Little Jewel (10 page)

I touched my finger to my cheek, the same spot where
the long scratches ran down his cheek.

‘No…Why?' he muttered.

‘You really should put some disinfectant on that. It's like a dog bite. You can catch rabies.'

This time, I could tell he was out of his depth. And Véra Valadier was, too. They were looking at me warily. Under the glare of the chandelier, thrown off course, they were nothing but a suspicious couple who had just been rounded up in a raid.

‘I think we're late,' she said, turning to her husband.

She had recovered her cold voice. Michel Valadier checked his bracelet watch.

‘Yes, we must go,' he agreed, also feigning indifference.

‘There's a slice of ham for you in the fridge,' she said to the little girl. ‘I think we'll be home late tonight…'

The little girl drew nearer to me and took my hand, squeezing it like someone who wanted to be guided through the darkness.

‘It would be better if you left,' Madame Valadier said. ‘She has to get used to being by herself.' She took the little girl by the hand and pulled her away. ‘Mademoiselle is going to leave now. You're to have dinner and put yourself to bed.'

The little girl looked at me once more, her eyes wide,
as if she would never again be astonished by anything. Michel Valadier had moved in closer, and the little girl was now standing motionless between her parents.

‘See you tomorrow,' I said to her.

‘See you tomorrow.'

But she didn't seem very sure about it.

Outside, I sat down on a bench beside the path that runs along the Jardin d'Acclimatation. I had no idea what I was waiting for. After a while, I saw Madame and Monsieur Valadier leave the house. She was wearing a fur coat; he had on his navy-blue coat. They didn't walk close together. When they reached the black car, she got in the back seat and he took the wheel, as if he were her chauffeur. The car headed off towards Avenue de Madrid, and I realised that I would never know anything about these people, neither their real first names nor their real surnames, nor why a troubled look sometimes came over Madame Valadier, nor why there were no chairs in Monsieur Valadier's study, nor why the address on his business card was different from that of his office at home. And the little girl? She, at
least, was not a mystery to me. I intuited what she might have been feeling. I had been, more or less, the same sort of child.

A light came on in her room on the second floor. I was tempted to go and keep her company. I thought I saw her shadow at the window. But I didn't ring the doorbell. I was feeling so miserable around that time that I scarcely felt up to helping someone else. What's more, the business with the dog had reminded me of an incident in my own childhood.

I walked to the Porte Maillot, relieved to get out of the Bois de Boulogne. During the day, when I was with the little girl at the edge of the skaters' lake, I could just about bear it. But, now that it was night, I felt a sensation of emptiness which was far more horrific than the vertigo that overwhelmed me on the pavement in Rue Coustou, outside Zone Out.

On my right, the first trees marked the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne. One November evening, a dog went missing in that park; it was something I would be haunted by for the rest of my life, at times when I least expected it. During sleepless nights and lonely days, and even during summer. I should have explained to the little girl how dangerous it was, this business of having a dog.

When I entered the schoolyard earlier and saw her
sitting on the bench, I thought back to another schoolyard. I was the same age as the little girl and there were older boarders in that schoolyard, too. They took care of us. Every morning, they helped us to get dressed and, in the evening, to get ready for bed. They mended our clothes. My ‘big girl' was called Thérèse, like me. She had dark hair and blue eyes, and a tattoo on her arm. As I recall, she looked a bit like the pharmacist. The other boarders, and even the nuns, were wary of her, but she was always kind to me. She stole chocolate from the kitchen and sneaked it to me at night in the dormitory. During the day, she sometimes took me to a studio, not far from the chapel, where the big girls were learning how to iron.

One day, my mother came to collect me. She told me to get in the car and I sat on the front bench seat, next to her. I think she told me that I was never going back to that boarding school. There was a dog on the back seat. And the car was parked almost at the same spot where I'd been knocked down by the truck, not long before. The boarding school can't have been far from the Gare de Lyon. I remember, when Jean Borand used to wait for me outside the boarding school on Sundays, we would walk to his garage. And the day my mother took me away in the car with the dog, we
went past the Gare de Lyon. In those days, the streets were deserted and I had the impression that the two of us in the car were the only people in Paris.

That was the day I went with her, for the first time, to the huge apartment near the Bois de Boulogne, the day she showed me
MY ROOM
. Before then, the few times Jean Borand took me to see her, we went by metro to the Place de l'Étoile, where she was still living in a hotel. Her room was smaller than my room in Rue Coustou. In the metal box, I found a telegram addressed to her at that hotel and in her real name: Suzanne Cardères, Hôtel San Remo, 8 Rue d'Armaillé. I was relieved every time I discovered the actual address of those places I only vaguely remembered, but which appeared in my nightmares over and over again. If I knew their exact location and studied their façades, I was convinced they would become less threatening.

A dog. A black poodle. Right from the start, he slept in my room. My mother never looked after him and, moreover, would have been no more capable of looking after a dog than a child. No doubt someone had given her the dog as a present. For her, it was nothing more than a fashion accessory that she must have got bored with quickly. I still wonder by what twist of fate that dog and I ended up together in the
car. Now that she was living in the huge apartment and her name was Sonia O'Dauyé, she probably needed a dog and a little girl.

