Читать книгу The Foundling's War - Yasmina Khadra - Страница 7

Jean had never read On Love.3 Had he ever opened it, he would probably have shut it again immediately. Theories left him cold, and the philosophy of love had not yet revealed itself to him. Jostled and pre-empted by reality, as spoilt as a little prince and punished as only the innocent are, he had never thought love could be expressed in cut-and-dried formulas. The cold-eyed clarity of Stendahl’s Julien Sorel, punctuated by outbursts of frenzy, left him annoyed and disbelieving. In truth, being incapable of calculation, he found it natural that fortune should smile on him more than other young men of his age. Life had granted him, very young, two capital experiences and he felt they would never be repeated, at least not in the same way. A shred of reason restrained him – reason that was swept away by the words ‘So it is you’ and by the amused look the speaker directed at him. He felt suddenly awkward and ridiculous, and so inferior to the lovely woman staring at him that it was all he could do not to take to his heels. Sitting facing her, he was unaware that the crystallisation around her fleeting outline had turned into a real love that was almost comfortable in its reciprocity, however undeclared it was, and that he was preparing for this young woman with her nose dotted with pale freckles, her unmade-up mouth that scorned lipstick, and short hair that exposed her lovely, gazelle-like neck, to be the love of his life – even long after everything was finished between them – and that his only distress, as it is with every happy love, would be not to know how to love her enough. In short, as she sat in front of him with her chin resting on the palm of a hand ornamented at the wrist by a green malachite bracelet, she was the natural intermediary a boy of twenty needed in order to embark upon manhood.

It would be so much kinder not to smile. Jean’s feeling for Claude and hers for him have coalesced within a drama containing plenty of burlesque elements. We ought to overlook the participation of Madame Michette and the girls at the Sirène. Let us just lament, by way of excuse, that the ways of love are impenetrable. Fortunately that’s all too true. The situation and timing are ill-chosen: the country is split down the middle by a defeat that has left it stunned. People are nursing their bruises and wounds, counting their dead, their missing, their prisoners. Without the saving grace of a cowardly relief that the adventure had been no worse, there would be little place left for the love that is blossoming, masked by a discreet ruefulness, between a young man of twenty and a young woman of twenty-five.

There is no mistaking some raising of eyebrows at the mention of their ages. Is Jean destined for ever to love women who are older than him? Let us remember that in those distant times women did not start making love as soon as they reached puberty. It was thus inevitable that a fine figure of a boy, as the novelists have it, should experience his first amorous awakenings with women who are a little more, or even much more, experienced than he is. With of course one exception: Chantal de Malemort, who by her conduct at Jean’s age had wrecked the idea of a pure love blossoming in a sylvan paradise, dawning in a provincial mansion and rudely sundered from its ideals in a cramped bohemian bedroom in Paris, in Rue Lepic. So here they are, these two, Jean and Claude, each subtly attracted to the other, and I am very tempted to talk of magic. In fact magic it certainly is if we enumerate the combination of circumstances necessary to bring this encounter about. If a single detail were out of place, the whole thing would be impossible. If, for instance – as Jean imagined, thinking about his Italian journey of 1936 – a thief had not stolen his bicycle, if the consular official had not shown him the door instead of offering him his help, if he had not met the truck driver, Stefano, the lover of Mireille Cece, if Mireille had not squeezed him dry with her insatiable appetite, if, as he fled from her, he had not met Palfy disguised as a priest in his elderly Mathis, and so on … he would never have found himself, one July afternoon, at a café table on Place de Jaude facing a young woman who, in any other circumstances, he would have had no reason to be meeting. We might ask ourselves some questions about the impressive intelligence of chance, which has been preparing for a long time for this inevitable event, and preparing for it with such minute attention to detail that no electronic brain could match it. It is an observation that leaves us with few illusions about our freedom of choice, but what does it matter if the result is the one we have been preparing for from birth? Out of the air we plucked the theft of Jean’s bicycle at Ostia, but there are a thousand other events whose sequence is equally necessary. And so must we also, in the same context, thank chance for having thrown Chantal into the arms of Gontran Longuet and Sergeant Tuberge for abandoning his men in their foxholes. The backstage scene is one of an immense watchmaker’s mechanism of cogs and wheels of such complexity that they pass all human understanding. Only the result counts, and for now Claude and Jean are face to face.

We shall compress the account of the first meeting of these two beings, already in love and still swimming in that atmosphere of happy awkwardness and sweet felicity that precedes the moment of fateful pronouncements. So as not to keep the reader in suspense any longer, we shall provide some details about Claude, at least the ones we know, unconnected with her character, whose slow discovery is Jean’s business. She is French on her father’s side, Russian on her mother’s. We shall refrain from mentioning Slavic charm, out of consideration for those who witnessed the arrival of the first Soviet troops in Poland, Silesia, Pomerania and East Germany, and, later, the triumphal entry of the liberators into Hungary and Czechoslovakia. That so-called quality may well be one of those ghastly clichés you still hear bandied about in nightclubs. Claude’s aura expresses itself in a different way, more like a poem whose lines are arranged in the form of drawings, in words that write themselves around her when she speaks and smiles.

I am conscious of having mentioned her smile a great deal already. That is because each time it appears in her natural, unmade-up features it is an extraordinary summons, an instant temptation, an expression one would give one’s soul to see appear. So why is she not surrounded by a swarm of admirers battling to get closer to her, elbowing each other aside, loathing their rivals and planning their victorious offensive? For the simple reason that charm and grace are not apparent to everyone and this exquisite young woman lacks one crucial quality that excites and fans men’s passions: she is incapable of being a bitch.

