Across the Bridge (18 page)

The box turned out to be staggering in size, too large for a drawer or a kitchen shelf. It remained for weeks on top of the television set. (Neither of them cared for chocolate, except now and then a square of the bitter kind, taken with strong black coffee.) Finally, he transferred half the contents to a tin container that some Polish friends in England had used to send the Wroblewskis a gift of shortbread and digestive biscuits, and dispatched it to a distant cousin of Magda’s. The cousin had replied that she could find chocolate in Warsaw but would welcome a package of detergent or some toilet soap that didn’t take one’s skin off.

He had used some of last year’s chocolates as an offering for the concierge, packing them attractively in a wicker
basket that had come with a purchase of dried apricots. She removed the ribbon and flowered paper, folded them, and exclaimed, “Ah! The mayor’s chocolates!” He still wonders how she knew: they are of excellent quality and look like any other chocolates you can see in a confectioner’s window. Perhaps she is on the list, and sends hers off to relatives in Portugal. It hardly seems possible: they are intended for the elderly and deserving, and she is barely forty. Perhaps she is one of the schemers who has used deceit – a false birth certificate. What of it? She is a worthy woman, hardworking and kind. A man he knows of is said to have filed an affidavit that he was too badly off to be able to pay his yearly television tax and got away with it: here, in Paris, where every resident is supposed to be accounted for; where the entire life of every authorized immigrant is lodged inside a computer or crammed between the cardboard covers of a dossier held together with frayed cotton tape.

When he brings Magda her breakfast tray he looks as if he were on the way to an important meeting – with the bank manager, say, or the mayor himself. He holds to his side of the frontier between sleeping and waking, observes his own behavior for symptoms of contagion – haziness about time, forgetting names, straying from the point in conversation. He is fit, has good eyesight, can still hear the slide of letters when the concierge pushes them under the door. He was ten months in Dachau, the last winter and spring of the war, and lost a tooth for every month. They have been replaced, in an inexpensive, bric-a-brac way: better than nothing. The Germans give him a monthly pension, which covers his modest telephone bill, with a bit over. He is low on the scale of atonement. First of all, as the German lawyer who dealt with the claim pointed out, he was a grown man at the time. He had completed his education. He had a profession. One can teach a foreign language anywhere in the world. All he had to do when the war ended was carry on as before. He cannot
plead that the ten months were an irreparable break, with a before and an after, or even a waste of life. When he explained about the German pension to a tax assessor, he was asked if he had served with the German Army. He feels dizzy if he bends his head – for instance, over a newspaper spread flat – and he takes a green-and-white capsule every day, to steady his heart.

As soon as Marie-Louise rings the front doorbell, the dog drags the leash from its place in the vestibule and drops it at his feet. Hector is a young schnauzer with a wiry coat and a gamesome disposition, who was acquired on their doctor’s advice as a focus of interest for Magda. He is bound to outlive his master. M. Wroblewski has made arrangements: the concierge will take him over. She can hardly wait. Sometimes she says to Hector, “Here we are, just the two of us,” as if M. Wroblewski were already among the missing. Walking Hector seems to be more and more difficult. Parisians leave their cars along the curbs without an inch of space; beyond them traffic flies by like driven hail. When Magda, of all people, noticed that those few trees were missing, he felt unreasonable dismay, as if every last thing that mattered to him had been felled. Why don’t they leave us alone? he thought. He had been holding silent conversations with no one in particular for some time. Then the letter came and he began addressing his friend. He avoids certain words, such as “problem,” “difficulty,” “catastrophe,” and says instead, “A state of affairs.”

The Nansen passports are being called in. Three people he knows, aged between eighty-one and eighty-eight, have had letters from the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs: the bureau that handles those rare and special passports is closing down. Polish political refugees do not exist any longer. They have been turned into Polish citizens (this is the first they’ve heard of it) and should apply to their own embassy for suitable documents. Two of the new citizens are an engraver, who still works in an unheatable studio on the far side of Montmartre,
and another artist, a woman, who once modelled a strong, stunning likeness of Magda. She could not afford to have it cast, and the original got broken or was lost – he can’t remember. It was through a work of art that he understood his wife’s beauty. Until then he had been proud of her charm and distinction. He liked to watch her at the piano; he watched more than he listened, perhaps. The third is a former critic of Eastern European literature who at some point fell into a depression and gave up bothering with letters.

