The wall was blank last night but now, as she passes on her way to Gallimard, she is stopped by the sight of the eye-catching poster. The submissive whore called France surrenders willingly. Pétain, the pimp, watches on. The image is now common across the city, probably the country. Crude, but effective. Truth, she tells herself, is not the first casualty of war – subtlety is. Rise, the poster says. Rise from your shame. France is fighting!
She moves on, the lurid details of curling cigarette smoke and a German officer’s hat beside the reclining woman vivid in her mind. She hears a motor and turns to see a council van from which two workers leap and begin tearing down the offending poster. One of them, young, clearly relishing his work, tearing the distasteful image from the wall in handfuls, glares at Dominique as if to say get lost, go, before we drag you in for simply looking at this filth. In no time the poster has vanished, the van gone.
Filth. Smut. It clearly roused rage in the young man and, Dominique can’t help but conclude, scared him too. For as much as the prostitute is docile, there is also something deeply unsettling about her: as though, there in all her degrading submission, her casual audacity, there is this disturbing sense of power, an insolent cheek, that they can’t quite put their finger on.
The café called Hope appears before her and she thinks of her first meeting with Jean there: the jovial accommodating host, the poster, the reclining whore, smut and fear . . . all of which carry her to the front door of the publishing house. She clutches her satchel which contains the edited novel and announces herself at the desk: she is there to meet Jean Paulhan.
His office is tiny. She can’t believe that this is where he works. There is barely room for the two of them to sit down: he at his desk, the eternal cigarette burning in the ashtray; she squeezed into the small space between the front of his desk and the wall, thick with books behind her. She dares not move in case the whole wall comes tumbling down on her.
He is scanning the manuscript: nodding, smiling, then serious. Suddenly he looks up. He inhales from his cigarette and gestures at the wall behind her, holding up the edited pages as he does.
‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘who is on the other side of that wall?’
She shakes her head.
He drops his voice. ‘The house Nazi.’
‘There?’
‘Yes. It is a little game we play with the Germans. We allow them to have a good resident Nazi. He recommends good German books for publication: often objectionable, distasteful books. And then we publish exactly what we want. He is . . . what do they call it in English? . . . our display window. He allows us to publish enough of what we want. Mr Joyce, even. But not,’ he says, pointing to the edited pages of the novel in front of him, ‘Mrs N. For that we have Les Éditions de Minuit.’
‘I like the name. Who thought of it?’
‘I did,’ he says casually, lighting another cigarette.
Having got the business at hand out of the way, he says, ‘I have booked our room.’
‘When?’
‘The usual,’ he says.
She rises from her chair, careful of the wall of books behind her. He rises too, taking her hand. When she reaches the door he is there, and – the office as tiny as it is – they are pressed against each other. And they stay like that for some time. Such, Dominique tells herself, is the value of tiny rooms and close spaces. Electric days, both of them constantly switched on: bright, transparent. Everybody knows. They must.
She leaves – the slightly stooped figure of Jean leaning in his doorway, the longing still in his gaze – and passes the office next to Jean’s, the domain of the house Nazi, eyeing it warily. As much as Jean might casually call him their window display, their convenience, a pawn-like figure in the little game they play with the Germans, it is nonetheless a reminder, and a depressing one, that they are there. Deep inside the everyday life of the city.