The Way I Found Her (14 page)

At about midnight, while I was working on
Le Grand Meaulnes
, I heard Valentina on my stairs. She came in, still wearing her white dress and her poppy sling and smelling of wine. I said coldly: ‘Did you have a nice dinner with Grigory?'

She sat down in her usual place on my bed. Her nose was shiny but her lipstick was fresh and bright. ‘Ah,' she said, ‘that poor Grigory. All he talks about is how bad things are in Moscow. You know, there was so much hope there in '89, but the hope has gone. He says some mornings he wishes he had died in the night. Can you imagine how that feels?'

I thought, when I've gone from here, when I find myself back at Beckett Bridges School without ever having touched the most amazing person I've ever met or even tasted her lipstick, I may know how it feels. But all I said was: ‘What's his book about?'

‘Oh, Russian history, long before the Revolution. I doubt anyone here will read it. I don't think he will get good sales.'

She patted her hair and looked around my room at my clothes all thrown into piles.

‘Is Grigory your lover, Valentina?' I said boldly.

She turned and stared at me, speechless for once. I looked away from her and opened my musical box and the tune,
Le Temps des cerises
, began to play softly from my bedside table. Part of me was amazed that I'd asked this question and another part wasn't.

After a while, Valentina said: ‘You know, darling, it's none of your business, but then again why shouldn't you know? He was my lover, off and on, for a long time. He has a wife in Moscow, Irina. And Irina is an alcoholic, so, you see, poor Grisha does not have a beautiful life. Far from it. I am very fond of him, but he depresses me. When he is around, I find myself remembering so much that I would really rather forget.'

I looked at Valentina. I thought, Grigory Panin's hands have held her breasts, his tongue has sucked on her red lips . . . ‘I see,' I said.

‘So there you are, Lewis. One does not go through life without lovers. No one does. You will see.'

‘Shall we do some
Meaulnes
now?' I said. ‘I'm in the middle of the bit where Meaulnes has returned from his adventure. He's met Yvonne de Galais at this crazy party. He's fallen in love with her, but she says to him, “We're too young, it's no use.”'

‘Oh yes, all right, darling. Off you go.'

So I began. This bit was near the beginning of
Chapitre XVI, Frantz de Galais
. The musical box went silent because it needed winding. I read: ‘
During all this dreaming of his, the night had fallen and he had not thought about lighting the torches. The wind blew open the door that communicated with his and whose window overlooked the courtyard. Meaulnes was about to close it, when he saw that there was a glow in this room like the light of a candle. He put his head through the half-open door. Someone was there, someone who must have climbed in through the window and was now walking up and down
 . . .'

As I read on, I could tell Valentina was impressed. My translation skills were definitely improving. There were clumsy constructions, things that didn't sound as if a proper writer had written them, but I was well into the book, and the further I went, the easier it was becoming.

I was almost at the end of the piece I'd prepared, when we heard footsteps on my stairs. I stopped reading. I hoped the footsteps didn't belong to Alice. Valentina didn't move and didn't look round when my door opened and Alice came into the room. I put my translation notebook and my copy of
Le Grand Meaulnes
under my bedcover and closed my musical box. Alice stood in the doorway and said: ‘What's going on?'

‘Nothing,' I said.

Valentina tried to take charge. ‘Come and sit down with us, Alice,' she said. ‘We were just talking about my poor country, Mother Russia . . .'

But Alice was furious. ‘Lewis should be asleep,' she snapped. ‘He's been looking exhausted.'

‘I'm not sleepy,' I said.

‘Maybe not, but your light should be out. Whose idea was this?'

‘Alice, Alice,' said Valentina, still trying to soothe her, ‘Lewis has been alone all day . . .'

‘That was his own choice, Valentina. He must go to sleep now.'

She was wearing a white nightdress Hugh had bought her from Laura Ashley. In the dim light of my room, she looked exactly like an angel in a bad mood.

I knew Valentina would leave then. I wondered whether Grigory was staying in the flat and if she would go down and undress and get into his bed and he would enfold her in his suicidal arms.

