The Steppes of Paris (3 page)

Just as he was falling back to sleep, he became aware of the noise of two people starting to make love with considerable gusto in the room next door. It seemed to Edward they were laughing in Portuguese.

In the morning, the hotel pipes blew like a hunting horn. Edward felt for his alarm clock, saw it was seven o’clock, and decided to make a good impression on Henry Hirshfeld by arriving at the office as soon as possible after eight.

His shower put the first damper on his resolve; it petered, rather than anything else, out of the old shower rose so that, instead of beginning the day as he liked to with his normal all-over blasting of hot water, he was simply wettened. He dressed for the office, relieved that Hirshfeld, who had the day before been wearing corduroy trousers, a brown belt and brown shoes, was not a tie man. He kept an unbelievably battered old sports jacket on the back of his door and, at lunch time, he had simply shrugged it on, whereupon it fell into place about him like a baggy skin.

There seemed something immature about having breakfast in the hotel, so Edward went out into the warm just faintly misty morning, intending to stop for a coffee and a croissant somewhere on his way. The pavements of the Boulevard Saint Germain were already quite busy, mainly with smart but grim-faced women, walking briskly like well-finished automatons to work. The few men about looked to him by contrast sorry; Lowry figures, hunched, with bent heads, scurrying. Aware of his own leisure – Henry had actually said to show up at
the office only when it fitted in with his house-hunting – Edward enjoyed the walk. At the corner of the Boulevard Saint Michel, he chose his cafe, bought a paper, and went in, intending to sit for a good ten minutes on the glassed-in terrace, having a soup-bowl-sized cup of coffee and one or maybe even two croissants, while he turned the pages of his paper and watched the smart women snapping past. OK, it was a pose but, stuff it, a harmless one. He hadn’t noticed that most of the terrace chairs were still up-ended on the tables and when he tried to sit down on one of the few which weren’t, a waiter bad-temperedly mopping the floor shouted at him that the only place he could have coffee at that hour was standing up at the bar. Even the minor thrill of noticing that two of the men at the bar were drinking red wine for breakfast and one, for God’s sake, brandy, didn’t make the bar an appealing proposition. The same scene was repeated, although less bad-temperedly, at a second café he tried lower down the boulevard so, as it was after eight o’clock already, he ended up drinking a foul-tasting black coffee standing in a totally Americanised fast-food joint with large illuminated pictures of the hamburgers and milk shakes it served, and caught the Metro at Saint Michel.

The office was deserted when, at a quarter to nine, he let himself in, with the master key Henry had given him. It wasn’t until gone nine o’clock that he heard another key wrestling with the lock and Marie-Yvette, to whom he had been briefly introduced the day before, fumbled her way in and gave every sign of severe shock at seeing him there.

In contrast to the sleek, hard-faced women on the Boulevard Saint Germain, Marie-Yvette was anything but smart, and Edward couldn’t help wondering if it were Henry who had hired her. He thought, with a feeling that was very close to the beginning of affection, that it would probably be typical of Henry Hirshfeld to have employed someone so resolutely un-smart.

Marie-Yvette had short, bedraggled henna-red hair. The day before, she had been wearing jeans and two unironed T-shirts one on top of the other, one navy blue and one white with a slogan. Today they were maroon and black. Edward had already noticed, and faintly reproached himself for noticing,
that she had virtually no breasts. As she went through the office, switching on the lights, he also noticed that she was wearing open-toed sandals and not a scrap of make-up. Her pitted skin gleamed a little.

She was looking him over at the same time. Despite her homespun appearance, she evidently wasn’t at all shrinking. When she had cleared the telephone answering machine of the night’s messages and taken a couple of sheets off the telex, she invited Edward to join her for a cup of coffee, which she began to make at a murky percolator installed in a corner of the main office.

“Ed-ward?” she pronounced carefully. “Not Eddie, like Murphy?”

Edward hesitated. He was, he recognised, childishly particular about who used which version of his name. Eddy was only for intimates, for his very closest friends; he was Edward to everyone else. He opened his mouth to reply firmly, ‘Not Eddie, like Murphy or anybody else,’ but found himself instead answering incautiously, “Different people call me different things: I’m Edward, Eddy, Ed, Ted, Teddy, Ned. Take your pick.” He supposed it must be the keenness of the new boy to ingratiate himself on the staffers which made him answer so unguardedly; that, and the unexpected intimacy of sitting drinking a leisurely coffee in an empty office with a girl who turned out to be – it came up in the conversation – exactly his own age and who reminded him, with her scrappy looks and stern standpoints, of a grim feminist with whom he had once shared a house in London.

