The Foundling's War (29 page)

Claude appeared, supported by Marceline Michette and the chauffeur. She could hardly place one foot in front of the other and her face was waxy and she was shivering in her wet dress, her fine ash-blond hair hanging in rat’s tails. Nelly hugged her. Madame Michette took matters in hand: a bath, warm towel, rub down with eau de Cologne, and electric hairdryer.

‘I’ve brought some woollens. Now go and get Cyrille!’

She pushed Jean and the chauffeur out of the door. Anna Petrovna lived in Passy, where the White Russians had gathered in exile, in a detached house down a private path overgrown with ivy. She opened the door and started when she saw Jean.

‘Well?’

‘She’s been released.’

‘Why hasn’t she come?’

‘She’s exhausted.’

‘I’ll go to her.’

‘No. You won’t find her at her apartment.’

She did not invite him in and despite the cold she left the door open. Behind her Jean could see a hall wallpapered in a hideous design.

‘I’ve come for Cyrille,’ he said.

‘He’s with my son.’

She pointed to the side of the building where there was a single room, probably an old garage, with a light in the window.

‘But you’ll only have him if Claude asks me herself.’

He gave her Nelly’s number.

‘Come in!’ she said finally.

Jean placed his hand on the receiver as Anna Petrovna seized it.

‘Wait!’

He lifted the receiver and listened for the telltale click of a listening device. There was no sound.

‘You can dial the number.’

Claude was very brief. Anna Petrovna burst into tears. There was no one at the other end when Jean took back the receiver.

‘You’ve taken my daughter from me!’

‘I doubt it.’

‘When will I see her?’

‘Soon.’

She wrapped a shawl around her shoulders and stepped across the little garden to knock on the door of the garage.

‘Vladi! It’s me!’

The door was unlocked and opened onto a magnificent disorder in the middle of which Cyrille, sitting on the floor, was busy tossing a ball onto a roulette wheel. As soon as he saw Jean he scrambled to his feet and threw himself into his arms.

‘Jean, Jean, you came. Where’s Maman?’

‘She’s waiting for you.’

Vladimir looked like Claude, but he had in his expressions something so inconclusive and soft that the second time one looked at
him one discovered an entirely different person, a thin and
spineless-looking
giant, whose hair was too long and whose hands trembled. As for the chaos he lived in, we would need pages and pages to describe it, with the risk of the reader dying of boredom before the end. Let us simply say that Vladimir, who had never managed to pass his baccalauréat, considered himself to be a great inventor, specifically of a rotary engine that could fit in the palm of a person’s hand and produce the power of a 200-horsepower diesel engine. The one-time garage had become his workshop and bedroom. Not his bathroom, as he rarely washed, except on the days when he went out to win a little money at a bridge club. In fact it had been a long time since he himself had actually believed in his invention but he continued to maintain its fiction because it concealed his laziness and inaction. The money he and his mother lived on he owed to his card-playing skills, particularly bridge, at which he was first-rate. The war had interrupted a career that had reaped rich rewards on cruise ships, where for the price of a ticket to the Caribbean he had learnt how to clean out all the wide-eyed amateurs in the space of a fortnight. Despite a few unpleasant aftermaths – two shipping lines had blacklisted him – he had been planning to leave for Japan, changing ships several times en route. Now, forced to stay in Paris, he made do with fleecing the amateur clubs of the 16th arrondissement and waited for better days. Jean understood in a flash what Claude had wanted to keep hidden from him and would be angry with him for having discovered.

In his arms, Cyrille hugged him tight.

‘Take me to see Maman now, Jean. Good night, Uncle Vladi. Good night, Grandmother.’

Nelly had given Claude her bed and she was resting with two pillows under her head. In the narrow kitchen Madame Michette was fussing and complaining at the lack of room. Organised as always, she had
brought food borrowed from Palfy’s refrigerator.

‘A boiled egg, some York ham, a slice of Gruyère and some stewed apples, that’s all a tired tummy needs. And where’s the egg cup?’

No, Nelly never ate boiled eggs. All she needed was coffee. Ingeniously Madame Michette decided to serve the egg mashed with bread soldiers. She had everything under control and reigned, maternal and full of authority, treating Cyrille to a tap on his fingers when she caught him picking his nose. Claude lay back with an expression of profound sadness on her face, as if the world from which she had returned by an accident of extraordinary good luck had opened up an abyss underneath her, to which a kind of vertigo kept trying to drag her down, despite her efforts to resist. She smiled at her son, ate because Madame Michette insisted, and wrapped herself back up in her torpor. Nelly kissed her on her forehead and eased a pillow from under her head. Cyrille, already naked, slipped under the covers and pressed himself up against his mother.

