‘Is your little boy sick?’ he got up the courage to ask her.
She shook her head. He was a young boy who was quite dirty, but his fat cheeks were rosy and soft. He walked over to her and stroked Ada’s knees with his dirty hands.
‘Do you have a child?’
‘Yes,’ she replied.
She had been afraid to ask herself that very question, but now that she had answered this strange little boy, she felt a sense of peace again. She dried her eyes.
Now that she had stopped crying, in the eyes of the child she turned back into a frightening and incomprehensible adult, like all grown-ups. He took a step away, and even though she called out to him, he didn’t move forward; he just continued staring at her with mistrust and fear. Ada felt as if her last friend had abandoned her. She stood up and went back to stand in front of Laurence’s house. It was nearly eight o’clock; the young woman had been wearing day clothes and would surely be coming home for dinner. She waited for a long time and finally saw Laurence. She had sensed her, even before recognising her, because of a strange, sudden pain in her heart. She walked quickly towards Laurence.
Laurence stopped; she started with a slight gesture of fear mixed with revulsion, thought Ada. Ada looked at her now without hatred, but with deep concentration, as if she were studying a model’s face.
‘I must guess what she has truly decided to do by watching her eyes and not by what she says,’ Ada thought, ‘and then plan my life according to what I read in her expression.’
‘I’m going away in an hour,’ she said.
‘Oh?’ said Laurence, moving to one side as if trying to avoid her. But her movement was hesitant, slow and half-hearted, as when you dream you are struggling in deep water, in quicksand, in murky lakes that overwhelm you and carry you away.
‘I will never come back, Madame. I’ll never see Harry again.’
‘Please leave.’
Suddenly, Ada grabbed the stunned Laurence by the hand.
‘Listen to me,’ she said, ‘you are the only one who will know the truth. Harry thinks I’ve gone to be with my husband. It’s not true. I’m still here in Paris. I could choose either to go away or stay near him and try to get him back. But I swear to you that I will never go near him again, never remind him I even exist; I won’t speak to him or write to him, if you think that would save him.’
Laurence said nothing, but she didn’t try to leave. She too was concentrating on watching Ada’s face, hoping, no doubt, to read the thoughts of this strange foreigner.
‘Do you want to help him?’
Laurence nodded; making a scene right there in the street seemed to cause her pain, thought Ada, as if some unbearable vulgarity had been added to her resentment and suffering.
‘Poor Harry . . .’ she suddenly thought. ‘Unhappy with her, unhappy with me, caught between two burning fires, between two races, what will become of him?’
‘Are you in a position to help him?’
‘I’m not,’ she replied quietly, ‘but my father is.’
‘Yes, that’s what I thought. Would he be willing to do it?’
‘Yes, if we agree not to get divorced. Did Harry? . . .’ She stopped, blushing sadly. ‘Did Harry try to find you?’
‘No.’
They fell silent.
‘Do you think that everything could be saved, Madame,’ Ada asked once more, ‘and that things would return to the way they were before, as if I’d never existed?’
Both women, overwhelmed by fear and hatred, looked at each other and said nothing. Ada didn’t move; she felt that by walking away from Laurence, she was losing Harry, and that everything truly would be as if he had never existed.
‘Just like in fairy tales,’ she thought in astonishment, ‘when you find yourself standing in front of a cracked mirror or a light that’s switched off, and the spell is broken.’
Yes, this woman, this Laurence, was a link between her and Harry, the only living link. One word, one step, and it would all be over. She had rewound her life once more; she was back to where she had started. With difficulty, she let go of Laurence. She didn’t run: she walked slowly away, head down. But her heart, her heart that never gave up hope, began to quiver, whispering from within her: ‘I lost him before and then found him. Perhaps that will happen again?’
No! She had to sacrifice him once and for all. She forced herself to overcome her stubborn desire for happiness and the belief that lived inside her, that absurd, incomprehensible belief, that Harry was truly destined to be hers.
