by John Lawton
The concierge looked her up and down as though she were applying for a job on the ground floor establishment, and thinking little of her appeal as a whore, pointed her to the second floor.
She rang the bell and stood in front of two tall, narrow doors of dull, unbuffed cherrywood.
He took an age, looked as though she had disturbed him in the middle of something. A big, dark, Slav featured man of forty or more, wearing only a sarong knotted at his waist and trailing on the floor. Spatterings of paint across his body and his sarong, as though he had just wiped his hands on it. A mop of touselled black hair on his head, another on his chest. A bear of a man.
“You are Serge?”
He stopped scratching and snapped to.
“My dear. At last. We’ve been expecting you for so long. First it was Monday, and then Wednesday, and then yesterday, and here you are at last.”
And a half-naked, painted bear she had never met before pulled her to him in his bear hug.
“Come in, come in. My, so little baggage. Is that all you have? Still, what does it matter? We have all of us lost so much. We have the delight of fresh beginning.”
“We do?”
“Of course we do. The world stripped bare for us to fall upon like seed from the tree. And speaking of bare, excuse me a moment my dear while I fling something on.”
The world stripped bare? Is that what had happened? Walking down the boulevards, across the Île de la Cité and the Pont Saint-Michel, it had been her stripped bare by the world. Perhaps this was what he meant by a seed?
He took her bag from her only to set it down a few feet inside the door.
“Permit me to dress, my dear. I shall be but a moment.”
And he left her in the hall.
From whatever room he had retreated to, she heard him say, “Make yourself at home, cherie. Have a good poke around.”
Only one of the many doors that led off the hall was open. She pushed at it and found herself in a north-facing room overlooking the street, bright with summer light, that Serge obviously used as his studio. It was all but devoid of furniture, the floor was spattered with paint, accretions of paint laid down like strata in rock over countless years, and canvases stood stacked aginst the wall in dozens.
In the middle of the floor lay a summer dress in an ivy-leaf pattern, a red hat, and a pair of roller skates. Seated on a high-backed wooden chair, sipping a glass of white wine, was a red-headed girl of about her own age, completely naked and completely without self-consciousness. Resting on the easel was a large canvas representing Girl with Wineglass—she was a faceless blur, her body a streak of vivid red and green.
The girl got up.
“You must be Méret. What kind of a name is that?”
It was not any question Méret had expected as a first question.
“I don’t really know. Greek or something. I was never sure.”
“I am Zozo. Would you like wine or tea? Do say wine, then I don’t have to go and fiddle about in the kitchen with the gas stove. It has a bad habit of going poof!—one could lose one’s eyebrows, or worse if one is naked.”
“Wine, then,” said Méret, devoid of choice. “Are you naked often?”
“Most of the time. He’s painted me a dozen times since the liberation. He’ll paint you, too. If I were you I’d volunteer now, while the weather’s warm. There was hardly any fuel last winter. My arse was blue with cold.”
Zozo poured her a glass of wine and the two of them stood in front of the work in progress.
“You know, part of me thinks, Why do I bother? They never look like me and he might just as well paint from imagination—which, of course, he won’t—and part of me knows how good he is.”
“Does he . . . sell?”
“Oh, yes . . . you’d be surprised how in a time of shortages people will find money for art. It is defiance, I think. Thumbing one’s nose at history. It was why we threw wild parties during the war. Now we have no money for food, or worse, no food, we buy paintings, we go to concerts, we worship fashion. We go hungry just to be able to afford the price of the little red cloche hat in the milliner’s window.”
Serge reappeared—black, baggy denim trousers, and a black shirt merely adding to the bearness.
“Zozo, scoot. We will do no more today.”
Without another word, Zozo drained her glass, picked her red cloche hat and her ivy-leaf-pattern dress from the floor, slipped both on in an instant, tucked the roller skates under her arm, and left.
“Do you paint, cherie?”
“No. I play.”
“Play what?”
“The cello. I used to play the cello.”
“Surely you haven’t given up?”
“No. It’s just that I don’t have a cello.”
He was nodding sagely, as though what she had just said required thought, which it surely didn’t. Suddenly he rushed to the window, looked down into the street. Zozo was sitting on the steps of the gendarmerie, tying the laces on her skates.
“Zozo! Ten o’clock!”
“Tomorrow is Saturday!”
“So . . . are we the bourgeoisie, keeping office hours now?”
She thumbed her nose at him, stood, spun full circle, and rolled away into the Quartier Latin.
To Méret this was a moment of near-magic—a woman without underwear, dressed only in a hat and a dress so thin as to be transparent, was roller-skating across Paris in the last of the afternoon sun, dodging pedestrians, thumbing her nose at gendarmes, and showing her backside to taxi cabs. It was absurd—in a world that had seemed to be made up only of cruel rationalizations, this was delightfully absurd. The world was indeed stripped bare.