So far only one man had disregarded this shortcoming. His name was Georges Chaminadze, and Caucasian blood ran in his veins. He was the father of the small boy with blue-green eyes who we shall encounter a few days after the first meeting with Claude, in a third-class railway carriage steaming slowly up to Paris. In the same compartment are six other people, all with set faces, who clearly dislike the presence of this boisterous child with the strange name of Cyrille. Jean is trying to get him interested in some drawings of monsters that he is sketching in an exercise book, while Claude stares out of the window at the countryside rolling past on the other side of the demarcation line.4 France is in the fields. Between Paris and the Loire the war has left few serious scars on the land. There is no sign of crops flattened by tanks, and only occasionally an abandoned truck at the side of the road or an aerodrome where planes were burnt where they stood on the morning of 10 May, at the sacrosanct coffee hour. A horse drags a wagon with a cot balanced on its roof. The crossing keeper chases his children, playing on the level crossing. The sun is shining. The summer of 1940 is superb, soft and golden. Three fighter planes – Messerschmitt 109s – fly over the train, showing their camouflaged undersides decorated with the black cross of the Luftwaffe. On a river bank there are even some fishermen sitting with their rods, two wearing straw hats, one in a beret. Paris is approaching: suburban burrstone houses and sad-looking apartment blocks, their shutters closed above shops still locked and dark. The train slows. Cyrille is at the window. Scrambling onto Claude’s knees, his feet have made her skirt ride up. Jean sees her knee for the first time. He places his hand on it, and she gives him a glance of reproof. The other passengers pull down their suitcases and parcels. Impatience and clumsiness make their natural rudeness worse. They would trample you underfoot rather than face a second’s delay.

Jean has very little with him, just a small bag containing a shirt and a sweater, his razor, a toothbrush, and a book. He is a long way from the ambitious Rastignac’s ‘It’s between you and me now!’,5 yet the future lies here: he must live to deserve the beautiful being at his side, whom the war has left defenceless. Georges Chaminadze is in England. He has managed to get a message through via the Red Cross. Claude is going back to her apartment and an uncertain livelihood. The train draws into the platform at Gare de Lyon with a long screech of brakes. German railway workers mingle with French. There are no longer any porters and no taxis.

The mêlée of passengers jostles and pushes its way to the Métro, which greets them with its smell of burnt electricity and disinfectant. Claude holds Cyrille’s hand. Jean carries the two cases. He escorts Claude to her apartment on Quai Saint-Michel. Apart from the occasional German car, the streets are empty. Paris smells good. The chestnuts are in leaf. The booksellers have reopened their stalls and there are soldiers flicking through pornography or buying engravings showing little urchins peeing in the gutter while a girl with an upturned nose watches spellbound. The lift is out of order. Four floors.

Claude pushes open the shutters and there is Notre-Dame, to which France’s government of freemasons and secularists filed on 19 May to pray to the Holy Virgin to save the nation. A Te Deum that fell on deaf ears. France has vanished but the witnesses to her past have remained: the Conciergerie, the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, and in the distance the Sacré-Cœur, as ugly as ever, the work of a pretentious pastry chef. Cyrille tugs off his socks and lies down on his bed among his favourite animals. Claude closes his bedroom door and walks back to the hall with Jean. She raises herself on tiptoe and kisses him quickly on the cheek.

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow.’

As he goes back downstairs he reflects that so far he has not even held her hand. But his palm has kept the memory of her knee that he stroked for a second on the train. Where to now? He knows no one and has only a few francs in his pocket. He feels a strong urge to turn round and retrace his footsteps. He reaches the Opéra. On the terrace of the Café de la Paix there are green uniforms and women sitting at the small tables. Rue de Clichy is deserted and the Casino de Paris is closed. Paris looks like a city drowsing in the sun, unwilling to wake up because it feels too early and there is no sign of the familiar morning noises – the buses and their grinding gearboxes, the milkmen and newspaper sellers – yet different noises are audible, as if in a bad dream – the two-stroke engines of German cars, the distant rumble and squeak of armoured units driving through the city back to the north, and the whistle of dispatch riders’ heavy BMW motorcycles. Drawn by a Percheron, a charabanc passes, transporting cases of beer. And on the giant billboard above the entrance to the Gaumont a poster for a German film.

Jean had thought he would never see Rue Lepic again, but here it is, and as he walks up it he recognises the Italian fruit-seller, the pork butcher from Limousin and the café-tabac run by the Auvergnat, though it is no longer Marcel behind the counter but his wife whose breasts are as large as ever. And finally the filthy, poetic building from which Chantal de Malemort escaped one morning, carried off in a Delahaye driven by that dandified thug, Gontran Longuet. Nearly all the shutters are closed, but two are open on the fourth floor. Jean climbs the stairs. Nothing has changed. He rings the bell. A sound of footsteps. The door opens wide. Jesús Infante stands with his mouth open.

‘Jean!’

He throws his arms wide, seizes Jean and crushes him, knocking all the air out of his body and thumping him on the back, Spanish-style.

‘Jean!’ he repeats. ‘You are ’live!’

On a bed behind him, draped with black satin, lies a girl with dyed blond hair.

‘Com’ in!’ Jesús shouts in a booming voice. ‘Make yourself at ’ome!’

The girl gets to her feet to look for a dressing gown and finds a piece of cloth that she knots above her breasts.

‘Coffee, Zorzette! A real one!’

