Little Jewel

~ ~ ~

I GOT HOME to my room in Rue Coustou around seven in the evening, and I wasn’t up to waiting until Wednesday for the pharmacist to come back. She was out of town for a couple of days. She had given me a telephone number in case I needed to speak to her: 225 Bar-sur-Aube.

In the basement of the café in Place Blanche, I asked the cloakroom woman to dial 225 Bar-sur-Aube for me. But the second she picked up the receiver, I told her not to bother. All of a sudden, I could no longer bring myself to disturb the pharmacist. I bought a token, went into the booth, and ended up calling Moreau-Badmaev’s number. He was listening to a program on the radio, but he asked me to come over anyway. I was relieved to know that someone was happy to spend the evening with me. I was loath to take the metro to the Porte d’Orléans. I was scared of changing trains at Montparnasse-Bienvenue. The corridor was as long as the one at Châtelet, and there wasn’t a moving walkway. I had enough money to take a taxi there. Once I was in the taxi at the top of the line in front of the Moulin Rouge, I suddenly felt at ease, just as I had the other evening with the pharmacist.

The green light of the radio set was switched on, and Moreau-Badmaev was sitting against the wall, writing on a pad, while a man with a tinny voice spoke in a foreign language. This time, he said, he didn’t need to write in shorthand. The man was speaking so slowly that he had time to write out the words. Tonight, he was doing it for pleasure and not at all for work-related reasons. It was a poetry reading. The program was being transmitted from somewhere faraway, and from time to time the man’s voice was muffled by static. He stopped talking and some harp music came on. Badmaev held out a piece of paper that I have treasured to this day:

Mar egy hete csak a mamara

Gondolok mindig, meg-megallva.

Nyikorgo kosarral öleben,

Ment a padlasra, ment serénye n

En meg öszinte ember voltam,

Orditottam toporzékoltam.

Hagyja a dagadt ruhat masra

Emgem vigyen föl a padlasra

He translated the poem for me, but I’ve forgotten what it meant and what language it was written in. Then he lowered the volume on the radio, but the green light stayed on.

‘You seem a little out of sorts.’

He was looking at me so considerately that I felt at ease, just as I had with the pharmacist. I wanted to tell him everything. I described the afternoon I’d spent with the little girl in the Bois de Boulogne, Véra and Michel Valadier, going back to my room in the Rue Coustou. And the dog that was lost forever almost twelve years ago. He asked me what colour the dog was.

‘Black.’

‘And have you spoken to your mother about it since?’

‘I haven’t seen her since then. I thought she’d died in Morocco.’

I was ready to tell him about coming across the woman with the yellow coat in the metro, about the large apartment block in Vincennes, the staircase and Death Cheater’s door, where I hadn’t been bold enough to knock.

‘I had an odd childhood…’

He listened to the radio all day long, taking notes on his writing pad. So he might as well listen to me.

‘When I was seven years old, they called me Little Jewel.’

He smiled at me. He probably thought that was a delightful name for a little girl. I bet his mother gave him a nickname that she whispered in his ear before kissing him goodnight. Patoche. Pinky. Poulou.

‘It’s not what you think,’ I said. ‘It was my stage name.’

He frowned. He didn’t understand. At that time, my mother also had a stage name: Sonia O’Dauyé. After a while, she had given up using her assumed title, but the little copper plaque, which read COMTESSE SONIA O’DAUYÉ, had remained on the apartment door.

‘Your stage name?’

I wondered if I should start from the beginning and tell him everything. My mother’s arrival in Paris, the ballet school, the hotel on Rue Coustou, then the one on Rue d’Armaillé, and my own first memories: the boarding school, the truck and the ether, that period when I wasn’t yet called Little Jewel. But I had revealed my stage name to him, so it was better that I stick to when my mother and I ended up in the big apartment. It wasn’t enough for her to have lost a dog in the Bois de Boulogne. She had to have something else that she could show off like a piece of jewellery: that’s no doubt why she gave me my name.

He remained silent. Perhaps he thought that I was now diffident about continuing, or that I had lost track of my story. I didn’t dare look at him. I stared at the green light in the middle of the radio set, a soothing phosphorescent green.

‘I’ll have to show you some photos…Then you’ll understand better.’

