Paris Stories (7 page)

He had been told that he knew this place, but his memory, if it was a memory, had to do with fields and a picnic. No one met him. He shared a taxi through soft snow with two women, and paid his share—actually more than his share, which annoyed the women; they could not give less than a child in the way of a tip. The taxi let him off at a dark, shiny tower on stilts with granite steps. In the lobby a marble panel, looking like the list of names
of war dead in his school, gave him his grandmother on the eighth floor. The lift, like the façade of the building, was made of dark mirrors into which he gazed seriously. A dense, thoughtful person looked back. He took off his glasses and the blurred face became even more remarkable. His grandmother had both a bell and a knocker at her door. He tried both. For quite a long time nothing happened. He knocked and rang again. It was not nervousness that he felt but a new sensation that had to do with a shut, foreign door.

His grandmother opened the door a crack. She had short white hair and a pale face and blue eyes. She held a dressing gown gripped at the collar. She flung the door back and cried, “Darling Richard, I thought you were arriving much later. Oh,” she said, “I must look dreadful to you. Imagine finding me like this, in my dressing gown!” She tipped her head away and talked between her fingers, as he had been told never to do, because only liars cover their mouths. He saw a dark hall and a bright kitchen that was in some disorder, and a large, dark, curtained room opposite the kitchen. This room smelled stuffy, of old cigarettes and of adults. But then his grandmother pushed the draperies apart and wound up the slatted shutters, and what had been dark, moundlike objects turned into a couch and a bamboo screen and a round table and a number of chairs. On a bookshelf stood a painting of three tulips that must have fallen out of their vase. Behind them was a sky that was all black except for a rainbow. He unpacked a portion of the things in his knapsack—wrapped presents for his grandmother, his new tape recorder, two school textbooks, a notebook, a Bic pen. The start of this Christmas lay hours behind him and his breakfast had died long ago.

“Are you hungry?” said his grandmother. He heard a telephone ringing as she brought him a cup of hot milk with a little coffee in it and two fresh croissants on a plate. She was obviously someone who never rushed to answer any bell. “My friend, who is an early riser, even on Christmas Day, went out and got these croissants. Very bravely, I thought.” He ate his new breakfast, dipping the croissants in the milk, and heard his grandmother saying,

“Well, I must have misunderstood. But he managed.… He didn’t bring his skis. Why not? … I see.” By the time she came back he
had a book open. She watched him for a second and said, “Do you read at meals at home?”

“Sometimes.”

“That’s not the way I brought up your mother.”

He put his nose nearer the page without replying. He read aloud from the page in a soft schoolroom plainchant: “ ‘Go, went, gone. Stand, stood, stood. Take, took, taken.’ ”

“Richard,” said his grandmother. When he did not look up at once, she said, “I know what they call you at home, but what are you called in school?”

“Riri.”

“I have three Richard grandsons,” she said, “and not one is called Richard exactly.”

“I have an Uncle Richard,” he said.

“Yes, well, he happens to be a son of mine. I never allowed nicknames. Have you finished your breakfast?”

“Yes.”

“Yes who? Yes what? What is your best language, by the way?”

“I am French,” he said, with a sharp, sudden, hard hostility, the first tense bud of it, that made her murmur, “So soon?” She was about to tell him that he was not French—at least, not really—when an old man came into the room. He was thin and walked with a cane.

“Alec, this is my grandson,” she said. “Riri, say how do you do to Mr. Aiken, who was kind enough to go out in this morning’s snow to buy croissants for us all.”

“I knew he would be here early,” said the old man, in a stiff French that sounded extremely comical to the boy. “Irina has an odd ear for times and trains.” He sat down next to Riri and clasped his hands on his cane; his hands at once began to tremble violently. “What does that interesting-looking book tell you?” he asked.

