From the Fifteenth District (36 page)

“ ‘The swallow flew away,’ ” answered Irina, reading over the child’s head. “ ‘The swallow flew away with my hopes.’ ”

“Good God, let me look at that!” said the old man in his funny French. Sure enough, those were the words, and there was a swallow of a very strange blue, or at least a sapphire-and-turquoise creature with a swallow’s tail. Riri’s grandmother took her spectacles out of her dressing-gown pocket and brought the book up close and said in a loud, solemn way, “ ‘The swallows will have flown away.’ ” Then she picked up the tape recorder, which was the size of a glasses case, and after snapping the wrong button on and off, causing agonizing
confusion and wastage, she said with her mouth against it, “ ‘When shall the swallows have flown away?’ ”

“No,” said Riri, reaching, snatching almost. As if she had always given in to men, even to male children, she put the book down and the recorder too, saying, “Mr. Aiken can help with your English. He has the best possible accent. When he says ‘the girl’ you will think he is saying ‘de Gaulle.’ ”

“Irina has an odd ear for English,” said the old man calmly. He got up slowly and went to the kitchen, and she did too, and Riri could hear them whispering and laughing at something. Mr. Aiken came back alone carrying a small glass of clear liquid. “The morning heart-starter,” he said. “Try it.” Riri took a sip. It lay in his stomach like a warm stone. “No more effect on you than a gulp of milk,” said the old man, marvelling, sitting down close to Riri again. “You could probably do with pints of this stuff. I can tell by looking at you you’ll be a drinking man.” His hands on the walking stick began to tremble anew. “I’m not the man Iwas,” he said. “Not by any means.” Because he did not speak English with a French or any foreign accent, Riri could not really understand him. He went on, “Fell down the staircase at the Trouville casino. Trouville, or that other place. Shock gave me amnesia. Hole in the stair carpet – must have been. I went there for years,” he said. “Never saw a damned hole in anything. Now my hands shake.”

“When you lift your glass to drink they don’t shake,” called Riri’s grandmother from the kitchen. She repeated this in French, for good measure.

“She’s got an ear like a radar unit,” said Mr. Aiken.

Riri took up his tape recorder. In a measured chant, as if demonstrating to his grandmother how these things should be
done, he said, “ ‘The swallows would not fly away if the season is fine.’ ”

“Do you know what any of it means?” said Mr. Aiken.

“He doesn’t need to know what it means,” Riri’s grandmother answered for him. “He just needs to know it by heart.”

T
hey were glassed in on the balcony. The only sound they could hear was of their own voices. The sun on them was so hot that Riri wanted to take off his sweater. Looking down, he saw a chalet crushed in the shadows of two white blocks, not so tall as their own. A large, spared spruce tree suddenly seemed to retract its branches and allow a great weight of snow to slip off. Cars went by, dogs barked, children called – all in total silence. His grandmother talked English to the old man. Riri, when he was not actually eating, read
Astérix in Brittany
without attracting her disapproval.

“If people can be given numbers, like marks in school,” she said, “then children are zero.” She was enveloped in a fur cloak, out of which her hands and arms emerged as if the fur had dissolved in certain places. She was pink with wine and sun. The old man’s blue eyes were paler than hers. “Zero.” She held up thumb and forefinger in an O. “I was there with my five darling zeros while he … You are probably wondering if I was
ever
happy. At the beginning, in the first days, when I thought he would give me interesting books to read, books that would change all my life. Riri,” she said, shading her eyes, “the cake and the ice cream were, I am afraid, the end of things for the moment. Could I ask you to clear the table for me?”

“I don’t at home.” Nevertheless he made a wobbly pile of
dishes and took them away and did not come back. They heard him, indoors, starting all over: “ ‘Go, went, gone.’ ”

“I have only half a memory for dates,” she said. “I forget my children’s birthdays until the last minute and have to send them telegrams. But I know
that
day.…”

“The twenty-sixth of May,” he said. “What I forget is the year.”

“I know that I felt young.”

“You were. You
are
young,” he said.

“Except that I was forty if a day.” She glanced at the hands and wrists emerging from her cloak as if pleased at their whiteness. “The river was so sluggish, I remember. And the willows trailed in the river.”

