Little Jewel

~ ~ ~

ON THE FOLLOWING Sunday — or the Sunday after that — I went back to Vincennes. I wanted to go earlier than I had the other times, before nightfall. This time I got out at the end of the line, at Château de Vincennes. It was sunny that autumn Sunday and, once again, as I wandered past the château and turned into Rue du Quartier-de-Cavalerie, I felt as if I was in a provincial town. I was the only person out walking, and at the top of the street, behind a wall, I heard the clopping of horses’ hooves.

I slipped into a daydream about what might have been: after many years away, I had just got off the train at a little station in my ‘home country’. I can’t remember which book it was where I first came across the expression ‘home country’. Those two words must have connected with something that affected me deeply or else stirred up a memory. After all, in my childhood, I had also known a country railway station, where I used to arrive from Paris, wearing that label around my neck, with my name written on it.

As soon as I caught sight of the apartment block at the end of the street, my dream vanished. There was no such thing as my home country, only an outlying suburb where no one was waiting for me.

I went through the gate and knocked on the concierge’s lodge. She poked her head through the half-open door. She seemed to recognise me, even though we had only spoken once before. She was wearing a pink woollen dressing-gown.

‘I wanted to ask you about Madame…Boré.’

I faltered over the name and feared she might not know who I was talking about. But this time she didn’t need to consult the list of tenants stuck on the door.

‘The woman on the fourth floor of A?’

‘Yes.’

I’d made a point of remembering which floor. Since I’d discovered that it was the fourth, I often imagined her moving more and more slowly as she climbed the steps. One night, I even dreamed that she fell down the stairwell. When I woke up, I couldn’t tell if it was suicide or an accident. Or perhaps I had pushed her.

‘You’ve been here before — the other day, wasn’t it…’

‘Yes.’

She smiled at me. I looked like someone she could trust.

‘You know she’s up to her old tricks again…’ Her tone was indifferent, as if nothing about the woman on the fourth floor of A could surprise her. ‘Are you family?’

I was afraid to say yes. And bring down the ancient curse on myself, the stigma from back then.

‘No. Not at all.’

In the nick of time, I had avoided being sucked into the slime.

‘I know some of her family,’ I said. ‘They sent me to find out how she is…’

‘What do you want me to tell you? Nothing has changed, you know.’ She shrugged. ‘She won’t even talk to me anymore. Or else she’ll have a go at me for no reason.’

I was not surprised by anything she said. Now, even after all these years, a vision rose before me, as if it had emerged from the deep: the grimacing face, the dilated eyes, and something like spittle on those lips. And the screeching voice, and the stream of abuse. Anyone who didn’t know her would not have been able to imagine the abrupt transformation of such a beautiful face. I could feel myself in the grip of fear again.

‘Have you come to visit her?’

‘No.’

‘You need to tell her family that she isn’t paying her rent anymore.’

Those words, and perhaps also the neighbourhood where I went to pick up the little girl every afternoon, made me think of the apartment near the Bois de Boulogne which, in spite of myself, I still remembered: the large room with three steps covered in plush; the painting by Tola Soungouroff; my bedroom, even more empty than the little girl’s. How did she pay the rent back then?

‘It will be tricky to kick her out. And, anyway, she’s known around the neighbourhood. They’ve even given her a nickname…’

‘What is it?’ I was genuinely curious. Was it the same one she had twenty years ago?

‘They call her Death Cheater.’

She said it kindly, as if it were a term of affection.

‘Sometimes we think she’s going to give up the ghost and then the next day she’s cheerful and charming, or else she does something really nasty.’

For me, the nickname had another meaning. I’d been under the impression that she’d died in Morocco and now I was discovering that she’d been resuscitated somewhere in the suburbs of Paris.

‘Has she lived here long?’ I asked.

‘Oh, yes! She was here well before me. It must be more than six years now.’

So, she was living in this building while I was still at Fossombronne-la-Forêt. I recalled an overgrown vacant block that we called Kraut’s Field, not far from the church. On Thursday afternoons, when there was no school, we used to explore the jungle there, or play hide-and-seek. The remains of a helmet and a mouldy pea coat had been found on the block — no doubt left by a soldier at the end of the war — and we were always afraid of coming across his skeleton. I didn’t know what Kraut meant. Frédérique, the woman who knew my mother, and who had taken me into her home, wasn’t there the day I asked her friend, the brunette with the boxer’s face, what it meant. Perhaps she thought I was frightened by the word and wanted to reassure me. She smiled and told me that it was a name people used for the Germans, but that it wasn’t really a rude word. ‘And your mother was called the Kraut…It was a joke.’

Frédérique wasn’t very happy that the brunette had told me this, but she didn’t elaborate. She was my mother’s friend — they must have known each other when my mother was ‘a dancer’. Frédérique Chatillon was her full name. Her women friends were always at the house in Fossombronne-la-Forêt, even when she wasn’t there: Rose-Marie, Jeannette, Madeleine-Louis, others whose names I’ve forgotten, and the brunette who had also known my mother when she was ‘a dancer’ and who didn’t like her.