He asked her in return, “Are you always Marie-Yvette?” and she answered snappishly, “Always, always. No abbreviations.”

They had been chatting for five or ten minutes when Aurore, the office secretary, who had been out on an errand when Edward came in the previous day, arrived in a whirlwind of concern at her lateness. She was a tall, very pretty young black woman from Martinique; all vivaciousness, ebullience, deep giggles, and a quite extraordinary contrast to stern, drab Marie-Yvette. She shook Edward’s hand formally but then tut-tutted teasingly over the difficulty of pronouncing his name: “Ed-ward, Ed-ward. Ts-ts-ts-ts-ts. Before we
have How-ard, now Ed-ward.” She sighed in mock exasperation.

“You can call him Eddie,” Marie-Yvette told her in French.

Aurore looked Edward up and down. “No,” she declared. “It does not suit him. He is,
hélas,
Ed-ward.” And, hanging up her jacket, she went off into a volley of provocative giggles.

Marie-Yvette shrugged. She put her hand on the telephone receiver to answer the first call of the day, which had been flashing for some moments on the switchboard, and retorted, “You create your own problems, Aurore.”

Ed-ward concluded, as he sat down in the small room which had been allocated to him, that he was stupid to have wondered if Henry Hirshfeld had been responsible for employing the paper’s present staff. Only Hirshfeld, he thought, smiling, would have picked such unlikely characters from among the city’s ranks of well-finished female automatons. He felt a brief moment’s warm anticipation at the prospect of working for the man.

Henry, arriving soon after ten, was astonished to find Edward there and only refrained from ticking him off for a completely unnecessary display of keenness when he heard him making appointments on the telephone with the two accommodation agencies.

Edward spent the best part of the next three days looking for a place to live. He had heard that it would be a problem; by the second week of September a lot of places had already been taken. But, even more than the limited number to choose from, it was the sort of apartments the agents were showing him which dismayed him.

Although he had imagined, before he came here, that he didn’t care at all where he lived, that being in Paris was a death sentence to adventure, and the shape or form or shell it took was immaterial, he had realised nearly at once this was wrong. His only hope lay in finding the right flat, one which would let him into some authentic layer of the city and enable him to travel, as Henry Hirshfeld had, simply by living there. This was precisely what the glass cube in Neuilly would not do.

The estate agents showed him three more cubes on Tuesday and Wednesday. They seemed convinced that a journalist on
a prestigious paper, even if only a young trainee journalist, must want to live in a modern block. They glossed over the undesirable, virtually suburban locations: Porte de Choisy, Porte de Châtillon, Vincennes. They dwelt in each case on the newness, the shiny kitchen, the anonymous, still paint-smelling hall. Edward told them three times, increasingly unpleasantly each time, that he wanted to live somewhere old, didn’t they understand, prior to 1914 at least, somewhere with a bit of character. Where was the problem? In the whole of Paris, crammed as it was, if you believed the literary stereotypes, with crummily picturesque locations, surely they could find somewhere a little less soulless for him?

By Thursday, they claimed to have understood what Monsieur Wainwright had in mind and the long-suffering woman from the agency drove him out to the extreme edge of the sixteenth
arrondissement
to show him what she said was the ideal property. It was in a solemn, grey stone street opposite the Bois de Boulogne, a street whose absolute silence oppressed them as soon as they opened the car doors, and where they did not see, arriving or leaving, a single pedestrian. The apartment was on the sixth floor of a chillingly grand apartment house. The entrance hall had a singularly ugly marble, which reminded Edward of nothing as much as lino, on the floor and walls, and two chandeliers. The lift was, rather embarrassingly for the estate agent, out of order. (The term on the card which hung from the lift door handle, Edward was delighted to notice, was
“En
Dérangement”.
)
As they laboured up the six floors, nothing but their own shoes disturbed the almost invalid silence except, at one point, an inexplicable lady-like “A-hem” issuing from an invisible source. The flat itself was a chamber of horrors of unstable little white and gold chairs, upholstered in yellow ochre plush, and a bedroom where every piece of furniture, including a sizeable dressing-table, was decorated with a large pink flounce. Despite the scale of the building, the flat itself was a minute three-room affair. Even the view of the yellowing autumn Bois did not compensate. It was, as Edward offensively told the estate agent on their way downstairs, just right for a very short can-can dancer.

