The Way I Found Her

by Rose Tremain

  ‘What man?’

  ‘The one who had the apartment before Pozzi and me. He took away the motorbike. It’s his bike and so he’s come and he took it away.’

  ‘Oh no . . .’

  ‘So Pozzi just weepin’ and weepin’. Says to me, “Maman, how we get to Africa now?”’

  Babba sat down on the sheetless bed and leant her head on her velvet arms. Tears began to run down her cheeks.

  ‘Do you want to get to Africa, Babba?’ I asked. ‘Do you want to leave Paris and go back?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I got work here, but what else I got? Not mother, not village, not sisters. And no work card. I’ve applied for my card, but it don’t come and don’t come. So one day they arrest me anyway and lock me up. They take Pozzi away . . .’

  ‘You must talk to Madame,’ I suggested. ‘She will sort out your work permit.’

  ‘No. People like me, they won’t give me any work card, I feel sure. No skill, no work card.’

  ‘You can polish brilliantly, Babba. That’s a skill . . .’

  She shook her head and began to dry her tears on her overall. The stupid thing I’d said about the polishing made her laugh her silent yawning laugh. She repeated it: ‘You can polish, Babba, hey!’ and then we both folded up laughing, despite the sadness of it all.

  I helped her put clean sheets on the bed and tidy my room, which had got chaotic somehow without my noticing. We played my musical box while we worked and Babba said she really liked Le Temps des cerises. I told her the English word, ‘Cherrytime’, but she could only pronounce it ‘sherrytime’. And so this reminded me of Grandma Gwyneth, who, when you went to stay with her and Grandad, would call from the kitchen at seven o’clock, ‘Sherry time, Bertie!’ And then he’d stop whatever he was doing and come in and pour her a glass of her favourite sherry, which was called Elegante. I never knew why she couldn’t pour it herself. Often, when Bertie handed her the sherry, he’d put a flimsy little kiss on her white head.

  When we’d done my room, we went downstairs. I told Babba she had to go into every room in the flat to see whether Grigory Panin was still lurking around. I waited in the kitchen while she did this with the vacuum cleaner as her camouflage. There were four bedrooms in the apartment and I expected her to find Grigory still asleep in one of them, exhausted after his night of ecstasy with Valentina.

  Babba didn’t come back for a long time. After waiting and waiting, I tiptoed out of the kitchen and stood in the corridor, listening. I could hear a row going on in Valentina’s room and I realised Valentina was blaming Babba for her accident, just as I feared. Babba’s voice was louder than usual. I heard her say: ‘Madame, I was only doing what you told me – shining the floors.’

  When Babba came out, she was shaking her head, as if she didn’t understand what she’d just been hearing. I thought, I expect she shook her head like that when that old Renault truck was stolen and again when she realised Pozzi’s motorbike was being repossessed.

  We went into the kitchen and closed the door. ‘What happened?’ I said.

  ‘Madame says I broke her arm. She shows me how she type with one hand. I didn’t break Madame’s arm, never.’

  ‘She didn’t sack you, did she?’ I asked.

  ‘No. But maybe I leave her, Louis. I never did break Madame’s arm.’

  ‘I know you didn’t. But don’t leave, Babba.’

  ‘If anyone would say this at home in Benin, it’s like they saying, “You are an evil woman, Babba. You been talkin’ to the spirits.” And I tell you, if they talk that way to me, I don’t stay to hear no more. Or else I punish them. I punish them bad.’

  ‘Would you really? What would you do to them?’

  ‘Perhaps I break their arm!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You want to hurt someone, you go to your Manbo and she makes offerings to the spirits. And then they come to you and ask, “What’s to be done, girl?”’

  ‘Does it work? Could they kill someone for you?’

  ‘Depends.’

  The kitchen door opened at that point and it was Mrs Gavrilovich with a load of groceries in a bag on wheels and she said she wanted us out of there, so that she could make mushroom pancakes for lunch. Since Valentina’s accident, Mrs Gavrilovich looked younger and seemed more sprightly, as if the broken arm had been just the thing she’d been waiting for.

  ‘Louis,’ she said, ‘take Sergei for his walk. He’s making bad smells in the salon.’