Jesús is the same as ever, shirt unbuttoned on his hairy chest, five o’clock shadow, gold-filled smile. On his easel is a canvas of depressingly anatomical realism. He intercepts Jean’s gaze.

‘Yes, it’s revolting, I know. But i’ sells, i’ sells. You ’ave no ide’. I make one a day. So – tell me everything!’

Jean tells his story quickly. Jesús’s reaction is decisive. Jean has nothing, so he must live with him. He has a camp bed he can put up in the studio. The Germans buy his nudes by the dozen. The gangster from Place du Tertre who sells them visits three times a day and has doubled his price. Anyhow, Jean’s not here for that. They’ll talk about it later. Jesús jerks his chin in the direction of Georgette, pouring boiling water into the coffee pot. She is not in on the secret. Jean studies her as she bends forward to fill his cup: she has a tired and listless face with smudges around her eyes. She bleaches her hair carelessly and smells of the same cheap scent as the girls from the Sirène. Jesús taps her on the bottom.

‘Go an’ get dress’. ’E’s finish’ for today.’

She goes to change behind a screen.

‘What time tomorrow?’ she asks.

‘Today, tomorr’, we celebrate Jean. I le’ you know. An’ fuck the painting!’

She shrugs and holds out her hand. He puts money in her palm and she vanishes. Jesús tells Jean about his ‘war’, which has been as simple as can be: he has stayed exactly where he is. The only one left in the building, he went to the Étoile to watch the Germans march past, their band leading the way, in front of General von Briesen. Life has slowly returned to something like normal. Jean, remembering his friend’s strange eating habits, asks if he can still find peanuts and red wine. No, there are no more peanuts.

‘The peanut supply line ’as been cut!’ Jesús says, imitating Paul Reynaud, former president of the Council and much given to vainglorious announcements.

‘So?’

‘I eat wha’ I find! War is war. You ’ave to survive.’

His face takes on a sorrowful expression. There is a question on the tip of his tongue, but he is hesitating. Finally he speaks.

‘An’ ’ow is Santal de Malemort?’

‘I don’t know,’ Jean says.

‘You forgive ’er.’

‘I haven’t thought about it.’

‘You ’ave to forgive.’

‘That’s rich, coming from you!’

Jesús puts his hands together. He would like to swear but there is no God, so Jean will have to believe him. This is the truth: he, Jesús, never slept with Chantal, although it is true that she came to see him when Jean was working nights and offered to pose for him. Jesús would not have dreamt of touching her. He hadn’t known how to say it to Jean, and then afterwards he realised the misunderstanding.

‘I don’t care,’ Jean said. ‘And you’re a chump not to have screwed her.’

‘You is telling me that I’m chump?’

‘A very big chump.’

‘Okay, I’m chump. She was a girl who like’ to show ’er tits …’

Jesús wants to know everything. Why did she go back to Malemort when Gontran Longuet was offering her the high life, sports cars, hotels, travel? Women were incomprehensible; in fact they were completely mad. An Andalusian philosopher, a man from Jaén, Joaquín Petillo, declared in the eighteenth century that female seed came from another planet. An unknown object, smaller than a whale and bigger than a sardine – but in the shape of a fish – had several thousand years ago deposited an unknown seed on the surface of the earth. Until that moment our fathers (and mothers), all hermaphrodites, had lived happily and immortally together.

‘So how did they reproduce?’ Jean asks.

‘By the masturbación, dear Jean, the masturbación, mother of all the virtues.’

Unfortunately the seeds of this strange planet, so remote it took a hundred years at the speed of light to get from there to here, had mingled with those of the men who had been calmly masturbating as the sun passed its zenith, and so the first women had been born, bringing discord into an idyllic world. From these strange and remote beginnings they had retained a quality of mystery that even the greatest seers had never managed to unravel. They were incomprehensible, completely mad, acting with a total lack of masculine logic, and you ended up asking yourself if they were not somehow ruled by an interplanetary logic evolved by their seed during the long voyage through space, a logic purely and exclusively feminine and incommunicable to any human not possessing ovaries.

‘Even a transvestite can’ understand it!’ Jesús declares, raising his finger. ‘Tell me abou’ your friend Palfy, who interes’ me …’

Jean tells him that Palfy badly wants to come and live in Paris. Unfortunately his papers are not in order. He is waiting for clearance from the Kommandantur, which is investigating his past. Palfy has no alternative but to wait: the Côte d’Azur is closed to him, London likewise. He needs fresh pastures and a clean slate for his great schemes.

‘Madeleine will ’elp ’im!’ Jesús says.

‘Have you seen her? Is she doing business again?’

‘You mus’ be barmy! She lives with the colonel who is commanding the cloths!’

Jean is baffled. His understanding was that colonels commanded regiments. But no, this is a German colonel who occupies an office on Rue de la Paix. Buying stocks of available French cloth for the Wehrmacht. Of every type; even organdie, jersey and satin. The German army is an exceptionally chic fighting force, which conceals beneath its aggressive flag a passion for frothy and seductive undergarments. The important thing is that Madeleine has not forgotten Palfy and Jean. Only last week she was voicing her anxiety that they had been taken prisoner. If it were true, she would move heaven and earth to have them released.

‘She will fin’ you work!’

‘I don’t know if I’ve the means to work. Unless someone pays me weekly. I haven’t got a sou to my name.’

