Overhead in a Balloon (20 page)

Grippes believed in the importance of errors. No political system, no love affair, no native inclination, no life itself would be tolerable without a wide mesh for mistakes to slip through. It pleased him that Public Treasury had never caught up with the three apartments – not just for the sake of the cash piling up in safe deposit but for the black hole of error revealed. He and Poche had been together for some years – another blunder. Usually Controller and taxpayer were torn apart after a meeting or two, so that the revenue service would not start taking into consideration the client’s aged indigent aunt, his bill for dental surgery, his alimony payments, his perennial mortgage. But possibly no one except Poche could be bothered with Grippes, always making some time-wasting claim for minute professional expenses, backed by a messy-looking certified receipt. Sometimes Grippes dared believe Poche admired him, that he hung on to the dossier out of devotion to his books. (This conceit was intensified when Poche began calling him “
Maître
.”) Once, Grippes won some City of Paris award and was shown in
France-Soir
shaking hands with the mayor and simultaneously receiving a long, cheque-filled envelope. Immediately summoned by Poche, expecting a discreet compliment, Grippes found him interested only in the caption under the photo, which made much of the size of the cheque. Grippes later thought of sending a sneering letter – “Thank you for your warm congratulations” – but he decided in time it was wiser not to fool with Poche. Poche had recently given him a thirty-three-per-cent personal exemption, three per cent more than the outer limit for Grippes’ category of unsalaried earners – according to Poche, a group that included, as well as authors, door-to-door salesmen and prostitutes.

The dun-coloured Gaullist-era jacket on Grippes’ file had worn out long ago and been replaced, in 1969, by a cover in cool banker’s green. Green presently made way for a shiny black-and-white marbled effect, reflecting the mood of opulence of the early seventies. Called in for his annual springtime confession, Grippes remarked about the folder: “Culture seems to have taken a decisive turn.”

Poche did not ask what culture. He continued bravely, “Food for the cats,
Maître
. We
can’t.”

“They depend on me,” said Grippes. But they had already settled the cats-as-dependents question once and for all. Poche drooped over Grippes’ smudged and unreadable figures. Grippes tried to count the number of times he had examined the top of Poche’s head. He still knew nothing about Poche, except for the wedding ring. Somewhere along the way, Poche had tied himself to a need for retirement pay and rich exemptions of his own. In the language of his generation, Poche was a fully structured individual. His vocabulary was sparse and to the point, centred on a single topic. His state training school, the machine that ground out Pelles and Poches all sounding alike, was in Clermont-Ferrand. Grippes was born in the same region. That might have given them something else to talk about, except that Grippes had never been back. Structured Poche probably attended class reunions, was godfather to classmates’ children, jotted their birthdays in a leather-covered notebook he never mislaid. Unstructured Grippes could not even remember his own age.

Poche turned over a sheet of paper, read something Grippes could not see, and said, automatically, “We
can’t.”

“Nothing is ever as it was,” said Grippes, still going on about the marbled-effect folder. It was a remark that usually
shut people up, leaving them nowhere to go but a change of subject. Besides, it was true. Nothing can be as it was. Poche and Grippes had just lost a terrifying number of brain cells. They were an instant closer to death. Death was of no interest to Poche. If he ever thought he might cease to exist, he would stop concentrating on other people’s business and get down to reading Grippes while there was still time. Grippes wanted to ask, “Do you ever imagine your own funeral?” but it might have been taken as a threatening, gangsterish hint from taxpayer to Controller – worse, far worse, than an attempted bribe.

A folder of a pretty mottled-peach shade appeared. Poche’s cubicle was painted soft beige, the torn linoleum repaired. Poche sat in a comfortable armchair resembling the wide leathery seats in smart furniture stores at the upper end of Boulevard Saint-Germain. Grippes had a new, straight metallic chair that shot him bolt upright and hurt his spine. It was the heyday of the Giscardian period, when it seemed more important to keep the buttons polished than to watch where the regiment was heading. Grippes and Poche had not advanced one inch towards each other. Except for the paint and the chairs and “
Maître
,” it could have been 1963. No matter how many works were added to the bundle in the locker, no matter how often Grippes had his picture taken, no matter how many Grippes paperbacks blossomed on airport bookstalls, Grippes to Poche remained a button.