And I tried to describe the two photos taken on the same day, the two head shots: ‘Sonia O’Dauyé and Little Jewel’, taken for a film in which my mother had been hired to perform, having never been a professional actress before. Why was she hired? And by whom? She wanted me to play the role of her daughter in this film. She was not the leading actress, but she insisted that I stay close to her. I had replaced the dog. For how long?

‘What was the name of this film?’

‘The Crossroad of the Archers.’

I replied without hesitation, but they were like words we learn off by heart in childhood — a prayer or a song recited from beginning to end without our ever really grasping the meaning.

‘Do you remember the shoot?’

I had to arrive very early in the morning. It was a sort of huge warehouse. Jean Borand had taken me there. Later, in the afternoon, when I had finished and could leave, he had driven me to the nearby Buttes-Chaumont park. It was very hot: it was summer. I had performed my part; I never had to go back to the warehouse again.

I had to lie on a bed, then sit up and say, ‘I’m scared.’ It was as simple as that. Another day, I had to keep lying on the bed and flip through a photo album. Then my mother came into the bedroom, wearing a diaphanous blue dress — the same dress she was wearing when she left the apartment on the evening after losing the dog. She sat on the bed and looked at me with big sad eyes. Then she caressed my cheek and leaned over to kiss me; I remember we had to do it several times. In everyday life, she never showed the slightest bit of affection.

He was listening closely, and wrote something on his pad. I asked him what it was.

‘The title of the film. It would be fun for you to see it again, don’t you think?’

Over the past twelve years, the idea of seeing the film again had not even occurred to me. For me, it was as if it had never existed. I had never mentioned it to anyone.

‘Do you think it would be possible to see it?’

‘I’ve got a friend who works at the cinematheque. I’ll ask him.’

Now I was worried. I was like a criminal who, with time, forgets her crime, even though incriminating evidence remains. She lives under another identity and her appearance is so changed that no one recognises her. If someone had asked me, ‘You weren’t Little Jewel, were you, a while ago?’ I would have replied no, and I would not have felt as if I were lying. That July day when my mother took me to the Gare d’Austerlitz and hung the label around my neck — Thérèse Cardères, c/o Mme Chatillon, Chemin du Bréau, Fossombronne-la Forêt — I knew it would be best to forget Little Jewel. Indeed, my mother had made a point of telling me not to speak to anyone or say where I had lived in Paris. I was simply a boarder coming back on holiday to her family in Chemin du Bréau, Fossombronne-la-Forêt. The train left. It was crowded and I was standing up in the aisle. It was lucky I was wearing my label, otherwise I would have got lost among all those people. I would have forgotten my name.

‘I don’t really want to see the film,’ I said.

The other morning, I’d been terrified by something I heard a woman say at the next table, in the café at Place Blanche: ‘The skeleton in the cupboard.’ I felt like asking Moreau-Badmaev if, over time, film stock decomposes like corpses. In that case, the faces of Sonia O’Dauyé and Little Jewel would be eaten away by some sort of fungus and their voices would not be heard again.

He told me I looked pale and suggested that we have dinner nearby.

We walked down the left-hand side of Boulevard Jourdan and entered a large café. He chose a table in the indoor terrace.

‘Look, we’re right opposite the Cité Universitaire.’ He pointed to a building on the other side of the boulevard that looked like a castle. ‘The students from Cité Universitaire come here and, because they speak all sorts of languages, they call this café Babel.’

I looked around the café. It was late and there weren’t many people.

‘I often come here and listen to people speaking their different languages. It’s good practice for me. There are even Iranian students but, unfortunately, none of them speaks Persian of the plains.’

At that time of night, they were no longer serving meals, so he ordered two sandwiches.

‘And what would you like to drink?’

‘A whisky, neat.’

It was at about this time the other night when I’d gone to Le Canter, in Rue Puget, to buy cigarettes. And I remembered how much better I’d felt after they’d made me drink the glass of whisky. I could breathe better; the anxiety had dissipated, along with the heaviness that was suffocating me. It was almost as good as the ether from my childhood.

‘You must have had a good education.’

I was worried that my voice might be tinged with envy or bitterness.

‘Only the baccalaureate and the School of Oriental Languages.’

‘Do you think I could enrol in the School of Oriental Languages?’

‘Of course.’

So I would not have told a complete lie to the pharmacist.

‘Did you pass the bac?’

At first I wanted to say yes, but it was too stupid to lie again now that I had confided in him.

‘No, unfortunately.’