‘Does she live alone?’ I asked the concierge.

‘For a long time, there was a man who used to visit her. He worked with horses somewhere around here. He looked North African.’

‘Doesn’t he come anymore?’

‘Not for a while.’

Because of all my questions, she was starting to look at me somewhat suspiciously. I was tempted to tell her everything. My mother went to Paris when she was young. She was a dancer. They called her the Kraut. They called me Little Jewel. It was too long and complicated to explain right there, outside, in the courtyard of this apartment block.

‘The problem is that she owes me two hundred francs…’

I always carried my money on me, in a little canvas pouch tied around my waist. I fossicked in the pouch. I still had a hundred-franc note, a fifty-franc note and some change. I held out the two notes and told her I would come back with the rest.

‘Thank you very much.’

She slipped them into one of the pockets of her dressing-gown. Her wariness had vanished all of a sudden. I could have asked her any old question about Death Cheater.

‘About the rent…I’ll let you know when you come back.’

I hadn’t really planned on coming back. What more would I learn? And what was the point?

‘They’ve cut off her electricity a few times. And each time, I’m glad for her sake, because she uses an electric blanket — it’s dangerous.’

I imagined her plugging the cord of her electric blanket into a socket. She’d always liked those sorts of devices, which seem so cutting edge for a while and then become obsolete, or else end up as everyday items. I remembered that, back in more prosperous times for her, when we lived in the big apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, someone brought her a box covered in green leather, which allowed us to listen to the radio. Later, I worked out that it must have been one of the first transistor radios.

‘You should warn her not to use an electric blanket.’

Well, sorry, it was not as simple as that. Had she ever, in her whole life, heeded good advice? And, anyway, it was too late.

‘You don’t happen to know the name of the man who came to visit her?’

The concierge had kept a letter from him, which he sent three months ago with payment for the rent. Through the half-open door, I saw her rummaging among papers in a big box.

‘I can’t find it…Anyhow, I don’t think that man will come by again.’

He was probably the one she was calling in the evenings from the phone box. After twelve years, by some miracle, there was still someone she could count on. But she had ended up scaring him away, too. Already, back when I was called Little Jewel, she could spend whole days in her room, cut off from the world, seeing no one, not even me, and, after a while, I had no idea whether she was still there, or if she had left me alone in that huge apartment.

‘What’s her place like?’ I asked.

‘Two small rooms and a kitchen with a shower.’

Her mattress was more than likely on the floor, next to the electricity socket. That way, it would be easier to turn on the electric blanket.

‘You should go up and see her. It would be a surprise for her to have a visitor.’

If we found ourselves face to face, she wouldn’t even know who I was. She had forgotten Little Jewel and all the hopes she had invested in me when she gave me that name. Unfortunately for her, I had not become a famous artist.

‘Can you do me a favour?’ The concierge rummaged in the big box again and held out an envelope. ‘It’s a reminder about her bills. I don’t dare give it to her in person, or she’ll swear at me again.’

I took the envelope and crossed the courtyard. As I stepped onto the entrance porch of Staircase A, I felt something pressing down inside my chest; I could scarcely breathe. It was one of those staircases with cement steps and a metal handrail, like in schools or hospitals. On each landing, bright, almost white light shone through a big window. I stopped on the first landing. There was a door on each side, and one in the middle, all made of the same dark wood, with the names of the tenants marked on them. I tried to get my breath back, but the feeling of constriction was getting worse and I was frightened I was going to suffocate. To calm myself down, I imagined what the name on her door would be. Her real one or her stage name? Or just: THE KRAUT or DEATH CHEATER. In the days when I was called Little Jewel and I would come home alone to our building near the Bois de Boulogne, I used to stay back in the lift for a long time. It had a black metal gate, and to enter you had to push two glass swing doors. Inside, there was a red velvet bench, glass panels on each side, and a neon globe in the ceiling. It was like a bedroom. My clearest memories are of the lift.

On the second landing, I felt the pressure stifling me again. So I tried to recall the other staircase, with its thick red carpet and copper banisters: on each floor there was only one large door with two panels. White.

I was seized by vertigo. I stepped away as far as I could from the handrail and flattened myself against the wall. But I was determined to climb the whole way. In the back of my mind was the voice of Madame Valadier — Véra — telling me about the little girl: ‘I often send her round the block at night…She wants to practise so she’s not frightened anymore.’ Well, it was the same for me. I would continue on up, I would go right to Death Cheater’s door, and I would ring the buzzer in bursts until she opened. And, just as the door opened, I would compose myself and say coolly, ‘You shouldn’t use an electric blanket. It’s a really stupid thing to do.’ And I’d watch dispassionately as her face grew pale and distorted with anger. I remembered that she was not keen on people talking to her about mundane details. But that was back when we were in the big apartment, when she wanted to remain mysterious.

