Honeymoon (12 page)

This time, she was looking for support. It was no longer as it had been that evening when we were walking down the Rue de la Citadelle when, for the first time in my life, I had had the feeling of being under someone's protection. And yet, after a few steps, once again it was she who was guiding me.

We came to a building with big, dark glass windows. Only two, on the top floor, were lit up.

"I always leave the light on," she said. "It's more cheerful."

She smiled. She was relaxed. But perhaps she was only pretending to take things lightly, to cheer me up. This part of the avenue was not planted with trees, but lined with buildings similar to the one she lived in, with all their windows dark. When I used to go to visit Cavanaugh, I couldn't prevent myself from passing that way. I was no longer in Paris, and that avenue led nowhere. Or rather, it was a transit zone to the unknown.

"I must give you my phone number …" She searched her bag, but couldn't find a pen.

"You can tell it to me … I shall remember it …"

I wrote down the number when I was back in Montmartre, in my room at the Explorers' Club. The following days I tried to phone her, several times. There was no answer. In the end I thought I must have remembered the wrong number.

Under the arch over the gate – a wrought-iron gate with opaque glass – she turned round and rested her grey eyes on me. She raised her arm gently and ran the tips of her fingers over my temple and cheek, as if she was for one last time seeking a contact. Then she lowered her arm and the gate closed behind her. That arm suddenly falling and the metallic clank of the gate shutting made me understand that from one moment to another one can lose heart.

I TOOK THE OIL LAMP from the bedside table and once again explored the inside of the wardrobe. Nothing. I picked up the envelope addressed to Rigaud,
3
, Rue de Tilsitt, which had been forwarded to
20
, Boulevard Soult, and put it in my pocket. Then, lamp in hand, I went down the corridor and into the other bedroom.

I opened the metal shutters, and had great difficulty in folding them back because they had rusted. Then I had no more need of the lamplight: a street lamp just opposite the window filled the room with a white light.

On the left was a small cupboard. The top shelf was empty. Against the wall was a pair of old-fashioned skis. At the bottom of the cupboard, a cheap suitcase. It contained a pair of ski boots and a page torn out of a magazine on which I could make out a few photos. I held the piece of glossy paper up to the light coming from the street lamp and read the text that accompanied the photos:

MEGÈVE HAS NOT BEEN DESERTED. FOR SOME YOUNG MEN A BREAK FROM THEIR ARMY LIFE, FOR OTHERS THEIR LAST HOLIDAYS BEFORE JOINING THE FORCES.

I recognized the twenty-year-old Rigaud in two of the photos. One showed him at the top of a piste, leaning on his ski sticks, the other, on the balcony of a chalet with a woman and a man who was wearing big sunglasses. Underneath the second photo was written: Madame Édouard Bourdet, P. Rigaud, university ski champion
1939
, and Andy Embiricos. Moustaches had been pencilled-in on Madame Édouard Bourdet's face, and I was certain that this was the work of Rigaud himself.

I imagined that when he moved from the Rue de Tilsitt to the Boulevard Soult he had taken the skis, the boots and the page from the glossy magazine that dated from the phoney war. One evening, in this room where he had taken refuge with Ingrid – the evening of the first air raid over Paris, but neither of them went down to the cellar – he must have contemplated these accessories with stupefaction, as relics of a previous life – that of a dutiful young man. The world he had grown up in and belonged to until he was twenty must have seemed so far-off and so absurd that while waiting for the end of the raid, he had absent-mindedly drawn moustaches on Madame Bourdet.

•

Before shutting the flat door, I checked to see whether the yellow key the concierge had given me was still in my pocket. Then I went down the stairs in semi-darkness, because I hadn't been able to find the light switch.

Down on the boulevard, the night was a little cooler than usual. Outside the service station, the Kabyle in the blue dungarees was sitting on a chair and smoking. He waved to me.

"Are you on your own?" I asked.

"He went to get some sleep. He's going to take over later."

"Do you work all night?"

"All night."

"Even in the summer?"

"Yes. It doesn't bother me. I don't like sleeping."

"If you ever need me," I said, "I could stand in for you whenever you like. I live in the district now, and I've nothing else to do."

I sat down on the chair opposite him.

"Would you like some coffee?" he said.

"With pleasure."

He went into the office and came back with two cups of coffee.

"I put a lump of sugar in. Is that all right?

We were now sitting on our chairs and sipping our coffee.

"Do you like the flat?"

"Very much," I said.

"I rented it from my friend, too, for three months, before I
found a studio flat in the neighbourhood."

"And the flat was empty, as it is now?"

"All that was left was an old pair of skis in a cupboard."

"They're still there," I told him. "And your friend has no
idea where to find the former owner?"

"He may be dead, you know."

He put his coffee cup down on the pavement by his
feet.

"If he isn't dead, he might get in touch all the same," I said.

He smiled at me with a shrug of the shoulders. We remained
silent for a few moments. He seemed thoughtful.

"In any case," he said, "he was a man who must have liked winter sports …"

•

Back at the hotel, I opened the folder containing my notes on Ingrid's life, and added the page torn out of the magazine and the envelope addressed to Rigaud. Yes,
3
, Rue de Tilsitt had indeed been where Madame Paul Rigaud had lived. I had written it down on a bit of paper after checking in an old directory. During the few days that Ingrid had lived with Rigaud in the Rue de Tilsitt it had been snowing in Paris, and they hadn't left the flat. Through the big windows in the salon they looked at the snow covering the Place and the avenues all around, and enveloping the city in a blanket of silence, softness and sleep.

