The Way I Found Her (19 page)

Mrs Gavrilovich went down on one of her rickety knees and touched the red carpet. She whispered to me that the carpet was a piece of Russian earth, right there in the middle of Paris. She didn't seem to notice that this earth had been burned in places. Then she headed for a cabinet made of glass, with a border of flowers, and she laid her head on this, so that her mouth came close to the mouth of the icon inside. The glass was smeary where it had been kissed by dozens of people believing they were kissing Jesus, and I thought, this isn't a very hygienic church.

I looked around for the people who destroyed lives. I wondered if Mrs Gavrilovich had drug dealers in mind, or what? More and more Russians had come in now, with their bags from Prisunic and cheap briefcases and pushchairs and parcels, but they seemed too old or too busy to be criminals. One thing I did notice about them, though: they all looked quite poor. You could tell they weren't French, from the 8th Arrondissement. You could imagine them having dental problems they couldn't afford to fix. They wore clothes like the stuff you see hanging on chrome rails in street markets – shiny trousers with flares; dresses that remind you of tablecloths. I thought, when they kiss Jesus, they ask him to let them win on the loterie nationale.

Mrs Gavrilovich seemed to have forgotten about me. She was intent on examining things – old flags and ribbons and medals and candle sconces and particular pieces of the wall. When the priest and his helpers came through from the
sanctuaire
, she was staring at a picture of St George, probably making sure that it and everything else was just as it had always and always been. As some chanting began, I saw her reach out and touch St George's leg.

I sat down on one of the chairs, next to a string bag full of potatoes. I could smell the earth on them and I suddenly thought, what if Valentina is dead and buried in the ground?

When it came to the time for communion, big hunks of white bread were handed round in a basket and I wondered whether, in the old days, or during the war or something, people came to church to be fed. But now, some of the congregation, including Mrs Gavrilovich, found this bread a bit indigestible; she just nibbled a crumb or two and put the rest in her handbag. In Devon, you never saw people put the body of Christ into their handbags. And the priest had his eye on her. He was small and his chanting voice was weak, but his eyes were piercing, and when he took off his jewelled crown he looked straight at Mrs Gavrilovich accusingly and she closed her bag with a snap. And she wouldn't look at him. Her eyes were shut tight, either from guilt at hiding the bread or because she'd just seen one of the ‘life destroyers' come into the church.

People entered all the time. Some of them came in and looked around and went out again, as if they were sampling the church and found this one too dilapidated and peculiar for their liking. From my chair, which was under a picture of Jesus walking on the water in the moonlight, I kept watch on everybody and on the number of flakes of plaster that fell out of the dome on to the netting. Twenty-nine flakes fell. The beautiful singing may have disturbed the air in the roof.

Among the faces that I watched, I half expected Valentina's to appear suddenly, as if she'd been in the church all along, as if she'd been hiding there for two days. But there was no sign of her. At one point, I turned round to the thin Jesus stepping over the moonlit waves and talked to him. I told him I quite liked this picture, then I asked him not to let Valentina die.

The Vigil lasted a long time. If a world-wide survey was conducted, Russians might turn out to be the most patient people on earth. At the end of it, Mrs Gavrilovich stood with some other women in a huddle, talking Russian, and while she talked they shook their heads. I thought, I expect they all knew Valentina when she was young and dressed in clothes bought at street markets; I expect they admired her blonde hair that never darkened.

When we got back to the apartment, Mrs Gavrilovich had a tot of vodka. Then she said she had to rest. I wanted to ask her more about the bad people and about what we were going to do, but she said she was too tired to talk; she said when I got old I would know what this kind of tiredness felt like.

I hovered by the door, while Sergei wagged his tail. Mrs Gavrilovich started taking the hairpins out of her bun and her grey hair came down in coils. I said: ‘Shall I go to the police and report a missing person?'

The snakes of hair made her look younger but sadder. I imagined her running across the coal yard the day Mr Gavrilovich had his heart attack and died. His name had been Anton.

She didn't answer me, but began mumbling in Russian.

‘Tell me what to do,' I said.

