by Rose Tremain
I stared at him. He didn’t look pale. He looked as if he’d been lying in a boat on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne with Alice Little.
‘How are you, Louis?’ he said.
‘I’m reading Crime et châtiment,’ I said. ‘I think Raskolnikov’s a kind of existentialist, isn’t he?’
‘Yes,’ said Didier. ‘Of course. He takes absolute responsibility for what he does.’
‘Is it easier for an existentialist to commit a crime – or do something bad – than for other people?’
Didier put his glasses back on. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s harder. Because he cannot pass on his guilt. He must endure it all alone.’
I looked hard at Didier. ‘Why does Raskolnikov put the money he finds under a stone?’ I said.
Didier smiled. ‘Do you want me to tell you,’ he asked, ‘or do you want to find out for yourself?’
I said I’d find out for myself. I was going to explain about the stealer at school and how I enjoyed tracking him, but all I said was: ‘I like mysteries. I like solving things. And I’m good at it.’
I knew that the only person I knew who really cared about Valentina – apart from me – was Mrs Gavrilovich. So this was where I went first, to her apartment in the rue Daru.
When the concierge opened the street door, she smelled of drink and her eyes were wet, as if the drink had been making her cry, but she let me in without any fuss because she recognised Sergei and began crooning over him and stroking his head. I thought, now I’m Arthur Miller again.
The flat was on the ground floor, so that Mrs Gavrilovich would never have to walk up any stairs, and on every windowsill were pots of red geraniums. As soon as she saw me, she put a watering can into my hands. ‘Louis,’ she said, ‘you have answered my prayers. Water the flowers.’
There was a fusty smell in the apartment, strongest in Mrs Gavrilovich’s bedroom, where there was a little altar set up in front of an icon in a heavy silver frame. Red candles were burning there and a prayer book with an ivory cover lay on an embroidered shawl. Plastic flowers had been arranged in a red glass vase and near to this was a photograph of Mr Gavrilovich. The face of the icon was sad and thin, with a halo like a cymbal banged against the head.
I did all the watering and then I sat down with Mrs Gavrilovich at a table covered with hand-embroidered lace. She poured me a glass of home-made lemonade and offered me some little dry cakes that smelled of some peculiar spice. She seemed to have all these things prepared, as if she’d been expecting me.
I waited. The lemonade was very cold and sweet and the cakes were full of caraway seed. Mrs Gavrilovich nibbled a cake carefully, nursing her broken teeth. I prayed she was going to tell me she knew where Valentina was, but all she said was: ‘This heat, I think it’s going to kill me, Louis. I never remember any summer in Paris quite like this.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It never seems to rain.’
‘No. Never rains any more. God has forgotten the flowers. But when I first came to Paris, it rained like the devil all through the summer, day after day. You ask Valentina. She remembers that long time of rain.’
I put down the cake I was eating and looked up at Mrs Gavrilovich. ‘I can’t ask Valentina,’ I said. ‘She hasn’t been home for two days.’
Sergei had found a butterfly on the windowsill. Now I saw him catch it in his mouth and eat it, wings and all. Mrs Gavrilovich saw this too and looked shocked. Perhaps she’d never seen the stuff Sergei could gobble up from the Paris gutters? I was about to smack him for eating the butterfly when Mrs Gavrilovich said: ‘Where is Valentina, Louis?’
I explained about the visit to Grigory Panin’s hotel. I had to repeat everything twice because she found my accent difficult to understand.
Eventually, she said: ‘You know he is mad, that poor Grigory, mad with suffering. A man who is mad with suffering is capable of anything.’
We sat there opposite each other, not speaking for a moment, imagining the kind of things a mad suffering man might do. Sergei noticed the stillness in the room and looked at us anxiously while the butterfly began its journey through his intestines.
Then Mrs Gavrilovich got up. ‘I am going to telephone Moscow,’ she said. She put on her glasses to search for Grigory’s number.
While she searched, I noticed that her room was untidy, with newspapers lying about and her embroidery silks strewn over the arms of the chairs and candle grease on the surfaces of tables.
