by Mary Byrne
Zorica will no longer smile down on it all from her window, across the flowers. She has seen her last fourteenth of July in this quarter that is a microcosm of the New Europe, and even a brave new world.
Down home, her great grand-twins, caught between two worlds, will play at blowing out the electric table lamp, giggling.
The older boy will sit at a computer, preparing an essay for school.
‘Serbia is at the gates of Europe,’ he will read from the Internet. ‘If they catch Mladic, we’ll get into Europe!’
‘We’ve been in Europe all along,’ Zorica will sigh, eyeing the giggling girls. She will stop sewing and switch off the table lamp.
‘There you are girls,’ she will say, ‘you’ve blown it out now.’
Between Men
‘Clouds sitting on my nose,’ the estate agent told a Paris colleague on the phone. In Paris, they always thought people in the south should be out sunning themselves. Whenever northerners said, ‘“I hear the sun in your accent,’ he almost threw up.
The village, indeed the whole region, was quiet, the affairs of summer packed away for another year. Vines had been pre-pruned and pruned once, some twice, ploughed and treated with some lethal yellow muck.
The phone rang. It was a client called Loison. ‘I’ve a house to sell, up in Ste Eulalie,’ Loison said.
The estate agent took the details, tidied his desk and left the office. He bumped into his secretary who was returning from lunch.
‘You can close up if I’m not back,’ he said.
On a day like this nobody would leave home unless he had to. The sun might reappear at intervals to warm the yellow and black stone villages, but this was the depth of winter darkness. He knew someone who, on days like these, went to bed and stayed there until spring beckoned again. The estate agent reckoned his own stiffness was a slight bout of rheumatism brought on by the damp. Either that or the force of gravity was beginning to pull harder. Keep it upbeat, he told himself: a damp day was ideal for showing up all the disadvantages of an old house.
He got his car from the large underground car park underneath his office, which was on the main shopping street, to attract stragglers, and drove off into the country. He decided not to turn on the radio, but instead marveled at what green remained, and would remain all winter: umbrella pines, dwarf oaks. Some old walls still displayed late oleander and bougainvillea. As he approached the little village—once and still more or less fortified—he appreciated yet again its lines and its age, although he knew he couldn’t live there.
The streets were so narrow the only parking was on the village square, where two men on a mechanical hoist were tinkering with Christmas lights on a huge tree.
As he made his way on foot he realized that most people were by now dozing by the fire after lunch. The acrid smell of wood smoke hung in the air.
He followed Loison’s instructions carefully, since none of the street names were marked. Sometimes people didn’t know their new street name anyway, referring rather to someone who had once lived there, usually by a nickname: Marmite’s house, Mosquito’s lane, Pepe’s alley. The names lived on after the death of their owners. The estate agent thought this might be a bit odd. A guest Buddhist, on a half-heard radio show in the car the evening before, had casually mentioned that the ego didn’t exist. He himself had often noticed the meaningless air of a house whose owner had died or departed. And now they were saying the ego mightn’t exist either. Were the locals desperately fighting the loss of Marmite and Mosquito’s ego?
Concentrate, he thought. Business. Houses.
Dark damp stains shadowed the ground floor level of most of the buildings, and would likely stay there until the sun warmed things up again.
He was beginning to think he’d gone wrong when he came on it: a dead-end street about a meter wide, a few stone houses on either side, each slightly different from its neighbor. The Loisons’ house was taller and skinnier than the others, all dark because most of the stone was local basalt. Blue workmen’s trousers and jackets hung from the balcony next door. Opposite, by way of reply, one huge pair of greying underpants hung from a makeshift wire under a window.
The estate agent knocked on the Loisons’ door.
He had disturbed a late lunch which the Loisons were eating in a triangular room whose two street windows provided the only natural light.
Mme Loison was feeding potato croquettes to a bald parrot in a cage on the table. The cage door was open but the grey-fleshed parrot was so busy inside that the estate agent thought at first it must be engaged in some kind of acrobatics. The parrot held onto its perch with one claw and reached the croquette up to its beak with the other, its grey baldness exaggerating what was already comical enough. The estate agent had a dreadful urge to laugh, which he drowned with difficulty.
The Loisons offered him food, coffee, anything he wanted.
‘I had a sandwich early on,’ he said.
He could see the performance going on all afternoon, sensing that here were people who didn’t let you go easily. Each time the parrot finished a croquette, it rattled the cage door with its beak until it was handed another.
Mme Loison and the parrot carried this on for some time.
They all looked at the estate agent for approval. He felt stifled. The air was full of the smell of fried food and some kind of hair spray or cheap perfume. The whole place was overheated.
After a while, they pulled themselves together and showed him round the house.
