The Way I Found Her

by Rose Tremain

  Later that day, when I told Alice that Didier was known as ‘the Bird’ and that he was sometimes capable of flight, she said condescendingly that I shouldn’t always believe the things the world appeared to say. And when I mentioned to Valentina that he was also an existentialist, she said: ‘Darling, either you must have misunderstood or that roofer was teasing you. Nobody uses that term today. It’s a completely outmoded philosophy.’

  It was like they both wanted to deny that Didier could be anything more than the person who’d come to mend the roof. But I knew better.

  Every Thursday afternoon, Valentina went to visit her mother, Mrs Gavrilovich.

  She told me that it was on a Thursday in the winter of 1981 that Mr Gavrilovich had died. He had died, said Valentina, in the yard of the café, bois et charbon, carrying a sack of coal from the coal bunker to the van. Valentina had glanced out of the window at the back of the café and seen him staggering about, like someone trying to remember the steps of a folk dance. He was still holding the corners of the sack of coal in his hands. Then he tripped over his own feet and sat down on the wet cobbles, ‘looking all around him in amazement, Lewis, as if he were seeing the yard for the first time’.

  Valentina and Mrs Gavrilovich went running out to him. He apparently leaned back on the sack of coal and swore in Russian, over and over. ‘Bad words,’ said Valentina, ‘words my mother could not tolerate. And in the middle of the swearing, his heart stopped beating.’

  I wanted to ask Valentina how Mr Gavrilovich could have been ‘in the middle’ of swearing when he died. Did one more curse, already lurking in his throat, come out of him after his heart had given up?

  I didn’t ask. I was afraid Valentina would think me pedantic. And she’d sometimes said that the most extraordinary things could happen to the people of Russia. Anything the human mind could imagine, no matter how strange or grotesque, had at one time or other taken place in Russian history. Which was why she was never shocked or surprised. And this could be one of those strange things: the word or words, even, spoken by the dead Mr Gavrilovich on a Thursday afternoon in the winter of 1981.

  When Valentina had started to make money from her Medieval Romances, the café was sold. The charbon bit of it had already stopped when Mr Gavrilovich died. The remaining coal was just gradually used up by the old range where Valentina and her mother cooked their meals.

  Then, when the money began to flood in from America and Germany and Britain and everywhere, Valentina installed Mrs Gavrilovich in a ground-floor apartment in the rue Daru, a short walk from the Russian Orthodox church of Saint Alexandre Nevsky. ‘And, you know,’ said Valentina, ‘Maman believes that God lives in that church! She said to me one day, “If you were God and could choose to live anywhere in the world, you’d probably choose Paris!”’

  At the moment, though, Mrs Gavrilovich wasn’t feeling well. She had an ulcer. She had the blues. The blues were a thing Russians were born with. They lay in their prams, weeping for the greyness of the sky. ‘And she is tired of everything, Lewis, and that’s a real problem. She telephones her concierge two or three times a day to complain about something or other and it’s getting unreasonable. One day, she complained about a thunderstorm and the concierge told her, “Listen, Madame Gavrilovich, if I could create thunder, I’d be something better in life than a concierge, so don’t speak to me any more on the subject!”’

  Valentina took Sergei and walked down the rue Rembrandt, heading for her mother’s apartment. I watched them go. Valentina’s shoes were green that day, to match a green silk dress. I decided her smart clothes made Mum look like a hippie by comparison, but I didn’t mention this to either of them.

  Mum and I took the métro to Jussieu. When you come up at Jussieu station, you arrive under some dark trees with big leaves that clatter in the wind. Mum said these were catalpa trees and that they grew in Africa and so this is what they have always been to me – catalpa trees.

  She’d taken me to see the Jardin des Plantes. It was so boiling hot it was as if we were in Africa.

  We walked along down an avenue of limes, in their big shade, where sparrows bathed in the dust. I could hear frogs calling from the miniature lily ponds. In the flower beds, there were giant artichokes and purple broccoli. Bits of the land had been sculpted and planted to resemble China and Corsica and the high Alps.

