‘I often send her round the block at night. She likes it. It makes her feel like a big girl. The other evening she even wanted to do a second trip…She wants to practise so she’s not frightened anymore.’
From behind us, at the end of the room, the gentle voice of Monsieur Valadier reached me, in between long stretches of silence and, each time, I wondered if his telephone conversation had come to an end.
‘Soon, you won’t be frightened of the dark anymore, and we won’t have to leave the light on so you can go to sleep.’
Madame Valadier opened the front door. When I saw that the little girl was about to go outside wearing only her skirt and blouse, I said, ‘Perhaps you should put on a coat.’
She seemed surprised and almost reassured that I might give her advice, and she turned to her mother.
‘Yes, yes…Go and put on your coat.’
She ran up the stairs. Madame Valadier looked at me intently with her clear, pale eyes.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You’ll know how to look after her…We are sometimes so lost, my husband and I…’
She was still staring at me with a look that made me think she was about to cry. And yet her face remained impassive and there was not the slightest trace of a tear.
We had gone further than around the block. I said to the little girl, ‘Perhaps you should go back home now.’
But she wanted to keep walking with me. I explained that I had to go and catch the metro.
As we went along the avenue, it felt as if I had been here before. The smell of the dead leaves and the damp earth reminded me of something. It was the same feeling I’d had in the little girl’s bedroom. Everything I had wanted to forget up until now or, rather, everything I had avoided thinking about, like someone with vertigo trying not to look down, all of it was going to emerge bit by bit, and now I was ready to face up to it. We were walking down the path that runs along the Jardin d’Acclimatation, and the little girl took my hand to cross the avenue in the direction of the Porte Maillot.
‘Do you live far away?’
She asked the question as if she hoped that I’d take her home with me. We had reached the entrance of the metro. I was convinced that if I just said the word she would follow me down the steps and never return to her parents. I knew exactly how she felt. It even seemed as if that was how it was meant to be.
‘Now it’s my turn to walk you home.’
She seemed crestfallen at the prospect. But I told her that next week I would take her for a trip in the metro. We were walking back along the path. It was two or three weeks after I thought I had recognised my mother in the corridors of Châtelet station. I imagined her at this time of day, crossing the courtyard of the apartment block, on the other side of Paris, wearing her yellow coat. On the stairs, she would stop on each landing. A missed opportunity. What is lost will never be found. Perhaps in twenty years’ time, the little girl, like me, would find her parents again, one evening at peak hour, in those same corridors where the train connections were signposted.
There was a light on in one of the French windows on the ground floor, in the room where Monsieur Valadier had been on the telephone. I rang the bell, but no one came. The little girl was quiet, as if she was used to this sort of situation. After a while, she said, ‘They’ve gone,’ and she smiled and shrugged. I considered taking her back to my place to spend the night. She must have read my mind. ‘Yes…I’m sure they’ve gone.’ She wanted to persuade me that we had no further reason to stay here, but, just to be sure, I went up to the lighted window and peered in. The room was empty. I rang the doorbell again. Finally, someone was coming. The instant the door opened a crack, in a ray of light, I saw the little girl’s face fill with awful disappointment. It was her father. He was wearing a coat.
‘Have you been here for long?’ he asked in a tone of polite indifference. ‘Do you want to come in?’
He spoke to us as if we were visitors who had called by unannounced.
He leaned over to the little girl. ‘So, did you have a nice long walk?’
She didn’t answer.
‘My wife has left to have dinner with some friends,’ he said, ‘and I was just about to join her.’
The little girl hesitated before going inside. She looked at me one last time and said, ‘See you tomorrow,’ her tone apprehensive, as if she wasn’t sure whether I’d come back. Monsieur Valadier was smiling vaguely. Then the door shut behind them.
I stood, not moving, on the other side of the boulevard, under the trees. On the second floor, a light went on in the window of the little girl’s room. Soon, I saw Monsieur Valadier hurry out of the house. He got into a black car. She must have been alone in the house and left a light on so she could go to sleep. I thought of how lucky we’d been: a little later, and no one would have come to open the door.
~ ~ ~
ON THE FOLLOWING Sunday — or the Sunday after that — I went back to Vincennes. I wanted to go earlier than I had the other times, before nightfall. This time I got out at the end of the line, at Château de Vincennes. It was sunny that autumn Sunday and, once again, as I wandered past the château and turned into Rue du Quartier-de-Cavalerie, I felt as if I was in a provincial town. I was the only person out walking, and at the top of the street, behind a wall, I heard the clopping of horses’ hooves.
I slipped into a daydream about what might have been: after many years away, I had just got off the train at a little station in my ‘home country’. I can’t remember which book it was where I first came across the expression ‘home country’. Those two words must have connected with something that affected me deeply or else stirred up a memory. After all, in my childhood, I had also known a country railway station, where I used to arrive from Paris, wearing that label around my neck, with my name written on it.
As soon as I caught sight of the apartment block at the end of the street, my dream vanished. There was no such thing as my home country, only an outlying suburb where no one was waiting for me.
I went through the gate and knocked on the concierge’s lodge. She poked her head through the half-open door. She seemed to recognise me, even though we had only spoken once before. She was wearing a pink woollen dressing-gown.
‘I wanted to ask you about Madame…Boré.’
I faltered over the name and feared she might not know who I was talking about. But this time she didn’t need to consult the list of tenants stuck on the door.
‘The woman on the fourth floor of A?’
‘Yes.’
I’d made a point of remembering which floor. Since I’d discovered that it was the fourth, I often imagined her moving more and more slowly as she climbed the steps. One night, I even dreamed that she fell down the stairwell. When I woke up, I couldn’t tell if it was suicide or an accident. Or perhaps I had pushed her.
‘You’ve been here before — the other day, wasn’t it…’
‘Yes.’
She smiled at me. I looked like someone she could trust.
‘You know she’s up to her old tricks again…’ Her tone was indifferent, as if nothing about the woman on the fourth floor of A could surprise her. ‘Are you family?’
I was afraid to say yes. And bring down the ancient curse on myself, the stigma from back then.
‘No. Not at all.’
In the nick of time, I had avoided being sucked into the slime.
‘I know some of her family,’ I said. ‘They sent me to find out how she is…’
‘What do you want me to tell you? Nothing has changed, you know.’ She shrugged. ‘She won’t even talk to me anymore. Or else she’ll have a go at me for no reason.’