A Country Road, A Tree (12 page)

“I’m used to it mattering.” She shrugs. “And then everything is such a fag, these days! Just the bare essentials take up so much of one’s time and energy. Living is a vocation now; life’s an art. One must carve it out for oneself every day.”

She moves to lift her glass; her long earrings catch the light. At least she is good at it, at this carving out of life. She does it with conviction.

“Any news of Marcel?”

Her face puckers up, half smiling, half a frown. “He’s quit,” she says.

“Quit?”

“Quit work.”

“No.”

She nods in contradiction. “It’s not that he
can’t
work—it is simply that he has decided not to.”

“And that’s that?”

“That’s that. All he’ll do now is chess.” She has heard it far too often, has got it by rote, is bored of it. “Art has become shop-soiled. You can buy and sell a picture or a sculpture, but you can’t own a game of chess.”

The purity of that. That’s something.

“Yes, he’s right, of course, I know,” she says. “But where does it take you, in the end?”

Through a complex web of potential, towards an endgame that is at once foreseeable and shifting, into silence, stillness. “It’s rather beautiful.”

“It’s a shame, is what it is. He was in Marseilles for a while, and Sanary-sur-Mer. He’s still planning to go to New York.” She lifts a shoulder. “I’m staying here.”

She parts her lips to say something more, but then the needle shifts into the hiss and fuzz at the centre of the disc, and she goes over to lift the arm and slide the record away. She has no notion of what an indulgence it has been to him, the music. More so even than the glass of brandy.

She speaks over her shoulder: “Would you abandon your home because you had house guests who wouldn’t take a hint? I’m not leaving. They can go.”

“You’re right, of course. It’s dreadfully bad manners.”

A delicious smile. “Shocking.”

—

When he leaves, she kisses him on both cheeks. He catches the scent of her powder, feels the coolness of her hair. He should be glad that she continues just the same, when so much else is changed; but he can’t quite work out why he’s so unnerved by her. Her words have stuck with him like ink on the skin, smudging in and creeping along tiny creases.

“You take care of yourself, now,” she says.

“And you,” he says. “God bless.”

Stepping back into the street is like coming out of a matinée. Dazzled, heady with brandy, he ambles along, chewing on their conversation, her gestures, that cheeky defiance, all the way home.

But where does it take you, in the end?

I’m not leaving. They can go.

Later, he lies awake, his back turned to Suzanne’s soft breathing, his toes twisted in the sheet, his shoulder denting the ticking and his ear pressed into the pillow. He can’t sleep: he is haunted by absences, by things unsaid. He can’t keep account of everyone; he can’t accommodate it all.

CHAPTER SEVEN

PARIS

Summer 1941

It’s strangely cool for August. The sky is grey; the city is grey. There are grey-green uniforms on the café terraces around Odéon; German officers swing out of shops with little luxuries; they walk three abreast and take up the width of the pavements. Paris is a luxury they have allowed themselves; they indulge in it. They fill the city with their grey.

He makes his way through all of this as if it is not real. The occupiers are silent images projected upon the city. They slip over him without touching. He holds his own pictures, his own images of Germany, in his head: the cool spires, the mist and stillness of early morning, the fug of beer-halls, strong paint-spattered hands, a crook’s smile.

Remember this. The Germany you love.

He takes out his cigarette pack, touches the tip of his last cigarette. This morning—in one of the Jewish neighbourhoods—the police made a mass arrest. They have taken hostages for the new French State. He is scanning through that tally in his head, for friends who might have been at risk. He must go and check on the Léons, at the very least. He puts the cigarette packet away and turns the other way down the rue de Vaugirard, and it seems quite ordinary, workaday, but normality is now a skin stretched thin and it can split at any time.

He’s walking briskly, urgent with concern for his friends, when a young woman brushes past. She does a little half-skip to make headway. Her body doesn’t quite fill her dress and she has no stockings on, but she’s swinging along the pavement as though she’s glad to be alive. Charming, that, if quite deluded.

She falters, slows. He peers past her to see what she has seen.

