by Simon Mawer
But none of this really mattered. During her stay in Paris, what mattered was what happened in the hot and cramped interstices of her programme. The grappling with Clément on the hotel bed on the afternoon of her arrival; the awkward dinner with him and his wife Augustine at some overpriced restaurant overlooking Notre Dame; and the other encounter that came as a coda to her meeting with the Soviet cultural attaché – the sudden shock when the office door was opened and a figure stood there in the doorway, a tall, bony man with slightly receding hair and a focused, aquiline face that she thought of as Jewish. Maybe that explained his unusual, biblical name: Absolon.
‘Mrs Marian Walcott,’ he said. ‘Or should I say Sutro? I could not let you go without seeing you.’
They shook hands warily, each trying to gauge the other, looking for subtle signs and significances. He was, apparently, working for the TASS news agency. No longer a soldier but a journalist. ‘Can we meet up?’ he asked when they had exchanged the expected platitudes. ‘Can we do that? Would you be kind enough to grant me audience? I am most busy at the moment but perhaps dinner tomorrow? Are you free? At your hotel at eight o’clock?’
She didn’t know. She really didn’t know.
‘The Hôtel Lyonnais, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’ll be there even if you are not.’
Marian Sutro travelling on the métro once again, rattling through the tunnels, emerging at the surface in a nondescript part of the city that the tourist never visits. Marian Sutro for the moment free of attachments, free of followers, still full of the memories of Clément while trying to dismiss memories of Absolon whose very presence here in the city seems something like a threat.
The Hôtel Lyonnais. How did he know that?
People pushed past her on the pavement. Cars, almost vanished during the occupation, now created a minor traffic jam round a section of roadworks. On the corner of rue des Couronnes a young man was selling copies of L’Humanité and shouting at passers-by not to believe what the government told them, not to believe the lies and the half-truths. Believe L’Humanité.
In a run-down café she ordered a pastis and took stock. Two men were sitting at a table playing cards and drinking. At another table outside on the pavement a young couple was deep in some intense argument, he holding her hand and shaking it, as though somehow this might stir his point of view into her head.
‘Where are you from, then?’ the barman asked.
No stranger ever asked a question like that the last time she was in the city. Questions drew you in to other people’s stories, got you involved, got you into trouble. Now no one cared. She watched water drop into the pastis and turn the clear liquid into a dense cloud. The lie came readily to her, clouding the truth just as the water clouded the pastis. ‘Grenoble.’ A cover story invented on the fly. ‘Just got in on the train.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Just looking round.’
The taste of the drink was like aniseed balls, evoking memories of midnight feasts at school, an innocence it seemed almost impossible to imagine. As the drink went down she felt that small blur of indifference that came with alcohol, the heightened sense of detachment, the feeling of carelessness. She had drunk pastis with Benoît that evening in Toulouse, the last evening in Toulouse – an evening when innocence was erased for ever, leaving behind no more than a residual aftertaste of guilt.
The barman wiped a couple of glasses and looked her over. What did he see? Une gonzesse, une poule de luxe, a posh bird slumming it? ‘First time in Paris? This isn’t the pretty part. Belleville’s not so belle.’
‘I was here during the war.’
‘Were you, indeed? Things aren’t much better now, I tell you. You still want to be careful. There are people here who’d skin you alive. Only the other day one of the fashion houses tried to take photos here. Models in fancy dresses, a photographer, lights, the whole lot. Local women attacked them. Tore the dresses off of the models. Left them in their knickers.’ The barman grinned. ‘True story.’
She paid and went outside. The market in the middle of the boulevard was as it had been during the war, stalls selling second-hand clothing, people picking through the coats and jackets just as they did in the days of the occupation. But now there were food stalls as well – dirty vegetables piled high, cheeses stacked like building blocks, scrawny chickens hanging by their necks, even a butchered lamb. ‘At your fucking prices we might as well still be under the frisés,’ a woman was shouting at one of the stallholders. There was derisive laughter from her audience.
Marian turned off the boulevard into the narrow streets at the foot of the butte where an old woman tried to sell her a sprig of lilac. ‘It’ll bring you luck, dearie.’
She began to climb. The street rose steeply between rotting tenements. Washing hung like bunting over the smell of ordure, of drains, of cooking. Was this the street down which she had run five years ago? Houses were boarded up, windows broken. Buildings leaned drunkenly towards each other. Struts of creosoted wood held a side alley open like someone separating a pair of punch-drunk prizefighters. Notices announced that the buildings had been condemned as uninhabitable by the Ville de Paris and that rénovation urbaine was in progress, but you couldn’t see it. In a narrow, weed-infested space a group of kids kicked a ball made of rags bound up with string. They shouted con! and merde! and other words she couldn’t comprehend. From the shadows of a doorway a woman watched her progress. ‘Nothing for tourists here,’ she called out. ‘This isn’t fucking Montmartre.’
