18

BROTHERS

Sylvia has gone to see her friend. I walk out of the precinct of our room and creep into my father’s library. Female voices float down from my mother’s bedroom. Alexandre, at the bottom of the stairs, is shouting encouragements. When he sees me he whispers that she’s going to see her Nounou, a woman we both detest – even if we never say it out loud. We look at each other wordlessly. We don’t need words. This Nounou, who brought her up, is an old woman straight out of a fairytale, only meaner and crueller than the witch. She’s an evil person who peppers the spiteful things she says with constant allusions to the Holy Virgin. Yet my father mysteriously understands my mother’s adoration, her mesmerised incantations to her, as if they were all part of some necessary ritual. Poum approaches her Nounou as Chinese courtiers approached their emperor, as Mongols approached Genghis Khan. Suddenly, Alexandre smiles down at me and goes back to his table. I slide next to him on a little stool with twirly legs.

I think of my mother closeted up there. To see her pack is an excruciating spectacle. Her underwear in satin pockets and her clothes, perfectly folded by someone else, are tentatively laid inside. Her powder, her books, her glasses stand on the edge like helpless sentinels. But always, just before closing the suitcase, she rips the lot out and everything lands higgledy-piggledy on the bed. The whole process must start from scratch. Later on, reading The Grapes of Wrath, or seeing a crowd of refugees, I will be reminded of my mother’s packing. The maid of the time, Maria, is a very attractive dark-haired Spanish girl. She speaks very little, seems to despise Poum and to like my father very much. Blissfully unaware, Poum murmurs to herself when she glances at Maria: ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.’

Sometimes Poum comes down the stairs, stands in front of Alexandre’s desk, her palms pressed flat on the wood. A bit like an athlete, she bends over, takes a deep breath, then stares at him wildly and runs up the stairs again. My father, instead of trying to dissuade her, nods gravely, as if this were an unavoidable catastrophe, an ineluctable ukase. He waves at her retreating back and blows her a kiss when she turns around at the top.

Then she’s gone, without a tear, like a soldier to war. Until the taxi swallows her, my father waves frantically out of the window, then closes it as carefully as the lid of a sarcophagus. He turns round and his humour changes. This is the first time we are quite alone in the house. Unobtrusively, his sole presence pervades the air of every empty room. We could be in a Roman camp, on a boat at sea, in a desert, far beyond French people, aunts, grandmothers and Nounous.

He flings himself into his reclining velvet chair and whips me up in the crook of his arm. It’s like settling against a whale. He reads me The Lion by Joseph Kessel out loud. The lion is my favourite character in the book, so we jump to the places where the lion is. Then he bounces out of his armchair to go and brush his teeth. There’s no transition, no ritual attached to his next activity. It springs out of nowhere. I sit on the edge of the bathtub and watch him. He doesn’t say a word during the whole operation. After a few trips back and forth across his teeth, the toothbrush flies into the glass. Flashing movements blend into each other. The shaving brush, the razor and his cheeks have become a frothy cloud with his hands flying in and out like Spitfires. The next second, his face is buried in a towel and he’s wiping it without even a rinse. The towel lands on the rack like Snow White’s duster in the Seven Dwarfs’ home. It mustn’t make it every time, but he’s already out of the bathroom before he can find out.

First we go to the Champs Élysées. It’s a holiday and there is not one person abroad from the place de la Concorde right up to the Étoile.

‘Look! Paris is ours!’

And before I can say ‘Jack Robinson’, as Sylvia does, the sun is pouring on his open face and he’s lying full length in the middle of the avenue with his arms wide open. I settle in the crook of one of them and we both enjoy the strange privacy of the vast open space.

‘So many people have marched down here, and now, look, it’s just the two of us!’

Then he takes me to Thoiry, a zoo outside of Paris where animals walk around quite free, because he wants to show me Kessel’s lion and neither of us can bear to see it locked in a cage. There are a lot of people waiting to buy a ticket. He grabs my hand and overtakes a dozen nuns.

‘We’re covered by the AAA! You’ll see. They won’t mind!’

As soon as my father breaks the rules, he talks about the AAA (Anti-Aircraft Artillery). He’s right, though – they don’t notice anything as he smoothly bypasses the whole talking black-and-white phalanx of robes and wimples. Once we are in, we only see camels. There’s a lion but she’s with her cubs and has no mane, so we are quite sure she’s not the one we are looking for. I try to hide my disappointment. My father squeezes my hand because he’s disappointed too. He runs to the car and we fly away from the zoo.

On the way back, he tells me about the bombing of London during the war, even though he wasn’t in London at the time, but in Paris with the German boots on the cobblestones.

‘The English were very brave,’ he announces. ‘They stuck it out on their island, all alone. When everyone else had given up, they held on.’

