I
t was a rainy summer afternoon, a year and a half since Sabiha had come to live with her aunt. The café was quiet, the dining room empty. The men had finished their midday meal and gone back to work an hour ago. The door to the street was open, a drift of rain darkening the boards, the door creaking in the breeze. Houria and Sabiha were in the kitchen baking pastries and singing along to the music on the radio. The breeze died, suddenly, and the rain came on heavier. People in the street were ducking and hurrying now, a young couple laughing and grabbing at each other as they ran past the window.
Houria stopped singing and said over her shoulder, ‘Someone came in.’
Sabiha looked out through the bead curtain. A stranger was sitting at the table under the window to
the right of the door, the table where she and Houria regularly ate their own midday meal. The window looked directly onto rue des Esclaves. The stranger appeared settled and had evidently been sitting there for a minute or two already. He was holding a book open on the table in front of him, his fingers spread across the pages, but he wasn’t reading. He was looking out at the squall and the people hurrying to get to shelter, some with umbrellas, others with their coats over their heads. He had taken his wet jacket off and hung it over the back of the chair opposite him. The jacket was a dark brown woollen weave with lighter tan leather patches on the elbows. Sabiha noticed that the stitching on the patch of the right sleeve had come adrift. It was the first thing she really noticed about him, and she would always remember it. He looked as if he was expecting someone to join him. He had fair hair and no moustache and was wearing blue jeans and a white open-necked shirt. On his feet he had brown elastic-sided boots. One boot crossed over the other under his chair.
The two women watched the man. His wet hair straggled over his shirt collar. He was tall. In his late twenties. His shoulders rounded with the way he was sitting forward over the table. He looked away from the street then and sat back and eased his shoulders, gazing
about, examining the empty dining room, his eyes sliding over the bead curtain, his expression serious, self-contained, confident, as if he felt no unease at finding himself in a strange place. He reached across the table to his jacket and took a pair of glasses from the inside pocket, put them on and began to read his book.
Houria and Sabiha looked at each other.
Houria said, ‘You’d better go and see what he wants.’
Sabiha pushed at a tray of biscuits. The tray was hot and she whipped her hand away and sucked her finger. She felt suddenly inarticulate.
‘Go on!’ Houria urged her gently, grinning.
Sabiha looked out through the curtain again. ‘We’re closed,’ she said. ‘He’ll leave in a minute.’
‘Chez Dom has never turned away a hungry traveller.’ Houria said this as if it was a principle enshrined in the traditions of the café since the founding days of her beloved Dom Pakos. ‘Go on!’ She gave Sabiha a shove with her elbow. ‘He’s not going to bite you.’
Sabiha gave her a look then lifted aside the bead curtain and stepped out into the dining room. She walked across to the man. She was wearing her sandals and the man did not hear her crossing the wooden boards. She stood behind his right shoulder, waiting for him to lift his head from his book. The rain was thrashing down outside, the street deserted now. She
should close the front door. She lifted a hand and pushed back a strand of loose hair.
At her movement the man turned and looked up at her. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see you there.’ His French was correct but spoken as if each word was a separate shape that he had to force across the reluctance of his tongue. For a couple of seconds she did not realise he had spoken French, but imagined him to have spoken in an unfamiliar language.
His eyes were grey and reminded her of the eyes of André's borzoi, Tolstoy. This man has gazed into vast distances and witnessed strange sights, she thought. ‘We’re closed,’ she said. ‘We close at two o’clock.’ She spoke slowly so he would understand her. She imagined him to have returned from a long journey lasting many years, so long ago that he had forgotten her and the café, only the most distant echo of his old life in his memory. She smiled at this gentle fantasy.
‘The door was open,’ he said.
‘I leave the door open for fresh air after the men have gone.’
‘Can I wait in here until the rain eases off?’ His eyes remained on hers.
‘Would you like something to eat while you wait?’
