Читать книгу Ring - Elisabeth Horem - Страница 4
ОглавлениеIt took only a few minutes for Louise to break the news, not the news he’d wanted to hear.
It came as a complete surprise. And to top it off, Gilles had been hired by an American university.
America, no less.
It looked sunny and warm through the bare window. Louise removed her scarf. Around her neck, she was wearing a small diamond pendant that he recognized immediately. His head throbbed with mute anger.
“What are you smiling about?”
Had he smiled, really? He certainly hadn’t felt like smiling, but since she said he had, fine.
Emboldened by the smile, then, he replied casually:
“Funny that you should be leaving, because it just so happens I’m leaving too. I was actually about to tell you.”
Touché. She raised a skeptical brow, waiting for more. As he was not forthcoming, she asked, “Where to?” with a caustic little laugh.
At first he was tempted to say it was none of her business anymore, but that would have risked sounding brutal, losing him his momentary advantage. So he improvised.
“Tahas.”
He could no longer recall how Gilles and she had met. They had got along from the start. She chided him for being cold toward his brother; she wanted him to ask Gilles out more. One day, he chanced to see them together in a restaurant. They couldn’t see him from where they were sitting, but he had a good view of them thanks to a reflection. They looked like anything but a couple in love. It seemed more like a business lunch. She never said a word about the meeting, nor did he ever bring it up.
Now, there they were, arm in arm, setting off for a new life, one he had trouble imagining. They would be crossing an ocean, leaving him alone on the nether shore. He couldn’t bear the idea, so he had tossed out a city name at random, in order not to be the one left behind.
Again, that old trap of unrequited love.
While waiting for Louise in that café in the old town, Quentin had read the newspaper. He skimmed the headlines distractedly, occasionally glancing out the window. As there was still no sign of Louise, he began looking through the classifieds. One sought a man in his thirties or forties, preferably unmarried, with a college degree (major unspecified). He needed to be flexible and to enjoy travel. Applications were to be sent to Tahas—a city whose very name sounded exotic.
So, sitting there with Louise now, feeling desperate, eye riveted on the pendant that Gilles had dared remove from their mother’s jewelry box, the name of Tahas sprang naturally to mind.
The afternoon was endless, his coworkers tiresome. The telephone’s ring jangled his nerves. Even the April sun that he, like everyone else, had found so delightful now annoyed him. Pretending to have a toothache, he went home.
He devoured a whole bar of chocolate (which he immediately regretted) and wondered whether he wouldn’t have been better off back at work.
Not a day went by that he didn’t relive the terrible, haunting image of a body lying on the sidewalk, covered by a pink raincoat.
He had just turned seven. His mother had sent him to buy some milk. “Careful not to break it,” she had warned, as he set off proudly clutching a large coin in one hand and in the other a net shopping bag with an empty bottle. The store wasn’t far, but with two streets to cross, it was something of an adventure.
He took tiny steps all the way back for fear of dropping the bottle. Thirty years on, he could still feel the cold contact of glass on his bare legs through the netting.
Outside their building, a crowd was gathering around something he couldn’t see. Police were on the scene. He drew closer to have a look, curious but intimidated. He heard someone say, “Oh my God, there’s her kid!” and people began to move away from him, as if terrified.
A woman lay beneath a bright raincoat, a pink color he liked very much, one that little boys were unfortunately never allowed to wear.
His mother had just jumped from the sixth floor. What followed was a muddle in his memory. He must have fallen, for the bottle had broken. A neighbor took him to her place, gave him clean socks, as his were sopping wet with milk, and dabbed his knee with some Mercurochrome. Later, Aunt Cathy would come get him. Gilles was at boarding school, and was spared the sight of their mother laid out under the raincoat. She was wearing the little diamond-studded cloverleaf necklace, that day.
Nothing so ephemeral as news. Take the dailies, for instance: yesterday’s, so avidly sought twenty-four hours ago, are of no interest to anyone today. The new, freshly inked paper makes yesterday’s useless, relegating it to the status of dead pulp, something to wrap your potatoes with, or to line the trash bin.
Quentin had a terrible time obtaining the two-day-old newspaper. To find it, he had to sort through a pile of papers a neighbor had nicely bound and set next to the garbage.
He found the ad he was after, tore it out, and stuffed it in his pocket.
He was somewhat taken aback by the answer he got: a certain Mr. Moser wrote him from Tahas to say that his application had been favorably reviewed and that he himself, director of the Parker Company, would be pleased to welcome him to the staff as of June first.
This all seemed disconcertingly simple. Not a word about what the company actually did. Nor the slightest hint as to what might be expected of him at the workplace. The letter did mention—and this was the only concrete item—that he would need to purchase his own plane ticket, reimbursable upon his signing the contract. Finally, he was asked to kindly confirm his arrival at the earliest convenience.
He had to admit this all sounded like some kind of joke. A joke of his own making, after all. The whole idea of leaving for Tahas had been a complete coincidence, an elaborate lie he had let play out a bit longer by answering the ad. He had never really intended to up and quit his job, to leave the country simply because his lover was marrying his brother. More power to them. The letter from this Moser fellow had brought the whole matter to a close. He should throw it out, and with it the memory of the entire episode.