I must have looked so ashamed and upset that he shrugged his shoulders. ‘It doesn’t really matter, you know. Lots of amazing people don’t have their bac.’

I tried to remember all the schools I’d been to: the boarding school, to begin with, from the age of five, where the big kids looked after us. What had happened to Thérèse since that time, long ago? She had at least one distinguishing feature I would have recognised: the tattoo on her shoulder, which she told me was a starfish. And then I’d been to Saint-André, when I lived with my mother in the big apartment. But, after a while, she started calling me Little Jewel and wanted me to have a role alongside her in the film, The Crossroad of the Archers. I was no longer attending Saint-André. I also remember a young man who looked after me for a very short time. Perhaps my mother had found him through the red-headed fellow at the Taylor Agency who had sent me to the Valadiers. One winter, when it was snowing heavily in Paris, the young man took me tobogganing in the Trocadéro gardens.

‘Aren’t you hungry?’

I had just drunk a mouthful of whisky and he was looking at me anxiously. I hadn’t touched my sandwich.

‘You should eat something.’

I forced myself to take a bite, but I had real trouble swallowing. I drank another mouthful of whisky. I wasn’t used to alcohol. It tasted bitter, but it had started to take effect.

‘Do you often drink spirits?’

‘No. Not often. Only tonight, so I could pluck up the courage to talk.’

I would show him the photo from The Crossroad of the Archers that I had filed away at the bottom of the metal tin. I avoided looking at it. I was wearing a nightshirt, wide-eyed, an electric torch in my hand, and I was wandering around the corridors of the château. I’d left my room because of the storm.

‘There’s one thing I don’t understand. Why did your mother leave you and go to Morocco?’

It was odd to hear someone asking these questions, when up until now I had been the only one to ask them of myself. Sometimes, in the Fossombronne house, I had overheard snatches of conversation between Frédérique and her friends. They thought I was out of earshot or that I was too young to understand. Some words have remained etched in my memory — especially those of the brunette, the one who had known my mother from the early days and who didn’t like her. One day I heard her say, ‘It’s lucky Sonia left Paris in time…’ I must have been thirteen and I was puzzled, but I didn’t dare ask Frédérique to explain.

‘I don’t really know,’ I said. ‘I think she went there with someone.’

Yes, she’d been taken there by a man, or he’d asked her to join him there. Was it Jean Borand? I don’t think so. He would have suggested that I go along, too. One evening, while Frédérique was out, the women were talking about my mother again, and the brunette said, ‘Sonia went out with some very weird types.’ One of them had paid — so she said—‘for Sonia to be in a movie’. I realised it was The Crossroad of the Archers.

One afternoon in summer, I’d gone for a walk in the forest with Frédérique. We went down Chemin du Bréau, which led to the forest. I asked her why, out of the blue, my mother had ended up in the huge apartment. Apparently, she had met someone and he had set her up there. But nobody ever knew what his name was. He was probably the one who took her to Morocco. Later on, I imagined a faceless man carrying suitcases at night. Secret meetings in hotel lobbies, on railway platforms, and always under the bluish tinge of a streetlight. Trucks being loaded in empty garages, like Jean Borand’s, near the Gare de Lyon. And the smell of rotting leaves and decomposition, the smell of the Bois de Boulogne on the evening when she lost the dog.

It must have been late, because the waiter came over to tell us that it was closing time.

‘Do you want to come back to my place?’ Moreau-Badmaev asked.

Perhaps he’d sensed what was on my mind. At the prospect of finding myself alone that night in Porte d’Orléans, I’d again felt something pressing down on me, preventing me from breathing.

Back at his apartment, he offered me a hot drink. I heard him opening and shutting a cupboard, boiling water; then there was the sound of a saucepan banging. If I lay on the mattress for a second, I would feel better. A warm, hazy light emanated from the globe in the tripod. I would have liked to turn on the radio set to see the green light. Now that I was lying down, my head on the pillow — a much softer pillow than I was used to at Rue Coustou — I felt as if someone had removed a metal or plaster corset from my chest. I wanted to spend all day like that, far from Paris, in the Midi, or in Rome, with sunlight filtering through the slats of the louvres.

He came into the room holding a tray. I sat up. I was embarrassed.

‘No, no, stay where you are,’ he said, and put the tray on the ground, at the foot of the mattress.

He handed me a cup. Then he pushed the pillow behind me and wedged it against the wall so I could lean back on it.

‘You should take off your coat.’