•

I woke up at about noon, and again hoped to get a message or a phone call from Annette before the end of the day. I went and had breakfast in the café on the other side of the square with the fountains. When I got back, I told the
patron
that I would be in my room until the evening, so that he wouldn't forget to come and fetch me if my wife phoned.

I've thrown open both halves of the window. A radiant summer's day. Nothing like the heatwave of the previous days. A group of children guided by monitors is making its way towards the former Colonial Museum. They stop, and surround the ice cream seller. The water in the fountains is sparkling in the sunlight, and I have no difficulty in transporting myself from this peaceful July afternoon where I am at the moment to the far-off winter when Ingrid met Rigaud for the first time. There's no frontier between the seasons any more, or between the past and the present.

•

It was one of the last days in November. As usual, she had left the dancing class at the Châtelet Theatre in the late afternoon. She hadn't much time now to get back to her father in the hotel in the Boulevard Ornano where they had been living since the beginning of the autumn: that evening the curfew was going to start at six throughout the arrondissement, because there had been an attack the day before on some German soldiers in the Rue Championnet.

She had earned some money for the first time in her life by dancing in the chorus, with some of her classmates, for the whole of the previous week, in a production of
Vienna Waltzes
at the Châtelet. A fee of fifty francs. Night was already falling, and she crossed the square to get to the entrance to the métro. Why did she feel so discouraged this evening at the prospect of going home to her father? Doctor Jougan had gone to live in Montepellier and he wouldn't be able to help her
father any more, as he had so far done by employing him in his clinic in Auteuil. He had suggested that her father should join him in Montpellier, in the unoccupied zone, but he would have had to cross the demarcation line illegally … Of course, the doctor had asked the other people in the Auteuil clinic to look after her father, but they had neither Doctor Jougan's generosity nor his courage: they were afraid it might be discovered that an Austrian, registered as a Jew, was working clandestinely in their clinic …

She felt suffocated in the métro carriage, crammed up against all the other passengers. It was more crowded than usual, no doubt because of the six o'clock curfew. At the Strasbourg-Saint-Denis station, so many people got in that the doors wouldn't shut. She ought to have taken a bicycletaxi with the fifty francs from
Vienna Waltzes
. Or even a horse-drawn cab. In the time it took to get to the Boulevard Ornano, she would have imagined that the war was over and that she was travelling through a different town in a happier period than this one, the period of
Vienna Waltzes
, for instance.

•

She didn't get out at Simplon as she usually did, but at Barbès-Rochechouart. It was half past five. She preferred to walk to the hotel in the fresh air.

There were groups of German soldiers and French policemen at the entrance to the Boulevard Barbès, as if it was a frontier post. She had a presentiment that if she went down the boulevard like the other people going home to the eighteenth arrondissement, the frontier would close behind her for ever.

She walked down the Boulevard Rochechouart on the left-hand pavement, which was in the ninth arrondissement. From time to time she glanced at the opposite pavement which marked the limit of the curfew and where it was darker, even though it wasn't six yet: still fifteen minutes before the frontier closed, and if she didn't cross it before then she wouldn't be able to get back to her father at the hotel. The métro stations in the district would also close at six. In the Place Pigalle, another frontier post. German soldiers were surrounding a lorry. But she walked straight on, on the same pavement, along the Boulevard de Clichy. Now only ten minutes. Place Blanche. There, she stopped for a few moments. She was just about to cross the Place and the frontier, she took three steps, and stopped again. She walked back on the pavement in the Place Blanche, on the ninth arrondissement side. Now only five minutes. She mustn't give way to the impulse to let herself be sucked into the darkness over on the other side. She must stick to the ninth arrondissement pavement. She walked up and down outside the Café des Palmiers and the chemist's in the Place Blanche. She forced herself not to think of anything, and especially not of her father. She counted. Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-six, twenty-seven … Six o'clock. Five past six. Ten past six. There. It was over.

•

She must go on walking straight ahead on the same pavement, and she must avoid looking over on to the other side where the curfew zone began. She quickened her pace as if she were hurrying over a narrow gangway and all the time afraid of toppling over into the void. She hugged the walls of the buildings and of the Lycée Jules-Ferry, where she had still been a pupil the year before.

When she had crossed the Place de Clichy, she finally turned her back on the eighteenth arrondissement. She was leaving it behind her, that district now forever drowned in the curfew. It was as if she had jumped from a sinking ship just in time. She didn't want to think about her father because she still felt too close to that dark, silent zone from which no one would ever be able to escape now. For her part, she had only just managed it.

She no longer felt the sense of suffocation that had come over her in the métro, and a little while before at the Barbès-Rochechouart crossroads at the sight of the motionless soldiers and policemen. It seemed to her that the avenue opening out in front of her was a big forest path which led, farther on, to the west, to the sea whose spray the wind was already blowing in her face.

•

Just as she reached the Étoile, it began to rain. She sheltered under a porch in the Rue de Tilsitt. On the ground floor of the next building there was a teashop called Le Rendez-vous. She hesitated a long time before going in, because of her sports coat and old pullover.

She sat down at a table in the back. There were not many customers that evening. She jumped: the pianist on the other side of the room was playing one of the tunes from
Vienna Waltzes
. A waitress brought her a cup of chocolate and a macaroon and gave her an odd look. She suddenly wondered whether she had a right to be there. Perhaps this teashop was forbidden to "unaccompanied minors". Why did that expression come to her mind? Unaccompanied minors. She was sixteen, but she looked twenty. She tried to bite into the macaroon but it was hard, and the chocolate was a very pale, almost mauve colour. It really didn't taste of chocolate. Would the fifty francs she'd earned from Vienna Waltt.es be enough to pay the bill?