But what had begun as a hoax had assumed more substance with each passing day, and as he waited for news from Tahas, he had begun to take it seriously.
He reread the letter.
The company stationery reassured him somewhat. Mention of a telex number seemed an encouraging sign. The absence of any solid information was perhaps motivated by a concern for discretion.
He tried to imagine himself in charge—of what?—of some secret mission? It simply didn’t add up, though he was looking at the letter now with increased interest.
He left it on the corner of his desk.
Every so often, the luminous spiderweb of a city would drift slowly beneath the belly of the aircraft, then vanish. Inexplicable glittering paths cut across the blackness below and ended mysteriously like threads of gossamer suddenly broken up by great interstellar winds.
Then the plane began its descent toward Tahas, dipping one wing, then the other, slowly decelerating, as if some invisible celestial moorings were holding it back. A constant stream of shapes was slipping beneath the wing now, circles, triangles, stars, and Quentin thought to himself that men had labored to design these figures and that the resulting work, the fruit of their daily toil, had surpassed their intentions, without their ever knowing, to join the concert of heavenly bodies. Out of this luminous mosaic emerged an altogether different humanity, more beautiful, more united, disembodied, awe-inspiring. He closed his eyes until the moment he felt the plane meet the hard grain of the tarmac. The spell was broken. Only the little bluish landing lights, phosphorescent forget-me-nots, still formed straight lines that ran to the horizon and beyond. What came next was pure chaos: the piles of luggage, the throng, the cacophony of loudspeakers, people staggering pathetically under the weight of their bags, constantly having to move aside to avoid obstacles, like disoriented ants. Nothing remained of that harmonious world glimpsed only moments before, a world where the same wind blew across the Milky Way and the cities of humanity.
For the first night, they put him up in the Grand Hotel. His room looked out onto a pleasant corner of lawn, but since he was only on the second floor, he didn’t have what could be called “a view.” He felt a twinge of disappointment, for he had imagined himself on that first night in Tahas sitting on the balcony outside his room, a glass of whiskey in hand, ice cubes tinkling as they melted, staring out at the lights on the opposite shore as they plunged their reflections into the dark water like festooned banderillas.
But that’s not how it went at all, since his room had no balcony looking onto the Ovir; nor did he really feel like whiskey, a drink he didn’t particularly care for. He was feeling sleepy more than anything else.
An English-language newspaper had been left on his table. He scanned the headlines and nearly dozed off. He’d be better off just turning in for the night, since the time change meant he would be losing three hours of sleep, and he was supposed to report to the Parker Company early the next morning.
The building where the company had its offices was easy to spot: no other façade on the Ring—or in the entire city, for that matter—was painted in such bright candy colors: plum purple, strawberry red, pistachio green. The lobby walls were covered almost entirely in marble, engraved with all kinds of inscriptions followed by floor numbers, calling to mind certain chapels lined with ex-votos. Or a columbarium.
The secretary who greeted Quentin seemed unaware of his existence. She asked him to wait a moment, then disappeared behind a door. Right next to the entrance, a man sat reading a newspaper. A tabloid, surmised Quentin, based on the headlines. A gemstone ring attracted attention to the man’s thick, hairy fingers. Nothing in this person’s outward attitude suggested that he had noticed Quentin’s presence.
A glass case displayed a collection of objects: a model tractor, some dolls in traditional dress, embroidered place mats in a grayish color, and two plates decorated with hand-painted flowers—in all likelihood, samples of local crafts. It all looked rather dusty. On top of the case sat a trophy, a winner’s cup for some soccer match.
Quentin nearly jumped when the door opened. It was only a woman bringing a cup of coffee. She had an unpleasant face, pallid, round, and flat as a moon. She passed by without paying him the slightest attention and set the cup on the desk of the man who grunted something from behind his newspaper.
The secretary had been gone for a while now, and Quentin was starting to wonder whether there had been a misunderstanding. He sought comfort in the fact that they had reserved him a room in the Grand Hotel, a room whose luxury had even flattered him a bit, and that this was the clearest proof that they were indeed expecting him.
The woman finally returned, then proceeded to walk him along a corridor cluttered with boxes and files piled right on the floor, leading him into a tiny office whose size struck him as odd, since he’d had time to read “Conference Room” on the door.
The man receiving him looked tired, even sick. He was having trouble completing his sentences, and several times passed a hand over his eyes, like someone who hadn’t slept much, who couldn’t stand the light. He first asked Quentin how he was doing, whether he’d had a good trip, whether the hotel room was suitable.
He spoke haltingly, as though struggling to gather his thoughts. Quentin’s being hired by the Parker Company seemed of no interest to him whatsoever. There was a silence. He leaned on his elbows, thrust his torso forward, and began diligently joining his fingers, two by two, thumb to thumb, index to index, and so on. When the ring fingers had come together, he resumed:
“Unfortunately, the director is away today. He’s on a trip in the south of the country for a few days. He asked me to tell you how sorry he is not to be here to welcome you. But since his departure was rather last-minute, he didn’t have time to let me know exactly what your job here will be all about. It’s unfortunate, I know. Well, at any rate, if I understood correctly, it wasn’t so much for a specific job that Mr. Moser has brought you on board—we already have perfectly qualified employees, you understand, all quite competent—as to . . . well, to back him up, to help him out more generally, and to, uh . . . bolster the . . . what’s the word? . . . the uh, European staff, yes that’s it, the European staff of our company.”
