A Lonely and Curious Country (2 page)

“Yes,” laughed Eduard. “
If he ever gets the window open.
Seriously: have a word with the landlord.”

“I don’t want to give him a hard time.” Yves shrugged. “He’s old and has health problems. He’s pretty much paralyzed. I think he must have been gassed in the war – the first one.”

“
You’ll
have health problems!” Eduard stubbed out his Gauloises as if it were a kulak. “Going up and down that hill every day.”

“I don’t know.” Anne-Marie squeezed Yves’ thigh. “Perhaps it’ll make him strong, all that exercise.”

“Strong enough for a demo?” Eduard stood, his chair grating across the cobbles behind him.

“Maybe.” Yves shrugged again. “If I get a decent night’s sleep.”

“Good man!
Solidarity!
” Eduard raised a clenched fist and strode away, keen to see how his friends’ black flags and brickbats were coming along.

***

Two Pernods, six Gitanes, and a stroll along the Left Bank later, Anne-Marie and Yves parted with a kiss. It was now a firm date: demonstration tomorrow morning, lunch and miscellaneous agitation in the afternoon, indoor lovemaking in the evening, with or without a riot. Yves paused for a moment to watch the early evening sun reflecting on the Seine. He didn’t need to check his watch to realize that if he didn’t turn his steps toward home – if you could call it home – it would be dark before he’d negotiated the circuitous cobbled alleys leading to the Rue d’Auseil. He wasn’t in a mood to deal with them in the dark. The second night after he’d moved in, he’d gone out for a stroll – late – looking for a bar. Didn’t find one. He ended up wandering for what felt like hours, although his watch told him it was less than one. He must have been going in circles, but there was little enough that he recognized. There were few streetlights, and those there were shed only a sickly nicotine-yellow glow. Little pools of gloom in which, sometimes, small knots of shadowy men congregated, muttering and smoking. Arabs, he believed. And, though he thought badly of himself for doing so, he would invariably turn around or cross the street.

Today, even before he reached the bridge over the muddy river, its surface flecked with panchromatic slime, the feeling of uneasiness returned. It climbed, as Yves climbed, the roads and alleys and steps beyond, rising, rising, rising to the Rue d’Auseil. He felt the hill beneath him, the hard mass of it pressing up through his calves and knees as he pushed himself toward the gray-blue twilight.
‘This is no good,’
he thought.
‘This? Every day? I’ll have to start looking for somewhere else as soon as I’ve scraped some money together. I can’t go back to Eduard and Claude: I’ll look a fool and I’ll never hear the end of it.’
He pressed on.

This evening – and evening was well advanced by the time he got there – Yves found the Rue d’Auseil at the first attempt, catching himself as he almost passed the turning. The road, as usual, was dark and quiet. His house, unusually, exhibited noise and light. Raised voices. Someone was haranguing Monsieur Blandot – the half-crippled landlord – in broken French.

“Where is he? Eh?
Where?
” Three young Arab men stood in the doorway of Blandot’s shabby office, set back a few meters from the foot of the stairs. Yves felt obliged to put his head round the door.

“Everything all right?” Although Yves nodded briefly at the Arabs, the question was directed exclusively to Monsieur Blandot, who sat, milky-eyed and unshaven, at his desk.
‘God knows what he does about that hill,’
he thought.

“Ah, Monsieur Leulliette!” Blandot caught at Yves verbally the way a beggar clutches at a man’s lapels. “Monsieur:
have you seen Youcef?
His friends here have not seen him for days. They are worried.”

“Youcef?” The name meant nothing to Yves.

“The young man in the room below yours. On the fifth floor. The Algerian gentleman. These are his friends.”

The three Arabs nodded at Yves and – surly, suspicious – muttered their names: Hakim, Moussa, Ahmed.

