The Chateau (36 page)

Even so, Eugène did not waken. He had to open the study door and go in and, bending over the bed, shake him into sensibility.

“Il y a un catastrophe!” Harold said loudly.

There was a silence, and then Eugène said, without moving: “Une catastrophe?”

The pounding was resumed, the bell started ringing again, and Eugène sat up and reached for his dressing gown. Harold turned and ran back to the kitchen. Awake at last, he managed to get the door open. The concierge and a boy of fifteen burst
in upon him. They were both angry and excited, and he had no idea what they were saying to him. The single word “inondation” was all he understood. The concierge turned the kitchen light on. Harold listened to the cascade. A considerable quantity of water must be flowing over the red-tiled floor and out the door and down six flights of the winding metal stair that led down into the courtyard, presumably. And maybe from there the water was flowing into the concierge's quarters. In any case, it was clear that she blamed him, a stranger in the apartment, for everything.

Eugène appeared, with his brocade dressing gown over his pajamas, and his massive face as calm and contained as if he were about to sit down to breakfast. Without bothering to remove the Turkish slippers, he waded over to the sink and stood examining the faucets. He and the concierge and the boy carried on a three-way conversation that excluded foreigners by its rapidity, volubility, and passion. They turned the faucets on and off. With their eyes, with their searching hands, they followed the exposed water pipes around the walls of the kitchen, and, passing over the electric hot-water heater, arrived eventually at a small iron stove—for coal, apparently, and not a cooking stove. (There were three of those in the kitchen.) It was cylindrical, five feet high, and two feet in diameter, with an asbestos-covered stove pipe rising from the top and disappearing into a flue in the wall. The concierge bent down and opened the door of the ash chamber. From this unlikely source a further quantity of water flowed out over the floor and down the back stairs. For a moment, as if he had received the gift of tongues, Harold understood what Eugène and the concierge and the boy were saying. Eugène inquired about the apartment directly below. The people who lived there were away, the concierge said, and she had no key; so there was no way of knowing whether that apartment also was being flooded. A plumber? Not at this hour, she said, and looked at Harold balefully. Then she turned her attention to the pipes in the pantry, and Eugène stood in front of the
electric hot-water heater, which was over the sink. Yesterday morning he had put the plug into the wall socket and explained that the heater took care of the hot water for the dishes. He said nothing about removing the plug when they were finished, and so, remembering how the light in the elevator and the light on the sixth-floor landing both extinguished themselves, barely leaving time to reach the door of the apartment before you were in total darkness, they had left the heater in charge of its own current. Foolishly, Harold now saw, because it must be the heater. Unless by some mischance he had forgotten to turn the gas off after Barbara's bath, last night. He distinctly remembered turning the gas off, and even so the thought was enough to make him have to sit down in a chair until the strength came back into his knees. Once more he inquired if the flood was something that he and Barbara had done. Eugène glanced around thoughtfully, but instead of answering, he joined the search party in the pantry. Cupboard doors were opened and shut. Pipes were examined. Hearing the word “chauffage” again and again from the pantry, Harold withdrew to the bathroom at the end of the hall, expecting to discover the worst—the gas heater left burning all night, a burst pipe, and water everywhere. The heater was cold and the bathroom floor was dry. He was on the point of absolving himself of all responsibility for the inundation when a thought crossed his mind—a quite hideous thought, judging by the expression that accompanied it. He went down the hall past the kitchen and opened the door of the little room that contained the toilet.

As a piece of plumbing, the toilet was done for. It only operated at all out of good will. Last night, while they were getting ready for bed, he had heard it flushing, and then flushing again, and again; and thinking to avoid just such a situation as had now happened, he got the kitchen stepladder, climbed up on it, reached into the water chamber, and closed the valve, intending to open it when they got up in the morning. By so doing, he now realized, he had upset the entire system. It could only be
that; they hadn't been near the iron boiler in the kitchen from which water so freely flowed. And it was only a question of time before the search, now confined to the pantry, would lead Eugène, the concierge, and the boy to the real source of the trouble. Nevertheless, like Adam denying the apple, he climbed up on the stepladder and opened the valve. The water chamber filled slowly and then the pipes grew still.

As he reached the kitchen door, the search party brushed past him and went into Eugène's bathroom. Harold turned and went back to their bedroom. Barbara had got up out of bed and was sitting at the window, with her dressing gown wrapped around her, smoking a cigarette.

“Look up the word ‘chauffage,' ” he said. “The dictionary is in the pocket of my brown coat,” and he went on down the hall. Ignoring the gas heater, Eugène searched for and found a valve behind the tub. As soon as the valve was closed, the bathtub began to fill with rusty red water gurgling up out of the drainpipe. He hurriedly opened the valve, and the water receded, leaving a guilty stain.

“ ‘Chauffage' means heating or a heating system,” Barbara said, as Harold came into the bedroom. He closed the door behind him.

“Did he say it was our fault?” she asked.

“I asked him five times and just now he finally said ‘Heureusement oui.' ”

“That doesn't make any sense, ‘heureusement oui.' ”

“I know it doesn't, but that's what he said. It
must
be our fault. We ought never to have come here.”

The voices and the heavy footsteps passed their door, returning to the kitchen, and wearily he went in pursuit of them. They still had not found the valve that controlled the water pipes, and the cascade down the back stairs was unabated. The landing and the stair well were included in the area under investigation. Locating a new valve, Eugène left his sodden Turkish slippers inside the kitchen door and went into the front of the apartment;
opened the door of the huge sculptured armoire and took out a cigar box; opened the cigar box and took out a pair of pliers.