He rubbed his eyes once again, breathing a little sigh of relief as though, as far as he was concerned, the hardest part was over.
“Madame Farge will show you your office. Feel free to ask her any questions you might have about settling in. You can also talk to Mr. Masko, our local assistant for . . . well, for all sorts of issues.”
In a supreme effort, he rose from his chair and shook Quentin’s hand. It was only at this point that Quentin noticed he reeked of alcohol.
The secretary walked him to an office that was nicely furnished but had no window, which confirmed the unpleasant overall impression he was getting from the place. An engraving above his desk depicted a sunset over a lake. On closer inspection, what he at first took to be rocks were in fact crocodiles lazing near the water, which he imagined as murky and disease-infested. Behind him, something rolled, then fell with a sharp click: it was a clock that counted out little steel marbles at the rate of one per minute.
Everything was settled very quickly. Moser’s assistant (whose name he never did find out) accepted Quentin’s resignation without making any trouble. He seemed distracted, not really listening. He was apparently indifferent to whether or not the staff was European, and seemed little concerned by what his superior might think of the matter.
When Quentin shut the door for the last time on the crocodiles and the clock, he sensed he’d somehow made a narrow escape. The only person he’d taken to at all was Masko, so he dropped by his office to say good-bye.
Everything Masko told him about the Parker Company and the two men who ran it confirmed his conviction that he had done well to quit.
“Yes, you’re definitely doing the right thing,” Masko told him. “And anyway, you probably have other plans in Tahas, don’t you?”
This simple question caught Quentin off guard, for he had no plans of any kind. He had toyed with the idea of going back to Europe, but he basically felt no real desire to do so. So Masko suggested he drop by the Consulate: he had heard they were looking for an emergency replacement for someone in the visa section.
“They’ll surely be delighted to add a European to their local staff,” he added bemusedly.
There was a short silence. A flash of something else in Masko’s look that Quentin was having trouble identifying. They parted on a chillier than expected note.
The Grand Hotel was not too far and he had seen no need to take a taxi, but it was so hot out that he soon wished he had. Halfway there, he suddenly felt terribly weary. The traffic noise on the Ring was deafening. He had forgotten his sunglasses, and felt as if the sun were boring into his skull. The hotel seemed to be receding into the distance, like a mirage. He made it at last, relieved at the idea that he would finally be able to lie down. He had a splitting headache.
In the elevator, what he had sought in vain to identify a short while ago finally became obvious: it was contempt.
“Looks like we’ve got ourselves another oddball,” quipped Rosemonde Goult. “Seems he was supposed to work for some company or other here, but he quit the job on day one. Strange, since he came all the way to Tahas just for the job; that’s what I heard, anyway. Something must have happened to make him bail on the very first day. In any case, he must not be a very stable person. I wouldn’t be surprised if he quit this job too. Thirty-seven, I saw on his passport: not an age when you should be switching jobs so often. Quentin Corval, funny name. Never met a Quentin before, unless you count the city of Saint-Quentin. Kind of a nice name, actually. I’ll have to write my niece who’s having a baby. She doesn’t know what to call it. Agnes! Did you steal my stapler again? They told her it was a boy, but they’re not always right. I’m actually not so sure I would have wanted them to tell me, you’re having a girl, or you’re having a boy. Not that it’s any better when women say ‘I’m having Caroline,’ or ‘I’m having Claude-Henri.’ Idiotic. Anyway, it’s due next month, right in the middle of summer, poor girl. At least it won’t be as hot there as it is here—though there are summers when it does get awfully hot there too. Claudine, are you the one who keeps turning off the air conditioning? Switch it back on, we can’t breathe in here. I don’t know what’s wrong with me today, I guess I’m a little under the weather. Must have been something I ate. I should have passed on those shrimp last night, in this heat . . .”
This is how Paul Gaudin heard of Quentin for the first time. He thought to himself that this Quentin would need help finding someplace to live. And that something had to be done to soundproof these offices. He then mused that he had never been to any city called Saint-Quentin, or if he had, it was a long while ago, yes, maybe before he had met Jeanne in any case, and he had forgotten.
Quentin Corval. The name itself conjured up a medieval castle in black stone, somewhere in Ireland or Scotland, in an untamed landscape of gray rock and peat bogs. (A cold, spumeladen wind whistling across the weathered vegetation.) But the report open on his desk prevented him from pursuing this vision any further, and he stopped thinking about Quentin Corval altogether.
A few weeks after his arrival, Quentin still knew very little of Tahas. Force of habit had already blunted his earlier curiosity, and he sensed he most likely wouldn’t be learning much more about the place.