Loison showed him the thermostats he’d installed in every room. In case the heating might fall below 30°C, thought the estate agent. Throughout the house, the decor was dark as the grave, and they stumbled from one floor to the other on steep, ill-lit stairs. Loison had also dragged bags of cement all the way to the top and built a roof terrace, only it had no view and you had to climb a ladder to get to it.
‘The marinas is on its way,’ said Loison.
This was a sea wind that would make things even damper. When it came from the east it was called Le Grec, as if it had blown all the way from Greece.
‘I’m from Paris,’ Mme Loison told him as they climbed back down, in a voice that said he should have recognized the accent that made her different from the locals.
He could see it now: a hairdressing salon or a rooms-by-the-hour hotel in rue St. Denis. Right enough, the bedrooms here wore as much wallpaper as any cheap Parisian hotel. Wooden beams had been plastered first then wallpapered. The interior of each bedroom door was also carefully wallpapered.
Mme Loison emphasized where each light switch was, in a way that suggested the estate agent would be showing people around next time. Then she dropped out and left them to visit the cellar together without her: ‘entre hommes,’ as she put it. Between men.
Mr Loison led the way down the stone stairs and they arrived in a tall space built into the rock. The door directly onto the street was where they used to bring the grapes in and the wine out, Loison explained unnecessarily. There was a toilet too, which meant he could come down here any time and stay as long as he liked.
Loison shot the lights on suddenly and the estate agent saw it: on a huge purpose-built platform, a fully electrified train set had been installed among carefully-built mountains and hills. In defiance of any precise geographical location, Loison’s handyman landscape contained city roads, country roads, town houses and country houses.
The estate agent could see why Mme Loison stayed away: this dungeon was her husband’s pièce de résistance, his other world, his own peculiar damp-smelling freedom.
Loison studied the estate agent for reactions. Seeing none, he threw another switch and lights winked all over the scene. They both gazed in silence for a moment, and the estate agent almost jumped when Loison finally set the train into motion.
Lamps glowed through the windows of houses built on escarpments of Japanese wallpape
r, torches glowed in the hills, while in the town traffic lights blinked, street lights swayed and bells rang as that wonderful train went by.
They both stared.
Loison looked at the estate agent and waited.
The estate agent could not find a suitable thing to say, indeed it seemed as if a word would choke him. All he could do was watch the performance.
Suddenly Loison tripped the switch and the show was over. ‘I come from here but I met her when I worked in Paris,’ he said. ‘It’s hard, a summer place, when summer is gone.’ He didn’t seem to expect a reply.
Slowly the two men made their way upstairs again.
The estate agent filled out the last formalities on his standard agency form at the kitchen table.
The parrot dozed.
When the estate agent came to the standard question—Reason for selling?—he couldn’t bring himself to ask, and left the space blank.
As he walked back up the narrow street, he felt he had in some way failed the clients. Worse than that, he had somehow failed himself.
It’s Not About the Money
Chantal had a voice like a drag queen, and one of those blonde bouffant hairstyles that went with it. A baroque version of what was once known as a French pleat, I believe.
She came to us on some kind of transfer scheme. It was that or get pre-retired, and at her age she couldn’t afford that, any more than anyone else. At the interview (it wasn’t an interview, she’d been parachuted in over his head) our boss told her she wasn’t bad looking at all. Already nervous, she nearly jumped a yard off the ground when he then asked her if she’d ever been through analysis.
‘Oh, là-là!’ she said, in that double-pitch of hers, when she came out to the coffee corner. She was in a bit of a state, but braving it out.
I did my best to reassure her: he was like that, he said the same to everybody, he was bull-goose loony. We called him Madame behind his back. We asked each other, ‘How’s she doin’ today?’ when we wanted to know what mood he was in. We could do it in front of him without his knowing who we were talking about. The difficulty was not to crack up with laughter.
Chantal raised her plastic cup of hot sugared and lemoned water that pretended to be tea.
‘Here’s lookin’ at you,’ she said.
Chantal joined my office, where there wouldn’t have been enough of us if they’d sent in ten Chantals. Ours was one of the less obscure offices of the Préfecture de Police in Paris, charged with filtering endless streams of stressed-out, nervous immigrants. Most had insufficient documentation. If they produced all the paperwork, we found another document that was needed and managed to keep them coming back and back until an earlier in-date document was now out of date and so they had to start again. Of course there were also the over-confident ones who leaped out of flash, double-parked cars, jumped the queue and tried to pull the wool over our eyes. Sometimes they sent an envoy to do it. Sometimes it even worked. But generally the wannabe immigrants were in the asking position, we had all the power. You became immune to the misery of it all, after a while.
Chantal, a spinster farmer’s daughter from a forgotten corner of Normandy, brought it all to the surface again:
‘What’s the cattle-crush out front, for?’ she asked me that first day, during the lunch break.
