2

When the blood finally stopped flowing, Mr Hire had no choice but to move around carefully, holding his head very still so as not to reopen the cut. One side of his moustache was drooping, and the mixture of blood and water had stained his face pink, like a watercolour.

He emptied the washbasin and wiped it clean with a dish cloth. He looked over at the iron heating stove: cold. Apart from the immobility of his head, which he wore on his shoulders like a foreign object, he was the same man who had been on the tram, in the Métro and in the basement on Rue Saint-Maur: calm and measured in all his gestures, which seemed as prescribed as a ceremonial rite.

He took a newspaper from his coat pocket and, crumpling it up, pushed it deep into the stove. On the black marble mantel there was a box of kindling, which he scattered over the paper. He was shrouded in silence and cold. The only sounds were the ones he made in jostling the poker or the coal pail. He got on his knees, still holding his head straight, his neck stiff, to slide a match beneath the grille and light the paper. He fumbled. After striking three matches he succeeded, and smoke billowed from all the cracks in the stove.

It was even colder in the room than outside. While waiting for the fire to catch, Mr Hire put his overcoat back on – a big overcoat of black ratiné with a velvet collar. He opened the cupboard that served as his kitchen, lit one of the gas burners, poured some water in a pot. His hands found what they needed without searching. He put a bowl on the table, a knife, a plate; then upon reflection he returned the plate to the cupboard, probably realizing that the incident at the concierge’s would prevent him from going to the market this week.

He had some bread left and some butter. He picked up a biscuit tin full of ground coffee, frowned, and looked at the stove, which was no longer smoking, no longer roaring. The kindling had burned away, and the coal hadn’t caught. There was no more kindling on the mantel. Mr Hire frowned again, then poured the boiling water over some coffee grounds and warmed his hands.

On the right side of the room there was a bed, a washstand and a bedside table; on the left, the tiny kitchenette and a table covered with an oilcloth.

Sitting at the table, Mr Hire ate buttered bread and drank coffee, impassively, staring straight ahead. When he had finished, he remained there for a moment, without moving, as if frozen in time and space. He began to hear noises, at first weak and anonymous – creaks, footsteps, collisions – and soon he could feel his entire universe, with this room at its centre, dissolving into the furtive sounds.

Next door, dishes were clinking and people were talking. It was strange, the clatter of the plates wasn’t at all muffled – it was as if Mr Hire were hearing it from inside his own apartment – but the voices melted into a solemn, almost mechanical murmur. Below him, as on every other evening, a child was practising the violin, always the same exercises. And there, too, a loud but droning voice could be heard instructing the boy to begin again.

Then there was the road, the mounting din of an approaching car, dim in the distance, explosive as it passed in front of the building, then on the far side of the horizon, rapidly sucked back into the void. One by one, the vehicles lumbered past, slowly, deafeningly, making the whole building shake while the occupants held their breath.

Finally, Mr Hire got up, buttoned his overcoat and wrapped a scarf around his neck. He picked up the bowl he’d been drinking from and washed it under the tap, dried it with a cloth that hung from a nail and returned it to the cupboard. He swept the breadcrumbs on to a piece of cardboard, grease-stained from repeated use, and tossed them into the stove; then he opened up the bed.

What was left? Wind up the alarm clock, a white stain on the black mantel. It read 8.30.

Was that everything? He took off his shoes and polished them, sitting on the edge of the bed, neck still rigid, his left cheek held high.

Yes, that was everything. The young boy began his exercise again, and the bow skidded across another chord. The man next door must be reading the newspaper aloud; the murmur was as monotonous as a running tap.

Mr Hire got up from the bed, where he had been sitting uncomfortably, and settled in the armchair facing the extinguished stove, with the dial of the alarm clock in front of him. After that he didn’t move, except to stuff his hands, which were freezing on the armrests, into his pockets.

Ten minutes to nine … nine o’clock … five minutes after nine … He didn’t close his eyes. He didn’t look at anything. He just sat there, as if on a train to nowhere. He didn’t even sigh. Finally a thin, precious layer of warmth began to form beneath his overcoat – he tried not to let it escape. Inside his slippers, his toes were frozen stiff.

Nine twenty … twenty-five, twenty-six.

From time to time a door slammed. People barrelled down the stairs, making such a racket they must have been stumbling over every step. Gradually, the whistle of the traffic cop became audible.

Nine twenty-seven … Mr Hire got up, turned off the light and felt his way through the darkness back to his chair, from which he could no longer see anything but the vaguely luminous hands of the alarm clock.

It wasn’t until ten o’clock that he began to grow impatient, and his fingers started to fidget in his pockets. His neighbours were all asleep. Somewhere in the distance a baby was crying; its mother tried to sing it back to sleep:

‘La … la … la … la …’

Mr Hire got up, walked over to the window. There was nothing but blackness on the other side. Just then, a light came on; only three metres away, a window was illuminated, revealing a bedroom in which the smallest detail was now visible.

The woman kicked her door shut with the force of thunder, but no noise carried across the courtyard. She was in a hurry, maybe also in a bad mood; she yanked the covers from the bed and tossed in a hot-water bottle she had been holding under her arm.

Mr Hire didn’t move. In his apartment it was completely dark. He was standing with his forehead against the icy window, motionless except for his pupils, which darted back and forth, following his neighbour’s movements.

After pulling the covers back up over the bed, the first thing she did was let down her silky red hair, which cascaded – though not very long, it was abundant – on to her shoulders. Then she began to massage her neck and ears with lingering, voluptuous strokes.

There was a mirror in front of her, on top of a carved-wood vanity. She looked in the mirror; she continued to look in the mirror as she reached down to the bottom of her black wool dress and pulled it off over her head. Then, in her slip, she sat on the edge of the bed to take off her stockings.

