The White Russian (12 page)

Jean

The first thing I noticed, after getting the taxi out of the garage as evening drew on and driving to Father’s office to see if I could get him home tonight before I started work, was that a lot of drunk chancers were weaving out of his building on the rue du Colisée. Many of them, I could see at once, were some sort of Russian – some blue-eyed Slavs, others skinny lads with the dark look of Romanians or Jews – and they were all looking as pleased with themselves as dogs who’ve stolen the chicken. I could guess what had brought them in such numbers, of course; they must have been filling their bellies at the funeral of the American woman who’d died upstairs, the one with the Russian name left her by a stray husband long ago – the woman who’d liked to patronize artists. Well, God be with her, I thought (not that I actually believe in any deity), and felt sorry that she had no one better to mourn her passing than these scroungers.

The second thing I noticed – on my way out, once Father had told me, irritably, that he wasn’t ready to go home; hadn’t got his work for the day done yet; what
was I bothering him for so early, and more in the same uncharacteristic, tetchy, red-eyed vein that made me think he must be sickening for something – was the girl.

She was waiting at the taxi rank as I got back into my parked cab – tall and very slender, and wearing a grey dress and pearls. She was standing in a beam of sunlight. But, under all those exuberant blond curls, her face was pensive.

I remembered her arriving here the other evening, driven by the American woman’s chauffeur. The memory contained a touch of shame, because, just for a moment, seeing a new face among the familiars of our street, I’d wondered whether this wasn’t
it
– the attack on Father that we spent so much effort trying to prevent: the bomb, the stabbing, the injection of poison, whatever. Once I’d properly taken in which car she’d come in, and the quality of her foreign clothes, I’d recognized the stupidity of the thought. But it had taken a moment or two to relax out of my combat-readiness, and a part of me still felt apologetic that, for a moment, I’d been ready to attack this innocent passer-by.

She’d had an uncertain, watchful look on her face then, too. But it had been transient, I’d thought; the effect of arriving in a new place, or of not understanding the fierce look I’d perhaps directed at her. I’d easily been able to imagine her with the shadow gone – turning back into just one more of the mass of identical sleek, contented, smugly established young people of her class, to whom everything came so easily. That hadn’t happened, though. There was no ease on her face. If anything, the shadow looked deeper now.

Well, no wonder. She must have been staying with the old
lady when she’d died. Perhaps she was family? Even if she wasn’t wearing proper mourning, she was probably dressed as sombrely as a holiday wardrobe allowed. And she must have spent this afternoon fending off the scroungers, too. Both things would be enough to make anyone sigh.

I gave her a sympathetic look as I drove up to the rank.

But there was no answering echo. She didn’t recognize me. In point of fact, she didn’t even look at me as she leaned in through the open window, smelling faintly of something elusive, not quite the innocent flower fragrances of young girls or the powerful musk-and-caustic of prostitutes (I’d left the windows open to get rid of that).

I’d been a taxi driver long enough to know a lot about prostitutes and their clients. I came across them every night, and they always spoke to me as though I were one of them. ‘We do the same kind of work, you and us,’ they liked to say. When the sun was rising, on my way to the garage after finishing work, I often gave these women lifts – they’d be heading home after a night’s work too – and they’d always offer me payment in kind. I usually had them sit in the back of the car and not beside me, as they were all drenched in their strong cheap perfume, and their proximity gave me a nauseating taste in my mouth. They’d go, but the smell lingered on. I’d shut my nostrils.

Unlike now. I took a cautious breath in, enjoying the mysterious otherness of this girl’s scent, and the pure white skin of her cheek.

The moment’s pleasure didn’t last. She broke the spell by rattling off an all-too-familiar address, which I recognized at once as that of the Russian old people’s home run by Madame Sabline out in the suburbs. (Wasn’t that also
the borrowed name of the American woman? I thought, unable to resist curiosity. Had the Russian she was said to have once married been some connection of Madame Sabline’s?) Then, with lowered eyes, the girl folded herself in back of the car and looked away, waiting for me to drive.