She was referring to the steel barriers, erected every morning by our ‘bouncers’—doormen and security men—to keep the wannabe immigrants in line.
Even I had a sense of shame, as I replied, ‘Hail, rain or shine.’
‘May the Lord look down on them,’ said Chantal. We were unused to hearing anyone make that kind of remark these days.
‘That’s not all,’ I explained. ‘They start queuing at two o’clock in the morning because we only handle so many each day. They relay each other for toilets and coffee.’
‘What must those busloads of foreign tourists—what must the world—think of us?’
Chantal first started seeing the shrink because she was being harassed by our boss. Either she was particularly raw-skinned, or the rest of us had just turned into the fat cows he accused us of being. It was well known that he referred to our office sniggeringly as the ‘gynecea.’ From the Greek. ‘Fat cows!’ he would say, under his breath. ‘Whores!’ When angry with one of us, his favorite question to her was ‘Got your period today?’
Some months after she came, Chantal started seeing a shrink once a week. Because she didn’t fully believe in the shrink, really, she also read, on the side, any books of psychology she could get her hands on, or understand, as a kind of double check. In one of the books she came across an anal-hoarding sadist. It was demonstrated that Himmler and Hitler had been such individuals. Chantal said it described our boss perfectly.
We all liked it, so the name stuck.
Work was his god, the office his church. He insisted that everything be done exactly as it always had in the past. We weren’t even allowed to move a desk or a chair or a plant. Every morning he whipped the bouncers downstairs into a frenzy of viciousness (he had a different method of needling men that I needn’t go into here) then he came up the stairs and started on his gynecea.
Apart from him, our office was woman-only. An accident, they pretended. However, the bigger office in the city center—where more important things were done, like stamping a residence permit because a decision had been made elsewhere and transmitted—was mostly full of men. Me and my colleagues had long since given up wondering about all that. They only gave us women the vote in 1945, for God’s sake
Each morning he came up the stairs and goaded us to speed up. Every day it was something different: the queue was around the block already, the Préfet was coming on a visit, the traffic police were getting antsy, a row had broken out about placement in the queue. Whatever it was, it was our fault.
After six months of this, Chantal announced she was giving up the shrink. I asked why.
‘Said I was maybe giving off the wrong signals.’
‘Wouldn’t believe you, huh?’
‘If what I said was true, then it was so outlandish that I must be encouraging such torture.’
‘What’d you do?’
‘I unpacked myself from his over-comfortable chair. I stood up. I said, “How much do I owe you?”’
Shortly afterwards, one Friday in May, Chantal was due to go on holiday leave.
As if he were jealous of her time off, or angry that his favorite boxing-bag was escaping, the anal-hoarder gave her a terrible grueling that morning.
She seemed to be taking it, except that by eleven o’clock she got into a row with a wannabe. This was unusual for Chantal, and she should have known better—it was a European wannabe: white, articulate. The anal-hoarder was prowling behind her. She exploded.
‘Paris is full of immigrants—full! Bad hotels are overflowing with them! The hotels are so shitty they frequently burn! We have so many immigrants we burn them alive!’
The black and brown wannabes shied back, startled yet slightly amused.
The white wannabe stalked out, threatening letters.
The anal-hoarding sadist told Chantal to go to the doctor, the chemist, anywhere only get out.
She went next door and was given a tranquilizing injection. She came back after lunch determined to finish out her day and go on holidays, ‘Like an ordinary Christian,’ as she said to me. She looked strained. Her French pleat was mussed, something I’d never seen before.
I put her on a back desk.
When he saw her not only back but at an unaccustomed desk, he barked, ‘Either you’re well enough to work or you’re ill. Get on the front desk.’
This was the hot seat. People he considered particularly slow, ‘having their periods’ etc. were put here and personally supervised. This made everyone nervous, and provided a particularly effective wannabe filter.
Ch
antal seemed to be standing it quite well, considering. After lunch, the anal-hoarder stuck to his office.
Then at three o’clock or so, the computers froze, and all hell broke loose.
Chantal was assailed by people desperate to get their paperwork before the weekend. An Italian couple were getting married. A German woman had an acting role to start immediately, without her the play couldn’t go on. An ailing Serb lady needed her daughter to help her in and out of hospital. And that was just the Europeans.
The anal-hoarder came out from the back like a king to his court, studiously straightening up the cord railing that kept the upstairs rabble in line.
‘What’s going on?’
She explained.
‘Take a look at yourself,’ he said to her. ‘You’re ageing, fast.’
This was his tack for those he considered past their periods.
Chantal suddenly swung into action. She dived into her handbag and came out with a chemist’s paper bag of medication which she waved at the wannabes.
‘The whole country’s on tranquillizers,’ she said. ‘You could do with them too,’ she turned to him, ‘although you might be in need of something stronger. Strait-jacketing, maybe.’