Little Jewel

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ON SEVERAL OTHER evenings, I retraced my steps. I waited on a bench at Châtelet at exactly the same time as I had first come across her. I was on the lookout for the yellow coat.

The barrier opens as the train leaves and the tide of passengers pours onto the platform. When the next train arrives, they’ll pile into the carriages. The platform empties, it fills again, and you let yourself drift off. With all the comings and goings, you no longer focus on anything precise, not even a yellow coat. A groundswell pushes you into one of the carriages.

I remember that, back then, the same poster was in every station. A couple with three fair-haired children all sitting round a table in an alpine chalet in the evening. Their faces were illuminated by a lamp. Outside, it was snowing. It must have been Christmas. Written on top of the poster were the words: PUPIER, THE CHOCOLATE FOR FAMILIES.

The first week, I went to Vincennes once. The following week, twice. Then twice more. There were always too many people in the café at around seven in the evening for anyone to notice me. The second time, I ventured to ask the chubby blond barman if the woman in the yellow coat would come today. He frowned without seeming to understand. Someone from another table called him over. I don’t think he heard me. But he wouldn’t have had time to reply. It was peak hour for him, too. Perhaps she wasn’t a regular at this café at all, and didn’t live in this neighbourhood. Perhaps the person she had called from the phone box lived in the brick apartment block and, that particular evening, she had been visiting and had brought cans of food. Later, she had taken the metro in the other direction, as I had also done, and she had gone home, and I would never know precisely where. My only point of reference was Staircase A. But I would have to knock on each door on each landing and ask whoever was prepared to answer whether they knew a woman, about fifty years old, with a yellow coat and a scar on her face. Yes, well, she had been there one evening the week before, after buying cans of food and a packet of coffee from the grocery store on the street. What could they possibly say to me? That I had dreamed it all up?

And yet, there she was again in the fifth week. Just as I was coming out of the entrance to the metro, I saw her in the phone box. She was wearing her yellow coat. I wondered whether she, too, had just left the station. So she might have regular commutes and timetables in her life…I had trouble imagining her holding down a day job, like everyone else on the metro at that hour. Châtelet station. It was a vague starting point for further clues. Tens of thousands of people wind up at Châtelet before scattering to all points of the compass. Their paths mingle and blur, once and for all. There are fixed points in this tide of people. I should not have been content to wait on one of the station benches. I should have spent time hanging around the ticket offices and newspaper stands, in the long corridor with the escalator, and also in the other corridors. People can be there all day, but you only notice them after they’ve become a predictable feature of the place. Homeless people. Buskers. Pickpockets. People who have lost their way and who will never go up to the outside world again. Perhaps she never left Châtelet all day, either.

I was observing her in the phone box. It was like the first time: she didn’t seem to have got through straightaway. She dialled the number again. She was speaking now, but the call was much shorter than the other evening. She hung up abruptly. She came out of the phone box and didn’t stop at the café. She continued along Avenue de Paris, still with the gait of a dancer, until we reached the Château de Vincennes metro. Why didn’t she get off at this stop, the end of the line? Because of the phone box and the café where she drank her customary kir before going home? And those other evenings when I hadn’t seen her? Of course: she must have got off at Château de Vincennes.

I had to speak to her, or she would end up noticing that someone was following her. I tried to think of the words. The fewest possible. I would extend my hand. ‘You used to call me Little Jewel. You must remember,’ I would say to her. We were approaching the apartment block and, as on the first evening, I couldn’t find it in me to address her. On the contrary, I let her draw further away. My legs felt heavy; I was filled with inertia. But also a sort of relief as her figure receded. That evening, she didn’t stop in the grocery store to buy cans of food. She crossed the courtyard of the apartment block, and I stayed behind the metal gate. The courtyard was lit by a single globe above the entrance to Staircase A. In that light, the coat took on its yellow hue again. She looked exhausted as she trudged, hunching slightly, towards the staircase. At that moment, the title of a picture book I used to read, when my name was Little Jewel, came back to me: The Old Circus Horse.

When she had disappeared, I went through the metal gate. On the left was a glass door with a sign stuck on it — a list of names in alphabetical order and, next to each name, the corresponding staircase. A light was on behind the glass. I knocked. In the half-open door the face of a woman appeared, a brunette, short hair, quite young. I told her that I was looking for a lady who lived there. A lady who was single and wore a yellow coat.

Instead of shutting the door, the woman frowned, as if she was trying to remember a name.

‘That must be Madame Boré. Staircase A…I’ve forgotten which floor.’