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I was going to Chartres. I got on the wrong train. I got off at the meatworks and
walked up here.’ He laughed and held up his book. ‘I was reading.’
She asked him, ‘Were you going to Chartres for a visit, or to live there?’
‘Henry Adams,’ he said, holding the book for her to see its cover. ‘I was told I ought to read it before I went.’
She said, ‘I’ll see what we’ve got.’
‘Thank you.’
She turned away and walked across and closed the street door. As she walked back across the floor and went into the kitchen she felt the stranger’s eyes on her, as if he shared her fantasy, and was trying to remember where they had met all those years ago before he set out on his travels.
Houria laughed at her and filled a bowl with leftover
harira.
She put the bowl and two of the freshly baked honey-dipped briouats on a tray. ‘Here, take this out to your friend.’
Sabiha said, ‘Don’t be silly! He’s not my friend.’
The following day the stranger came into the café while the midday meal was in full swing. Sabiha was busy and didn’t see him until she stopped at the table by the window.
He looked up at her and smiled. ‘Hi. I came back.’ She felt the blood coming up along her neck and into her cheeks. She said, ‘Did you get on the wrong train again?’
‘Today I got on the right train,’ he said. ‘What do you think? Was that a good idea?’
‘I don’t know what you mean.’ But she did know what he meant and she was pleased. ‘Will you still go to Chartres?’
They looked at each other. She didn’t know what to say. She reached and straightened the tablecloth. ‘There’s what you had yesterday,’ she said. ‘Or there’s fish balls.’ She could not hold his gaze. She waited for him to give his order and looked over his head and out the window at the street. Old Arnoul Fort was standing in the doorway of his drapery shop across the road smoking a cigarette. He was watching her. Their eyes met and he waved. She lifted her hand in acknowledgment.
‘I’ll have the fish balls, thank you,’ the man said.
She turned away to fetch his order.
He called after her, ‘And can I have some wine?’
She turned back.
‘Please,’ he said.
‘Red or white? We serve a half-litre or a litre.’ She indicated the brown earthenware jug on the next table.
The two workmen at the table were watching. They both looked at the jug on their table.
‘A half-litre, thank you. Red.’
She realised that every man in the dining room had been watching her and the stranger.
They were in the little sitting room under the stairs. Houria was ironing blouses and aprons and tablecloths. Sabiha was watching the television. It was a week since they had seen the stranger. They had not been talking about him when Sabiha suddenly said, ‘I wonder if he’ll ever come back again?’
Houria said, ‘Yes, I wonder.’
The singer on the television sang into the microphone, her eyes closed. Sabiha watched the singer. She might have done with the conversation. It wasn’t that she
wanted
to see the stranger again, she told herself, she just couldn’t get him off her mind. When she woke up in the morning she lay in bed thinking about him. Not fine romantic thoughts, just
thinking,
pointlessly, stupidly, annoyingly. Seeing him sitting there at the table under the window reading his book. She wished she could forget him. She said, ‘He just came in to get out of the rain the first time.’
Houria turned the apron over and ran the iron along the piping. ‘Then he came back to see you.’
Sabiha made a scoffing noise and shifted on the couch. She looked up at her aunt. ‘It’s good to be just us, isn’t it? It’s the best thing.’
Houria said, ‘Just us, yes,’ and went on ironing. ‘Yes, darling, it is very good.’
Sabiha watched the screen. She wished she hadn’t said that. They
were
just themselves, weren’t they? But she couldn’t leave it at that. ‘So, if he was coming to see me, why did he stop coming?’ It wasn’t a question. It was an attempt to have done with him.
Houria folded the apron and laid it on the ironed pile and looked at her niece.
