Paris Noir

NOCTURNE LE JEUDI by SCOTT PHILLIPS

For over two years the English bookseller has lived in a former maid’s room on the top floor of an old building on the rue Yves Toudic in the tenth arrondissement of Paris. Day and night he hears through the walls shouting matches of impressive vulgarity and ferocity; the adversaries are a mother and daughter, aged about eighty and fifty respectively. For some months after moving in he was rather afraid of these hideous creatures nesting at the end of the hallway, until the day he realised that they were the same pair of old ladies he’d met a dozen or more times on the stairs. During these encounters the old dears flash him sweet charming smiles and their voices – hoarse and masculine behind closed doors – take on in public a honeyed, almost childish tone. The daughter, slightly handicapped in a manner that remains unclear to him, squints and limps and dresses like a nun. Once they’ve disappeared into their apartment the screaming fits start up again with as much hateful fury as ever, those sweet voices deepened and amplified: ‘Get up you lazy cunt,’ the mother barks, ‘I want my dinner.’

‘Fuck off, ass pirate,’ the daughter answers.

Before moving in here he’d never heard a woman called an ass pirate before; now it’s his daily lot. Normally it’s the daughter who calls her mother this; the older woman prefers the term ‘whore’.

Tonight he thinks he heard the curt sound of a fist against flesh, which bothers him; not knowing which woman is the aggressor this time, he decides to go out. In any case he would have had to leave for dinner, since as usual he has nothing to eat in his room. He almost never slept in it in the days when he had a girlfriend; since she showed him the door six weeks ago – six weeks! – he feels the need to get out in the evenings in order not to submit to depression. He grabs a book at random before opening the door, then double-bolts it behind him.

In the corridor he runs into a young man leaving the toilet, so wasted he has to lean on the wall to remain upright. He wonders if this isn’t the owner of the burnt, twisted spoon he found on the sink the other day.

‘Evening.’

The young man gives him a benevolent smile, shrugs, manages to burble an incoherent response before heading in a leisurely way down the stairs, leaning heavily on the rail. The English bookseller waits until the other has had the time to get to the ground floor before descending himself.

The café on the street corner, as most of its business comes from students in the morning and at noon, is closed evenings; and without thinking about it he chooses its rival across the street where he takes a bar stool, orders a beer and starts reading.

After a second beer and a ham-and-cheese sandwich he shudders at the unpleasant sensation of a hand on his shoulder. Looking over his shoulder he finds at his back a neighbour from the fifth floor, a retired pharmacist whose name he can’t recall.

‘Buy you a round, young man?’

‘Sure,’ says the Englishman, wishing to remain alone but unwilling to hurt his neighbour’s feelings.

The pharmacist, still standing, orders two draughts and grabs the book without asking his permission. ‘It’s in English? What’s it about?’

‘The death of John F. Kennedy, it’s sort of a rehash of all the theories about who was behind the assassination.’

‘Oh? And who was that, do you think?’

‘The author of the book thinks it was probably the New Orleans mafia.’

‘Wrong,’ says the pharmacist with a dry smile, shaking his head.

‘Oh, well,’ says the Englishman, with no desire to pursue it further.

‘Who profited from it?’

‘I don’t know… Khruschev, Castro…?’

The pharmacist closes his eyes, as if patiently addressing a small child. ‘The Jews, naturally.’

‘Oh,’ says the younger man, whose stomach has just started hurting. He has no desire to despise his neighbour, who, pain in the ass though he may be, is alone in the world; he has let it drop that neither his ex-wife nor his daughter nor his grandchildren have any contact with him any more. ‘Is that so?’

‘You don’t believe me? John Kennedy was going to give the Arabs back the land they got stolen away from them in ‘47. The Jews didn’t have any choice. It was the Mossad that did it.’

The bookseller swallows the rest of his beer in a swig, stands up looking at his watch and feigning surprise. ‘Shit, I’m meeting someone at the Bastille in fifteen minutes, I’ve got to get going. Thanks for the beer, the next round’s on me.’

‘I’ve got my car outside, I’m free at the moment, you want me to drop you?’

Holy fucking God no. ‘That’s nice of you, I think the Métro’s quicker this time of day.’

Aware of the pharmacist’s eyes on his back, he leaves, crosses the street and walks to the place de la République, where he stops in front of the Métro entrance. Having nothing planned for the evening, and anxious to avoid the nauseating prospect of an evening listening to the neighbours, he decides to see a movie at the Bastille after all.

