“I’ll see you in lab,” you call out to him, and, despite yourself, it comes out as a question. You’ve already turned to leave when you hear his voice through the closed door, coming to you as though from very far away:
“No, you won’t. It’s just you and her now.”
Is It Still You?
Up close, the dead look like the dead; from afar, they look like themselves.
—Marcel Moiré
I woke in the dark convinced that she was trying to tell me something from the other side. My gaze fell on the clock’s glowing red digits at the precise moment they went from 4:59 to 5:00, and it seemed to me a sign, like the oscillations of a swinging door telling me that someone had passed through it only moments earlier. Though she was gone, I couldn’t help but think that she hadn’t really left; I could still feel her presence in the city. At the Louvre—especially on the first Monday of the month, when admission was free for everyone—I sometimes saw her silhouette among the people standing in the winding queue that disappeared into the Pyramid.
My waking hours were spent asking myself why she had done it, when I wasn’t trying to avoid the question altogether. It was only now starting to sink in that I hadn’t really known her at all, during the year we had shared at our university residence. She had rarely talked about her life in Japan, and I didn’t even know the name of her hometown. I remembered her once telling me that there was nothing worse than having light-colored hair, for a Japanese girl. It was one of the few times she had brought up her past. In high school, a classmate had hair that turned brown in the summer, and the school forced her to dye it black to conform to the dress code. It was after Fumiko noticed that the girl was losing her hair (due, no doubt, to the harsh chemicals of the dye) that she suddenly stopped coming to class, before showing up again, her hair back to normal—thick and full—except that it wasn’t her hair but a wig. Years later, Fumiko was still convinced that her classmate had become completely bald and was hiding it to save face.
As the room grew progressively brighter, I watched a bar of light make its way across the wall. I knew it was moving, but no matter how hard I concentrated I couldn’t see its movement. It was nearly seven when I finally got up. After the cramped quarters of the Cité U, I hadn’t yet adjusted myself to my new living space, and I often found myself reflexively ducking my head or cutting short a gesture in anticipation of a wall that wasn’t there. On the other hand, not yet used to the sloped ceiling, I had bumped into it several times already. The room was a garret, with only one window, which opened outwards (like older panes in Denmark) so that I was able to lean over and touch my own roof. I had a view of the nearby buildings with their chimney stacks and parabolas and antennas, and if I craned my neck a little, I could even see part of the street corner.
Just before leaving, I paused at the window and—on an impulse—tried to see what I could of the street below, and my heart almost stopped. There she was, positioned within the sliver of a view, as though she’d known exactly where to stand on the sidewalk. Fumiko. She was just standing there, her face expressionless, wearing a bright-blue corduroy jacket, a yellow scarf wound around her neck. Her short hair looked wet and black, though it could have been the morning light falling on it at a certain angle.
My first impulse was to run outside, but that meant hur- rying down four flights of stairs, traversing the hall d’entrée, then the porte cochère … Split between keeping her in sight and running after her, I found myself unable to move, unable to decide on a course of action. As the seconds ticked by, I started to sweat. Finally, I tore my gaze away and distanced myself from the window. By the time I reached the ground floor, having nearly tripped and fallen several times, I was in a lamentable state, gasping and cursing. For helvede, fanden! Satans pis! In situations like this, it was my Danish that came out, old grammar-school curses, invectives scrawled on lavatory walls …
The street corner was empty. I leaned over, hands braced on my knees, and caught my breath. What exactly had I seen? A ghost? An apparition? A remanent image from a dream? I turned and looked up at my garret window, half expecting to find Fumiko gazing down at me, but there was no one there.
* * *
A few minutes later, I entered the Gare du Nord through the street-level elevator. As I stepped into the glass cabin, a woman hurried in after me while the doors were closing. Asian, with pale skin and black hair cut so short the follicles stood upward, porcupine-like—she looked nothing like Fumiko, but I found myself stealing glances at her, almost despite myself. She was dressed all in black, with black-painted nails; even her earrings were made of some kind of black stone that gleamed dully in the light. I followed her out of the elevator, then watched her disappear down the stairs that led to the platforms of the RER trains. For several moments, I felt an overwhelming urge to keep following her, if only to find out where she was headed. Around me, some people were in a hurry, and others loitered around for who knows what. Station announcements echoed off the walls, about pickpockets or abandoned baggages (one scenario almost refuting the other). I heard the familiar four notes of the SNCF. Frozen in indecision, I continued to stand there while, below me, I heard the sound of the train pulling in, the brakes squealing and grating. If I ran down the stairs, I could still get on before it was too late, I started to tell myself, before I snapped out of my stupor. What was I doing? I had somewhere to be, important business at the other end of the city. Turning away from the stairs, like someone suddenly coming to a decision (if anyone was watching through the nearby security camera), I headed towards the foot tunnel connecting to La Chapelle and the 2 Line of the métro, a passage so winding and interminable that, each time, it seemed to me that I would come out on the other side to find myself already at my destination.