Mrs Gavrilovich found Grigory’s number and began dialling. I didn’t know exactly what the time was In Moscow, but I wondered if it was the hour when Grisha’s wife Irina started her drinking for the day.
It was Irina Mrs Gavrilovich was speaking to. I thought I could be sure of this because she spoke gently, like she was talking to a child, and with Grisha she probably would have been angry. I sat still and listened to the Russian language. If I closed my eyes, it was Valentina I could hear, talking Russian in the Mercedes on the way to Les Rosiers.
When Mrs Gavrilovich put the phone down, she said: ‘Well, Valentina isn’t in Moscow, not as far as we can tell. That was Grisha’s wife, Irina. She says Grisha returned, like he planned, on the evening flight. She says what he wanted to talk about were the roast quail he had eaten for lunch at the Plaza.’
I was about to say that if Grisha had taken Valentina to Moscow, he wouldn’t have brought her home to Irina, he would have booked her into a hotel, but I didn’t. I just kept quiet while Mrs Gavrilovich began to search for something in her untidy room, looking behind cushions and in half-open drawers, as if she suddenly thought Valentina had become tiny and might be found under a pile of embroidery silks. Sergei and I watched her and waited, Sergei licking his mouth after his gourmet meal of the butterfly. The thing Mrs Gavrilovich was searching for was a blue shawl, and when she found it she put it over her head and said she was going to church. It was time for a Vigil.
She invited me to come with her. She said that in church we would think about what to do. She told me that when she lived in the slaughterhouse at La Villette, she used to make pilgrimages to the Nevsky church whenever she could afford the métro ticket; it was her place of refuge and from it she got the courage to start the café, bois et charbon. Then she said: ‘Perhaps, when the Vigil is over, Valentina will be home,’ and I thought, we all keep saying or thinking this: that when a certain amount of time has passed, Valentina will materialise out of the stifling air. But she doesn’t materialise. The minutes keep passing. They turn into hours. And where Valentina should be, there’s only my invisible longing for her, silent in empty space.
On the way to the church, which was only about two minutes from the apartment, Mrs Gavrilovich whispered to me that there were ‘some people’ who came to this church who were ‘bad’ and that when she saw these bad people she had to close her eyes because she couldn’t bear to look at them.
‘Why are they “bad”?’ I asked.
‘Louis,’ she said, ‘they are the worst.’
‘What have they done?’
‘They destroy lives, that’s all I know.’
‘How?’ I asked, but Mrs Gavrilovich didn’t want to talk about this any more. She just wrapped the blue shawl more firmly round her head. And we were in the courtyard of the church now, so she signalled to me to be quiet and leant on my shoulder as we walked up the steps. Way above us was a mosaic of Jesus reading a book he seemed quite bored with and I thought, if it had been Crime and Punishment he would have been more engrossed.
Inside the church, it was cool. On the floor was an old red carpet, burned in places and stained with candle wax, and up in the air was a yellow bowl of light, where the sun came in through the sides of the glassy dome. A few people walked around, looking at the saints and martyrs on the pillars and walls and lighting candles and talking to each other. There were no pews, only a line of chairs arranged around the edges of the carpet, and on these chairs the people had put carrier bags and shopping baskets and pieces of knitting, like they were planni
ng to have a jumble sale there during the service. When you looked up at the dome, what you saw was a swathe of netting, like a hammock, strung across it, to catch the flaking paint and plaster that was floating down from the figure of God on high.
Mrs Gavrilovich went down on one of her rickety knees and touched the red carpet. She whispered to me that the carpet was a piece of Russian earth, right there in the middle of Paris. She didn’t seem to notice that this earth had been burned in places. Then she headed for a cabinet made of glass, with a border of flowers, and she laid her head on this, so that her mouth came close to the mouth of the icon inside. The glass was smeary where it had been kissed by dozens of people believing they were kissing Jesus, and I thought, this isn’t a very hygienic church.
