The Way I Found Her (15 page)

He was sitting by himself at a table, behind a pile of books. He had a pen in his hand. I hid behind some shelves and watched him. I read in the paper that at Lady Thatcher's book-signing in Harrods people were queuing right round and out of the book department and into Lingerie. But this didn't seem to be happening to Grigory.

One or two people came by the table and stared at him and passed on. One woman picked up a book from the pile and examined it, as if it were an aubergine at a market stall, and put it down again. Grigory looked pale and broken-hearted. He fiddled with his pen. And so I began to feel sorry for him and I went up to the table and spoke to him.

He didn't remember who I was. I had to introduce myself all over again. While he struggled to understand me, I sneaked a look at his book, which was called
La Vie secrète de Catherine la Grande
. And then he smiled at me and said: ‘And so you have come to buy a book?'

I explained that I had no money and he said in English, ‘Oh dear, catastrophe!'

Then, when he understood that I'd lost my way, he asked one of the shop assistants to fetch a map of Paris. We spread the map out on Grigory's table and the three of us stared at it, trying to work out my route home. Grigory said: ‘You have strayed from 8th Arrondissement, Louis.' I thought, I expect his syntax is often devoid of the definite article because everything in Russia has become too complicated to define.

In the end, he walked all the way home with me, giving up on the book-signing. As we left the shop, I looked back and saw that the table was already being cleared of the copies of
La Vie secrète de Catherine la Grande
and restacked with its normal display. Grigory had an odd way of walking, with his head thrown back, as if he were navigating by the sun. I thought this was just a Grigory phenomenon, but suddenly he stopped and looked around him and said: ‘Where are we? I forgot to look at streets and signs. I was doing what I do in Moscow, watching sky.'

‘Why do you watch the sky, Grigory?' I asked.

He ran his hand through his Vonnegut hair and scratched his scalp. Then he looked at me intently. ‘In Russia,' he said, ‘to stay sane – to stay
alive
– you must transcend. You understand what I mean?'

My head filled up with the complexity of the world. I thought, I'm way behind with everything. I should be writing stuff down in my Concorde notebook, so that I can remember it, and I'm not, because for two-thirds of the time my mind is choked with thoughts about Valentina.

As we waited to cross the Avenue Friedland, in a brief lull between onslaughts of taxis, I asked Grigory if he thought Valentina was a beautiful woman.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘Of course.'

‘Why “of course”?'

‘Well. I love her. Always. Since age of thirty-six when I met her. To me, Valentina is life. Not my life. My life is not life, it is death. But Valentina is
life
. So of course to me she is beautiful.'

We crossed the avenue. I felt the sweet poignancy of the fact that Grigory was leaving Paris in the next two days and going back to his alcoholic wife, Irina, whereas I was staying on in Valentina's apartment for another five or six weeks.

‘Have you read her new book?' I asked.

‘No,' said Grigory. ‘I asked her if I could read this one, but she won't let me, I don't know why. Do you know why, Louis?'

‘No,' I said, ‘I've no idea.'

We all had dinner that night in a restaurant in the Place de l'Alma. Grigory had chosen it because he wanted to be within sight of the Eiffel Tower, but, as we sat down, Valentina complained he was behaving like a tourist and that he'd be punished with a lousy meal. He laughed a big, furious laugh. ‘Lousy meal?' he said and pointed at all the dishes on the menu – sole, halibut, turbot, scallops, chicken, lamb, veal, steak, duck, venison and quail. ‘You think this is lousy meal, Miss Gavril? You have so forgotten your past, you have so forgotten what my existence is, that you really think that?'

‘Never mind, Grisha,' Valentina said. ‘Forget it. There is your Tower, you see?'

At night, the Tower was gold. Valentina and Alice sat with their backs to it and Grigory and I had it there in our vision whenever we cared to look up. And when the meal came, I agreed with Grigory, I didn't think the food was lousy, but after a bit the evening began to go wrong.