“Actually, there was a swift current after the spring rains.”

“But no wind. The clouds were heavy.”

“It was late in the afternoon,” he said. “We sat on the grass.”

“On a raincoat. You had thought in the morning those clouds meant rain.”

“A young man drowned,” he said. “Fell out of a boat. Funny, he didn’t try to swim. So people kept saying.”

“We saw three firemen in gleaming metal helmets. They fished for him so languidly – the whole day was like that. They had a grappling hook. None of them knew what to do with it. They kept pulling it up and taking the rope from each other.”

“They might have been after water lilies, from the look of them.”

“One of them bailed out the boat with a blue saucepan. I remember that. They’d got that saucepan from the restaurant.”

“Where we had lunch,” he said. “Trout, and a coffee cream pudding. You left yours.”

“It was soggy cake. But the trout was perfection. So was the wine. The bridge over the river filled up slowly with holiday people. The three firemen rowed to shore.”

“Yes, and one of them went off on a shaky bicycle and came back with a coil of frayed rope on his shoulders.”

“The railway station was just behind us. All those people on the bridge were waiting for a train. When the firemen’s boat slipped off down the river, they moved without speaking from one side of the bridge to the other, just to watch the boat. The silence of it.”

“Like the silence here.”

“This is planned silence,” she said.

Riri played back his own voice. A tinny, squeaky Riri said, “ ‘Go, went, gone. Eat, ate, eaten. See, saw, sen.’ ”

“ ‘Seen’!” called his grandmother from the balcony. “ ‘Seen,’ not ‘sen.’ His mother made exactly that mistake,” she said to the old man. “Oh, stop that,” she said. He was crying. “Please, please stop that. How could I have left five children?”

“Three were grown,” he gasped, wiping his eyes.

“But they didn’t know it. They didn’t know they were grown. They still don’t know it. And it made six children, counting him.”

“The secretary mothered him,” he said. “All he needed.”

“I know, but you see she wasn’t his wife, and he liked saying to strangers ‘my wife,’ ‘my wife this,’ ‘my wife that.’ What is it, Riri? Have you come to finish doing the thing I asked?”

He moved close to the table. His round glasses made him look desperate and stern. He said, “Which room is mine!” Darkness had gathered round him in spite of the sparkling sky and a row of icicles gleaming and melting in the most dazzling possible light. Outrage, a feeling that consideration had been
Wanting – that was how homesickness had overtaken him. She held his hand (he did not resist – another sign of his misery) and together they explored the apartment. He saw it all – every picture and cupboard and doorway – and in the end it was he who decided that Mr. Aiken must keep the spare room and he, Riri, would be happy on the living-room couch.

The old man passed them in the hall; he was obviously about to rest on the very bed he had just been within an inch of losing. He carried a plastic bottle of Evian. “Do you like the bland taste of water?” he said.

Riri looked boldly at his grandmother and said, “Yes,” bursting into unexplained and endless-seeming laughter. He seemed to feel a relief at this substitute for impertinence. The old man laughed too, but broke off, coughing.

At half past four, when the windows were as black as the sky in the painting of tulips and began to reflect the lamps in a disturbing sort of way, they drew the curtains and had tea around the table. They pushed Riri’s books and belongings to one side and spread a cross-stitched tablecloth. Riri had hot chocolate, a croissant left from breakfast and warmed in the oven, which made it deliriously greasy and soft, a slice of lemon sponge cake, and a banana. This time he helped clear away and even remained in the kitchen, talking, while his grandmother rinsed the cups and plates and stacked them in the machine.

The old man sat on a chair in the hall struggling with snow boots. He was going out alone in the dark to post some letters and to buy a newspaper and to bring back whatever provisions he thought were required for the evening meal.

“Riri, do you want to go with Mr. Aiken? Perhaps you should have a walk.”

“At home I don’t have to.”

