The Way I Found Her

by Rose Tremain

  ‘He could just stay on in Paris . . .’ I suggested.

  ‘It’s not that simple. It never is that simple. And who would care for Irina?’

  I closed my Concorde book and got Sergei’s lead. I wished Valentina was taking me to lunch at the Plaza. Before we left, I went to see Alice, who was working at her word processor. These days, she was either working in her room or out at some unknown destination and I hadn’t had a proper conversation with her since we discussed the inseparable canaries.

  When I said goodbye to her she turned and looked at me and said, ‘Are you all right?’ as if she’d suddenly remembered I was part of her life, and yet her look was sort of distracted and far away. And I had an embarrassing moment of my old Elroy longing. If Elroy had been there, ready for action with his beret on, I would have said to him: ‘Your mission is to infiltrate Alice’s heart.’

  The Hôtel de Venise, where Grisha was staying, was nearby. I wished it had been miles away on the other side of Paris, so that Valentina and I could have walked along, side by side, for the whole morning.

  When we got there, I saw that it was quite a smart-looking place. It had little trees outside and red awnings over some of the windows. I looked up at these awnings and wondered which room Grigory was in and whether the room and the mini-bar and the guest bathrobes and everything made him feel more suicidal or less.

  And it was then that the moment came.

  Certain moments in a life are in another tense: they are going to become. And only when you get to that other tense do they reveal to you what they were and what they meant, and then you know that one moment is responsible for everything that came afterwards and you think, if only I had understood what was going to happen and prevented it . . .

  It was just after Valentina said goodbye. First she leaned down, like she’d so often done before, and put a kiss on my head, and I smelled her perfume and her lipstick and her soft hair with its tiny fingers of grey. And then she went into the revolving door of the Hôtel de Venise, wearing her smart black-and-white dress, and as the door revolved with her in it she turned and waved at me and then she was gone.

  And that was the moment: Valentina goes into the door and the door keeps turning, revolving anticlockwise, and the door is taking her away, but just before it does she remembers me outside on the pavement with Sergei and she turns. She turns and she waves . . .

  That was the moment – before it went into its new tense. But I didn’t know it then.

  Part Two

  The day was so hot and bright, you imagined the roads might melt.

  I decided I’d take Sergei to the river, down by the Pont Neuf where people fish and read and lie in the sun. I’d buy us some bread and salami and we could dream the day away where it was cool by the water. I knew from the way he whimpered in his sleep that Sergei had vivid dreams.

  Going along the Quai du Louvre, I stopped in front of the bouquiniste who had sold me Le Grand Meaulnes. Just like the time before, he was chatting with the other stall holders and I thought, this is how the bouquinistes like to spend their lives, not trying to sell books, but just talking and talking. When he looked up and saw me, he nodded at me, as if he remembered me. I said bonjour to him and then I thought, it wasn’t me he remembered, it was Sergei. If you’re out with Sergei in a smart city, it’s like you’re Arthur Miller and Sergei’s Marilyn Monroe.

  Hugh’s letter had made me feel guilty about buying only one book, so I was consciously searching for something, not just drizzling my eye over a row of spines like the tourists do. And I alighted on the title Crime et châtiment. I both knew and didn’t know what the book was, and then when it was in my hand I decided I had known all along that of course it was Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky.

  I told Sergei to sit. It was very seldom that he obeyed me. When he did obey me, he looked embarrassed, as if he’d done something only a stupid puppy would do.

  While I looked at the book, he looked at it too, with his tongue lolling out, as if Crime and Punishment were a slab of meat. It was an edition dated 1957. It had a battered old cover on it, with a garish drawing of a man coming into a room holding an axe. And as soon as I had it in my hands, I felt a panicky longing to own it. Maybe this had something to do with the axe. I wanted to start reading it straight away.

  Warning Sergei not to move, I took the book to the stall holder and began digging out my money. While he searched for an old paper bag, he said: ‘It was Le Grand Meaulnes last time, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’m working on an English translation.’