The city was enormous. When seen from the panoramic restaurant, The Himalaya, it stretched as far as the eye could see. The horizon was always drowned in a variably thick layer of smog depending on how strong the winds were, and there were days when he could hardly make out the Grand Hotel from his place, a mere three hundred meters away. Beneath this haze, the city appeared without structure or boundary, like a human swamp. What was called “downtown”—actually, just a neighborhood like many others—was located inside the Ring, that wide boulevard which described a perfect circle on the city map. Twenty years ago, all foreign residents in Tahas were obliged to live on the Ring and nowhere else. With the new regime, that rule was relaxed, along with many others, but the curious custom remained, and foreigners went on living there, even now, with a few rare exceptions. What had been established as a constraint, and felt like one by those it affected, gradually turned out to be more convenient than they had thought. It in no way impeded their ability to get around; on the contrary, it spared them getting caught in traffic jams. What’s more, the Ring had the rather peculiar feature of being raised several meters above ground level, like a big circular slide. The buildings that lined it had their entrance at street level, but what looked like the ground floor was in fact one story up. The illusion was further reinforced by the presence of meager gardens out front. On closer inspection, what looked like little gardens were in fact hedges of potted shrubs lined up behind the iron grills.
This distribution of the foreign colony along the same boulevard was particularly advantageous for diplomats in that it simplified their contacts. In any other capital, managing in one evening to attend a holiday gathering, one or two cocktail parties, and then a dinner, would be inconceivable. In Tahas, it was perfectly feasible. Since all the homes holding the events were located on the Ring, one had only to make a succession of stops at the appointed places. The return trip consisted quite naturally of coming full circle, arriving conveniently back home without having to wander through unfamiliar neighborhoods, attempting to decipher dimly lit street names written in foreign lettering, losing one’s way under the combined effects of fatigue, disorientation, and alcohol.
But Quentin was not a diplomat, thank God, and his utterly subaltern position at the consulate spared him the need to make the nightly thirteen-kilometer circuit. He preferred to stay at home most evenings, reading or watching local television shows of which he understood not a word, but which relaxed him for that very reason.
He liked his new apartment. He had almost settled in, though he lacked the will to address certain details and be done with them. The apartment already suited him just as it was, and he knew very well that the last things which remained to be done—hanging a few pictures, having some curtains made, or changing the glass tabletop he had broken the first day by setting a hot pan on it—would never get done. Louise used to enjoy making all-day projects out of rearranging something that was perfectly fine to start with, or fixing things that weren’t broken. She was one of those people who got passionate about having faucets changed or heaters serviced. If she had been there, she would have taken charge, not resting until she had hung the engravings, ordered the curtains, and had the glass tabletop replaced. Not doing any of this felt a little like revenge, which he found gratifying.
It all worked out well in the end. At the consulate, he was off by two and had his afternoons free. In the morning, he began much earlier than he had at his previous job, but since his colleagues had no qualms about arriving late and leaving on time, it wasn’t long before he was doing the same.
When he first arrived, the wing where he was supposed to work was under repair, so they put him temporarily in a little prefab annex located behind the main building, back in a kind of garden.
There was a restroom and sink, a refrigerator, and an electric kettle and cups for making coffee, allowing him to stay holed up in his little hideout all day. Hardly anyone ever came out to bother him, and soon they simply forgot he was there. The time came when he was dealing with no one but the office boy, who brought him papers from time to time, or a new ration of passports to be stamped.
From the start, he kept his distance from the redhead who was handling his own paperwork, the one he’d given his passport to on the first day. The milky flab of her fat arms aroused in him both disgust and fascination, as did her name, which he found a bit sickening to pronounce. Rosemonde Goult talked incessantly, broadcasting a misfortune, predicting a fall from grace, tracking a marriage on the rocks. She was the herald of love affairs and secret flaws, the standard-bearer of rumor. The three other secretaries, markedly younger than she, were much less talkative. Since they all wore their hair more or less the same, it took Quentin a while to tell them apart. For the first few days, they assumed the aspect of a three-headed feminine being, pleasant enough to look at, but without leaving any particular impression on him. It was only gradually that the tricephalous creature broke into three persons who, apart from frequenting the same hair salon, were quite distinct from each other. While he was still living at the Hotel de l’Étoile (far less sumptuous than the Grand Hotel, where he’d ended up having to foot the bill himself), part friendly and part curious, they invited him to dinner. Punctual and wearing a tie, he arrived at their place bearing three strictly identical bouquets, which each in her heart of hearts found charming. But nothing further was to come of the evening.
As for the men, most of them his superiors, he had no relationship with any, save for Gaudin, the only one who took any interest in his welfare. He was the one who showed him around when he first got to Tahas, and suggested places to shop. He was also very helpful when it came to finding an apartment. He alone had thought to give him a map of Tahas, an item that was unavailable locally for some reason, and that had to be ordered abroad from specialized bookstores. Quentin didn’t forget these courtesies, and they remained somewhat friendly—but only somewhat, for Paul Gaudin was a naturally reserved man.
Every so often they went out together for a drink. Gaudin had a little goatee. He had prominent eyes, always a little woeful, and the first time Quentin saw him, he thought he did indeed look like a goat. That resemblance later disappeared, however, and Quentin found the now familiar face bore no trace of that first impression.