I wasn’t even aware that I still had my coat on. And my shoes. I put the cup down on the floor next to me. He helped me take off my coat and shoes. When he took off my shoes, I felt a huge relief, as if he’d removed the sort of leg irons that slaves and people on death row wear around their ankles. I thought of my mother’s ankles, which I’d had to massage and which had forced her to give up classical dance. All the failure and misery of her life were contained in those ankles, and the pain must have ended up spreading through her whole body. Now I understood her better. He held out the cup to me again.

‘Jasmine tea. I hope you like it.’

I must have looked pretty dreadful for him to be speaking so gently, almost in a whisper. I nearly asked him if I looked sick, but I couldn’t bring myself to. I preferred not knowing.

‘I get the impression that you’re preoccupied by your childhood memories,’ he said.

It all started with the woman wearing the yellow coat in the metro. Before that, I scarcely gave them a thought.

I swallowed a mouthful of tea. It was less bitter than the whisky.

He had got out his writing pad.

‘You can trust me. I’m used to making sense of everything, even foreign languages, and yours is not that foreign to me.’

He seemed moved to have made this declaration. And I was moved, too.

‘From what I can gather, you never found out who rented the huge apartment to your mother…’

I remember there was a cupboard in the living-room wall, at the spot where the steps covered in white plush formed a sort of dais. My mother would open the built-in cupboard and get out a wad of banknotes. I had also seen her give a wad to Jean Borand, one Thursday when he came to collect me. Apparently, there was enough in the treasure trove to last until the end, until the day she drove me to the Gare d’Austerlitz. Even that day, before I got on the train, she slipped an envelope into my suitcase; it contained several of those wads of notes. ‘Give them to Frédérique, so that she looks after you.’

I wondered later where she had got hold of all that money. From the same man who had provided her with the apartment? The one whose name no one ever knew? Or what he looked like? Try as I might to dredge up a memory of him, I was sure I had never known any man who came as a regular visitor to the apartment. And it couldn’t have been Jean Borand, since she was giving him money. Perhaps that fellow was my father, after all. But he didn’t want to be seen; he wanted to remain an unknown father. He must have come very late at night, around three in the morning, while I was asleep. I often woke in the middle of the night and, every time, I was sure I heard loud voices. My bedroom was quite close to my mother’s. Twelve years later, I would have been curious to know how she felt, that first evening, when she arrived in the apartment, after leaving her hotel room in Rue d’Armaillé. Would she have felt that she was turning the tables on life? She had not been able to become a prima ballerina, and now, under a new identity, she wanted to have a role in a film by dragging me along with her, like a performing dog. And, from what I had gleaned at Frossombronne, listening to the conversations, it was the man whose name no one knew who had financed the film for her.

‘Do you mind?’

He stood up and leaned over the radio. He turned a knob and the green light came on.

‘I have to listen to a program tonight…For my work… But I’ve lost track of what time it starts.’

He turned the dial slowly, as if he was looking for a station that was difficult to tune into. Someone was speaking in a guttural language, and there was a long silence between each sentence.

‘There — that’s it.’

As the sentences followed, one after the other, he took notes on his pad.

‘He’s announcing the evening’s programs…The broadcast I’m interested in is on later.’

I was pleased to see the green light. I don’t know why, but I found it comforting, like those lights left on in the hall outside children’s bedrooms. If they wake at night, they’ll see light through the half-open door.

‘Does it annoy you if I leave the radio on? I’m doing it just in case, to make sure I don’t miss the program.’

Then I heard music, similar to the music I’d heard the other night when I was in the bedroom at Rue Coustou with the pharmacist. A pure, clear sound, conjuring the image of a girl sleepwalking across a deserted square at night, or the wind blowing down an esplanade in November.

‘Is the background music annoying?’

‘No.’

If I had been listening to it by myself, I would have found it depressing, but with him it didn’t bother me at all. On the contrary, I found the music soothing.

‘And do you still remember the address of the huge apartment?’

On the cover of my mother’s diary, after the instruction: ‘If lost, return this diary to…’, I recognised her large handwriting: ‘Comtesse Sonia O’Dauyé, PASSY 15 28.’

‘I even remember the telephone number,’ I told him.