I had reached the fourth floor. There were three doors there, too, but the dirty beige paintwork on the doors and walls was flaking off. A light bulb hung from the ceiling. A piece of graph paper was sticky-taped to the left-hand door. In black ink, in messy handwriting, was the word BORÉ.

Rather than climbing a staircase, the impression I had was of having descended into a well. It had taken twelve years for the white door with two panels to become this old flaking door, in the weak light of the bulb, and for the little gold plaque, engraved with the name COMTESSE SONIA O’DAUYÉ, to become nothing more than a scrap of paper from a schoolbook with that unprepossessing name scrawled across it: BORÉ.

I stood in front of the door, without ringing the buzzer. When I used to come home alone to the big apartment near the Bois de Boulogne and ring the buzzer, often no one answered. So I’d go down the staircase and telephone from a café not far along the avenue. The bar owner was kind to me, as were the customers. They seemed to know who I was. They must have found out. One day, one of them said, ‘It’s the little girl from 129.’ I didn’t have any money and they didn’t make me pay for the call. I went into the booth. The phone was too high for me and I had to stand on tiptoes to dial the number: PASSY 15 28. But no one answered at the residence of Comtesse Sonia O’Dauyé.

For a second, I was tempted to ring. I was almost certain she would come to the door. First of all, the apartment was too small for the noise of the buzzer to fade away as it had in the succession of rooms at PASSY 15 28. And also her visitors were so few that she would be on the lookout for any break in her monotonous solitude. Or was she still hoping for a visit from that man who hadn’t come for a while — the one who looked North African…But perhaps her periodic bouts of antisocial behaviour — when she’d lock herself in her room or disappear for several days — had got worse after twelve years.

I placed the envelope on the doormat. Then I scuttled down the stairs. At each landing, I felt lighter, as if I had dodged danger. In the courtyard, I was surprised to be able to breathe again. What a relief to be able to walk on firm ground, the security of the pavement…Just now, in front of that door, it would only have been a matter of a gesture, a step, and I would have been sucked down into the slime.

I had enough change left to take the metro. In the carriage, I dropped onto a seat. After the euphoria of fleeing the apartment block, I was now overwhelmed with exhaustion and despair. As much as I told myself that this woman they called Death Cheater no longer had anything at all to do with me, and wouldn’t even recognise me if we happened to run into each other, I still couldn’t banish my unease. I didn’t get off at Nation, where I should have changed lines, but I was having trouble breathing again, so I left the metro and went up for some fresh air.

I was in front of the Gare de Lyon. It was already dark and the hands on the giant clock showed five o’clock. I would have liked to jump on a train and arrive very early the next morning in the Midi. It wasn’t enough to have left the apartment block without ringing the buzzer on her door. I had to get out of Paris as soon as possible. Unfortunately, I had no more money for a train ticket. I’d given the concierge just about everything in my pouch. What possessed me to pay Death Cheater’s debts? But I did remember that in the big apartment near the Bois de Boulogne I was the only one she’d call on when she didn’t feel well. After disappearing for several days, she would turn up again with her face all puffy, a crazed look in her eyes. Always at the same time of day, five in the afternoon. And always in the same place, in the living room, on the three steps covered in white plush, which made a sort of dais where she had arranged cushions. She would be lying on the cushions, her face hidden in her hands. And when she heard me coming, she always said the same thing, ‘Massage my ankles.’ Later, at Fossombronne-la-Forêt, I used to wake up with a start. In my dreams I heard her hoarse voice telling me, ‘Massage my ankles.’ And, for a few seconds, I thought I was still in the big apartment. It was all going to start happening again.

I didn’t feel brave enough to go back down into the metro. I decided to walk home. But I headed off aimlessly, caught up in my own thoughts. I soon realised that I was going round and round the same few connecting streets, all with huge apartment blocks, just beyond the station. Then, at the end of one of those streets, I came out on Boulevard Diderot, from where you can see the passengers coming and going around the station, as well as the illuminated signs: Café Européen.