She walked on with difficulty, clutching the gates along the avenue, her lips burning, her legs leaden and painful. But she shed no tears.
32
Ada very rarely received any post. So when an official letter addressed to her arrived at her house, she experienced a moment of blind hope. But it wasn’t Harry’s handwriting. It was only a deportation order, with a period of one week allowed for the necessary formalities to be completed. Ben was nowhere to be found. Perhaps they weren’t looking for him very hard: ever since Delarcher had taken his son-in-law’s affairs in hand, the gossip surrounding the ‘scandal of a group of international financiers’, as it was called, had died down, and as Ben was the principal figure in a trial that everyone wished to avoid at all costs, it was hoped that he might not be in France. But just as the waves carry seaweed and shells down into the sea along with the corpse of a drowned man, so provident justice swept away those close to the famous Ben Sinner, forcing his family, his mother and his wife into exile.
All this happened with the greatest possible discretion: the newspapers were not alerted; Harry was told nothing. His business continued as businesses do in such circumstances. After a long article in the evening paper, no further information had appeared until several days had passed, and then only on the second page, in smaller print; after that, the story had disappeared, turning up as a short paragraph among minor news items before vanishing entirely. Only a few small local rags printed articles about it again, just as a starving dog grabs the remains of a meal that others have left behind, gnawing in vain at a bone. There were a few vague threats, promises of details to come, but then political events of great importance occurred and everything went quiet.
After such a scare, the established business resumed its calm, dignified attitude, like a sick man who has revealed certain things about his youth, his shameful past and vile love affairs while delirious, and then wakes up without any memory of what he said during the night. (And even if he does eventually remember, he isn’t worried: only the professionals around him heard, the doctors and nurses; no one would find out anything.)
When the deportation order arrived, Aunt Raissa rushed to find Ada, begging her to go to Harry, to save them. Where would she go? What country would have her? How would she earn a living?
Then she received a mysterious telegram and calmed down. Ada realised she had been in touch with Ben. A new boutique would soon be opening in a South American country far away, ‘Little Paris’ or ‘French Fashion’, and the spirited, hard Aunt Raissa, her hair now dyed a youthful red colour, would recover her former strength and begin a new life. She was already making plans, deciding which patterns to take with her, more or less illegally, while still trying to have the decree forcing her to leave repealed.
That evening, one by one, all of Aunt Raissa’s friends arrived, all the immigrants she had known in Paris. They formed an extraordinary tableau of withered faces, heavy bodies, dull eyes. There were Jews from Odessa and Kiev, former ladies-in-waiting to the Empress, ladies of the court who had shone for a time after their exile but who were now living on black bread, as they put it. There were the wives and widows of corrupt financiers who had either died, gone on the run or were in prison. To all the women, the announcement of a deportation of one of their own had a precise, sinister meaning. It meant that they too, sooner or later, could fall prey to the same decree; they too, one fine day, might have to leave their sordid little furnished room, the Parisia
n street that consoled all of them with its bustle, cheerfulness, clear skies and polite passers-by, only to wait endlessly at the consulates for a passport they’d been promised but which never arrived, then to leave in search of a precarious means of existence. They avoided showing their faces during the day, thinking there were spies and policemen everywhere; in the evening, they were braver. They climbed the stairs to Aunt Raissa’s door, sat in a circle around the lamp and stared at the open trunk in the middle of the room, an ominous symbol. Whenever they heard a noise – the concierge’s footsteps on the stairs, someone knocking at a door, the telephone ringing – they picked up their skirts and ran, just as chickens scurry in all directions when one of them is chased and caught.
Speaking softly, they exchanged addresses and advice:
‘I know the wife of the chief of police quite well . . .’
‘Well, my lodger has a daughter who’s a secretary in the Home Office . . .’
