Paris: Friday August 3, 1945
In August 1944, as the Allies advanced, General von Choltitz, the military commander of Paris, had ignored Hitler’s order to leave the city “a smoking ruin” and had surrendered to the shotguns, billy clubs, and bread knives of the Forces Françaises de l’Interieur and to the Sherman tanks of the French Second Armoured Division. This had saved the city from the fate of Vienna or the far worse fate of Berlin. Rumours Méret had heard that the Germans had melted down the Eiffel Tower to make weapons turned out to be somewhat exaggerated.
On the Left Bank, the Quai Saint-Michel curved with the river pretty well opposite the middle of the Île de la Cité. One street below this the Rue de la Huchette ran between the Boulevard Saint-Michel and the Rue des Deux Ponts. Before the war, it had housed a boulangerie, a bouchier chevaline, a bookbinder, a draper, a flower shop, a laundry, two hotels, a café and a bordel. After the war, mostly it still did.
A German tank had blundered down this narrow street in May 1940, but managed to extricate itself with little damage—and in August 1944 some of the fiercest battles of the resistance had taken place at the western end of the street in the Place Saint-Michel and all along the boulevard . . . snipers shooting and shot at . . . tarmac torn up to discover long-lost cobblestones with which to barricade the end of the street . . . and as the Germans left they had been waved on their way to perdition with raised lavatory brushes at every window.
Two side streets led off the Rue de la Huchette—the Rue Zacharie and the short but wonderfully named Rue du Chat-qui-Pêche. On the latter corner was the gendarmerie and, opposite, on the corner of Rue Zacharie, the bordel, le Panier Fleuri.
She had been given an address of an apartment that turned out to be over the bordel and had its double, ground-floor doors next to the windows of the florist.
Tosca had left her at the Gare de l’Est.
“You’ll be fine on your own, kid.”
“What if I get lost?”
“It’s a straight line down to the river, across the island till you hit the Boul Mich. A blind man couldn’t get lost.”
“What if I just disappear?”
“You think we wouldn’t look? You think we wouldn’t find you?”
It was her first taste of freedom. At the dacha in Poland she was never alone. Tosca had been there some of the time, perhaps most of it, but when she wasn’t Gregor was. Sleep had become the approximation of freedom, the surrogate of peace and privacy.
Now she was walking down the Boulevard de Strasbourg alone. More alone than she could ever remember being in her whole life. Paris was a revelation. And what it revealed was Méret Voytek.
The concierge looked her up and down as though she were applying for a job on the ground floor establishment, and thinking little of her appeal as a whore, pointed her to the second floor.
She rang the bell and stood in front of two tall, narrow doors of dull, unbuffed cherrywood.
He took an age, looked as though she had disturbed him in the middle of something. A big, dark, Slav featured man of forty or more, wearing only a sarong knotted at his waist and trailing on the floor. Spatterings of paint across his body and his sarong, as though he had just wiped his hands on it. A mop of touselled black hair on his head, another on his chest. A bear of a man.
“You are Serge?”
He stopped scratching and snapped to.
“My dear. At last. We’ve been expecting you for so long. First it was Monday, and then Wednesday, and then yesterday, and here you are at last.”
And a half-naked, painted bear she had never met before pulled her to him in his bear hug.
“Come in, come in. My, so little baggage. Is that all you have? Still, what does it matter? We have all of us lost so much. We have the delight of fresh beginning.”
“We do?”
“Of course we do. The world stripped bare for us to fall upon like seed from the tree. And speaking of bare, excuse me a moment my dear while I fling something on.”
The world stripped bare? Is that what had happened? Walking down the boulevards, across the Île de la Cité and the Pont Saint-Michel, it had been her stripped bare by the world. Perhaps this was what he meant by a seed?
He took her bag from her only to set it down a few feet inside the door.
“Permit me to dress, my dear. I shall be but a moment.”
And he left her in the hall.
From whatever room he had retreated to, she heard him say, “Make yourself at home, cherie. Have a good poke around.”