‘Sous, I’m making plenty o’ them. We share. This nigh’ dinner is on me …’

Jesús, then, is assuming importance in Jean’s life, having been in the first part of this story no more than a face glimpsed between two doors. The author is well aware of how irritating it is to see reproduced phonetically the words of an individual afflicted with such a strong accent. We get tired not just of the accent, but even more of the crude, overblown caricature a foreigner speaking our language imperfectly feels obliged to give to the least of his ideas, as though the nuances are likely to be completely missed because their refined and distinguished French equivalents (as we like to think) are lacking. Make no mistake though: like Baron Nucingen jabbering his execrable French, dunked in low German like bread in soup,6 Jesús, sucking his way through a French as beaten and twisted as a Spanish omelette, is no fool. As a young man he fled the mediocrity of a petty bourgeois Andalusian family, shopkeepers in the torrid city of Jaén, to breathe a different air that, even befouled by occupation, he continues to call the air of freedom – not political freedom, about which he does not give a damn, and will continue not to give a damn to the point that, when France is finally liberated, he is still a member of the Communist Party, but freedom to shock, sexual freedom, of which his own Spain at that time has not the slightest idea. In truth, his great dilemma – about which, out of embarrassment and naivety, he dares not speak to anyone – can be expressed in four words: where is painting going? Impossible to discuss it with other painters, especially those who have made it. The only talk he hears from them is about money, girls and food. With Jean it is different. Jesús can unburden himself without fear of ridicule: Jean is not an artist and will not retaliate with sarcastic remarks that conceal all the jealousy, envy and contempt with which his contemporaries are riddled. To Jean and Jean alone he can confide, without being mocked or scoffed at, his unspeakable misfortune in having to prostitute himself in order to survive and keep his hopes alive. Despite the difference in their ages – Jesús is thirty and Jean now twenty-one – they are children from the same stock: friendship is the only asset they possess. It is quite true that Jesús did not sleep with Chantal de Malemort. He could have, but did not want to. Preserved by his disinterested ambitions, Jesús will never grow up, whereas Jean will become an adult in small steps that will each break his heart a little more. Oh, what price must a youth not pay to become a man one day! Jean, back in a Paris it sickens him to return to, possesses neither love nor friendship enough to keep his courage alive. Fortunately Claude is there, and in her presence nothing is inevitable, everything is simple, and there is no shade of ambiguity from the beginning. I would not like to say more at a time when Jean himself still knows nothing. Let us attempt, in some measure, to act as he does, and feel our way towards this woman whose smile will light up two of the four dark years to come.

*

Jean recoiled from meeting Madeleine. In two days and as many journeys across Paris on foot he had taken in the reality of the occupation: the parades at the Étoile, the signposts, the flags of the Third Reich stamped with the swastika flapping in Rue de Rivoli. Small signs, yet they sufficed to stop him forgetting and to allow him to guess that an iron fist existed, gloved in velvet for now but an unspeakable and indeterminate threat in the sky of the future. The free zone could play its games of smoke and mirrors, parade with its bands blaring and its comic-opera army of a hundred thousand men, unfurl all the modest pomp of a new regime, but the undeniable, naked, crushing truth was here, in Paris.

Next morning Jesús introduced Jean to the director-owner of the gallery who sold his grotesque and obscene nudes at Place du Tertre. This person, who before the war had mocked the Spaniard with merciless sarcasm, nicknaming him ‘Papiécasso’ for his unsaleable collages, had spotted in the defeat a new and much more interesting clientele than the American and English tourists of the inter-war years. Short, fat, blue-eyed, his neck pinched by a celluloid collar, his cheeks red and his short legs swamped by trousers even more voluminous than his backside, Louis-Edmond de La Garenne claimed to be descended from a crusader who would have covered himself in shame had he seen one of his descendants keeping a shop. Jean was deeply put off by his lack of eyebrows and his jet-black hair (with its unnatural reddish glints) which clashed with a face that was smooth, chubby and apparently completely hairless. Jesús had forgotten to warn him that Louis-Edmond wore a wig, ever since a strange illness that had robbed his body of all hair. Louis-Edmond de La Garenne looked Jean up and down.

‘I know my way around men,’ he boasted. ‘I’m never wrong. The first impression is the only one worth having. Afterwards you get bamboozled into all sorts of feelings and nuances. You’ll do. Do you speak German?’

‘Not a single word. Only English.’

‘Perfect. Our clientele at this time is exclusively German. It demands flattery. Either these imbeciles imagine they speak French or they will address you in the language of our hereditary enemy: English. You’re the man I need. You’ll start straight away. I’ll give you five hundred francs a month. With tips you’ll do very nicely for yourself.’

‘Louis-Edmond,’ Jesús said, ‘you take us for stupid bastards who is workin’ for nozing. You give Jean two thousan’ francs an’ a commission on what ’e sell ’imself.’

‘Jesús, no one is indispensable.’

‘No, is true. No’ even you. Especial’ you. You understan’ me?’

‘You’re ruining me. I accept only to give you pleasure.’

Jesús treated him to a vigorous thump in return.

‘You are intelligen’, Louis-Edmond. Very intelligen’, you old sweendler.’