Now, there’s nothing unusual about avoiding a taxi driver’s eyes. Parisians do it all the time. But, to a taxi driver, it’s a bad sign, a sign of a person who feels no restraining influences – someone who’s thinking: What does it matter what this driver thinks of me if I will never see him again and he has no way of telling my friends about it? Because, by absurd chance, I’d been obliged to adopt this job as my calling in life, I saw my chance clients as they were in reality and not as they wished to appear, and my contact with them had shown them in a very bad light on almost every occasion.

Abruptly, I pulled away. I regretted my momentary sympathy for the girl now. Her indifference brought rushing into my head all the usual mixture of irritation and regret that such comfortless and pointless experiences should be my lot. Rage, too: when I looked down at my hands on the wheel, I saw that there were white points on my knuckles.

I accelerated round a corner, sharply, not looking behind to see whether my passenger was shaken by the sudden speed, barely hearing the angry cacophony of car horns that resulted. I was remembering the man I’d given a lift to at dawn, who had five suitcases and whom I’d driven to the avenue Victor-Hugo. He’d got out of the car and said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, ‘Now take these suitcases up to the fifth floor.’ There wasn’t any doubt in his voice. He didn’t even bother to say ‘please’.

‘Listen,
mon vieux
,’ I said, and he turned round at my familiar tone, looking as shocked as if I’d hit him. ‘Your arms aren’t paralysed, are they?’

‘No, why?’

‘I just don’t see why I should suddenly start carrying your suitcases up to the fifth floor, or any other floor. If I had to change a wheel, I wouldn’t turn to you and ask you to do it for me, would I?’

He looked at me. Then he asked, ‘Are you a foreigner?’

‘No,’ I replied, provocatively. ‘My father is a butcher at 42 rue de Belleville.’

He’d complained to the police, of course. But, as always happens when these misunderstandings arise, everything was sorted out as soon as I handed over my nonsense passport to the police, and they saw I was a Russian. After all, I hadn’t committed a crime. I’d just offended a wealthy man’s sense of the relationships that should prevail between different categories of citizen in France.

I turned another corner, with a judder. I was secretly pleased to see, in the mirror, the girl’s hands closing quickly on the strap in the side of the door to hold herself steady.

In this dark state of mind, which often came upon me, I felt that everything good in the world had been closed off from me. I was alone, locked out, and desperate not to be caught up forever in the endless human vileness with which my work brought me into nightly contact. By this I didn’t just mean the women on the streets, the men destroying their livers in the cafés, or the night people who inundated the city in a state of sexual frenzy – for, if you were a Paris taxi driver working at night, even the Russian Civil War could not compare with the absence of
virtue of the streets I’d ended up in. No, what depressed me even more than all that was this strange separation of people into estates, and orders, as remote from each other as Eskimos and Australians, and the stultifying way no one ventured into acquaintanceships or even geographical areas not allocated to people of their sort, or even spoke much to anyone who wasn’t precisely the same as himself, or indeed herself. That Paris was made up of fixed zones for the different orders I learned, first, from the elderly worker next to me in a paper factory off the boulevard de la Gare. It was one of the first places I worked after getting here. He told me that during the entire forty years he had lived in Paris he had never been to the Champs-Élysées because, as he explained, he had never worked there. He couldn’t imagine any other reason for someone like him to see the centre of the city.

I’d hardly been able to believe that. But experience confirmed it over and over again afterwards. Although working people at least all talked to me as if I were one of them – there was no side to them – the poor were even more limited in their outlook than their rich oppressors. They had absolutely no idea that there might be ways out of their misery. For instance, I could never get it across to my fellow factory workers, back in those days, that I was going to night school. ‘What are you going to study?’ they’d ask, baffled. I’d tell them. ‘You do know it’s hard. You’ll need to know a lot of special words,’ they’d reply, shaking their heads doubtfully. A woman worker advised me to give up all of this useless stuff. It wasn’t for working people like us, she said, and tried to persuade me not to take the risk but to stay there, where, as she put it, in ten years’ time I
might become a foreman or the head of a team of workers. ‘Ten years!’ I said. ‘I’d die ten times over in that time.’

