After the Circus

~ ~ ~

We reached the quays via Boulevard Murat. At the place where the street made a right angle, she said, “I used to live around here.”

I should have asked when that was and under what circumstances, but I let the moment pass. When you’re young, you neglect certain details that might become precious later. The boulevard made another sharp turn and headed toward the Seine.

“So, do you think I’m a good driver?”

“Very good.”

“You’re not afraid to be in the car with me?”

“Not at all.”

She pressed on the accelerator. At Quai Louis-Blériot, the road narrowed, but she sped up even more. A red light. I was afraid she would run it. But no, she screeched to a halt.

“I think I’m getting the hang of this car.”

Now she was driving at normal speed. We arrived at the gardens of Trocadéro. She crossed the river over the Pont d’Iéna, then skirted the Champ-de-Mars.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To my hotel. But first, I need to pick up something I forgot.”

We were on the deserted square of the Ecole Militaire. The huge edifice seemed abandoned. We could make out the Champ-de-Mars, like a prairie gently sloping toward the Seine. She continued straight ahead. The dark mass and surrounding wall of a barracks. At the end of the street, I saw the viaduct of the elevated metro. We stopped in front of a building on Rue Desaix.

“Will you wait for me? I won’t be long.”

She had left the key on the dashboard. She disappeared into the building. I wondered whether she’d ever return. After a while, I got out of the car and planted myself in front of the entrance, a glass door with wrought iron. There might have been a rear exit. She would vanish, leaving me with this useless automobile. I tried to talk sense to myself. Even if she did give me the slip, I had several reference points: the café on Rue Washington where Jacques was a regular, Ansart’s apartment, and especially the suitcases. Why was I so afraid she might disappear? I had met her only twenty-four hours ago and knew almost nothing about her. Even her name I’d learned through others. She couldn’t keep still; she flitted from place to place as if running from some danger. I didn’t think I could hold on to her.

I was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk. Behind me, I heard the entrance door open and close. She walked up quickly. She was no longer wearing her raincoat, which she had folded over her arm, but a full-length fur.

“Were you going to leave?” she asked. “Had you gotten tired of waiting?”

She gave me a worried smile.

“Not at all. I thought you’d skipped out on me.”

She shrugged.

“That’s ridiculous … Whatever made you think that?”

We walked to the car. I had taken her raincoat and was carrying it over my shoulder.

“That’s a nice coat,” I said.

She seemed embarrassed.

“Oh, yes … It’s a lady I know … She lives here … a seamstress … I’d given her the coat so she could resew the hem.”

“Did you tell her you’d be coming over so late?”

“It was no bother … She works at night …”

She was hiding the truth from me and I was tempted to ask more specific questions, but I held back. She would eventually get used to me. Little by little she’d learn to trust me and tell me everything.

We were back in the car. I laid her raincoat on the back seat. She pulled away from the curb, gently this time.

“My hotel is right near here …”

Why had she chosen a hotel in this neighborhood? It wasn’t just chance. Something must have kept her around here, like an anchor point. Perhaps the presence of that mysterious seamstress?

We took one of the streets that led from Avenue de Suffren toward Grenelle, on the border of the 7th and 15th arrondissements. We stopped in front of a hotel, its façade bathing in the glow from the lit sign of a garage at a bend in the road. She rang at the door, and the night porter came to open for us. We followed him to the reception desk. She asked for the key to her room. He shot me a suspicious glance.

“Can you fill out a registration? I’ll need to see some ID.”

I didn’t have my papers on me. In any case, I was still a minor.

He had put the key on the reception desk. She picked it up nervously.

“This is my brother …”

The other hesitated for a moment.

“Well, you’ll have to show me some proof. I need to see his papers.”

“I forgot to bring them,” I said.

“In that case, I can’t let you go up with the young lady.”

“Why not? He’s my brother …”

Staring at the two of us in silence, he reminded me of the detective from the day before. The light accentuated his square jaw and balding head. A telephone sat on the counter. At any moment, I was expecting him to pick up the receiver and alert the nearest police station to our presence.