It was Gaudin again who took him the very first week to the Sport and Leisure Club, called SporTahas. Quentin had never much cared for sports, nor did he like sporty types in general, but certain signs indicated that he had arrived at the age when one had to start watching out, and he began the kind of serious exercise regimen he had always mocked: running in large circles around a lawn dressed in unflattering sports gear, or swimming back and forth in a pool. He made the promise that, once he had his own membership at SporTahas, he would go to the pool every day and take tennis lessons twice a week. He bought a car from a Belgian who’d had to return home abruptly. The front right door was dented, but the engine ran perfectly. An ideal car for getting around town.
A new life was surreptitiously knitting itself around him, a life made up of recent habits—hastily acquired, but already, it seemed to him, locked in place.
The coffee cup still next to the telephone told him at a glance that the cleaning lady had not come. He found the apartment in the same disarray in which he had left that morning—a livable disarray typical of many men who live alone. The French doors that gave onto the balcony had been left open, allowing dry leaves to blow inside. A film of dust covered the furniture.
Quentin went over to close the doors, saying that Yassa absolutely had to come and clean tomorrow. This was already the second day she’d skipped. It was troubling to think that she might not come back at all and that he would need to find someone else. It happened all the time. These people came from who knows where to do this kind of housework. All one knew was their first name, probably not their real one, and that was it. One fine day, they would fail to show, and there was no way to look for them, to find out why they had stopped coming, whether they had found a better job or were dead. They would simply vanish without a trace. One would then change the locks and look for someone else.
Were it not for the looming threat of Yassa’s defection, Quentin wouldn’t really mind her absence, for she had a peculiar way of mopping—she would throw herself onto the floor with her wet rag, scrubbing the tiles on her knees, almost prostrate at times, as if to demonstrate the full extent of her abject condition. She always looked tired and sickly, though whether this was real or feigned was hard to tell. He fell for it sometimes, feeling confusedly guilty over having somehow offended her and, to make amends, he would give her some small household object. Then, unfailingly, he would wish he hadn’t.
Breaking with habit, he was going out this evening: Gaudin had asked him the favor of standing in for him at a party he couldn’t attend, since he had to pick up his wife, who was returning from a two-month trip in Europe, where she’d had to go for surgery.
“So, you understand? It’s a vernissage for Sanariglia’s son . . .”
Of course he understood, and at that moment he’d even been glad to oblige, in return for Gaudin’s many services. But when it came time to put on a suit and tie, and to slip into his socks, he could see no reason why his presence was required that night at some exhibit, at the home of people he didn’t know.
He looked at his watch. It was time to get ready. A look out the window confirmed his hunch that it wasn’t the sort of weather to be going out in, and that he would be better off staying at home that evening. The afternoon was waning, and it would soon be nightfall. Every evening, night came abruptly, unannounced by dusk—unless by “dusk” one meant that very brief instant when the sunless sky turned mauve. Then the city was suddenly flooded in darkness, as if somewhere an enormous dike had given way.
He had never been to the Sanariglia’s, but he had no trouble understanding that they had done some substantial furniture rearranging to turn their living space into a gallery. The tables and sofas, arranged in a studiously haphazard fashion and draped in moiré silk and sumptuous satin, had abandoned their original function for the evening. The paintings, whose predominant color was a greenish yellow, were propped casually here and there. From the four corners of the central living room, loudspeakers were emitting a rather unpleasant monochord whistling sound. The lady of the house and mother of the artist moved from group to group explaining the fundamental importance of music to the visual arts. Thus Quentin realized that all the paintings represented different tunings, and that the whistling one heard was not simply the result of a faulty sound system. In the adjacent room, the hosts had spread a buffet of tiny edibles on trays and in baskets, shaped into checkerboards, pyramids, fans. He considered all this fragile, futile architecture for a moment, and decided he wasn’t hungry.
Guests kept arriving, all dusty and teary-eyed, for a violent sandstorm had descended on the city. Now that enough people had gathered, no one felt any further need to look at the paintings (Madame Sanariglia herself, busy shaking hands, never left the foyer). Quentin wanted to seize the moment to make his exit. A waiter took his glass with gratitude and compunction, placing it on a tray already overflowing with empty glasses showing fingerprints and lipstick. Quentin was making his way to the door to take leave of Madame Sanariglia when a new couple entered, very different from the other people present.
The woman had felt no need to extinguish her cigarette, but simply switched it to her left hand, greeted the hosts, then immediately switched it back to her right. Her reddish-brown hair was pulled back so tight that her eyes, her smile, and her entire face seemed to be converging toward the mass of chignon at the back of her head. She was very heavily made-up, and wore an extraordinary amount of jewelry (a mix of genuine and fake, no doubt). Her escort, a man in a white suit, was wearing a splendid tie. Quentin thought that her entire person must correspond to many people’s notion of beauty. Based on their age difference, they could be mother and son.
Quentin, who by then was on his way out, was the first person they met. Their names dissolved into the din of voices. The piped-in music had stopped, for a pianist who had emerged seemingly out of nowhere was now playing a piece that no one could hear. This man was overweight and getting on in years, and from where he stood, Quentin could see drops of sweat falling like tears onto the keyboard as he labored through his pathetic routine. Quentin repeated their names, almost shouting. The man in the white suit must have been Italian, since his first name was Luigi, but the woman, oddly, called him Sasha. Perhaps Quentin had misheard. The woman had a Russian-sounding name, however, which made sense out of Sasha.