I looked around for the people who destroyed lives. I wondered if Mrs Gavrilovich had drug dealers in mind, or what? More and more Russians had come in now, with their bags from Prisunic and cheap briefcases and pushchairs and parcels, but they seemed too old or too busy to be criminals. One thing I did notice about them, though: they all looked quite poor. You could tell they weren’t French, from the 8th Arrondissement. You could imagine them having dental problems they couldn’t afford to fix. They wore clothes like the stuff you see hanging on chrome rails in street markets – shiny trousers with flares; dresses that remind you of tablecloths. I thought, when they kiss Jesus, they ask him to let them win on the loterie nationale.
Mrs Gavrilovich seemed to have forgotten about me. She was intent on examining things – old flags and ribbons and medals and candle sconces and particular pieces of the wall. When the priest and his helpers came through from the sanctuaire, she was staring at a picture of St George, probably making sure that it and everything else was just as it had always and always been. As some chanting began, I saw her reach out and touch St George’s leg.
I sat down on one of the chairs, next to a string bag full of potatoes. I could smell the earth on them and I suddenly thought, what if Valentina is dead and buried in the ground?
When it came to the time for communion, big hunks of white bread were handed round in a basket and I wondered whether, in the old days, or during the war or something, people came to church to be fed. But now, some of the congregation, including Mrs Gavrilovich, found this bread a bit indigestible; she just nibbled a crumb or two and put the rest in her handbag. In Devon, you never saw people put the body of Christ into their handbags. And the priest had his eye on her. He was small and his chanting voice was weak, but his eyes were piercing, and when he took off his jewelled crown he looked straight at Mrs Gavrilovich accusingly and she closed her bag with a snap. And she wouldn’t look at him. Her eyes were shut tight, either from guilt at hiding the bread or because she’d just seen one of the ‘life destroyers’ come into the church.
People entered all the time. Some of them came in and looked around and went out again, as if they were sampling the church and found this one too dilapidated and peculiar for their liking. From my chair, which was under a picture of Jesus walking on the water in the moonlight, I kept watch on everybody and on the number of flakes of plaster that fell out of the dome on to the netting. Twenty-nine flakes fell. The beautiful singing may have disturbed the air in the roof.
Among the faces that I watched, I half expected Valentina’s to appear suddenly, as if she’d been in the church all along, as if she’d been hiding there for two days. But there was no sign of her. At one point, I turned round to the thin Jesus stepping over the moonlit waves and talked to him. I told him I quite liked this picture, then I asked him not to let Valentina die.
The Vigil lasted a long time. If a world-wide survey was conducted, Russians might turn out to be the most patient people on earth. At the end of it, Mrs Gavrilovich stood with some other women in a huddle, talking Russian, and while she talked they shook their heads. I thought, I expect they all knew Valentina when she was young and dressed in clothes bought at street markets; I expect they admired her blonde hair that never darkened.
When we got back to the apartment, Mrs Gavrilovich had a tot of vodka. Then she said she had to rest. I wanted to ask her more about the bad people and about what we were going to do, but she said she was too tired to talk; she said when I got old I would know what this kind of tiredness felt like.
I hovered by the door, while Sergei wagged his tail. Mrs Gavrilovich started taking the hairpins out of her bun and her grey hair came down in coils. I said: ‘Shall I go to the police and report a missing person?’
The snakes of hair made her look younger but sadder. I imagined her running across the coal yard the day Mr Gavrilovich had his heart attack and died. His name had been Anton.
She didn’t answer me, but began mumbling in Russian.
‘Tell me what to do,’ I said.
But she was confused now. It was like she was half asleep already, and without replying she went into her room with the red candle and closed the door.
I called our own number. I expected Alice to answer, but what came floating up was Valentina’s recorded voice telling me she couldn’t come to the telephone right now. The voice told me to leave a message. I wanted to say, ‘Valentina, come back to me, please,’ but what I said was: ‘Mum, this is Lewis. I’m going to look for Babba.’
Sergei and I got on the métro at George V. In this station was a brilliant busker, who suspended a piece of black cloth across the handrails and started doing a puppet show there and then between George V and the Étoile. His puppet was a skull. The skull talked to us and told us how lonely it was.