“… and so, ipso facto, Polish citizens,” the engraver told M. Wroblewski, over the telephone. “What are they going to do with us? Ship us back to Poland? Are we part of a quota now? At our age, we are better off stateless.” Perhaps it is true. They never travel and do not need passports. Everyone has a place to live, an income of sorts. Two of the three still actually earn money. In a way, they look after one another.

No one has made a move. As the engraver says, when you are dealing with world-level bureaucracy, it is smarter to sit still. By the time you have decided how to react, all the rules may have been changed.

It is true and not true. One can quietly shift a pawn without causing a riot. M. Wroblewski’s attitude runs to lines of defense. Probably, some clerk at the Ministry is striking off names in alphabetical order and is nowhere close to the “W”s. After several false starts, he has written and mailed a letter to the Quai d’Orsay asking for French citizenship. He might have applied years ago, of course, but in the old days refusal was so consistent that one was discouraged at the outset. By the time he and Magda had their work, their apartment, their precious passports, the last thing they wanted was to fill in another form, stand in another line. He made no mention in the letter of refugees, status, or citizenship – other than French – but drew attention to the number of years he had lived in France, his fluent French, and his admiration for the culture. He spoke of the ancient historical links between
Poland and France, touched briefly on the story of Napoleon and Mme. Waleska, and reminded the Ministry that he had never been behind with the rent or overdrawn at the bank.

(He sent the letter more than a month ago. So far, there has been no word from the Quai d’Orsay: an excellent sign. One can coast with perfect safety on official silence.)

In the meantime, something new has turned up. About three weeks ago he received a personal letter from the bank, written on a real typewriter, signed with real ink: no booklets, no leaflets, no pictures of a white-haired couple looking the Sphinx in the eye or enjoying Venice. There was just the personal message and one other thing, a certificate. “Certificate” was printed in thick black letters, along with his name, correctly spelled. A Mme. Carole Fournier, of Customers’ Counselling Service, entreated him to sign the certificate, ask for an appointment, and bring it to her desk. (Her own signature seemed to him open and reliable, though still untried by life.) According to Mme. Fournier, and for reasons not made clear, he was among a handful of depositors – aristocrats, in their way – to whom the bank was proposing a cash credit of fifteen thousand francs. The credit was not a loan, not an overdraft, but a pool into which he could dip, without paying interest, any time he needed ready money but did not wish to touch his savings. The sums drawn from that fund would be replaced at the rate of two thousand francs a month, transferred from his current account. There was no interest or surcharge: he read that part twice.

For fifteen thousand francs he could fly to Australia, he supposed, or go on a cruise to the Caribbean. He could buy Magda a sumptuous fur coat. He would do none of those things, but the offer was generous and not to be rejected out of hand. He had opened an account with his first salary check in France: perhaps the bank wanted to show gratitude for years of loyalty. Besides his current account, he possessed two savings accounts. One of these is tax-free, limited by law to a
deposit of fifteen thousand francs – by coincidence, the very amount he was being offered. Some people, he supposed, would grab the whole thing and dribble it away on nonsense, then feel downcast and remorseful as they watched their current account dwindle, month after month. The gift was a bright balloon with a long string attached. The string could be passed from hand to hand – to the bank and back. He saw himself holding fast to the string.