Only one of the many doors that led off the hall was open. She pushed at it and found herself in a north-facing room overlooking the street, bright with summer light, that Serge obviously used as his studio. It was all but devoid of furniture, the floor was spattered with paint, accretions of paint laid down like strata in rock over countless years, and canvases stood stacked aginst the wall in dozens.
In the middle of the floor lay a summer dress in an ivy-leaf pattern, a red hat, and a pair of roller skates. Seated on a high-backed wooden chair, sipping a glass of white wine, was a red-headed girl of about her own age, completely naked and completely without self-consciousness. Resting on the easel was a large canvas representing Girl with Wineglass—she was a faceless blur, her body a streak of vivid red and green.
The girl got up.
“You must be Méret. What kind of a name is that?”
It was not any question Méret had expected as a first question.
“I don’t really know. Greek or something. I was never sure.”
“I am Zozo. Would you like wine or tea? Do say wine, then I don’t have to go and fiddle about in the kitchen with the gas stove. It has a bad habit of going poof!—one could lose one’s eyebrows, or worse if one is naked.”
“Wine, then,” said Méret, devoid of choice. “Are you naked often?”
“Most of the time. He’s painted me a dozen times since the liberation. He’ll paint you, too. If I were you I’d volunteer now, while the weather’s warm. There was hardly any fuel last winter. My arse was blue with cold.”
Zozo poured her a glass of wine and the two of them stood in front of the work in progress.
“You know, part of me thinks, Why do I bother? They never look like me and he might just as well paint from imagination—which, of course, he won’t—and part of me knows how good he is.”
“Does he . . . sell?”
“Oh, yes . . . you’d be surprised how in a time of shortages people will find money for art. It is defiance, I think. Thumbing one’s nose at history. It was why we threw wild parties during the war. Now we have no money for food, or worse, no food, we buy paintings, we go to concerts, we worship fashion. We go hungry just to be able to afford the price of the little red cloche hat in the milliner’s window.”
Serge reappeared—black, baggy denim trousers, and a black shirt merely adding to the bearness.
“Zozo, scoot. We will do no more today.”
Without another word, Zozo drained her glass, picked her red cloche hat and her ivy-leaf-pattern dress from the floor, slipped both on in an instant, tucked the roller skates under her arm, and left.
“Do you paint, cherie?”
“No. I play.”
“Play what?”
“The cello. I used to play the cello.”
“Surely you haven’t given up?”
“No. It’s just that I don’t have a cello.”
He was nodding sagely, as though what she had just said required thought, which it surely didn’t. Suddenly he rushed to the window, looked down into the street. Zozo was sitting on the steps of the gendarmerie, tying the laces on her skates.
“Zozo! Ten o’clock!”
“Tomorrow is Saturday!”
“So . . . are we the bourgeoisie, keeping office hours now?”
She thumbed her nose at him, stood, spun full circle, and rolled away into the Quartier Latin.
To Méret this was a moment of near-magic—a woman without underwear, dressed only in a hat and a dress so thin as to be transparent, was roller-skating across Paris in the last of the afternoon sun, dodging pedestrians, thumbing her nose at gendarmes, and showing her backside to taxi cabs. It was absurd—in a world that had seemed to be made up only of cruel rationalizations, this was delightfully absurd. The world was indeed stripped bare.
She became aware of how big the apartment was. It went two floors up and two across, over both the bordel and the florist. He showed her to her own room on the third floor. She set down her bag in a cream-coloured room, with woodwork in pale green and a dormer window that looked south across rooftops and peeked in through other dormers into other rooms and other lives. A plain deal chest of drawers, a half-melted candle stuck in an enamel candlestick, a narrow iron bedstead in curlicues of faded gold. A portrait on the wall—another blurred woman in strikingly unnatural colours, sprawled like an odalisque—it might be Zozo, it might be anyone
He said, “Unpack. Wash. Bathe if you like. We’ll take a stroll at dusk. A stroll, a drink. Stroll some more, drink some more.”
He left her alone. Twice in one day she had become mistress of her own space and time. She sat on the edge of the bed. A mattress as hard as oak. She knew at once that she could be happy here. She knew at once that it could not last.