Michel Déon - The Foundling's War

Cyrille came back to her, his cheeks on fire, cheerfully blowing out a cloud of condensation.

‘Look, Marceline, I’m smoking.’

He inhaled from an imaginary cigarette and pretended to hide it behind his back when she scolded him.

‘It’s very bad to be smoking at your age. Monsieur Michette, who’s ten years older than you, has never smoked in his life. That’s why he’s so well …’

‘Is Monsieur Michette the bogeyman?’

‘You know, I’m really going to get cross with you.’

‘Oh no, I don’t think you will. You’re too good.’

Marceline’s heart turned over: a child was telling her she was good. She had reached the age of fifty without knowing it. Cyrille grabbed her hand.

‘Let’s go home. Maman will be getting worried.’

They crossed Place Saint-Sulpice. As soon as Cyrille glimpsed the pigeon catcher he started shouting and clapping his hands, running away from Marceline and making the birds scatter. The man said nothing, waiting patiently for calm to return and again holding out the breadcrumbs on his palm. His nose was getting redder and redder. Its luminosity was the only thing people noticed in his obtuse face. They called him Red-nose and told him he was a nasty piece of work.

Claude was regaining consciousness, but hazily and so confusedly that for most of the day she seemed absent from her own life. Getting up late, she had mainly sat slumped in an armchair. Her hand dangled and Cyrille, on all fours, pushed against her apparently lifeless fingers with his head. The fingers caught a curl of blond hair and wound it around them, and Cyrille purred.

‘I’m your pussycat.’

‘Yes, you’re my pussycat.’

Afraid that Claude would let herself be taken away, Palfy and Jean had forbidden Anna Petrovna from visiting her daughter. She had telephoned from a public call box. Claude had affected a lighthearted voice to reassure her. Anna Petrovna allowed herself to be convinced because she was reluctant to leave darling Vladimir, who was in bed with influenza. As soon as she put the phone down Claude relapsed into apathy, from which she only emerged when Jean arrived. As soon as he appeared her face lit up and her voice regained its eagerness, so much so that Marceline, who had begun to develop a literary turn of phrase since spending time among Nelly’s bookshelves, exclaimed, ‘You’re Tristan and Iseult! What are you waiting for? King Mark has gone.’

She took Cyrille out, pretending that there was shopping to be done in the quartier. On her return her trained eye was surprised to see them still sitting apart from each other.

Alone with Claude, Jean spent his time trying to find out what had happened. Each day he extracted from her a few more words that she uttered with infinite reluctance. She spoke of a night in a cupboard, a blinding light, questions that two men drilled into her, a cold bath into which she had been thrown and where she had fainted, and a man with greying hair who had picked her up and carried her to a car and then in the car to Palfy’s apartment.

‘Please,’ she said, ‘don’t keep asking me. I don’t want to remember. You have to say nothing. They know everything. They know more than I do.’

The one certainty was that they had not arrested Georges Chaminadze, who had come from London on a special mission and left again by unknown means. It was his second such mission. On the first, despite orders to the contrary, he had spent three days with Claude, without Cyrille for fear that he would talk. The G was him.

‘Do you still love him?’ Jean asked.

‘No. I love you.’

So why would she not give herself to him?

‘I promised him. On Cyrille’s life.’

‘If he extracted that promise from you, it’s because he loves you.’

‘No. He doesn’t even love me. I’m not explaining anything. We were to divorce. He was living with another woman. But he didn’t want me to see anyone else.’

‘Then why did you let him force you to make that promise?’

‘Oh Jean, you’re the one torturing me now … I really don’t know. He’s very convincing. He’s handsome. He was my husband, my only lover. He’s Cyrille’s father … I didn’t know I was going to meet you … I hoped he would come back and that, even if I didn’t love him any more, we’d be able to live together, so that Cyrille would be happy.’

Piece by piece the picture of Georges Chaminadze became clearer, a very different picture from the photograph glimpsed in Claude’s bedroom of a tall, uncomplicated-looking young man, happy to be alive, racket in hand on a tennis court.

‘You have to understand,’ Claude said, ‘he was terribly spoilt. At the age of five he used to have servants kissing his hand. He’s like Vladi, he never wanted to work. And like Vladi he was a natural card player. They often used to team up on international cruises. Both of them spoke Russian, French, German and Spanish almost without an accent. Maman adores him … Nearly as much as Vladi … When I said I’d divorce him if he went on living like that, she said I was wrong.’

‘That’s why she hates me.’

‘Yes, she’s crazy, but you have to forgive her; she’s lost everything and now Vladi’s a loser too, banned from playing in all sorts of places …’

On other days Claude did not speak, answering only yes or no, but from a smile or the pressure of her hand, Jean knew she was happy he was there. He was anxious to know how she had lived until now.

‘On very little,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t spend very much, which must be a reaction to Maman. If she ever gets a thousand-franc note she’ll go out and buy caviar rather than pay the gas bill. I’ve sold some jewellery. Very cheaply, but in any case I don’t have many needs. And you don’t know it, but you helped me a lot. The first time he came Georges left me some money too. It must have come from the expenses he was given for his French mission. He’s never been very scrupulous. The police searched the apartment. They took my last two rings and the money I had left. Now I’ve got nothing …’

She held out two open palms.

Marceline said that if Claude would agree to get dressed she would regain her appetite for living, but by staying in bed in a nightdress or lolling in an armchair in a dressing gown she was wallowing in self-pity. Without admitting it, Marceline had discovered in herself extraordinary depths of devotion. She protected Claude, cared for her, made sure she ate, refrained from asking her a single question, and unilaterally decided to take charge of Cyrille’s rather random education. Claude listened astonished to this large woman, built like a wardrobe and with the veins in her cheeks flushed a lively red after a bottle of cheap burgundy, delivering her remarkable course in manners. But what was good enough for the girls at the Sirène was also good enough for a small boy. Cyrille drank his glass of water with his little finger crooked, washed his willy morning and evening, and said, ‘Hello, Monsieur Palfy; good evening, Madame Nelly.’ Taken all together, his instruction contained many good things, and there would always be time to go back on certain habits. The main thing was that Cyrille trusted Madame Michette, secret agent and woman of action, in a way that did not rule out being cheeky to her.

*

Nelly appeared occasionally. She came back for a coat, a book, a dress. Claude knew she was living with Jean at Palfy’s. She did not mind. No one was deceiving anyone. Only Duzan wandered lost through the labyrinth, discovering that he needed Nelly more than she needed him. He was like a fly bumping into a pane of glass. He saw Nelly free and called out to her repeatedly, and she did not hear him. He thought of denouncing her and dropped a hint to Julius Kapermeister who would have shown interest had Madeleine, tipped off by Jean, not intervened. She had taken Jean’s side, Nelly’s side, the side of the unknown Claude who had been pointlessly tortured. Every day she sent a chauffeur to Saint-Sulpice with some ‘treats’. Thanks to her companion, Blanche de Rocroy, she had discovered the part played by Rudolf in spiriting Claude out of the hands of the Gestapo’s French auxiliaries: a dangerous role that for the first time had compromised this man of aristocratic demeanour but soft character, who found himself alarmed at the thought of being disciplined and posted to a combat unit for his actions. Goodbye to the black-market restaurants, to his picture-dealing racket and the confiscation of Jewish wealth, not to mention another, even more fruitful business activity, which we shall return to.