And Hotel Terminus. I told myself that I should have rented a room in that neighbourhood. Life is completely different when you live near a railway station. It feels as if you’re just passing through. Everything is temporary. One day or another, you’ll hop on a train. In those neighbourhoods, the future is at your doorstep. All the same, the giant clock face brought back something buried in my past. I think I learned how to tell the time from that clock, back when I was called Little Jewel. I’d already started taking the metro then. It was a direct line from Porte Maillot to Gare de Lyon. I counted the fourteen stations as they passed, so I wouldn’t make a mistake. And I would get off at Gare de Lyon, just as I had done earlier today. When I arrived at the top of the steps, I used to check the giant clock face to see that I wasn’t late. He would wait for me at the entrance to the metro. Or sometimes at an outside table at the Café Européen. He was my uncle, my mother’s brother, or half-brother. At least that’s how she introduced him to me. And I often heard her say on the phone, ‘My brother will take care of that…I’ll send my brother over to you…’ Sometimes he looked after me while my mother was away. He would sleep over at the apartment, and take me to school in the morning. Soon I went by myself, then less and less often…On Thursdays and Sundays, I took the metro to the Gare de Lyon to meet him. In the beginning, he would come and pick me up from the apartment in the morning. My mother had told him that he didn’t need to go out of his way for me and that I could catch the metro by myself…I don’t think he dared defy her wishes, but sometimes, without telling her, he’d wait for me downstairs, outside the apartment block.

It was the first time in ages that I’d walked in that neighbourhood. Was he still living around here? We used to head away from the Gare de Lyon, then turn left into one of the little streets I’d been wandering earlier. At the end of the street, we’d arrive at a tree-lined avenue, where we went into a garage that was always empty. We climbed a staircase to an apartment. We crossed a lobby that opened into a room, in the middle of which was a dining-room table. He didn’t have the same last name as my mother, even though they were — apparently — brother and sister. His name was Jean Borand. There was a photo of him in the biscuit tin and I had recognised him immediately. His name was written in pencil on the back of the photo.

I still felt a constriction in my chest. I would much rather have been thinking about something else. And yet Jean Borand had been kind to me. It wasn’t a bad memory, not like the memories of my mother. By now, I had reached Avenue Daumesnil, which reminded me of the street where the garage had been. I walked along, looking from side to side, searching for it. I would ask to speak to ‘Monsieur Jean Borand’. From my memory of him, I was certain he would be happy to see me, just like he used to be. Perhaps he wouldn’t recognise me? Although he would surely remember me. Was he really my uncle? In any case, he was the only one who would be able to answer my questions. Unfortunately, even though I looked hard at all the buildings on both sides of the street, I didn’t recognise anything. There was no garage, not a single landmark. One evening, in the same neighbourhood, near the Gare de Lyon, he had taken me to the cinema. It was my first time. The theatre seemed immense and was showing The Crossroad of the Archers, the film in which, a while before, I’d had a small role alongside my mother. I hadn’t recognised myself on the screen and, when I’d heard my voice, I’d even wondered if Little Jewel was some other girl, not me.

Yes, I know, it was wrong for me to be thinking about all that, even about Jean Borand. He didn’t have anything to do with it, but he, too, was part of that period of my life. That Sunday, I should never have climbed the stairs to the door of the woman who used to be called the Kraut and who is now called Death Cheater. For the moment, I was still walking aimlessly, hoping soon to find Place de la Bastille, where I would take the metro. I tried to cheer myself up: later, after I’d returned to my room, I would go out and telephone Moreau-Badmaev. He’d definitely be home on a Sunday night. I’d suggest that we have dinner together in a café in Place Blanche. I’d tell him everything: about my mother, about Jean Borand, about the apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, and about the girl they used to call Little Jewel. I was still the same person, as if Little Jewel had been preserved, intact, inside a glacier. The same terrifying panic came over me in the street and woke me with a start at five in the morning. And yet I had also experienced long periods of calm, when I ended up forgetting it all. But now that my mother was apparently alive, I no longer knew which path to take.

On a blue street sign I read: AVENUE LEDRU-ROLLIN. It intersected with another street, at the end of which, once again, I caught sight of the massive Gare de Lyon and the illuminated clock face. I’d gone round in circles and come back to where I’d started. The station was a magnet and I was drawn to it; it was a sign of my destiny. I had to get on a train straightaway; I had to make a break. The words had suddenly come into my head and I couldn’t get rid of them. They gave me a bit more courage. Yes, the time had come to make a break. But instead of heading for the station, I kept following Avenue Ledru-Rollin. Before making a break, I had to see this through to the end, without really knowing what to the end meant.

There was not another soul around, which was normal for a Sunday night, but the further I walked, the darker the avenue became, as if that evening I had put on sunglasses. Perhaps my eyesight was failing? Further down, on the left-hand side, was the neon sign of a chemist. I didn’t take my eyes off it, in case I lost it in the darkness. As long as the green light kept shining, I would be able to find my way. I hoped it would stay lit until I got there. A late-night chemist, that very Sunday, on Avenue Ledru-Rollin. It was so dark that I’d lost all notion of time and thought it was the middle of the night. Behind the shop window, a brunette was sitting at the counter. She wore a white coat and a severe bun, which seemed incompatible with her sweet face. She was sorting a pile of papers and, from time to time, she made notes using a Bic pen with a green lid. Eventually, she would have to notice me staring at her, but I couldn’t help myself. Her face was so different from Death Cheater’s, the face I had seen in the metro and imagined behind the door on the fourth floor. Anger would never deform the face before me, nor would that mouth ever be contorted or launch a volley of abuse…There was a calmness and grace about her in the soothing glow of the light, the same warm glow I’d experienced in the evenings at Frossombronne-la-Forêt…Had I really experienced that same glow? I pushed open the glass door. I heard the faint tinkling of a bell. She raised her head. I walked towards her, but I didn’t know what to say.