Before he had a chance to do anything about it, he had a dizzy spell in the street and had to enter a private art gallery and ask to sit down. (They were not very nice about it. There was only one chair, occupied by a lady addressing envelopes.) His doctor ordered him to take a week’s rest, preferably miles away from home. The preparation that was required – finding someone to sleep at the flat, two other people to come in during the afternoons and on the weekend – was more wearing than just keeping on; but he obeyed, left nothing undone, turned Hector over to the concierge, and caught the train for Saint-Malo. Years before, in an era of slow trains and chilly hotels, he had taken some of his students there. Uncomplaining, they ate dry sandwiches and apples and pitched the apple cores from the ramparts. This time he was alone in a wet season. Under a streaming umbrella he walked the ramparts again and when the sky cleared visited Chateaubriand’s grave; and from the edge of the grave took the measure of the ocean. He had led his students here, too, and told them everything about Chateaubriand (everything they could take in) but did not say that Sartre had urinated on the grave. It might have made them laugh.

He left the grave and the sea and started back to the walled city. He thought of other violations and of the filth that can wash over quiet lives. In the dark afternoon the lighted windows seemed exclusive, like careless snubs. He would write to his friend, “I wondered what I was doing there, looking at other people’s windows, when I have a home of my
own.” The next day he changed his train reservation and returned to Paris before the week was up.

Magda recognized him but did not know he had been away. She asked if he had been disturbed by the neighbor who played Schubert on the piano all night long. (Perhaps the musician existed, he sometimes thought, and only Magda could hear him.) “You must tell him to stop,” she said. He promised he would.

Mme. Carole Fournier, Customers’ Counselling Service, turned out to be an attractive young woman, perhaps a bit thin in the face. Her hollow cheeks gave her a birdlike appearance, but when she turned to the computer screen beside her desk her profile reminded him of an actress, Elzbieta Barszczewska. When Barszczewska died, in her white wedding dress, at the end of a film called
The Leper
, the whole of Warsaw went into mourning. Compared with Barszczewska, Pola Negri was nothing.

The plastic rims of Mme. Fournier’s glasses matched the two red combs in her hair. Her office was a white cubicle with a large window and no door. Her computer, like all those he had noticed in the bank, had a screen of azure. It suggested the infinite. On its cerulean surface he could read, without straining, facts about himself: his date of birth, for one. Between white lateral blinds at the window he observed a bakery and the post office where he bought stamps and sent letters. Hector, tied to a metal bar among chained and padlocked bikes, was just out of sight. Had the window been open, one might have heard his plaintive barking. M. Wroblewski wanted to get up and make sure the dog had not been kidnapped, but it would have meant interrupting the charming Mme. Fournier.

She glanced once more at the blue screen, then came back to a four-page questionnaire on her desk. He had expected a welcome. So far, it had been an interrogation. “I am sorry,”
she said. “It’s my job. I have to ask you this. Are you sixty-six or over?”

“I am flattered to think there could be any doubt in your mind,” he began. She seemed so young; his voice held a note of teasing. She could have been a grandchild, if generations ran as statistics want them to. He might have sent her picture to his friend in Warsaw: red combs, small hands, zodiac (Gemini) medallion on a chain. Across the street a boy came out of the bakery carrying several long loaves, perhaps for a restaurant. She waited. How long had she been waiting? She held a pen poised over the questionnaire.

“I celebrated my sixty-sixth birthday on the day General de Gaulle died,” he said. “I do not mean that I celebrated the death of that amazing man. It made me very sorry. I was at the theatre, with my wife. The play was
Ondine
, with Isabelle Adjani. It was her first important part. She must have been seventeen. She was the toast of Paris. Lovely. A nymph. After the curtain calls, the director of the theatre walked on, turned to the audience, and said the President was dead.” She seemed still to be waiting. He continued, “The audience gasped. We filed out without speaking. My wife finally said, ‘The poor man. And how sad, on your birthday.’ I said, ‘It is history.’ We walked home in the rain. In those days one could walk in the street after midnight. There was no danger.”

Her face had reflected understanding only at the mention of Isabelle Adjani. He felt bound to add, “I think I’ve made a mistake. It was not President de Gaulle after all. It was President Georges Pompidou whose death was announced in all the theatres of Paris. I am not sure about Adjani. My wife always kept theatre programs. I could look it up, if it interests you.”

“It’s about your being sixty-six or over,” she said. “You’ll have to take out a special insurance policy. It’s to protect the bank, you see. It doesn’t cost much.”