Berger, 2
THE BERGER PARENTS’ BEDROOM: an almost square, not very large room with a woodblock floor and walls hung with a light-blue paper with narrow yellow stripes; a map of the 1975 Tour de France, full size, presented by Vitamix, the tonic of sportsmen and champions, is pinned on the rear wall to the left of the door; beside each staging post there are black-lined boxes to be filled in by race followers as the Tour proceeds with the timings of the first six riders in each stage and of the three overall leaders in each of the classes (Yellow Jersey, Green Jersey, King of the Mountains).
The room is empty except for a fat alley cat – Poker Dice – curled up drowsing on the fluffy sky-blue quilt draped over a divan-bed flanked by two matching bedside tables. On the right-hand one stands an old valve-radio set (the one whose operation at what Madame Réol considers to be unreasonably early hours puts in jeopardy the otherwise friendly relations the two couples enjoy): its lid, which can be raised to reveal a primitive pickup, bears a bedside lamp with a conical shade decorated with the symbols of the four suits of playing cards, and a few 45 rpm record sleeves: the one on top illustrates Boyer and Valbonne’s famous ditty, “Boire un petit coup c’est agréable”, sung by Viviane Malehaut with Luca Dracena on the accordion and tympani; it depicts a roughly sixteen-year-old girl clinking a glass with a group of fat, guffawing sausage-makers who, against a background of split pigs on butcher hooks, raise their glasses of sparkling wine in one hand and in the other proffer great white china trays spilling over with various pork delicacies: ham dotted with fat, saveloy, muzzle, andouille sausages from Vire, red tongue, pigs’ trotters, brawn, and sweetbreads.
On the left-hand bedside table, a lamp made from an Italian wine flask (Valpolicella) and a Série noire detective thriller, Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake.
It was in this flat that the lady with the little dog lived until 1965, with her son who aimed to take the cloth. Before her, for many years, the flat’s tenant had been an old gentleman everyone called The Russian because he wore a fur cap all year round. The rest of his dress was markedly more Western: black trousers with a seat reaching up to his sternum held up both by braces and an underbelly belt, a white but rarely pristine shirt, a broad black tie, almost a cravat, and a walking stick with a top made from a billiard ball.
The Russian was actually called Abel Speiss. He was a softhearted man from Alsace, a former army veterinarian, who spent his spare time sending in solutions to all the little competitions published in newspapers. He solved riddles with disconcerting ease:
Three Russians have a brother. The brother dies leaving no brothers. How can this be?
history catch-questions:
Who was John Leland’s friend?
Who was threatened by a Railway share?
Who was Sheraton?
Who shaved the old man’s beard?
“word-chain” puzzles:
HIM |
LOVE |
ONE |
HEM |
HOVE |
ORE |
HER |
HAVE |
ARE |
|
HATE |
ALE |
|
|
ALL |
arithmetical puzzles:
Prudence is 24 years of age. She is twice as old as her husband was when she was as old as her husband is. How old is her husband?
Write the number “120” using four eights.
anagrams:
STREET |
= |
TESTER |
ATHENS |
= |
HASTEN |
ABSOLUTE |
= |
OUSTABLE |
and logic problems:
What comes after OTTFFSSE?
Which is the odd item in the following list:
French, short, polysyllabic, written, visible, printed, masculine, word, singular, American, odd?
boxwords, crosswords, three-corner words, two-dimensional “ghosts” words (a, at, ate, rate, grate, gyrate), block-words, etc., and even “hidden questions”, the nightmares of all puzzle-solvers.
His great specialism was cryptograms. But although he victoriously carried off the Grand National Contest, with a prize worth THREE THOUSAND FRANCS, run by the Vienne and Romans Reveille, by discovering that the message
aeeeil |
ihnalz |
ruiopn |
toeedt |
zaemen |
eeuart |
odxhnp |
trvree |
noupvg |
eedgnc |
estlev |
artuee |
arnuro |
ennios |
ouitse |
spesdr |
erssur |
mtqssl |
encrypted the first two lines of “La Marseillaise”, he never managed to decipher the puzzle set by Dogs of France:
n neo rt aluot
ia ouna s ilel-
-rc oal ei ntoi
and his only consolation was that no other contestant had managed it either, and the magazine decided to withhold the first prize.
Apart from riddles and logogriphs, The Russian had one other passion in life: he was madly in love with Madame Hardy, the wife of the olive-oil trader from Marseilles. She was a motherly, middle-aged woman with a sweet face and a faint moustache on her upper lip. He took advice from everyone in the building, but despite the encouragement he got from all, he never dared – in his own words – to “speak his flame”.