With their faded hair, sad eyes, hunched shoulders beneath Russian shawls, threadbare black dresses, small hands that were still pretty but had broken nails from doing menial work, they leaned in towards Aunt Raissa’s lamp, and the smoke from their endless cigarettes wafted around them. Ada found them strangely fascinating. In their soft, melodic voices, they compared the advantages of different countries:
‘My husband wrote to me to say that Venezuela . . .’
‘Ah, my dear, don’t talk to me about that place . . . They say that Brazil . . .’
‘But the climate, the snakes . . .’
‘I’ve heard there are still some places left for immigrants in Canada . . .’
Then, gradually, because they were elderly for the most part – the young people had other problems and didn’t go to Aunt Raissa’s – and because even old age has its brighter side, a carefree, frivolous and melancholy way of evading the truth, of closing its eyes and forgetting the future, even the most pressing, the most threatening of futures, they started talking about recipes and dresses, and their senile chatter, interspersed with little bursts of laughter and brief affected cries, covered up the sighs that each of them occasionally heaved. In general, they didn’t feel as sorry for Ada as they did for her aunt:
‘You’re young, my girl. At your age . . . And besides, if you wanted to . . .’
For Aunt Raissa told everyone, in great detail, with a strange mixture of admiration and resentment, all about Ada’s affair. And Ada, gloomy and silent, sat and listened, her head bowed.
She calculated the distance between herself and these women by the feeling of shame she felt. Through her relationship with Harry, and for her sins, she had become sophisticated. The way they made a show of their woes, their resignation to being outsiders, was this her fate as well? Anywhere she went with Aunt Raissa, she would find herself surrounded once more by these powdered faces that looked like hastily patched-up ruins, women who had nothing left in this world, no husbands, no children, no homes. Everything she had scorned, she now clung on to in despair, just as she was about to lose it. She had so often mocked Harry: she would say that he was not the owner but the slave of his wealth:
‘You belong to your precious Nankin cups,’ she used to say, ‘to your jade collections, to your books . . .’
How wonderful it would be, she now thought, to belong to an object, or a person, or a collection of traditions, conventions and customs. To own things, to fit in, what did that matter? But to have bonds that were complex and intricate, or solid and heavy, and not to remain, like these women, like she herself, a being with no roots, carried along by the wind . . .
In the afternoon, when they brought tea in from the kitchen in a collection of mismatched cups and sugar on a saucer (the sugar bowl had been broken), Ada went into the other room. She stretched out on the settee, beneath Harry’s blanket, the only precious thing she owned. It was at this hour that Harry’s face, an image she had bravely fought off all day long, came back to her and took hold of her. She thanked God, in spite of everything. She had retained the power she’d had as a child to fantasise, to imagine scenes that were closer, more vivid to her than reality. For over a week, she hadn’t touched a paintbrush or canvas: it was just too difficult. It was impossible to work with the knowledge that she couldn’t show her painting to Harry, couldn’t hear his criticisms or his praise. But this slow, unyielding, involuntary working of her mind, this was her treasure. She conjured up Harry, she was with him again; she spoke to him. The women’s voices rose and fell; here on this street in Paris, they miraculously managed to carry her back to the distant past. Wasn’t that Ben she could hear, practising his Hebrew in the next room? Wasn’t she that little girl whose thick hair fell over her eyes as she burned with a desire to sleep, always waiting, always hoping? She hid her face in her hands. No one saw her crying. All those women had shed so many tears that they didn’t notice them any more than they noticed the rain falling in autumn.
‘These are my people,’ thought Ada, ‘my family.’
Nevertheless, on the day that her resident’s permit to live in France expired, Ada said goodbye to her aunt, hugged a silent, tearful Madame Mimi, and, abandoning Ben, her memory of him and her memory of Harry, abandoning hope, she left, all alone. She had been granted a visa to live in a small country in Eastern Europe.