I joined the stream of morning commuters, dwelling on what I had seen—or thought I had seen—from my window. The clothes she’d had on, the blue corduroy jacket and yellow scarf, puzzled and troubled me. She had never owned a blue corduroy jacket (I was less sure about the yellow scarf); it seemed strange that my subconscious should invent new articles of clothing, an outfit I had never seen her wear, rather than reconstruct something from existing memories. That said, it was certainly an outfit I could imagine her wearing (she had been fond of corduroy). Could I have glimpsed the jacket-and-scarf combination somewhere, at some point, on a faceless mannequin in the display window of one of the clothing shops at the Forum des Halles?
While thinking this, I let my gaze fall on the people walking alongside me. Most were badly and carelessly dressed—cheap-looking clothes, mismatched colors—the usual morning crowd of commuters. I scrutinized everyone, as though I might find the answer to the mystery of Fumiko’s blue jacket and yellow scarf in the sea of drab ensembles and low-quality threads. Parts of the tunnel were under construction, and I walked past piles of gravel or bricks that looked like they could have been there for weeks or months. They had stripped the walls, bunkerlike now, though I seemed to recall the tiles covering them being in perfect condition; at the same time, the ceiling, which had seen better days, was untouched: no sign of a renovation or even a cleaning. I stopped in front of a stretch of temporary siding that had been placed in front of a wall that had been knocked down. Through a gap between two pieces of siding, I was able to make out a dimly lit corridor with bare, unfinished walls. Just then, I felt someone bump me as he passed by. Jostled out of my reverie, I turned away from the wall and continued walking. My destination was at the western edge of the city, where the Dauphine campus was located, not far from the Bois de Boulogne. The 2 Line would take me there, no need to change trains. The exam wasn’t for another two hours, but I liked to be early for things. Lately, I had grown increasingly afraid of arriving late, of missing something, and I always made a point of leaving my place much earlier than necessary, in order to prepare for any and all contingencies.
The morning rush had just ended, and the platform was mostly empty. A few scattered people stood around or wer
e seated on the orange bucket seats. Above their heads, a poster proclaimed, in a pastiche of La Fontaine: “The one who leap-frogs over a turnstile / During a ticket check won’t have a smile.” On the ground, a copy of the free weekly newspaper, already tattered from being continually trampled, fluttered halfheartedly every now and then. Near the mouth of the tunnel was a one-legged man on crutches. The empty leg of his pants had been cut halfway off and tied closed. He was standing very close to the edge of the platform and peering around the corner into the tunnel, as if impatient for the train to arrive. I breathed in the hot, dry air of the métro, with its unmistakable “buttery” odor, which had always puzzled me, if only because no one else seemed to understand what I was talking about. (I had first noticed it upon arriving in Paris three years ago.) When the train came slowly, almost reluctantly to a stop, I got on, then stuck my head out to glance at the man with one leg, but he was no longer there, at the far end of the platform. For several seconds I remained like that, thinking … Had he boarded the train, or…? I sat down on one of the pull-down seats and tried to forget about the one-legged man. If he hadn’t gotten on the train he must have gone back up the stairs, surely. I let my mind wander as we traversed the eighteenth arrondissement: Anvers … Pigalle … Blanche … Place de Clichy … I found oddly comforting the sound of the train as it sped through the tunnel, its metal wheels grinding against the rails like a knife blade against a spinning whetstone. Gradually, I became aware of another sound, out of sync and increasingly difficult to ignore. I felt myself start awake. COURCELLES, the large white-on-blue letters read. I heard heavy, labored breathing and glanced around. By then, the compartment was completely empty except for another passenger in the corner sitting with his back to me. I could only see the back of his head, but I was certain it was the man from the platform. The thought of him leaning heavily on his crutches and hopping laboriously from wagon to wagon while I slept, the thought of him pausing in front of me to catch his breath, swaying slowly on his crutches, was enough to make my flesh prickle. Listening to his raspy and guttural respiration, I expected him, any moment now, to turn around in his seat. Then I would know for sure. I waited, with a mixture of dread and longing. There was no way he could see me without turning around, and yet I couldn’t help thinking that his gaze was already on me. After a while, the tension in the compartment was such that I had to get off, though there were still two more stations until the terminus, Porte Dauphine.
* * *
Once outside, I took several deep breaths. The more I thought about it, the less it made sense to me. What was there to fear from a man with one leg on crutches? The streets here were completely deserted, not a soul in sight, everything immaculately maintained, light-years from the Gare du Nord with its chaos and bustle, its trash-strewn gutters. Many of the residences I passed had service entrances (at the bottom of some somber steps) and a number of them housed embassies, according to the plaques next to the black wrought-iron gates: KAZAKHSTAN … POLDAVIA … ESTOTILAND … CAMBODIA … It was impossible to tell if they were open to the public. Their imposing black doors seemed like portals to a world I knew nothing about, a world forever beyond my reach, like a scene in a painting.
