Reaching her usual bus-stop, she put down her shopping bag and with her right hand massaged her rump just where it met the spine, a gesture she made often these days though it gave her little relief. The high stool in the warehouse where she worked every morning as a checker possessed no back, and increasingly she was resenting the deficiency. “Devil,” she muttered to the offending part. Having rubbed it, she began plying her black elbows behind her like an old town raven preparing to fly. “Devil,” she repeated. Then, suddenly aware of being watched, she wheeled round and peered upward at the heavily built man towering behind her.
He was the only other person waiting, and indeed, at that moment, the only other person in the street. She had never spoken to him, yet his face was already familiar to her: so big, so uncertain, so sweaty. She had seen it yesterday, she had seen it the day before, and for all she knew, the day before that as well—my Lord, she was not a walking diary! For the last three or four days, this weak, itchy giant, waiting for a bus or hovering on the pavement outside the warehouse, had become a figure of the street for her; and what was more, a figure of a recognisable type, though she had yet to put her finger on which. She thought he looked
traqué—
hunted—as so many Parisians did these days. She saw so much fear in their faces; in the way they walked yet dared not greet each other. Perhaps it was the same everywhere, she wouldn’t know. Also, more than once, she had felt
his
interest in
her.
She had wondered whether he was a policeman. She had even considered asking him, for she had this urban cockiness. His lugubrious build suggested the police, so did the sweaty suit and the needless raincoat that hung like a bit of old uniform from his forearm. If she was right, and he
was
police, then—high time too, the idiots were finally doing something about the spate of pilfering that had made a beargarden of her stock-checking for months.
By now the stranger had been staring down at her for some time, however. And he was staring at her still.
“I have the misfortune to suffer in my back, monsieur,” she confided to him finally, in her slow and classically enunciated French. “It is not a large back but the pain is disproportionate. You are a doctor, perhaps? An osteopath?”
Then she wondered, looking up at him, whether he was ill, and her joke out of place. An oily gloss glistened on his jaw and neck, and there was an unseeing self-obsession about his pallid eyes. He seemed to see beyond her to some private trouble of his own. She was going to ask him this—You are perhaps in love, monsieur? Your wife is deceiving you?—and she was actually considering steering him into a café for a glass of water or a
tisane
when he abruptly swung away from her and looked behind him, then over her head up the street the other way. And it occurred to her that he really was afraid, not just
traqué
but frightened stiff; so perhaps he was not a policeman at all, but a thief—though the difference, she knew well, was often slight.
“Your name is Maria Andreyevna Ostrakova?” he asked her abruptly, as if the question scared him.
He was speaking French but she knew that it was not his mother tongue any more than it was her own, and his correct pronunciation of her name, complete with patronymic, already alerted her to his origin. She recognised the slur at once and the shapes of the tongue that made it, and she identified too late, and with a considerable inward start, the type she had not been able to put her finger on.
“If it is, who on earth are
you?
” she asked him in reply, sticking out her jaw and scowling.
He had drawn a pace closer. The difference in their heights was immediately absurd. So was the degree to which the man’s features betrayed his unpleasing character. From her low position Ostrakova could read his weakness as clearly as his fear. His damp chin had set in a grimace, his mouth had twisted to make him look strong, but she knew he was only banishing an incurable cowardice. He is like a man steeling himself for a heroic act, she thought. Or a criminal one. He is a man cut off from all spontaneous acts, she thought.
“You were born in Leningrad on May 8, 1927?” the stranger asked.
Probably she said yes. Afterwards she was not sure. She saw his scared gaze lift and stare at the approaching bus. She saw an indecision near to panic seize him, and it occurred to her—which in the long run was an act of near clairvoyance—that he proposed to push her under it. He didn’t, but he did put his next question in Russian—and in the brutal accents of Moscow officialdom.
“In 1956, were you granted permission to leave the Soviet Union for the purpose of nursing your sick husband, the traitor Ostrakov? Also for certain other purposes?”
