For the brave bourgeoisie of the city Hautepierre exists by hearsay: one would never think of setting foot there. If not actually a waste inhabited by dragons it is terra incognita: one is uncertain even of how to get there, assuming one wanted to try. It exists: that’s enough. The Meinau is a different matter. People ‘whom we know’ live there. A little uneasily, a little apologetically now, but there’s no quarter of Strasbourg now as it used to be. There’s hardly anywhere one gets one’s moneysworth nowadays. Everywhere is under siege.
If you were a student, whether of sociology, or urban psychology, or architecture, or simply the morals of provincial cities, and Arlette was all these things, the Meinau would be worth study: a residential suburb in South Strasbourg, classic in being ramshackle and piecemeal.
Before the war – ah, the good old days – land was cheap and building permits available for a bit of palm grease. There were none of these damned controls; socialism was for the poor and was called the French Section of the Workers International. Laughable. An enterprising capitalist could do wonders, cut his coat generously. Buy up a farm, cut it into lots, plan a street grid, lay on a bit of electricity, and you were in a snug way of business. Equipment in the paving and sewage line was perfunctory, very, but that had never bothered anyone. In the Meinau, a rural part of the world along the main road to Colmar, there was an excellent precedent. Schulmeister, a Napoleonic adventurer who had flourished exceedingly selling dubious information to governments and cardboard boots to the army, had carved out a huge estate there, palace and park.
Houses in bad pretentious taste shot up and surrounded themselves with little trees and flowering bushes. All very nice. You were conveniently close to the town and to business, yet peacefully free of the hurlyburly: the old urban quarters along the Avenue des Vosges were getting alarmingly dirty and noisy. Even in the fifties the volume of motor traffic was becoming quite impossible: everybody said so. The Meinau, bordered by little serpentine waterways and rustic allotment gardens, was ideal: no roads led anywhere, and values kept going up: lovely.
It was in the sixties that alarming things began. There was a football stadium on waste ground just across the railway line to Germany: stadiums are low. Much worse, the municipality laid violent hands upon the Schulmeister estate and built controlled-rent blocks for the poor around the park and the ‘Canardiére’ pond: decidedly low. The Route de Colmar became a vulgar brawl of congested traffic bordered by filling stations, all the way out to Illkirch: frightful. Last and worst, to relieve the traffic of heavy freight, seeking a way west out of Germany while avoiding the saturated city centre, the awful planners are driving new ring roads. The heavy articulated ‘street trains’ come galloping through the rustic orchards, stinking and squealing past one’s own front door.
There are still a dozen placid, outwardly unwrinkled streets of desirable residences in the Meinau. But the noose is drawn tight: they are fighting asphyxiation.
One would sell, but values have flattened out. And it’s the same everywhere; you have somewhere nice and the poor appear alongside you. Where do all the poor come from? Why can’t the municipality, run after all by our friends, do better at hustling them off to weird places like Hautepierre with the Spanish and the Arabs? There are flesh-creeping tales of these blocks, of urine-stained elevators, ten-year-old gangsters and women raped in underground garages. Maddened invalid pensioners shooting from their prison windows with .22 rifles. The horde of greasy unisex hornets on motorbicycles.
Arlette was ironing Arthur’s shirts, a complicated syllogism. Ironing is female servitude, right? But no civilized man wears synthetic shirts. While cotton shirts must be ironed. You can send them to the laundry, but this is not economical. Men iron, if at all, clumsily and incompetently.
Lamentable conclusion: if the men are not to be laughingstocks the women iron the shirts. All wrong.
She was curious about Marie-Line. A bourgeois offspring from the Meinau. The sociopathic conditions seemed to Arlette just as menacing as those of the noisy smelly barracks of Neuhof or the Elsau. She knew these houses only from the outside; she was guessing.
A solid core of solid ugly villas, divided into two, maybe three flats now there are no servants any more. Polished bellpushes and clipped hedges. Veneer drinks’ cupboards and real leather sofas. Italian-tiled bathrooms and matched-unit kitchens. Basement garages shielding well-washed and waxed cars.
These people have arrived. They are by God going to stay arrived. They will fight tooth and nail to ensure that their children do not lose class, face, standing. The marxist cliché is that capitalism is on its last legs. Maybe; tough ol’ legs though. Marching about chanting slogans produces tightlipped grins behind the lace curtains, while the money flees quietly to Switzerland. The bourgeois are well fortified against riots by the ruck. What they fear most is the creeping attack from treachery within. Today’s anarchists are rarely tubercular orphans in damp cellars. Most are expensively educated well-brought-up adolescents in rude health. The old-style Marie-Lines came from physical slums: the new ones from moral slums.
Well after two o’clock. Damn this tiresome child. Arlette thumped crossly with the iron. A lovely day outside. Mid-autumn was best of all. When the mists lift – there are rather too many river-valleys in the Strasbourg area – the sherry-coloured light is full of mellow fruitfulness. Keats’ truism is altogether too bland and feeble for the grape harvest in Central Europe, for the splendid cocktail of acrid invigorating smells. Who’d be indoors?
The buzzer went.
Marie-Line was still a child; thin bony fingers; flat boy’s behind. The features well formed, the voice poised, the movements graceful. Almost, not quite, an adult.
It took no skill to see she was in a nervous state. Bit fiercely at her fingers, smoked greedily, fidgeted with her feet. As tall as herself and well nourished. Golden corn hair, pale face made paler by too much whitish make-up but set off nicely by a black sweater and a violet scarf. Very pretty face. Might coarsen and thicken disconcertingly soon, even without beer and fried potatoes. Marvellous classic nose, thought Arlette, her own twitching: that wasn’t beer. Child has been at the whisky bottle.
