A Country Road, A Tree (35 page)

“How are you,” he asks, “my flea?”

“Oh,” she says, unsettled by the endearment. “You know, it goes.”

He drops his kitbag and reaches out an arm and she steps into the space. He holds her there a moment, the both of them like boards. One arm is wrapped around her.

“You’re thin,” he says.

She can hear the rumble of his voice in his chest. She nods, her head sliding up and down against serge. Everyone in Paris is thin. His flesh, though, has filled itself out. He is more solid than he used to be. She wants to say,
I am happy to see you,
but the truth of it is not quite as clear as happy. There has been too much wear and tear for there to be straightforward happiness now. There is not the substance, the structure left for that.

Now, he pushes her gently away and goes to unbutton his coat, which makes him remember the calico sack.

“Here,” he says. “I brought something for you.”

She swipes at her eyes. More bounty from his better life; it makes her feel sour. But the mouth of the bag opens on a clutch of pears and offers up a cloud of scent, floral, sweet; her mouth floods.

“Oh, the cow,” she says.

She dips in a hand and lifts out a fruit and hands the bag back to him. The pear is heavy with juice; between her fingertips the skin is grained and toad-like. She presses her mouth into the soft flesh, her eyes closing. She eats, wordless, the wet sweetness of it astonishing, while he sets the bag down and slides off his coat and hangs it up and looks around the scant little apartment, and twists his head to peer up at the sleeping loft above. She sucks the last of the flesh from the strands of the core and drops what’s left into the wastepaper basket. Juice has gathered under her lower lip and she wipes it upward with the flank of her hand. Then she notices him, noticing her.

“Excuse me,” she says.

“You’re hungry. Have another.”

“I’m sorry.”

She dips her hand in again. Her cheeks flush. She bites carefully. Little fractions of wet flesh and grainy skin. Turned and lingering on the tongue, while he climbs the stairs to the little sleeping loft and looks around. Like a dog circling its bed.

He calls down to her. “We’ll go out for lunch,” he says. “If you’d like to.”

She pauses, swallows. “Can we?”

“Yes,” he says. “Why not?”

She tilts her head, unseen, considering the new authority in his voice. This is having money, she supposes. A salary that just happens to him every month. This is having more than enough, rather than substantially less.

“I’d like that,” she says.

She drops the threads of the second pear into the wastepaper basket. She fetches her shoes and sits down to put them on. Her hands are cold and sticky with juice. He clumps back down the stairs. She does not look at him. You have brought me pears, she thinks, but this is what I have brought for you: this is all that I have in abundance. We have had a glut of horrors here.

“I don’t know what you’ve heard,” she says.

“What’s that?”

“About our friends,” she says, and then she pauses and has to clear her throat, because after all there is scant satisfaction in sharing this.

“What do you know?”

“Different stories.”

He looks away; she follows his gaze across to his bookshelves, his desk.

“Not yet,” he says.

“What?”

“Later,” he says. “Just not yet.”

She stares at him. Unseen, she shrugs. “Well.”

He can do as he pleases. He always will. She is too worn out with it all to care.

—

They eat lunch in a little local bistro, where they used to eat before. Frayed cuffs on the waiters, who are men he doesn’t know; washed-thin dresses on the ladies, bare legs. He recognizes the sisters who used to run the hairdresser’s. There is bread, since bread is no longer rationed, and he has rillettes and cornichons, and they have a
pichet
of wine to share. They are quiet; the whole place is quiet. Life goes on, after all. It insists on it.

The meal is expensive. It is three times what they would have paid for something rather better before the war. But it is welcome. And the coffee, when it comes, is real, and strong, and good. It makes her shudder.

“Will you be back,” she asks, “do you think?”

“To Paris?”

“Yes.”

He casts his gaze around the restaurant, taking in the scuffed tiles, the thin faces, the empty mirrored shelves where there had once been bottled spirits and liqueurs.

“Where else would I go? My contract ends in January.”

