Hedi Kaddour - Waltenberg

Give or take it’s eighteen months’ smoking for a camera, but meanwhile I go on buying gramophone records, I’m wrong, it’s less than a year of smoking, just four hundred packets, that would make four times six twenty-four, four and carry two, four times one, plus two, six, sixty-four plus the three zeros, that’s already sixty-four thousand with four hundred packets, got to be accurate, in my head seventy-three thousand multiplied by a hundred and sixty, no, in seventy-three thousand how many hundred and sixties are there? No, sixty-four thousand buys four hundred packets, for five hundred packets it would cost another sixteen thousand, total eighty thousand, that makes the Paillard the equivalent of about four hundred and sixty packets, a year’s smoking, if I’m careful.

I must brush up on my mental arithmetic, hello, we’re off, something like a thousand kilometres to go, I’ve never been further than Mulhouse, no, another five minutes, it’s that other train that’s going, I always make that mistake, it’s because I want to be off, the cigarettes, the camera, the reflection in the window, I’m twenty-seven, the face of the ballerina on a page of the magazine, she’s the same age as me, she’s made up as an old woman in a wig and a shawl, she scrambles through the barbed wire, Budapest is finished, she’s leaving, I don’t give a damn about the cardinal hidden in the Yankee Embassy, but the ballerina, and the University Hospital in Budapest, bottom right of the photo, a head, on the floor, a room in the hospital attacked by cannon, fired by Soviet tanks, the corpses of four patients, in a meeting of my cell I’d have said it was a fake photo got up for propaganda purposes, but Hatzfeld said have no illusions, almost everything they say is true, you just have to turn the pages.

In another photo it was Stalin’s head that was on the ground, next to an advert for Vick’s VapoRub, to be applied as a poultice on the chest at night the minute the infant sneezes, in Humanité it was a photo of a militia man at the headquarters of the Hungarian Communist Party, he was lying full length on the ground, a picture of Lenin placed on his stomach and a bayonet stuck clean through his throat, was the poultice mummy used to put on my chest Vick’s VapoRub? It smelled of camphor and mint, that plus a soupspoonful of Rami linctus and I was ready for the night, I used to shut my eyes feeling slightly sick, it was better to be sleepy, read White Fang on the QT by my bedside lamp with a poultice on my chest and the aftertaste of Rami in my mouth, which spoiled everything.

The Poles present Gomulka with a teddy bear to thank him for standing up to the Russians, the bear is enormous, it’s in the station at Warsaw, a two-page spread, you try to look at the hands in the photos of Gomulka, Hatzfeld told you that, in prison in Stalin’s day he had his fingernails torn out, can’t really see for sure, this time the Poles come off better than the Hungarians, and then this pretty woman enters the compartment, a porter stows away her luggage, the pretty woman has no change, she searches through her bag marked H, comes up with nothing, she is wearing two delicate gold bracelets, the porter scowls, waits, he’ll miss his next job.

You watch the little drama, the pretty woman’s eyes are on you but she isn’t looking at you, she is tall, under her coat a red dress, cut at the neck in an austere V, she doesn’t want anything from you, you exist so minimally, but you are there, this she knows, had enough of this, you give the porter the coin, he goes without a word, he thought he might get more than the standard charge, your face feels hot, the woman thanks you with an irritated nod, pointed chin, broad forehead, she’s taller than you, brunette, frankly she is not really happy about the way you interfered.

You sit down again, without speaking, don’t exploit the situation, in any case you don’t know how to, the train sets off, you are sitting in a corner seat next to the window facing the engine, it has not crossed your mind to offer your seat to the pretty woman, she has settled down on the same side as you but at the other end, next to the door, she can’t see you now, a hundred thousand refugees have fled into Austria, you see people walking through the streets carrying loaves of bread, the woman has not yet taken her gloves off, she stands to retrieve one of her cases from the rack, you leap up to help, a ‘thank you’ in a discouraging voice, you’ve sat down again, she removes her purse from her case, closes the case, takes it by the handle, you leap up again, you put the case back on the luggage rack.

