The Little Man From Archangel (4 page)

There were still some details which he did not understand, but they were material details of no great importance. For example, he always carried his keys in his trouser pocket, attached to a silver chain. When had his wife managed to get hold of them without his knowing? Not at night, because he slept more lightly than she did, and besides he was the first one down in the morning. Occasionally, it was true, in order not to wake her, he would go downstairs in pyjamas and dressing-gown to make his coffee. It had not happened the day before, but the day before that, and he hadn't touched the safe since then.

'Have you got a book about bee-keeping, please?'

It was a boy about twelve years old, who had just come in, and spoken in an assured voice, his face covered in freckles, his copper
-
coloured hair streaked with sunlight.

'Are you thinking of keeping bees?'

'I found a swarm in a tree in the vegetable garden and my parents are going to let me make a hive, provided I do it with my own money.'

Jonas had fair ginger hair too, with freckles on the bridge of his nose. But at this child's age he must have already worn glasses as thick as the ones he was wearing now.

He had wondered to himself sometimes whether on account of his short-sightedness he saw things and people differently from others. The question intrigued him. He had read, for example, that the various species of animals do not see us as we really are, but as their eyes show us to them, and that for some we are ten times as tall, which is what makes them so timid when we approach them.

Does the same phenomenon occur with a short-sighted person, even though his sight is more or less corrected by spectacles? Without glasses the world was to him only a more or less luminous cloud in which floated shapes so insubstantial that he could not be sure of being able to touch them.

His spectacles, on the other hand, revealed to him the details of objects and faces as if he had been looking at them through a magnifying glass or as if they had been engraved.

Did this cause him to live in a separate sphere? Were these spectacles, without which he had to grope his way, a barrier between himself and the world outside?

In a shelf of books about animals he finally found one on bees and bee-hives.

'How about that one?'

'Is it expensive?'

He consulted, on the back cover, the pencilled price.

'A hundred francs.'

'Would you let me have it if I paid half next week?'

Jonas didn't know him. He was not from the neighbourhood. He was a country boy whose mother had probably come into the market with vegetables or poultry.

'You can take it.'

'Thank you. I will be in again next Thursday without fail.'

Outside in the sun of the street and the shade of the covered market the clientele had changed insensibly. Early in the morning there was a preponderance of working-class women doing their shopping after taking their children to school. It was also the time for the vans from the hotels and restaurants.

As early as nine o'clock, and especially around ten o'clock the shoppers were better dressed, and at eleven some of them brought their maids with them to carry the parcels.

The shavings in the gutter, trampled underfoot, were losing their golden hue to turn brown and sticky, and were now becoming mixed with outer leaves of leeks, carrots and fish heads.

Gina had taken no change of clothes with her, no underclothes, not even a coat, though the nights were still cool.

If she had been intending to stay in the town, on the other hand, would she have had the nerve to take his most valuable stamps?

After seven o'clock in the evening, there were no more buses to Bourges, nor for anywhere else, only a train at 8.52 which connected with the Paris train, and, at 9.40, the slow train from Moulins.

The station employees knew her, but he didn't dare go and question them. It was too late. He had twice spoken of Bourges and he was obliged to stick to it.

Why had he behaved in this way? He could not account for it. It was not from fear of ridicule, because everyone, not only in the Place du Vieux-Marché, but throughout the town, knew that Gina had had many lovers before marrying him. It could not have passed unnoticed, either, that since her marriage she had had several adventures.

Was it a sort of shame that had prompted him to reply, first to Le Bouc, then to Palestri:

'She has gone to Bourges.'

Shame which was born of shyness? What happened between him and Gina did not concern anybody else, and he believed himself to be the last person to have any right to discuss it.

But for the disappearance of the stamps he would have waited all day, then all night, hoping from one moment to the next to see her return like a dog which has run away.

The room upstairs had not been done, and the strong box had not been closed, so he went up, made his bed as meticulously as when he was a bachelor and the maid was away.

It was as a maid that Gina had come into the house. Before her there had been another, old Léonie, who at the age of seventy still put in her eight or nine hours a day with different employers. In the end her legs had swollen up. Latterly she could hardly manage to climb the stairs, and as her children, who lived in Paris, did not care to look after her, Doctor Joublin had put her in a home.

For a month Jonas had been without anyone, and it didn't worry him unduly. He knew Gina, like everyone else, through having seen her pass by, or from selling her an occasional book. At that time she had behaved in a provocative manner with him as she used to with all men, and he blushed every time she came into his shop, especially in summer, when it seemed to him that she left behind her a trace of the smell of her armpits.

'Haven't you got anyone yet?' Le Bouc had asked him one morning when he was having his coffee in the little bar.

He had never understood why Le Bouc and the others from the Square did not use the familiar
tu
with him, for they nearly all used it among themselves, calling one another by their Christian names.

They didn't call him Milk, however, almost as if it were not his name, nor Monsieur Milk, but, nearly always, Monsieur Jonas.

And yet at the age of two he was living in the Square, just next door to Ancel's, the butcher's, and it was his father who had converted the fishmonger's,
'A La Marée,'
now kept by the Chenus.

It was not because he had not been to the communal school either, like most of them, but to a private school, then to the
lycée.
The proof was that they were already addressing his father before him as Monsieur Constantin.

Fernand had asked him:

'Haven't you got anybody yet?'

He had replied no, and Le Bouc had leant over his counter.

'You ought to have a word or two with Angèle.'

He had been so surprised that he had asked, as if there could have been two Angèles:

'The greengrocer?'

'Yes. She's having trouble with Gina. She can't do anything with her. I think she wouldn't be sorry to see her working outside so that someone else could break her in.'

Up till then Gina had been more or less helping her mother in the shop, and slipping off at every opportunity.