Jean discovered that the gallery already possessed a salesperson, a middle-aged woman with a dignified but ravaged face named Blanche de Rocroy, the last of her line, beggared and humiliated at every turn by La Garenne, suffering his criticisms in silence as she had suffered since childhood, the only daughter of decrepit and déclassé aristocrats whose one remaining pride was the name they carried. Her fiancé had been killed at the front in 1918. What chance did she have of finding another when she looked like a battered, abject old owl with no bust? La Garenne had slept with her once during her period of greatest misery and still requested, in a tone that brooked no refusal, minor services from her which she provided in his office after the door had been locked behind her. For the first few days Jean could not get a word out of her. He tried to reassure her that he had not been taken on so that La Garenne could get rid of her, but because only a man could deal with customers interested in canvases of nudes. She half believed him and for a long time continued to look as gloomy as the rural landscapes that she sold with barely disguised apathy. Business boomed. Soldiers on leave in field-grey uniforms crowded outside the gallery windows, shoving each other with their elbows, smothering their guffaws, embarrassment and curiosity pressing them together. Their NCOs walked past, ramrod straight, eyes front, outraged in the name of the Reich at the sight of these bottoms, nipples and pussies, the very symbols of the moral and physical corruption that had led France to its destruction. The officers, on the other hand, strode in, leafed through the gallery’s catalogue and asked to see what Louis-Edmond proudly called his ‘hell’, a collection of pornographic prints, licentious drawings and Jesús’s most daring canvases. It was understandable that Blanche de Rocroy should feel uncomfortable displaying such horrors to male customers who were in the habit of screwing monocles into their eyes so as not to miss the smallest detail. Jean’s days were therefore mostly spent in ‘hell’, with Louis-Edmond only appearing when a customer started haggling too much. Moving from honeyed charm to outright disdain, and from disdain to perfectly pitched indifference, he would close the sale with his ineffably glib tongue. The examples of extreme erotica sold fast. Jesús began to be unable to satisfy the demand, and La Garenne started to look for new artists. He found a few, but their work did not sell: talentless and sleazy, they failed to meet La Garenne’s customers’ exacting requirements. From Jean Jesús learnt what was happening and slammed the door on his dealer. Jean laughed. Louis-Edmond, frantic at the idea of running out of merchandise, sent him back as his ambassador, bearing a very large cheque.

‘Tell ’im to come ’ere hisself,’ Jesús answered. ‘I wan’ to see this shit climb my stairs on ’is ’ands an’ knees.’

The dealer came, and climbed. Jesús let him off the hands and knees, though La Garenne was ready to submit. Puce-faced, perspiring, so breathless he could not speak, he listened without protesting as he was called every name under the sun, his head bent, twisting his plump hands with their filthy nails. When Jesús ran out of insults La Garenne sobbed, ‘I am a wretch.’

‘A wretch stuff’ with cash!’

‘I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about my name, which I’ve allowed to be dragged through the mud. Me! The descendant of a crusader!’

‘An’ fuck your crusades!’

But La Garenne had got his breath back, and with it his snooping instinct, and was glancing around the studio. Ignoring the daubs he usually bought, he went up to an easel on which stood one of Jesús’s new canvases, a black and luminous landscape, a violent confrontation between a lava-covered land and the sea, under a blazing sky.

‘This is brilliant!’ he said. ‘I’ll buy it.’

‘Eh?’ Jesús said, dumbstruck.

La Garenne took out his cheque book.

‘How much? You tell me.’

‘I don’ feed the jam to the pig.’

‘Jesús, I’m not asking for compensation for your insults. Where genius is concerned, everything is allowed. How much?’

‘No.’

La Garenne signed his cheque, dated it, left the amount blank and handed it to Jesús.

‘You put down whatever you like.’

‘Go fuck yourself!’

As we may imagine, La Garenne walked away with the picture, leaving behind a cheque for twenty thousand francs and the promise that Jesús would deliver within the next week a series of six etchings for ‘hell’.

‘Edition of fifty, not one more!’ the dealer promised, his arm extended as if for a fascist salute.

Jean had reason to believe that, with the help of subtle manipulation, the fifty would turn into two hundred, plus several dozen artist’s proofs. La Garenne fiddled the documentary evidence and had already for a long time been forging the pseudonymous signature Jesús used for his bread-and-butter work. To buy Jesús’s landscape as he had, almost with his eyes closed and with an impressively faked passion and a cheque to match, had been a stroke of genius. Jesús wavered. For a time he even stopped heaping insults on Louis-Edmond, making an effort, without great conviction, to acknowledge a flair beneath his crudity, a sort of instinct for painting that only the treacherous circumstances and frightful materialism of the French prevented from showing itself. Jean refrained from pouring cold water on his friend’s enthusiasm and opening his eyes to the Machiavellianism of La Garenne who, almost as soon as they were back at the gallery, had handed Jesús’s canvas to Blanche, curling his lip contemptuously.

‘Put that in the toilet or the cellar. Yes, in the cellar. If I had that in front of me I couldn’t deal with two shits at once.’

Perhaps the important thing was that Jesús had found a buyer for a painting that he had begun to think was unsaleable.

What about Claude? I hear you say. We have not forgotten her. She explains everything. Without her Jean would not stay a single day longer in this new Paris, slowly beginning to fill with people again and to face the autumn with a kind of fearful, courageous expectancy. He puts up with the ignominy of working for La Garenne, with Blanche’s relentless gloom, with the disheartening experience of spending his days in the gallery’s hell, because when he finishes work Claude’s smile and the cool welcome of her cheek is waiting for him on the fourth floor of Quai Saint-Michel.

Cyrille would open the door: a pale little boy with curly blond hair and blue eyes sparkling with pleasure.

‘Maman, it’s Jean!’ he would shout.

‘Who else did you think it would be?’ she would answer from the next room.

She would appear, her face half turned to his, offering her cheek and the beginning of her smile. Cyrille would go back to his toys, and when the weather was fine they would lean on the balcony and look out over the city slowly disappearing in the twilight, the Seine velvet and immobile, its banks empty but for pedestrians hastening home.