But she was confused now. It was like she was half asleep already, and without replying she went into her room with the red candle and closed the door.

I called our own number. I expected Alice to answer, but what came floating up was Valentina's recorded voice telling me she couldn't come to the telephone right now. The voice told me to leave a message. I wanted to say, ‘Valentina, come back to me, please,' but what I said was: ‘Mum, this is Lewis. I'm going to look for Babba.'

Sergei and I got on the métro at George V. In this station was a brilliant busker, who suspended a piece of black cloth across the handrails and started doing a puppet show there and then between George V and the Étoile. His puppet was a skull. The skull talked to us and told us how lonely it was.

The skull got off at Porte Maillot. I felt bad about not giving it anything, but all I'd eaten that day was Mrs Gavrilovich's caraway cake, so I had to keep the bit of money I had. Nobody in the world knows how hungry I can get.

Sergei went to sleep in the hot train and I noticed suddenly that he was starting to smell a bit, as if he needed a shampoo, and I remembered that Valentina took him to a dog parlour off the Avenue Matignon, where he'd once fallen in love with a poodle called Manon. ‘And you know, Lewis,' Valentina had said, ‘when dogs fall in love, they are not well behaved like you and me; they are very vulgar indeed.' I liked this idea of Sergei fucking a poodle at a dog hairdressers', with all the owners and beauticians looking on. Everyone was shocked, apparently, except Valentina, who just laughed and said: ‘Well, it's lucky they don't care about privacy.' She knew Sergei wasn't a monk: he was a star and he had to get laid sometimes. If he'd been a person, he would have fucked somebody or other every night and snorted cocaine and been driven round in a stretch limo with an inbuilt cocktail cabinet. So you could say in a way that he was
less
vulgar than a human being, not more.

We got out at La Défense. To get to Babba's building, you had to cross a walkway hung across the new road works, then come down into Nanterre, which didn't feel like part of Paris, but like some other city, where football was played in the street and where the trees were small. There were a lot of open spaces, where nothing seemed to exist, not even a closed market or a car park, like the space was mined, and only a few pigeons came there (too light to trigger the mines with their skinny red feet) and walked around on the asphalt, waiting for a breeze.

On one of these spaces, something had been put: it was an enormous snake. Children played round it. Part of its body was under the ground and part above. It was made of brown and white mosaic pieces that glistened in the sun and its head reared up about five foot out of the earth.

I stood and gaped at it, with Sergei growling, and the kids climbed along the snake's back and into its mouth. Some of these kids were black and I looked at them carefully, in case one of them turned out to be Pozzi, but it's hard to recognise a child you've only seen once in a photograph taken in winter. Part of me was searching for the little glove dropped in the snow.

We went on, getting nearer to the building. There were no cafés here, or boulangeries or dry cleaners or anything, just some old garages sprayed with graffiti and chain-link fencing keeping you off some dusty grass. You could have been in Idaho or Birmingham or somewhere. There was loud rap coming from a garage mechanic's cassette player and, further off, a police siren screaming. And it was autumn here; that was another odd thing. In Paris proper, it was high summer, but here the leaves were yellow and falling, I don't know why.

The building was in a group of seven, mosaicked green and beige and purple and blue. Whoever designed the flats had probably designed the snake, using the leftover bits of ceramic. Both the snake and the buildings looked as if they had been designed in a dream. You could imagine the architect waking up from the dream and starting to scribble with purple chalks. Tears of pride and joy began to fall on to his scribblings and so he'd thought, this is how the windows will look, like tear-drops! But now, like Babba had said, there were rusty rivets holding the tears to the wall, holding bits of the wall to itself. Some of the tears were smashed and these ones looked more like tooth cavities. I thought, I bet the residents hope this architect is crying with shame.

