Bella... A French Life (16 page)

Four thousand eight hundred and forty two: arranged alphabetically starting with A.Abdel-Malek’s
‘Egypte; Société Militaire’
which my father bought and ending with Stefan Zweig’s ‘
The Royal Game’
, which I bought from one of Paris’ bouquinists.

“Which is the last book you’ve read?” he asks.

I shrug, not sure to tell him about the German dictionary.

“No, don’t reply to that. It was a stupid question. A childish one. I apologise.”

“My father’s German dictionary,” I reply all the same, and of course, in all honesty.

“Lord! I do not think I’ve ever heard of anyone reading a dictionary. I had a landlady once in Rome who read recipe books though.”

“The dictionary caught my eye and I felt an urge to flip through it. I was not reading it as such. My eye then fell on a word.”

“It would be interesting to know which word it was.”

“It was the word
schicksal
.”

“... destiny? Am I right to think it means destiny?”

I nod. I wait for his reaction, my lips tightly closed.

“Interesting.”

“Do you believe in destiny, Colin?”

“I was going to ask you whether you do.”

“I do not know whether I do.”

“Your compatriot Voltaire did.”

“You are referring to his
Zadig ou la Destinée
.”

“You’ve read it!”

“Had to. School, you know. But I’ve a copy in my library. I did not buy it though. The book was my father’s. It’s a collector’s item. Must be worth a small fortune. ”

“Well, Voltaire was not the only one to believe one’s life has been predestined and its course is beyond our - beyond human - control.  May I speak of Pasternak?”

“Of course. Please do.”

“The Russian speaks of
sud’ba
which my Russian-English dictionary translates as
destiny.
Destiny or
fate
. Life deals us our cards but - and this is the interpretation - we alone play the cards. One cold October day, snow cascading down on Moscow, Pasternak walked into the
Novy Mir
office and someone said to him:
Boris Leonidovich, let me introduce one of your most ardent admirers.
The admirer was Olga Ivinskaya, and so began one of the world’s greatest but saddest love stories. That is
sud’ba
. Nearer home - a man who hated shopping and therefore tried never to have to go into a shop - had to buy a young lady, whom he was taking out for dinner, a bouquet of flowers so he had no choice but to go to a florist shop. It was in the cards which he had been dealt that from behind the counter stepped a most beautiful girl. Six months later they were married. That man was my father and the girl in the florist shop was my mother. That too is
sud’ba.
”

“That’s beautiful,” I say.

“That’s romantic. What we all need,” he says.

The grandfather clock starts to chime.
He lives to silence all my fears ... He lives to wipe away my tears ... He lives to calm my troubled heart ... He lives all blessings to impart ...
 

I wait for the time to strike. It is a quarter past nine. Just as my father used to do, Colin sung quietly to the chime. His voice, like that of my father, is a baritone.

Is it my imagination or did I this time find solace in those words?

Not wanting to know, I drop my eyes and hurriedly I resume eating, my knife and fork scraping over the porcelain. There is no movement or sound from Colin. Is he looking at me? I feel that so he is, but I do not dare look up and at him. I continue eating. My
poulet bonne femme
has turned out quite tasty; not too salty, not tough, yet not overcooked either. I hear Colin clear his throat.

“I wonder - I wonder if your clock will fit onto my bike? I would just love to take it with me when I leave.”

His voice was loud and jovial. Too jovial to be natural.

When I leave
was what he said.
Of course he will leave.
 

The clock is ticking the seconds away. The ticking is suddenly ear-splittingly loud. Tick tock! Tick tock! Time never stands still.

“You would have to dismantle the clock. Break it up into pieces,” I say, looking up.

He nods. It is a nod which has a waiting quality to it.

He rests his elbows on the table and drops his chin into his cupped hands and looks straight at me, wordlessly.

He is playing with me. God Almighty, he is playing with me; the cat playing with the mouse, waiting for his moment to strike. The cat’s eyes are asking: Are you frightened of me … because if you are not, you ought to be, because I am capable of devouring you! I will devour you!

