Little Jewel

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IN THE BEGINNING, I was aware of a funny smell on the stairs. It came from the red carpet, which must have been decomposing. You could already see the wooden steps coming through in a few spots. So many people had climbed up and down these stairs, back when this building was a hotel…The staircase was steep and led directly from the covered entrance on the street. I knew my mother had lived in this hotel: the address was on my birth certificate. One day, when I was looking through the classifieds to find a room to rent, I was surprised to come across the address under the heading STUDIO RENTALS.

I turned up at the appointed time. A man of about fifty with a ruddy complexion was waiting for me on the pavement. He took me up to the first floor and showed me a bedroom with a little bathroom. He insisted I pay three months’ rent in cash. Fortunately, I still had enough money on me. He took me to a café, on the corner of Boulevard de Clichy, to fill in and sign the papers. He explained to me that the hotel had been closed down and that the rooms had become studios.

‘My mother lived in this hotel…’

I heard myself say the sentence slowly and was startled. What had got into me?

‘Oh, really?’ he said distractedly. ‘Your mother?’ He was of an age to have known her. I asked if he had been in charge of the hotel in the past. No. He had bought it last year with some business partners and they had done various renovations.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t such a glamorous hotel.’

On my first night there, I imagined that perhaps my mother had lived in the room I was in. Things had suddenly fallen into place on the evening I was looking for a room to rent, when I saw the address in the newspaper: 11 Rue Coustou. For a little while before then, I would open the old biscuit tin, flick through the diary and address book, look at the photos…But I confess that I had never previously opened the tin, or else, if I did open it, I never had the urge to focus on what seemed to be nothing more than old scraps of paper. Ever since I was a child, I’d kept this tin with me; like Tola Soungouroff’s painting, it had always been part of the furniture and accompanied me everywhere. I even stored some cheap jewellery in there, the sort of trinkets you keep for ages and don’t pay much attention to. And, if you happen to lose them, you realise that you were never aware of certain details about them. So I didn’t remember what the frame of Soungouroff’s painting looked like. And if I had lost the biscuit tin, I would have forgotten that on the lid there was a torn sticker on which you could still read: LEFÈVRE-UTILE. One has to beware of so-called witnesses.

I had come back to the beginning, since that address was on my birth certificate as my mother’s place of residence. And I had probably lived there, too, early in my life. One evening, when Moreau-Badmaev was walking me home, I told him my story and he said, ‘So, you’ve found your old family home.’

And we both burst out laughing. The entrance is concealed by honeysuckle; the gate has stayed shut for so long that weeds have grown on the other side and you can only open it a bit to squeeze through. In the depths of the plain, under the light of the moon, was the castle of our childhood. With a candelabra in our hand, we walk through the blue living room and the picture gallery lined with portraits of our ancestors. Nothing has changed; everything has stayed in exactly the same spot, under a layer of dust. We climb up the main staircase. At the end of the corridor, we finally arrive at the children’s bedroom.

Moreau-Badmaev was having a laugh, describing my return to the family estate as it might have happened in another life. But the window of my bedroom looked out onto Rue Puget, a short street, much narrower than Rue Coustou and making a sort of triangle with it. My bedroom was at the apex of the triangle. There were no shutters or curtains. At night, the illuminated sign on the garage further down Rue Coustou flashed red and green on the wall above my bed. It didn’t worry me. On the contrary, I found it comforting. Someone was watching over me. Perhaps the red and green flashes dated back a long time, to when my mother and I were in the bedroom, lying on the same bed, trying to get to sleep, as I was now. The lights went on and off, on and off, and I found it soothing as I slipped off to sleep. Why had I rented this room, when I could have chosen one in another neighbourhood? But it wouldn’t have had red and green flashes, as regular as heartbeats, which I ended up telling myself were the only traces left of the past.