  So I had to leave my conversation with Babba and set off, for what felt like the eightieth time, with Sergei’s kite lead. After he’d crapped in the gutter exactly opposite the apartment-house door, he pulled me along at crazy speed towards the Avenue Friedland. I was thinking so much about Babba and her spirits that I didn’t attempt to guide him, but just followed him, like a dog is meant to follow its master. It was only after about half an hour that I realised I was lost.

  We were at the gate of a little park and Sergei could smell grass and flowers, so he wanted to lure me in there. I wanted to lure myself in, too, and sit down on a bench and try to work out how to get home. I expected some park attendant would come and yell at me, but then I saw that the rules in this park appeared to be different. It was lunchtime and lots of people were camped on the grass, eating sandwiches and salads out of little cartons and drinking Yop. Sergei saw that he’d arrived in paradise, so I let him off the lead and he tore round, pissing against the trees, snapping at pigeons, eating grass and harassing the picnickers. He’s a creature who gets away with a lot of bad behaviour because he’s so beautiful. I wondered if he was a bit like Valentina in this one respect.

  The bench I sat on was near a litter bin and while I tried to retrace our walk in my mind, to lead us home, a tramp came up to the bin and started rummaging in it. He was burned brown by the sun and his thin clothes were black and dusty. He began to eat the remains of people’s salads, which had come ready-packed with little plastic spoons and forks. After he’d finished eating, he licked all the spoons and forks clean and stuck them into the waistband of his trousers.

  As he lifted up his T-shirt to put them in, I saw that he had a collection of them already there, going right round his body, like a cartridge belt full of plastic cutlery. I tried to work out what he was going to do with them, and decided they must be a currency among homeless people. Grandma Gwyneth had told me that in the war people in England saved everything, because there was so little to buy and you never knew when something was going to come in useful. They saved string. So I thought, for a tramp like this, it’s as if there’s a war going on here and now, in the middle of 1994.

  Watching the tramp picking through the lunch cartons made me feel hungry. Imagining going into a café and ordering a croque-monsieur, I realised that I had no money, not a centime for food or drink or a métro ticket or a cab or a map. I called Sergei to me and clipped on his lead. I stood up and said ‘Chez nous!’ to him, thinking, this is the moment for him to demonstrate his fabled knowledge of the city. But he just looked at me blankly with his sweet brown eyes, and when we came out of the park gates he immediately set off in the wrong direction. I yanked him round and I led him towards a bookshop that I remembered passing. Hugh had once said to me, ‘In a selfish world, Lewis, booksellers are a category of people who are generally helpful and kind,’ so I thought I would go in there and say that I was lost. In French, the words I was going to say sounded pitiful: ‘Mon chien et moi, nous sommes perdus . . .’ as if we were en route for hell.

  The bookshop was large. You had to pass through a kind of turnstile to get into it and this didn’t seem to have been designed with dogs in mind. I sidled out again and tied Sergei to a tree. A woman assistant glared at me on my way back in, so I walked past her into the depths of the shop, looking for someone kinder.

  Then I saw Grigory Panin.

  He was sitting by himself at a table, behind a pile of books. He had a pen in his hand. I hid behind some shelves and watched him. I read in th
e paper that at Lady Thatcher’s book-signing in Harrods people were queuing right round and out of the book department and into Lingerie. But this didn’t seem to be happening to Grigory.

  One or two people came by the table and stared at him and passed on. One woman picked up a book from the pile and examined it, as if it were an aubergine at a market stall, and put it down again. Grigory looked pale and broken-hearted. He fiddled with his pen. And so I began to feel sorry for him and I went up to the table and spoke to him.

  He didn’t remember who I was. I had to introduce myself all over again. While he struggled to understand me, I sneaked a look at his book, which was called La Vie secrète de Catherine la Grande. And then he smiled at me and said: ‘And so you have come to buy a book?’

  I explained that I had no money and he said in English, ‘Oh dear, catastrophe!’

  Then, when he understood that I’d lost my way, he asked one of the shop assistants to fetch a map of Paris. We spread the map out on Grigory’s table and the three of us stared at it, trying to work out my route home. Grigory said: ‘You have strayed from 8th Arrondissement, Louis.’ I thought, I expect his syntax is often devoid of the definite article because everything in Russia has become too complicated to define.