She nods. She is making those little moves—napkin laid aside, bag hunted for and opened, peered into—that signal departure. “Well, I’m teaching this afternoon, so…”

People still learn to play the piano, then. And children still sit their exams, no doubt. They go on holiday, and celebrate their saints’ days and their birthdays. For all it still feels so sketchy and provisional, they are now living in a world where a Jewish boy’s baccalaureate counts for something again.

“I have to return to Saint-Lô tomorrow,” he says.

“I see.”

“I’m only in Paris to fetch rat poison. It’s not easy to get hold of, not out there.”

“Right.”

“I’ll send you something when I get back. What would you like? What do you particularly need?”

She closes her eyes and half smiles at his entire failure to understand. She needs everything; she has nothing but needs. Some can be kept at bay, others are impossible to assuage.

“A bar of soap,” she says. “A toothbrush. A lipstick. Anything at all.”

He walks with her to the Métro. By the square, a small child picks up horse chestnuts from the pavement; a woman watches, having watched him all the way through all the war. He recalls the baby in the pram being bumped along the cobbles, that razor-clear autumn of ’41, when he’d carried the typed-up information across town to Jimmy. And Jimmy—he wonders, how did Jimmy fare? Did he get through it all and out the other side?

At the steps down to the station, Suzanne kisses him on the cheek, brief and cool. “What happened to your coat?” she asks.

He looks down at the clean green serge of his Red Cross greatcoat, with its white and red armband, then back at her, nonplussed. Nearby, a pigeon scrats in the gutter. It is an ugly battered thing, peg-legged. Pigeon pie.

“No,” she says. “Your other coat.”

“Oh, yes. I left it behind, in Ireland.”

“Why did you do that?”

He’d hung it up in the wardrobe in his mother’s spare room. With his father’s still-cherished overcoat and shoes, her fox fur, the stink of camphor. He’d closed the door on it and turned the key, that same evening, in that same darkness, his mother’s shawl still over his arm.

“It seemed like the right thing to do. Anyway, they gave me this one, so.”

“Will they let you keep it?”

“Oh. I don’t know.”

She tsks, shakes her head. “What’ll you do, then, when your contract’s up?”

He shrugs.

“What do you think a new coat would cost, right now?”

“I have no idea.”

“Well,” she says. He is still himself, for all he’s changed. “You’ll find out, I suppose. Till I see you.”

Then she kisses him again, because it seems the thing to do, and she turns away, and she clips down the Métro stairs.

Now that she is gone, he could go back to the empty apartment, to the peace and solitude of it. He could turn the key on the rest of the world and let him and the silence warm to each other; he could find a notebook, start to write. But instead he walks, hands stuffed into his pockets, turning the pebble round and round in his fingertips, the collar of his greatcoat scratchy at his jaw. He presses on through the half-broken, skin-and-bones, scraping-by life of the place, through the city clattering with footfalls and pierced with voices and rumbling with drays, past the men in old coats and shoes worn to shreds, and young women in threadbare dresses and bright lipstick, and the old ladies in black clothes who have shuffled their way through the war with shopping bags and hairnets intact. The blue paper has gone from the street lamps. They have torn down all the German signposts, and the yellow placards from outside the Jewish shops. And the city, ticking over, ticking on, is nonetheless thick with loss, as infested with absences as the hospital is with rats. Walking in Paris, in October 1945, is the loneliest thing in all the world.

He takes his cigarette packet out and touches the one remaining cigarette. He puts the packet back.

He will get used to it, just as he has grown accustomed to the missing teeth, the missing toe, his scar. He will learn to accommodate the loss.

—

There are places, even in the ruins, that are touched by grace. Saint-Lô at night, and a little window is warm and lit. It is curtained with an old lace shawl to disguise the new and dimmer substitute for glass and the figures that move around on the other side.

Because inside the small front room, there’s a piano and a tumbler of Calvados, and there’s music playing, and it is all quite pleasant and comfortable and people do like to be there. Men like to be there. That Calvados on the piano-top is his, and he sips it whenever the music allows him to, because it is him playing the music, popular and sentimental songs. One of the girls leans against the instrument and watches him play. He is surprised, rather, by the ease of the music after so long an absence; his fingertips find their way without much need for thought. The Calvados may be helping with that, since he is not concerned about the performance; he just performs. The old upright is practically in tune, though the middle C key has gone mute. Which is not bad, when so many other pianos are now tangled wires and splintered teeth.