There’s a hulk of grey-green on the corner. A knot of soldiers. For the time being they’re occupied with some lad who’s failed to show sufficient respect: he’s jostled, barked at; some German, some ugly French. His cap is sent spinning into the gutter. He scurries after it, ducks to scoop it up, then darts off down a side street; he’s gone. And then, amongst the soldiers, a fist knocks against an arm; a head jerks, a chin juts; eyes swivel round and watch the young woman approach.

An arm swipes at her. “Mademoiselle, your papers, if you please.” And she can’t refuse or turn away. She has not that right.

He’s in a rush, but fear slows time, so that one could feel the sluggish thud of one’s own blood as the papers are presented, shaking, and thick fingers receive the document. She is addressed in heavy French; the comments underneath are in German. He watches, approaching, as she blinks back and forth from one face to another.

He is passing her now, and her eyes follow him round, watching as she might watch someone else’s balloon drifting free up into the air.

His hands flex, grip. His thin boots plant the pavement and he is past her, and he has done nothing and is still walking on, and he can hear her voice crack with frustration: her papers are in order, she has to get home, she’s expected, her mother will be worried. These arrests, you see. And the heavily accented voices, the suggestion in French that they meet later to clarify the issue, perhaps over a drink. The German, muttered underneath, is a more intimate suggestion.

And he just keeps on walking. Against all instincts. Because what good would it do to intervene?
What use do you imagine you could be?

No use whatsoever, Mother. No use to anyone at all.

He rounds the corner, teeth stinging, his jaw is clenched so tight. He blunders straight into another man.

A fumbled readjustment.

“Ah, excuse me—”

“Oh, hello—”

And it is Paul Léon himself, his light summer jacket neatly buttoned over a pristine shirt and a blue silk tie. He looks as though he has stepped straight out of those satellite years before the war.

“Paul.” They shake hands. “Thank God. I was just on my way to see you.” He touches Paul’s elbow, exerting gentle pressure, steering him away from the checkpoint.

They cross the road together and continue in the direction Paul had been going, but now on the far side of the street. They pass, with the expanse of cobblestones between them, the knot of soldiers and the young woman. She is really arguing now; her voice is shrill and insistent and the soldiers are getting fed up, shuffling; it’s not exciting now that she’s scolding them like a furious little sister. He sees the papers offered back and her grab them and stuff them away. She stalks off.

“I was worried, when I heard about the round-up,” he says.

Paul’s lips compress. “We plan to leave.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, my friend. We’ll leave as soon as the boy’s got his
bachot.
”

“When’s that?”

“Tomorrow.”

He nods. Good.

“Though I have to say, we’re not best pleased. Lucie particularly hates these
déménagements.
There is so much to organize, and it is so disruptive for the children, and for our work.”

“I know,” he says, though he knows he does not really know. Work is one thing, but children are entirely another. How one could look a life’s worth into the future and consider the prospect good enough to throw small people out to flounder round in it, to pin exams to them and think that it will matter. Instinct is powerful, he supposes. Blood and spunk and all of that, it pushes against sense. Love, perhaps.

“I still expect to see him,” Paul says.

It takes just a moment. “Do you?”

He tries to see Joyce here, now, a blind man with a stick, feeling his way along through Paris under occupation. Outraged at the inconvenience of it all.

“I knew he wasn’t well, but it just didn’t occur to me that he would die.”

“Fifty-eight,” he says. “It’s not old.”

“I thought maybe we would have another book from him,” Paul says.

“Really?” He can’t imagine what this book would be.

They approach the junction with the rue Littré. This is where Paul must turn, it seems, because he slows and offers out a hand.

“Ah well,” Paul says. “It’s good to see you, my friend.”

“Be careful,” he says. “Please.”

They clasp hands. Paul gives him a smile and turns away, and ambles off. The stooped pale shape diminishing down the dim street, under the grey August sky.

—

It is the fascination of disgust, the way his attention is fixed on her and her lips as they move. The disgust of the green and pink twist of mouse innards left on the doorstep, the slime-thick hair teased from the plughole, the way that nails sink into the flesh of an overlooked pear. The lips forming on the words: those
sales métèques.
With their dirt and disease and lice and their disease and their dirt and their scheming, and their insistence on being where they are not wanted, their insistence on just being.