Even from Mr Hire’s room, the goose bumps on her skin were visible. When she had stripped down to her underwear, she spent a long time rubbing her nipples, which were shrivelled from the cold.

She was young and full of life. She grabbed a long white nightgown and put it on before removing her underwear, studied herself some more in the mirror, and took some cigarettes out of the drawer of the bedside table.

She hadn’t looked at the window. She didn’t look at it now. She was already under the covers, an elbow propped up on the pillow. Before starting in on the novel in front of her, she languidly lit a cigarette.

She was facing the courtyard, facing Mr Hire. Behind him, the alarm clock was faithfully beating out the seconds and moving its phosphorescent hands.

There was a red blanket on the bed. Her head was tilted to one side, accentuating the fullness of her lips, and the sensual mass of her red hair, minimizing her forehead, giving a soft curve to her neck. She seemed made out of some kind of rich sappy pulp.

She continued to caress her nipple, mechanically, through the fabric of her nightgown. Each time she drew her hand back to take the cigarette from her mouth, the nipple was more clearly visible.

A click from the alarm clock signalled 10.30; another, eleven o’clock. There were no other sounds except the wail of the unfed infant and, from time to time, the angry hiss of a car on the main road.

The girl flipped pages, blowing ashes off the blanket, lighting cigarette after cigarette.

Mr Hire didn’t stir except to scratch at the cloud his breath had formed on the window.

Above the courtyard, in the invisible sky, a vast silence gradually took hold.

At a quarter past midnight the novel was finished. The woman got up to turn off the light.

This particular night, the concierge had got up three times. Each time she had pulled aside the curtain to make sure that the detective was still there, pacing back and forth on the pale, windswept pavement.

The windowpanes, covered with frozen dew, resembled frosted glass. Hands blue from the cold, Mr Hire dusted off his overcoat, dropping the brush twice; he got down on his knees to tie one of his shoelaces, quickly surveyed the room and closed the door of the wardrobe, which was ajar.

Nothing left to do except pick up his briefcase and put on his hat. With his key in his pocket, he walked down the creaking stairs: the building was new and it was flimsily built. It wasn’t very cheerful either, painted in a palette of steel greys and sombre browns. The stairs themselves were fir, and refused to develop a patina; they were dirty, almost black in the centre, but on the sides, where no one walked, the wood had remained pale and characterless. The walls, instead of ageing gracefully, were dropping plaster in chunks.

The doors paraded by, along with the pine banister and the bottles of milk on the landings. There was a terrible echo. Everywhere, people could be heard stirring behind the walls with a clamour like the clash of the titans. But it was only the tenants getting dressed.

A gust of frigid air heralded the approach of the ground floor. Mr Hire took the last few steps, turned to his left and stopped short.

The girl with red hair was there, pushing open the door to the concierge’s. Her cheeks were even rosier from being outdoors at six in the morning – all the more so because of the way they contrasted with her white apron. She was still holding half a dozen empty milk bottles, dangling them by their clasps from a single finger.

She turned her head halfway. Hearing footsteps, she turned it back and went on talking to the concierge, who was at home.

Mr Hire passed by without giving her a glance. After he had gone on a way, a pocket of silence formed behind him: the concierge hurried feverishly into the corridor.

Mr Hire continued walking. The cold intensified everything: whites grew whiter, greys lighter, blacks blacker. He bought his newspaper at the newsstand and forced his way into the human mass clogging the pavement around the little market stalls.

‘Sorry …’

He hardly said the word. It was inaudible, really, even to himself. But it was a habit, a movement of the lips that occurred whenever he passed between two women, bumped into someone, knocked against the side of a car.

‘Sorry …’

The tram was waiting. Mr Hire picked up his pace, stuck out his chest and with his briefcase at his side broke into a trot, as he always did for the final stretch.

‘Sorry …’

He didn’t look at individual people. He didn’t single anyone out. He pushed forward, advancing into the human swarm and finding unexpected openings, whole unoccupied squares of pavement, where he could slip through more quickly.

He sat in his regular seat on the tram, briefcase on his knees. He was about to open the newspaper. His gaze scanned the tram’s occupants quickly, without lingering on any of them. Mr Hire frowned and began to fidget, suddenly uncomfortable in his seat, uneasy, unable to open his paper.

He began to stroke his left cheek with his hand. He felt something very close to what he’d felt the previous night, when his bandage had been ripped off at the concierge’s. The man standing across from him at the other end of the tram had been one of the concierge’s two companions.

Still he flipped through his newspaper until they reached Porte d’Italie. Here, as always, he followed the throng rushing into the Métro. On the platform, he went back to his reading.

A growing racket announced the arrival of a train. A carriage stopped directly in front of him. The doors snapped open. He was jostled.

‘Sorry …’

He took one step forward, one step back, with his paper held up in front of him the whole time. He was still on the platform. The doors closed again, the train pulled away. And, in one of the carriages that passed in front of Mr Hire, a man struggled in vain to open the doors and jump out.

It was the man from the tram, from the concierge’s, the one who had ripped off the bandage!

Over the edge of his paper, Mr Hire watched as the train plunged into darkness. Then he turned around, climbed back up the stairs and into the air, and went into a small café, where he sat down next to the window and ordered a hot chocolate. His legs were weak, as if he had run for a long time. He offered a feeble smile of thanks to the waiter who served him.

At noon, he was still there, where it was warm, watching the people go by: more and more of them, the thousands who walked, ran, stopped, caught up with each other, passed each other by, yelled and whispered, while in the small bar, the waiters seemed to be rattling the saucers on purpose.