She got up. I was afraid that, in front of Alice, she wouldn't give me her good-night kiss, but she did, and I could smell drink and Russian cigarettes and perfume all mingled in that single touch. Then she went away and Alice-the-Angel began her tirade of anger about my disappearance that morning. ‘If you do that again, Lewis,' she said, ‘I will send you home.'

When Babba came the next day to clean my room, she found the pillowcase in the wardrobe in two minutes flat.

‘Louis, what you got here?' she said. ‘You been doing voodoo in your bed?'

‘Yes,' I said.

She then looked at the sheets and tore them off the bed. ‘I better take these home to wash. You don't want Madame to see this or hear what they say at the laundry?'

‘Thanks, Babba,' I said. Then I added: ‘Perhaps I could buy you something in return, a toy, to give to Pozzi . . .'

She looked suddenly sad. ‘Pozzi,' she said, ‘he's crying and crying, Louis.'

‘Why? What's happened?'

‘That man came.'

‘What man?'

‘The one who had the apartment before Pozzi and me. He took away the motorbike. It's his bike and so he's come and he took it away.'

‘Oh no . . .'

‘So Pozzi just weepin' and weepin'. Says to me, “Maman, how we get to Africa now?”'

Babba sat down on the sheetless bed and leant her head on her velvet arms. Tears began to run down her cheeks.

‘Do you
want
to get to Africa, Babba?' I asked. ‘Do you want to leave Paris and go back?'

‘I don't know,' she said. ‘I got work here, but what else I got? Not mother, not village, not sisters. And no work card. I've applied for my card, but it don't come and don't come. So one day they arrest me anyway and lock me up. They take Pozzi away . . .'

‘You must talk to Madame,' I suggested. ‘She will sort out your work permit.'

‘No. People like me, they won't give me any work card, I feel sure. No skill, no work card.'

‘You can polish brilliantly, Babba. That's a skill . . .'

She shook her head and began to dry her tears on her overall. The stupid thing I'd said about the polishing made her laugh her silent yawning laugh. She repeated it: ‘You can polish, Babba, hey!' and then we both folded up laughing, despite the sadness of it all.

I helped her put clean sheets on the bed and tidy my room, which had got chaotic somehow without my noticing. We played my musical box while we worked and Babba said she really liked
Le Temps des cerises
. I told her the English word, ‘Cherrytime', but she could only pronounce it ‘sherrytime'. And so this reminded me of Grandma Gwyneth, who, when you went to stay with her and Grandad, would call from the kitchen at seven o'clock, ‘Sherry time, Bertie!' And then he'd stop whatever he was doing and come in and pour her a glass of her favourite sherry, which was called Elegante. I never knew why she couldn't pour it herself. Often, when Bertie handed her the sherry, he'd put a flimsy little kiss on her white head.

When we'd done my room, we went downstairs. I told Babba she had to go into every room in the flat to see whether Grigory Panin was still lurking around. I waited in the kitchen while she did this with the vacuum cleaner as her camouflage. There were four bedrooms in the apartment and I expected her to find Grigory still asleep in one of them, exhausted after his night of ecstasy with Valentina.

Babba didn't come back for a long time. After waiting and waiting, I tiptoed out of the kitchen and stood in the corridor, listening. I could hear a row going on in Valentina's room and I realised Valentina was blaming Babba for her accident, just as I feared. Babba's voice was louder than usual. I heard her say: ‘Madame, I was only doing what you told me – shining the floors.'

When Babba came out, she was shaking her head, as if she didn't understand what she'd just been hearing. I thought, I expect she shook her head like that when that old Renault truck was stolen and again when she realised Pozzi's motorbike was being repossessed.

We went into the kitchen and closed the door. ‘What happened?' I said.

‘Madame says I broke her arm. She shows me how she type with one hand. I didn't break Madame's arm, never.'

‘She didn't sack you, did she?' I asked.

‘No. But maybe I leave
her
, Louis. I never did break Madame's arm.'

