Little Jewel (5 page)

It was dark, and yet it was barely five o'clock. Silence everywhere, the same silence I had known at Fossombronne-la-Forêt, at the same time of day and at the same age as the little girl. I suspect that, at that age, I, too, had an adult's
handwriting. I got into trouble because I stopped using a fountain pen, and wrote with a ballpoint instead. Out of curiosity, I checked what the little girl was using: a ballpoint. At her school, in Rue de la Ferme, they probably allowed students to use Bic pens with transparent tips and black, red or green lids. Did she know how to do capital letters? In any case, I doubted they still taught edged-pen lettering.

They took me back to the ground floor. On the left, a double door opened onto a large empty room, at the end of which was a desk. Monsieur Valadier was sitting on the corner of the desk, talking on the telephone. A chandelier cast a harsh light over him. He was speaking in a strange-sounding language that only Moreau-Badmaev could have understood: perhaps Persian of the plains. A cigarette was stuck in the corner of his mouth. He waved to me.

‘Say hello to the Moulin Rouge for me,' Madame Valadier whispered, staring at me with a sad look as if she envied me going back to that neighbourhood.

‘Goodbye, Madame.'

It had slipped out but still she corrected me. ‘No. Goodbye, Véra.'

So I repeated it: ‘Goodbye, Véra.' Was that actually her name or had she chosen it, one day at Lycée Jules-Ferry
when she was feeling sad, because she didn't like her real name?

She proceeded towards the door with the lithe gait of aloof, unfathomable blonde women.

‘Walk with mademoiselle for a bit,' she said to her daughter. ‘There's a good girl.'

The little girl nodded and gave me an anxious look.

‘I often send her round the block at night. She likes it. It makes her feel like a big girl. The other evening she even wanted to do a second trip…She wants to practise so she's not frightened anymore.'

From behind us, at the end of the room, the gentle voice of Monsieur Valadier reached me, in between long stretches of silence and, each time, I wondered if his telephone conversation had come to an end.

‘Soon, you won't be frightened of the dark anymore, and we won't have to leave the light on so you can go to sleep.'

Madame Valadier opened the front door. When I saw that the little girl was about to go outside wearing only her skirt and blouse, I said, ‘Perhaps you should put on a coat.'

She seemed surprised and almost reassured that I might give her advice, and she turned to her mother.

‘Yes, yes…Go and put on your coat.'

She ran up the stairs. Madame Valadier looked at me intently with her clear, pale eyes.

‘Thank you,' she said. ‘You'll know how to look after her…We are sometimes so lost, my husband and I…'

She was still staring at me with a look that made me think she was about to cry. And yet her face remained impassive and there was not the slightest trace of a tear.

We had gone further than around the block. I said to the little girl, ‘Perhaps you should go back home now.'

But she wanted to keep walking with me. I explained that I had to go and catch the metro.

As we went along the avenue, it felt as if I had been here before. The smell of the dead leaves and the damp earth reminded me of something. It was the same feeling I'd had in the little girl's bedroom. Everything I had wanted to forget up until now or, rather, everything I had avoided thinking about, like someone with vertigo trying not to look down, all of it was going to emerge bit by bit, and now I was ready to face up to it. We were walking down the path that
runs along the Jardin d'Acclimatation, and the little girl took my hand to cross the avenue in the direction of the Porte Maillot.

‘Do you live far away?'

She asked the question as if she hoped that I'd take her home with me. We had reached the entrance of the metro. I was convinced that if I just said the word she would follow me down the steps and never return to her parents. I knew exactly how she felt. It even seemed as if that was how it was meant to be.

‘Now it's my turn to walk you home.'

She seemed crestfallen at the prospect. But I told her that next week I would take her for a trip in the metro. We were walking back along the path. It was two or three weeks after I thought I had recognised my mother in the corridors of Châtelet station. I imagined her at this time of day, crossing the courtyard of the apartment block, on the other side of Paris, wearing her yellow coat. On the stairs, she would stop on each landing.
A missed opportunity. What is lost will never be found
. Perhaps in twenty years' time, the little girl, like me, would find her parents again, one evening at peak hour, in those same corridors where the train connections were signposted.

There was a light on in one of the French windows on the ground floor, in the room where Monsieur Valadier had been on the telephone. I rang the bell, but no one came. The little girl was quiet, as if she was used to this sort of situation. After a while, she said, ‘They've gone,' and she smiled and shrugged. I considered taking her back to my place to spend the night. She must have read my mind. ‘Yes…I'm sure they've gone.' She wanted to persuade me that we had no further reason to stay here, but, just to be sure, I went up to the lighted window and peered in. The room was empty. I rang the doorbell again. Finally, someone was coming. The instant the door opened a crack, in a ray of light, I saw the little girl's face fill with awful disappointment. It was her father. He was wearing a coat.

‘Have you been here for long?' he asked in a tone of polite indifference. ‘Do you want to come in?'

He spoke to us as if we were visitors who had called by unannounced.

He leaned over to the little girl. ‘So, did you have a nice long walk?'

She didn't answer.

‘My wife has left to have dinner with some friends,' he said, ‘and I was just about to join her.'

The little girl hesitated before going inside. She looked at me one last time and said, ‘See you tomorrow,' her tone apprehensive, as if she wasn't sure whether I'd come back. Monsieur Valadier was smiling vaguely. Then the door shut behind them.

I stood, not moving, on the other side of the boulevard, under the trees. On the second floor, a light went on in the window of the little girl's room. Soon, I saw Monsieur Valadier hurry out of the house. He got into a black car. She must have been alone in the house and left a light on so she could go to sleep. I thought of how lucky we'd been: a little later, and no one would have come to open the door.