I had dialled it so often from the booth in the café. One of the customers had commented that I was ‘the little girl from 129’. It was late afternoon when I got home from Saint-André and no one came to answer the door. Neither my mother, nor the Chinese cook, nor his wife. The Chinese cook would get back around seven o’clock, but Comtesse Sonia O’Dauyé might not get back until the next day. Every time, I consoled myself that she hadn’t heard the doorbell. She would definitely hear the phone ringing. PASSY 15 28.

‘We could always try calling the number,’ Moreau-Badmaev said, smiling.

In twelve years, the idea had never occurred to me. One day at Fossombronne, when I heard Frédérique say she’d gone once to Avenue Malakoff to collect some of my mother’s belongings, I wondered what belongings she meant. The portrait by Tola Soungouroff? But she said she wasn’t able to enter the apartment: there were red wax seals fastened onto the door. That night I dreamed that my mother had a burn mark on her shoulder, branded with a hot iron.

‘PASSY 15 28, you said?’

He picked up the phone from the floor next to the bedside table and placed it on the bed. He held the receiver out to me and dialled the number. Back when I was living in the apartment, I had difficulty reading the letters and numbers on the dial in the phone booth at the café.

The ringing went on for a long time. It had an odd, muffled, reedy sound. Who might be living in the apartment now? The real owners, probably. The real children — the ones referred to on the board in the kitchen — had reclaimed the bedroom that I had no right to occupy for two years. And the real parents must be in the bedroom where my mother used to sleep.

‘Seems like no one’s answering,’ Moreau-Badmaev said.

I held the receiver up to my ear. In the end, someone picked up, but no one answered. Men’s voices, women’s voices, voices from close by, voices from far away. They were trying to call each other and find a way to begin to answer each other. Every now and then, I distinctly heard two people talking to each other and their voices drowned out the others.

‘The number is no longer in use. So people are using it to make contact and arrange to meet. It’s called the Network.’

Perhaps all those unknown voices were individuals from my mother’s diary whose telephone numbers didn’t answer any longer. I could also hear a sort of rustling, the wind in the leaves, in summer, on Avenue Malakoff. I concluded that, since we had left, no one had lived in the apartment, except ghosts and these voices. The wax seals were still on the apartment door. The windows had been left wide open: that was why you could hear the wind. The electricity was off, like on the night of the air raid when I was so terrified that I ran to find my mother in the living room. She lit candles.

She didn’t have many visitors. Two women often came: fat Madeleine-Louis and Simone Bouquereau. Later on, I saw them again in Frédérique’s house in Frossombronne, but they avoided me and definitely didn’t want to talk about my mother. Perhaps they were ashamed of something.

Simone Bouquereau had a head like a little blonde mummy, and I was shocked by how thin she was. The brunette said that Simone had ‘been in rehab’. One evening, after dinner, she thought I had gone up to bed and she was talking about the past with Frédérique. ‘Simone was the one who kept up poor Sonia’s supplies,’ she said. I wrote the words down on a scrap of paper. There were so many of their conversations I eavesdropped on, from the age of fourteen, in an attempt to understand. I asked Frédérique what it meant. ‘Every now and again, ever since her accident, your mother took morphine.’ I had no idea what accident she was referring to. Her ankles? Apparently morphine is a good cure for pain.

I still had the receiver up to my ear. The voices were drowned out by the rustling of the wind in the leaves. I pictured the wind slamming the doors and windows, blowing flurries of dead leaves onto the parquet floor and onto the steps covered in white plush in the living room; I imagined, too, the plush decayed and turned into moss, the glass in the windows broken; hundreds of cats overrunning the apartment, as well as black dogs, like the one she had lost in the Bois de Boulogne.

‘Do you recognise someone’s voice?’ Moreau-Badmaev asked. He put the handset on the bed and smiled at me.

‘No.’ I hung up and put the telephone back on the floor. ‘I’m frightened of going home by myself,’ I said.

‘But you can stay here.’ He shook his head as if it was obvious. ‘I have to work now. I hope the noise of the radio doesn’t disturb you.’

He left the bedroom, then came back with an old lampshade that he somehow attached to the tripod. The light from the globe became even more hazy. Then he sat on the edge of the bed, next to the radio, and placed the writing pad on his knees.

‘The light isn’t too strong for you?’

I replied that it was just right as it was.

I was lying on the other side of the bed, the side in shadow. On the radio, I heard the voice from earlier, just as guttural. Again, the silences between sentences. At intervals, he wrote words on his pad. I could no longer take my eyes off the green light and I drifted off to sleep.