The Pegnitz Junction (14 page)

I fastened her seat belt, and she looked up at me to see what was going to happen next. She had been dressed for the trip in a blue-and-white cotton frock, white socks, and black shoes with a buttoned strap. Her hair was parted in the middle and contained countless shades of light brown, like a handful of autumn grass. There was a slight cast in one eye, but the gaze was steady. The buckle of the seat belt slid down and rested on one knee. She held on to a large bucket bag – held it tightly by its red handle. In the back of the seat before her, along with a map of the region over which we were to fly, were her return
ticket and her luggage tags, and a letter that turned out to be a letter of instructions. She was to be met by a Mme. Bataille, who would accompany her to a
colonie de vacances
at Gsteig. I read the letter towards the end of the trip, when I realized that the air hostess had forgotten all about Véronique. I am against prying into children’s affairs – even “How do you like your school?” is more inquisitive than one has a right to be. However, the important facts about Mme. Bataille and Gsteig were the only ones Véronique was unable to supply. She talked about herself and her family, in fits and starts, as if unaware of the limits of time – less than an hour, after all – and totally indifferent to the fact that she was unlikely ever to see me again. The place she had come from was “Orly,” her destination was called “the mountains,” and the person meeting her would be either “Béatrice” or “Catherine” or both. That came later; the first information she sweetly and generously offered was that she had twice been given injections in her right arm. I told her my name, profession, and the name of the village where I taught school. She said she was four but “not yet four and a half.” She had been visiting, in Versailles, her mother and a baby brother, whose name she affected not to know – an admirable piece of dignified lying. After a sojourn in the mountains she would be met at Orly Airport by her father and taken to the sea. When would that be? “Tomorrow.” On the promise of tomorrow, either he or the mother of the nameless brother had got her aboard the plane. The Ile-de-France receded and spread. She sucked her mint sweet, and accepted mine, wrapped, and was overjoyed when I said she might put it in her bag, as if a puzzle about the bag had now been solved.
The stewardess snapped our trays into place and gave us identical meals of cold sausage, Russian salad in glue, savory pastry, canned pears, and tinned mineral water. Véronique gazed onto a plateau of food nearly at shoulder level, and picked up a knife and fork the size of gardening tools. “I can cut my meat,” she said, meaning to say she could not. The voice that had welcomed us in Paris and had implored Véronique and me to put out our cigarettes now emerged, preceded by crackling sounds, as if the air were full of invisible fissures: “If you look to your right, you will see the city of Dijon.” Véronique quite properly took no notice. “I am cold,” she stated, knowing that an announcement of one’s condition immediately brings on a change for the better. I opened the plastic bag and found a cardigan – hand-knit, light blue, with pearl buttons. I wondered when the change-over would come, when she would have to stop saying “I am cold” in order to grow up without being the kind of person who lets you know that there is a draft in the room, or the beach is too crowded, or the service in the restaurant has gone off. I have pupils who still cannot find their own cardigans, and my old aunt is something of a complainer, as her sister never was. Despite my disinheritance, I was carrying two relics – a compote spoon whose bowl was in the form of a strawberry leaf, and the confirmation photograph of my mother. They weighed heavily in my hand luggage. The weight of the picture was beyond description. I knew that they would be too heavy, yet I held out my hand greedily for more of the past; but my aunt’s ration stopped there.

The well-mannered French girl beside me would not drink the water I had poured into her glass until advised she could.
She held the glass in both hands and got it back in its slot without help. Specks of parsley now floated on the water. I said she might leave the remains of the cold sausage, which she was chewing courageously. Giddy with indiscipline, she had some of the salad and all of the pear, and asked, indicating the savory pastry, “Is that something to eat?”

“You can, but it’s boring.” She had never heard food referred to in that way, and hesitated. As I had left mine, she did not know what the correct attitude ought to be, and after one bite put her spoon down. I think she liked it but, not having understood “boring,” was anxious to do the right thing. With her delicate fingers she touched the miniature salt and pepper containers and the doll’s tube of mustard, asking what they were for. I remembered that some of the small girls in the school saved them as tokens of travel, and I said, “They are for children to keep.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Some children keep them.”