The skull got off at Porte Maillot. I felt bad about not giving it anything, but all I’d eaten that day was Mrs Gavrilovich’s caraway cake, so I had to keep the bit of money I had. Nobody in the world knows how hungry I can get.
Sergei went to sleep in the hot train and I noticed suddenly that he was starting to smell a bit, as if he needed a shampoo, and I remembered that Valentina took him to a dog parlour off the Avenue Matignon, where he’d once fallen in love with a poodle called Manon. ‘And you know, Lewis,’ Valentina had said, ‘when dogs fall in love, they are not well behaved like you and me; they are very vulgar indeed.’ I liked this idea of Sergei fucking a poodle at a dog hairdressers’, with all the owners and beauticians looking on. Everyone was shocked, apparently, except Valentina, who just laughed and said: ‘Well, it’s lucky they don’t care about privacy.’ She knew Sergei wasn’t a monk: he was a star and he had to get laid sometimes. If he’d been a person, he would have fucked somebody or other every night and snorted cocaine and been driven round in a stretch limo with an inbuilt cocktail cabinet. So you could say in a way that he was less vulgar than a human being, not more.
We got out at La Défense. To get to Babba’s building, you had to cross a walkway hung across the new road works, then come down into Nanterre, which didn’t feel like part of Paris, but like some other city, where football was played in the street and where the trees were small. There were a lot of open spaces, where nothing seemed to exist, not even a closed market or a car park, like the space was mined, and only a few pigeons came there (too light to trigger the mines with their skinny red feet) and walked around on the asphalt, waiting for a breeze.
On one of these spaces, something had been put: it was an enormous snake. Children played round it. Part of its body was under the ground and part above. It was made of brown and white mosaic pieces that glistened in the sun and its head reared up about five foot out of the earth.
I stood and gaped at it, with Sergei growling, and the kids climbed along the snake’s back and into its mouth. Some of these kids were black and I looked at them carefully, in case one of them turned out to be Pozzi, but it’s hard to recognise a child you’ve only seen once in a photograph taken in winter. Part of me was searching for the little glove dropped in the snow.
We went on, getting nearer to the building. There were no cafés here, or boulangeries or dry cleaners or anything, just some old garages sprayed with graffiti and chain-link fencing ke
eping you off some dusty grass. You could have been in Idaho or Birmingham or somewhere. There was loud rap coming from a garage mechanic’s cassette player and, further off, a police siren screaming. And it was autumn here; that was another odd thing. In Paris proper, it was high summer, but here the leaves were yellow and falling, I don’t know why.
The building was in a group of seven, mosaicked green and beige and purple and blue. Whoever designed the flats had probably designed the snake, using the leftover bits of ceramic. Both the snake and the buildings looked as if they had been designed in a dream. You could imagine the architect waking up from the dream and starting to scribble with purple chalks. Tears of pride and joy began to fall on to his scribblings and so he’d thought, this is how the windows will look, like tear-drops! But now, like Babba had said, there were rusty rivets holding the tears to the wall, holding bits of the wall to itself. Some of the tears were smashed and these ones looked more like tooth cavities. I thought, I bet the residents hope this architect is crying with shame.
When you got close up to the building, you could hear a lot of noise coming from it – music and shouting and some kind of machinery whining. I hoped it was all ordinary noise and had nothing to do with voodoo. A door was open on the ground floor, so we went in and found ourselves in a kind of launderette that was full of scalding air. An old woman in an overall sat on a plastic chair staring at the tumbling clothes, as if the washing was an old movie she couldn’t take her eyes off. I was about to ask her if she knew Babba, when she looked up and saw Sergei and yelled at me that dogs weren’t allowed in the laundry. I put my hands up, like someone being arrested, and said, OK, I’d take Sergei out but please could she tell me where to find Babba.
She reminded me of the concierge in Mrs Gavrilovich’s block, with her wet face and her hair all greasy and stuck to her head. ‘Babba?’ she said. ‘Babba qui?’
I explained carefully that Babba was the woman from Benin who lived with her son Pozzi in the apartment where the motorbike had been. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you mean Violette?’