The transformation of his fate happened very quickly. Where initially his interviews had started late, making the point that he was an afterthought, or were cancelled altogether, making the point that he was expendable, suddenly higher officials in more pleasant offices were meeting him on time. The gnomes who peopled these offices began to consider him useful.
Soon after the airlift to Berlin began, the French government gave Lukas a visa, a generous salary and a room in a small residential hotel off the boulevard Montparnasse. Since his French was not particularly good, they registered him in a course at the Alliance Française on the boulevard Raspail, and there he spent four hours each morning working on his grammar, his future imparfait. He was promised further training in ciphers, radio, Morse code and skydiving, but those courses would come only after his French was good enough.
There had been a great rush to sign him up, so much so that he thought he might be back in Lithuania within weeks, and then the gnomes disappeared and there seemed to be no hurry at all. The bureaucrats had put him in a drawer and they would open it when they needed him. Every week an envelope with cash awaited him at his hotel desk, and his room and his courses were paid for. So he began his French domestic life; he had not lived so normally since before the war.
Late one afternoon, Lukas walked out and strolled along the street before the shop windows, studying the tins of food in the displays, the incredible variety of items he had never imagined. Prunes in Armagnac were familiar enough, but chestnuts remained a romantic mystery to him. They fascinated him because a childhood poem had mentioned the scent of chestnuts roasting in the streets of Italy. The Jambon de Bayonne, the dried ham hanging in the charcuterie window, fascinated him as well, for the meat was not smoked and he did not see how it was possible for meat to dry without going bad unless it spent some time in a chimney. He had never seen sea urchins or oysters, eaten asparagus or artichokes. Even the horse butcher provided him with a kind of dark fascination.
He walked through the Luxembourg Gardens. It seemed that everything cost money in Paris, but the park was free and the exotic palm tree in front of the palace by the fountain was a reminder of the unlikelihood of his existence in France. From there he made his way down the boulevard St-Michel and across the Seine toward the Bastille, to the small apartment shared by Monika, her mother and her sister in the Marais district, a decidedly less exotic part of Paris, the former Jewish neighbourhood now filled with working people and immigrants from Eastern Europe.
Dinner was always rushed. Monika’s cheerful mother hurried them along through a light meal because she would soon have piano students in the apartment all evening. They ate bread and butter, and a bowl of vegetable soup on the side—not cabbage soup, because it made the apartment smell bad and some of the students did not like it. Lukas brought slices of ham to put on their bread.
Monika’s sister, Anne, was a university student studying chemistry and working in the evenings as a receptionist at a clinic, and she was always in a rush, like the other two. Lukas divined that one of the young medical students at the clinic was interested in her, and she returned his attentions.
After dinner, Lukas rode back across town with Monika on the metro, and this trip to the Alliance for her evening classes was filled with talk of their day. He had a few questions about French grammar— such as why they needed two past tenses, the imparfait and the passé composé. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to have only one? And why one set of verb past tenses for speech and another for writing?
She laughed at him then and asked him if he knew how strange their own language was—how it had two plurals, one for numbers from two to nine and another for ten and above; how it did not distinguish between a hand and its arm, a foot and its leg; how it had no word for “bidet.”
Monika had lived long enough in Paris and her uncle long enough in France that the place seemed ordinary to her, whereas to Lukas it was still exceedingly exotic. Monika was his guide in this world, and the possessor of a larger constellation of friends, a group of Lithuanian castaways. All but the ones who had been raised in France were in transition, and had been for years, dreaming of America, Canada and Australia.
Monika kissed him in the corridor of the Alliance before she went into class. They kissed often these days, whenever they could. He settled in to wait for her in the Alliance student café. He was happy to have spent time with her and her family, happy to expect her in two hours, and glad for the book, Saint-Exupéry’s Vol de Nuit, to practise his French.
Therefore he was surprised to feel his mood shifting as he waited for Monika in the Alliance café. She was only in class for two hours, but quickly the shadows in the corridor began to grow long. As his mood thickened, he could no longer read. He tried to write, but there was something about the shadows that made him gloomy. This happened sometimes, more frequently than he liked to admit. The memories rose in him and troubled him.
It crossed his mind that since he never saw the body, maybe Vincentas had just been wounded and captured after all. They would have tortured him if he survived, maybe even shot him after they had squeezed whatever they could get from him. On the other hand Vincentas might have been deported to Siberia and still be alive there. Which would be the worse fate, to be alive in Siberia or dead? Probably alive, because one died alone, whereas if one survived, he took others to their deaths with his information.
Lukas heard laughter from the courtyard outside the café, from young people talking. He envied them their lightheartedness. He could not seem to regain his own lightheartedness, the contentedness of an hour ago. Where had it gone?
And so he brooded for the two hours she was in her class. When she came out, she looked at him and saw immediately that something was wrong.
“What is it?” she asked.
“I wonder if you know how hard things can be for me sometimes.”
“I think I know.” She studied him carefully. He did not ordinarily speak like this.
“And yet my suffering has brought me to you, for which I’m grateful.”
He didn’t go on, but she could tell there was more to say, so she waited. The corridor had emptied of students and the guardian would be skulking nearby somewhere, waiting to lock up and go home.
“But if it was my fate to be brought to you, why did so many have to die to get me here?”
It was an impossible question. Europe was full of people who could ask that same question, but they must not ask it; they were in danger of getting lost among the ghosts if they did.
SEVENTEEN
PARIS
SEPTEMBER 1949
THE RUE DES LIONS ST-PAUL was an exceptionally quiet street in the Marais district of Paris, not far from where Lukas had first spoken to the émigré community almost a year and a half earlier. Between the passage of schoolchildren eastward in the morning and westward in the afternoon, no more than a dozen pedestrians passed below Lukas’s second-storey study. When they did come, he could tell by the clicking of their heels on the narrow sidewalk.
Since the street window faced north, it did not receive much light anyway, and so, having finished his work for the day, Lukas pulled shut the shutters and locked them. The only other windows in the apartment faced the courtyard, where children were sometimes permitted to play if they did not get too loud and irritating to the concierge. The concierge or her husband was almost always at the window in the passageway downstairs.