The three of them made a quick exit, as they truly couldn’t hear a word. Outside, the sandstorm had ceased.
Quentin let himself be dragged along to the home of some of the woman’s friends to finish out the evening. There were a dozen people present, all younger than the three of them, with the exception of a man who may have been in his fifties, and whom Quentin assumed to be the host. He was wearing a palm-tree print shirt, and was laughing for no apparent reason other than the presence of the girl next to him, whose neck he fondled while whispering into her ear. His obvious desire to look younger than his years made him look older. On second thought, Quentin guessed that the man’s age must be closer to sixty. Very unlikable.
Conversation was lagging. Everyone seemed to have had quite a bit to drink. A boyish-looking girl gave a self-important account of her trip down south on some humanitarian mission. That kind of misery, it’s just unimaginable. And every night, you hear gunfire. They had even shot at her jeep. Quentin suppressed a yawn that made his eyes water.
Next to him, a tall, lanky American spoke in a groggy voice:
“Your bath, for instance, you take a cold one first, it’s refreshing in this heat. And then, after a little while, you want to get warmer, so you add some hot water, and that feels good. But how much is enough, huh? Because if you put too much in, you burn yourself. Then what?”
Having arrived at this point of his little speech, the American lost his train of thought and poured himself another drink. Within a few moments, he had completely changed topics; Quentin heard him trying to convince the girl sitting to his left to come spend the night at his place.
“But I’m warning you, it’s a pretty small apartment, I hope you enjoy doing it standing up,” he said.
At that, he rose and, with no further concern for the girl, issued a general “Good night, everybody,” then asked the palm-tree shirt if he could have a little bread for his breakfast in the morning. He’d completely forgotten to buy some.
Quentin, who was bored to tears, took advantage of this departure to make his own exit, and no one made a move to dissuade him.
Back home, he took out the business card he had slipped into his pocket without a glance, and learned that the woman he’d met at the Sanariglia’s was named Nina Andreïevna Praskine—dance instructor—and that she didn’t live on the Ring.
He would still occasionally dream of Louise. On some nights, she would come to him, soft and sweet. It was so good to be back together. She was his best, his oldest, his only friend. And in his dream, they were curled up together, talking in whispers until time stood still, and everything was explained, healed, forgiven.
He also dreamed a few times of a friend from college. They had been inseparable, then had a falling out for a reason he could no longer recall. Quentin had had his faults, to be sure, and in his dreams he acknowledged them, asked forgiveness; it felt so good to be a better person than he once was. Since he began dreaming about him, he often wondered whether Arnaud Mayeux had read this or that book, whether or not he would like this painting, that piece of music, whether he would approve of the way Quentin had left home, of the life he was leading in Tahas. He found himself taking his absent friend’s judgment into account, weighing his opinions. Or again, women he had known and thought long forgotten were resurfacing in his sleep like drowning victims.
Through the open door of his dreams, these people would reenter his life during the early days of his stay in Tahas; over time, their visits became less frequent, until they finally disappeared altogether.
One morning while putting some papers in order, he came across a photograph that had slipped between some bank statements. In the foreground, houses were scattered like the gray and white cubes of some building blocks knocked over by a capricious child. They had no color except that dazzling, hard-edged white and that peculiar shade of slate gray the sea turns in stormy weather. The far horizon was scored by that day’s more grayish-blue sea. It wasn’t a very sharp image, but one could make out a smattering of islands, as if on one stormy day the same wind had knocked over the tower of cubes and blown those rocks out to sea. The top of the picture showed beautiful clouds scudding across the sky above the islands. This photo taken from the upper floor of the old summerhouse captured the look of the area very well. The gunmetal gray ribbon of road that went down to the sea ran past the foot of a large tree with blue-tinted foliage. Louise, visible from the back, seemed to be hurrying down that road into the distance, flanked by a large black dog. Louise’s hair and the dog’s coat were the same color. For a moment, Quentin was tempted to tear up the photo, then changed his mind and tucked it back into the bundle of papers where chance had placed it, thinking that nothing could be further from this world of muted, deep color than the country where he was now living and, not sure whether this idea should depress or excite him, he put it out of his mind. All that remained for the rest of the day was the fleeting and nostalgic vision of pearl-gray fog—soft, warm, and fluffy as wool.
Nina Praskine lived on the ground floor of a dilapidated house back in a courtyard. It wasn’t easy to find. You had to walk through a dim passageway and zigzag around piles of garbage. Visitors were greeted by a strong smell of urine, and the first time Quentin visited her place, he almost backtracked, sure that he must have taken a wrong turn.
The house itself was not without charm, if you were willing to disregard the decrepit exterior and surrounding squalor. Fifty years ago, it had probably been a lovely suburban villa. But the city had expanded since then, and there was nothing left of the garden but a dingy courtyard constantly eroded by the helter-skelter construction of shanties made of corrugated metal and boards. An old car—who knows how it got there—was rusting away right in the middle.
The greenish-gray roughcast plaster was coming off the exterior walls in great slabs, and one could see the dilapidation spreading across the façade like a disease. One day it would reach the core of the house and the walls would collapse, at which point a fresh supply of tin and lumber would build over what was once the house.