  We sat down in the middle of China, next to a little waterfall. We didn’t speak, but just looked around us.

  I thought, I’ve stepped so far out of my normal life, I may never get back to it. I knew this could happen to people. A perfectly ordinary person – his name could be Paul Berger, say – can arrive somewhere new, like in the Appalachian Mountains, and watch his previous life vanish, as if into a tiny lamp or vial. Paul Berger might keep the lamp or vial in some drawer, but he’d forget about it absolutely. Perhaps, when he was old, he’d discover it there in the drawer and say to himself, ‘What’s this?’ And then he’d give the corroded old vial a shake and remember it contained his former life.

  We left China and went into the menagerie section of the park. We stood by a little compound of American bison, their fur all tattered and falling off them. I began thinking about their former lives and I said to Alice: ‘If you’re a bison and you’re here, do you think that there’s any bit of you that remembers the Great Plains?’

  Alice thought about this for a while, then she said: ‘More interesting is the question whether a bison who had never been to the Great Plains can feel their existence inside him somewhere.’

  I agreed that this was more interesting, but I didn’t really know how to start to speculate about it. On certain days, in my version of my future, I became a philosopher, but this particular Thursday didn’t seem to be one of them. I wondered what Didier would come up with if I put this question about the bison to him.

  ‘When we go back to Devon,’ I said, ‘I may not be able to fit back into my old life. Too much may have happened to me . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Alice, ‘it doesn’t work like that. When we go back, it’ll be as if all of this hardly existed.’

  ‘It won’t,’ I said.

  One of the bison got tired of looking at us and began to lollop towards its shed. I noticed that parked outside the shed, in the muddy straw, was a cocktail trolley. I pointed this out to Mum and she said: ‘It’s a cocktail trolley, so it is! Well, I suppose things get abandoned in the most unlikely places – things and people, for that matter.’

  ‘Why do you say people?’

  ‘Oh, because it happens . . .’

  ‘You’d never be abandoned.’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. But how is one to know?’

  ‘And you wouldn’t abandon Dad, would you?’

  ‘Oh, no.’

  I glanced up at Alice. Her hair looked very red today, in the sunshine, like the beginnings of a bush fire. I felt glad she didn’t yet know what Dad’s project was. If you realised that all your loved one could make for you was a hut like a public toilet, you might seriously think of abandoning him there and then.

  Now, the other bison meandered towards the shed. They reminded me of the vagrants you saw in England in winter, bundled up in heavy rags and swaying along on worn-out feet. I said to Mum: ‘I expect some amazing food is going to be given to them – elephant grass or something.’ But no one came to feed them, so we walked on.

  ‘Who’s Barthélémy?’ I asked suddenly.

  Mum looked surprised and was about to say she didn’t know anyone called Barthélémy, when she remembered. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘he’s a character in Valentina’s book. He’s plotting a murder.’

  ‘Who’s he going to murder?’

  ‘The husband of his mistress. A duke.’

  ‘How’s he going to do the murder?’

  ‘He’s the son of an apothecary. He steals poisons from his father’s shop and mixes them and experiments with them in secret during the night. He’s trying to find a poison that acts fast and leaves no trace.’


  I thought this sounded quite good. I asked Mum if I could read some of her translation and she looked at me intently, as though an idea were dawning on her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said after a while. ‘Why not?’ Then she said in a kind of whisper: ‘This new book of Valentina’s is a thousand times better than any of her others. Much more exciting. A lot more cruel. It’s as if it’s been written by someone else.’

  I liked the idea that there could be some mystery attached to the book. I thought, perhaps our apartment is going to become so full of secrets, it’ll get hard to breathe. And one secret that I decided to keep from Mum was Valentina’s visits to my room and the work I was going to do with her on Le Grand Meaulnes.

  The following Sunday afternoon, I was playing Computer Chess in my room when Alice came up and said to me, ‘I can’t work, Lewis. Let’s go out. Let’s go now.’

  She seemed in a fluster, angry. Her hair was spiky.