  In the end, he walked all the way home with me, giving up on the book-signing. As we left the shop, I looked back and saw that the table was already being cleared of the copies of La Vie secrète de Catherine la Grande and restacked with its normal display. Grigory had an odd way of walking, with his head thrown back, as if he were navigating by the sun. I thought this was just a Grigory phenomenon, but suddenly he stopped and looked around him and said: ‘Where are we? I forgot to look at streets and signs. I was doing what I do in Moscow, watching sky.’

  ‘Why do you watch the sky, Grigory?’ I asked.

  He ran his hand through his Vonnegut hair and scratched his scalp. Then he looked at me intently. ‘In Russia,’ he said, ‘to stay sane – to stay alive – you must transcend. You understand what I mean?’

  My head filled up with the complexity of the world. I thought, I’m way behind with everything. I should be writing stuff down in my Concorde notebook, so that I can remember it, and I’m not, because for two-thirds of the time my mind is choked with thoughts about Valentina.

  As we waited to cross the Avenue Friedland, in a brief lull between onslaughts of taxis, I asked Grigory if he thought Valentina was a beautiful woman.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why “of course”?’

  ‘Well. I love her. Always. Since age of thirty-six when I met her. To me, Valentina is life. Not my life. My life is not life, it is death. But Valentina is life. So of course to me she is beautiful.’

  We crossed the avenue. I felt the sweet poignancy of the fact that Grigory was leaving Paris in the next two days and going back to his alcoholic wife, Irina, whereas I was staying on in Valentina’s apartment for another five or six weeks.

  ‘Have you read her new book?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ said Grigory. ‘I asked her if I could read this one, but she won’t let me, I don’t know why. Do you know why, Louis?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’ve no idea.’

  We all had dinner that night in a restaurant in the Place de l’Alma. Grigory had chosen it because he wanted to be within sight of the Eiffel Tower, but, as we sat down, Valentina complained he was behaving like a tourist and that he’d be punished with a lousy meal. He laughed a big, furious laugh. ‘Lousy meal?’ he said and pointed at all the dishes on the menu – sole, halibut, turbot, scallops, chicken, lamb, veal, steak, duck, venison and quail. ‘You think this is lousy meal, Miss Gavril? You have so forgotten your past, you have so forgotten what my existence is, that you really think that?’

  ‘Never mind, Grisha,’ Valentina said. ‘Forget it. There is your Tower, you see?’

  At night, the Tower was gold. Valentina and Alice sat with their backs to it and Grigory and I had it there in our vision whenever we cared to look up. And when the meal came, I agreed with Grigory, I didn’t think the food was lousy, but after a bit the evening began to go wrong.

  First, some Americans came and sat down next to us. They looked like bankers. One of them was loud and in charge of everything and spoke nutty sort of French to the waiters and bossed the others around, and you could tell that this one, whose name was Gene, worked in Paris and thought he knew everything about France and Europe. At first I didn’t mind them: I really like the way Americans have their volume control way up, as if the whole world were far too quiet for them. But then Gene began talking about Britain.

  He called it the UK. He went on and on about what a hopeless country it had become, like he was giving a seminar on the decline and fall of everything and everyone in England, like he was saying the whole place was finished and ruined and now just a heap of shit adrift in the Channel. It got far worse than hearing about the British forces’ unscheduled tea break at Caen. I’d far rather feel mildly ashamed of my country than stimulated into a pathetic patriotism.

  I looked over at Alice, to see if she was getting upset, but she wasn’t listening; she seemed to be trying to mediate between Valentina and Grigory, who had never really recovered from Valentina’s remark about the ‘lousy meal’, and now they were arguing in Russian and Valentina’s bangles were jingling with fury and Grisha was tugging and tugging at his hair. I was caught between these two zones of agony – the American and Russian, like in the Cold War – and I didn’t know what to do or where to put my mind to stop it hurting.