She became aware of how big the apartment was. It went two floors up and two across, over both the bordel and the florist. He showed her to her own room on the third floor. She set down her bag in a cream-coloured room, with woodwork in pale green and a dormer window that looked south across rooftops and peeked in through other dormers into other rooms and other lives. A plain deal chest of drawers, a half-melted candle stuck in an enamel candlestick, a narrow iron bedstead in curlicues of faded gold. A portrait on the wall—another blurred woman in strikingly unnatural colours, sprawled like an odalisque—it might be Zozo, it might be anyone
He said, “Unpack. Wash. Bathe if you like. We’ll take a stroll at dusk. A stroll, a drink. Stroll some more, drink some more.”
He left her alone. Twice in one day she had become mistress of her own space and time. She sat on the edge of the bed. A mattress as hard as oak. She knew at once that she could be happy here. She knew at once that it could not last.
§67
It was still light when they began their stroll, meandering along the Quai des Grand Augustins, over the Pont Neuf, onto the Île de la Cité, past the cathedral of Notre Dame, onto the Île Saint-Louis, back to the left bank to nip in and out of the bars of the Boulevard Saint-Germain—the Deux Magots and the Café de Flore—to end up, as dusk rolled down upon the city like a theatre curtain, at the restaurant Porquerolles.
He talked nonstop all the way, pausing only to acknowledge people he knew—a wave to Jean Cocteau (striking, bony, handsome); a few words in two languages and a formal introduction to Pablo Picasso (broad, woolly in a bald sort of way, looking like a Spanish peasant); a joke that set them both giggling with Samuel Beckett (bony, mysterious, far from handsome, piercing eyes behind wire-rimmed spectacles).
“Do you know everyone in Paris?” she asked.
He took her arm and slipped it through his. Strolling like lovers now.
“I’ve lived here, on the same street, in fact, since I was five or six years old. Yes, I know a lot of people, but most of them not well. Paris is a moveable feast. For example, I spent the war here. Beckett and Picasso did not. I suppose they might have been at risk. And I suppose I was not. Meanwhile, who stayed, who left, who did what has become the subject of a fiction as massive as La Comédie humaine. And it drives people apart. For almost a
year France has been eating itself alive. I have learnt to value any friendship and not to ask too closely about who did what, with whom, when.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Well, let me give you the obvious example. The war is scarcely over—Japan has not yet surrendered—and Marshal Pétain is on trial. Today in fact, Pierre Laval took the stand to give evidence on behalf of the Vichy regime. It’s possible they’ll both hang.”
“And it’s possible,” she said, “that that would be justice.”
“Indeed, but it is not a healing process. And I fear that France will go on devouring herself for a generation.”
They had reached the door of Porquerolles. He held it open, she paused on the threshold. She did not want this to be a subject that dominated their meal.
“You will understand, Serge, that I am even less likely to forgive than any French citizen.”
“I do, and I would never expect you to. But we must walk away from the mess of recrimination or go on eating ourselves alive.”
“And you think that can apply to an individual as well as a nation, do you?”
“Let’s eat.”
§68
When they left Porquerolles it was night. The street lamps ablaze. They cut like broken glass.
“What’s the matter?” he said.
“Nothing,” she replied, and tucking her head down walked on beside him. Paris was a revelation. And what it revealed was Méret Voytek.
Two young women, only a few years older than she was, passed them, walking side by side. One wore her mother’s scent, Soir de Paris, the other Chanel No. 5. Two trails of perfume entwining in the night air in an invisible, delectable double helix. Wisteria and honeysuckle, wrapped the one about the other. She stopped and turned and looked. Breathed in.
“Startling, isn’t it?” she heard him say.
She said nothing, watched the two women caught like flickering frames on a cinema screen by streams and pools of light as they passed the illuminated window of each café and restaurant.
“Before the war,” he went on, out of sight behind her, a baritone susurrus at her shoulder, “I would have said Paris smelled of drains, castor oil and patchouli. Now every woman that passes is an olfactory delight. As though they had been saving it these last five years. Their faces are different, all but stripped of their maquillage. A bare simplicity. Even the way they walk is different. Watch them. There is none of the hautecouture, arse-wobbling strut of the pre-war Parisienne. They plant their feet firmly on the ground, as though stepping out into this strange new world. And it is a strange new world, is it not?”
He was by her side now, looking down as she looked up.
“Yes,” she said. “Strange in that it is original. Nothing like it has ever existed. And there is none shall find it stranger than I.”
Back in her room atop the studio, atop the bordel, in Rue de la Huchette, she took out her possession. Her sole possession. The last relic of her childhood—the small conical bottle of Soir de Paris, three-quarters full. She had had it for the best part of a fortnight now, had opened it and sniffed at it but not used it.
She dabbed a little on her neck, a little more on her hand, and as the alcohol cleared she smelt her mother one fleeting final moment as Paris 1929 submerged into Paris 1945, the scent became her scent, and she entwined with the honeysuckle and wisteria, spiralling out into un soir Parisien.
§69
In the morning she slept late. When she finally came down to the studio, the same hat and a different dress were heaped in the middle of the floor next to the roller skates, and Zozo sat naked again.
Serge was in his sarong, and she concluded it was his affectation or preference to paint bare-chested. Given his propensity to splash paint everywhere, it might even be a practical choice.
Kneeling on the floorboards was a young man who might have been Zozo’s twin, skinny as he was, with a thick thatch of auburn hair. He was unpacking a suitcase and listing everything he took out.