“ ‘The swallow flew away,’ ” answered Irina, reading over the child’s head. “ ‘The swallow flew away with my hopes.’ ”

“Good God, let me look at that!” said the old man in his funny French. Sure enough, those were the words, and there was a swallow of a very strange blue, or at least a sapphire-and-turquoise creature with a swallow’s tail. Riri’s grandmother took her spectacles out of her dressing-gown pocket and brought the book up
close and said in a loud, solemn way, “ ‘The swallows will have flown away.’ ” Then she picked up the tape recorder, which was the size of a glasses case, and after snapping the wrong button on and off, causing agonizing confusion and wastage, she said with her mouth against it, “ ‘When shall the swallows have flown away?’ ”

“No,” said Riri, reaching, snatching almost. As if she had always given in to men, even to male children, she put the book down and the recorder too, saying, “Mr. Aiken can help with your English. He has the best possible accent. When he says ‘the girl’ you will think he is saying ‘de Gaulle.’ ”

“Irina has an odd ear for English,” said the old man calmly. He got up slowly and went to the kitchen, and she did too, and Riri could hear them whispering and laughing at something. Mr. Aiken came back alone carrying a small glass of clear liquid. “The morning heart-starter,” he said. “Try it.” Riri took a sip. It lay in his stomach like a warm stone. “No more effect on you than a gulp of milk,” said the old man, marveling, sitting down close to Riri again. “You could probably do with pints of this stuff. I can tell by looking at you you’ll be a drinking man.” His hands on the walking stick began to tremble anew. “I’m not the man I was,” he said. “Not by any means.” Because he did not speak English with a French or any foreign accent, Riri could not really understand him. He went on, “Fell down the staircase at the Trouville casino. Trouville, or that other place. Shock gave me amnesia. Hole in the stair carpet—must have been. I went there for years,” he said. “Never saw a damned hole in anything. Now my hands shake.”

“When you lift your glass to drink they don’t shake,” called Riri’s grandmother from the kitchen. She repeated this in French, for good measure.

“She’s got an ear like a radar unit,” said Mr. Aiken.

Riri took up his tape recorder. In a measured chant, as if demonstrating to his grandmother how these things should be done, he said, “ ‘The swallows would not fly away if the season is fine.’ ”

“Do you know what any of it means?” said Mr. Aiken.

“He doesn’t need to know what it means,” Riri’s grandmother answered for him. “He just needs to know it by heart.”

They were glassed in on the balcony. The only sound they could hear was of their own voices. The sun on them was so hot that Riri wanted to take off his sweater. Looking down, he saw a chalet crushed in the shadows of two white blocks, not so tall as their own. A large, spared spruce tree suddenly seemed to retract its branches and allow a great weight of snow to slip off. Cars went by, dogs barked, children called—all in total silence. His grandmother talked English to the old man. Riri, when he was not actually eating, read
Astérix in Brittany
without attracting her disapproval.

“If people can be given numbers, like marks in school,” she said, “then children are zero.” She was enveloped in a fur cloak, out of which her hands and arms emerged as if the fur had dissolved in certain places. She was pink with wine and sun. The old man’s blue eyes were paler than hers. “Zero.” She held up thumb and forefinger in an O. “I was there with my five darling zeros while he … You are probably wondering if I was
ever
happy. At the beginning, in the first days, when I thought he would give me interesting books to read, books that would change all my life. Riri,” she said, shading her eyes, “the cake and the ice cream were, I am afraid, the end of things for the moment. Could I ask you to clear the table for me?”

“I don’t at home.” Nevertheless he made a wobbly pile of dishes and took them away and did not come back. They heard him, indoors, starting all over: “ ‘Go, went, gone.’ ”

“I have only half a memory for dates,” she said. “I forget my children’s birthdays until the last minute and have to send them telegrams. But I know
that
day.…”

“The twenty-sixth of May,” he said. “What I forget is the year.”

“I know that I felt young.”

“You were. You
are
young,” he said.

