The Way I Found Her (18 page)

I told her this wasn't going to happen. I said: ‘You can stand there all night and she won't come.'

Alice looked round at me. ‘Why are you so sure?' she asked.

‘Because,' I said, ‘something has happened to her. Just as I've told you.'

Alice took me out to supper. She chose a Vietnamese restaurant with black tablecloths where the air smelled of ginger and the beer was served with limes. She let me drink the lime-scented beer. It was like she'd forgotten I was thirteen and me.

Then she began talking about the Vietnam war. She said: ‘That was the moment when language changed.'

In the bright pencil lights above our table, Alice's hair looked tangled. A Vietnamese hummingbird might have liked it for a nest. ‘What do you mean, “language changed”?' I said.

‘I think it dates from then. ‘When the Americans came back from the war, their sentences were mined with expletives: fucking this and fucking that. If you're in a war you don't understand, no doubt you begin to swear at everything because swearing is an expression of inarticulate rage. And then that way of speaking just passed into common usage – first there, in the States, then in Britain.'

I said I imagined people had always sworn, especially in Scotland, but Alice said, ‘Yes, but not like they do now. These days it's as if swearing is the skeleton of the language, the thing that holds it together.'

I was eating chicken pieces with green chillies and some kind of nuts and my nose felt as if it was on fire. I said: ‘It means the rage went on when the war ended, does it?'

‘Yes. Of course the rage went on. We're not just in a war we don't understand. We're in a
life
we don't understand.'

I was silent for a few seconds. Then I said: ‘Yes. I suppose we are.'

In the night, I went down to Valentina's bedroom and got into her bed. The sheets were silky and cool and the pillow smelled of the wallflower night cream. I lay in the dark and waited.

After a little while, Valentina came in and undressed silently and the light from the street fell on to her blonde hair and on to her fat arse as she pulled down her cream satin knickers. My penis was erect and I whispered to her: ‘You'll soon understand, Valentina, that I will always be ready and waiting.'

She slithered into the bed and took me into her arms. I attached my mouth to one of her big rosy nipples and sucked like a babe and a little moisture came out of her breast and trickled down my throat. Then I rolled over on to her and she put me inside her and said: ‘Now, darling, let's see if you can do this like a grown-up,' and no sooner had she said that than I lost consciousness and felt my body fly to heaven.

When I woke, everything was just as it had been when I went to bed, except for the damp in my sheets and the beginnings of morning light at my round window. For a moment, I thought I really had gone down to Valentina's room and that she really had come back and got into bed with me. Then my next thought was: she's there now. If I go down now, at four o'clock, she will be there, she will have come back.

Her bedroom door was closed. I knocked on it softly, thinking it was a shame to wake her when she must be tired from wherever she'd been, but continuing to knock all the same. There was no answer, so I went in.

The room was empty. On the bed was the big pile of cushions that lay there in the daytime and with which she'd propped herself up when she got back from the hospital.

I didn't go to the bed, but just stood staring at the cushions. An old-fashioned silver clock on the mantelpiece ticked away another fragment of time. I calculated that it was now forty-one hours since Valentina had been in the apartment. Forty-one hours and at supper Alice had refused to talk about it, absolutely refused. She said I was whirling off into fantasy. She reminded me that my imaginary German fighter pilot had supposedly slept wrapped in his parachute, and lived on grass. I reminded her that I was seven then, or even six, when I believed all that, but she said, ‘It makes no difference. You've always had a nervous imagination. Perhaps you'll become a writer.'

The curtains in Valentina's room hadn't been drawn. I sat down on a little chair and watched all the furniture creep out of the darkness, as though something or someone were displacing it by magic. I put Valentina on the hill of Montmartre, still wearing her black-and-white dress and her ‘Ypres' scarf, and tried to displace her with the power of my will. Step by step, I brought her nearer to me. Down she came, down the winding streets as the cafés opened and people began going to work, down through flurries of pigeons, down through light and shadow, walking on her high heels right across Paris and back into my life.

At breakfast I told Alice I thought we should go to the police and report a missing person. She said she didn't think Valentina would want us to do that yet; it would be embarrassing for her when she came home.