ON THE FOLLOWING Sunday—or the Sunday after that—I went back to Vincennes. I wanted to go earlier than I had the other times, before nightfall. This time I got out at the end of the line, at Château de Vincennes. It was sunny that autumn Sunday and, once again, as I wandered past the château and turned into Rue du Quartier-de-Cavalerie, I felt as if I was in a provincial town. I was the only person out walking, and at the top of the street, behind a wall, I heard the clopping of horses' hooves.

I slipped into a daydream about what might have been: after many years away, I had just got off the train at a little station in my ‘home country'. I can't remember which book it was where I first came across the expression ‘home country'. Those two words must have connected with something that
affected me deeply or else stirred up a memory. After all, in my childhood, I had also known a country railway station, where I used to arrive from Paris, wearing that label around my neck, with my name written on it.

As soon as I caught sight of the apartment block at the end of the street, my dream vanished. There was no such thing as my home country, only an outlying suburb where no one was waiting for me.

I went through the gate and knocked on the concierge's lodge. She poked her head through the half-open door. She seemed to recognise me, even though we had only spoken once before. She was wearing a pink woollen dressing-gown.

‘I wanted to ask you about Madame…Boré.'

I faltered over the name and feared she might not know who I was talking about. But this time she didn't need to consult the list of tenants stuck on the door.

‘The woman on the fourth floor of A?'

‘Yes.'

I'd made a point of remembering which floor. Since I'd discovered that it was the fourth, I often imagined her moving more and more slowly as she climbed the steps. One night, I even dreamed that she fell down the stairwell. When
I woke up, I couldn't tell if it was suicide or an accident. Or perhaps I had pushed her.

‘You've been here before—the other day, wasn't it…'

‘Yes.'

She smiled at me. I looked like someone she could trust.

‘You know she's up to her old tricks again…' Her tone was indifferent, as if nothing about the woman on the fourth floor of A could surprise her. ‘Are you family?'

I was afraid to say yes. And bring down the ancient curse on myself, the stigma from back then.

‘No. Not at all.'

In the nick of time, I had avoided being sucked into the slime.

‘I know some of her family,' I said. ‘They sent me to find out how she is…'

‘What do you want me to tell you? Nothing has changed, you know.' She shrugged. ‘She won't even talk to me anymore. Or else she'll have a go at me for no reason.'

I was not surprised by anything she said. Now, even after all these years, a vision rose before me, as if it had emerged from the deep: the grimacing face, the dilated eyes, and something like spittle on those lips. And the
screeching voice, and the stream of abuse. Anyone who didn't know her would not have been able to imagine the abrupt transformation of such a beautiful face. I could feel myself in the grip of fear again.

‘Have you come to visit her?'

‘No.'

‘You need to tell her family that she isn't paying her rent anymore.'

Those words, and perhaps also the neighbourhood where I went to pick up the little girl every afternoon, made me think of the apartment near the Bois de Boulogne which, in spite of myself, I still remembered: the large room with three steps covered in plush; the painting by Tola Soungouroff; my bedroom, even more empty than the little girl's. How did she pay the rent back then?

‘It will be tricky to kick her out. And, anyway, she's known around the neighbourhood. They've even given her a nickname…'

‘What is it?' I was genuinely curious. Was it the same one she had twenty years ago?

‘They call her Death Cheater.'

She said it kindly, as if it were a term of affection.

‘Sometimes we think she's going to give up the ghost
and then the next day she's cheerful and charming, or else she does something really nasty.'

For me, the nickname had another meaning. I'd been under the impression that she'd died in Morocco and now I was discovering that she'd been resuscitated somewhere in the suburbs of Paris.

‘Has she lived here long?' I asked.

‘Oh, yes! She was here well before me. It must be more than six years now.'

So, she was living in this building while I was still at Fossombronne-la-Forêt. I recalled an overgrown vacant block that we called Kraut's Field, not far from the church. On Thursday afternoons, when there was no school, we used to explore the jungle there, or play hide-and-seek. The remains of a helmet and a mouldy pea coat had been found on the block—no doubt left by a soldier at the end of the war—and we were always afraid of coming across his skeleton. I didn't know what Kraut meant. Frédérique, the woman who knew my mother, and who had taken me into her home, wasn't there the day I asked her friend, the brunette with the boxer's face, what it meant. Perhaps she thought I was frightened by the word and wanted to reassure me. She smiled and told me that it was a name people used for the Germans,
but that it wasn't really a rude word. ‘And your mother was called the Kraut…It was a joke.'

Frédérique wasn't very happy that the brunette had told me this, but she didn't elaborate. She was my mother's friend—they must have known each other when my mother was ‘a dancer'. Frédérique Chatillon was her full name. Her women friends were always at the house in Fossombronne-la-Forêt, even when she wasn't there: Rose-Marie, Jeannette, Madeleine-Louis, others whose names I've forgotten, and the brunette who had also known my mother when she was ‘a dancer' and who didn't like her.

‘Does she live alone?' I asked the concierge.

‘For a long time, there was a man who used to visit her. He worked with horses somewhere around here. He looked North African.'

‘Doesn't he come anymore?'

‘Not for a while.'

Because of all my questions, she was starting to look at me somewhat suspiciously. I was tempted to tell her everything. My mother went to Paris when she was young. She was a dancer. They called her the Kraut. They called me Little Jewel. It was too long and complicated to explain right there, outside, in the courtyard of this apartment block.