First, some Americans came and sat down next to us. They looked like bankers. One of them was loud and in charge of everything and spoke nutty sort of French to the waiters and bossed the others around, and you could tell that this one, whose name was Gene, worked in Paris and thought he knew everything about France and Europe. At first I didn't mind them: I really like the way Americans have their volume control way up, as if the whole world were far too quiet for them. But then Gene began talking about Britain.

He called it the UK. He went on and on about what a hopeless country it had become, like he was giving a seminar on the decline and fall of everything and everyone in England, like he was saying the whole place was finished and ruined and now just a heap of shit adrift in the Channel. It got far worse than hearing about the British forces' unscheduled tea break at Caen. I'd far rather feel mildly ashamed of my country than stimulated into a pathetic patriotism.

I looked over at Alice, to see if she was getting upset, but she wasn't listening; she seemed to be trying to mediate between Valentina and Grigory, who had never really recovered from Valentina's remark about the ‘lousy meal', and now they were arguing in Russian and Valentina's bangles were jingling with fury and Grisha was tugging and tugging at his hair. I was caught between these two zones of agony – the American and Russian, like in the Cold War – and I didn't know what to do or where to put my mind to stop it hurting.

I tried transcending, like Grigory said he did in Moscow, by just staring at the very top of the Eiffel Tower and sending my thoughts to that and then attempting to imagine Monsieur Eiffel in his workshop with all his hundreds and hundreds of fantastic drawings and calculations. But it was difficult to eat and transcend at the same time, and whenever a waiter came to the American table (which one very often did because Gene and the other bankers ordered more and more bottles of wine and water and iced Coke and bread and extra cutlery) he got in the way of my view of the Tower and all my concentration was lost.

Then suddenly Grigory pushed back his chair and stood up. There was a half-full bottle of red wine on the table between him and Valentina and with a sweep of his huge hand he knocked it over and the wine splashed all over the table and on to Valentina's dress and her broken arm in its sling. He yelled at her, one last insult or accusation in Russian, then pushed his way out of the restaurant and strode away up the Avenue Montaigne and out of sight.

Valentina grabbed the Badoit bottle and poured water on to her dress and began rubbing it with a table napkin. ‘Damn him!' she said. ‘That Grisha just doesn't know how to behave . . .'

Alice got up and went out and I saw her start to run after Grigory. Next to me, the Americans had stopped slagging off England for two seconds and were staring at Valentina, who had begun to cry. A waiter arrived with a clean tablecloth, but Valentina pushed him away. ‘Laissez!' she yelled at him.

I felt immobilised in my Cold War zone. I just gaped at everything, like at a bomb landing far away. But then I instructed myself to move and I went round to Valentina's side of the table and put my hand on her shoulder. ‘Don't cry,' I said. ‘I expect it's only a jealous rage. If I was your lover, I'd get in jealous rages, Valentina.'

Valentina blew her nose on her napkin and smiled at me. ‘Would you, Lewis?' she said. ‘But with Grisha, it's more than jealousy. He wants my life.'

‘What do you mean, he “wants your life”?'

‘He would like to have my life here in Paris, so all he ever does is criticise me for it and try to make me feel guilty. He is so envious, I think he could kill me!'

‘Do you mean really kill you?'

‘Yes, I do. And in some way I understand him. My life is like a ghost haunting his own. He would like to be free of this ghost.'

I stroked Valentina's hair. I noticed that just by her temple there were a few grey strands in among the blonde and I thought she might like to do something about them, so I said, ‘There's a bit of grey here, Valentina. Only a tiny bit.'

‘I know, darling,' she said. ‘I'm getting old.'

‘No, you're not. But the next time you go to the hairdressers, you could ask them to dye these bits, couldn't you?'

‘Yes. I will. Now, Lewis, you go and get the bill, sweetheart. I want to go home.'

While we waited for the bill, Alice came back and sat down. She said nothing to Valentina and Valentina said nothing to her. The animosity between them was becoming like a cancer or something, growing quietly all the time.

The next day Babba didn't arrive. Usually, she was in the apartment by ten, every day except Saturday and Sunday, but this was a Tuesday and there was no sign of her.