‘Off you go, the pair of you,’ Marceline said to Jean and Nelly. ‘I’ll stay and keep an eye on them, keep the fire going so they don’t catch cold. I’ve brought my coffee. Count on me, I won’t drop off. And there’s lots to read anyway …’

She had put on her glasses and was scanning the bookshelves.

‘Michaux? Is that it? He didn’t go overboard, did he? Just little pieces. I knew a Monsieur Michaux. He was a council worker. Can’t be him. Max Jacob? Wouldn’t be Jewish, would he? Mind you, I’ve got nothing against Jews. On the contrary. Now they’re persecuting them, I think that’s disgusting. Anyhow, not all Jacobs are Jews. I knew one of them too, a Protestant, a real one. He’d never come to the Sirène on a Sunday. Very devout. Oh, but this Max Jacob only writes little pieces too. You do like your writers to leave half the page empty, don’t you, Madame Nelly? Oh, look, Corneille! The
Complete Works. Le Cid
must be in there somewhere. Dialogue’s so much more fun. Don’t you worry about me. I’ve got lots to read. The night will go very quickly. That little lady will be much better after a good sleep.
And if she wakes up, I’ll give her another pill. Go on, leave us alone. Go and have some fun, now that the worst’s over.’

Nelly offered her some champagne. After studying the label Madame Michette shook her head.

‘It’s
brut
. I only like semi-sweet. Don’t worry. I’ve brought my little bottle of burgundy. A glass now and then and the night will be over in a flash. Go on, my dears, off you go, off you go …’

Cyrille sang to her, ‘There was a lady called Madame Michette, and Madame Michette, she lost her pet …’ She wagged her finger at him, pretending to frown but in reality delighted and enchanted by this little boy who ran, whooping like a Sioux, along the paths of the Luxembourg Gardens where the piled-up dead and frozen leaves crunched underfoot. The stone urns on their pedestals looked whiter than usual, as if turned to ice by the cold, and the statues shivered in the frosty air. Like mummies in their sarcophagi the German sentries guarding the Senate in their concrete pillboxes observed the children clustered around the big pond through their aiming slits. The layer of ice on the pond, broken up by stones, allowed the model boats to sail among the yellowish icebergs, shadowed by goldfish in search of bread. The rigid lines of barbed wire did not cut Paris off from a victorious Germany, but cut Germany off from a childish, joyful world immersed in imaginary battles with pocket submarines and sailing boats. The uncertainty of combat remained a mystery for these men who had also once played with model boats or whose children, far away, were doing the same thing in a public garden. Marceline was carrying Cyrille’s boat – a Breton fishing boat with red sails, a gift from Jean – while Cyrille collected chestnuts in a paper bag. He already had a bagful in the studio, and in the afternoon she prised the chestnuts from their spiky sheaths and helped him use them to make fantastic characters: beggars, kings, fairies, bulls and ants. Their big project was to make a Nativity scene for Christmas. There was no hessian, paints or gold paper in the apartment, but Marceline had managed to find some at a hardware shop on Rue des Canettes. In one of Nelly’s drawers she had found a tube of glue. Clumsily she
had sculpted the ox and the ass out of peeled chestnuts, and she was anxious now that her efforts at the baby Jesus and Virgin Mary would be even clumsier.

Cyrille came back to her, his cheeks on fire, cheerfully blowing out a cloud of condensation.

‘Look, Marceline, I’m smoking.’

He inhaled from an imaginary cigarette and pretended to hide it behind his back when she scolded him.

‘It’s very bad to be smoking at your age. Monsieur Michette, who’s ten years older than you, has never smoked in his life. That’s why he’s so well …’

‘Is Monsieur Michette the bogeyman?’

‘You know, I’m really going to get cross with you.’

‘Oh no, I don’t think you will. You’re too good.’

Marceline’s heart turned over: a child was telling her she was good. She had reached the age of fifty without knowing it. Cyrille grabbed her hand.

‘Let’s go home. Maman will be getting worried.’

They crossed Place Saint-Sulpice. As soon as Cyrille glimpsed the pigeon catcher he started shouting and clapping his hands, running away from Marceline and making the birds scatter. The man said nothing, waiting patiently for calm to return and again holding out the breadcrumbs on his palm. His nose was getting redder and redder. Its luminosity was the only thing people noticed in his obtuse face. They called him Red-nose and told him he was a nasty piece of work.

Claude was regaining consciousness, but hazily and so confusedly that for most of the day she seemed absent from her own life. Getting up late, she had mainly sat slumped in an armchair. Her hand dangled and Cyrille, on all fours, pushed against her apparently lifeless fingers with his head. The fingers caught a curl of blond hair and wound it around them, and Cyrille purred.