‘Do you feel ill?’

I couldn’t utter a word. And the heaviness in my chest was still suffocating me. She came over to me.

‘You’re very pale…’ She took my hand. I must have given her a fright. And yet her hand felt firm in mine. ‘Sit down over here.’

She took me behind the counter, to a room with an old leather armchair. She sat me in the armchair and placed her hand on my forehead.

‘You don’t have a fever…But your hands are like ice… What’s the matter?’

For years I had never said a word to anyone. I had kept it all to myself.

‘It would be too complicated to explain,’ I replied.

‘Why? Nothing is that complicated.’

I burst into tears, which I hadn’t done since the dog had died, at least twelve years or so earlier.

‘Have you had a shock recently?’ she asked, lowering her voice.

‘I’ve seen someone I thought was dead.’

‘Someone very close to you?’

‘It’s not at all important,’ I assured her, trying to smile. ‘I’m just tired.’

She stood up. I could hear her, back in the shop, opening and shutting a drawer. I was still sitting in the armchair and didn’t feel any urge to move.

She came back into the room. She had taken off her white coat to reveal a dark-grey skirt and jumper. She handed me a glass of water, at the bottom of which a red tablet was dissolving in bubbles. She sat next to me, on the arm of the chair.

‘Wait until it’s properly dissolved.’

I couldn’t take my eyes off the fizzing red water. It was phosphorescent.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Something good for you.’

She’d taken my hand in hers again.

‘Are your hands still as cold?’

And the way she said ‘cold’, emphasising the word, suddenly reminded me of the title of a book that Frédérique used to read to me at night, in Frossombronne, when I was in my bed: The Children of the Cold.

I downed the drink in one gulp. It tasted bitter. But in my childhood I’d had to swallow pills that were far more bitter.

She went to get a stool from the shop and placed it in front of me so I could rest my legs.

‘Try to relax. You don’t seem very good at taking it easy.’

She helped me take off my raincoat. Then she unzipped my boots and gently removed them. She came and sat on the arm of the chair again and took my pulse. At the touch of her hand, clasped round my wrist, I immediately felt safe. I could have dropped off to sleep, and that prospect filled me with the same sense of well-being that I experienced when the nuns gave me ether to inhale, and I fell asleep. That was just before I went to live with my mother in the big apartment near the Bois de Boulogne. I was a boarder in a school somewhere and I have no idea why I was waiting in the street that day. No one had come to collect me, so I decided to cross the street, and I was knocked down by a truck. I wasn’t badly hurt, only my ankle. They made me lie down in the truck, under the tarpaulin, and drove me to a nearby house. I ended up on a bed, nuns all around, one of them leaning over me. She was wearing a white veil and she gave me inhale ether.

‘Do you live in the neighbourhood?’

I told her I lived near Place de Clichy and that I was about to go home on the metro when I’d felt sick. I was on the point of telling her about my visit to the Death Cheater’s apartment block in Vincennes but, for her to understand properly, I would have had to go back a long way, perhaps to that afternoon when I was waiting outside the school gate — I’d love to remember exactly where that school was. It wasn’t long before everyone had gone home, the pavement was empty, the school gate shut. I was still waiting; no one had come to collect me. Thanks to the ether, I couldn’t feel the pain in my ankle anymore, and I drifted off to sleep. A year or two later, in one of the bathrooms in the apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, I came across a bottle of ether. I was mesmerised by the midnight-blue colour of the bottle. Every time my mother had one of her episodes, when she didn’t want to see anyone and asked me to bring her meals to her room on a tray or to massage her ankles, I took a whiff from the bottle so I felt brave enough to go to her. It was all too much to explain now. I just wanted to lie there, without speaking, my legs up on the stool.

‘Do you feel a bit better?’

I had never met anyone who was so gentle and assured. I had to tell her everything. Did my mother really die in Morocco? The more I went through the biscuit tin, the more doubts crept into my mind. It was the photos that made me uneasy. And especially the one that my mother wanted taken of me in the studio near the Champs-Élysées. She asked the photographer who had just taken a series of shots of her in various poses. I remembered that afternoon well. I was there from the beginning of the session. And the detail in the photos reminded me of the particular accessories that had, I would go so far as to say, branded me. The loose-fitting tulle dress that my mother wore belted at the waist; the tight-fitting velvet bodice; and the veil that made her look, under those bright, white camera lights, like a fake fairy. And me, in my dress: I was a fake child prodigy, a poor little circus animal. A toy poodle. Years later, looking at those photos, I finally understood that she was so keen to push me onto the dance floor because then she could make a fresh start herself. She had failed, but it was up to me to become a star. Was she really dead? The same old threat was still hanging over my head. But now I had the chance to talk it all through with someone. I didn’t even need to say anything. I would show her the photos.

