Across the Bridge (17 page)

When they reached the Rue du Bac the driver drew up as closely as he could to the entrance, even tried to wedge the cab between two parked cars, so that Forain would not have to step into a gutter filled with running water. Forain could not decide what to do about the tip, whether to give the man something extra (it was true that he could have refused to take him anywhere) or make him aware he had been aggressive. “You should be waiting your turn.…” still rankled. In the end, he made a Tremski-like gesture, waving aside change that must have amounted to 35 percent of the fare. He asked for a receipt. It was not until after the man had driven away that Forain saw he had not included the tip in the total sum. No Tremski flourish was ever likely to carry a reward. That was another lesson of the day.

More than a year later, Lisette – now working only part-time – mentioned that Halina had neglected to publish in
Le Monde
the anniversary notice of Tremski’s death. Did Forain want one to appear, in the name of the firm? Yes, of course. It would be wrong to say he had forgotten the apartment and everything in it, but the inventory, the imaginary camera moving around the rooms, filled him with impatience and a sense of useless effort. His mind stopped at the narrow couch with the brown blanket, Halina’s bed, and he said to himself, What a pair those two were. The girl was right to run away. As soon as he had finished the thought he placed his hand over his mouth, as if to prevent the words from emerging. He went one further – bowed his head, like Tremski at Barbara’s funeral, promising himself he would keep in mind things as they once were, not as they seemed to him now. But the apartment was vacated, and Tremski had disappeared. He had been prayed over thoroughly by a great number of people, and the
only enjoyment he might have had from the present scene was to watch Forain make a fool of himself to no purpose.

There were changes in the office, too. Lisette had agreed to stay for the time it would take to train a new hand: a thin, pretty girl, part of the recent, nonpolitical emigration – wore a short leather skirt, said she did not care about money but loved literature and did not want to waste her life working at something dull. She got on with Halina and had even spared Forain the odd difficult meeting. As she began to get the hang of her new life, she lost no time spreading the story that Forain had been the lover of Barbara and would not let go a handsome and expensive coat that had belonged to Tremski. A posthumous novel-length manuscript of Tremski’s was almost ready for the printer, with a last chapter knitted up from fragments he had left trailing. The new girl, gifted in languages, compared the two versions and said he would have approved; and when Forain showed a moment of doubt and hesitation she was able to remind him of how, in the long run, Tremski had never known what he wanted.

O
WING TO HIS
advanced age and a lack of close relatives, M. Wroblewski receives little personal mail. Most of the friends of his youth in Warsaw are dead and the survivors have not much to say, except about their grandchildren, and one cannot keep writing back and forth about total strangers. Even the grandparents know them only through colored snapshots or as shrill, shy voices over the telephone. They barely say anything in Polish and have English-sounding names: their parents emigrated as soon as they could. M. Wroblewski’s wife has a niece in Canberra: Teresa, wife of Stanley, mother of Fiona and Tim. He keeps their photographs filed in large brown envelopes. Should Teresa and her family ever decide to visit Paris, he will spread their cheerful faces all over the flat.

You might imagine that changed conditions in Eastern Europe would stir some hope into the news from Warsaw, but his correspondents, the few who are left, sound dispirited, mistrustful. Everything costs too much. Young people are ignorant and rude. The spoken language is debased. Purses are snatched on church steps. There are no books worth reading – nothing but pornography and translated Western trash. Recently, a friend he has not seen in fifty years but with whom he has kept in touch sent him a long letter. The friend
had been invited to describe his wartime ghetto experience in a radio talk. As a result, he was sent messages of insult and abuse. There was even a death threat. He is an old man. Surely enough is enough. “On that score, nothing has changed,” he wrote. “It is in the brain, blood, and bone. I don’t mean this for you. You were always different.”

