in, at around six in the evening, and then would close up and come down to the Refuge herself.
The new Refuge was still under construction when the meetings began. At first, the walls and ceiling of the room were covered by only a light gray wash, to form the undercoat for the depiction of a cavern, in which he intended to paint a number of vignettes, only the first of which he had completed by the time of the first meeting. Close to the door, it was a scene depicting his train journey across the Sahel, the one end of the train in Bamako, the other edging into the cathedral of Dakar station, and in between the desert, the baobab trees, circling birds, the border post, the family left behind, the hawkers, the small towns. It was Fawad the Algerian who had asked him to explain the picture, and who afterwards suggested he complete the wall with depictions of all the journeys to Paris of the people gathered at the Refuge; and this was how—over a number of months—the walls and ceiling of that room came to be populated with fantastical vignettes of the stories of each of those gathered there: of farms, villages, towns, cities across Africa, of car journeys, desert walks, container ships, overpacked dinghies, mountain hikes, beach landings, sojourns in hospitals, detention centres, safe houses.
Eddie Signwriter Page 23