“A kilo of butter, four jars of strawberry jam, two of honey, a kilo forty of ham, two strings of sausages, a dozen eggs . . .”
Then he noticed Méret. Stood up and played the Frenchman, taking her hand and kissing her fingers just below the knuckles.
“Zeke Dupré de Segonszac. Enchanté. I see you’ve met my sister?”
Zozo blinked and smiled but held the pose. The boy returned to his case. Last of all he retrieved a faded, battered biscuit tin, a scene in the style of Fragonard all but worn away.
“And for my last trick . . . well you’d better stand well back.”
It was a brie, in a condition rapidly approaching liquid. When he popped the lid it was as though a cheeky child had lobbed a stink bomb into the room.
Zozo lost her pose, her hands held to her face.
Serge said, “What the hell is that?”
But Méret went up to the tin, knelt down, and inhaled.
“It’s rather strong,” the boy said, half-apologetic and understating the obvious.
“No,” said Méret. “It’s beautiful. It’s a beautiful smell. A good smell.”
“A good smell? Where have you been?”
“Oh, yes, a good smell.”
“Ah, well . . . I’m glad someone is happy.”
Serge leaned over them and stuck the lid back on.
“Enough!”
Méret asked, “Where do you find such things?”
Zeke rested on one elbow, stretched out his legs, shrugged a Gallic shrug as though the answer were obvious.
“About once a month I take the train out into Basse-Normandie and I buy directly from the farmers. Mostly relatives—uncles and cousins.”
“You mean the black market?”
“Naturellement.”
“Isn’t that . . . unpatriotic?”
She’d no idea she’d said anything funny but Zeke and Zozo began to giggle and in seconds Serge was guffawing—a bellowing laugh that left him red in the face.
He put an arm around her, lifted her bodily off the floor as though she were no lighter than a bird, hugged her to him—half-naked, sticky with paint—twirled her round and round.
“Of course, it’s unpatriotic! That’s the reward of victory. To know we can be unpatriotic. To be able to beat the system with a clear conscience. And it’s the best game in town.”
§70
Serge encouraged her to go out alone. Each day she went in a different direction. By Monday she had already visited the Champs Elysées, the Champs de Mars, and the Jardins du Luxembourg and found herself drifting off the end of the Boulevard Saint-Germain and into the Rue Mouffetard.
Early in the evening she sat in the window of Les Hérons Rouges, a small café about halfway down the Mouffetard. She would have liked coffee but they had none, so she sipped at a weak black tea. She would have sold her soul for a croissant but they had none of those, either. Instead, she found a phrase of her father’s popped into her head like a warning from the dead and she deployed it—she counted her blessings. August in Paris—a Paris that might get too hot and was pitifully short of everything—but so what?
It was around half past six in the evening. There had been a human surge up and down the street for the last hour that was beginning to thin. It had been the best free entertainment she had ever seen that didn’t involve music.
She had looked out fascinated, and now she was aware of someone looking back at her from the street, seemingly equally fascinated. A thin man in a shabby olive-coloured cotton suit that hung badly on him. It was Georges Pasdeloup, the roofer who had fed her dried fruit and wrinkled apples in Auschwitz.
He came into the café, stood a moment in silence before saying, “It is you isn’t it? I never knew your name.”
Every hair on her head bristled but there were only two things she could possibly say.
“I’m Méret Voytek. Please, won’t you join me?”
He waved to the bartender, mouthed vin rouge, and sat down.
�
��You’ve . . . you’ve gained w . . . w . . . weight,” he said. “Not that I would normally comment on a lady’s w . . . w . . . weight. But we were all of us so thin a year ago. I . . . I . . . have not.”
He tugged at his bag of a suit.
“This was still in my w . . . wardrobe where I had left it when the boche came for me. I used to fill it. Somehow, I cannot seem to. No m . . . m . . . matter what I eat.”
Another phrase sprang to mind, not one of her father’s generous helpings of homespun philosophy but one of her mother’s scathing criticisms. He looked, as she would have said, “like death warmed up.” And she could not recall that he had stammered.
“Georges, is it not?”
He nodded as though uttering any more might be an effort.
“When did you get back, Georges?”
“In May. The B . . . B . . . British took the camp I was in. The Germans had abandoned us already. We were starving. I thought nothing could be worse than Auschwitz. I was wrong.”
She listened to Georges’s tale—how he had survived the journey from Auschwitz to Belsen; how the British found so many dead they had buried them with a bulldozer; how, on their return, the French had deloused them en masse at the Gare d’Orsay not thinking that that was exactly what the Germans had done at the other end of their journey—and she had agreed that yes, they could meet again.
And all the way back to the apartment she had regretted the promise, knowing all the while that she was bound to keep it.
§71
When she got back to Rue de la Huchette, Serge and Zozo were listening to the wireless. Something had happened.
“The Americans have bombed Hiroshima.”
“Where’s that?”
“I don’t really know, somewhere in southern Japan.”
“And this is news? They bomb Japan every day.”
“This was just one bomb. And there’s nothing left of Hiroshima.”