The Way I Found Her

by Rose Tremain

  Then we climbed up miles of wooden stairs and came out at the very top of the auditorium and looked down at the grand piano on the concert platform, far away. Grandma Gwyneth had said: ‘What we’re going to hear, sweetheart, is a piece called Rhapsody in Blue, by an American composer called George Gershwin. Here it is, you see, in your programme, Rhapsody in Blue, and it’s one of my favourite pieces of music of all time.’

  The two of us went to the concert on our own; Bertie, Hugh and Alice didn’t come. Sometimes, she did this: took me on ‘treats’ of her own devising. She wanted me to like the music so much, she kept looking at me all the time they were playing it, to see if I was liking it. What I said to her afterwards was: ‘I didn’t like it at first, but it got better.’

  Now, on my imaginary walk, I went into the Festival Hall and sat down in a plastic chair. There was a smell of stale coffee in the air. And opposite me, on another chair, Grandma Gwyneth was sitting, wearing a coral-coloured bit of knitwear and a tweed skirt, and she was crying her eyes out into a tiny little hankie. The thing I found myself wondering was, why was it that she and Bertie always had hankies available whenever they were needed, and nobody else ever did?

  I stopped my walk then. I hadn’t gone at all far. I sat down on my chair and felt sick with sorrow at all the anguish I was causing. I thought of Alice, searching for me in the deep dark of Notre-Dame. I thought of Moinel ringing our apartment bell and asking for me and knowing that I’d broken my promise to him. I thought of Violette cleaning my empty room and feeling afraid and wondering which, if any, of the spirits she should talk to.

  And then I thought about Hugh, with Bertie and Gwyneth, travelling to Heathrow in a taxi they couldn’t afford, and just watching the fields of the West Country going by in silence and knowing that, until now, their lives had been relatively happy compared with some, or even compared with most, but now that happiness was finished and gone.

  I tried to reassure everybody. First of all, I said: ‘I had to find Valentina. This was the one and only important thing I’ve done in my life.’ I wanted to add: ‘When you’re older, you’ll understand this,’ which was a thing people said to me all the time, but then I remembered that Gwyneth and Bertie were quite old anyway, so it wasn’t really appropriate. I left this alone and just said: ‘But I’m going to stay alive. I’m going to get out of here. I’ve got it worked out. The only thing I refuse to do is leave without Valentina.’

  They all looked at me in silence. They were in a little semicircle in front of me and I could see them struggling with all their individual sad thoughts. But I knew that only Moinel and Violette cared about Valentina and the others didn’t really mind whether she lived or died.

  For most of the next night, I worked on the baton. I’d cut it right through in one place and so I began straight away on the second cut. I knew the dinner knife and I were in a kind of race, now, with the delivery of the ransom money. The knife had sliced its way through the equivalent of about seventy-five thousand beef steaks. Its serrated head was tiring and beginning to bend.

  Only two slates were still attached to the bit of baton on which I was working; the others round them were loose and just held down by their own weight. I had a collection of slate pins in my pocket. And I was now able to stick my head out into the night.

  I described to Valentina the things I could see. I said: ‘There’s an orange glimmer in the sky quite far away on the left and I suppose that’s Paris, but I think we’re sort of in the country, here, because I can’t see any other buildings or hear any traffic.’

  ‘Can you see the road?’ asked Valentina.

  We knew there was a road leading to our place because we sometimes heard cars or vans coming and going, but I told her that with only my head out in the air I couldn’t see anything on the ground, just the tops of things.

  ‘The tops of what?’ she said.

  ‘Trees.’

  She began to speculate on what this house was and who owned it. She said it couldn’t be derelict, even though our rooms and the shower room were old and dirty, because it had electricity and hot water. She thought it had to belong to a relation of one of the kidnappers, to someone they could trust completely. ‘And Alexis,’ she said, ‘has no relations. He used to have an old mother who worked in a newspaper kiosk, but she died. I think she died of cold in that freezing little kiosk. So it must be some relation of Todorsky’s or Shukov’s. Someone once told me Leo Todorsky had a cousin who was a concert pianist, but I never believed it. I think probably the whole family are criminals and dealers.’