Nina Praskine’s apartment took up the entire ground floor. The two upper floors of the house were empty. The owner who once lived there had died, and his children lived elsewhere. The windows were boarded up.
In the courtyard, all kinds of people were living, sleeping, working.
“At first,” explained Nina, “there was no one but the doorman and his family, which already meant a dozen people or more. One never knew exactly. Then he had his brother come up from the Azga region and move in. After that, another brother moved into the courtyard—always with wife and children—because his own house had collapsed. Add to that visits by any number of country cousins. There are always some of those around, and they stay for weeks at a time. Basically, they all make up one big family—the doorman’s. You see how well-guarded I am!”
And with that, she burst out laughing.
Quentin often returned to Nina Praskine’s. He never found out exactly why she’d originally come to Tahas. She’d been living there for many years, during which she watched the doorman’s family grow. She’d known the place before the shanties and garbage overtook the courtyard. She recalled a lovely tree by the door—a kind of cherry tree now cut up for lumber—and a climbing rose bush in front of the house. All that had disappeared or changed, but she remained. She said she couldn’t stand the weather in Europe.
In the entrance, one would often trip over one or another of the children playing on the floor. She never closed the door. Friends stopping by would enter without knocking. When she wasn’t at home, they would go to the kitchen and make themselves some tea, which they would drink in the living room while waiting for her to return. Nina took no offense whatsoever. This casualness had shocked Quentin at first. Within a few weeks, he started doing the same. One felt as much at home in her place as in one’s own. Mere acquaintances acted likewise, showing about as much restraint as would members of her own family. One would enter, go get something to drink, snatch a few chocolates off the buffet, and then choose a place to sit. There was always plenty to read: there were magazines everywhere, photo albums, books left wide open like birds spreading their wings, perched on the edge of a table or the arm of a chair. Nina owned a somewhat disconcerting mix of rare objects and worthless bibelots. Gorgeous antique engravings were hung next to cheap color prints. An orange plastic ashtray had as much claim to the mantelpiece as a silver candelabrum. She seemed to accept these objects the way she accepted people: as they were, without valuing one over the other.
Most of the time, Quentin would find Nina at home, unless she was out giving her dance lessons. He quickly learned to ignore the doorman’s daughter, who spent her days sitting in a corner behind the coatrack. She would wrap herself in whatever clothing was hung there, bury her head in it, and sit perfectly still. Quentin gave a start the first time he came upon her draped in the folds of some sequined thing that was always glittering there in that dark corner.
The courtyard looked better if you didn’t see it in broad daylight. In the evening, everything seemed cleaner, quieter. There were also fewer children. These were the off-peak hours of the day, for Nina’s visitors. A pot-bellied samovar shone in a corner of the room, as if to recall her Russian origins, but she always made tea in the kitchen, because she didn’t have any embers to use. Two or three cups of tea, talk of this or that, and the evening’s first visitors would be arriving. Quentin would sometimes stay, but that was the exception. More often, he would try to get home early while the stores were still open, doing some shopping on the way back.
One day, she suggested he come see the little studio where she gave her dance lessons. As parents would never have consented to send their little girls to the quarter where she lived, she’d had to rent an apartment on the Ring. It was a small, two-room flat where, every afternoon from three to five, she taught the basics of classical ballet to the little daughters of the foreign colony, children of diplomats for the most part.
He returned several times, then every day at four to watch the second lesson of the day, attended by girls aged seven to nine. He would sit in a corner, waiting for the class to finish, after which he would walk Nina back to her place.
He greatly enjoyed watching the little girls dance. It didn’t take him long to single out the gifted ones from among those who were less so. Nina often put him in charge of the music. Compliant and happy, he would change cassettes, rewind, and fast-forward as instructed. During her classes, Nina wore a stern expression, and liked to remind her charges that she did things the traditional way. If they didn’t like it, they knew where the door was. “One, two, three . . . And one and two and three . . . One, two, three . . .” And so the children, in a momentary return to seriousness, resumed their exercises, together this time. Their limp tutus reminded Quentin of the crinkled pink petals of godetia flowers. As the tape recorder roared out the accompaniment, he found himself wishing there were a real piano on which an old spinster would relentlessly pound out the same polkas over and over.
This innocent pleasure was soon brought to a painful and entirely unexpected end. The mothers showed up one day at the studio—fortunately for Quentin at the start of the first lesson, which spared him the embarrassment of meeting them face-to-face. Imagine their surprise and indignation when they found out that a man had been coming every day to watch the little girls dance—a man in his forties, a bachelor, who had no reason for being there but might well be motivated by the most unspeakable intentions. How could you be so complacent, they asked, with the obsessions of such an unsavory individual, you of all people, Madame Praskine, the dance instructor to whom the best families entrust their children?
They demanded a guarantee that henceforth no man would be admitted to her classes, unless it be a father or uncle of one of the pupils.
When he arrived that day, Nina took him aside, into the former kitchen, now a changing room, and told him what had transpired with the emissaries she had just received. He blushed in shame at being taken for the criminal he was not. All around them hung tutus, satin slippers, children’s underclothes, little tights all twisted. His gaze fell upon a grass-stained sock, which he found particularly moving. Where in all of Tahas was there enough grass to stain socks? Nina attempted to downplay the issue, and pretended to laugh it off, but it was an unpleasant matter for her as well.