The prostitutes wear cardigans over their slips and frocks. They have boots and slippers and bare legs. They shiver and huddle into themselves; their skin is blueish. There’s something familiar about the girl who’s watching him play; he can’t quite place her, but then he’s half-cut, and the uncut half is taking care of the music, so that doesn’t leave anything very much for working out where he has seen the prostitutes before.

Late on, blurry with drink, he’s obliged to leave the piano and amble off to find the necessary. He opens an inner door expecting a back room or the kitchen, but there’s night air and stars above, where the walls and roof have been blown clean off. A man is pissing up against a heap of broken bricks. Finished, the fellow buttons up and slips past him with a grin, heading back indoors. He takes his turn out in the night and adds his water to the musky pool. As he pisses, he lifts his face to the rain, closes his eyes, enjoys the easy sway of his own Calvados-adjusted senses.

The door shut behind him, he returns to the piano, and people are talking and laughing and going on as if there were a whole house standing square around them, not just a few chancy habitable rooms. This is what the world is liable to do nowadays—collapse in ruins—and people go on behaving as though it were nothing very much at all.

He sips from his cigarette, one hand keeping the rhythm going; then his smoke smoulders and fades out in a saucer, and a girl tops up his drink, and when the woman leans closer as a song ends, he gets up to hear her, and someone else slides into his seat at the piano, and his head reels and the woman takes his arm and smiles, and says his French is sweet.

“Come upstairs with me,” she asks, “why don’t you?”

And so she leads him off upstairs, and it turns out that he is drunker than he’d thought he was, or that the stairs are out of kilter: they pitch him sideways, so that he has to hang on to the bannister and clamber up them like a mountaineer. Perhaps what’s familiar about her is just hunger: the pinched look, the stick-thin, bones-on-show appearance makes sisters of them all. French women just look like that now.

Upstairs with her, the door shut behind them, and she peels off her cardigan and steps out of her slip, and he can see the press of hipbones through the skin and the dip like salt cellars in her collarbone, and when she lies down her breasts fall away sideways from the bones of her ribcage, and her breasts are so soft, very soft, and traced with mother-of-pearl stretchmarks, and he rolls a prophylactic clumsily on and is inside her, and it is only just as he comes that he remembers her, heavy with pregnancy, handing him a bottle of Calvados and telling him he was welcome here.

—

A pack of boys races down the newly surfaced roads; smaller kids huddle together on the corner, hovering over a concoction of mud and leaves. Girls have chalked a game on to the ground and are skipping through it. He walks, clipboard in hand, beside the colonel.

“On the whole, successful, I’d say.”

“And the corpses dealt with?”

“Incinerated, yes. You know what the kids are like here. Play with anything.”

They stop short to allow a pack of little children to thunder by.

“This is a hospital, not a playground!” the colonel yells after them.

They hurtle on, joyous, heedless.

“This place is getting lousy with them,” the colonel says. “Worse than the rats. Someone’s going to get hurt.”

The building work continues. Trucks grind back and forth; there are staff cars, locals’ cars, and half a dozen ambulances that hurtle in and out of the site at all hours, day and night. The children do stand a good chance of getting hit.

“Their mothers send them to play here,” he says.

These are kids who are missing fingers, who have brutal scars beneath their clothes; these are kids who are also missing parents, brothers, sisters, friends. For all the risks from traffic, they’re safer here than anywhere else for miles and miles.

Things are getting better. Things are becoming sound. There’s asphalt on the roads and on the paths. There’s glass, or something like glass, in all the windows. There’s lino on the labour-room floor—since there is breeding still, even now, even in this devastation. There are curtains round the beds, and clean sheets and warm blankets neatly tucked in. The operating theatre gleams with aluminium and sterile steel. The rain doesn’t drip through, the wind is kept at bay, the rats are in retreat. There is tea and there are biscuits and there is bread-and-jam when it is required, and it is often required. There’s kindness here. There’s decency amongst the ruins. It is something to behold.