I got up from the armchair. Now was the moment to say something, but I had no idea where to begin.

‘Are you sure you’re steady on your feet?’

So attentive, her voice so calm. We had left the little room and were back in the shop.

‘You should see a doctor. Perhaps you’re anaemic.’ She looked me in the eye, and smiled. ‘The doctor will prescribe vitamin B injections for you. I’m not giving them to you right now…Come back and see me.’

I stood in front of her. I was trying to delay the moment when I’d walk out of the chemist and find myself alone again.

‘How are you getting home?’

‘On the metro.’

At that time of evening there were plenty of people in the metro. They were on their way home after a movie or a stroll down the Grands Boulevards. I no longer felt up to the metro trip back to my room. This time I was frightened of getting lost for good. And then there was the other problem: if I had to change trains at Châtelet, I did not want to risk coming across that yellow coat again. Everything was going to happen all over again, in the same places, at the same times, until the end. I was trapped in the same old chain of events.

‘I’ll come with you.’

She saved my life; it was a close call.

She turned off the lights in the chemist and locked the door. The neon sign stayed on. We walked side by side, something I was so unaccustomed to that I could scarcely believe it. I was terrified that, at any moment, I’d wake up in my room. Her hands were in the pockets of her fur coat. I was too scared to take her arm. She was taller than I was.

‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.

And she took my arm.

We had reached the intersection that I had crossed earlier and we were now going down the street at the end of which I could see the Gare de Lyon and the clock.

‘I think you’re really nice and that I’m wasting your time.’

She turned towards me. The collar of her fur coat brushed her cheek.

‘Of course not. You’re not wasting my time at all.’ She paused for a second. ‘I was wondering if your parents are still alive.’

I told her that I still had a mother, who lived in the suburbs.

‘And your father?’

My father? He must have been somewhere in the suburbs, too, or in central Paris, or somewhere far away in the big wide world. Or else he died a long time ago.

‘I’m not sure about my father’s identity.’

I kept my tone casual, as I was worried about making her uneasy. And I wasn’t used to confiding in people.

She remained silent. I had shocked her with all that sadness and gloom. I tried to think of something more cheerful, a brighter note.

‘But fortunately I was brought up by an uncle who was kind to me.’

It wasn’t really a lie. For two or three years, Jean Borand had looked after me every Thursday. Once he had taken me to the Trône fair, not far from his place. Was he my uncle? Perhaps he was my father, after all? When we were living in the apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, my mother used to cover her tracks and embellish the truth. She said to me one day that she ‘didn’t like vulgar things’; I had no idea what she was referring to. Back when we were living in the big apartment, her name wasn’t Suzanne Cardères anymore. She was the Comtesse Sonia O’Dauyé.

‘I don’t want to bore you with my family stories.’

She still had her arm in mine. We had arrived at the Gare de Lyon, near the metro station. So it was all over now. She would leave me at the top of the stairs.

‘I’ll take you home in a taxi.’

She led me over to the station. I was so surprised I couldn’t bring myself to thank her. There was a line of taxis along the street. Next thing, the taxi driver was waiting for directions. I managed to say, ‘Place Blanche.’

The pharmacist asked if I had been living in the neighbourhood for long. No, just a few months. A room in a place on a little street. It used to be a hotel. The rent wasn’t much. Besides, I’d found a job. The taxi drove along the river and the empty streets.

‘But you’ve got friends, haven’t you?’

At Trois Quartiers, one of my co-workers, Muriel, had introduced me to a small group of people she went out with on Saturday nights. For a little while, I’d been part of the gang. They would go out to dinner and then on to a nightclub. Sales girls, fellows who were starting off at the stock exchange or in jewellery shops or car dealerships. Department managers. One of them seemed more interesting than the others and I went out with him. He used to invite me to dinner and to Studio 28, a cinema in Montmartre, to watch old American movies. One night, after the movie, he took me to a hotel near Châtelet, and I let him have his way. I have only a vague memory of all those people and all those evenings out. None of it mattered at all to me. I couldn’t even remember his first name. His surname was all I’d retained: Wurlitzer.

‘I don’t have many friends anymore,’ I said.

‘You mustn’t be by yourself all the time like that… Otherwise you won’t be able to keep fighting your demons.’