  I said I thought there was water near by. From time to time, not often, I heard a noise like a boat’s engine. I thought it could be one of those old canals that nobody used much any more.

  The moon came up while I worked and I noticed that it was getting towards full. Ingrid once informed Carl that girls of sixteen were more ‘cosmic’ than boys because their periods were influenced by the movements of the moon, and when Carl told me about this alleged cosmicness I said Ingrid was talking complete and total crap. But now, when I looked at the moon, I thought, there’s something about the way it is that reminds me of Valentina.

  She was sleeping. She said she was tired because she’d been walking around Manhattan, from her publisher’s apartment on Park Avenue right down to a Mexican restaurant on West 13th Street. She’d seen a pair of cops on roller blades. She said the sky was red, fading to green. A white limo went by her and she knew Al Pacino was inside it. She said: ‘It gave me an odd feeling to be in New York City with no money.’

  To keep myself awake and make my arm carry on working, I tried to go through my chess game with Alexis and work out how he’d parried so easily. My first chess teacher had been an actor, who used to do baby-sitting for Hugh and Alice for about a pound an hour. His name was Julian. I was meant to put my light out and go to sleep at nine, but I never did. I used to stay up with Julian and eat sultanas and play chess, and one of the first things he told me was: ‘Never play a game just once; play it a second time in your mind. That way, your defeats are never wasted.’

  It was difficult to keep track of time. The number of days that had passed since I’d woken up in this attic and vomited on the floor could have been ten, or twelve, or more. It could have been fifteen. In movies about prisons, people nearly always scratched little lines into the wall to make sure they knew when Wednesday was coming round again or when snow would begin to fall. Sometimes, you had a scene where they looked at all the lines and worked out that it was their wedding anniversary or Christmas Day or something and started to cry. I could have made some marks with Valentina’s rusty nail, but I hadn’t done it. Part of me had become uninterested in time.

  Valentina said she knew that autumn was coming. She said she could hear it in the wind. And she told me she longed to be in Paris again, walking along with Sergei in the fresh autumn air, seeing the new season’s fashions coming into the shops, watching the roses in the Parc Monceau begin to fade and the chestnut leaves turn brown, seeing the tourists depart and the Parisians return, looking forward to winter in the most beautiful city on earth. And I imagined her there, with the sunlight falling on her blonde head and on Sergei’s auburn coat. I thought, when it’s the two of them together, it’s like there’s no Arthur Miller, just two Marilyns.

  A new thing was that Valentina sometimes sang to me through the pipe hole. She had quite a beautiful voice. I imagined the monkeys on their other floor, hearing her singing and stopping to listen and sometimes recognising the tunes, because what she mainly sang were old Russian songs she’d learned from Olga and Anton. Some of them had words and some didn’t, or else they once had and Valentina had forgotten them. Most of them were love songs and when I asked her to translate the words, she’d say things like: ‘Well, this man is a train driver. He’s making a comparison between his woman’s body and the embankments and cuttings his train is passing through.’

  Then one afternoon, when I was resting from my work on the bato
n and half asleep on my mattress and the autumn wind was gusting around the slates above us, Valentina hummed a tune that I suddenly recognised. I said to her: ‘That was the tune I heard in my bathroom – the one the whistler whistled.’

  She stopped humming. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

  But I was sure. Ever since Grandma Gwyneth had begun my musical education by taking me to hear Rhapsody in Blue at the Festival Hall, I could remember pieces of music in my mind. I told Valentina to sing it again, and this time she put some words to it.

  ‘That was it,’ I said. ‘I know it. That was the song.’

  ‘Lewis,’ she said, ‘nobody in France knows that old song. So whoever was in that room – if there was anybody in that room – could not have been whistling that.’