The first evening Claude said, ‘It’s terrible!’

‘What’s terrible?’

‘Everything. Not knowing anything about the people you love, or even the people you don’t love. Not being sure of anything. What will happen to us? We’re using up the best years of our lives wanting to know, wanting to have an answer.’

‘I close my eyes. You should do the same.’

‘You don’t have anyone else.’

‘I’m the same as you. I have you.’

‘You don’t have me. You have to remember that.’

‘Well, I think I have you, whether you like it or not, and deep down it doesn’t matter if you do or you don’t.’

Yes, let us dispel the ambiguity. Nothing has happened between them since their meeting at Clermont-Ferrand, and it is Claude’s wish that nothing should happen. To all appearances that is not how things are: they are together, they see each other every day. When the gallery closes, Jean walks down from Montmartre to Saint-Michel. He likes crossing Paris like this, among crowds of Frenchmen and -women hurrying about their business, paying no attention to the signs in Gothic script that they encounter en route. The occupiers are still tourists. There were others like them before the war, and no one is surprised that this new wave of curious visitors responds to the same siren songs as their predecessors, making straight for the Opéra or the Folies-Bergère. Jean loves Paris for other reasons; for him the city is intimate and full of secret places. Turning a corner, catching sight of a theatre or a cinema, revives memories that no longer cause him pain. Claude is there, and she drives out Chantal de Malemort. As he crosses Pont Saint-Michel he looks up to see Claude’s windows and is flooded with happiness. Cyrille has his tea and goes to sleep in his mother’s bed. Claude has laid a table for two. They sit and talk. From time to time Claude looks down and the divine smile that Jean adores leaves her face. Then quickly, in a few words, he takes back what he has just said and what has upset her. Since the day he put his hand on her knee in the train that brought them to Paris, she has never had to be wary of him. Little by little she has learnt who he is and where he comes from, and is surprised that he has no desire to go and see what is happening at Grangeville.

‘Aren’t you worried about your father?’

‘He’s not my father. I love him, but I don’t feel I have anything in common with him any more.’

‘What about Antoinette?’

‘I’d like to see her again. There’s no urgency.’

‘And Chantal de Malemort?’

‘We have nothing to say to each other.’

He would love Claude to talk, as he does, about the people close to her, about her family whom she sees, he knows, during the day; but she seems to prefer to be without attachments where he is concerned. A single woman with a small boy, the two of them perched on a Paris balcony. Not a word about the husband. There is a photo of him in the bedroom, on the bedside table on Cyrille’s side of the bed. Jean hates this bed. He finds it hard to look at it when he goes to kiss the little boy on his damp forehead before he leaves. One night they go on talking for so long that when they stop it is after curfew. Jean sleeps on a couch in the sitting room; he has to curl up like a dog under an eiderdown. The night seems endless to him. Is Claude asleep? He swears that she is. A single police car speeds past along the embankment, then there is no other noise until the dripping, cold dawn reveals a lugubriously grey Paris.

Claude makes coffee and toast. Cyrille is in a bad mood. Jean cheers him up and the boy does not want him to go. After that night there are others, and now Jean sleeps practically every other night at Quai Saint-Michel. Sleeps properly. Lightly, in case Claude were to get up in the adjoining room and come to him. But, as we have guessed, she does not come. Occasionally he wonders what progress he has made since the day he first sat awkwardly opposite her. In all honesty he is obliged to say: none. The curious thing is that it does not make him feel bad, and little by little he has settled for this friendly and affectionate distance that she has assigned to him, like the trinkets – a silver snuff box, an ivory sweet tray, a tortoiseshell dance card, a crystal perfume bottle – laid out on a small side table that she often strokes with her finger as she walks past, familiar mementoes of life in Russia that her mother has saved. Jean is there, just like them, though he is not from Russia.

In fact he would feel perfectly comfortable where she has put him, if he did not, at certain moments, desire her with a painful intensity. During the day she knows how to keep his desire at bay, but at night, asleep behind her bedroom door, she loses her advantage and Jean has a trio of images that help remind him of her reality: the silhouette of her body placed between him and the sun, beneath the transparent material of her dress; her knee on the train (which will stay with him for the rest of his life); and, one morning when she bent over to butter Cyrille’s bread, her dressing gown falling open and revealing a bare breast. Not both, just one; although with a modicum of imagination one could picture the other as very similar. She did not notice and Jean averted his gaze to avoid embarrassing her, but at night, as soon as he closes his eyelids, he sees again the curve and delicacy of this breast that looks like a young girl’s. It is maddening and unbearable. The funniest part of it is that his days are spent sorting, exhibiting, putting away, and selling Louis-Edmond de La Garenne’s ‘hell’, an unbelievable pornographic vomitus, an ocean of the most extreme erotica, of which Jesús is the chief supplier. In all honesty, Jean fails to understand how anyone can feel the slightest emotion at the sight of an obscene engraving, and he would need very little persuasion to consider all the customers who throng the gallery in Place du Tertre as suffering from some form of mental illness. And so, step by step, he is discovering what is particular to his own notion of physical love: almost total indifference when he is not in love, and contrarily, hypersensitivity when he is. He would not need much persuasion either to believe that all lovers of erotica must be impotent. Who among his customers would feel their heartbeat race when they looked at Claude because she had innocently worn a sleeveless dress or because, as she sat down, she had revealed her knee?