He left immediately. In order to exit, he had to walk through the dance room. The little girls, strangely silent, watched him as he went, and he had the feeling their sly gazes betrayed both hostility and curiosity.
From that day on, he saw Nina only at her place, later in the day, after the dance lessons.
One evening, he found the courtyard in a state of unusual agitation. Men were in discussion, talking all at once, and women were keening.
Nina was at home, going busily through some papers, eyeglasses perched on her nose. She seemed upset.
“What’s going on?”
“Libella has drowned. They’ve just fished her out of the water. Yes, you do know her, you know the one, the doorman’s daughter that was always here, by the coatrack. Last night she went missing. Makki came looking for her, since it was very late and her father was furious that she hadn’t come home yet, but she was already gone. I didn’t see her leave. It was only after Makki had left that I noticed she had taken that big sequined cape that she was always wrapped in. That seemed odd to me. Last night, everyone in the neighborhood was out looking for her. She never used to set foot outside the courtyard. I don’t think she’d ever been outside, not since she was born. You’ve seen her, she couldn’t even cross a street alone! A boatman discovered her this afternoon. He saw something shiny behind his boat, which was docked at the time. The body must have been carried along by the current, and the cape got caught in his propeller. How in the world did that poor girl, who never seemed capable of nursing the least desire, who had never even seen the Ovir, how is it she suddenly left the house and crossed so many streets to go throw herself into the river? And why in my cape? What can I say . . . ? I feel somehow that it’s my fault: she was in my house, she took my cape, and she went straight to the Ovir and drowned herself.”
Quentin was unable to calm her down. She continued to search feverishly for something in her desk, then in a shoebox full of papers, talking all the while, repeating that she must surely share some responsibility, that it was such a horrible thing, that she should have taken better care of the girl. That cape was the sign that she, Nina, had been the unwitting instrument of Libella’s fate.
Her hands were shaking, still searching through other drawers and an old cardboard suitcase full of papers. Her cheek constantly quivering from nervous tics was painful to watch. The room was turning into quite a mess.
“What exactly are you looking for, in all this?”
“I’ve misplaced a notebook. My little notebook, where I write down all my . . .”
She trailed off and continued her insanely obstinate search. She finally found it in a pile of old magazines, a place she’d already looked. She let out an ah! holding up the blue notebook for which she’d searched so long and hard, then fell into a chair amid all the scattered papers and began to weep.
“Please, could you leave me now? You’re such a dear, but do go home, I need to be alone. Don’t be angry, Quentin, just understand me, and let me be by myself now.”
He had never seen her in such a state. He wished he could do something for her, but he had to face it: he would do better to let her be. So he left for home, worried, helpless to console her. While in the courtyard, things had settled down.
By the next day, he found Nina had recovered her composure. She had put away all the papers and magazines that she’d strewn around the room, and had clearly seized the opportunity to do some heavy housecleaning. She would say no more of the previous day’s distressing incident; when he alluded to the subject, she brushed it away with a sweep of her hand. The mere sight of the coatrack filled Quentin with dread, and he avoided looking in that direction. A few days later, he noticed that she had moved some furniture around: the coatrack had disappeared, and in its place she had put a little pedestal table.
His consciousness, still half submerged in sleep, whispered to him that something strange was happening outdoors. Sounds, unusual yet familiar, moved through his head in one direction, then the other, like falling stars whistling as they crossed paths. Fuzzy ideas outlined in gray rose yawning from their slumber. Cautiously, Quentin cracked open his eyes, and with a certain reluctance, observed that the room was awash in a dismal, grayish half-light that was filtering through the curtains. In a supreme effort to extricate himself from the tangled web of sleep, he now understood what extraordinary event was taking place: it was raining, and the sound of the traffic’s wet wake on the asphalt Ring wafted all the way up to his bedroom.
Relieved at having identified this sound whose mystery had been making him anxious, he opened his eyes more resolutely. The vague fear he’d experienced, the muddled images of a hopeless war that surfaced from this morning’s final nightmare, had completely vanished, giving way to a profound sense of well-being. So, it was raining. And with that dim light seeping in from behind the curtains came Europe—good old Europe, friendly and familiar, filling his room. But the mirage gradually faded, and things once again assumed their normal shape. It was the first rain of the season, the first rain he had witnessed since his arrival in Tahas, and that was all it was. He sat up, pulling the covers over him, and turned to the thermos on his night table, which had sat ready since the previous evening to provide the comfort of hot coffee as soon as he woke.
The sudden intrusion of Europe into his bedroom that morning in Tahas, the first day of rain, had forced him to occupy two contradictory worlds at once, creating a kind of hiatus in his existence. When he saw that misty, subdued light, which reminded him so keenly of Europe, time stood still, the way a pendulum stops for just a heartbeat. Then, the radio’s droning the day’s news, the warm smell of coffee, the lamp lit next to the bed, all these unimportant and comforting things grew more reassuring. Thanks to them, the great pendulum was once again set in motion.