‘I’m your pussycat.’

‘Yes, you’re my pussycat.’

Afraid that Claude would let herself be taken away, Palfy and Jean had forbidden Anna Petrovna from visiting her daughter. She had telephoned from a public call box. Claude had affected a lighthearted voice to reassure her. Anna Petrovna allowed herself to be convinced because she was reluctant to leave darling Vladimir, who was in bed with influenza. As soon as she put the phone down Claude relapsed into apathy, from which she only emerged when Jean arrived. As soon as he appeared her face lit up and her voice regained its eagerness, so much so that Marceline, who had begun to develop a literary turn of phrase since spending time among Nelly’s bookshelves, exclaimed, ‘You’re Tristan and Iseult! What are you waiting for? King Mark has gone.’

She took Cyrille out, pretending that there was shopping to be done in the quartier. On her return her trained eye was surprised to see them still sitting apart from each other.

Alone with Claude, Jean spent his time trying to find out what had happened. Each day he extracted from her a few more words that she uttered with infinite reluctance. She spoke of a night in a cupboard, a blinding light, questions that two men drilled into her, a cold bath into which she had been thrown and where she had fainted, and a man with greying hair who had picked her up and carried her to a car and then in the car to Palfy’s apartment.

‘Please,’ she said, ‘don’t keep asking me. I don’t want to remember. You have to say nothing. They know everything. They know more than I do.’

The one certainty was that they had not arrested Georges Chaminadze, who had come from London on a special mission and left again by unknown means. It was his second such mission. On the first, despite orders to the contrary, he had spent three days with Claude, without Cyrille for fear that he would talk. The G was him.

‘Do you still love him?’ Jean asked.

‘No. I love you.’

So why would she not give herself to him?

‘I promised him. On Cyrille’s life.’

‘If he extracted that promise from you, it’s because he loves you.’

‘No. He doesn’t even love me. I’m not explaining anything. We were to divorce. He was living with another woman. But he didn’t want me to see anyone else.’

‘Then why did you let him force you to make that promise?’

‘Oh Jean, you’re the one torturing me now … I really don’t know. He’s very convincing. He’s handsome. He was my husband, my only lover. He’s Cyrille’s father … I didn’t know I was going to meet you … I hoped he would come back and that, even if I didn’t love him any more, we’d be able to live together, so that Cyrille would be happy.’

Piece by piece the picture of Georges Chaminadze became clearer, a very different picture from the photograph glimpsed in Claude’s bedroom of a tall, uncomplicated-looking young man, happy to be alive, racket in hand on a tennis court.

‘You have to understand,’ Claude said, ‘he was terribly spoilt. At the age of five he used to have servants kissing his hand. He’s like Vladi, he never wanted to work. And like Vladi he was a natural card player. They often used to team up on international cruises. Both of them spoke Russian, French, German and Spanish almost without an accent. Maman adores him … Nearly as much as Vladi … When I said I’d divorce him if he went on living like that, she said I was wrong.’

‘That’s why she hates me.’

‘Yes, she’s crazy, but you have to forgive her; she’s lost everything and now Vladi’s a loser too, banned from playing in all sorts of places …’

On other days Claude did not speak, answering only yes or no, but from a smile or the pressure of her hand, Jean knew she was happy he was there. He was anxious to know how she had lived until now.

‘On very little,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t spend very much, which
must be a reaction to Maman. If she ever gets a thousand-franc note she’ll go out and buy caviar rather than pay the gas bill. I’ve sold some jewellery. Very cheaply, but in any case I don’t have many needs. And you don’t know it, but you helped me a lot. The first time he came Georges left me some money too. It must have come from the expenses he was given for his French mission. He’s never been very scrupulous. The police searched the apartment. They took my last two rings and the money I had left. Now I’ve got nothing …’

She held out two open palms.

Marceline said that if Claude would agree to get dressed she would regain her appetite for living, but by staying in bed in a nightdress or lolling in an armchair in a dressing gown she was wallowing in self-pity. Without admitting it, Marceline had discovered in herself extraordinary depths of devotion. She protected Claude, cared for her, made sure she ate, refrained from asking her a single question, and unilaterally decided to take charge of Cyrille’s rather random education. Claude listened astonished to this large woman, built like a wardrobe and with the veins in her cheeks flushed a lively red after a bottle of cheap burgundy, delivering her remarkable course in manners. But what was good enough for the girls at the Sirène was also good enough for a small boy. Cyrille drank his glass of water with his little finger crooked, washed his willy morning and evening, and said, ‘Hello, Monsieur Palfy; good evening, Madame Nelly.’ Taken all together, his instruction contained many good things, and there would always be time to go back on certain habits. The main thing was that Cyrille trusted Madame Michette, secret agent and woman of action, in a way that did not rule out being cheeky to her.