The last straw was discovering in the course of their conversation on the drive back that the flat cost 750 francs a month
more than his rent allowance from the paper, a sum which the woman from the agency had smilingly assured him she would in no circumstances exceed.

Arriving at the office, distinctly depressed, Edward found on his desk a scribbled invitation to dinner the following evening from Henry Hirshfeld. There was no sign of Henry himself and Marie-Yvette told Edward in an offhand way that Henry had gone out to interview a mad priest and wouldn’t be back any more that day. Edward left a note of acceptance on Henry’s desk. He was slightly ashamed of how glad he was to accept, having rather to his disgust managed to get fairly lonely and miserable over the few evenings spent on his own. That was not how he saw himself; he was resilient, enterprising, by now he ought to have engineered an adventure or two. But the sort of adventure he might have engineered in London – drunken dares, hoax phone calls, the public embarrassment of an old friend – required companions or at least an appreciative audience to come home to. The mundane repetition of a meal alone followed by a walk or a film, and then going to bed by himself in what he termed his geriatric bedroom, with no prospect yet of any change, had very quickly got him down. He couldn’t help dwelling, too, on the nights he should have been spending, tropical nights, with the windows open on a non-stop street-life and insistent music. He would welcome, he thought sullenly, climbing under the pink candlewick, the disturbed sleep, the mosquito bites, the sweating.

The hotel played a nasty trick on him. He was woken in the night by two voices crying out in passion in the room next door. After their quite phenomenally noisy crescendo, Edward could hear them panting and chuckling and commenting to one another. His second night, he heard quite distinctly that they were speaking Portuguese. Wherever they were from, their stamina couldn’t fail to impress him when he was woken by a repeat performance, this time with a climactic cry of “
Senhora
da
Gloria
!”
only a couple of hours later. Sleepy and irritated, he pulled the pillow over his head, but in the morning they were at it again, less energetically this time, it was true, but he could still clearly hear whoops of female laughter and the sound of flailing limbs knocking the wall. Crabbily and uncomfortably, he soaped himself hard in the
shower. He used the pretext that he had not yet found a local café ready to serve him a comfortable breakfast at eight o’clock to stay in the hotel for breakfast and try to identify the couple. No likely candidates appeared and it wasn’t until Friday morning, when he happened to meet them leaving their room and travelled down in the lift with them and their luggage that he realised they had been at breakfast after all but they were such an unlikely pair that he had failed to identify them. They were short and fat and very far from beautiful; a dark and hirsute pair with prominent, fleshy features and stubby, gold-laden fingers. Edward put their age admiringly at around fifty. He saw their suitcases were plastered with Varig labels and, because they were preparing to pay their hotel bill, they were holding in their stubby, jewelled fingers green Brazilian passports.

Henry Hirshfeld lived in the Marais, an area Edward had not really ventured into on his previous trips to Paris, for all that he thought he knew the city, and he was a bit put out to find that it seemed to be one of its most beautiful districts. Following Henry’s brief but accurate directions, he came out of the Metro at Saint Paul, took a left, second right, another left, another right, and found himself on the corner of the street Henry had written down for him. He was about twenty minutes too early. As he walked around the neighbourhood to fill in time, he was astonished to find himself in the middle of something virtually mediaeval. Although it was still quite light, the narrow streets seemed to hold their own darkness. For some reason Edward couldn’t fathom, nearly all the shops were closed and shuttered and there was almost no one about. As he admired, despite his stubborn intentions, the crooked façades and deep courtyards, he suddenly noticed two stars of David painted on the windows of one of the few unshuttered shops. ‘Oh,’ he thought dimly, ‘a Jewish shop.’ But then he noticed there were stars of David and what he was pretty certain were Hebrew shop signs the whole way up and down the street. Taken aback, he retraced his steps. He had just walked unheedingly through what seemed to be an entirely Jewish neighbourhood. Since the twenty minutes were more
than up, he turned in the direction of Henry’s address, but he was still shocked by what he had failed to notice. Those streets in the summer twilight were somewhere a long way away. He had crassly overlooked it, but they weren’t in Paris at all. And as he found the corner of Henry Hirshfeld’s street again, he wondered in an uncertain groping way if it were out of some sort of tribal loyalty that Hirshfeld had chosen to live there.