‘You’ll come to a bad end,’ she said, finally.

When I was on my way home, in the mornings, at five or six o’clock, driving through the unrecognizably empty and sleepy streets, I’d often pass through Les Halles. I’ll never forget how struck I was when I first saw workers in the vegetable market harnessed to those small carts on which they carry their cabbages and carrots. I still remember looking at their weather-beaten faces and strange eyes, which seemed to be covered with a transparent and impenetrable film, typical of people unused to thinking – most prostitutes have the same sort of eyes – and reflecting that Chinese coolies and Roman slaves probably had the same eternally veiled look and pretty similar conditions of existence, too. The entire history of human culture had never existed for people like these. All those names – Galileo, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Mozart, Tolstoy, Bach, Balzac – all the hundreds and thousands of years of human civilization meant nothing here. There was just dawn, and the harness, and the same old slave hauling his cart.

Whenever this savage mood was upon me, I’d try to reason with myself. I’d tell myself that I’d never have learned all this if I hadn’t become a Paris taxi driver. I’d tell myself (feeling it to be a lie) that all experience was good. I’d tell myself that my experiences would, in some way, enrich the writing I was one day going to do, if ever I got any free time between driving, sleeping and the needs of my father and the poor sick creature whom, out of politeness, I called my mother. I’d say …

Well, what does it matter what I told myself? It never
worked, telling myself all that uplifting rubbish. So this evening, still intensely aware of that girl sitting on the back seat looking out of the window – aware of the lovely line of her neck and shoulder and of her casual disrespect, I tried something simpler. I emptied my mind and let the hypnotic movement of the streets all around calm me.

One after another, round street lamps appeared then disappeared in the darkening air.

The same streets, always the same streets rearing up around me: but sometimes, if I forced myself to take notice of them, the beauty of those luminous night lines, the conjunction with a black avenue here or a rustling park there, did have a soothing effect.

Drawing away from the centre of town, I found this happening now. Remembering the wild eyes of other wealthy clients when I’d answered their unthinking rudeness with spirit, saying things like, ‘If you’re not happy, get out and take another cab,’ I did wonder how this girl would have responded if I’d challenged her. But, by then, as we headed off down a quiet suburban avenue, my anger had pretty much dissipated. And when I looked in the mirror and saw the pinched look on her face, I thought better of it.

She was so obviously not happy.

Anyway, I thought, finally able to enjoy the breeze moving the great lime trees that lined this avenue, had she really done anything so wrong? She hadn’t talked, true. But had I, so quick to take offence, actually even tried to talk with her either?

I’d have been utterly corrupted by Paris if I too became unable to converse with people outside my station, I
realized. The thought gave me courage and a little surge of warmth that was perhaps what hope, that feeling I hadn’t experienced for so long, might be like.

I half turned, trying to catch her eye. ‘So what takes you to this outpost of Little Russia?’ I asked.

My voice startled her. My question too. She looked straight at me. ‘You know there are Russians there?’

Her French was good, I noticed, with hardly any accent. Her voice was low and pleasant.

I was so delighted that she’d answered, and looked properly at me, that I rushed into an uncharacteristically long and detailed reply. I started telling her all the usual things people said about the estate we were heading for: that it was a big mansion with spacious grounds, and had once belonged to a Russian nobleman; that, after the Revolution in Russia, he’d turned it into a charity so that all the impecunious gentlefolk who’d escaped and ended up here in France had somewhere seemly to visit, walk in the grounds or go to classes or meetings in the former drawing rooms. There’d even been an orphanage, for a while, until all the Civil War orphans grew up. Now they were taking old folk in instead. ‘The old folk feel right at home,’ I said, and I felt my smile twist into something dangerously like a sneer, because it felt so hard to explain with anything like sympathy the joylessness of their exiled existence, ‘because there are samovars everywhere, and every franc can be mournfully sub-divided into kopeks …’

I thought she might laugh at that. People sometimes had, when I’d said it before.