  ‘That’s a grand idea. Grand. But it’s too sad for my liking, that book.’

  ‘Is it still sad at the end?’

  ‘Yes, mon petit. It’s still sad at the end.’

  He handed me Crime and Punishment wrapped in a bag from Prisunic and I paid him fifty-nine francs. If you’re a writer, I thought, you can’t ever predict where your work is going to end up or what it will be wrapped in.

  In the night, after beginning to read Crime and Punishment, I had a dream about Raskolnikov and I woke up sweating. I didn’t know whether, in the nightmare, I’d been Raskolnikov or his intended victim, Alena Ivanovna. For a moment, it seemed to me as if everything in my attic room was yellow and I felt suffocated and sick.

  I drank some water, got my torch, then opened my bathroom window and climbed out on to the roof. I thought there might be a night breeze up there, but the air was so hot and heavy, it seemed to weigh my body down.

  I climbed past the maid’s room, where the curtain was still drawn across the dormer, and out on to the plateau where the tanks were. Part of me was still in my dream of St Petersburg, so for a few minutes the sight of the city below me, with all its sickly orange light, made me feel uneasy. I walked round and round to calm myself, taking deep breaths of the stifling air.

  Then I crouched down. I often found this position comforting and I’d noticed that Didier did too. Even on a ledge, he’d sometimes crouch and I thought, that’s the bird part of him, waiting to fly.

  I began to recall the last conversation I’d had with him, about existentialism. I hadn’t told him what Valentina had said about nobody being an existentialist any more, because I didn’t want him to feel embarrassed. I guess that sometimes people hang on to things long after everyone else has kicked them into darkness and dust.

  We’d been working on slate hanging. As I hammered in my pins, feeling mildly brilliant, like a proper roofer, Didier had said: ‘How do you imagine God, Louis?’

  I said: ‘I don’t imagine Him at all.’

  He looked pleased about this, like it was a bond between us. Then he said: ‘When most people imagine God, they think of him as a kind of artisan, like a toy-maker. They may not realise it, but they do. There God sits in his workshop, making us, his toys.’

  I asked Didier if God’s place of work was considered to be the Palais Royal toy-shop, and he laughed. He said I was getting to know Paris quite well and might not want to go back to Devon. And I said I was planning never to go back to Devon but to stay in the rue Rembrandt for the rest of time.

  He made no comment, just stared at me for a moment, then continued on about God. ‘If we imagine God as the toy-maker,’ he said, ‘then we assume that, with each individual toy, God knows in advance of its creation what the essence of that toy is going to be. Certain essential characteristics of that toy are set down before its existence begins. OK?’

  I’d told Didier at this point that Hugh, who wants very much to believe in God and is annoyed by all the evidence against His existence, probably thought of himself as ‘made’ by Him.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Didier. ‘So it is a crude idea, but you see how it approximates to what people imagine? And what the existentialists are saying is that God is not a toy-maker. There is no toy-maker! Therefore the individual has no prior essence before he begins his life. He floats out of some primal soup and tries to become something. We become this or that and then we die and that i
s all. And we can’t excuse our failings by saying we were made in such and such a way. Because there was no hand to make us.’

  Didier didn’t look at me much as he talked, but just concentrated on his slates and I concentrated on mine and I felt glad he was telling me something interesting (even if Valentina would mock it), because I had a sudden scary vision of the void beyond the cage behind me and how falling through the air is one of the things that human beings seriously dread and pray to God – even if they don’t believe in God – will never happen.

  And then I asked Didier if this was why he called himself ‘the Bird’ – like he had to believe he was a bird – to stop himself being afraid, not just of falling, but of being nothing in a chaotic universe. What he said was: ‘I’m always afraid, Louis. Always. All the time.’

  Now I began to feel easier in my stomach, crouched there on the roof, and after a while I went to explore what was going on inside the scaffolding cage. I climbed down and inspected the slates I’d helped to hang. I touched them to see if they were stable and they were and I felt suddenly quite proud of them, like I wanted to put my initials on them for posterity: LL. I moved my light along the whole section, to see how much further Didier had got, and I was surprised to find that he’d hardly got any further at all. It was pretty clear to me from this that he hadn’t been at work for at least a couple of days.

