I could see that she had a black eye. Her hair was a mess, and she was clearly tired.
Who is the man from last night? I asked her.
Get out, she repeated and opened a kitchen drawer, plunged her hands inside, frantically scraped metal on metal, then pulled out a knife and brandished it at me. I told you not to follow me and not to interfere in my life.
I approached her, and she slowly retreated. I grabbed her by the wrist and pulled the knife from her hand. Then I dragged her back to the living room. I threw her on the sofa and said, I know that George would want me to protect you, and I will do so as long as I am here.
George! she screamed. George does not even know of my existence. I am free, do you understand? You do not interfere with my life! I will tell the police about you, and send you back to George and wherever you came from! She waved her hands at me. Then she took a deep breath, her hands fell, her voice softened, and she said, Leave. Please leave. You are causing me trouble. She gently pushed me.
Who is he? What is his full name? I said.
Vas te faire foutre, she said.
No one hits George’s sister, and no one pulls a knife on either of us. I will find your Moshe, I said and walked out the door.
Yes, go! she said, following me. And take this with you. She threw an envelope at my back. Leave, and mind your own business. Collant de merde!
I picked up the envelope and ran back down the stairs. The envelope contained a ticket to Canada. The flight was in six days.
I walked slowly back to my hotel, and when I arrived, I called my generals and told them, We need to find the man from last night, and lay a plan.
At the hotel, I sent an officer to interrogate the man at the desk, to ask him if he had the information on the plate number. He came back with a negative answer. My officers and I paced and smoked pipes. Some of my officers had their feet on the table, showing their boots. The campaign room was filled with smoke, and maps on the table that detailed flowing rivers, mountains, and long plains.
We should attack soon, before your voyage to the new continent, comrade, one general with a droopy white moustache declared.
I agreed. We decided to dismiss the meeting and to each go on our own way and wait to hear of the enemy’s whereabouts.
FOR TWO DAYS I sent my officer to ask the man at the front desk about the licence-plate number, and always the answer was the same: He was working on it. Finally, on the third day, a messenger on a horse entered the military complex, breathing heavily. We have it, he said.
I opened the letter. The car was registered under Mani and Associates, Jules Favre, 52 rue de la Commune.
I called the revolutionaries. We met and decided on an attack plan.
I WENT TO THE address in the letter and watched the place. Eventually I saw the man I was waiting for, driving the same car as before. He parked his vehicle in the lot and went inside the building. I waited for a little while and then entered the building and watched from the bottom of a set of spiral stairs as his leather jacket ascended toward the heavens.
I went back home and consulted with my fellow fighters. All night we stayed awake, preparing for the attack. In the afternoon of the next day, I went down to the basement of my hotel. I opened the garbage bin and looked inside. Then I walked around the basement, searching, until I found a metal pipe lying on the floor between a pile of old chairs, a broken table, and an old sink.
I grabbed the pipe, pushed it inside my sleeve, and took the stairs back to my room.
I called my lieutenant and informed him that the ammunition had arrived.
He brought the horses, and that evening we rode to the enemy’s territory. Our enemy’s car was now parked down the street. I went over to it and started to rock it, until the car alarm went off. Then I pulled on my hat, rushed over to the stairs of the apartment building, hid between two floors, and waited for a door to open.
In the dim moonlight, I watched a man’s silhouette rushing down the stairs. When he faced me, I lowered my hat over my eyes and said, Bonsoir, in a muffled voice. As soon as he passed by me, I hit him from behind. And before he had the chance to recover, I rushed toward him and gave him many blows from the whistling pipe in my hand. I frisked his pockets, pulled out his wallet, and picked up his car keys from the floor. Then I rushed down the stairs, jumped on my horse, and we galloped across the Parisian cobblestones while, in the background, we heard the car alarm lamenting in sorrow and pain.
THAT NIGHT, I had a series of nightmares. In one of them I saw myself drowning in a large sea that had shrunk to the shape of a tub. I dreamt of Roland pouring wine for me, and then, when he turned around from the sizzling stove, I saw Rambo’s face telling me, Ya habbub, we will send you back home. As I ran down the stairs in my dream, George appeared to me, smiling and with a gun in his hand. He stood on the stairs, and leaned against the wall, and spun the barrel of his gun.
I woke up in a sweat; it took me a few minutes to realize that I was in Paris. I rushed to the door of my room and checked that it was locked. Then I locked the bathroom door. I sat at the window and gazed out at the darkness, and made sure that Paris was still Paris.
Still, flashbacks came to me rapidly, and I could not sleep. I thought of George, and I expected Rambo to come to my room and ask me to take a walk. I called myself a coward and many other names for fearing the ghost of that dead brute. The dead do not come back, I chanted and chanted.
I cursed Roland for asking me to throw away my gun. I blamed everything on my gun’s absence. I did not have those dreams when my gun slept under my pillow, I thought to myself.
I paced my room. I chain-smoked, because in the underground torture dungeon, a lit cigarette was the thing I had most longed for.
I remembered how, when Rambo had held my neck and filled my nostrils with cold water, I had wondered about underwater smoking. And I remembered how my mother had smoked while thieving water from the neighbours’ reservoir. As a kid, I had watched her climbing the thick pipes to reach the water tank. It had mesmerized me to see her plunging her entire upper body, including the cigarette on her lips, into the metal tank, and resurfacing with the cigarette still lit on her lips and a bucket filled with water in her hand. I had watched her before every dive, stretching her toes like a ballerina, exposing her thighs above my small figure while she fished for water, and like a sailor muttered curses (that echoed inside the water tank) of her life of sacrifice and her marriage to that good-for-nothing gambler father of mine.
And years later, I, like my mother, dived into that tub, under my torturer’s supervision; I plunged my upper body, thinking of my mother’s intact cigarette, of the phoenix brand that never ceased to burn and never ceased to die. And when Rambo whispered to me, assuring me of my nearing death, I was relieved at my parents’ absence, for my death like all death should be a death and an end — no memory, no photograph, no stories, and no mother’s tears. In death, everything should cease. All else is nothing but human vanity and make-believe.
THE NEXT MORNING, cars passed by and honked, and the flags of a football team split the winds and trembled above cars, and people danced in the streets, drank and chanted aloud. When I opened the window, the noise rose; when I closed the window, the noise settled like the bedsheets that the hotel cleaning lady had flipped over my bed the day before while I sat in her presence and watched the sheets fall slowly, gracefully, like the flight of the partridge above sunny waters.
I had watched the cleaning lady disappear into the bathroom, tossing the towels in the bin, ignoring me, perhaps feeling my lusty looks at her short skirt, or my eyes untying her white apron. I had thanked her for every cup she changed, every paper she picked up, for every bend, for every sweep, every pillow cover she caressed, every quilt she tucked. When I offered her cigarettes, she smiled and said that she did not smoke. She took my ashtray and emptied it in a bag. I had asked her name. I had asked where she came from. And when I held her hand and shouted, Linda from Portugal, I will wait for you to come to my room every day! Let me caress your breast, let me fall gently upon you, she had pulled her hand back and rushed quickly out of the room, pushing her cleaning cart toward the freight elevator, sticking her head through the doors as they shut, making sure I did not follow her and hold her waist, and offer her money, and breathe in her ear, and push the elevator’s stop button, and untie her white apron.