Sabiha swung her feet off the couch and stood up. She went out to the kitchen and put the kettle on the gas. She put the mint leaves and lumps of brown sugar in the two glasses and stood waiting for the water to heat. Tolstoy stood in the open doorway watching her. A grey ghost in the pale light of the laneway. She went across and patted his head and said goodnight to him. Then she closed the door. She was angry. It was stupid. Why couldn’t she just be happy and content, as she had been before the stranger came in? It
was
stupid. The whole thing. He was just a man, after all. The streets were full of them every day. What was so special about
him?
She watched the steam starting to come out of the spout of the kettle in little pouting curls. It was an old kettle. As battered and loved as her mother’s kettle had been. He was a foreigner and a stranger. He could hardly speak French. And he had just been passing through. She hated him for disrupting everything. The wooden grip on the handle had split and the two halves had been bound neatly together with wire years ago, the wire worn to a smooth polish. She ran her fingers lightly over the wire, feeling the soft ripples against her skin. Dom’s handiwork. Had the stranger really come back after that first day just to see her? She poured the water slowly into the glasses, breathing the fragrance of the fresh mint.
With a perfectly equal intensity of feeling, Sabiha wanted to forget about the stranger and to see him again. Her days in the café felt empty without his visits. As if something was missing now, where before he came everything had been perfectly in place. While she was serving lunch she found herself watching out for him, hoping to see him coming along the street from the direction of the railway station. The days were flat and uneventful without the disturbance of his visits. Every day now, by two o’clock in the afternoon, when she and Houria were sitting down to their own midday meal, she felt grumpy and discontented. It wasn’t fair.
It was no good talking to Houria about it. She and Dom had decided to live together for the rest of their lives on the very first day they met. Anyway it wasn’t about that. She didn’t know what it was about. She didn’t
want
to know. It would just have been good to see him come into the café and smile at her with his lovely calm grey eyes, as if everything was understood between them.
She placed the glasses of amber tea on saucers and put a sesame biscuit with each, then she picked them up and carried them into the sitting room. The sitting room smelled of Houria’s ironing and the warmth of the gas fire. The television was still going. She loved her home here with her aunt. She loved it so much she felt the tears welling up. She didn’t want anything to change. Was she like Houria’s mother, her
other
grandmother, a discontented person? Was that who she took after? The thought terrified her. Did she have a choice to be who she wanted to be, or did she have to be the person fate had decided she would be?
Houria turned around from the ironing board and smiled to see the tears in her niece’s eyes. ‘Don’t worry. He’ll come back.’
Sabiha set the glasses down on the table in front of the couch. ‘I don’t care. I hope he
never
comes back.’ She went up to Houria and put her arms around her
and burst into tears. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me!’
Houria held her close and stroked her hair and said, ‘You have a good cry, darling. You’ll feel better.’
S
aturday morning, and Houria and Sabiha were at the kitchen bench preparing the evening meal—another of Houria’s ideas for expanding the scope of the business, a Saturday evening for the men, a time for relaxing instead of the rush of their workday meals. The lamb had been in the oven since before dawn and the kitchen was filled with the delicious smell of its roasting flesh. Houria was preparing the chickens and Sabiha was chopping carrots, the stock simmering in the big boiler on the stove beside her, the narrow kitchen window to the back lane steamed up, old Tolstoy lifting his snout and howling to an ancestral memory of the steppes, or maybe to a bitch on heat up the road.
Houria paused and watched her niece chopping the carrots, and she thought once again how beautiful
Sabiha was and how deep and gentle was the friendship which had grown between them. How greatly her own life had been enriched by her brother’s generous gift of his favourite daughter! She resumed pushing the warm spicy stuffing into the cavity of the chicken. The change had slipped over the happy simplicity of their lives like the change of a season, the moment when you turn and quietly close a door and retreat a little into yourself. She had watched Sabiha falling in love and not knowing she was falling in love. Now she watched her dealing with the stranger’s absence, her struggle to forget him and to be content again. Houria knew that what she was witnessing was Sabiha’s struggle not to believe in her heart that this man had wilfully disappointed her or, in some obscure and unaccountable way, betrayed her, the deep irrationality of her feelings troubling her and putting a cloud over her days. That was Sabiha’s torment, to know one thing and to passionately believe another. Houria herself had known this blank enmity of time before she met Dom, the interminable passage of the hours, the hope of each day rising then failing, the inability to reason it all away. For what is there in life, she asked herself as she rammed the stuffing into the cold carcass of the bird, that is more sublime than the finding of a mate?