Just as she said this, the telephone rang and I ran to it, thinking I was going to hear Valentina's voice, but when I picked it up there was no one there. I kept saying ‘Hello, hello', like a moron: ‘Hello, hello, hello . . .' There was something at the other end, a not-quite-silence, as if a voice were trying to make itself heard from deep underneath the sea.

When ten o'clock came, I waited for Babba. I thought, if Babba comes to work, then everything may be all right. But she didn't come. So I said to Sergei: ‘Right, I've had enough of waiting. Now we're going to begin the search.'

I told Alice I would be out most of the day. She smiled and said: ‘When you come in, Valentina will be here. We'll make dinner for you.'

Before leaving, I checked the roof and discovered that Didier was back. ‘Where were you?' I asked.

‘Oh,' he said, ‘ill. I had a summer flu.'

I stared at him. He didn't look pale. He looked as if he'd been lying in a boat on the lake in the Bois de Boulogne with Alice Little.

‘How are you, Louis?' he said.

‘I'm reading
Crime et châtiment
,' I said. ‘I think Raskolnikov's a kind of existentialist, isn't he?'

‘Yes,' said Didier. ‘Of course. He takes absolute responsibility for what he does.'

‘Is it easier for an existentialist to commit a crime – or do something bad – than for other people?'

Didier put his glasses back on. ‘No,' he said. ‘It's harder. Because he cannot pass on his guilt. He must endure it all alone.'

I looked hard at Didier. ‘Why does Raskolnikov put the money he finds under a stone?' I said.

Didier smiled. ‘Do you want me to tell you,' he asked, ‘or do you want to find out for yourself?'

I said I'd find out for myself. I was going to explain about the stealer at school and how I enjoyed tracking him, but all I said was: ‘I like mysteries. I like solving things. And I'm good at it.'

I knew that the only person I knew who really cared about Valentina – apart from me – was Mrs Gavrilovich. So this was where I went first, to her apartment in the rue Daru.

When the concierge opened the street door, she smelled of drink and her eyes were wet, as if the drink had been making her cry, but she let me in without any fuss because she recognised Sergei and began crooning over him and stroking his head. I thought, now I'm Arthur Miller again.

The flat was on the ground floor, so that Mrs Gavrilovich would never have to walk up any stairs, and on every windowsill were pots of red geraniums. As soon as she saw me, she put a watering can into my hands. ‘Louis,' she said, ‘you have answered my prayers. Water the flowers.'

There was a fusty smell in the apartment, strongest in Mrs Gavrilovich's bedroom, where there was a little altar set up in front of an icon in a heavy silver frame. Red candles were burning there and a prayer book with an ivory cover lay on an embroidered shawl. Plastic flowers had been arranged in a red glass vase and near to this was a photograph of Mr Gavrilovich. The face of the icon was sad and thin, with a halo like a cymbal banged against the head.

I did all the watering and then I sat down with Mrs Gavrilovich at a table covered with hand-embroidered lace. She poured me a glass of home-made lemonade and offered me some little dry cakes that smelled of some peculiar spice. She seemed to have all these things prepared, as if she'd been expecting me.

I waited. The lemonade was very cold and sweet and the cakes were full of caraway seed. Mrs Gavrilovich nibbled a cake carefully, nursing her broken teeth. I prayed she was going to tell me she knew where Valentina was, but all she said was: ‘This heat, I think it's going to kill me, Louis. I never remember any summer in Paris quite like this.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘It never seems to rain.'

‘No. Never rains any more. God has forgotten the flowers. But when I first came to Paris, it rained like the devil all through the summer, day after day. You ask Valentina. She remembers that long time of rain.'

I put down the cake I was eating and looked up at Mrs Gavrilovich. ‘I can't ask Valentina,' I said. ‘She hasn't been home for two days.'

Sergei had found a butterfly on the windowsill. Now I saw him catch it in his mouth and eat it, wings and all. Mrs Gavrilovich saw this too and looked shocked. Perhaps she'd never seen the stuff Sergei could gobble up from the Paris gutters? I was about to smack him for eating the butterfly when Mrs Gavrilovich said: ‘Where is Valentina, Louis?'