I nod approvingly. Sylvia is English. I was born in London. I’m English. I have an English passport. England is home for me, much more than Paris. Even our bedroom is a kind of stranded England. Sometimes I feel Sylvia and I are hiding in Paris, hiding in their apartment, as if, for us, the Resistance were still going on.

We are so alone that day, I hardly believe him when he suddenly claps a hand on my shoulder and announces for the first time: ‘You know! You have a brother!’

A brother …

Each time he talks of my brother, new attributes fall from his lips. Sometimes my brother is fair, sometimes he’s dark; sometimes he’s a brave soldier fighting in a far-away country, peopled with other strange brothers.

‘One day, Catherine, your brother will come and get you. He’ll take you away in his car, he’ll …’

‘When?’ I ask.

‘Soon, soon, surely, surely.’

Alexandre becomes thoughtful. The invisible presence of my multifaceted brother is there, sitting in the car with us. According to my father he’s incredibly handsome, strong, agile and brave. I imagine him as a trapeze artist. From the start, family members feel like ghostly heroes to me.

Then he suddenly interrupts our silence.

‘If you counted all the kilometres I have under my belt, I’d have driven round the world three times – and without shedding a single drop of blood!’

That instant his Peugeot hits with a bump the grassy mound between the two lanes of traffic. We are sailing above everyone. Then with a jerk of the steering wheel, he makes the car land down flat on its four tyres again and we are back on the autoroute. He has a slight frown.

‘I think I’ve made a little mistake. What luck I have such good reflexes!’

Processions of indignant drivers honk their horns in our wake. My father has an indulgent smile.

‘They’re all in a hurry to get back to their fiancées.’

As for my mother, she’s never touched a steering wheel in her life. When in the car, she sits in the front seat like a delicate piece of Meissen china precariously swerving, her hands folded in her lap, serenely gazing out of the window or chatting happily to my father. Now, amid screeching gears, because he believes in barely touching the clutch, he swings his eyes off the road and captures my gaze.

‘Did you know that Caesar was very short and bald? He was called the “bald seducer”. All the women were in love with him, as they were with Vronsky, as they are with your brother!’

‘Is my brother bald?’

‘Of course not, whatever gave you that idea?’

I know Vronsky much better than my brother. He’s poor Anna Karenina’s wicked lover. She threw herself underneath a train because of him. My parents often talk about her. I think she’s a friend of theirs. I shake my head.

‘That awful Vronsky.’

He nods.

‘That’s right, Catherine, he was a good-for-nothing. Caesar was worth a million Vronskys.’

I nod.

‘My brother is also.’

He smiles. ‘Yes, Catherine, absolutely!’

This exchange has made his pensive mood go up in smoke. As soon as he speaks of Caesar’s campaigns, his enthusiasm returns. When other drivers glance at his animated face, they drop their speed. Even when they happen to walk by him in the street, people are stymied and stranded in his wake on the pavement. Now his hand soars up towards the clouds behind the windscreen.

‘Caesar had conquered Egypt. Queen Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, ordered a precious carpet to be brought to the Roman. When they opened it at his feet, Caesar found her rolled up inside – naked.’

‘What did Caesar do?’ I ask.

‘Well, he couldn’t resist.’

‘Resist what?’

He looks at me in amazement. ‘Cleopatra, of course! He had to sleep with her straightaway!’

‘On the carpet?’

My father smiles at me.

‘Why not? What good ideas you have, Catherine.’

He drives on contentedly, while I ponder Caesar going all the way to Egypt to sleep with someone on a carpet. I don’t ask for further details. Each story is an egg delicately poised in my mind, full in itself – a world I don’t want to challenge or alter in any way. I know there isn’t enough time for him to say all he has to say to me, even if, when we are in the car, it feels like we’re riding through time.

Then he is frowning again.

‘You know, Catherine, women are equal to men in every point, except in physical strength. You must remember that. You can do anything except beat a heavyweight in the ring. I saw Dempsey fight once in New York. He was very gentle, nearly childlike, but he had a talent: he knew exactly where and when to punch.’

I assimilate this.

‘A talent like Camille Claudel’s?’

‘Yes, exactly. They both had a gift and they found out how to use it. Do you understand that?’

I nod. I ask him what his gift is. He looks at me a long time with his pale blue eyes. I can see a fingernail moon around them. It’s very rare and only his eyes have it. I can feel he wants to describe himself completely. Nothing must be missing.

‘My gift, Catherine, is my baraka! My luck!’

My invisible brother is still floating in the car; his absence is a powerful presence. When I have learnt some French and hear the other children talking about their brothers, they’re so relaxed about it. They see them every day and even complain about them. When I ask, ‘Really? You have your breakfast with your brother?’, they stare as if I were a Martian. ‘Of course, you idiot. We live in the same house.’ I digest this information in silence. When I can’t help asking, ‘Then at night, at night you …’, all I can see are their eyes – their clever eyes that know all the answers. ‘At night, we see them too. We even have pillow fights.’ That takes my breath away. I am deep in Enid Blyton … pillow fights. This brother is a seed my father has put in my head. It’s growing like ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. At first my father speaks of him in general terms, but little by little the descriptions become more specific.