  I said: ‘You know, this computer’s making stupid moves, Mum. It captured my knight with its bishop and forgot it needed the bishop to defend its king. It was just greedy for the knight. I moved my queen in and it brought a rook over to defend, but it’s going to be too late because—’

  ‘Never mind that,’ Alice said. ‘Leave it. Let’s go.’

  We went straight out of the apartment without a word to Valentina. I could hear her talking on the telephone in her study and I was about to suggest to Alice that we wait and tell her where we were going, but Alice had already grabbed her key and was flying down the stairs, so I closed the apartment door and followed her. I knew that when I got back, the stupid Travel Computer could be checkmated in five moves.

  It was a peculiar day, still hot, but sunless, with a sky of grey wool. We caught a metro going west. A guy got on and started to play the guitar and sing to us. When he’d finished and was going round with the hat, he said: ‘If this experience has been disagreeable to you in any way, please inform me.’ But nobody informed him.

  We got out at La Défense, the last stop on the line. Someone had recently built an arch here. The Arche de Ia Défense was the tallest, heaviest arch ever to be built in the history of the world. In front of it was a huge cascade of white steps and a big esplanade, the colour of the grey sky.

  We stood around on the steps, looking up at the arch. Mum was scowling. Her beauty vanished a bit when she scowled. The designers of this arch had forgotten to put in a lift to carry people to the top, or so it seemed to me, because they’d added on a little fragile-looking elevator underneath it, like a hoist a trapeze artist might take to get him to his high wire.

  I said to Mum I quite liked the trapeze idea, but she wasn’t paying me much attention. She was staring out at the esplanade now, which had office buildings and modern sculptures all round it, and when I followed her line of vision I saw that it rested on the word FIAT on the top of a skyscraper. I stayed still by her side and after a moment she said angrily: ‘Luckily, we’ve all outgrown the idea that signs are put up for our entertainment.’

  I didn’t understand what she meant. There are times when I just don’t understand her at all. What I usually do then is let a bit of silence drift by.

  After this particular bit of silence had passed, I said: ‘What are you cross about, Mum?’

  ‘Valentina,’ she snapped.

  Her saying this made me realise something: when we’d been in Brittany with Valentina, I’d found her sort of bossy and difficult, but now I didn’t; in fact I thought there was something really beautiful about her, something as beautiful and soft as snow. I wanted to walk into this snow, like on a new, fantastic morning, and lie down.

  ‘Why are you angry with Valentina?’ I asked.

  ‘Because she treats me unfairly,’ said Alice, ‘and I simply don’t know how long I can go on working like this. She interrupts me all the time. She queries half of what I write. She’s always been a self-centred woman and she just doesn’t see . . .’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘That I have to be left alone to get on. She thinks she owns me. She doesn’t own me!’

  ‘No one owns you, Mum,’ I said. But I said this sadly, because the idea that we might have to leave Paris and leave Valentina suddenly seemed really horrible.

  I was about to suggest that Mum talk to Valentina and ask her politely not to keep interrupting her, when I heard a voice calling ‘Louis! Louis!’ and I turned round and saw Didier.

  He was zooming towards us on roller blades. He was smiling, as if we were his old friends. He came to a perfectly controlled stop right beside us and shook our hands. And I thought, he didn’t have to come up to us at all. There are a lot of people here and he could have pretended that he hadn’t seen us, but he didn’t.

  I think he understood that Alice was feeling miserable, because he turned his attention to her straight away. He didn’t seem embarrassed in front of her, like he’d been that day in the street. He pointed out to us the roller-skating slalom run on the right of the esplanade and told us that he and a few friends came here most Sundays ‘to show off’. I wanted to see him skate. I reckoned that someone called Didier-the-Bird would have to be a brilliant roller-blader. So I said: ‘Will you skate for us, Didier?’