Again you are sitting, you stare out of the window, you are leaning forward, head turned towards the window and the landscape, tracking the houses the train has just passed. And in the window, the reflection of your head is also leaning forward, now you can see the reflection of the woman’s face, her profile, it is rare for a woman to have such a beautiful profile, the prettier the girl the more like a grouper-fish she looks, it was a Breton friend who told you that about girls who don’t respond, the woman has a large brow, a straight nose, as much chin as is necessary, you tell yourself it’s like a profile on a medal, ‘Monsieur,’ the woman is speaking to you, she’s not looking at you, she’s searching through her purse, she takes out a coin, ‘Monsieur,’ now she’s looking at you, she holds out the coin, you refuse it, ‘Please’, her voice is crisp, ‘I insist,’ you take the coin, she thanks you once more, her tone is not sharp now, it is cold, you say, ‘Neither a borrower nor a lender…’

She says nothing, your smile is frozen on your lips, you feel foolish, you slip the coin into your jacket pocket, the left one, you hold the coin briefly between your fingers in your pocket, you stroke it, you look out of the window, you take your left hand out of your pocket, elbow on arm-rest, hand held up to your mouth, index-finger on your upper lip, a lingering smell of perfume on your finger, sweet, heavy, the woman must perfume her gloves, at moments it seems as if the perfume is coming from her whole person, it fights with the smell of the compartment, a mixture of smoke, polish and SNCF disinfectant, you look at her, she is reading, her legs are long.

Your hand returns to your pocket seeking the coin, you warm it between the ends of your fingers as you look at the woman’s legs, you decide you are going to say something to her, being suave is not that difficult, you’re a Parisian male and she’s a middle-class lady up from the country who is going home, she’ll be the one to say something first, you’ll get to know her better, she’ll invite you to her château, you’ll go for long walks together, you won’t be allowed to touch her, you’ll chance your luck some evening, she’ll grab a horse-whip, a stony look in her eye, she wants you naked but you mustn’t move, big four-poster, chintz bed-curtains patterned with red flowers, outside the country speeds by, you fidget in your seat and hardly see anything of the landscape which you’d been looking forward to seeing.

You take the coin out, smuggled in your hand, it’s warm now, you hold it against your left cheek, bring it nearer to your nose, you try to rediscover the perfume on the coin, a trace, what was the name of your mother’s perfume? it was by Guerlain but what was it called? you shouldn’t have held the coin against your cheek, now it’s been tainted by the smell of this morning’s shaving soap, the perfume might well be by Guerlain, but mixed up with the smell of your shaving soap the result is not very pleasant, you try to discover a trace of it on the end of your finger and in the air of the compartment.

You watch the reflection of the woman’s profile in the window where fields, woods and villages flash by, you have crossed your legs, your magazine is open on your knees, that’s not quite accurate, actually it’s your thighs, but the word thigh is indecent, does the woman spray perfume on her thighs after she gets out of the bath? you’re strolling with her in the country, it’s early evening, you are returning from your walk, there’s a whole group of you now moving across hill and dale, sometimes a wisp of mist fifty centimetres above the ground, you walk through it, the woman has caught you up and is walking next to you, she has taken you by the hand, Gilberte, Catherine and Micheline are there, they show off their petticoats, the elegant, sober ‘Emo’ model, Gilberte’s is made of run-proof Bemberg rayon, which is gathered nylon over lace, Micheline’s, priced three and a half thousand francs, is virtually a nightdress, Empire neckline and the skirt flounced with a lace insertion, two pages further on is the ‘Boccaccio’, a short nightie, with a round neck and short sleeves puffed with coloured smocking, and the ‘Esmeralda’, a very youthful style and impeccably cut, youthful, impeccable, the words don’t mean a thing, pointless as adjectives, you can get a better idea of the ‘Boccaccio’ but I don’t know what smocking is.