Jesús, when Jean attempts to explain these nuances, opens his eyes wide. In Spain only virginity can trigger an erotic frenzy. A married woman, the mother of a child, is totally uninteresting. Several times the discussions that follow last till dawn. The next day Jean is reeling. He accuses himself of naivety and clumsiness. Any man with any experience would already have obtained from Claude what he so passionately desires; and later, as he crosses Paris to see her again, he spends the journey making cynical resolutions he is determined to keep and every time fails to keep. As soon as she is there in front of him, he is disarmed. First there is Cyrille, who every day shows him more and more affection, then there is Claude herself, talking to him as if she has guessed his resolve and is herself determined to head it off.

‘Jean, I think you and I are going to make something wonderful, something completely unique in the world that no biologist could even think of. Born to different fathers and mothers, we are going to have the same blood.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘That you are my younger brother.’

‘Haven’t you ever heard of incest?’

‘Yes. And haven’t you ever heard of the curse that strikes down those who engage in incest?’

He tells her she is being overdramatic. She smiles and they talk of other things, of Jesús whom she wants to meet, and of Palfy, about whom there is still no news. Jean wonders if his friend has moved into the Sirène with all its comforts, continuing to dupe Madame Michette mercilessly. It is so unlike him to put up with the same fate as everyone else! No one who knows him can imagine him waiting for a visa along with three hundred thousand hopefuls waiting to cross the demarcation line and get to Paris. He has failed to reply to the interzone postcard Jean sent at the beginning of September. It probably sounded baffling to him anyway, with its series of permitted formulas, almost all to do with food or family.

The truth is that no one knows what is happening on the other side of the militarised border. When Parisian newspapers are not lampooning the Vichy government, they are dismissing it as a den of traitors coolly plotting vengeance. In Paris people live in a closed and isolated world. Beyond the palisade people might be mobilising or they might not: if the German communiqués are to be believed, in London, Coventry and elsewhere everyone has gone to ground.

The army of occupation continues to conduct its war without a scratch, a superb fighting mechanism whose resources were criminally concealed from the French. It has fuel, leather, endless supplies of machinery, perfect discipline, and all it can eat. The exotic London Jean once knew is impossible to imagine now, under a storm of steel: the majesty of Eaton Square that he loved, the doll’s houses of Chelsea, the elderly ladies in Hyde Park, the boats that steamed up the Thames to moor at Hampton Court among the oarsmen. It seems so distant now! The French are winding themselves into a cocoon, like a small child, while the Heinkel 111 bombers drone through the night towards Britain. They remain in a state of shock. The most pressing question is that of subsistence, a difficult problem for which the country is unprepared. At least love can make everything else go away. Jean does not stint himself. In the evening when he arrives at Saint-Michel there is always a package under his arm, something to make the dinner go better, whatever he has managed to extort from the grocer in Rue Lepic. Blanche de Rocroy’s cousin, who lives in the Seine-et-Marne region, sends her parcels of butter, lard and even game that she shares with Jean, who passes it on to Claude and Cyrille. The lift in their building is sealed off and he has to walk past the lodge of the concierge, a ghastly woman who wears her spitefulness on her face. Whenever she opens her door a crack, a smell of stew and decomposition fills the lobby. Jean is unaware that she has bought herself an exercise book in which she notes down the comings and goings of the tenants and their visitors. For the moment she does it because she enjoys it, with the thought at the back of her mind that one day it might be useful. Who to? The German police, or the French? She doesn’t know, but she tells herself she is a patriot and that if there had been more like her France would not be in the state it’s in now. Jean hurries up four floors. Claude’s cheek is waiting on the other side of the door.

‘You’re late!’ she says.

To excuse himself, he opens his package, which contains a hare. They skin it together on the kitchen table, an operation Jean has seen his father carry out a hundred times with an Opinel painstakingly sharpened beforehand. Alas, their own knife is far from razor-sharp and the skinning is a laborious business. The blood dries on their hands and Claude begins to feel sick. They will be cooking all evening, using up their last onions, a scrap of flour, four potatoes, some herbs and a glass of red wine. Cyrille proclaims that he does not like eating dead hare. He wants a live one. Because they have eaten late, Jean is to sleep on the couch in the small sitting room. Claude is on the other side of the wall. He strains to hear her breathing. Nothing. Not a sound. Neither the other tenants on this floor nor those on the floor above have returned to Paris. The ghastly concierge maintains they are all Jews; she has proof they are, in the form of the miserable New Year tips they used to give her before the war. In fact the only Jew is an upstairs tenant called Léon Samuel-Roth, a professor at the Sorbonne who for ten years has been writing an essay (eight hundred pages of his final draft are complete) on the Marxist aspects of the thought of Jean Racine as developed in his two Jewish plays, Esther and Athalie. At this moment Professor Samuel-Roth is hidden away in the Auvergne, missing his books terribly. Having succeeded in avoiding the increasingly widespread arrests, within four years he will nevertheless finish his essay (another four hundred pages), bring the manuscript back to Paris in October 1944, a few months after the Liberation, and leave it on a bus, a loss he will get over surprisingly easily, frequently telling his students that it was actually a fairly superficial piece of work, an academic’s distraction, and that at the age of fifty he felt the time had come instead to write a novel, whose action would be located in the same Auvergne where he lived for four years without seeing a thing, buried in his writing and with his nose, bristling with grey hairs, constantly to the grindstone. The other absent tenants on Claude’s floor are an elderly Alsatian couple, the Schmoegles, the husband a former officer in the Coloniale7 and since his retirement a technical adviser to a company manufacturing lead soldiers. No one knows what became of them when Paris fell and we shall hear no more of them; perhaps they died in the general exodus, hastily buried without anyone taking note of who they were. The fact that their apartment is empty will soon be passed on by the concierge to the German police, who will requisition it for one of their informers, who in turn will be denounced by the same concierge at the Liberation, be arrested and have his throat cut in a cellar, to be succeeded by an FFI colonel8 who will finally take his ease among the late Schmoegles’ belongings.