I used to go for walks with the dog, beyond the apartment block and all the way along the avenue, down to the Porte Maillot. I can't recall the dog's name. It wasn't a name my mother had given him. It was around the beginning of the time I went to live with her in the apartment. She hadn't yet enrolled me in the Saint-André school and I wasn't yet known as Little Jewel. Jean Borand collected me on Thursdays and took me to his garage for the whole day. And I kept the dog with me. I knew already that my mother would forget to feed him. I was the one who got food ready for him. When Jean Borand came to collect me, we took the metro, and smuggled the dog onto the train, too. We walked from the Gare de Lyon to the garage. I wanted to remove his leash. There was no chance of him getting run over; there were no cars in the streets. But Jean Borand warned me not to take off his leash. After all, I had almost got run over by a truck in front of the school.

My mother enrolled me in Saint-André. I walked there alone every morning, and I came home every evening at around six. Unfortunately, I couldn't take the dog to
school, even though it was very close to the apartment, on Rue Pergolèse. I found the exact address on a scrap of paper in my mother's diary. Cours Saint-André, 58 Rue Pergolèse. On whose advice did she send me to that place? I stayed there all day long.

One evening, when I got home to the apartment, the dog wasn't there. I thought my mother had gone out with him. She had promised me that she'd walk him and feed him, tasks I'd already asked the cook to do, the Chinese man who prepared dinner and brought my mother a breakfast tray to her room every morning. My mother came home a bit later, without the dog. She said she'd lost it in the Bois de Boulogne. She had the leash in her bag and she handed it to me as if to prove that she wasn't lying. Her voice was very calm. She didn't look sad. She seemed to think it was all quite normal. ‘You'll have to make up a lost-dog notice tomorrow, and perhaps someone will return him.' She took me to my room. But her tone was so calm, so blasé, that I had the feeling she was preoccupied with something else. I was the only one who thought about the dog. No one ever brought him back. I was too scared to turn out the light in my room. Since the dog had been sleeping with me, I wasn't used to being by myself at
night, and now it was even worse than at boarding school. I pictured him in the darkness, lost in the middle of the Bois de Boulogne. That same evening, my mother went out, and I still remember the dress she was wearing. It was a blue dress with a veil. That dress has appeared in my nightmares for a long time, always worn by a skeleton.

I kept the light on all that night, and every other night. I never stopped being frightened. It would be my turn after the dog's, I was sure of it.

Strange thoughts came into my mind, so muddled that I waited ten or so years for them to take shape, before I could put them into words. One morning, sometime before seeing the woman in the yellow coat in the corridors of the metro, I woke up with a sentence running through my head, one of those sentences which seem incomprehensible, because they are the last shreds of a forgotten dream:
You had to kill the Kraut to avenge the dog
.

I GOT HOME to my room in Rue Coustou around seven in the evening, and I wasn't up to waiting until Wednesday for the pharmacist to come back. She was out of town for a couple of days. She had given me a telephone number in case I needed to speak to her: 225 Bar-sur-Aube.

In the basement of the café in Place Blanche, I asked the cloakroom woman to dial 225 Bar-sur-Aube for me. But the second she picked up the receiver, I told her not to bother. All of a sudden, I could no longer bring myself to disturb the pharmacist. I bought a token, went into the booth, and ended up calling Moreau-Badmaev's number. He was listening to a program on the radio, but he asked me to come over anyway. I was relieved to know that someone was happy to spend the evening with me. I was loath to take
the metro to the Porte d'Orléans. I was scared of changing trains at Montparnasse-Bienvenue. The corridor was as long as the one at Châtelet, and there wasn't a moving walkway. I had enough money to take a taxi there. Once I was in the taxi at the top of the line in front of the Moulin Rouge, I suddenly felt at ease, just as I had the other evening with the pharmacist.

The green light of the radio set was switched on, and Moreau-Badmaev was sitting against the wall, writing on a pad, while a man with a tinny voice spoke in a foreign language. This time, he said, he didn't need to write in shorthand. The man was speaking so slowly that he had time to write out the words. Tonight, he was doing it for pleasure and not at all for work-related reasons. It was a poetry reading. The program was being transmitted from somewhere faraway, and from time to time the man's voice was muffled by static. He stopped talking and some harp music came on. Badmaev held out a piece of paper that I have treasured to this day:

Mar egy hete csak a mamara

Gondolok mindig, meg-megallva
.

Nyikorgo kosarral öleben
,

Ment a padlasra, ment serénye n

En meg öszinte ember voltam
,

Orditottam toporzékoltam
.

Hagyja a dagadt ruhat masra

Emgem vigyen föl a padlasra

He translated the poem for me, but I've forgotten what it meant and what language it was written in. Then he lowered the volume on the radio, but the green light stayed on.

‘You seem a little out of sorts.'

He was looking at me so considerately that I felt at ease, just as I had with the pharmacist. I wanted to tell him everything. I described the afternoon I'd spent with the little girl in the Bois de Boulogne, Véra and Michel Valadier, going back to my room in the Rue Coustou. And the dog that was lost forever almost twelve years ago. He asked me what colour the dog was.