  ‘Why not? Because it’s Russian?’

  ‘Yes. It’s Russian. It’s from the 1930s, and it was my father’s favourite song all his life. The singer is a stork. He is making a nest on a high factory chimney, out of reach of any human hand. And if you are thinking of laughing, please do not. It’s a song about persecutions.’

  I said I wasn’t thinking of laughing. I said I’d remembered that the singer of It’s not easy being green had been a frog. Then I said: ‘I know what’s in that room, Valentina. Apart from the bed, it’s all the old stuff you used to have in the café. There’s the Wurlitzer you’ve turned into a safe, but there’s also an awning up there and a Dubonnet ad and stacks of chairs and an oven. So it’s obvious who was whistling, isn’t it: it was Anton.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Lewis,’ she said.

  I didn’t feel like saying anything more. I just lay there and pulled my blanket over me. Now that this autumn wind had come, it felt cold in our rooms.

  After a few moments of silence, in which I felt myself start to fall asleep and then just pull back from it, like from the edge of a lake of warm sand, Valentina whispered: ‘He’s buried in the Cimetière de Montmartre.’

  ‘Where he’s buried wouldn’t make any difference,’ I said.

  ‘But I just don’t believe that was what you heard, Lewis. You’ve got it muddled in your mind.’

  I said: ‘If it wasn’t Anton, who was it, then?’

  ‘It was no one. That room is always kept locked. You were tired after your journey from England. I remember, that evening, you were very tired and confused . . .’

  ‘Later, I was tired. Not then, when I heard that whistler.’ And I whistled the tune, so that Valentina could see that I recognised its phrasing and could reproduce it more or less exactly. As I whistled, I wondered how the words fitted in and whether the stork’s nest was vandalised at the end of the song, or if it survived.

  When I finished, Valentina said: ‘Why would Anton whistle to you – and not to me?’

  ‘Easy,’ I said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He was warning me. And I don’t care whether you believe me or not. He was drawing my attention to the fact that one day I was going to have to save your life.’

  The first time I climbed out on to the roof, it was raining. It was the middle of the night and you could smell this new rain on everything around, as though it had made the landscape exhale. Even the roof slates were exhaling.

  I made my way up to the ridge, just above the gap, and crouched there, like an actual monkey, with my eyes darting nervously around. The rain was so soft, it made a kind of gauzy bandage round every point of light. Except there weren’t many points of light. Our house – or farm or whatever it was – seemed to be way out on its own somewhere, with a thick line of trees to the right of it and an old empty meadow sloping away from it towards a flat horizon.

  I monkey-walked to the gable end of the roof and looked down. From here, I could see the road or track we’d heard the cars on. It ran past the house and meandered away up the meadow and I had the feeling that, at the top there, it joined a proper road. I waited, to see if something would come along, and after about ten minutes I saw yellow headlights, blurred by the gauze of rain, go slowly past, and so I knew that was where we’d go when we made our escape, to that road.

  In Devon, I was forbidden ever to hitch lifts, but this was what we would do – hitch a lift back into Paris and back into our lives. I pictured us waiting on the road for a car to come by. We stood there, hiding in the shadow of some trees, holding hands. The only thing I wished I had, besides Valentina’s hand in mine, was shoes on my feet.

  But there was a problem: it felt high, that roof – too high, too much on its own in the black sky, as if, when you left it, you’d fall down and down into nothing at all and go on falling for ever. Behind me was a smudge of Paris light, only dimly orange in the rain and miles away, but there nevertheless, patiently waiting for us, and I wished I was on the other end of the roof, looking at that and not at the darkness below me and the tall trees. I couldn’t see, from where I was crouching, any way of getting safely to the ground.

  I stayed still, poised on the gable-end like a bird, thinking about Didier and the air balloon that came towards him and his father through the brightening sky. It seemed to me that, in some way I might never have the philosophical insight to explain, Didier had brought me to where I was, squatting on the roof ridge, with all this deathly space underneath me. But he hadn’t explained to me how to get down. I wanted to yell at him: ‘Tell me how to get out of here! You said you could fly, but you never told me what you really meant. I need to fly now, but I can’t, because you never showed me how.’