That said, even in such a neighborhood I still came across the inevitable dog droppings. They really were everywhere. By now I had become a past-master at avoiding them—guided by an inner radar that warned me of their presence—and in all my years I had never stepped on a single piece of excrement. I turned onto a smaller street lined with tall, ornate buildings in the Haussmannian style. I looked up and saw someone, a housekeeper, draping a large rug over the railing of a balcony. At that moment, the woman paused in her work, and I wondered if she had spotted me. It was impossible, from where I stood, to distinguish her individual features. Perhaps she also felt what I felt, that the very fact of my presence here was something of a spatiotemporal anomaly.
I had no idea where I was going, or if I was walking in the right direction. The exam wasn’t for another hour—still plenty of time. I was continuing to make my way down the street, not thinking about anything in particular, when I noticed someone ahead of me. My attention was drawn to her hair, the top half of which was gray, the bottom half a reddish brown—as though she had colored her hair at some point and then let the roots grow out. The combination of the gray and the reddish brown, one below the other, like colors in a Rothko painting, was eye-catching, I had to admit, especially on this bright spring day. The rest of her appearance was not in any way remarkable. From the back, it was hard to ascertain her exact age, though I would have guessed at least sixty or seventy, judging by the gray of her hair.
I’m not sure how long I had been walking behind her when it occurred to me that I might be following her. Or was I simply walking behind her because she was ahead of me? I could walk faster and overtake her—it wouldn’t be too difficult, at the pace she was going—so that she would have no choice but to follow me. For I was convinced that we were both headed in the same direction. We were both headed towards the Dauphine campus. How did I know this? I didn’t, of course. In fact, I thought it rather unlikely that the woman walking in front of me, with her Rothko hair, was, like me, on her way to take the entrance exam for the school of translators and interpreters. But was it any more unlikely than seeing my dead girlfriend on the street corner below my garret window?
I was still lost, though I didn’t want to admit it to myself. Thankfully, I had plenty of time to wander around and avoid dog droppings at my leisure. If I was going to waste half an hour or more, this wasn’t a bad neighborhood to do it in. I imagined myself calling out to her: the distance between us would have obliged me to raise my voice. It might be unpleasant, even a little frightening, to be shouted at by a complete stranger on a deserted street, despite the sun shining above our heads and the fact that we were in what was considered a “posh” area of the city. I looked at my watch. There was still time. I picked up my pace a little, diminishing the distance between us a bit. Now I could see that the bag she was carrying contained grocery items, a head of lettuce, several carrots, the smooth skin of a tomato. My heart sank. Could she really be headed for the Dauphine campus with that? Far more likely that she was returning home after marketing somewhere nearby. What had possessed me to think otherwise? I looked at my watch again and felt the first glimmerings of panic. I continued to walk behind the woman, but with each step I felt my legs growing heavier. A part of me wanted nothing more than to stop following her, but I was afraid that she might really be headed for the Dauphine campus, in which case any other direction would be the wrong direction. I could run up to her and ask her if she was going to the school for translators and interpreters, but that was the one thing I would never do. Nearing an intersection, I suddenly noticed that the woman was no longer in front of me, and that, at the same time, there was a sign up ahead indicating the direction to the Dauphine campus. All along, I had been on the right path.
* * *
The modern-looking buildings, the esplanade, the bicycles—all of it reminded me of my old faculty at Amager, in Copenhagen. The school for translators and interpreters occupied the second floor. I stood in line with the other applicants, French and foreigners alike, and when it was my turn I handed the woman behind the desk my papers. As I did so, it struck me that the last person who had touched my passport was Fumiko. One day, she had shown me her passport, and I had taken mine out for her to see, remarking to her as I did so that we had come to France from two completely different places, but our passports were the same color. She had come to my room (for some reason, we never went to hers) with a brick of cassis juice and served it in cups so small they could only have been shot glasses. She’d bought the cups by mistake at Auchan not long after arriving in France. I told her to return them, but she refused, saying that she had once tried to return something, a pot holder, and was sent from one part of the store to another by the customer-service personnel; it had taken her two hours to find someone who finally t
old her that she could exchange the pot holder only for the exact same pot holder. That afternoon, in my room, she pointed out that, in fact, our passports were not quite the same color: mine was slightly lighter, like the color of our hair (hers, she declared, was slightly darker). As the woman behind the desk leafed through the pages of my passport, frowning at my photo, then at the Danish coat of arms on the cover, then at my photo again, as though comparing the two against each other, it was all I could do not to reach over and snatch the thing out of her hands.
The exam was held in the main auditorium, and I chose a seat next to the middle aisle, halfway up the rows—the same spot I would have chosen for myself in a cinema. From my vantage point I could take in everything below me at a glance, and as the minutes went by I watched the rows around me gradually fill up. That was when I noticed, to my left, a familiar head of gray/reddish-brown hair. As soon as I saw her, it seemed to me that the long walk through the sixteenth arrondissement had been a dream. Or rather, all of it had been real—the deserted streets, the service entrances, the embassies—all of it except her. And yet here she was, only a few rows away from me. There was something in Danish folklore, a spirit capable of taking on a human appearance and preceding its victim to a location, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember the name. It was there, on the tip of my tongue …
Even if I hadn’t run into her earlier, in the street, and even if her hair had been less bizarre looking, I would have noticed her, for she was by far the oldest person in the auditorium.
Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost Page 7