On the Stairs, 1
YES, IT COULD BEGIN this way, right here, just like that, in a rather slow and ponderous way, in this neutral place that belongs to all and to none, where people pass by almost without seeing each other, where the life of the building regularly and distantly resounds. What happens behind the flats’ heavy doors can most often be perceived only through those fragmented echoes, those splinters, remnants, shadows, those first moves or incidents or accidents that happen in what are called the “common areas”, soft little sounds damped by the red woollen carpet, embryos of communal life which never go further than the landing. The inhabitants of a single building live a few inches from each other, they are separated by a mere partition wall, they share the same spaces repeated along each corridor, they perform the same movements at the same times, turning on a tap, flushing the water closet, switching on a light, laying the table, a few dozen simultaneous existences repeated from storey to storey, from building to building, from street to street. They entrench themselves in their domestic dwelling space – since that is what it is called – and they would prefer nothing to emerge from it; but the little that they do let out – the dog on a lead, the child off to fetch the bread, someone brought back, someone sent away – comes out by way of the landing. For all that passes, passes by the stairs, and all that comes, comes by the stairs: letters, announcements of births, marriages, and deaths, furniture brought in or taken out by removers, the doctor called in an emergency, the traveller returning from a long voyage. It’s because of that that the staircase remains an anonymous, cold, and almost hostile place. In old buildings there used to be stone steps, wrought-iron handrails, sculptures, lamp-holders, sometimes a bench to allow old folk to rest between floors. In modern buildings there are lifts with walls covered in would-be obscene graffiti, and so-called “emergency” staircases in unrendered concrete, dirty and echoing. In this block of flats, where there is an old lift almost always out of order, the staircase is an old-fashioned place of questionable cleanliness, which declines in terms of middle-class respectability as it rises from floor to floor: two thicknesses of carpet as far as the third floor, thereafter only one, and none at all for the two attic floors.
Yes, it will begin here: between the third and fourth storey at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier. A woman of about forty is climbing the stairs; she is wearing a long imitation-leather raincoat and on her head a kind of felt hat shaped like a sugar-loaf, something like what one imagines a goblin’s hat to be, divided into red and grey squares. A big dun canvas hold-all, a case of the sort commonly called an overnight bag, hangs on her right shoulder. A small cambric handkerchief is knotted through one of the chromed metal rings which attach the bag to its strap. Three motifs, which look as if they had been printed with a stencil, are regularly repeated over the whole fabric of the bag: a large pendulum clock, a round loaf cut through the middle, and a kind of copper receptacle without handles.
The woman is looking at a plan held in her left hand. It’s just a sheet of paper, whose still visible creases attest to its having been folded in four, fixed by a paperclip to a thick cyclostyled volume – the terms of co-ownership relating to the flat this woman is about to visit. On the sheet there are in fact not one but three sketchplans: the first, at the top right-hand corner, shows where the building is, roughly halfway along Rue Simon-Crubellier, which cuts at an angle across the quadrilateral formed by Rue Médéric, Rue Jadin, Rue de Chazelles, and Rue Léon Jost, in the Plaine Monceau district of the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris; the second, at the top left-hand corner, is a vertical cross-section of the building giving a diagrammatic picture of the layout of the flats and the names of some of the residents: Madame Nochère, concierge; Madame de Beaumont, second floor right; Bartlebooth, third floor left; Rémi Rorschach, television producer, fourth floor left; Dr Dinteville, sixth floor left, as well as the empty flat, sixth floor right, occupied by Gaspard Winckler, craftsman, until his death; the third plan, in the lower half of the sheet, is of Winckler’s flat: three rooms facing the street, kitchen and bathroom on the courtyard side, and a boxroom without natural light.
The woman carries in her right hand a bulky set of keys, no doubt the keys of all the flats she has inspected that day; some are fixed to novelty key-rings: a miniature bottle of Marie Brizard apéritif, a golf tee and a wasp, a double-six domino, and a plastic octagonal token in which is set a tuberose flower.
It is almost two years since Gaspard Winckler died. He had no child. He was not known to have any surviving family. Bartlebooth entrusted a notary with the task of finding any heirs he might have. His only sister, Madame Anne Voltimand, died in 1942. His nephew, Grégoire Voltimand, had been killed on the Garigliano in May 1944, at the breakthrough on the Gustav line. The notary took many months to unearth a third cousin of Winckler’s called Antoine Rameau, who worked for a manufacturer of knockdown divans. The taxes on the inheritance, added to the legal costs of the search for heirs, turned out to be so high that Antoine Rameau had to auction off everything. It is already a few months since the furniture was dispersed at the Sale Rooms, and a few weeks since the flat was bought by a property agency.
The woman climbing the stairs is not the director of the property agency, but his assistant; she doesn’t deal with the commercial side, nor with customer relations, but only with the technical problems. From the property angle, the deal is a good one, the area is decent, the façade is of ashlar, the staircase is OK despite the agedness of the lift, and the woman is now coming to inspect in greater detail the condition of the flat itself, to draw up a more detailed plan of the accommodation with, for instance, thicker lines to distinguish structural walls from partitions and arrowheaded semicircles to show which way the doors open, and to decide on the work needed, to make a preliminary costing for complete refurbishment: the partition wall between the toilet and the boxroom to be knocked down, allowing the installation of a bathroom with a slipper-bath and WC; the kitchen tiles to be renewed; a wall-mounted gas-fired boiler (giving both central heating and hot water) to replace the old coal-fired boiler; the woodblock floor with its zigzag moulding to be lifted and replaced by a layer of cement, a felt underlay, and a fitted carpet.
Not much is left of these three small rooms in which Gaspard Winckler lived and worked for nearly forty years. His few pieces of furniture, his small workbench, his jigsaw, his minute files have gone. On the bedroom wall, opposite his bed, beside the window, that square picture he loved so much is no longer: it showed an antechamber with three men in it. Two were standing, pale and fat, dressed in frock-coats and wearing top hats which seemed screwed to their heads. The third, similarly dressed in black, was sitting by the door in the attitude of a man expecting visitors, slowing putting a pair of tight-fitting new gloves on over his fingers.
The woman is going up the stairs. Soon, the old flat will become a charming pied-à-terre, two recept. + bedr., all mod. cons., open outlook, quiet. Gaspard Winckler is dead, but the long and meticulous, patiently laid plot of his revenge is not finished yet.