Henry’s home was at the back of one of those deep courtyards, a courtyard which had been considerably smartened up, certainly, but which, despite its scrubbed stone and ultra-modern lighting, retained its venerable character. Edward was impressed by the weighty wooden double front doors, through one of which you stepped into the renovated courtyard, which came as something of a shock behind the unassuming dark façade. He climbed to the second floor up a broad, immaculately white stone staircase and then stood for a few seconds, feeling ridiculously unsure of himself and eager to make a good impression, in front of the bell marked “Hirshfeld/Nguyen”.

Henry opened the door, still in the same checked shirt and cords he had been wearing at the office and Edward felt a fool for having changed into a fresh shirt and a tie. Henry showed him through a short corridor, hung with so many paintings Edward did not manage to focus on any single one, into a large, comfortably furnished living-room. Almost at the same moment as they entered the room from the corridor, a small figure whom Edward took to be Mrs Hirshfeld came in at the other end. Although Edward had registered that Henry’s wife was Vietnamese, he hadn’t actually stopped to consider what she might be like. If he had given her any thought at all, it was to expect that she would be a sinewy, self-confident modern American woman inside a Vietnamese shell. The woman who walked towards him, smiling and holding out both hands, surprised him so much that he was worried he might have momentarily gaped at her. She was extremely small, and seemed, if possible, even smaller beside her lumbering husband. She had her hair scooped strictly into a perfectly round bun, like a neat silk pincushion on the top of her head, and through it she had stuck what Edward thought of vaguely as a single lacquered chopstick. She was wearing
black cotton ski-pants, bead-embroidered cloth sandals and something rather like a smock in whose abstract pattern there seemed to be a dab of every bright colour known to man. She greeted Edward just as her husband had by taking his single politely held out hand in both of hers and Edward wondered briefly which of them had had the gesture first.

“Hi, Edward,” she said in twangy Oriental American English, “I’m Mai.”

They sat and had drinks in the pleasant living-room. Side by side on one of the two low settees, Henry and Mrs Hirshfeld formed such a total contrast that, at first, Edward had a little difficulty concentrating on the conversation. Just before they went to table, the child of this most unlikely couple came into the room. She had her mother’s glossy hair and Oriental complexion but although she was only, Edward guessed, about ten, she already showed signs of growing tall like her father. She stood rather gawkily in the doorway and confronted them from under her fringe, possibly a bit put out, Edward thought, to see the visitor.

Henry introduced her. “This is Dina, also known as Dinh. We gave her a name which adapted equally well to both sides of her heritage. It’s very convenient for her; some days she’s one, some days she’s the other.” And, not in the least patronisingly, but perfectly seriously, he asked his daughter, “Which are you today, honey?”

The child shot Edward a short but he felt on the whole uncomplimentary look before answering shortly, “Dinh.”

The meal was easy, not in the least taxing. The subject of work and the paper only came up once or twice in a relaxed, tangential way. The Hirshfelds’ horizons clearly extended far beyond the recurring themes and vocabulary of journalism. Even when a phone call for Henry from the New York office disrupted the main course, nobody seemed particularly interested in using it as a pretext for bringing the conversation back to work and Edward’s expected contribution to it. They talked about the euphoria that had greeted the Socialists’ victory at the last elections, the dancing that had gone on for most of the night at the Place de la Bastille, the planned cultural developments in the capital, and, at one point, the subject having been arbitrarily introduced by Dinh, they all
talked perfectly seriously for at least ten minutes about the sadism of spinster teachers.

Edward decided to walk back to his hotel. The evening had contradictorily both cheered him and further depressed him. Naturally he was pleased at the prospect of having at least one place in Paris where he knew he would spend further educational evenings. But, at the same time, the family scene had reinforced his feeling that he was stuck in a stolidly bourgeois city, where life was lived according to the same old encrusted patterns. For all their appearance of unconventionality, the Hirshfelds were after all just a middle-aged married couple, leading a comfortable, settled life. And if there were one thing Edward could not stand the thought of, it was marriage. The mere idea of tying yourself to the one person forever and, even worse, voluntarily giving up your freedom to take off into the blue, to do as you liked, made him shudder. He thought marriage was a kind of communal madness and every time one or another of his acquaintances succumbed to it, he saw it as another manifestation of the herd instinct, the terror-stricken lemming rush over the cliff, to which he intended to remain forever immune. It was the early signs of this distressing aberration which had made him so very relieved to part from Rosie.