She knew that Dom, in his new life on the other side, agreed with her.
She looked at the six prepared carcasses ranged on the bench and hoped she wasn’t overdoing things. What if none of the men turned up tonight? Some of the midday regulars wouldn’t be able to afford an evening meal, and others just wouldn’t be bothered to come. Saturday evening was a risk. Everything was a risk. She took up the first chicken and rammed the steel spit through it. She felt for Sabiha and prayed the stranger would return for her, but in her heart she feared they had probably seen the last of him. Her impression had been of a style of man who could be trusted, a calm man, without great disturbing ambitions, a man who might become a reliable husband and father. A man, in other words, whose life waited to be completed by a good woman and children. And wasn’t he also strong and healthy and not
too
good-looking? Such a man, with this certain sturdy plainness about him, would be faithful. Dom had been faithful. She cherished the memory of his faithfulness. She would cherish it till the end of her days. His gift. His manly homage to her. She sighed and wiped her eyes and grabbed another chicken and rammed it through with the big steel skewer and she went, ‘Yai! Yai! Yai!’
Sabiha looked up quickly. ‘What’s the matter, Aunty?’
Houria said, ‘My beautiful Dom just visited me.’
An hour later she lifted her head from her pastry and saw the stranger coming through the door into the empty dining room from the street. It was the sunlight falling across the boards as he opened the door that made her look up, his long shadow before him. She did not feel surprised.
So, here he is!
Such things are written. She watched him turn and close the door with care, as if he feared to wake the house. He was carrying a small khaki rucksack across one shoulder. The leather patch on the sleeve of his jacket had not been mended. So, there was no woman attending to his needs!
She turned to Sabiha and touched her arm.
Sabiha looked up, the big vegetable knife in her hand.
Houria raised her chin. ‘See who’s here.’
He stood at the bar, not looking around, but waiting, as if he knew himself watched.
Sabiha looked and said nothing.
Houria said softly, ‘You could go and tell him we’re closed, darling.’
Sabiha looked through the bead curtain at him. She was certain he would leave and would never come back ever again if she did not go out to him at once.
‘Should I take my apron off?’
‘Go and speak to him. Just the way you are.’
Sabiha went out through the curtain and walked across to the stranger.
He turned and saw her. ‘Good morning,’ he said.
‘Good morning.’ She stood before him.
‘I had to go back to London to get my things,’ he said.
The awkward earnestness of his manner made him seem like a boy. She wanted to laugh at him. And suddenly it was he, not she, who was vulnerable and ill at ease.
‘I meant to come back straightaway but other things happened and I was delayed. I should have told you I was going to be away for a while.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s not my business what you do.’
He looked down at his boots, then up at her. ‘I wondered if you’d like to go to Chartres for the day? I still haven’t been. We can go there and back today. Just for an excursion. Just for that.’ He stood frowning at her. ‘If you don’t want to go, it’s okay. I just thought I’d call in and ask you. Just in case you did feel like going. That’s all.’
‘We’re busy today,’ she said. She was delighted to see how nervous he was.
‘Yeah. Well, okay then. It’s all right. I’m sorry. Another day maybe. I shouldn’t have asked.’
She knew he was about to leave and she did not know how she could keep him there. Why could she not find it in herself to be generous and say to him, ‘I’m glad you came back'? He would surely not return a second time. He was probably ten years older than her. If he were Tunisian he would be married by now. She wondered why he wasn’t married.