  He said sure, in a minute he would, but he wanted to know first what we thought about the arch. Alice began going on about how she knew the architect had conceived it as the western gateway to the city and that it had become part of the ‘Great Axis’ made by the Arc de Triomphe, the Place de la Concorde, the Place du Carrousel and the Louvre. Then she added that, close to, she didn’t really like it. Didier looked pleased. I don’t know if it was the bit of history she’d learned or her not liking the arch that pleased him. He asked Alice if we had time to see what was on the other side of it, on the piece of ground ‘which had not been in the architect’s calculations’.

  I knew we had all the time in the world, that Alice wouldn’t want to go back to the apartment yet, but she turned and asked me if I thought we had enough time. I nodded and so we walked with Didier through the arch, under the trapeze thing, until we got to a rail on the western edge of the development. ‘There,’ said Didier.

  We found that we were looking down at a cemetery. Didier said nothing. We all three of us stared at the cemetery, which looked as though it had been filled up long ago, because it was chock-a-block with graves. I think this was the first French graveyard I’d seen and I noticed that, instead of having flat slabs put over them, the dead here were put inside proper stone buildings with roofs on and railings round some of them and tiny gardens planted with plastic flowers. It was like looking at the Afterlife Housing Estate. All it lacked were TV facilities.

  Then Didier suddenly said: ‘My father is buried here.’

  Alice said she was sorry, and I immediately thought that Didier seemed too young to have a dead father. I’d worked out that he was no older than about twenty-seven, so his father might only have been fifty or fifty-five. Not many people seemed to die at this age. I made a note to ask Didier whether his father had been a roofer and if the mortality rate among roofers was high.

  Didier went on: ‘As you can see, it’s difficult to get into that graveyard now. There’s building work all round it, new roads out to the périphérique.’

  Alice nodded. It was a bit windy out here above the cemetery and her hair started blowing about wildly. Didier took off his glasses and began polishing them on the hem of his T-shirt. Without them, he looked more like a tennis star or a cyclist than a philosopher. ‘So how do you get there?’ asked Alice.

  ‘Oh,’ said Didier, putting his glasses back on, ‘I fly. Didn’t Louis tell you I could fly?’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ said Alice, ‘but I don’t necessarily believe everything he says.’

  ‘Would you like a Yop?’ asked Didier.

  ‘What?’ said Alice.

  I told Mum Yop was a yoghurt drink. Students and joggers in the Parc Monceau drank Yop and the litter bins were full of old Yop containers. She said
OK, she’d like one. Then she said to Didier, ‘Which tomb is your father’s?’

  He pointed to the far side of the graveyard, where I’d noticed one of the dead people’s houses had an angel on the roof. It was the only angel in the whole place. ‘There,’ he said, ‘next to the angel. The small one on the right of it.’

  We all looked at Didier’s father’s tomb. In scale, and in situation, it looked like the garage to the house with the angel. It didn’t look as though there was any room for Didier’s mother in the garage, and I wondered whether, every time he came here, Didier thought, that fucking angel, overshadowing Papa, and making him seem small, I’m going to knock its wings off one day!

  But he didn’t seem downhearted. He bought us the Yops and we drank them while we watched the roller-skaters and I could see that Mum’s fury was lessening and that she was enjoying herself. I didn’t know which thing it was that had cheered her up.

  When Didier went off to skate, as soon as he did his first run we could see that he was the best, the niftiest. His slalom technique was perfect and he went faster than all the other skaters.

  I said to Mum: ‘That could be it, you know.’

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Why he’s called Didier-the-Bird.’

  But her eyes were fixed on Didier and she didn’t bother to reply.

  When we got back to the flat, it was about six o’clock. Sergei was there alone. There was a furious note on the hall table from Valentina, which said: Why do you sneak out like thieves? This is not a hotel! Lewis, walk Sergei when you return. V.

  I got Sergei’s kite lead. I thought I’d head for the Eiffel Tower and beg it to let me stay in Paris. I’d never begged in French before, to something made of iron, but I didn’t see why I shouldn’t try.

  We set off down the leafy boulevard, which I now knew was the Avenue George V, but we hadn’t got very far when Sergei suddenly stopped and wouldn’t walk on. I tugged at him, but he just sat down in the street and then he vomited.