  The last time I’d been on the roof in the middle of the night, I’d enjoyed thinking of Valentina asleep underneath my feet, but on this night I knew she wasn’t there. Alice and I had had supper on our own and Alice had said, ‘I wonder what’s happened to Valentina.’ I’d said, ‘Yes, I wonder.’ But I thought I knew where she was, I thought I could guess. She was in the Hôtel de Venise. I could imagine the room and the double bed and Valentina’s black-and-white dress laid on a chair. I could see Grisha’s big hands stroking her bottom and his shaggy head lying on her shoulder. And I thought that the row they’d had with the spilt wine and everything would probably make this night even sweeter for them and in the morning neither of them would want to leave.

  I climbed back up to the water tank and sat down, with my back to it. I could feel the great mass of water inside it, waiting.

  The next day, I sat in the kitchen, like I’d done the day before, waiting for Babba, and the hands of the kitchen clock went round. I thought, now Grigory and Valentina are ordering room service. A trolley is going to come loaded down with croissants and pains au chocolat and Valentina will stuff them all into herself while Grisha watches her. Under his guest bathrobe, he will be starting to get another erection . . .

  Sergei sat with me. He knew we were waiting for something and at every little sound in the apartment he pricked up his ears. In my Concorde notebook, I was making desultory notes for a letter to Hugh. Long ago, he’d said to me: ‘Never write thoughtless letters, Lewis. Make notes first of what you want to say.’ So far I’d written: Bought C and Punishment from bouquinistes. Started to read. Brilliant beginning. Then I stopped.

  I couldn’t think of anything else I wanted to tell Hugh, because everything else was too difficult to explain and anyway my thoughts weren’t centred on this supposed letter, but on Babba dancing in her voodoo cellar and on Valentina fucking Grisha in the Hôtel de Venise. I thought, there is a disparity between what is meant to be in the mind of a thirteen-year-old boy from Devon and what is actually in it.

  No one came. The clock hands just kept moving and Sergei and I kept on sitting there with our ears on red alert. Then I thought, perhaps Babba has a telephone number – even in her horrible mosaic building there must be telephones, unlike the village I imagined in Benin, which wasn’t connected to the outside world in any way whatsoever.

  I went into Valentina’s study, to look for her address book. Sergei followed me, wagging his tail, as if I was going to manufacture a strawberry tart out of Valentina’s Filofax.

  I found a number. The entry in the book, under ‘B’, said: Babba – voir Mme Sibour. I picked up Valentina’s portable phone and dialled. While the number rang, I thought, I hope Babba is known as Babba in her building and not by some fantastic African name with an ancient meaning that she’s never told us.

  But no one answered.

  I sat down at Valentina’s desk, in front of her computer screen. I noticed there was dust on the screen and I began to wonder how the apartment would get cleaned if Babba never came back. The only cleaning I’d seen Valentina do was emptying ashtrays.

  The computer was a Power Macintosh 7500, a kind of parent to the one I had at home. It was second nature to me to lean forward and switch it on and my hand rested naturally on the mouse and began to move it around. I scrolled through Valentina’s file titles and I could tell that she was fond of codifying, because a lot of the titles were just acronyms. One of these was APAL and others were JOPRI and GOH and IRIN and MASP. I was searching for her new novel. I knew the title in English was For the Love of Isabelle, but on the first scroll through I couldn’t find it. I thought at least the word Isabelle would be there, but it wasn’t.

  I reminded myself to think in French. None of Valentina’s acronyms would relate to English words. As I clicked the mouse, I remembered banging down her silver clothes brush when I realised she wouldn’t use me as her secretary and I thought how wise she’d been not to hire me when I couldn’t even make sense of her file titles.