I wondered if this was a mistake, and if she would begin taking things that did not belong to her. She curled her hand around the little mustard tube and said she would keep it for
Maman
. Now that she was wearing the cardigan, her purse was empty save for a mint sweet. I told her that a bag was to put things in, and she said she knew, looking comically worldly. I gave her a centime, a handkerchief, a postcard – searching my own purse to see what could be spared. The stewardess let us descend the ramp from the plane as if she had never seen Véronique before, and no one claimed her. I had great
difficulty finding anyone at the terminal who knew anything about Mme. Bataille. When I caught sight of Véronique, later, hurrying desperately after a uniformed woman who did not slow her pace for a second, I feared that
was
Mme. Bataille; but fifteen minutes after that I saw Véronique in the bus that was to take us to the railway station. She was next to a mild, thin, harassed-looking person, who seemed exhausted at the thought of the journey to come.

Now, mark the change in Véronique: She shook out her hair and made it untidy, and stood on the seat and jumped up and down.

“You are a very lucky little girl, going to the mountains
and
the sea,” said Mme. Bataille, in something of a whine. Véronique took no more notice of this than she had of Dijon, except to remark that she was going to the seashore tomorrow.

“Not tomorrow. You’ve only just arrived.”

“Tomorrow!” The voice rose and trembled dangerously. “Papa is meeting me at Orly.”

“Yes,” said the stupid woman soothingly, “but not tomorrow. In August. This is June.”

The seats between us were now filled. When I next heard Véronique, the corruption of memory had set in.

“It was the stewardess who cut up your meat,” said Mme. Bataille.

“No, a lady.”

“A lady in a uniform. The lady you were with when I met you.”

“No.”

The reason I could hear them was that they were nearly shouting.

Presently, all but giving in, Mme. Bataille said, “Well, she was nice, the lady. I mean, the stewardess.”

Two ideas collided: Véronique remembered the woman fairly well, even though the flight no longer existed, but Mme. Bataille knew it was the stewardess.

“I came all alone,” said Véronique.

“Who cut your meat, then?”

“I did,” said Véronique, and there was no shaking her.

E
ven if Peter Dobay had not instantly recognized me and called my name, my attention would have been drawn by the way he and his wife looked at the station of our village. They got out of the train from Montreux and stood as if dazed. One imagined them blinking behind their sunglasses. At that time of year, we saw only excursion parties – stout women with grey curls, or serious hikers who would stamp from the station through the village and up the slopes. Peter wore a dark suit and black shoes, his wife a black-and-white silk dress, a black silk coat, and fragile open sandals. Her blond hair had been waved that day. I wondered how she would walk in the village streets on her thin high heels.

When we were face to face, Peter and I said together, “What are
you
doing here?”

“I live here – I teach,” I said.

“No!” Turning to his wife, he said excitedly, “You know who this is, don’t you? It’s Erika.” Then, back to me, “We’ve come up to see my wife’s twins. They’re in a summer school here.”

“Better than dragging them round with us,” said his wife, in a low-pitched, foggy voice. “They’re better off in the fresh air.” She touched my arm as if she had always known me and said, “I just can’t believe I’ve finally seen you. Poodlie, it’s like a
dream
.”

I was faced with two pandas – those glasses! Who was Poodlie? Peter, evidently, yet he called her “Poodlie,” too: “Poodlie, it’s wonderful,” he said, as if she were denying it. His wife? Her voice was twenty years older than his.

He went off to see to their luggage and she stopped seeing me, abruptly, as if now that he was gone nothing was needed. She looked at the village – as much as she could see, which was the central street and the station and the shutters of the station buffet. All I could see was her mouth and the tight pinpoint muscles around it, and the flour dusting of face powder.

“Well?” she said when Peter returned.

“I can’t believe it,” he said to me, and laughed.
“Here!
What are you doing
here
?”

“I teach,” I began again.

“No, here at the station, now, on Sunday.”

“Oh, that. I was waiting for the train with the Sunday papers.”