Nelly appeared occasionally. She came back for a coat, a book, a dress. Claude knew she was living with Jean at Palfy’s. She did not mind. No one was deceiving anyone. Only Duzan wandered lost through the labyrinth, discovering that he needed Nelly more than she needed him. He was like a fly bumping into a pane of glass. He saw Nelly free and called out to her repeatedly, and she did not hear him. He thought of denouncing her and dropped a hint to Julius Kapermeister who would have shown interest had Madeleine, tipped off by Jean, not intervened. She had taken Jean’s side, Nelly’s side, the side of the unknown Claude who had been pointlessly tortured. Every day she sent a chauffeur to Saint-Sulpice with some ‘treats’. Thanks to her companion, Blanche de Rocroy, she had discovered the part played by Rudolf in spiriting Claude out of the hands of the Gestapo’s French auxiliaries: a dangerous role that for the first time had compromised this man of aristocratic demeanour but soft character, who found himself alarmed at the thought of being disciplined and posted to a combat unit for his actions. Goodbye to the black-market restaurants, to his picture-dealing racket and the confiscation of Jewish wealth, not to mention another, even more fruitful business activity, which we shall return to.

Claude had escaped from the French police but they had not accepted that they were beaten and still hoped she would eventually lead them to Georges Chaminadze. Better informed than the police, we can reveal that Georges had already left French soil, probably on board one of those little Lysanders that landed at twilight or dawn, setting down in open fields men and women who melted into the anonymous crowd and often never reappeared. It may sound as if such missions hardly tally with what we know of Georges’s character, but that would fail to take into account the fact that, as a born gambler, he found in the secret war the same pleasure he found in squeeze plays at bridge or bluffing at poker. Danger amused him. That this time death might be the endgame was an added attraction. In the same lighthearted way he had disobeyed orders and spent three
days with his wife, then tried to see her on the Sunday when she had been in the country. The concierge had informed on him and now Quai Saint-Michel was a busted flush, under permanent surveillance. He had made his wife a hostage with a disregard for her safety that reflected his true personality. In London he had been congratulated on his mission’s success, having concealed the fact that by going to Quai Saint-Michel he had been a hair’s breadth from a disaster that could, if he had talked, have led to an entire intelligence network being laid waste.

There is, therefore, no longer any Claude mystery for Jean. All is clear. The silence she met him with has been broken in a few sentences. Where his entreaties and insistence came up against a brick wall, the brutality of the police succeeded in a single night. Jean is delivered. But life has taken a dangerous turn and Claude, recovered and returned to normal life, may still be forbidden to him. He is simultaneously happy and desperate.

He would be more desperate than happy if Nelly were not there to entertain him. He discovers her generosity and what she herself calls her volatility. Relieved of Duzan (‘It wasn’t a weakness,’ she explained, ‘but a concession to received ideas: an actress
must
sleep with “her” producer. Why make yourself conspicuous? It wasn’t my lucky day! I’ve been punished and found out Dudu’s an ass’), relieved of Duzan, she is returning to the theatre. Jean-Louis Vaudoyer has offered her back her old place at the Comédie Française, and Dullin, director at the Théâtre de la Cité, formerly the Sarah-Bernhardt, is tempting her with a part in Jean-Paul Sartre’s first play,
The Flies
. But the Comédie Française is promising Corneille. Madame Michette is pushing hard for Corneille. Since she began living at Nelly’s studio, her reading habits have broadened and deepened. She is not so keen on comedies. Tragedies are what she finds really exciting. She longs to see Nelly in the role of Chimène, to hear her speaking Camille’s imprecations and Pauline’s sweet lament. She is discovering the ‘greatness of spirit’ that the life she has led hitherto has rarely
given her the chance to encounter. The result is both a shock and an inspiration. She would like to speak in verse, but doesn’t know where to start. There is a lacuna in her education. If only the Blue Sisters of Issoire had not made do with teaching her to read and write, to count and sew and cook! If only they had led her to the heroes of Antiquity! Her life would have been so different. A deep wistfulness wells up in her. The powerful ones of this world have flaws they overcome as an example to us. Now it is we who must follow in their footsteps!

To return to more down-to-earth matters, Jean was without a job. His ‘resignation’ cheque from Duzan left him enough to live on for a month. Of course the producer was trying every means he knew to take Jean back, hoping he would bring Nelly with him. Even Palfy advised against falling into the trap.

‘Ultimately Duzan’s a windbag. All mouth. If Nelly doesn’t want him, he ceases to exist. Even the German co-producers are refusing to help him. Let him go under. You need to travel light. I suggested opening a gallery …’