A compliment, yes, but no one wants to be singled out, tested, examined, decreed an exception. “I don’t mean this for you” leads to awkwardness and painful feelings. Perhaps, a long time ago, as a young man, callow and cordial, M. Wroblewski had said the same thing to his friend: “Naturally, you are completely different. I’m talking about all the others.” Could he have said it? He would like to be able to send his friend a plane ticket to Paris, find him a comfortable room and discreetly settle the bill, invite him to dinner: M. Wroblewski, his friend, and Magda around the little table in the living room, with the green lampshade glowing and the green curtains drawn; or at Chez Marcel, where he used to go with Magda. The owner would remember them, offer free glasses of cognac with their coffee: jovial, generous, welcoming – One Europe, One World.

There, you see, M. Wroblewski would tell his friend. There are chinks of light.

This is a soft autumn, moist and mild. Between showers the broad boulevards fill up with people strolling as though it were summer. He sits in the Atelier, the new place just next door to the Select, composing and rejecting an answer to his friend. His hat and stick are on a chair; his dog, an obedient one, lies under it. The Atelier opened in the eighties, but he still thinks of it as “the new place.” It seems to have been in Montparnasse forever. The table mats depict a mature model posing for a life class some three generations ago. Newspapers are on wooden holders, in the old way. The waiters are patient, except when a customer’s reaction to a slopped saucer is perceived as an affront. Across the street the mirrored walls of the building that now rises above the Coupole reflect an Île-de-France sky:
watered blue with a thin screen of clouds. If you sit at the front row of tables you may be pestered by foreign beggars, some of them children. M. Wroblewski keeps loose change in his pocket, which he distributes until it runs out. There have been many newspaper articles warning him not to do this: the money is collected for the brutal and cynical men who put the children on the street.

His friend in Warsaw is completely alert, with an amazing memory of events, sorted out, in sequence. If he were here, at this moment, he would find a historical context for everything: the new building and its mirrors, the naked model, the beggar girl with her long braid of hair and the speck of diamond on the side of her nose. Who, after hearing the voice of an old man over the radio, could sit down and compose a threat? All M. Wroblewski can see are a man’s hunched shoulders, the back of his thick neck. But no, his friend might say: I have seen his face, which is lean and elegant. What do you still hope for? What can you still expect? So much for your chinks of light.

And so they would exchange visions through the afternoon and into the evening, with the lights inside the café growing brighter and brighter as the trees outside become part of the night. Perhaps his friend would enjoy meeting someone wholly new, remote from the dark riddle of the man and the death letter. Unfortunately, most of M. Wroblewski’s Paris acquaintances have vanished or moved away to remote towns and suburbs (everything seems far) or retired to a region of the mind that must be like a twisted, hollow shell. When he reads his wife a letter from Canberra he takes care to translate the English expressions Teresa puts in as a matter of course. Magda used to understand English, but even her French is fading now. Before he reaches the end of the letter she will have asked four or five times, “Who is it from?” – although he has shown her the signature and the bright Australian stamps. Or she may surprise him with a pertinent
question: “Are they coming home for Christmas?” There is no telling what Magda means by home. She may say to him, “Does my father like you?” or even, “Where do you live?”

She uses his diminutive, says “Maciek and I,” but knows nothing about him. She can play a game of cards, write a letter – it is never clear to whom – and he pretends to stamp and post it. By the time he has invented a plausible address, the incident has dissolved. She stares at the envelope. What is he talking about? She is poised on the moment between dark and light, when the last dream of dawn is shredding rapidly and awareness of morning has barely caught hold. She lives that split second all day long.

This morning, when he brought in her breakfast tray, he found a new letter astray on the carpet. Her writing is larger than before, easy to read:

Everything in the letter is true, if you imagine that today is unwinding some forty-five years ago. He said, “What a nice letter. Is it for Teresa?”

She sat up in bed, accepted tea. “What is Prussia?”

The Prussia question is new. Perhaps in one of the shredded dreams someone called out “Prussia!” in a dream voice that turned words and names into dramatic affirmations. She
looked toward the window, sipped her tea. She could see (if she was taking it in) the big garage at the corner and at least one of the trees on Boulevard Raspail.

“They’ve cut some trees down,” she remarked not long ago, walking with him around the block. She was right: it was he who failed to notice the gaps, even though he goes along the boulevard every day of his life.