  I tried transcending, like Grigory said he did in Moscow, by just staring at the very top of the Eiffel Tower and sending my thoughts to that and then attempting to imagine Monsieur Eiffel in his workshop with all his hundreds and hundreds of fantastic drawings and calculations. But it was difficult to eat and transcend at the same time, and whenever a waiter came to the American table (which one very often did because Gene and the other bankers ordered more and more bottles of wine and water and iced Coke and bread and extra cutlery) he got in the way of my view of the Tower and all my concentration was lost.

  Then suddenly Grigory pushed back his chair and stood up. There was a half-full bottle of red wine on the table between him and Valentina and with a sweep of his huge hand he knocked it over and the wine splashed all over the table and on to Valentina’s dress and her broken arm in its sling. He yelled at her, one last insult or accusation in Russian, then pushed his way out of the restaurant and strode away up the Avenue Montaigne and out of sight.

  Valentina grabbed the Badoit bottle and poured water on to her dress and began rubbing it with a table napkin. ‘Damn him!’ she said. ‘That Grisha just doesn’t know how to behave . . .’

  Alice got up and went out and I saw her start to run after Grigory. Next to me, the Americans had stopped slagging off England for two seconds and were staring at Valentina, who had begun to cry. A waiter arrived with a clean tablecloth, but Valentina pushed him away. ‘Laissez!’ she yelled at him.

  I felt immobilised in my Cold War zone. I just gaped at everything, like at a bomb landing far away. But then I instructed myself to move and I went round to Valentina’s side of the table and put my hand on her shoulder. ‘Don’t cry,’ I said. ‘I expect it’s only a jealous rage. If I was your lover, I’d get in jealous rages, Valentina.’

  Valentina blew her nose on her napkin and smiled at me. ‘Would you, Lewis?’ she said. ‘But with Grisha, it’s more than jealousy. He wants my life.’

  ‘What do you mean, he “wants your life”?’

  ‘He would like to have my life here in Paris, so all he ever does is criticise me for it and try to make me feel guilty. He is so envious, I think he could kill me!’

  ‘Do you mean really kill you?’

  ‘Yes, I do. And in some way I understand him. My life is like a ghost haunting his own. He would like to be free of this ghost.’

  I stroked Valentina’s hair. I noticed that just by her temple the
re were a few grey strands in among the blonde and I thought she might like to do something about them, so I said, ‘There’s a bit of grey here, Valentina. Only a tiny bit.’

  ‘I know, darling,’ she said. ‘I’m getting old.’

  ‘No, you’re not. But the next time you go to the hairdressers, you could ask them to dye these bits, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I will. Now, Lewis, you go and get the bill, sweetheart. I want to go home.’

  While we waited for the bill, Alice came back and sat down. She said nothing to Valentina and Valentina said nothing to her. The animosity between them was becoming like a cancer or something, growing quietly all the time.

  The next day Babba didn’t arrive. Usually, she was in the apartment by ten, every day except Saturday and Sunday, but this was a Tuesday and there was no sign of her.

  I sat in the kitchen, writing a collection of crazy thoughts in my Concorde notebook, and sort of waiting for Babba. I tried to imagine what Babba was doing or thinking. I wondered if there was a voodoo temple in Paris somewhere, in someone’s basement or cellar, and if Babba and Pozzi were on their way to it now with offerings for the spirits, or whether they were just calmly existing at home, doing their washing or making their beds or sitting still and crying for the lost motorbike.

  I was drinking Orangina. I could feel this day getting hotter and more stifling than any we’d had. It had got difficult to imagine rain falling ever again. When I thought about winter, it felt like something that had last occurred when I was five.

  Valentina came into the kitchen at eleven-thirty. She was beautifully dressed in white and black with her arm in the ‘Ypres’ scarf and smelling of her favourite scent, Giorgio. I knew she was going out, so I said I’d come with her. I loved walking along the street in the slipstream of her perfume.

  ‘All right, darling,’ she said, ‘but I’m not going far. Later I’ve got to go to the hospital for an X-ray on my arm, but first I must see Grisha. He’s meant to do interviews at RTL and France Info this morning – to talk about his little book – so I must make sure these have gone OK. I will take him to lunch at the Plaza. My poor Grisha! All I can do is buy him meals. I don’t know what else is to be done for him.’