T
he mottled-peach jacket began to darken and fray. Poche said to Grippes, “I asked you to come here,
Maître
, because I find we have overlooked something concerning your income.” Grippes’ heart gave a lurch. “The other day I came across an
old ruling about royalties. How much of your income do you kick back?”

“Excuse me?”

“To publishers, to bookstores,” said Poche. “How much?”

“Kick back?”

“What percentage?” said Poche. “Publishers. Printers.”

“You mean,” said Grippes, after a time, “how much do I pay editors to edit, publishers to publish, printers to print, and booksellers to sell?” He supposed that to Poche such a scheme might sound plausible. It would fit his long view over Grippes’ untidy life. Grippes knew most of the literary gossip that went round about himself; the circle was so small that it had to come back. In most stories there was a virus of possibility, but he had never heard anything as absurd as this, or as base.

Poche opened the file, concealing the mouldering cover, apparently waiting for Grippes to mention a figure. The nausea Grippes felt he put down to his having come here without breakfast. One does not insult a Controller. He had shouted silently at Poche, years before, and had been sent upstairs to do penance with Mme. de Pelle. It is not good to kick over a chair and stalk out. “I have never been so insulted!” might have no meaning from Grippes, keelhauled month after month in one lumpy review or another. As his works increased from bundle to heap, so they drew intellectual abuse. He welcomed partisan ill-treatment, as warming to him as popular praise. Don’t forget me, Grippes silently prayed, standing at the periodicals table in La Hune, the Left Bank bookstore, looking for his own name in those quarterlies no one ever takes home. Don’t praise me. Praise is weak stuff. Praise me after I’m dead.

But even the most sour and despairing and close-printed essays were starting to mutter acclaim. The shoreline of the
eighties, barely in sight, was ready to welcome Grippes, who had re-established the male as hero, whose left-wing heartbeat could be heard, loyally thumping, behind the armour of his right-wing traditional prose. His re-established hero had curly hair, soft eyes, horn-rimmed glasses, dimples, and a fully structured life. He was pleasing to both sexes and to every type of reader, except for a few thick-ribbed louts. Grippes looked back at Poche, who did not know how closely they were bound. What if he were to say, “This is a preposterous insinuation, a blot on a noble profession and on my reputation in particular,” only to have Poche answer, “Too bad,
Maître
– I was trying to help”? He said, as one good-natured fellow to another, “Well, what if I own up to this crime?”

“It’s no crime,” said Poche. “I simply add the amount to your professional expenses.”

“To my rebate?” said Grippes. “To my exemption?”

“It depends on how much.”

“A third of my income?” said Grippes, insanely. “Half?”

“A reasonable figure might be twelve and a half per cent.”

All this for Grippes. Poche wanted nothing. Grippes considered with awe the only uncorruptible element in a porous society. No secret message had passed between them. He could not even invite Poche to lunch. He wondered if this arrangement had ever actually existed – if there could possibly be a good dodge that he, Grippes, had never heard of. He thought of contemporary authors for whose success there could be no other explanation: it had to be celestial playfulness or twelve and a half per cent. The structure, as Grippes was already calling it, might also just be Poche’s innocent, indecent idea about writers.

Poche was reading the file again, though he must have known everything in it by heart. He was as absorbed, as contented, and somehow as pure as a child with a box of paints. At any moment he would raise his tender, bewildered eyes and murmur, “Four dozen typewriter ribbons in a third of the fiscal year,
Maître?
We
can’t.”

Grippes tried to compose a face for Poche to encounter, a face above reproach. But writers considered above reproach always looked moody and haggard, about to scream. “Be careful,” he was telling himself. “Don’t let Poche think he’s doing you a favour. These people set traps.” Was Poche angling for something? Was this bait? “Attempting to bribe a public servant” the accusation was called. “Bribe” wasn’t the word: it was “corruption” the law mentioned – “an attempt to corrupt.” All Grippes had ever offered Poche was his books, formally inscribed, as though Poche were an anonymous reader standing in line in a bookstore where Grippes, wedged behind a shaky table, sat signing away. “Your name?” “Whose name?” “How do you spell your name?” “Oh, the book isn’t for me. It’s for a friend of mine.” His look changed to one of severity and impatience, until he remembered that Poche had never asked him to sign anything. He had never concealed his purpose, to pluck from Grippes’ plumage every bright feather he could find.