“Except that I was forty if a day.” She glanced at the hands and wrists emerging from her cloak as if pleased at their whiteness. “The river was so sluggish, I remember. And the willows trailed in the river.”

“Actually, there was a swift current after the spring rains.”

“But no wind. The clouds were heavy.”

“It was late in the afternoon,” he said. “We sat on the grass.”

“On a raincoat. You had thought in the morning those clouds meant rain.”

“A young man drowned,” he said. “Fell out of a boat. Funny, he didn’t try to swim. So people kept saying.”

“We saw three firemen in gleaming metal helmets. They fished for him so languidly—the whole day was like that. They had a grappling hook. None of them knew what to do with it. They kept pulling it up and taking the rope from each other.”

“They might have been after water lilies, from the look of them.”

“One of them bailed out the boat with a blue saucepan. I remember that. They’d got that saucepan from the restaurant.”

“Where we had lunch,” he said. “Trout, and a coffee cream pudding. You left yours.”

“It was soggy cake. But the trout was perfection. So was the wine. The bridge over the river filled up slowly with holiday people. The three firemen rowed to shore.”

“Yes, and one of them went off on a shaky bicycle and came back with a coil of frayed rope on his shoulders.”

“The railway station was just behind us. All those people on the bridge were waiting for a train. When the firemen’s boat slipped off down the river, they moved without speaking from one side of the bridge to the other, just to watch the boat. The silence of it.”

“Like the silence here.”

“This is planned silence,” she said.

Riri played back his own voice. A tinny, squeaky Riri said, “ ‘Go, went, gone. Eat, ate, eaten. See, saw, sen.’ ”

“ ‘Seen’!” called his grandmother from the balcony. “ ‘Seen,’ not ‘sen.’ His mother made exactly that mistake,” she said to the old man. “Oh, stop that,” she said. He was crying. “Please, please stop that. How could I have left five children?”

“Three were grown,” he gasped, wiping his eyes.

“But they didn’t know it. They didn’t know they were grown. They still don’t know it. And it made six children, counting him.”

“The secretary mothered him,” he said. “All he needed.”

“I know, but you see she wasn’t his wife, and he liked saying to strangers ‘my wife,’ ‘my wife this,’ ‘my wife that.’ What is it, Riri? Have you come to finish doing the thing I asked?”

He moved close to the table. His round glasses made him look desperate and stern. He said, “Which room is mine!” Darkness had gathered round him in spite of the sparkling sky and a row of icicles gleaming and melting in the most dazzling possible light. Outrage, a feeling that consideration had been wanting—that was how homesickness had overtaken him. She held his hand (he did not resist—another sign of his misery) and together they explored the apartment. He saw it all—every picture and cupboard and doorway—and in the end it was he who decided that Mr. Aiken must keep the spare room and he, Riri, would be happy on the living-room couch.

The old man passed them in the hall; he was obviously about to rest on the very bed he had just been within an inch of losing. He carried a plastic bottle of Evian. “Do you like the bland taste of water?” he said.

Riri looked boldly at his grandmother and said, “Yes,” bursting into unexplained and endless-seeming laughter. He seemed to feel a relief at this substitute for impertinence. The old man laughed too, but broke off, coughing.

At half past four, when the windows were as black as the sky in the painting of tulips and began to reflect the lamps in a disturbing sort of way, they drew the curtains and had tea around the table. They pushed Riri’s books and belongings to one side and spread a cross-stitched tablecloth. Riri had hot chocolate, a croissant left from breakfast and warmed in the oven, which made it deliciously greasy and soft, a slice of lemon sponge cake, and a banana. This time he helped clear away and even remained in the kitchen, talking, while his grandmother rinsed the cups and plates and stacked them in the machine.

The old man sat on a chair in the hall struggling with snow boots. He was going out alone in the dark to post some letters and to buy a newspaper and to bring back whatever provisions he thought were required for the evening meal.

“Riri, do you want to go with Mr. Aiken? Perhaps you should have a walk.”