“Ostrakov was not a traitor,” she replied, cutting him off. “He was a patriot.” And by instinct she took up her shopping bag and clutched the handle very tight.
The stranger spoke straight over this contradiction, and very loudly, in order to defeat the clatter of the bus: “Ostrakova, I bring you greetings from your daughter Alexandra in Moscow, also from certain official quarters! I wish to speak to you concerning her! Do not board this car!”
The bus had pulled up. The conductor knew her and was holding his hand out for her bag. Lowering his voice, the stranger added one more terrible statement: “Alexandra has serious problems which require the assistance of a mother.”
The conductor was calling to her to get a move on. He spoke with pretended roughness, which was the way they joked. “Come on, mother! It’s too hot for love! Pass us your bag and let’s go!” cried the conductor.
Inside the bus there was laughter; then someone shouted an insult—old woman, keeps the world waiting! She felt the stranger’s hand scrabbling inexpertly at her arm, like a clumsy suitor groping for the buttons. She pulled herself free. She tried to tell the conductor something but she couldn’t; she opened her mouth but she had forgotten how to speak. The best she could manage was to shake her head. The conductor yelled at her again, then waved his hands and shrugged. The insults multiplied—old woman, drunk as a whore at midday! Remaining where she was, Ostrakova watched the bus out of sight, waiting for her vision to clear and her heart to stop its crazy cavorting. Now it is I who need a glass of water, she thought. From the strong I can protect myself. God preserve me from the weak.
She followed him to the café, limping heavily. In a forced-labour camp, exactly twenty-five years before, she had broken her leg in three places in a coal slip. On this August 4th—the date had not escaped her—under the extreme duress of the stranger’s message, the old sensation of being crippled came back to her.
The café was the last in the street, if not in all Paris, to lack both a juke-box and neon lighting—and to remain open in August—though there were bagatelle tables that bumped and flashed from dawn till night. For the rest, there was the usual mid-morning hubbub, of grand politics, and horses, and whatever else Parisians talked; there was the usual trio of prostitutes murmuring among themselves, and a sullen young waiter in a soiled shirt who led them to a table in a corner that was reserved with a grimy Campari sign. A moment of ludicrous banality followed. The stranger ordered two coffees, but the waiter protested that at midday one does not reserve the best table in the house merely in order to drink coffee; the
patron
had to pay the rent, monsieur! Since the stranger did not follow this flow of patois, Ostrakova had to translate it for him. The stranger blushed and ordered two ham omelettes with
frites,
and two Alsatian beers, all without consulting Ostrakova. Then he took himself to the men’s room to repair his courage—confident, presumably, she would not run away—and when he returned his face was dry and his ginger hair combed, but the stink of him, now they were indoors, reminded Ostrakova of Moscow subways, and Moscow trams, and Moscow interrogation rooms. More eloquently than anything he could ever have said to her, that short walk back from the men’s room to their table had convinced her of what she already feared. He was one of them. The suppressed swagger, the deliberate brutalisation of the features, the ponderous style in which he now squared his forearms on the table and with feigned reluctance helped himself to a piece of bread from the basket as if he were dipping a pen in ink—they revived her worst memories of living as a disgraced woman under the weight of Moscow’s malevolent bureaucracy.
“So,” he said, and started eating the bread at the same time. He selected a crusty end. With hands like that he could have crushed it in a second, but instead he chose to prise ladylike flakes from it with his fat finger-ends, as if that were the official way of eating. While he nibbled, his eyebrows went up and he looked sorry for himself, me a stranger in this foreign land. “Do they know here that you have lived an immoral life in Russia?” he asked finally. “Maybe in a town full of whores they don’t care.”
Her answer lay ready on the tip of her tongue:
My life in Russia was not immoral. It was your system which was immoral.