We made an odd couple and we must have looked rather suspicious, she and I. I remember the man’s strong jaw, his lipless mouth, the calm contempt with which he stared at us. We were at his mercy. We were nothing.

I turned toward her:

“I must have left my ID when we had dinner with mom,” I said in a timid voice. “Maybe mom has found it.”

I stressed the word mom to give him a more reassuring impression of us. She, on the other hand, seemed quite prepared to have it out with the night porter.

She was holding the key. I plucked it from her hand and set it down gently on the desk.

“Come on … We’ll go try to find that ID …”

I dragged her out by the arm. It was about thirty feet to the hotel exit. I was sure the man was watching us. Walk as naturally as possible. Especially don’t make it look like we’re running away. And what if he locked the door, and we were caught in a trap? But no.

Once outside, I felt relieved. That night porter was no longer a threat.

“Would you like to go back to the hotel alone?”

“No. But I’m sure that if we’d insisted, he would have given in.”

“I’m not.”

“Were you scared of him?”

She looked at me with a mocking smile. I wished I could have confessed to her that I’d lied about my age, that I was only eighteen.

“So, where to now?” she asked.

“My place. We’ll be much better off there than at the hotel.”

In the car, as we followed Avenue de Suffren toward the quays, I felt the same apprehension as with the night porter. I wondered whether this car and that fur coat she was wearing wouldn’t draw even more attention to us. I was afraid that at the next intersection, we might be stopped by one of those police roadblocks that were common in Paris at the time, when they checked for unaccompanied minors after midnight.

“Do you have your driver’s license?”

“It must be in my handbag,” she said. “Have a look.”

Her handbag was sitting on the dashboard. There wasn’t much in it and I immediately located the license. I was tempted to read it, so that I would finally know her name, address, and date and place of birth. But, out of discretion, I didn’t.

“What about the registration — do we have that?”

“Probably … check in the glove compartment.”

She shrugged. She seemed not to care about all the dangers I dreaded for us. She had switched on the radio, and gradually the music calmed me down. I felt confident again. We hadn’t done anything wrong. What could anyone hold against us?

“We should head to the South with this car,” I said to her.

“I thought you wanted to go to Rome.”

Up until then, I had imagined traveling to Rome by train. Now I tried to imagine us driving along the highway. First we would go to the South of France. Then we’d cross the border at Ventimiglia. With just a little luck, everything would go smoothly. Since I was underage, I’d draft a letter supposedly signed by my father, authorizing a trip abroad. I was an old hand at this type of forgery.

“Do you think they’d lend us the car?”

“Sure … Why wouldn’t they?”

She didn’t want to give me a straight answer.

“Well, you haven’t known them very long …”

She remained silent. I returned to the attack.

“That fellow, Jacques — did you meet him through Ansart?”

“Yes.”

“And what does Jacques do for a living?”

“He and Ansart are in business together.”

“So how did you meet Ansart?”

“In a café.”

She added:

“Jacques lives in a very nice apartment on Rue Washington. His full name is Jacques de Bavière …”

After that, I often heard that name on her lips: Jacques de Bavière. Did I mishear? Wasn’t it a more prosaic name, like de Bavier or Deba-viaire? Or simply a pseudonym?

“He’s a Belgian national, but he’s been living in France forever. He lives with his stepmother on Rue Washington.”

“His stepmother?”

“Yes, his father’s widow.”

We had arrived at the Pont de la Concorde. Instead of turning onto Boulevard Saint-Germain, she crossed the Seine.

“I prefer taking the quays,” she said.

“This Jacques de Bavière … He seems to be in love with you …”

“Perhaps. But I don’t want to live with him. I want to retain my independence.”

“You prefer living in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt?”

I had adopted a sarcastic tone, as if I didn’t believe in the existence of that house in Saint-Leu-la-Forêt.

“I have a right to my own life …”

“Someday you’ll have to take me to Saint-Leu …”

She smiled.

“Are you making fun of me?”

“Not in the slightest. I’d be very curious to see your house …”

“Unfortunately I stopped living there yesterday — as you know very well …”

The Pont-Neuf. We followed the same route that we’d taken on foot the evening before. She parked the car in the recess on Quai de Conti, at the corner of the cul-de-sac.

