Sitting up in bed, supported by cushions on either side and resting with a pillow behind her head, her hands clasped on the sheet, her stiff hair dyed with henna and held in place at her temples by a pink ribbon, and her eyes, a viscid blue, wide open, she was waiting for them. One might have thought that her relaxed lower jaw, laying bare a few last teeth, the yellow colour of old ivory, that poked up out of shrunken, rotten gums, was that way because she was about to complain bitterly, with sea-lion cries, of their neglect. But she was still. The wrinkles on her face covered thickly with foundation, her bituminous eyelids, the crazed, bright-red lipstick, were frozen for ever. The room’s sour-sweet stench — a nauseating mixture of things left to rot, face creams and dead flesh — left no doubt. Mercedes had risen to the occasion of death with her sense of theatre undiminished. Her pot of foundation sat open on her bedside table, and on the floor — it must have slipped from her hands after a final inspection — lay a cheval glass, on which was written in greasepaint, ‘Down with the Jews!’ Yes, unintentionally she was berating her unknown visitors, the chance witnesses of her death — Marceline Michette, Madame Berthe, Jean Arnaud, an anonymous locksmith and a policeman (no. 2857) — for the mirror’s message was meant for the person she had waited for in vain, her whipping boy, the deplorable Louis-Edmond upon whom she had heaped infamy since the day he was born. At that moment Jean felt sorry for him, however odious and ignoble he might be. What an ordeal his life must have been, caring for this mother he had loved, admired, cosseted, washed and spoon-fed, whose chamber pot he had guiltily tiptoed out to empty daily in the WC on the landing, and whose reward, as the ineluctable proof of her brief affair with a banker, had been to be showered with insults. The banker must have acknowledged the child, then abandoned it after one tantrum too many from Señora del Loreto. The story did not seem hard to reconstruct, and one could picture the hell of these three rooms, with Mercedes hating Louis-Edmond for being the symbol of an ultimately failed career. What horror, and what a stench! The smell was unbearable, yet no one dared move, as if, pinned down by embarrassment, not one of the five witnesses could take another step. Agent no. 2857, who had already come across plenty of horrors and whose strong spirit was ready to confront more in this long, dark period, was the first to come back down to earth. He opened an attic window that no one had touched for centuries. The catch came away in his hand and a rod clattered down, freeing two panes thick with grime that smashed on the parquet floor. For the first time fresh air blew in with the sounds of Rue de la Gaîté: a newsboy selling Paris-Soir, a horse neighing. Madame Berthe stifled a theatrical sob.
‘Madame del Loreto! Madame del Loreto!’
The policeman felt he should pick up the broken glass but rapidly gave up. Potato peelings, cigarette butts and newspaper cuttings were scattered thickly over the floor. Instead he moved to the bed to touch the scraggy arm that emerged from a lace nightdress that was grey with dirt.
‘She’s cold!’ He nodded. ‘And stiff!’
A doctor was summoned, who confirmed the death and signed the death certificate.
‘It’ll be difficult to straighten her out,’ he said. ‘But that’s the undertaker’s problem.’
Madame Berthe took things in hand.
‘I’m a friend. Her son has been arrested.’
The policeman feigned mild interest.
‘Has he committed a crime?’
‘No. They say he’s a Jew.’
‘Everything’s possible.’
She began searching through the three rooms. A wooden leg fell out of a tottering wardrobe.
‘Just like Sarah Bernhardt!’ Madame Berthe exclaimed. The theatre was in her blood.
A chest of drawers released a cascade of lace underwear.
‘That’s worth something!’ Madame Michette said, acquainted with both the tastes of men and the lace of Le Puy.
The second room was a sort of kitchen with a stone sink overflowing with dirty plates and empty tins. The third was clearly Louis-Edmond’s, if you could call a cupboard lit by a lead skylight a room. The dim light fell on a child’s iron bedstead where he could only have slept curled up. Straw poked out of the torn mattress. La Garenne slept under a horse blanket that was full of holes. On a table there was a spare wig and some sketchbooks filled with pitiful caricatures, relics of the impecunious years of Léonard Twenty-Sous around La Coupole and the other cafés of Montparnasse. His cape hung on a hanger, and in a cardboard suitcase open on the floor there lay black ascots, celluloid collars and long johns of grey jersey.
At the sight Jean felt as if he was intruding so odiously into a man’s privacy that he turned and left, taking Marceline Michette with him.
‘We’ll have seen a few things by the time this war’s over!’ she said. ‘People sitting dead in their beds! Mercedes del Loreto! What a woman she must have been! And him? What a chap! Devoted and all … And that old bag of bones, mustering the energy to insult him one last time before she snuffed it. There’s no thanks for the charitable!’
The rest of the story belongs to the undertaker and to Louis-Edmond, who was released for a reason as obscure as the one that had got him arrested. The only people present at the funeral were him, Jean, Madame Berthe, Marceline and, in the background and so discreet his shyness was almost touching, an old gentleman in a hound’s-tooth suit and white spats, his grey bowler hat at an angle, and in his buttonhole a red carnation that he threw on top of the coffin. Who was he? No one ever knew. He disappeared as he had come, between the graves of Montparnasse Cemetery, on a muggy morning at the end of August beneath a sky heavy with clouds that burst that afternoon, drenching Paris. Only Madame Berthe cried, out of theatrical habit, while Louis-Edmond remained dry-eyed, his face frozen, pasty from the days he had spent in custody, in the shadow of the Dépôt.19 On the same day the Wehrmacht entered Dnepropetrovsk.
Anna Petrovna crammed a sugar cube into her mouth, drank her cup of tea and declared, ‘The Germans will never take St Petersburg. The Russian people will force them back into the sea.’
Jean looked at her uneasily. He had said nothing which could have provoked this declaration of faith. In fact he had said barely a word after having arrived without warning at Quai Saint-Michel and found himself face to face with Claude’s mother. Cyrille had thrown his arms around Jean’s neck.
‘Why don’t you come every night any more? I’ll tell you a secret when we’re on our own, just us.’
Anna Petrovna had pretended not to hear, although her pale-blue eyes were scrutinising Jean with enough intensity to make him feel genuinely embarrassed. Claude had done her best to dispel the awkwardness.
‘Maman has brought us some real tea. Do you want a cup?’
‘Yes, but I shouldn’t, it’s so precious.’
Claude had poured him a cup and Anna Petrovna had launched her attack, as if what Jean had said somehow cast doubt upon the fighting qualities of her Russian compatriots.
‘Muzhik or tovarishch, it’s one and the same. When he’s roused he’ll defeat the world.’
Thinking of Palfy’s theories, Jean almost smiled. Palfy foresaw a similar outcome, for more Gallic reasons. Deep down Anna Petrovna was suffering at the thought of the Russians’ defeat, Russians she had so hated when they had driven her from her country.
‘They’ll allow them to reach Moscow, and Moscow will burn. They’ll only have ashes left. Stalin doesn’t care. He’s Georgian. To him the Muscovites are yellows.’
‘What’s yellows?’ Cyrille asked.
Anna Petrovna shrugged. She spoke with a strong Russian accent, and even though Claude herself had no accent, their intonations were similar. Like many people at this time she had grown thinner and her face, a year ago still attractive, full and smooth, had sagged suddenly. New lines dragged at the corners of her mouth and eyes, destroying the remains of a beauty that had certainly been great, greater than Claude’s with her regular features, her calm and reflective face. Anna Petrovna stood up.