I sat in the kitchen, writing a collection of crazy thoughts in my Concorde notebook, and sort of waiting for Babba. I tried to imagine what Babba was doing or thinking. I wondered if there was a voodoo temple in Paris somewhere, in someone's basement or cellar, and if Babba and Pozzi were on their way to it now with offerings for the spirits, or whether they were just calmly existing at home, doing their washing or making their beds or sitting still and crying for the lost motorbike.

I was drinking Orangina. I could feel this day getting hotter and more stifling than any we'd had. It had got difficult to imagine rain falling ever again. When I thought about winter, it felt like something that had last occurred when I was five.

Valentina came into the kitchen at eleven-thirty. She was beautifully dressed in white and black with her arm in the ‘Ypres' scarf and smelling of her favourite scent,
Giorgio
. I knew she was going out, so I said I'd come with her. I loved walking along the street in the slipstream of her perfume.

‘All right, darling,' she said, ‘but I'm not going far. Later I've got to go to the hospital for an X-ray on my arm, but first I must see Grisha. He's meant to do interviews at RTL and France Info this morning – to talk about his little book – so I must make sure these have gone OK. I will take him to lunch at the Plaza. My poor Grisha! All I can do is buy him meals. I don't know what else is to be done for him.'

‘He could just stay on in Paris . . .' I suggested.

‘It's not that simple. It never is that simple. And who would care for Irina?'

I closed my Concorde book and got Sergei's lead. I wished Valentina was taking
me
to lunch at the Plaza. Before we left, I went to see Alice, who was working at her word processor. These days, she was either working in her room or out at some unknown destination and I hadn't had a proper conversation with her since we discussed the inseparable canaries.

When I said goodbye to her she turned and looked at me and said, ‘Are you all right?' as if she'd suddenly remembered I was part of her life, and yet her look was sort of distracted and far away. And I had an embarrassing moment of my old Elroy longing. If Elroy had been there, ready for action with his beret on, I would have said to him: ‘Your mission is to infiltrate Alice's heart.'

The Hôtel de Venise, where Grisha was staying, was nearby. I wished it had been miles away on the other side of Paris, so that Valentina and I could have walked along, side by side, for the whole morning.

When we got there, I saw that it was quite a smart-looking place. It had little trees outside and red awnings over some of the windows. I looked up at these awnings and wondered which room Grigory was in and whether the room and the mini-bar and the guest bathrobes and everything made him feel more suicidal or less.

And it was then that the moment came.

Certain moments in a life are in another tense: they are
going to become
. And only when you get to that other tense do they reveal to you what they were and what they meant, and then you know that one moment is responsible for everything that came afterwards and you think, if only I had understood what was going to happen and prevented it . . .

It was just after Valentina said goodbye. First she leaned down, like she'd so often done before, and put a kiss on my head, and I smelled her perfume and her lipstick and her soft hair with its tiny fingers of grey. And then she went into the revolving door of the Hôtel de Venise, wearing her smart black-and-white dress, and as the door revolved with her in it she turned and waved at me and then she was gone.

And that was the moment:
Valentina goes into the door and the door keeps turning, revolving anticlockwise, and the door is taking her away, but just before it does she remembers me outside on the pavement with Sergei and she turns. She turns and she waves
 . . .

That was the moment – before it went into its new tense. But I didn't know it then.

Part Two

  

The day was so hot and bright, you imagined the roads might melt.

I decided I'd take Sergei to the river, down by the Pont Neuf where people fish and read and lie in the sun. I'd buy us some bread and salami and we could dream the day away where it was cool by the water. I knew from the way he whimpered in his sleep that Sergei had vivid dreams.

Going along the Quai du Louvre, I stopped in front of the bouquiniste who had sold me
Le Grand Meaulnes
. Just like the time before, he was chatting with the other stall holders and I thought, this is how the bouquinistes like to spend their lives, not trying to sell books, but just talking and talking. When he looked up and saw me, he nodded at me, as if he remembered me. I said bonjour to him and then I thought, it wasn't me he remembered, it was Sergei. If you're out with Sergei in a smart city, it's like you're Arthur Miller and Sergei's Marilyn Monroe.