  I felt really angry and pissed off with him. And not just about the flying. The thing that pissed me off more than anything was the idea that, when everything was over and Alice and I had gone back to England, he would probably forget us. He’d go on with his life with Angélique; he’d buy her ugly dresses at the market and sometimes take her roller-blading on Sundays, and he’d never think of us. And I just couldn’t stand this thought. Because I knew for certain that all through our lives we’d remember him.

  I was getting wet up on the ridge, but it wasn’t cold and I considered taking off my clothes and letting the drizzle wash me clean. When you’re a hostage, water takes on a different significance. Then I was deflected from doing this by the sound of a door opening and an outside light being switched on. I didn’t move. I wanted to drop down below the roof line but I knew I couldn’t do this soundlessly, so it was better to stay still. Nobody looks up at their own roof, not unless they think there’s something unsafe up there, or unless they’re old Grisha with his head in the clouds.

  After a moment, I heard a car start up. I knew it was a Citroën 2CV from the rattle that engine has. It reminded me of waiting in the school playground for Alice to remember me and drive over.

  Then I heard something I didn’t expect: it was a woman’s voice, shouting in Russian. She sounded really angry and I waited to hear which one of the kidnappers she was angry with, but nobody answered her. She slammed her door. The Citroën’s lights came on and the car was driven up the track towards the road. I saw it bounce and lurch, just like Alice’s 2CV used to do, and I thought how odd it was that every single car in the world had become more advanced and smooth and sophisticated except this one crazy model.

  At the road, it turned left, driving towards the Paris light. I watched it until it was out of sight and then I made my way silently, gripping the wet surfaces with my hands and toes, back to my hole and fanned the slates back into position above me, like closing a cunning little door.

  I didn’t tell Valentina that I hadn’t been able to work out a way of getting down from the roof. I just described what I’d been able to see and that there was a road not far away. In the last few days, Valentina hadn’t been on any walks and I knew this was a bad sign, a sign that she was depressed.

  She started to talk about a dream she’d had. She’d been in Rome in the dream (Valentina always dreamed in this international kind of way) and looking at Raphael’s tomb in the Pantheon. And through the hole in the Pantheon roof had started to come a great mass of
birds.

  These birds were black, like starlings or crows, and so many thousands of them came fluttering in that they began to fill up the whole gigantic space and Valentina knew that if she stayed where she was, looking at Raphael’s tomb, she’d be suffocated by them. The thought of being suffocated by birds was terrible, but when she tried to walk away she found she couldn’t move from the spot. ‘And what I realised,’ she said, ‘was that I was going to die. I stood there and accepted it: the birds were Death and the person they’d come to get was me.’

  I was silent for a moment. Just hearing her tell the dream had made me shiver. Dreaming it must have been quite bad. I said airily: ‘What you thought were birds in the dream weren’t birds at all, or Death, or anything like that; they were Yves St Laurent dresses. Some of the dresses were black and had feathers attached to them, which is why they looked like birds, but in fact what you dreamed was the number of designer outfits you’re going to be able to afford before you snuff it.’

  After the rain, it got hot again. I could feel this heat coming through the slates and I could smell it in the sweat on Alexis’s body.

  He was getting anxious again. He took me to empty my shit pail one morning (he said Vasily was ill) and as he pushed me along the corridor, I could hear him gasping more agonisingly than usual and I could feel his arm shaking. He said to me in French: ‘I want you to know, if those people try to get clever, if they try to crap on me, I will kill Valentina and I will kill you.’

  I was going to be sort of smart-arsed and say to him: ‘I don’t know why you wanted me to know that, Alexis,’ but I didn’t. I needed information, so I asked him if Bianquis had promised him the money.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘promised. But if they think they can trick me, those rich cunts . . .’