He looked at her helplessly. ‘I only came to Paris for an overnight stay last time. I was going to Chartres then back to London in the morning.’
‘But you took the wrong train. I know. You told me.’
‘Yes. I took the wrong train.’ He held her gaze. ‘I’m glad I did.’ A little light of defiance was in his grey eyes now, as if he would not accept defeat.
‘Will you stay longer this time?’ she asked.
‘It depends.’ He gestured towards the door. ‘I’m booked in for two nights at the pension across the square. Madame du Bartas.’ He laughed. ‘She says she knows you and your aunt.’
‘You asked her about us?’
‘I’m sorry. Was that wrong? She asked me why I was here. She seems nice enough. Her place is clean. And it’s not expensive.’
‘Nothing’s expensive in Vaugirard,’ she said. So it was true. He had come back to see her. ‘What did Madame du Bartas tell you about us?’
The bead curtain rattled and they both turned. Houria was coming across the room, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘Good morning,
monsieur
,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to see you here in Chez Dom again. We don’t do lunch on Saturdays but we can offer you coffee and a sweet pastry.’ She walked right up to him and shook his hand. ‘I’m Houria Pakos.’ She turned to Sabiha. ‘This is my niece, Sabiha.’
The stranger said how do you do as he shook Houria’s hand. Sabiha did not offer him her hand. ‘I’m John Patterner,’ he said.
‘Are you on holiday, Monsieur Patterner? We don’t get many tourists out here. The abattoirs keep them away.’ She laughed. ‘There’s not a lot to bring visitors to our little corner of Paris. It’s not the Paris they’re looking for.’ Houria looked him up and down. ‘So, where are you from,
monsieur?’
‘Australia,’ he said. ‘I’m from Australia.’
‘Whereabouts in Australia? My husband sailed there many times when he was in the merchant navy.’
‘New South Wales originally, but Melbourne these days,’ John Patterner said.
‘Dom visited the Dandenong mountains. Do you know them?’
John Patterner laughed. ‘Of course! The Dandenongs, for sure. They’re just hills really. They’re not mountains.’
‘So you know them?’
‘Of course, yes. Everyone in Melbourne knows the Dandenongs.’ He kept glancing at Sabiha.
Houria looked at him with satisfaction, her eyes bright. ‘So,’ she said with deliberation, putting her hands on her broad hips and taking a step back the more fully to see John Patterner. ‘You know the Dandenongs and my Dom knew the Dandenongs.’ She smiled and said, ‘The Dandenongs,’ as if it were an important code for some deeper meaning that had been established between herself and this stranger from the other side of the world. An understanding between grown-up people. ‘And what is your profession, Monsieur Patterner, when you are in Melbourne?’
‘I’m a high school teacher. But I grew up on a farm.’ He looked quickly at Sabiha again. ‘I can turn my hand to anything. I’m a pretty good carpenter. I’ve done the lot. Everything. You name it, I’ve had a go at it.’
‘My Dom could turn his hand to anything too. And they’ve given you a holiday from teaching?’
‘I’ve taken some leave without pay. I was going to Scotland. I’ve been staying in London for a couple of months. I thought I’d come over here and have a look at Chartres before I went north.’
‘And when your leave is finished, then you will go back to Melbourne and start teaching again?’
He was looking at Sabiha. ‘That was more or less the idea, Madame Pakos.’ He turned back to Houria. ‘I was just asking your niece if she’d like to come to Chartres with me today. But if you’re busy, perhaps another day would be better.’
Houria said, ‘I’ll ask Adrienne, our landlord’s daughter, to lend a hand. She sits in there watching the television all day. André will be glad to have her off his hands for a few hours.’ She turned to Sabiha. ‘Why don’t you make some coffee?’ She smiled at John Patterner and touched Sabiha’s arm. ‘Take good care of my niece today, Monsieur Patterner. She is all I have in the world. I shall expect her back before dark.’