'You wouldn't like to talk to her yourself?' Jonas had suggested.

It seemed to him incongruous, indecent almost, on his part, as a bachelor, although he had no ulterior motives, to go and ask a woman like Angèle to let him have her daughter for three hours a day.

'I'll have a word with her father. No! I'd better see Angèle. I'll give you her reply tomorrow.'

To his great surprise, the reply next day was yes, or as good as yes, and he was almost frightened by it. Angèle had told Le Bouc, to be precise:

' Tell that Jonas I'll come round and see him.'

She had come, late one afternoon during a slack period, had insisted on seeing over the house, and had discussed wages.

That meant changing his habits, and it was not without reluctance that he gave up going at half-past twelve and sitting in Pepito's little restaurant, where he had his own pigeon-hole for his table-napkin and his bottle of mineral water.

'After all, if she's going to work at all, it might as well be worth her while. It's high time she got down to some cooking, and we hardly have time in our place at midday to eat more than a piece of sausage or some cheese.'

Didn't Gina resent his having engaged her, at first? Anyone would have thought she was doing everything possible to make herself unbearable so that he would throw her out.

After a week with him she was working from nine o'clock in the morning until one. Then Angèle had decided:

'It's absurd to cook for one person alone. It costs no more to do it for two. She might just as well have lunch with you and do the washing-up before leaving.'

Suddenly his life had changed. He didn't know everything, because he didn't hear the gossip, perhaps also because people didn't speak freely in front of him. He didn't understand, at first, why Gina was always in low spirits and why she would suddenly turn aggressive only, soon afterwards, to burst into tears in the middle of her housework.

It was then three months since Marcel Jenot had been arrested and Jonas hardly ever read the papers. He had heard his name mentioned at Le Bouc's, for it had created quite a sensation. Marcel Jenot, the son of a dressmaker who worked for most of the women of the Market, including the Palestris, was under-cook at the Commercial Hotel, the best and most expensive in town. Jonas must have seen him at some time or other without paying any attention. His photograph, in the papers, showed a young man with a high forehead and a serious expression with, however, a rather disquieting curl to his lip.

At twenty-one he had just finished his military service in Indo-China and was once more living with his mother in the Rue des Belles-Feuilles, the street beyond Pepito's restaurant.

Like most young men of his age he owned a motor-cycle. One evening on the Saint-Amand road, a large car-load of Parisians had been stopped by a motor-cyclist who seemed to be asking for help and then, brandishing an automatic, had demanded money from the occupants, after which he had punctured the four tyres of the car and made off.      

The motor-cycles number plate, at the time of the hold-up, was covered with a layer of black paint. How had the police managed to trace it to Marcel? The papers must have explained it, but Jonas didn't know.

The investigation was under way when Gina had gone into service with him, and a month later the trial had taken place at Montluson.

It was Le Bouc who had told the bookseller about it.

'How is Gina?'

'She does her best.'

'Not too upset?'

'Why?'

'Marcel is being tried next week.'

'Which Marcel?'

'The one in the hold-up. It's her boy friend.'

She actually had to stay away for a few days and when she came back to resume work, it was a long time before she opened her mouth.

That had been nearly three years ago now. A year after she had joined him as a housemaid Jonas married her, surprised at what was happening to him. He was thirty-eight and she twenty-two. Even when, in the sunlight, her body almost naked under her dress, she used to move to and fro around him and he breathed her smell, he had never made a single ambiguous gesture.

At Le Bouc's they had adopted the habit of asking him, with a smile at the corner of the mouth: 'Well, well! And how's Gina?' He would reply, naively: 'She's very well.'

Some of them went so far as to give him a wink, which he would pretend not to see, and others seemed to suspect him of keeping something up his sleeve.

By keeping his ears pricked and asking a few questions here and there, he could easily have found out the names of all the lovers Gina had had since she had begun to knock about with men at the age of thirteen. He could also have found out about what had happened between her and Marcel. He was not unaware that she had been questioned several times by the police in the course of the inquiry and that Angèle had been summoned by the magistrate.

What would be the use? It was not in his character. He had always lived alone, without imagining that he would one day be able to live otherwise.

Gina did not keep house as well as old Leonie. Her tablecloths, when she took the trouble to use them, were seldom clean and, if she sometimes sang as she worked, there were days when her face remained set, her mouth truculent.

Often, in the middle of the morning, she would disappear on the pretext of doing some shopping up the road and come back, with no apology, two hours later.

Even so, hadn't her presence in the house become essential to Jonas? Had there been a conspiracy, as some people claimed, to force his hand?

One afternoon Angèle had called in the clothes she always wore during the day in her shop, for she only really dressed up on Sundays. 'Well now, Jonas!'

She was one of the few people not to call him Monsieur Jonas. True, she addressed most of the customers in the most familiar manner.

'Don't touch those pears, love!' she would shout at Doctor Martroux's wife, one of the most prim and proper women in the town. 'When I go to see your husband I don't play with his instruments.' That day she strode into the kitchen and sat down on a chair, 'I've come to tell you I've had an offer for my daughter.'

Her gaze made an inventory of the room, where nothing can have escaped her attention.

'Some people from Paris who have just settled in the town. The husband, an engineer, has been appointed assistant manager of the factory and they are looking for someone. It's a good post, and Gina would get board and lodging. I promised them a reply the day after tomorrow. You can think it over.'

He had had twenty-four hours of panic and had turned the question over in his mind in all its aspects again and again.... As a bachelor he couldn't have a living-in maid. Besides there was only one bedroom in the house. That Angèle knew. So why had she come to offer him a sort of first refusal?

It was difficult enough to keep Gina in the house all day for she would have nothing to do for hours on end.