No, bloody hell, this mouse is not for devouring.

“I’ll wash up,” I say.

“I’ll come and help you.”

“No!”

The word was almost a shout.

“In that case, I will go see if I can write a couple of hundred words. I won’t type - don’t worry. Rest assured, I won’t type at night and rob you of your sleep.”

At the door, he turns.

“I almost forgot to say, I will be out all of tomorrow.”

“So will I.”

I lied.

“In that case, don’t prepare anything for dinner. I will grab something when I’m out. I will be off first thing in the morning, so I won’t be having breakfast either. And oh yes, at what time at night will you be locking the front door?”

“I won’t lock the door, not tomorrow night. You can lock it once you’re back in.”

-0-

Chapter Twenty-One

Larissa is a redhead today. When I last came to the salon - about three months ago - she was a champagne-blonde. I have always found her regal in the Catherine Deneuve way; friendly but not to the extent of hugging and kissing her clients addressing them as
ma chérie
.

“Good morning, Dr Wolff. What can we do for you this morning?”

Larissa shows me to a lilac chair in front of a heart-shaped mirror within a lilac frame.

“Oh Larissa, just the usual,” I tell her.

“The usual no longer looks like the usual, Doctor Wolff.”

“Tell it to me, Larissa!”

“You should come in more often, Doctor Wolff.”

She’s a name person: it will be Doctor Wolff this and Doctor Wolff that as long as I am in here.
Should not have come
.

The tap water is cold.

“How’s this for temperature, Doctor Wolff?”

“Could be a little warmer, thanks.”

Her assistant, a young gay with green spiked hair, puts a cup of black coffee down beside the wash basin. Larissa tells him to take it back to the kitchen and to keep it warm as I will still be under the tap for a while. She pours cold shampoo over my hair twice and after having rubbed it in thoroughly, her long, red nails, digging into my scalp, she applies a cream conditioner. It smells of coconut; coconut as she tells me will make my hair grow really fast.

“Just don’t get it onto your face because you will become all hairy. Ghrr!”

Jonny - the assistant - laughs revealing beautifully white teeth; he must have had an adoring mother who took him to the dentist every six months as our Ministry of Health advises, his equally adoring papa not having minded settling the bill.

When I was a child, I hated going to the dentist. It was excruciatingly painful - emotionally painful.  Dr Henri Brodard was the dentist’s name. His son was Baudelaire Brodard; he was my first ever boyfriend. Recalling both of the Brodards is still excruciatingly emotionally painful for me, but as there was not another dentist in Sainte-Marie-sur-Brecque it was not as if my mother could have taken Marius and me elsewhere to have our cavities filled. And … Baudelaire was at my school, a class ahead of me, and with his Californian surfing looks - curly blond hair, bulging biceps and sky-blue eyes - he was not easy to ignore.

Dr Brodard was a Second World War hero. When France capitulated to the Nazi Germans in 1940, he set sail in the family pleasure boat for Dover and joined General Charles de Gaulle’s Free French in London. There are two kinds of French. There are those who resisted the Nazi Germans and those who joined them - the collaborators. But no, I need to correct myself here. There was still another kind; the women who, like my mother had slept with German soldiers, either for money or for love, the one kind having been, to their compatriots, as bad as the other. Dr Brodard having been with De Gaulle in London, a detail he never failed to remind his patients of, was therefore of the right stuff.

“Wolff?” he queried, the first time my mother walked into his surgery, her hand firmly clutching mine. “Sounds familiar.”

“We live here. Not in the village itself, but my husband Rodolph and I own and run Le Presbytère.”

“
Ah bon!
”

It was a snort.

He asked my name.

“Bella,” my mother replied on my behalf.

I stood behind her, holding onto her skirt in fear, but at that stage my fear was provoked by the big green apparatus in front of me from which a dangerously sharp drill protruded, and not by the man himself.

“Come, sit down here, Miss Bella.”