“Careful,” Grippes repeated. “Careful. Remember what happened to Prism.”

Victor Prism, keeping pale under a parasol on the beach at Torremolinos, had made the acquaintance of a fellow-Englishman – pleasant, not well educated but eager to learn, blistered shoulders, shirt draped over his head, pages of the
Sunday Express
round his red thighs. Prism lent him something
to read – his sunburn was keeping him awake. It was a creative essay on three émigré authors of the nineteen-thirties, in a review so obscure and ill-paying that Prism had not bothered to include the fee on his income-tax return. (Prism had got it wrong, of course, having Thomas Mann – whose plain name Prism could not spell – go to East Germany and with his wife start a theatre that presented his own plays, sending Stefan Zweig to be photographed with movie stars in California, and putting Bertolt Brecht to die a bitter man in self-imposed exile in Brazil. As it turned out, none of Prism’s readers knew the difference. Chided by Grippes, Prism had been defensive, cold, said that no letters had come in. “One, surely?” said Grippes. “Yes, I thought that must be you,” Prism said.)

Prism might have got off with the whole thing if his new friend had not fallen sound asleep after the first lines. Waking, refreshed, he had said to himself, “I must find out what they get paid for this stuff,” a natural reflex – he was of the Inland Revenue. He’d found no trace, no record; for Inland Revenue purposes “Death and Exile” did not exist. The subsequent fine was so heavy and Prism’s disgrace so acute that he fled England to spend a few days with Grippes and the cats in Montparnasse. He sat on a kitchen chair while Grippes, nose and mouth protected by a checked scarf, sprayed terror to cockroaches. Prism, weeping in the fumes and wiping his eyes, said, “I’m through with Queen and Country” – something like that – “and I’m taking out French citizenship tomorrow.”

“You would have to marry a Frenchwoman and have at least five male children,” said Grippes, through the scarf. He was feeling the patriotic hatred of a driver on a crowded road seeing foreign license plates in the way.

“Oh, well, then,” said Prism, as if to say, “I won’t bother.”

“Oh, well, then,” said Grippes, softly, not quite to Poche. Poche added one last thing to the file and closed it, as if something definite had taken place. He clasped his hands and placed them on the dossier; it seemed shut for all time now, like a grave. He said,
“Maître
, one never stays long in the same fiscal theatre. I have been in this one for an unusual length of time. We may not meet again. I want you to know I have enjoyed our conversations.”

“So have I,” said Grippes, with caution.

“Much of your autobiographical creation could apply to other lives of our time, believe me.”

“So you have read them,” said Grippes, an eye on the locker.

“I read those I bought,” said Poche.

“But they are the same books.”

“No. The books I bought belong to me. The others were gifts. I would never open a gift. I have no right to.” His voice rose, and he spoke more slowly. “In one of them, when What’s-His-Name struggles to prepare his civil-service tests, ‘… the desire for individual glory seemed so inapposite, suddenly, in a nature given to renunciation.’ ”

“I suppose it
is
a remarkable observation,” said Grippes. “I was not referring to myself.” He had no idea what that could be from, and he was certain he had not written it.

P
oche did not send for Grippes again. Grippes became a commonplace taxpayer, filling out his forms without help. The frosted-glass door was reverting to dull white; there were fewer shadows for Grippes to let in. A fashion for having
well-behaved Nazi officers shore up Western culture gave Grippes a chance to turn Poche into a tubercular poet, trapped in Paris by poverty and the Occupation. Grippes threw out the first draft, in which Poche joined a Christian-minded Resistance network and performed a few simple miracles, unaware of his own powers. He had the instinctive feeling that a new generation would not know what he was talking about. Instead, he placed Poche, sniffling and wheezing, in a squalid hotel room, cough pastilles spilled on the table, a stained blanket pinned round his shoulders. Up the fetid staircase came a handsome colonel, a Curt Jurgens type, smelling of shaving lotion, bent on saving liberal values, bringing Poche butter, cognac, and a thousand sheets of writing paper.