She turned and looked at me with a slightly mischievous smile. I couldn’t bring myself to ask her how old she was. Perhaps ten or fifteen years older than I was, the same age as my mother at the time of the big apartment and the two photos, of her and of me. All the same, what an odd thing to do, to go and die in Morocco. ‘She wasn’t a nasty woman,’ Frédérique told me one night when we were talking about my mother. ‘She was just unlucky.’ She had come to Paris when she was very young, to learn classical ballet at the Paris Opera Ballet School. It was all she wanted to do. Then she’d had an accident ‘with her ankles’ and had to stop ballet. At twenty, she was dancing, but as a chorus girl in obscure cabaret shows, at Ferrari, Préludes, the Moulin Rouge, all those names I’d heard, during their conversations, from the brunette who didn’t like my mother and who, like her, had worked in those clubs. ‘You see,’ Frédérique said, ‘because of her ankles, she was like a wounded racehorse on the way to the abattoir.’

The pharmacist leaned over and said, ‘Try to cheer up. Shut your eyes and think about pleasant things.’ We had reached Rue de Rivoli, before the Louvre, and the taxi was stopped at a red light, even though there were no pedestrians and no other cars. To the right was the illuminated sign of a jazz club, hidden among the dark apartment blocks. Because the bulbs in some of the letters had burned out, you couldn’t read the name of the club anymore. I had ended up there one Sunday night, with the others, in a basement where an old orchestra was playing. If we hadn’t gone there that night, I guess they would have played to an empty house. Around midnight, I left the club with Wurlitzer, and that was, I believe, the moment when I became aware of just how lonely I was. Rue de Rivoli was empty, a freezing January night…He had suggested that we go to a hotel. I knew the hotel well, with its steep staircase and musty smell. I thought it was the sort of hotel where my mother must have ended up at the same age as me, on the same Sunday nights, when she was called Suzanne Cardères. And I didn’t see why everything had to start over again. So I fled. I ran off down Rue de Rivoli under the arcades.

I asked the taxi driver to stop on the corner of Boulevard de Clichy. It was time to say goodbye. ‘Thank you,’ I said to the pharmacist, ‘for coming with me.’

I was trying to think of some way I could get her to stay with me. Perhaps it wasn’t that late after all. We could have dinner together in the café on Place Blanche.

But she was the one who took the lead. ‘I’d really like to see where you live.’

We got out of the taxi and, just as we set off, I felt an odd sensation of lightness. It was the first time I’d walked along that street with someone. Usually, when I came home by myself at night, I would get to the corner of Rue Coustou and suddenly feel like I was leaving the present and sliding into a zone where time had stopped. And I was terrified of never being able to cross back, to return to Place Blanche, where life was being lived. I thought I would remain forever a prisoner of that little street and that room, like Sleeping Beauty. But tonight I had someone with me, and around us was nothing more than a harmless stage set cut out of cardboard. We were walking along the pavement on the right. This time I had taken her arm. She didn’t seem at all surprised to be there. We walked the length of the big building at the bottom of the street; we passed the cabaret with the shadowy entrance hall. She looked up at the sign in black letters: ZONE OUT.

‘Have you been in there?’

I told her that I hadn’t.

‘It doesn’t look much fun.’

At that time of night, going past Zone Out, I was always frightened that I’d be dragged into the hallway or, rather, sucked in, as if the laws of gravity no longer applied in that space. Out of superstition, I often walked on the opposite side of the street. The week before, I had dreamed of going to Zone Out. I was sitting there in darkness. A spotlight came on; its cold white light lit up a small stage as well as the room where I found myself at a round table. Sitting at other tables were the silhouettes of motionless men and women who I knew were no longer alive. I woke up with a start. I think I’d been screaming.

We reached number 11 Rue Coustou.

‘You’ll see…It’s quite shabby. And I’m worried that I didn’t tidy up.’

‘That doesn’t matter at all.’

I was being looked after. I no longer felt ashamed or frightened of anything. I went ahead of her on the stairs and along the corridor, but she didn’t seem to mind. She followed, nonchalant, as if she knew the way.

I opened the door and switched on the lamp. As luck would have it, I’d made the bed and put my clothes in the wardrobe. There was just my coat hanging from the handle on the window.

She went over to the window. In her soothing voice, she asked, ‘It’s not too noisy outside?’

‘No, not at all.’

Down below was Rue Puget, a short street that I often took to cut through to Place Blanche. There was a bar on the corner, Le Canter, with yellow wood panelling on the façade. I’d gone there one evening to buy cigarettes. Two dark-haired men were drinking at the bar with a woman. Other men were playing cards in grim silence at a table at the back. I was told that I had to have a drink if I wanted to buy a packet of cigarettes and one of the dark-haired fellows ordered me a whisky, neat, which I downed in one go so I could be done with it. He asked me if I ‘lived with my parents’. There really was quite a strange vibe in that place.

She was glued to the window, staring out. I said that it wasn’t such a great view. She made a remark about there not being any shutters or curtains. Did I find it difficult to sleep? I assured her that I didn’t need curtains. The only thing that would have been really useful was an armchair or even just a chair. But until that evening I had never had any guests.