“I told you,” he cried to his wife. “Remember it was one of the things I said. Even if Erika was starving, she’d buy newspapers. I never knew anyone to read so many papers.”

“I haven’t had to choose between starving and reading,” I said, which was a lie. I watched with regret the bale of papers carted off to the kiosk. In half an hour, those I wanted would be gone.

“
We’re
starving,” he said. “You’ll have lunch with us, won’t you? Now?”

“It’s early,” I said, glancing at his wife.

“Call it breakfast, then.” He began guiding us both towards the buffet, his arms around our shoulders in a peasant-like bonhomie that was not like anything I remembered of him.

“The luggage, Poodlie,” said his wife.

“He’ll take it to the hotel.”

“What hotel?”

“The biggest.”

“Then it’s there,” I said, and pointed to an Alpine fortified castle, circa 1912, of yellowish stone, propped behind the street as if on a ledge.

“Good,” he said. “Now our lunch.”

T
hat was how, on a cool bright day, just before the start of term, I saw Peter again.

In the dark buffet, Peter and his wife kept their glasses on. It seemed part of their personal decorum. Although the clock had only just struck twelve, the restaurant was nearly filled, and we were given a table between the serving pantry and the door. I understood that this was Peter, even though he didn’t look at all like the man I had known, and that I was sharing his table. I avoided looking at him. Across the room, over an
ocean of heads, was an open window, geraniums, the mountains, and the sky.

“You have beautiful eyes,” said Peter’s wife. Her voice, like a ventriloquist’s, seemed to come from the wrong place – from behind her sunglasses. “Poodlie never told me that. They look like topazes or something like that.”

“Yes,” said Peter. “Semiprecious stones from the snow-capped mountains of South America.”

He sounded like a pompous old man. His English was smooth as cream now, and better than mine. I spoke it with too many people who had accents. Answering a question of his wife’s, I heard myself making something thick and endless out of the letter “t”: “It is crowded because it is Sunday. Tourists come for miles around. The food in the buffet is celebrated.”

“We’ll see,” said Peter, and took the long plastic-covered menu with rather an air.

His wife was attentive to me. Parents of pupils always try to make me eat more than I care to, perhaps thinking that I would be less intractable if I were less thin. “Your daughter is not only a genius but will make a brilliant marriage,” I am supposed to say over caramel cake. I let myself be coaxed by Peter’s wife into having a speciality of the place – something monstrous, with boiled meat and dumplings that swam in broth. Having arranged this, she settled down to her tea and toast. As for Peter – well, what a performance! First he read the whole menu aloud and grimaced at everything; then he asked for a raw onion and a bunch of radishes and two pots of yoghurt, and cut up the onions and radishes in the yoghurt
and ate the whole mess with a spoon. It was like the frantic exhibition of a child who has been made uneasy.

“He isn’t well,” said his wife, quite as though he weren’t there. “He treats it like a joke, but you know, he was in jail after the Budapest uprising, and he was so badly treated that it ruined his stomach. He’ll never be the same again.”

He did not look up or kick me under the table or in any manner ask me not to betray him. It occurred to me he had forgotten I knew. I felt my face flushing, as if I had been boiled in the same water as the beef and dumplings. I thought I would choke. I looked, this time with real longing, at the mountain peaks. They seem so near in the clear weather that sometimes innocent foot travellers set off thinking they will be there in three-quarters of an hour. The pockets of snow looked as if they could have been scooped up with a coffee spoon. The cows on the lower slopes were the size of thimbles.

“Do you ski at this time of year?” said Peter’s wife, without turning to see what I was staring at.

“One can, but I don’t go up any more. There’s an hour-and-a-half walk to the middle station, and the road isn’t pleasant. It’s all slush and mud.” I thought they would ask what “the middle station” meant, but they didn’t, which meant they weren’t really listening.

When I refused a pudding, Peter said, with his old teasing, “I told you she was frugal. Her father was a German professor at Debrecen, the Protestant university.”

“So was yours,” said his wife sharply, as though reminding him of a truth he forgot from time to time.