I explained about the visit to Grigory Panin's hotel. I had to repeat everything twice because she found my accent difficult to understand.

Eventually, she said: ‘You know he is mad, that poor Grigory, mad with suffering. A man who is mad with suffering is capable of anything.'

We sat there opposite each other, not speaking for a moment, imagining the kind of things a mad suffering man might do. Sergei noticed the stillness in the room and looked at us anxiously while the butterfly began its journey through his intestines.

Then Mrs Gavrilovich got up. ‘I am going to telephone Moscow,' she said. She put on her glasses to search for Grigory's number.

While she searched, I noticed that her room was untidy, with newspapers lying about and her embroidery silks strewn over the arms of the chairs and candle grease on the surfaces of tables.

Mrs Gavrilovich found Grigory's number and began dialling. I didn't know exactly what the time was In Moscow, but I wondered if it was the hour when Grisha's wife Irina started her drinking for the day.

It was Irina Mrs Gavrilovich was speaking to. I thought I could be sure of this because she spoke gently, like she was talking to a child, and with Grisha she probably would have been angry. I sat still and listened to the Russian language. If I closed my eyes, it was Valentina I could hear, talking Russian in the Mercedes on the way to Les Rosiers.

When Mrs Gavrilovich put the phone down, she said: ‘Well, Valentina isn't in Moscow, not as far as we can tell. That was Grisha's wife, Irina. She says Grisha returned, like he planned, on the evening flight. She says what he wanted to talk about were the roast quail he had eaten for lunch at the Plaza.'

I was about to say that if Grisha had taken Valentina to Moscow, he wouldn't have brought her home to Irina, he would have booked her into a hotel, but I didn't. I just kept quiet while Mrs Gavrilovich began to search for something in her untidy room, looking behind cushions and in half-open drawers, as if she suddenly thought Valentina had become tiny and might be found under a pile of embroidery silks. Sergei and I watched her and waited, Sergei licking his mouth after his gourmet meal of the butterfly. The thing Mrs Gavrilovich was searching for was a blue shawl, and when she found it she put it over her head and said she was going to church. It was time for a Vigil.

She invited me to come with her. She said that in church we would think about what to do. She told me that when she lived in the slaughterhouse at La Villette, she used to make pilgrimages to the Nevsky church whenever she could afford the métro ticket; it was her place of refuge and from it she got the courage to start the
café, bois et charbon
. Then she said: ‘Perhaps, when the Vigil is over, Valentina will be home,' and I thought, we all keep saying or thinking this: that when a certain amount of time has passed, Valentina will materialise out of the stifling air. But she doesn't materialise. The minutes keep passing. They turn into hours. And where Valentina should be, there's only my invisible longing for her, silent in empty space.

On the way to the church, which was only about two minutes from the apartment, Mrs Gavrilovich whispered to me that there were ‘some people' who came to this church who were ‘bad' and that when she saw these bad people she had to close her eyes because she couldn't bear to look at them.

‘Why are they “bad”?' I asked.

‘Louis,' she said, ‘they are the worst.'

‘What have they done?'

‘They destroy lives, that's all I know.'

‘How?' I asked, but Mrs Gavrilovich didn't want to talk about this any more. She just wrapped the blue shawl more firmly round her head. And we were in the courtyard of the church now, so she signalled to me to be quiet and leant on my shoulder as we walked up the steps. Way above us was a mosaic of Jesus reading a book he seemed quite bored with and I thought, if it had been
Crime and Punishment
he would have been more engrossed.

Inside the church, it was cool. On the floor was an old red carpet, burned in places and stained with candle wax, and up in the air was a yellow bowl of light, where the sun came in through the sides of the glassy dome. A few people walked around, looking at the saints and martyrs on the pillars and walls and lighting candles and talking to each other. There were no pews, only a line of chairs arranged around the edges of the carpet, and on these chairs the people had put carrier bags and shopping baskets and pieces of knitting, like they were planning to have a jumble sale there during the service. When you looked up at the dome, what you saw was a swathe of netting, like a hammock, strung across it, to catch the flaking paint and plaster that was floating down from the figure of God on high.