She’d looked around, coming in, with a knowing air at the newness and selfconscious rawness of the place. ‘Interviewing’ people at a desk takes practice: Arlette didn’t have it yet. The girl seemed to know that. She’d taken a cigarette out of the box without being asked, and picked languidly at a punished finger. One can look very world-weary at eighteen.
‘I’m Marie-Line Siegel,’ she’d said coming in. ‘Sorry about being a bit late.’ Irritated at having been uncontrolled and vulnerable on the phone.
‘D’you need that thing on?’ stabbing a finger at the tape recorder.
‘Not if you prefer it off,’ said Arlette.
‘I don’t mind. Irritating that’s all; thing going round. But what’s the use of coming at all, unless I’m prepared to trust you? I don’t know you. But one must trust somebody.’
‘What made you decide to trust me?’
‘I don’t know. You’re a woman, I suppose. Not that that… skip it. Are there woman detectives; I mean are there many?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Then what – oh well, let’s not quibble.’
‘Let’s come to the point.’
‘You’re so right. Anyhow, my father’s Doctor Armand Siegel.’
‘What sort of doctor?’
‘Dentist. Lots and lots of sophisticated equipment. Great big panoramic radiograph. Squads of assistants and nurses, eligible females. Boy, do you appreciate it when the bill comes in, typed in a beautiful huge IBM typeface. Sorry; gassing rather. Sorry too, bit uptight about my father on the whole.’
‘And your mother?’
‘Is, better said was, Véronique Ulrich; that’s another great doctor dynasty. She was a disgrace though; ran away. I kept on being told how wicked and ungrateful. I don’t see her, so don’t know how wicked she is. Average, I suppose. Leaves me alone; that was part of the bargain.’
‘Divorce bargain?’
‘No, you don’t know my family; they don’t divorce. Too Christian and forgiving and suffering. Divorce is shocking. Be a sight better if they did. Then he could marry his exceedingly respectable mistress, Catherine-Rose Pelletier, who’s in the cabinet of the Prefect, a career woman you see, pure and single-minded.’
‘You sound a bit uptight about her too.’
‘Cathy’s all right. Makes rather a fuss about being cultural; Bach and stuff. But she doesn’t pretend she’s my new mummy. Quite cool and detached. Loathes me, I dare say, but too Christian to allow that. All these people are very honourable, but they’re to piss on, you know.’
The abruptness made the girl give a short uneasy laugh, turned adroitly into airy.
‘You’re right, I’m being unfair. And talking too much. And sounding sorry for myself?’
‘Be as sorry for yourself as you like if you deserve it.’
‘Just that this is all very hupperclawss Strasbourg. Very right wing. You very right wing?
‘You mean do I vote for all those people calling themselves Republicans? No. Will I show you credentials? No. Take me as you find me.’
The girl laughed with less tension.
‘Good. Sorry. You know, that’s how one gets corrupted. They want to know who you are, meaning where you fit in, meaning how they’ll behave. Wouldn’t do to upstage somebody who might have a brother-in-law in Paris, knowing people.’
‘I don’t. But where do you fit in?’
‘I like you,’ with a real laugh. Big compliment.
‘Great.’
‘Oh, I’m still at school, in the last class, terminal A you know, philo and languages. Should be in C, where the bright ones are supposed to be, doing maths, if I’d been willing to do medicine. It wouldn’t have been looked at askance, if you get me. Biology or something, that’s suitable enough for a woman; they’d have admitted that. I wouldn’t be seen dead with it, and maths bores me silly. Or I could have done B. Economic sciences you know, like Cathy. Frankly, they’re the dropouts from both C and A. D of course is unspeakable; that’s all the commercial ones who’re going to make money.’ One knew more now about Marie-Line, as well as about the school selection system.
‘They all want to make money. Normal in the circumstances.’
‘Yes, but these think of nothing but marketing and the cash flow. The one true religion. Yes, I’m crude; I hear nothing else all day. So you do a philo baccalaureat in A, and where are you?’
‘You’re in the Law Faculty,’ said Arlette as though it were not rhetorical. ‘Or you’re in the big troop of Arts, an apprentice school teacher. Or you do the phony ones like Sociology or Psychology, and read Marx only nobody does, and Freud which everyone does, alas.’
‘You know about it then.’
‘Did it myself. You thought mostly then about getting a man.’
‘We’ve come some way since then,’ with the tolerant contempt of eighteen for fifty. ‘The men can’t afford to get married, to let themselves get crippled and distracted by some passive sofa cushion. There are the cheap lays, and of course the gang of nymphos and lezzies, but if you’ve brains you don’t sit all obsessed with sex.’
Arlette was wondering where the point was and when would they reach it. Be patient. You got confidences, the greatest banalities, told you solemnly like the Dead Sea Scrolls had got deciphered, and you must not yawn. She’ll get there. It’s what, after all, she’s come here for. I have to pass a test first, that I’m not sex-obsessed.
‘I know a boy,’ said Marie-Line abruptly, ‘in the lycée. Doing Greek; slightly weird but he’s interested in prehistory. He doesn’t have it easy. He’s from a poor family, they’re not educated a bit, and while they’re nice, and one respects them, they’re pretty dense and kind of null. So he depends on me quite a lot. And I depend on him. It isn’t jam and roses, this narrow sterilized background in a provincial flea-dump like Strasbourg.
‘And we’re economically dependent. I’d like to get a job only there’s nothing I know. What’s the use of that university anyway? Anyhow I’m up against it. I do what the daddy wants, which is get a right-honourable Bac and be a good girl, meaning cut Michel out of existence, or Dad and Uncle Freddy Ulrich will Take Steps.’
‘What sort of steps?’
‘Shut me up in some psychiatric clinic,’ quietly.