He turns himself away, watches the posters as the wind tugs at their corners. The easy lines of a dancer’s leg, the yellow and blue of a southern beach. Fresher, more recent layers of the palimpsest: children clustered round a stolid man in uniform:
Populations abandonnées faites confiance,
it reads,
au soldat allemand!

The queue shuffles itself forward. He turns his collar up against the wet and tugs his hat brim down and shuffles forward too. His boots are leaking, unrepaired; his feet squelch.

Look at us, mugs that we are, queuing for hours in the rain, and in August, would you believe it! Dreadful summer that it’s been. And even then the bread not what it was.

Sawdust in the flour, her friend says.

Chalk.

Bad year for the grain.

But in the camps, oh ho, they just get everything handed to them. Out at Drancy and at Royallieu. They don’t know how lucky they are: three meals a day, all the bread they want, nothing to worry about, not like us. They don’t know they’re born.

Bad year for the grain, in that all the grain has been carted off to Germany. Bad year for the potatoes. And for the wine. And for the coal. He has a choice, of course; he doesn’t have to stay and listen to this. He could just step out of the queue. He could just walk away. And he could have a good go at tearing that poster off the wall as he passes. He could just keep on walking, walking like he used to, the long miles winding into the mountains, the wide spread of silence, with its markers of distant birdcalls and a farm-dog’s bark and sometimes a solitary car, the wind in their ears and their feet planted one after the other on the macadam, and then gravel, and then narrow trails of worn earth. The escape up to where everything was fresh and clean and clear.

But now the war is everywhere and he cannot walk away.

And—this of course bears consideration—Suzanne will tear strips off him if he comes home without their bread.

So he turns aside, his back against the wall, and smokes a cigarette. He thinks, you shall find out how salt is the taste of another man’s bread, and how hard is the way up and down another man’s stairs.

Dante is a consolation.

—

“But. No.”

Suzanne’s lips are compressed and her face is tight with distress. She nods. It’s true.

“But how did it happen? When?”

“There was another round-up this morning. He must have thought it was safe to be out, that it was all over and done with. So many people must have thought as much.”

“Christ.” He sits down. “Where’ve they taken him?”

Suzanne shakes her head. “Drancy, maybe?”

The world can collapse to this. To the inside of a truck, rattling across the cobblestones of Paris. To the crowded precincts of a camp. To the locked door and the barbed wire coiled across the sky. And the vile ignorance of fellow citizens, who begrudge you even this.

“How’s Lucie?”

Just another shake of the head.

His jaw is tight, his teeth stinging. He can feel the pressure of Paul’s hand in his, the lightly worn intelligence, that civility. The stooped figure diminishing down the street. They can’t do this. How can they do this? It’s just ridiculous, to lock up Paul Léon. It is an outrage. He’s on his feet, rebuttoning the coat he hadn’t yet removed, and is heading for the door.

“Where are you going?” Suzanne blinks at him, her eyes big and wet.

“I’ll go and see Lucie.”

“What can you do?”

“I’ll find out.”

—

Lucie has been crying. Her eyes are puffy and her mouth is smudged, but her face has been washed and powdered and when she speaks her voice is careful and measured. She holds herself erect.

She does her best to smile. She ushers him into the apartment, offers him a seat, has nothing else to offer. The children are not at home. Whatever else they are denied, they are still obliged to go to school.

“I’m so sorry, Lucie.”

In the sunny room of Shakespeare and Company, years ago: she was on Paul’s arm, her belly huge under a blue coat, and they were talking with Sylvia, and Lucie had laughed, he remembers the sight of her, and she had seemed almost luminous then, extraordinary beside her gangling husband. She’s a journalist, Sylvia had informed him in one of her gossipy confidences after the couple had left; she’s on the Paris desk of the
Herald Tribune.
And the husband has a couple of books under his belt too. Now the woman is creased and dimmed, her mouth twisted to a knot. And then her face crumples and she buries it in her hands. He reaches out towards her, then stops short. He tucks his hands between his knees, looks up at the unbleached square on the wall where a painting used to hang.