She sat on the edge of the bed. She wanted to know if I felt better. Yes, I honestly felt much better than earlier, when I had first seen the neon sign of the chemist. Without that landmark, I don’t know what would have happened to me.

I wanted to ask her to have dinner with me in the café in Place Blanche. But I didn’t have enough money. She was going to leave and I would be alone again in this room. That prospect now seemed even worse than when I was expecting her to let me out of the taxi by myself.

‘And how is your job going?’

Perhaps I was deluding myself, but she seemed genuinely concerned about me.

‘I work with a friend,’ I said. ‘We translate broadcasts made by foreign radio stations.’

What would Moreau-Badmaev have made of that lie? But I didn’t want to tell her about the Taylor Agency, about Véra Valadier, or her husband, or the little girl. It all seemed too frightening to think about.

‘Do you know many foreign languages?’

And I could see in her eyes that I had gained a measure of respect. I wished it weren’t a lie.

‘It’s my friend who knows most of them…I’m still a student at the School of Oriental Languages.’

Student. The word had always impressed me, while actually being one seemed somehow out of my reach. I don’t think the Kraut had even graduated from primary school. She made spelling mistakes, but they weren’t so obvious because she had such big handwriting. As for me, I’d left school at fourteen.

‘So, you’re a student?’

She seemed relieved for me. I wanted to put her mind at rest even more, so I added, ‘It was my uncle who advised me to enrol at the School of Oriental Languages. He’s a teacher himself.’

And I conjured up an apartment in the university neighbourhood, which I barely knew and which, in my mind, was somewhere in the vicinity of the Pantheon. And there was my uncle, at his desk, by the light of a reading lamp, hunched over an old book.

‘What does he teach?’ She smiled at me. Had she really been taken in by my lie?

‘Philosophy.’

I thought of the man I used to meet every Thursday, when we were living in the big apartment, my uncle — that’s what we called him — the so-called Jean Borand. We used to enjoy listening to the echo of our voices in the old empty garage. He was young and had a Parisian accent. He’d taken me to see The Crossroad of the Archers. He’d also taken me to the Trône fair, not far from the garage. He always wore a tie pin and, on his right wrist, a chain bracelet, which he said was a present from my mother. He called her Suzanne. He would never have understood why I claimed he was a philosophy teacher. Why lie? Especially to this woman who appeared to be so favourably disposed to me.

‘I’m going to let you sleep now…’

‘Couldn’t you stay the night with me?’

It was as if someone else was speaking. I was terribly surprised at having been so bold. I was ashamed.

She didn’t bat an eyelid. ‘Are you frightened of being here alone?’

She was still sitting on the edge of the bed, next to me, looking me in the eye, and her gaze, unlike my mother’s in the painting by Tola Soungouroff, was gentle.

‘I’ll stay if that would be a comfort to you.’

And, with weary, unaffected ease, she took off her shoes. It was as if she did the same thing every evening, at the same time, in this same room. She lay back, without taking off her fur coat. I remained on the edge of the bed, motionless.

‘You should lie down, too. You need some sleep.’

I lay down next to her. I didn’t know what to say or, rather, I was frightened that the slightest word would sound false, and that she’d change her mind, get up and leave. She was silent, too. I heard music nearby; it sounded as if it was coming from in front of the building. Someone was playing a percussion instrument. The notes rang out, clear and mournful, like background music.

‘Do you think it’s coming from Zone Out?’ she said. And she burst out laughing. Suddenly, it all dropped away: everything that terrified me, made me uneasy and led me to believe that, ever since I was a child, I could never shake off an evil curse. A musician with a thin lacquered moustache was tapping a xylophone with his drumsticks. And I envisioned the stage at Zone Out, illuminated by the cold white spotlight. A man dressed as a coach driver was cracking his whip and announcing in a muffled voice, ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, I give you Death Cheater!’

The lights faded. And suddenly, under the spotlight, the woman in the yellow coat appeared, just as I had seen her in the metro. She walked slowly towards the front of the stage. The fellow with the lacquered moustache kept banging his instrument with his drumsticks. She greeted the audience with her arms raised. But there was no audience. Just a few inert, mummified figures seated at some round tables.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The music must be coming from Zone Out.’

She asked if she could turn off the light on the bedside table, which was on her side of the bed.

The neon light from the garage shone its familiar glow on the wall above us. I started to cough. She moved over, closer to me. I rested my head on her shoulder. As soon as I felt the fur’s softness, my anxiety and dark thoughts began to recede. Little Jewel, Death Cheater, the Kraut, the yellow coat…All those pathetic props now belonged to someone else’s life. I had shed them like a costume, a harness I had been made to wear for ages and which made it difficult to breathe. I felt her lips on my forehead.

‘I don’t like you coughing like that,’ she said softly. ‘You must have caught a cold in this room.’

She was right. It would soon be winter and they hadn’t yet turned on the central heating.