I drove around all night with the unfamiliar feeling that, for once, my misery was of my own making.
I’d messed everything up with my savage tongue and my quick temper. I always did.
But when I got to the rough café where I always stopped in the pre-dawn hours, already full of loathing for everything I would find in it – for it was many years since I’d found any tragic charm in the dark poetry of human perdition – the American girl I’d been thinking about for so many hours was sitting at the bar.
It seemed so unbelievable that she would be here that, for a moment, I blinked, in case she just vanished. Rich girls didn’t come to places like this. Everyone (except me) stayed in their own fixed orbit. I knew that. I’d known it for years.
But nothing changed when I opened my eyes again. Her golden curls were still bobbing above the heads of Monsieur Martini, completely drunk by now and only an hour or so away from being ejected on to the street, and of Suzanne, with her rough white-blond hairdo and gold teeth, having a night off, perhaps, from the maison de passe where she’d recently found grander employment, and of the middle-aged woman with grey hair sitting quietly with that familiar big oilskin shopping bag, waiting for her clients, and of the cloth-capped heads of the other drivers playing cards while they waited for the dawn train. There was a glass of milk in front of her.
There’d been so many times when I’d taken each of these people to task for the way they were ruining their lives. Monsieur Martini, for instance, who taught classics and lived out of town with his wife and six children: I’d once told him he shouldn’t be sitting here once a week spending his two hundred francs on so many drinks that they put him in the gutter at dawn, but he’d only laughed and reproached me for my bourgeois mentality. ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t you understand that you’ll end up in a hospital bed with DTs?’ I remembered bawling as he downed another Martini. But all he said back was:
‘You don’t understand the essence of Gallic philosophy.’
‘What?’ I replied, astonished.
‘Yes,’ he repeated, filling his pipe. ‘Life is given to us for pleasure.’
I’d also outraged the old lady who owned the café, the one now chatting with Evie, who had accumulated a substantial fortune long ago, but couldn’t stop working. Yet how indignant she’d been when I’d told her that, however much she prided herself on her industriousness, the truth was that her life was as pointless as Monsieur Martini’s; how furiously she’d bawled back at me, ‘How can you compare me to that alcoholic?’
Perhaps I’d been fully corrupted since then. But, at any rate, I felt no desire at all to protest at any of my bar acquaintances’ depravity tonight as I passed between them, heading straight for the long stretch of zinc and Evie.
She only turned when I was almost touching her. There was a cautious look on her face.
‘There. Just as I told you, see? Regular as clockwork, he is,’ the café owner told her calmly. She was looking more like a benign witch than ever. She plunked down another glass of milk at the counter for me. Turning to me, she said, more kindly than I’d have expected, ‘I gave her what you have, milk.’
Then she removed herself a metre or so down the bar, and started polishing glasses, though of course I knew she was listening. They all were.
I picked up my milk and examined it carefully. The mere fact that Evie had left her rich Paris where she must feel at home to enter this other world had impressed the hell out of me. And there were so many other reasons why I wanted to be different, and gentler, with her, now, too. But I wasn’t quite sure how to begin, with all those eyes on us. ‘I really never thought’, I said, quietly, so the café owner would at least know not to join in, ‘that you’d come here.’
Another line from Tolstoy came beating through my head: ‘He knew she was there by the joy and terror that took possession of his heart … Everything was lit up by her. She was the smile that brightened everything around.’
Evie’s slow, relieved smile filled the room. With a pang of mortification, I realized that she’d expected me to be angry again.
Without my meaning it to happen, my face softened into a smile, too.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ I heard myself saying, with something strangely like the joyful innocence I’d thought, until then, only happened in films, or dreams, or other people’s lives. She raised an encouraging eyebrow. ‘I’ve been hasty … and I’d like to … I mean, it seems to me that you might be right, and the Zhenya you were talking about might be my father …’ She leaned closer. I took a deep breath and started again. ‘You need help with those letters, don’t you?’