Unless you try to keep a conversation alive, nothing shows. When he takes her out in the afternoon for tea and a slice of fruitcake, she looks finer and more self-possessed than most of the old ladies at other tables. They make a mess with crumbs, feed piecrust to their unruly lapdogs, pester the waiter with questions as repetitive and tedious as any of Magda’s: Why is that door open? Why doesn’t someone shut the door? Well, why can’t you get somebody to fix it? The trouble about Magda is only that one can’t leave her alone for a minute or she will be out in the street, trying to climb on a bus, on her way to teach a solfège class in a Polish school that no longer exists.

Morning is the slow time, when she refuses to understand the first thing about buttons, zippers, a comb, a toothbrush. Marie-Louise, who was born in Martinique, arrives at nine o’clock, five days a week. She knows how to coax Magda out of bed and into her clothes. (A bath can take three-quarters of an hour.) At last, neatly dressed, holding hands with Marie-Louise, she will watch a program of cartoons or a cooking lesson or a hooded man sticking up an American bank. Still clutching Marie-Louise, she may say, in Polish, “Who is this woman? I don’t like this woman. Tell her to go away.”

Marie-Louise is sent by the city’s social services and costs them nothing. The rules are firm: household tasks are banned, but she may, as a favor, start the washing machine or make a compote of apples and pears for Magda’s lunch. In the meantime, he does the shopping, walks the dog. If Marie-Louise says she can stay until noon he walks up to
Montparnasse and reads the newspapers. The white awning and umbrellas at the Atelier bring to mind the South, when Nice and Monaco were still within his means and not too crowded. He and Magda went down every Easter, travelling third class. He can retrace every step of their holiday round: beach in the morning, even when Easter fell in March and the sea was too cold for wading; a picnic lunch of bread, cheese, and fruit, eaten in deck chairs along the front; a rest; a long walk, then a change into spotless, pressed clothes – cream and ivory tones for Magda, beige or lightweight navy for him. An apéritif under a white awning; dinner at the pension. (In the dining room the Wroblewskis kept to themselves.) After dinner, a visit to the casino – not to gamble but to watch the most civilized people in Western Europe throw their money around. You would have to be a millionaire to live that way now.

In Montparnasse, the other day, a woman sitting by herself turned on a small radio. The music sounded like early Mozart or late Haydn. No one complained, and so the waiters said nothing. Against the music, he tried to calculate, in sums that have no bearing on money, his exact due. He would have sworn before any court, earthly or celestial, that he had never crawled. The music ceased, and a flat, cultured voice began describing what had just been played. The woman cut the voice and returned the radio to her handbag. For a few seconds the café seemed to have gone dead; then he began to take in conversations, the clink of spoons, footsteps, cars going by: sounds so familiar that they amounted to silence. Of course he had begged. He had entreated for enough to eat, relief from pain, a passport, employment. Shreds of episodes shrugged off, left behind, strewed the roads. Only someone pledged to gray dawns would turn back to examine them. You might as well collect every letter you see lying stained in a gutter and call the assortment an autobiography.

There must have been some virtues, surely. For instance, he had never tried to gain a benefit by fraud. Some people make a whole life out of trickery. They will even try to wrangle a box of the chocolates that the mayor of Paris distributes at Christmastime. These would-be swindlers may be in their fifties and sixties, too young to be put on the mayor’s list. Or else they have a large income and really ought to pay for their own pleasures. Actually, it is the rich who put on shabby clothes and saunter into their local town hall, waving a gift voucher that wouldn’t fool a child. And they could buy a ton of chocolates without feeling the squeeze!

The Wroblewskis, neither prosperous nor in want, get their annual gift in a correct and legal way. About four years ago, a notice arrived entitling Magda Zaleska, spouse Wroblewska, to the mayor’s present. She was just beginning to show signs of alarm over quite simple matters, and so he went in her place, taking along her passport, a lease of which she was the co-signer, and a letter of explanation that he wrote and got her to endorse. (Nobody wanted to read it.) He remembers how he trudged upstairs and down before coming across a hand-lettered sign saying “Chocolates – Show Voucher and Identity.”