He pulled me away from my mother and pushed me down onto the brown leather chair under the big green apparatus. I wiggled in order to sit comfortably and one of my plaits - my hair was combed into two plaits those days - brushed against one of his hands which he went to wash under a tap in the room. He did not close the tap properly and for the rest of our visit it dripped water loudly into the stained sink underneath it.

Not on that visit, but on the next, a week later, Dr Brodard asked my mother straight out at which death camp my father was based during the war.

“He was in France during the war,” she replied.

I could see she was trying hard to smile. Not to get angry.

“So, he was one of those who stole our art works and our wine - and women.”

He looked at my mother, sniffing at the air, as if he could smell a stinking rotten tooth.

At that time, I have not yet read those books about the Second World War, so I did not understand Dr Brodard’s rancour and I thought he, like my mother’s family, just did not like the German people, so his remark did not upset me and I therefore could not understand why my mother cried when she told my father about our day at the dentist. Later, after I have read up about the Second World War and the dishy Baudelaire and I were sharing the sandwiches in our lunch boxes, I was the one who cried after each visit to the dentist. I cried because I so fancied Baudelaire and I wanted to become his wife when I was grown-up but feared his father would never accept me as his daughter-in-law.

Baudelaire - Beau as all in the village called him because of his good looks - and I used to go to the beach. He could swim, but I could not.

”You live by the sea and you can’t swim. Explain that one to me, Bella.”

He said that more than once.

One day he offered to teach me how. Despite my protests, he dragged me into the sea and with a boy’s clumsiness at wooing, he kicked my feet from underneath me, and when I did not surface, he dived down to find me, and pulled me back to the surface.

“
Merde
,” he said.

He shook his head like a wet dog who wanted to get water out of its eyes and ears. Immediately, he apologized for having used such an expletive, and I, wanting to show him I might not be able to swim, but I was certainly grown-up, called him a bugger, and of course I had no idea what the word meant. As there was no reaction of shock from him, I think he also did not know. The two of us - I never called him Beau because I loved the name Baudelaire and I had already decided that one day we would call the son we were going to produce Baudelaire too - used to kiss, but never did we go further than that. As it is, the kisses were never passionate; they were short closed-mouth kisses, his hands always behind his back and mine hanging uncertainly at my sides.

When I set off for the lycée in Nantes, Baudelaire too left, but for one of the top schools of Paris.

“I will write,” he promised.

It was a promise which he sealed with another kiss, one which was a little longer and with more feeling behind it than those previous ones.

“I will wait for your first letter,” I told him.

He never wrote.

Our paths crossed again in Paris when we were both at the Sorbonne but in different faculties because he was studying politics for a career in the diplomatic service. He was with a girl who I thought was a little plump, which surprised me, because he was so athletic and always stopped me from eating sweets saying it would make me fat and
fat was ugly
.

The girl’s name was Anne; her father was a surgeon. Baudelaire told her I was studying medicine.

“Do you think you will make it? It’s awfully hard getting a medical degree, you know,” she told me.

I shot a glance at him, but he failed to come to my defence.

The remark she made at our next meeting hurt me even more. No, hurt is not the correct word: it knocked me sideways.

“Beau tells me your father was a guard in Auschwitz or somewhere equally horrible.” 

She had lifted her voice and all those who sat around us - it was at a concert at the Olympia music hall - swung round to see who the remark had been aimed at.

“My father ... my dad ... was in France during the war and nowhere near a concentration camp,” I muttered.

I did not look at her, and neither at Baudelaire. I looked towards the stage where the musicians were tuning their instruments.

“Drop it, my love,” Baudelaire said to fat Anne looking with love deep into her black eyes.

“No, why should I, Beau? Her father was a goddamn Nazi.”

What was I to reply to that, because, yes, my father was a Nazi; he was in the
Wehrmacht
fighting for Hitler, so he was a Nazi.

That was a night I again pulled the blanket over my head.

-0-

I take Larissa for lunch at the Vaybee because it is Saturday and I do not fancy eating alone in a restaurant on a weekend day. I also invite Jonny but he does not
do lunch;
he is watching his figure.