In the silence insomnia gnaws at Jean. He knows it will make his frustration worse, but he cannot stop himself from fantasising. He has to clench his teeth, get up and go out on the balcony, where the sudden numbing autumn cold freezes his temples. Quai and Pont Saint-Michel, Quai du Marché Neuf and the forecourt of Notre-Dame are deserted. Jean remembers a film by René Clair, Paris Asleep, that Joseph Outen had showed at his film club in Dieppe in the heyday of his cinema period. Alas, it is not the charmingly cocky Albert Préjean, his cap tilted over his ear, who is making the most of the sleeping city, but a German motorcyclist, fatly girdled in black leather and preceded by a brush stroke of yellow light, whose machine rips into the silence as it dashes past. What message can be urgent enough for the rider to wake up thousands of sleeping Parisians along the road to his destination? And talking of films, where has poor Joseph Outen got to? Has he been killed, taken prisoner, wounded? Did he make it back to Normandy, to a new hobbyhorse and another pipe dream? Freezing, Jean closes the window, moves across to the communicating door, and hears the parquet floor creak in Claude and Cyrille’s bedroom. The door opens, and in the doorway a figure is vaguely outlined against a black background. Claude closes the door behind her.

‘You’re not asleep,’ she murmurs in a reproachful voice.

‘Nor are you.’

He stretches his hand out towards what he guesses to be her bare arm, grasps it, and presses his thumb against the vein beating in the crook of her elbow. Her skin is warm and smooth. Claude, usually sensitive to all physical contact, does not pull her arm away.

‘That motorcyclist woke us both,’ she says.

‘I wasn’t asleep, I was on the balcony.’

‘In this weather?’

‘In this weather.’

He goes on stroking the crook of her elbow and the skin whose taste he so longs to know.

‘Why aren’t you afraid?’

‘Of you? Never.’

‘I’m an idiot.’

‘Don’t say that! I can’t bear it. And I wouldn’t love an idiot anyway.’

It is the first time she has said it. An icy shiver runs down his spine that he finds it hard to make sense of.

‘You said you love me.’

‘Of course. Could you have doubted it? Would I be here if I didn’t love you?’

‘So?’

‘So we wait … Go to sleep. Cyrille will wake up.’

At daybreak he leaves for Rue Lepic, to wash and shave. The elation he feels makes the human beings pressing into the entrances to the Métro look sadder and greyer than usual. He notices how much thinner they are already. The well-fed crowds of 1939 have given way to men and women whose clothes flap around them. Poor diet makes them more sensitive to the cold. Jean usually walks back, varying his route. It’s his only way of maintaining his physical fitness, under threat from the sedentary existence he leads. He longs to have his bicycle with him but it is out in the country, in Normandy, assuming no one stole it during the exodus. He decides to write to Antoinette.

Jesús is already up. Winter and summer, he rises at five, lights his stove with wood from a friendly joiner in Rue de l’Abreuvoir, boils the water for his coffee or something with the colour of coffee if not the taste.

‘I wouldn’ min’ meetin’ this girl!’ he says.

‘She isn’t a girl!’

‘So she’s what?’

‘A … woman … Thanks very much … So you can suggest she poses naked for you straight away, I suppose.’

They laugh at this. Before going to his easel Jesús does ten minutes of weight training in his underwear. In the mornings he works for himself, but no collages now, no borrowed technique. He had plenty of excuses; anyone coming from Jaén has a good excuse. Everything’s fascinating and new when you haven’t seen anything yet, but two or three visits to museums quickly reveal Surrealism showing its age, and now Jesús has decided not to listen to or admire anyone but himself. The result is landscapes. And for him these mean a return to Andalusia every time: scorched earth, melancholy vegetation, an oily sea, skies crushed by light. As he remembers the landscapes of his childhood, he feels such thirst for austerity and absolutism that he simplifies his colours to their extreme. From a short way away the spectator could be looking at abstract canvases and must examine them close up to grasp the pictures’ tormented life.

‘You understand, my friend. I am ’appy, ’appy … I do wha’ I wan’. And I tell you, fuck La Garenne … Fuck ’im, fuck ’im …’

In truth, Jesús is a long way from being able to send La Garenne packing, and at ten o’clock when his model arrives he bundles his canvas into a wardrobe and whips out a sketchbook. Jean leaves for the gallery. Blanche has the keys and is already there as he arrives. Through the window the sight of her scrawny figure fills him with pity, even though, despite the endless stream of insults and obscene remarks La Garenne subjects her to, she has somehow always managed to cling to something like dignity. She has a distinguished voice, which verges on affectedness in her pronunciation of certain words, as though she intended to remind whoever might get the wrong impression from her physical appearance that she remains a Rocroy. She has only just turned forty, yet it is impossible to guess how old she is. Bad luck ages people: they go grey, bags appear under their eyes, their shoulders droop, their legs become so thin they look like broomsticks. Handling Jesús’s series of drawings for La Garenne’s specialist clientele, she smiles unembarrassedly, observing how ‘saucy’ they are, which is the very least that might be said of them.