Yves smiled at each in turn.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know him. I haven’t seen him.” He might have, for all he knew: on the stairs, checking the ever-empty pigeonholes downstairs for mail, lounging on a street corner. How would he know? They didn’t all look alike, of course not, he’d never say that. But he didn’t
know
any of them, and there were quite a few. The one who had identified himself as Hakim faced Yves and made staccato points with a jabbing cigarette:

“Youcef say man upstairs smoke hashish all time! Smell make him sick! Sleep bad!
Sick!
Not answer door yesterday! Not answer today! Borrow key – room empty! Stink of hashish – ash all over floor! No Youcef!”

“Hashish? I’ve noticed that, too. I thought it was coming up from below.”

Blandot nerved himself: “I do not want anyone smoking hashish in my house, thank you very much, gentlemen. There are plenty of tenants who will not give me such trouble. Should I call the police?”

A sudden flurry from all in the doorway indicated that, no, they would prefer it if Monsieur Blandot did not call the police. Hashish was merely something of which they had heard tell. An idea struck Yves.

“The police. Could your friend have crossed the bridge and gone into the center of town? There are so many cops around these days, what with… everything. And, with him being Algerian… Well, you know how the police feel about you. Have you checked the hospitals?”

“Not yet.” Hakim’s eyes fell and he muttered despondently to his companions, resigned to finding his friend, if at all, in a hospital bed, cell or morgue.

“You can use the pay phone in the hall,” said the landlord. “Had that installed in ’53 – knew it would come in handy.”

The Algerians flowed past Yves toward the dusty telephone, hanging neglected on the wall.

“It’s not unusual for people to leave unexpectedly,” whispered Blandot. “It happens! Especially with…” He nodded in the direction the Arabs had taken. “But this one was paid up to the end of the month, and I have his deposit, too (which is forfeit), so that
is
a little curious.” Blandot shrugged. “That’s life! He seemed all right, for one of…” He nodded toward the Arabs again.

As Yves turned to go, he paused on the threshold as a thought struck him.

“I don’t suppose, Monsieur Blandot, that he could be in the other room on my floor?”

“No, no.” Blandot spoke urgently and paled beneath his stubble. “That room is unoccupied.”

Hakim stamped back along the hallway: “What room? I thought
he
had only room on top floor.” His cigarette indicated Yves.

“No,” said Yves. “My room is on the
west
of the sixth floor, but there is a door opposite, on the
east
side. Could your friend have gone in there?”

“No,” asserted Blandot, rising in his seat insofar as he could. “There
is
a little room, as you say. But it is unoccupied. No one has been in there for years.”

“Oh, that can’t be right, Monsieur Blandot.” Yves shook his head. “No, I’ve often heard someone moving about on my floor at night. I assumed that room was in use.”

“You must be mistaken. The door is kept locked.”

Hakim stubbed out his cigarette on the doorframe: “We go look.”

***

With the keys relinquished reluctantly by Blandot, Yves and Hakim ascended the chimney-like staircase, every step a creak. Another one of the Algerians followed close behind. Moussa, was it? Or Ahmed? The third remained downstairs, persisting with expensive, erratic and fruitless phone calls. At each landing, Yves glanced at the doors of what must have been the Algerians’ rooms, and those of the other, more furtive tenants whom – he presumed – had already been quizzed. On the fifth floor, Hakim walked to Youcef’s room and pushed open the door.

“See! All his thing here.” Hakim raised his head and flared his nostrils. “Smell hashish, yes?
Hash?
”

Yves stepped forward and found his nose and lungs filling with an intoxicating aroma that made him, for a moment, light-headed. It was without doubt the smell he had noticed in his own room, but fresher, stronger.

“Yes.” He nodded. “Hash.” And yet, even as he said it, Yves was thinking:
‘No, that’s not hash. At least not any kind I’ve ever smelt.’
Blinking hard into the gloom, he saw that the window opposite stood wide open, the strong breeze blowing through it carrying the odor his way. The sharply defined square of the window, high above the city, revealed a patch of blue sky, still illumined by the long-set sun. Then he heard a click as Hakim flicked on the room’s one weak light bulb, hanging unshaded from a cord in the center of the ceiling.