  The novel was there, of course. It took me about four minutes to find it. It was listed under the acronym POLAMI, which unravelled as Pour l’amour d’Isabelle and up on to the screen came page 201 of the text. When I saw it appear, I felt very slightly and stupidly triumphant, like when I’d found my stolen football at the car-boot sale.

  I ran the fast-scroll back to the beginning and began to read. With Crime et châtiment I had to look words up in the dictionary all the time, but Valentina’s prose was quite a bit more simple than Dostoevsky’s. She’d learned something from him, though, and this was that novels have to have a good beginning or the bored old orang-utan readers just lay them aside and reach for something to play with or stare up at whatever happens to be passing in the sky.

  And her beginning was OK. It described Isabelle’s thoughts and feelings the night before her marriage to her fiancé, Pierre, the Duke of Belfort. For some reason, Isabelle is having a calligraphy lesson (as if there used to be medieval evening classes), and as she writes all her beautiful words she keeps glancing round at her wedding dress on a stand in the room, and this wedding dress is made of silver and weighs as much as a suit of chain mail. ‘And in Isabelle’s heart, too, there was just such a terrible weight. She knew that from the moment when she put on the dress her happy life would be over.’

  Then you see why she feels all this. Pierre comes in and interrupts the calligraphy lesson. And Pierre is gross. He’s a duke and an aristocrat, but he looks like a kind of crazy idiot, with mad bloodshot eyes and greasy hair and little tics and twitches that make his face and body jerk around. He tries to kiss Isabelle and when he does this ‘through all her body came a chill, like the chill of winter, like the chill of death’. From this moment, you’re on Isabelle’s side and I thought, that’s one of the important things in a novel – you have to be on someone’s side.

  The next day, the wedding takes place. You hope, at the last minute, something is going to prevent it, but nothing does prevent it and so there it is, Isabelle with her beautiful handwriting is married to Pierre who is so uncoordinated he can barely write his name. On the wedding night, Pierre is drunk, so at least Isabelle doesn’t have to get fucked by him; not yet anyway. He passes out on the bedroom floor and she goes to sleep alone in a carved bed covered with furs.

  Meanwhile, down in the old city of Belfort, a certain Barthélémy, handsome son of an apothecary, is working on a potion ‘to cure sadness’, ordered that day by the calligraphy teacher. The following morning, Barthélémy arrives with the potion at the Duke’s residence and sees, at her window, Isabelle, the most beautiful woman he’s eve
r glimpsed in twenty-six years of existence . . .

  I read for quite a long time. Not once did I think, I’d rather be looking at the sky. And it wasn’t just that I was enjoying Valentina’s story. Getting into other people’s computer files is quite a sexy thing: like you’ve started to undress their thoughts.

  I closed the POLAMI file only when the narrator started going on about medieval time. Then I decided to surf through the file bank, starting with APAL, which was the first title on the list. The text of APAL was just coming up when I heard the door open behind me. I knew it couldn’t be Valentina, who would have come in noisily, so it had to be Alice, and it was.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she said.

  I turned and looked at her, then straight away looked back at the screen. These days, I was getting cold with Alice; I was giving her a chill of winter, a chill of death. ‘Writing a letter,’ I said.

  ‘Did Valentina give you permission to use her computer?’

  ‘Yup.’

  Then I had a bad shock. I spoke to the mouse in my mind: Get me out of here fast! Because I’d suddenly seen what APAL was. I arrowed the Close Box, clicked it and got a blank screen. My heart was pounding. I accessed a new file and wrote at speed: Dear Dad, Bought Crime et châtiment from the bouquinistes. Brilliant beginning. I knew that Alice must have noticed me get out of an existing file and into a new one, but she didn’t say anything, only came a bit nearer to me, so that I could smell that she was wearing perfume – a thing she hardly ever did. And the perfume reminded me of home, of evenings when Alice and Hugh would go out to dinner and I’d be alone with my homework and my chess and my favourite TV shows.

  ‘OK,’ said Alice after a moment in which she read the two pitiful lines of my letter to Hugh but made no comment on them, ‘I’m going out for a bit. Is there anything you want?’