Marian went on upwards. The climb became steeper until finally there was a flight of stairs leading up to the crest of the hill. She stopped and looked around, recalling no stairs in the desperate rush of her flight, just the steep descent down uneven cobbles, and the view across the whole of the city, the Tour Eiffel rearing up like a stiletto from a muddled sea of roofs. Spring sunshine brushed uneven strokes of light and dark across the city; when she was here before it had been a leaden day of unremitting gloom. She remembered only because it was impossible to forget. But did she run over these broken paving stones and uneven setts? Was that the drain where she threw her pistol? She cast around helplessly, fancying she might go down on her knees and reach her arm into the dark hole to find the weapon still lying there, the 9mm Browning whose heft she could still feel in her hand.
An old man approached her, drunk or mad, mumbling incoherent words. She shook her head at whatever he was offering or asking, and walked on, following the road from the edge of the hill, following the thread of memory back to the intersection at the end where six streets converged onto a narrow square. A single recollection stood out from the mess of memory like a fractured bone from an open wound – high up on a wall the street sign saying Rue de Envierges with below it a hammer and sickle in dripping red paint. The sign was still there but the hammer and sickle had gone, painted over with a mask of grimy white so that all that remained was a shadow, a vague crescent cut through by a diagonal, like a fog-obscured moon pierced with a lance.
She looked round the little square. Posters. Red posters announcing a meeting of the Parti Communiste Français where Jacques Duclos would address the faithful; multicoloured posters advertising some event or other – a circus, a play, a film at the Belleville-Pathé. Official posters in small print over the seal of the Mairie de Paris. From a bakery on one corner a woman emerged with two baguettes tucked under her arm. At another corner there was some kind of repair shop where two youths were doing things to the intestines of a motorbike. On a third corner there was a café and directly opposite was the impasse, the cul-de-sac, the blind alley, the dead end where the dead met their end.
She crossed the square and peered in: a street going nowhere except to a flight of stairs. This was where. She had run into this dank, cobbled place, then stopped at the foot of the steps to turn and see the Gestapo men, the SD men, whatever men they were, filling the entrance behind her. A rat in a trap.
Cautiously she stepped forward into t
he shadows, into the embrace of rotten plasterwork and grimy windows and memory. Drainpipes crawled downwards like veins through ulcerated flesh. There was the smell of piss, of cat and man. A torn poster advertised a tonic wine that would make you beam with delight. Beneath it Armand had chalked eternal love to Agnes.
And then there was the plaque. It was a plain thing, a rectangle of white stone high up one wall bearing the title Front National, Comité du Quartier.
En cet endroit, it declared, en Novembre 1943 deux agents de nazi-fascisme ont été exécutés par Julius Miessen, martyr pour la cause de la liberté.
In this place, in November 1943, two agents of Nazi-Fascism were executed by Julius Miessen, martyr for the cause of freedom.
She felt strange, as thin and feeble as tissue paper, as though the light was passing through her and the slightest breeze might blow her away. There at the top of the steps, for a fleeting moment, is the figure of Julius Miessen; and, when she turns, there are the two men silhouetted at the entrance to the impasse, sealing off the way back. She is at the axis of her memory. The world, the walls and the stones wheel round. Panic threatens to overwhelm her.
‘You, come here!’ one of the men shouts.
She looks back again, up the cliff of steps. Miessen, if it was Miessen, has vanished. Cautiously, feeling her way, she turns and goes back towards the two men at the entrance. She can feel the hard grip of wood and steel in her pocket, the weight of the Browning semi-automatic pistol. It is almost an extension of her arm, a prosthesis implanted there by hours of training. You don’t aim the bloody thing. You’re not at a shooting gallery. You cover the target with your weapon, holding it with two hands, the body square on, the feet apart, knees flexed. Double tap. Bang! Bang!
How is it that some memories are fragmented, broken and disjointed, whereas others remain whole and complete? This memory is complete. She looks up to the top of the steps and there he is: the man who calls himself Julius Miessen, who met her on the Toulouse train, who followed her from the station, who haunted her like a ghost through the streets of the city. She looks back and there they are, lying in pools of blood on the damp stone setts, one of them still moving, trying to raise himself up, trying to pull something from his pocket as she covers the few yards towards him.
From three feet away, she shoots him through the eye.
Someone was coming down the steps. At the sound of his footsteps she spun round, thinking, for an absurd moment, that it must be Miessen. But it was only a middle-aged man, his face rough with stubble, his eyes shaded with a peaked cap. He barely seemed to notice her as he walked past. Perhaps he didn’t see her. Perhaps she had become entirely transparent, no more than an insubstantial memory trembling on the cool early summer air. No more substantial than the memory of the two men lying dead on the cobbles in their puddles of blood.
The man went on out into the bright light of the square while she stood there in the shadows for a long time, looking, thinking about time and place. It was here; it was not here. Ned would have talked about the spacetime continuum or something, explaining that everything had moved on so that all that remained for her to see was a mere husk, distant not only in time but also in space.
Where, she wondered, do memories lie? How do memories lie?
She turned and went back into the square and across to the café. Inside, behind the dull gleam of a zinc counter, a woman watched with narrow, suspicious eyes.
‘I noticed the plaque in the impasse.’
The woman shrugged. ‘What of it?’ She wiped a table for Marian to sit, but it wasn’t clear which of the two benefited more from the operation, the grimy table or the equally grimy rag that she used.