“See! There is clothe! There is shoe! Why go, no clothe, no shoe? See! Is ash on floor! Ash on table. Ash on chair. Ash on bed.”

“Yes.” Yves nodded. “Ash.”

It was very fine, very pale, very light, blowing against them, carried by the breeze. Yves and Hakim and Moussa (or Ahmed) slapped their legs to brush it from their trousers.

“Did you open the window?” asked Yves.

“No.” Hakim shook his head. “Was like.”

“You don’t think he could have jumped, do you? Or fallen?”

The missing Youcef had obviously taken something – the smell alone proved that. Could there have been some LSD involved? Made him think he could fly? Yves had heard of such things. He made so bold as to tiptoe across the room, planting his feet in ashy prints he presumed to have been made earlier by the searching Algerians. He was halfway to the window when Hakim said, wearily: “I already look.”

Although Yves did not doubt the Arab’s ability to look out of a window, the opening – and the lingering image of the deep blue horizon – drew him on. Two weeks he had lived upstairs without a window to look through. This could only be, what? Three meters below his? He wanted to see the view. He rested his hands on the sill but immediately drew them back as he felt the grit: they were covered in ash. It was odd to find it here too, given the breeze. Yves put his hands back on the windowsill and leaned out. Below him, vertiginously and infinitely far, was the murky neighborhood of the Rue d’Auseil, speckled with scabs of light enough to pick out its hovels and alleyways, its steps and weed-broken pavements, the smoky factories beyond and the warehouses beyond them. The bridge and the sewer-like river were, thankfully, shielded from view. Yves pulled up his gaze and cleansed his palette: Paris dazzled brilliantly all around, dressed for a spring night, beautiful as ever. His immediate vicinity was the only morbid lesion on her face.

Yves breathed in the evening air, cool, refreshing. He twisted now and looked up to confirm his orientation was correct. It was: above him, below the steeply angled eaves, barnacled to the side of the house, was the black mass of his dormant window, encased behind inert shutters.
‘I must look through that window,’
he thought.
‘I will look through it. Tonight.’

“Hey, come on, yes? What you do?” Hakim was getting impatient. Although the Algerian had wrested control of the keys as soon as Blandot handed them over, Yves now realized that he was essential to the proposed search. He was to be Hakim’s witness to whatever would be found in the room facing his, and to testify that the Arabs removed nothing. He stepped back briskly, nose wrinkling at the dust he kicked up, and pulled the door shut behind him. Then he led the Arabs to the sixth floor.

“That’s my room.” Yves pointed across the cramped, top-floor landing. Hakim threw a brief, suspicious look his way. “He’s not in there!” Yves added, before sighing in resignation. “All right! Let’s be thorough.” He unlocked his own door and pushed it hard, generating an air current strong enough to circle the room and come back out before he had even switched on the light. The air smelt much the same as the room below.
“See!”
Yves said this boldly, though embarrassed by the dishevelment of his room: the piles of clothes (some washed, some not); the posters that did not fully conceal the stains on the walls (Godard’s
Breathless
sharing honors with screen-printed agitprop by Anne-Marie’s arty friends); the stacks of Camus and Sartre beside a cramped writing desk; the small typewriter and disarrayed papers (neglected, half-finished essays), weighted down by an overburdened ashtray; the waste basket choked with paper.

Yves was a little offended that the Algerians did indeed step into his room to see, opening his wardrobe and peering under the bed.

“OK,” said Hakim. “Is good.” With three quick strides, he crossed the landing and pushed the key into the lock of the eastern door. He groaned with the strain as he forced the key in a slow, grating circle. Still the door did not open, until he put his shoulder to it. It revealed only darkness. Hakim reached in and Yves heard his hand sweeping up and down the wall in search of a light switch, but not finding one. The Arab muttered something over his shoulder to Moussa and the two pulled out cigarette lighters and sparked them into life. Yves drew his own. Led at arm’s length by the three flames, they moved inside.