She ran her finger down the list. She pointed to a name. Boré. Staircase A. Fourth floor. I began to cross the courtyard. When I heard the concierge shutting her door, I did an about-turn and slipped out onto the street.

That evening, during the trip home on the metro, I kept thinking about the name. Boré. Yes, it was similar to the name of the man I had understood to be my mother’s brother, Jean Borand. On Thursdays, he used to take me to his garage. Was it just a coincidence? And yet my mother’s surname, as it appeared on my birth certificate, was Cardères. And O’Dauyé was the surname she had adopted as a sort of stage name. That was around the time when my own name was Little Jewel…

In my bedroom, I looked at the photos once again. I opened the diary and the address book that I kept packed away in the old biscuit tin and, in the middle of the diary, I came across a piece of paper torn out of a school exercise book — I recognised that scrap only too well. The tiny handwriting in blue ink did not belong to my mother. At the top of the page were the words: SONIA CARDÈRES. Under the name was a dash, then the following lines, which ran into the margin.

A missed opportunity. Unhappy in September. A quarrel with a blonde woman. Tendency to rely on dangerously easy solutions. What is lost will never be found. Falling for a non-Frenchman. A change in the months to come. Be careful at the end of July. A visit from a stranger. No danger, but exercise caution all the same. The journey will end well.

She had been to see a fortune teller or a palm reader. I assume she was uncertain about her future. Tendency to rely on dangerously easy solutions. All of a sudden, she had become frightened, like being on the scenic railway ride at an amusement park. It’s too late to get off. It speeds up and soon you’re wondering if the carriages will fly off the tracks. She could sense that everything was about to come tumbling down.

Unhappy in September. That was probably the summer when, out of the blue, I found myself alone in the country. The train was packed. I was wearing a label around my neck with an address written on it. What is lost will never be found. In the country, not long after, I received a postcard. It’s in the bottom of the biscuit tin. Casablanca. La Place de France. ‘Lots of love.’ Not even a signature. Large handwriting, the same as in the diary and the address book. In the past, girls of my mother’s age were taught to write in large script. Falling for a non-Frenchman—but which one? Several names that are not French feature in the address book. Be careful at the end of July. That was the month I was sent off to the country, to Fossombronne-la-Forêt. The painting by Tola Soungouroff was hanging on the wall of my bedroom so that, every morning when I woke up, my mother’s eyes were staring at me. After receiving the postcard, I never heard another thing. All that was left was that gaze in the morning, and at night when I was in bed reading, or when I was sick. After a while, it dawned on me that she was staring not at me but into space.

No danger, but exercise caution all the same. The journey will end well. Words you repeat to yourself in the dark for reassurance. The day she went to see the clairvoyant, she probably knew that she was bound to leave for Morocco. And, anyway, it was there in the cards or in the lines of her hand. A journey. She left after I did: she was the one who took me to the Gare d’Austerlitz. I remember driving there, along the Seine. The station was next to the river. Many years later, I noticed that, if I happened to be near the Gare d’Austerlitz, I experienced an odd sensation. Everything suddenly felt colder and darker.

I had no idea where the painting could possibly be. Had they left it in my old room in Fossombronne-la-Forêt? Or else, after all this time, had it turned up, as I’d imagined, in some flea market on the outskirts of Paris? She had written the details of the painter, Tola Soungouroff, in her address book. It was the first name under S. The colour of the ink was different from the other names, the writing was smaller, as if she had wanted to make an effort. I presume Tola Soungouroff was one of the first people she met in Paris. One evening during her childhood, she had arrived at the Gare d’Austerlitz: I was almost certain about that. The journey will end well. I think the fortune teller made a mistake, but perhaps she disguised some of the truth so that her customers wouldn’t be disheartened.

I would have liked to know what my mother was wearing that day at the Gare d’Austerlitz when she arrived in Paris. Not the yellow coat. And I wished I hadn’t lost the picture book called The Old Circus Horse. It was given to me in the country, at Fossombronne-la-Forêt. No, that’s wrong: I think I already had it in the apartment in Paris. And the painting was also hanging on the wall of one of the rooms in that apartment, the huge room with the three steps covered in white plush. The cover of the book featured a black horse. It was doing a lap, it looked like its last, its head bowed; it seemed exhausted, as if about to collapse. Yes, when I saw her crossing the courtyard of the apartment block, the image of the black horse came back to me. The horse was walking around the track and the harness seemed like a huge weight for it to bear. The harness was the same colour as the coat. Yellow.