‘Were you here then?’
‘Been here thirty years. What do you want?’
What did she want? An interesting question without a ready answer. ‘A pastis, please.’
The drink came, with its little jug of water. ‘So what happened? In the impasse, I mean.’
Another shrug. The woman was pale and desiccated, as though she had been hidden in the shadows for too long, and starved for most of the time. ‘Nothing much. A shooting. Kind of thing happened in those days, didn’t it? You’re not too young to remember.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘I didn’t see it myself.’ She returned to the domain that was exclusively hers, behind the zinc counter, and called, ‘Georges! Come here a minute, will you?’ Then to Marian, ‘He’ll tell you. He saw it all.’
Peremptorily summoned, Georges came in from the back, smoking a caporal and scratching himself.
‘She wants to know about the shooting.’
Georges eyed Marian suspiciously. ‘Why’s that?’
Never hesitate, a voice said inside her head. Never go anywhere or do anything without having a plausible reason. Never be caught out. ‘I’m a journalist. Doing a piece on incidents in the quartiers. Local colour kind of stuff. For L’Humanité, Combat, anyone who’ll take it.’ It was a cover story made up on the fly and she knew she had nothing to support it, no notebook, no pencil even. But he didn’t seem to care. Perhaps the idea of being quoted in the press was enough.
‘Gestapo,’ he told her. ‘They were chasing this girl, see. Got her trapped in the impasse, like a rat in a cellar. And just as they were going to arrest her this guy comes along and shoots the buggers. Bang, bang, straight through the heart, each one. Cool as you like. Maybe he was her lover or something. That’s what I reckon.’
‘Her lover?’
‘Got to be some reason, hasn’t there?’
‘Why were they after her?’
‘A Jew, wasn’t she?’
‘A Jew?’
‘They were always after Jews, weren’t they? Where were you at the time, for fuck’s sake?’
‘Geneva.’
He laughed. ‘Well out of it, I’d say.’ His laugh turned into a raucous cough. He took a drag on his cigarette to calm things down. ‘Anyway, as far as I could see, she got away. Ran off down there—’ He pointed vaguely beyond the windows of the café. ‘Don’t know if they caught her. They were all over the place, looking for her.’
‘And the man? This Miessen … Doesn’t sound French.’
‘Dutch, so they say. French mother. They got him shortly after. Dragged him through here so everyone could see, poor bastard. Real mess, he was. Blood all over. A few days later they shot him, that’s the story. In Fresnes Prison. D’you know Fresnes?’
‘I know Fresnes.’
There was something in her tone that gave her away. He drew on his cigarette again, looking at her shrewdly. ‘How come?’
‘I did a piece about it. Fresnes then and now, it was called. For Combat.’
‘Is that right?’ He licked his lips, as though tasting the texture of her answer. Maybe he read Combat. Maybe he was trying to recall the article. ‘Anyway, whatever happened to him, now he’s a hero and they put up a plaque to his memory and claim him for their own. And journalists who were safe and sound in Geneva at the time write stories about him.’ A laugh, full of phlegm. ‘Fat lot of good any of it’ll do him, that’s for sure.’
She counted out the money for her drink. Still he was watching her. Something in her manner had awoken his curiosity, some little hint she had given, perhaps some mistake she had made. ‘She was about your age, the girl was. Younger. Looked a bit like you. Almost be your sister. I saw her, you see. I was standing right here and I saw her as she came out of the impasse. Running like hell, she was. Wearing a black and white coat, I remember that. Classy, it looked. Not the kind of thing you see round here.’ He looked her over now, at her own clothes which were not the kind of thing you saw round there, either. ‘What do you know about it all?’
She got up from the table. The door was open and outside there was the refuge of bright sunshine. She thought of Miessen’s battered face, hiding behind it the only other brain that stored the truth. The other two witnesses both had bullets through theirs. How insignificant and ephemer
al the act of remembering. ‘I know she wasn’t Jewish,’ she said. ‘Nor was she his lover. And she wasn’t my sister.’
Absolon
On the way back in the métro she thought about it, about the impasse and the plaque, about memory and record. Miessen, not her. Absolution of a kind. Back at the hotel she found a message waiting for her at the reception desk. Absolution become Absolon. He assumed that everything was still all right for dinner that evening and would come round at eight o’clock.
Memories and half-memories. What happened in the impasse in Belleville, and what happened that night in Hamburg after the Ravensbrück trial, that single night with Tony Bright that she had clutched to herself and imagined as something without significance and devoid of consequence. Did this Russian know anything about it? Had he and Bright talked it over the next day, perhaps over a few vodkas – dreadful male banter she could only imagine? Would Bright have told Absolon, nudging him in the ribs and laughing over his little triumph? She’s a good lay. Something like that. Screw, she’s a good screw.
When she came down into the narrow reception hall with its two dusty armchairs and its painting of the cathedral of Saint-Jean in Lyon, there he was, wearing a well-cut grey suit, his hair thinner than she remembered, his face narrower, leaner, more lined, but Major Absolon nevertheless. She couldn’t even recall his first name.