But she did not say it, she kept rigidly silent. Ostrakova had already sworn to herself that she would restrain both her quick temper and her quick tongue, and she now physically enjoined herself to this vow by grabbing a piece of skin on the soft inside of her wrist and pinching it through her sleeve with a fierce, sustained pressure under the table, exactly as she had done a hundred times before, in the old days, when such questionings were part of her daily life—When did you last hear from your husband, Ostrakov, the traitor? Name all persons with whom you have associated in the last three months! With bitter experience she had learned the other lessons of interrogation too. A part of her was rehearsing them at this minute, and though they belonged, in terms of history, to a full generation earlier, they appeared to her now as bright as yesterday and as vital: never to match rudeness with rudeness, never to be provoked, never to score, never to be witty or superior or intellectual, never to be deflected by fury, or despair, or the surge of sudden hope that an occasional question might arouse. To match dullness with dullness and routine with routine. And only deep, deep down to preserve the two secrets that made all these humiliations bearable: her hatred of them; and her hope that one day, after endless drips of water on the stone, she would wear them down, and by a reluctant miracle of their own elephantine processes, obtain from them the freedom they were denying her.
He had produced a notebook. In Moscow it would have been her file but here in a Paris café it was a sleek black leatherbound notebook, something that in Moscow even an official would count himself lucky to possess.
File or notebook, the preamble was the same: “You were born Maria Andreyevna Rogova in Leningrad on May 8, 1927,” he repeated. “On September 1, 1948, aged twenty-one, you married the traitor Ostrakov Igor, a captain of infantry in the Red Army, born of an Estonian mother. In 1950, the said Ostrakov, being at the time stationed in East Berlin, traitorously defected to Fascist Germany through the assistance of reactionary Estonian émigrés, leaving you in Moscow. He took up residence, and later French citizenship, in Paris, where he continued his contact with anti-Soviet elements. At the time of his defection you had no children by this man. Also you were not pregnant. Correct?”
“Correct,” she said.
In Moscow it would have been “Correct, Comrade Captain,” or “Correct, Comrade Inspector,” but in this clamorous French café such formality was out of place. The fold of skin on her wrist had gone numb. Releasing it, she allowed the blood to return, then took hold of another.
“As an accomplice to Ostrakov’s defection you were sentenced to five years’ detention in a labour camp, but were released under an amnesty following the death of Stalin in March, 1953. Correct?”
“Correct.”
“On your return to Moscow, despite the improbability that your request would be granted, you applied for a foreign travel passport to join your husband in France. Correct?”
“He had cancer,” she said. “If I had not applied, I would have been failing in my duty as his wife.”
The waiter brought the plates of omelette and
frites
and the two Alsatian beers, and Ostrakova asked him to bring a
thé citron:
she was thirsty, but did not care for beer. Addressing the boy, she tried vainly to make a bridge to him, with smiles and with her eyes. But his stoniness repulsed her; she realised she was the only woman in the place apart from the three prostitutes. Holding his notebook to one side like a hymnal, the stranger helped himself to a forkful, then another, while Ostrakova tightened her grasp on her wrist, and Alexandra’s name pulsed in her mind like an unstaunched wound, and she contemplated a thousand different
serious problems
that required
the assistance of a mother.
The stranger continued his crude history of her while he ate. Did he eat for pleasure or did he eat in order not to be conspicuous again? She decided he was a compulsive eater.
“Meanwhile,” he announced, eating.
“Meanwhile,” she whispered involuntarily.
“Meanwhile, despite your pretended concern for your husband, the traitor Ostrakov,” he continued through his mouthful, “you nevertheless formed an adulterous relationship with the so-called music student Glikman Joseph, a Jew with four convictions for anti-social behaviour whom you had met during your detention. You cohabited with this Jew in his apartment. Correct or false?”
“I was lonely.”
“In consequence of this union with Glikman you bore a daughter, Alexandra, at The Lying-in Hospital of the October Revolution in Moscow. The certificate of parentage was signed by Glikman Joseph and Ostrakova Maria. The girl was registered in the name of the Jew Glikman. Correct or false?”
“Correct.”
“Meanwhile, you persisted in your application for a foreign travel passport. Why?”
“I told you. My husband was ill. It was my duty to persist.”