33
The child would soon be born. The birth would take place in March, in a small town in Eastern Europe, in a hotel room above the marketplace. Ada couldn’t get a bed in a hospital because civil war had broken out a few days earlier – a continual occurrence in the country – accompanied by a series of strikes and retaliations: the hospitals were all full. They might be able to find room for their own citizens, she’d been told, but not for foreigners.
Ada had acquiesced. She was used to it. She was not completely without resources, however: ten years spent in Paris provides valuable experience. She had found a job as a sales assistant in a bazaar on the main street. She modelled fashionable ‘Parisian hats’ over her black hair, which she had grown back into the style she had worn in the past. The local women found them tempting and bought little saucer-shaped hats decorated with flowers, or turbans swathed with polka-dot netting which they perched high on their red or blonde hair. Whenever she was weary of all the grey and darkness around her, Ada took pleasure in studying their dazzling hair, the colour of wheat and gold. Winter was long: the light shimmered for a few hours over the snow, then turned blood-red, piercing the fog above the river like an arrow before disappearing. By the time Ada came out of the shop, there was nothing but darkness all around. It wasn’t like night in Paris, where street lamps and shop signs lit up the dark: here there were icy shadows, a cruel, black sky where high rooftops covered in snow stood out in sharp detail. The ditches on both sides of the street were so deep that she was afraid of falling at every step, so she walked with great difficulty, teeth clenched, head down; it never even occurred to her to look up at the cold, brilliant stars, closer and brighter here than in Paris.
On Sundays, she stayed at home and painted all day long; she felt happy then, because the only effort she had to make was to choose which shade of silvery white best suited her secret desire, or to look at the women’s faces she’d seen during the day, the women with their long blonde hair. When the light faded, she remembered that her condition required her to go for a walk, to get some fresh air, so she would make her way slowly downstairs and head for the river that divided the town into two parts; in some places, people were skating. An open space was cordoned off by strings of lights and you could see the quick, light silhouettes gliding across the ice. A little orchestra was playing a noisy, jarring fanfare, but to Ada, it sounded softer; the wind dispersed the sounds that were too harsh and the blaring of the brass instruments. Some sleighs passed by, their lamps casting a yellowish glow that danced on the ice; the skaters who came out of the circle also pinned little paper lanterns on to their jackets, so each of their gliding movements created a short, luminous streak of light.
r /> Sometimes a man would see Ada standing there; he would go up to her, attracted by the black hair fluttering across her pale face, but as soon as he saw she was pregnant, he would walk away without a word. She could stand there as long as she pleased and think back to last year, and the year before . . . think, remember, regret, cry . . . until the iron bar on the bridge froze her fingers and they felt numb and painful. She went back home, and her neighbour brought her a modest meal from a nearby restaurant. The woman was also an immigrant; she had been rejected first by America, then by Germany. She had two sons in one country in Europe and a daughter in another; her husband was imprisoned in a concentration camp. Such circumstances formed a special class of people that existed beyond caste and race, a world apart, where helping each other was the only moral code. Ada, who earned a good living and had few needs, sometimes gave some money or an old dress to her neighbour, who in turn helped Ada with chores she found difficult to do. It was understood, almost without any discussion, through a sort of mutual understanding, that when the child was born, it would be this woman – Rose Liebig – who would look after him while Ada continued to work.
The unrest broke out a few days before the birth: at dawn, they saw soldiers charging through the empty marketplace. When they had gone, Ada leaned out of the open window and saw a hotchpotch of objects rolling about in the snow: empty baskets, tarpaulins, bread, strings of onions; some farmers’ wives had arrived during the night with their wares but had fled. They heard gunfire for several hours, then everything went quiet. The women who had run away came back with their donkeys and baskets; the older ones were crying while the youngsters laughed. Lying in her bed, Ada could hear the shouting from the market again. She didn’t have the strength to get up; terrified, she imagined being rushed to hospital in a car with broken suspension, over bumpy roads. She was almost relieved when told there was no space for her anywhere.