‘I know you didn't. But don't leave, Babba.'

‘If anyone would say this at home in Benin, it's like they saying, “You are an evil woman, Babba. You been talkin' to the spirits.” And I tell you, if they talk that way to me, I don't stay to hear no more. Or else I punish them. I punish them bad.'

‘Would you really? What would you do to them?'

‘Perhaps I break their arm!'

‘How?'

‘You want to hurt someone, you go to your
Manbo
and she makes offerings to the spirits. And then they come to you and ask, “What's to be done, girl?”'

‘Does it work? Could they
kill
someone for you?'

‘Depends.'

The kitchen door opened at that point and it was Mrs Gavrilovich with a load of groceries in a bag on wheels and she said she wanted us out of there, so that she could make mushroom pancakes for lunch. Since Valentina's accident, Mrs Gavrilovich looked younger and seemed more sprightly, as if the broken arm had been just the thing she'd been waiting for.

‘Louis,' she said, ‘take Sergei for his walk. He's making bad smells in the salon.'

So I had to leave my conversation with Babba and set off, for what felt like the eightieth time, with Sergei's kite lead. After he'd crapped in the gutter exactly opposite the apartment-house door, he pulled me along at crazy speed towards the Avenue Friedland. I was thinking so much about Babba and her spirits that I didn't attempt to guide him, but just followed him, like a dog is meant to follow its master. It was only after about half an hour that I realised I was lost.

We were at the gate of a little park and Sergei could smell grass and flowers, so he wanted to lure me in there. I wanted to lure myself in, too, and sit down on a bench and try to work out how to get home. I expected some park attendant would come and yell at me, but then I saw that the rules in this park appeared to be different. It was lunchtime and lots of people were camped on the grass, eating sandwiches and salads out of little cartons and drinking Yop. Sergei saw that he'd arrived in paradise, so I let him off the lead and he tore round, pissing against the trees, snapping at pigeons, eating grass and harassing the picnickers. He's a creature who gets away with a lot of bad behaviour because he's so beautiful. I wondered if he was a bit like Valentina in this one respect.

The bench I sat on was near a litter bin and while I tried to retrace our walk in my mind, to lead us home, a tramp came up to the bin and started rummaging in it. He was burned brown by the sun and his thin clothes were black and dusty. He began to eat the remains of people's salads, which had come ready-packed with little plastic spoons and forks. After he'd finished eating, he licked all the spoons and forks clean and stuck them into the waistband of his trousers.

As he lifted up his T-shirt to put them in, I saw that he had a collection of them already there, going right round his body, like a cartridge belt full of plastic cutlery. I tried to work out what he was going to do with them, and decided they must be a currency among homeless people. Grandma Gwyneth had told me that in the war people in England saved everything, because there was so little to buy and you never knew when something was going to come in useful. They saved
string
. So I thought, for a tramp like this, it's as if there's a war going on here and now, in the middle of 1994.

Watching the tramp picking through the lunch cartons made me feel hungry. Imagining going into a café and ordering a
croque-monsieur
, I realised that I had no money, not a centime for food or drink or a métro ticket or a cab or a map. I called Sergei to me and clipped on his lead. I stood up and said ‘Chez nous!' to him, thinking, this is the moment for him to demonstrate his fabled knowledge of the city. But he just looked at me blankly with his sweet brown eyes, and when we came out of the park gates he immediately set off in the wrong direction. I yanked him round and I led him towards a bookshop that I remembered passing. Hugh had once said to me, ‘In a selfish world, Lewis, booksellers are a category of people who are generally helpful and kind,' so I thought I would go in there and say that I was lost. In French, the words I was going to say sounded pitiful: ‘Mon chien et moi, nous sommes perdus . . .' as if we were en route for hell.

The bookshop was large. You had to pass through a kind of turnstile to get into it and this didn't seem to have been designed with dogs in mind. I sidled out again and tied Sergei to a tree. A woman assistant glared at me on my way back in, so I walked past her into the depths of the shop, looking for someone kinder.

Then I saw Grigory Panin.