The film is a piece of shit, an English love-and-war story; he stays seated until the end anyway, reading the credits along with a few other disillusioned, compulsive film buffs. When the lights go back up he sneaks into the screening room next door where another film is fifteen minutes under way. That’s all right, it’s the third time he’s seen it and he knows the opening by heart.

In fact the first time he saw it, six weeks ago, he was with the girlfriend, a fact that occurs to him towards the end of the film. It’s an American comedy, just the kind of thing she hated, and though it would be wrong to attribute the breakup to his insistence on seeing the movie, it was nonetheless the day after that she gave him the sad news that she was leaving him. At the time he’d felt no sadness, just a vague sense of humiliation – obviously he would have preferred to be the one doing the leaving – and irritation, since replacing her would not be easy.

Now he feels shadowed by deep depression, and for the umpteenth time since the breakup he misses her. He’s tired of jerking off, and his efforts to meet other women have come to nothing. Add to that the fact that his bookstore – where the ex-girlfriend in question still works – trudges forward day by day on an inevitable march towards the mortification of bankruptcy. He wonders at what point he will give up and go back to England, finds the prospect sickmaking.

Outside the air is cool, though not bad for the season. He stops off in a beer bar with a Belgian monastery theme where they know him. Without waiting for his order the waiter brings him half a litre of Abbey beer; he relaxes, begins to read again.

At a quarter to midnight, having read fifty pages and drunk a litre and a half of Tripp el, and having got up three times for a piss, he leaves the bar and crosses the place de la Bastille. He ends up standing before an art cinema that runs Dr Strangelove every night at midnight; it seems to him, drunk as he is, to be the only film in the world that could improve his outlook on life.

As expected, he leaves the cinema with his spirits considerably lifted. Anxious to read a few more pages before sleep he stops in a café on the place and orders half a litre of Munich beer. When it comes he drinks it as though it were his first of the night and not the tenth and then, warmed and happy, orders another.

The boulevard Beaumarchais is nearly deserted when he starts walking it around two-thirty in the morning. He doesn’t give a shit about the girl or the bookstore or Paris. If he has to go back to England, tant fucking pis.

When he first hears the woman’s cries, he doesn’t identify them as such and doesn’t turn to look. When they continue, overlaid by others, male and full of rage, he looks across the boulevard to see a struggle between a man and a woman, the former attempting to forcibly drag the latter towards the front door of a nearby building.

The woman is young and, like her assailant, of Asian origin. Her struggles against his efforts to drag her are frenzied, and he understands that she’s in a panic, begging for help in a language he can’t understand or even identify.

While the bookseller, stopped in his tracks, continues to watch, the woman continues to scream and her attacker continues to drag her towards the doorway. They’re both Japanese – Korean, perhaps? – and he decides they must be a couple, that this is a mere domestic dispute and therefore none of his affair.

He continues on his way home.

The young woman’s cries follow him up the boulevard, mixed with those of her enraged attacker, and the sounds of the occasional automobile passing at that hour of the morning. It must have been a couple having a spat, he tells himself, none of his business. They were probably drunk, both of them, and he knows better than to place himself between a man and a woman in the middle of a fight, especially when they’re drunk. And if that’s not the case then surely some passerby will note her distress and stop to rescue her…

As he reaches the boulevard des Filles du Calvaire, he realises that he no longer hears the woman’s voice; in fact he hears almost nothing. It’s the quietest moment he’s experienced since the day he arrived in Paris.

Now he’s stricken with an unexpected panic; how could he bear the knowledge that an innocent had suffered for his lack of courage? He turns on his heel and starts running at top speed towards the Bastille. Despite the dissipation of the last few weeks he’s in good physical shape, and he is rather proud of the fact that he’s running so fast without losing his breath. He crosses the boulevard and when he finally makes it to the spot where the struggle took place he sees no one. The night is calm, the door to the building closed, and no witness is present to tell the fate of the unhappy couple. He pushes the door without managing to open it, tries to ring the bell, knocks as hard as he can, but fails to awaken the building’s concierge, if it has one. He’s not even sure that this was where he was dragging her. In any case there are no more screams, no visual or auditory trace of the fight.

After a minute he gives up, takes up once more his slow ascent of the boulevard Beaumarchais towards his empty room, feeling not quite as nauseated as he will tomorrow morning.