When you got close up to the building, you could hear a lot of noise coming from it – music and shouting and some kind of machinery whining. I hoped it was all ordinary noise and had nothing to do with voodoo. A door was open on the ground floor, so we went in and found ourselves in a kind of launderette that was full of scalding air. An old woman in an overall sat on a plastic chair staring at the tumbling clothes, as if the washing was an old movie she couldn't take her eyes off. I was about to ask her if she knew Babba, when she looked up and saw Sergei and yelled at me that dogs weren't allowed in the laundry. I put my hands up, like someone being arrested, and said, OK, I'd take Sergei out but please could she tell me where to find Babba.

She reminded me of the concierge in Mrs Gavrilovich's block, with her wet face and her hair all greasy and stuck to her head. ‘Babba?' she said. ‘Babba qui?'

I explained carefully that Babba was the woman from Benin who lived with her son Pozzi in the apartment where the motorbike had been. ‘Oh,' she said, ‘you mean Violette?'

‘Yes,' I said quickly. ‘Where is Violette?'

‘Seventh floor,' she said. ‘Now take your dog out of here.'

We had to walk out of the building and in at another door to find the stairs. On the concrete pathway there was a disgusting splurge of vomit we had to step round. Sergei doesn't always know the difference between fresh and recycled food.

Near the second door there were two lifts, gaping open, but they looked broken somehow, and dark like coffins, so we started going up the stairs.

I forgot to count the floors and there were no numbers or signs anywhere. I imagined guys coming home stoned and trying to get into the wrong apartment. Then I realised that each floor was painted a different colour; this was another marvel thought up by the architect at four in the morning. He expected the residents would identify with their colour and take pride in being green or yellow. The first line of a song out of my childhood flashed into my mind.
It's not easy being green
. I didn't know who sang this or when. To some youths smoking on the stairs, I said: ‘What colour is seven?'

They started giggling. Some of them had shaved heads and some had blond dreadlocks. I'd been told at school that you could turn your hair into dreads just by washing it regularly in Badedas. I stood by the wall, out of breath and foreign and pale. With a single movement of their tattooed arms, the Badedas guys could have lifted me up and thrown me down the stairwell.

‘What's your dog's name?' one of them asked.

I held tightly to Sergei's lead. ‘Michel,' I said.

They fell around, laughing. Then they began calling ‘Michel . . . Michel . . .' and Sergei looked at them haughtily. We were on floor orange. It could have been five or six, I hadn't a clue, but I tugged Sergei on up the next flight. The youths called after me: ‘Where do you come from, kid? Are you German? Heil Hitler!'

I thought they were going to follow me, but they didn't. It had never occurred to me that anyone would want to steal Sergei, but now it did. I just told myself to keep going, even though my ribs were aching and my legs felt weak. I wished I hadn't come here. I wanted to call out to Babba, wherever she was hiding; I wanted her to put her velvet arms round me.

The next floor was red, so we set off down this red corridor. It seemed to go round in a circle, on and on, dark and blank. I heard a sound like a dentist's drill coming from behind one of the doors, so I stopped and listened. The sound came and went. Then I noticed a name on a card that was taped to the door:
Arletti, Jean-Christophe, Chirugien Dentiste
. I wondered if I was on a kind of trade floor, with doctors and solicitors and private detectives behind all the doors, but then I saw that the dentist's apartment also had a number, 729. The numbers were so minute, you could hardly read them, but with the 7 coming first I figured I must be on the seventh floor, so I rang the dentist's bell.

A nurse opened the door. She was black and wore a bright white uniform. I wondered if she might be a relation of Babba's. ‘Excuse me,' I said. ‘I'm looking for Violette.'

‘Not this apartment. This is the apartment of Doctor Arletti,' she said.

‘Can you tell me where I can find Violette?'

‘Violette who?'

‘Babba . . .' I stammered.

The nurse turned back into the room and said something to the dentist. Sergei gave an involuntary whine, as if he was getting impatient and wanted to be back in the sunshine, in the Paris that he knew. I felt a bit the same. It would have been so easy to find the coffin lifts and drop down and walk away through the yellow leaves.

The nurse came back and said she didn't know the person ‘Violette Babba' and nor did Doctor Arletti. I thought, I expect you're afraid of dentists, Babba, and have never been near one in your life. I expect you would scream if a man tried to put his fingers into your mouth.