His grandmother looked cross; no, she looked worried. She was biting something back. The old man had finished the contention with his boots and now he put on a scarf, a fur-lined coat, a fur hat with earflaps, woollen gloves, and he took a list and a shopping bag and a different walking stick, which looked something like a ski pole. His grandmother stood still, as if dreaming, and then (addressing Riri) decided to wash all her amber necklaces. She fetched a wicker basket from her bedroom. It was lined with orange silk and filled with strings of beads. Riri followed her to the bathroom and sat on the end of the tub. She rolled up her soft sleeves and scrubbed the amber with laundry soap and a stiff brush. She scrubbed and rinsed and then began all over again.

“I am good at things like this,” she said. “Now, unless you hate to discuss it, tell me something about your school.”

At first he had nothing to say, but then he told her how stupid the younger boys were and what they were allowed to get away with.

“The younger boys would be seven, eight?” Yes, about that. “A hopeless generation?”

He wasn’t sure; he knew that his class had been better.

She reached down and fetched a bottle of something from behind the bathtub and they went back to the sitting room together. They put a lamp between them, and Irina began to polish the amber with cotton soaked in turpentine. After a time the amber began to shine. The smell made him homesick, but not unpleasantly. He carefully selected a necklace when she told him he might take one for his mother, and he rubbed it with a soft cloth. She showed him how to make the beads magnetic by rolling them in his palms.

“You can do that even with plastic,” he said.

“Can you? How very sad. It is dead matter.”

“Amber is too,” he said politely.

“What do you want to be later on? A scientist?”

“A ski instructor.” He looked all round the room, at the shelves and curtains and at the bamboo folding screen, and said, “If you didn’t live here, who would?”

She replied, “If you see anything that pleases you, you may keep it. I want you to choose your own present. If you don’t see anything, we’ll go out tomorrow and look in the shops. Does that suit you?” He did not reply. She held the necklace he had picked and said, “Your mother will remember seeing this as I bent down to kiss her good night. Do you like old coins? One of my sons was a collector.” In the wicker basket was a lacquered box that contained his uncle’s coin collection. He took a coin but it meant nothing to him; he let it fall. It clinked, and he said, “We have a dog now.” The dog wore a metal tag that rang when the dog drank out of a china bowl. Through a sudden rainy blur of new homesickness he saw that she had something else, another lacquered box, full of old cancelled stamps. She showed him a stamp with Hitler and one with an Italian king. “I’ve kept funny things,” she said. “Like this beautiful Russian box. It belonged to my grandmother, but after I have died I expect it will be thrown out. I gave whatever jewelry I had left to my daughters. We never had furniture, so I became attached to strange little baskets and boxes of useless things. My poor daughters – I had precious little to give. But they won’t be able to wear rings any more than I could. We all come into our inherited arthritis, these knotted-up hands. Our true heritage. When I was your age, about, my mother was dying of … I wasn’t told. She took a ring from under her pillow and folded my hand on it. She said that I
could always sell it if I had to, and no one need know. You see, in those days women had nothing of their own. They were like brown paper parcels tied with string. They were handed like parcels from their fathers to their husbands. To make the parcel look attractive it was decked with curls and piano lessons, and rings and gold coins and banknotes and shares. After appraising all the decoration, the new owner would undo the knots.”

“Where is that ring?” he said. The blur of tears was forgotten.

“I tried to sell it when I needed money. The decoration on the brown paper parcel was disposed of by then. Everything thrown, given away. Not by me. My pearl necklace was sold for Spanish refugees. Victims, flotsam, the injured, the weak – they were important. I wasn’t. The children weren’t. I had my ring. I took it to a municipal pawnshop. It is a place where you take things and they give you money. I wore dark glasses and turned up my coat collar, like a spy.” He looked as though he understood that. “The man behind the counter said that I was a married woman and I needed my husband’s written consent. I said the ring was mine. He said nothing could be mine, or something to that effect. Then he said he might have given me something for the gold in the band of the ring but the stones were worthless. He said this happened in the finest of families. Someone had pried the real stones out of their setting.”

“Who did that?”

“A husband. Who else would? Someone’s husband – mine, or my mother’s, or my mother’s mother’s, when it comes to that.”

“With a knife?” said Riri. He said, “The man might have been pretending. Maybe he took out the stones and put in glass.”

“There wasn’t time. And they were perfect imitations – the right shapes and sizes.”

“He might have had glass stones all different sizes.”