Now, the car swirls away from the centre of Paris and drives into the Bois de Boulogne again. Alexandre parks, making a large smear in the gravel. He’s soon walking briskly along the path. It’s colder today and, to my relief, there’s no sign of returning to the lake and to Mr Crocodile. Winter is still resisting spring, not one leaf on the trees.

My thick coat itches. With one of his sudden gestures, he leans over a wall, without noticing the twigs and leaves all over his jacket. Then, in quite an ordinary way, his gaze still fixed on the trees in front of him, he suddenly comes out with: ‘You know you have a brother!’

I nod. ‘Yes, you told me in the car.’

His gaze swivels up at the sky.

‘This is another one.’

I catch my breath – another one.

‘Yes, he crossed the Pyrenees to join de Gaulle. After that, he fought in a tank regiment. A tank is very big, it can destroy a whole village, but it’s very fragile too. All you have to do is throw a hand grenade inside it and the whole thing bursts into flames!’

He stops a second, looking around him as if an explosion were echoing right now in the quiet of the park, with bits of tank scattered everywhere amid the strolling people. He squeezes my hand until the dust settles.

‘Your brother was alone in the forest with his machine gun, walking in front of the first tank, to protect the line of tanks from snipers. The caterpillars of the enormous machines roared behind him. He was always the one they chose, because he was so cool-headed. You have to be, not to lose your nerve.’ He flashes a smile at me. ‘German soldiers were lying in wait behind the trees. He had to spot them first or be killed with all his unit.’

He talks without looking at me. My cold hand nestles deep in his pocket against his palm, which is always warm because he’s a marcou.

‘You know, your brother was scared of nothing. He’s very, very brave.’

For the first time, he turns towards me. His blue eyes have a paler, more metallic gleam than usual.

‘Then, suddenly, his machine gun burst into fire and he turned around crying (my father cups his palm around his mouth to imitate my brother’s cry): “I think I got one, Captain!”’

An old lady with a walking stick gasps and stumbles on the gravel behind us. My father doesn’t notice; he never notices anything when he’s telling a story. But he immediately senses when I am not entirely in the forest with him and grabs my arm.

‘Do you know what happened?’

I shake my head vigorously.

‘He had cut the German soldier in two. His captain was the one who told me about it.’

I ask if the German soldier was killed or if they could sew him up. My father slowly shakes his head.

‘No, they couldn’t sew him up, Catherine. He was dead. It was war. If your brother hadn’t killed that poor German, the three guys inside the tank would have been killed instead, and your brother too.’

Each of my brothers has his own particular story, his stamp, a tone I recognise from the start. This brother is a Spartan, for sure. Yet even his familiarity with machine guns doesn’t make me realise that I’ll never see him in his pyjamas, or have pillow fights with him. It is as if he had sprung, like Cadmus, from the earth fully dressed and clothed with habits I know nothing of. When schoolkids are waiting for their siblings, in spite of myself I expect my brothers to turn up too. They’ll sit next to me, put a hand on my shoulder and shake it, with that intimate and gentle gesture people use when they have known each other forever. Even though it seems to take so long to happen, I know that somehow, somewhere, it will. I often ask myself if it did my brothers any good to be dreamed about so much and so often and to have so many stories told about them. Were they luckier at exams? Did they have more success with girls? Or were they just happier?

On the way back in the car, it’s the first brother’s turn again. I recognise a particular quality of yearning on my father’s face. He coughs as he gazes even further into the distance than usual.

‘He had the face of an angel and couldn’t bear anyone hurting animals, Catherine. He was so sweet-natured, everybody loved him. Then he went off to war in Indochina. He returned, covered in medals, without a scratch, but a completely different person.’

I ask what happened to him. My father shakes his head.

‘He killed people too, in close combat. He slit men’s throats. There was no choice. He had to obey orders. I was so lucky, during the whole war I never had to do that. It’s the luck of the draw, I suppose.’

My father sighs, with a worried frown. His face is empty and sad. His enthusiasm, like the tide in Bognor Regis, has disappeared from the beach.

‘He has never spoken about it to anyone, not even to me.’

I can’t believe that.

‘Really? Not even to you?’

‘No,’ he answers, whipping out his arm to hug me against his tweed jacket, before sighing and dropping his hands between his knees. His rounded shoulders look bereft and unhappy. He repeats the two syllables of his son’s nickname … Vinvin … The sky above our heads is grey and tormented. It starts raining. We don’t move an inch, as if the pattern of the drops were a code.

‘My brothers can’t help being Spartans, can they?’ I whisper.

Alexandre beams at me.

‘No, little one, they can’t.’