“There is something I have to tell you,” Harold said. “I'm awfully sorry but last night the toilet didn't work properly and so I got the kitchen stepladder and …”

Eugène listened abstractedly to this confession and when it was finished he asked where Harold had put the stepladder. Then he went into the little room where the toilet was, picked up the stepladder, and carried it out to the back landing. With the pliers, standing on the stepladder, he closed a valve in the pipeline out there. He and the concierge and the boy listened. Their faces conveyed uncertainty, and then hope, and then triumph, as the sound of falling water began to diminish. It took some time and further discussion, a gradual letting down of tension and a round of congratulations, before the concierge and the boy left. Eugène put away the stepladder and picked up the mop. As he started mopping up the red tiles, Harold said: “Barbara and I will clean the kitchen up.”

Eugène stopped and stared at him, and then said: “The floor will be dirty unless it is mopped.” They stood looking at each other helplessly. He must think we don't understand anything at all, Harold thought.

“I'm very sorry that your sleep has been disturbed,” Eugène said.

Harold studied his face carefully, thinking that he must be speaking sarcastically. He was not. The apology was sincere. Once more, with very little hope of a sensible answer, Harold asked if they had caused the trouble.

“This sort of thing happens since the war,” Eugène said. The building is old and needs new plumbing. Now that the water is turned off, there is nothing more that we can do until the plumber comes and fixes the leak.”

“Was it caused by turning the water off in the toilet?”

Eugène turned and indicated the little iron stove, inside which a pipe had burst, for no reason.

“Then it wasn't our fault?”

For a few seconds Eugène seemed to be considering not what Harold had just said but Harold himself. He looked at him the way cats look at people, and did something that cats are too polite ever to do: he laughed. Then he turned and resumed his mopping.

Standing on the balcony outside their room, Harold lit a cigarette. Barbara was in bed and he couldn't tell whether she was asleep or not. The swallows were darting over the roof tops. Directly below him, so straight down that it made him dizzy to look, an old man was silently searching through the garbage cans. On the blue pavement he had placed four squares of blue cloth, and when he found something of value he put it on one or the other of them.

The stoplights at the intersection at the foot of the hill changed from red to green, from green to red. The moon, in its last quarter, was white in a pearly pink sky. The discovery that it was not their fault had come too late. They had had so much time to feel they were to blame that they might just as well have been. Too tired to care any longer, he left the balcony and got into bed. A moment later, he got up and took his wallet out of his coat and found a five-hundred-franc note and then returned to the balcony. When the old man looked up he would make signals at him. Though he waited patiently, the old man did not look up. Instead, he tied his four pieces of cloth at the corners and went off down the street, which by now had admitted it was morning.

A
WAKENED OUT OF A DEEP SLEEP
by a silvery sound, Harold sat up in bed. It was broad daylight outside. The telephone? he thought wildly. The front door? Or the back? Whatever it was, Barbara was sleeping right through it.

He got up and followed his own wet footprints down the gray carpeting until he came to the foyer. This time when he opened the front door someone was there—the concierge, smiling and cordial, with three blond young men. One of them had a brief case, and they didn't look at all like plumbers. The concierge asked for M. de Boisgaillard, and Harold knocked on the study door and fled.

Ten minutes later, he heard a faint tap on their door.

“Yes?”

As he sat up in bed, the door opened and Eugène came in. Keeping his voice low because Barbara was still asleep, he said: “The people you let in— They just arrived in Paris this morning, from Berlin.” He hesitated.

Harold perceived that Eugène was telling him this because there was something they could do for him. Eugène was not in the habit of asking for favors, and it was painful for him to have to now. What he was going to say would alter somewhat the situation between them and him, but he was going to say it anyway.

“They have no money, and they haven't had any breakfast.”

“You'd like Barbara to make breakfast for them?” Harold asked, and found himself face to face with his lost friend, Eugène the way he used to be before that picnic on the banks of the Loire.

Bread, oranges, marmalade, eggs, honey—all bought the afternoon before, and with their money. Nescafe in the big suitcase, sugar cubes in the small one. All the wealth of America to feed the hungry of Europe.

“There is plenty of everything,” he said.

“Plenty?” Eugène repeated, unconvinced.

“Plenty,” Harold said, nodding.

“Good.”

The image of a true friend was dimmer; was fading like a rainbow or any other transitory natural phenomenon, but it was still visible. When Eugène left, Harold woke Barbara, and as he
was hurriedly getting into his clothes he began to whistle. It was their turn to do something for Eugène. And if they cared to, they could be both preoccupied and moody as they went about it.

When Barbara wheeled the teacart into Mme Cestre's drawing room, the four heads were raised. The four men rose, and the Germans clicked their heels politely as Eugène presented them to her and then to Harold, who had come in after her. All three were pale, thin, and nervous. One had pink-tinted rimless glasses, and one had ears that stuck straight out from his head, and one was tall and blond (the pure Nordic abstraction, the race that never was) with wide, bony shoulders, concave chest, hollow stomach, and the trousers of a much heavier man hanging from his hip bones.

“Do sit down,” Barbara said.

Herr von Rothenberg, the Nordic type, spoke French and English fluently, and the two others told him what they wanted to say and he translated for them. They had traveled as far as the French border by plane, and from there by train. They had arrived in Paris at daybreak.

“We were very surprised,” Herr von Rothenberg said to the Americans. “We did not expect to find Paris intact. We had understood that it was largely ruins, like London and Berlin.”