The windows of both the office and the adjacent bedroom were lit. This time, we wouldn’t be able to avoid Grabley, and the prospect made me nervous. I said:

“We’ll go in on tiptoe.”

But just as we were crossing the foyer in the semidarkness, Grabley opened the door to the bedroom.

“Who’s there? Is that you, Obligado?”

He was wearing his plaid bathrobe.

“You could at least introduce me …”

“Gisèle,” I said in an unsure voice.

“Henri Grabley.”

He had moved toward her and held out a hand that she didn’t shake.

“Delighted to meet you. Please forgive me for greeting you in this attire.”

He was playing master of the household. Moreover, his entire person corresponded so perfectly to that empty apartment …

“Mister Grabley is a friend of my father’s,” I said.

“His oldest friend.”

With a gesture, he bade us enter the room, adjacent to the office, that had never had a very determinate function: sometimes it was a living room — the furniture used to consist of a midnight-blue sofa, two wing chairs of the same color, and a coffee table — sometimes a “guest room.”

The curtainless windows looked out on the quay.

“I was getting fed up with my view of the courtyard, so I moved in here. Do I have your permission, Obligado?”

“Make yourself at home.”

He had walked into the room, but she and I remained on the threshold. A mattress was lying on the floor, in the left-hand corner. Light came from a naked bulb in a lamp base. There wasn’t any furniture left. On the marble mantelpiece were a large radio and the black oilskin bags Grabley sometimes used for his morning shopping.

“Shall we go into the office instead?”

He kept his eyes fixed on her, a fatuous smile on his face, his head slightly raised.

“You’re very lovely, Miss …”

She didn’t react, but I was afraid she would leave because of him.

“I hope you won’t hold my frankness against me, Miss.”

Our silence was making him feel awkward. He turned to me.

“I haven’t been able to reach your father. The phone number he gave me doesn’t answer.”

No surprise there. I could even foresee that number ringing in the void for all eternity.

“Just keep trying,” I told him. “He’ll answer eventually.”

He looked hapless, standing there before us like an old ham who can’t win over the audience.

“Hey, what if the three of us had dinner tomorrow?”

“I don’t know if Gisèle is free.”

I looked to her for support.

“That’s very kind of you, sir, but I’m afraid I won’t be able to come in to the city tomorrow evening.”

I was grateful to her for adopting that courteous tone — I’d been afraid she would answer much more cuttingly. I suddenly felt sorry for Grabley, with his blond mustache and shopping bags on the mantelpiece; for my father, who had hightailed it … Today, I again see that scene, from a distance. Behind the panes of a window, in muted light, I can make out a blond man in his fifties wearing a plaid bathrobe, a girl in a fur coat, and a young man … The light bulb in the lamp base is too small and too weak. If I could go back in time and return to that room, I would change the bulb. But in brighter light, the whole thing might well dissolve.

In the fifth-floor bedroom, she was lying against me. I could hear muted music and an announcer’s droning voice.

Grabley was listening to the radio downstairs.

“There’s something weird about that guy,” she said. “What does he do?”

“Oh, he’s a bit of a jack of all trades.”

One day, I had come across a wallet he’d left in the office. Among the other documents it contained, one very old one in particular had raised my eyebrows: an application to be listed in the Business Register as a greengrocer in the produce market in Reims.

“And what about your father? Is he like that too?”

For the first time, she had used the familiar tu.

“No, not exactly …”

“Did he go to Switzerland because he was in trouble here in France?”

“Yes.”

None of this seemed to bother her much.

“What about you? Do you have any family?” I asked her.

“Not really.”

She looked me in the eye and smiled.

“I have a brother named Lucien …”

“But what do you do for a living?”

“A little of everything …”

She knitted her brow, as if searching for the right words. She finally said:

“I was even married once.”

I pretended not to have heard. The slightest word or movement might interrupt this confidence. But she fell silent again, eyes fixed on the ceiling.

Reflections skidded across the walls. Their shape and movement were like foliage rustling and trembling in the wind. It was the last tour boat passing by, its searchlights aimed at the building façades along the quays.