Do you love me?” She always asked me that, Suzanne, on Sunday mornings when we were lazing in bed in my room on rue Beccaria. “You never say it to me,” she would insist. “You’re supposed to say things like that, you know.” I asked her to shut up and go back to sleep, and afterwards we would go and have a bite at Hortense, a greasy spoon behind the place d’Aligre which on Sunday lunchtimes served the best blanquette in Paris. After that, we would take a walk down to the canal and then come back to bed and make the springs creak again because she liked that, Suzanne, she was always asking for it and she knew what to do to put lead in my pencil. She told me that she learned all that with an American soldier she fell for in August ’44 and who, for about ten days, had made her see all the colors, as she put it. “It weren’t only Paris what was liberated, I’ll tell you that for nothing!” she recalled enthusiastically.
So we fucked until exhaustion set in and about six in the evening she’d have her hand between her thighs pretending she was in pain because we’d been going at it too hard, simpering as she whined, and then she’d get up to wash herself at the little sink, giving me a good look at what she was doing. Sometimes that got me going again in spite of the fatigue, but she had to go back to her place in the 19th, where she lived with her mother who’d been sent half-mental by the death of her husband in captivity and was constantly threatening to throw herself out of the window and lived like a hermit most of the time in a room with the shutters closed because daylight gave her migraines, or so she claimed. Suzanne looked after this poor woman, terrified by her suicide threats even though, deep down, she didn’t really believe them. “Well, I’d better go see if she’s jumped,” she’d say sometimes in a casual voice as she was leaving, but she didn’t hang around all the same, and nothing, not even her insatiable desire for romping in the sheets, would have kept her back a single minute longer.
She worked in a foundry in Aubervilliers, making aluminium saucepans. She spent the whole day in front of a metal-stamping press and at twenty-five she was already half-deaf and she talked really loud just like she screamed really loud when she was coming, and on sunny days, when the window was open, the whole building must have heard her. In fact, I’m pretty sure they must have heard her on the other side of the boulevard, even over the traffic.
We didn’t feel anything for each other except a sort of camaraderie, but that did mean we had stuff to talk about and we would discuss politics as we walked through Paris and she would take me to Galeries Lafayette to daydream among the aisles, trying on hats or feeling up lingerie. Sometimes, in a little bistro where we’d go to eat and dance a bit on Saturday nights, we would meet up with her friends from the Communist Party, among them a woman of my age who’d come back from Ravensbrück. Her name was Hélène and she smiled all the time and had a lovely clear laugh, huge dark eyes and brown hair that fell down in waves over her shoulders. She was maybe the prettiest woman in Paris. She should have been in the movies, she’d have shown the stars of the era a thing or two. I didn’t dare speak in her presence. I watched her on the sly, trying to understand what made her gaze so sweet, and sometimes our eyes would meet and what I saw then would take my breath away: in those depths, all I could see was pain. Absolute misery.
She knew, about me. The others had told each of us about the other. But we never talked about it. Sometimes an allusion, a news item read in the paper, would bring the monster rising to the surface, but straight away a rush of frivolity would shove its mouth back below the water and once again we’d start to laugh, drink, dance. Life went on, and we had to live.
And in moments like that I desired all women and I wanted to eat everything and drink everything, forgetting myself in this noisy jubilation, letting myself be swept away by this whirlwind in the hope perhaps that it would tear me up from the depths where I’d been thrown years before.
I remember the evening when Hélène asked me to dance. She was a really good dancer. Her long legs lifted her up, sent her spinning with so much grace and power that she never seemed to feel tired. Her partner was a man who must have been her boyfriend at the time, Jacques, a teacher who’d fought in the Resistance in Limousin. He was younger than her and he joked around all the time, a warm and friendly man, and also a skilled dancer. When they took the floor together, people would often move to the sides to watch them. I can see them now in that cellar with an orchestra playing jazz, the crowd clapping their hands in rhythm, the two of them alone in the world and me in mycorner unable to stop myself loving that woman and drinking like a fish to drown out the feelings that scared me.
One evening, she came up to me and held out her hand. It was the outdoors dance near the Bastille, and the musicians onstage had embarked on a series of slow waltzes to give the dancers a rest after the javas and tangos. Hélène held me tight to her with her hand on my waist and I let her lead me because I danced like a lump of wood, especially when I’d been drinking. And especially if I was dancing with her. I could feel the fabric of her dress under my fingers, soaked with sweat because she’d been dancing non-stop for nearly an hour. Her hair flew into my nose, my mouth. From time to time, as we spun, I saw Suzanne wagging her finger at us warningly, smilingly, and I responded with exaggerated winks or grimaces. We danced. Hélène’s ankles and thighs sometimes touched mine, pushing me and leading me and, furtively, her belly was brushing against my crotch. All I could think about was that body against mine, that skin a few millimeters from mine, damp and warm, and now and then I would look down to glimpse her face with her eyes almost closed and I could think of nothing to say to her, not even a remark about my dancing or some gallant nonsense, the kind of platitudes that usually came so easily to me.
Suddenly she moved even closer to me, held me more tightly. “So?” she said. “How is it?”
I didn’t understand. I thought she was talking about the fact of us dancing together, as this was the first time we’d done so in the months we’d known each other. “It’s good,” I said. “I’d been wanting to for a while.”
The music stopped and people clapped and shouted. Around us, people changed, swapping partners. “No,” she said in an irritated voice. “I mean you, now. How are you?”
The orchestra started up again and we remained immobile, face to face, looking at each other and hardly even breathing, mouths open, despite our breathlessness and the weight that was crushing our chests. “I don’t know. I kind of feel like I’m floating. I just let it take me. Enjoy it. And sometimes it’s like I’m watching myself do it, from afar.”
She nodded, looking thoughtful, her eyes darker and deeper than ever, staring into mine.
“What about you?”
She thought for a few seconds then said: “Me? I dance.” And she led me once again out onto the dance floor and I followed her twirls with my feet of lead, legs stiff, head hanging heavy.
I saw her maybe another dozen times and we never spoke again, not face to face like that. Jacques was no longer around. He’d gone back to his hometown, summoned by the Party to stand in the elections. So Hélène danced with other men, never more than a dance, and she chatted and she laughed, and Suzanne and her friends put the world to rights, convinced that Stalin would not leave the French working classes alone against strike-breakers, that Maurice, as they called him, would guide the people of France towards a better tomorrow. I thought they were right. I remembered the soldiers of the Red Army who found us, the ten of us, hidden out in the ruins of a farm, reduced to chewing the frozen meat of a dead cow. I remember their appalled looks when they saw our moving corpses, in spite of all they must already have seen, and their kindness and all the little things they did to make sure we’d be less cold, less hungry, that we wouldn’t die. So it seemed to me that those people really could save the world, even if I didn’t know from what, because I couldn’t see what might happen to us now.
I reckon Hélène thought the same way as me: she didn’t speak much, mostly content to share in the general outrage or to nod agreement with that smile which would, in itself, have been capable of changing people’s lives had it been plastered to the walls or projected on a cinema screen. Sometimes I met her dark gaze that cloaked a suffering I immediately sensed was just like mine. Several times I tried, as we were leaving, somewhat dazed by the noise, head heavy from too many cigarettes and too much booze, to walk next to her and talk to her but I never managed to say anything and the last time I saw her she took my arm and said: “Life is good, don’t you think? The weather’s good, and spring is in the air!”
“That doesn’t alter the fact that we . . .” I began to reply, but she put a hand to my lips: “We’re alive, aren’t we? Plenty of others are dead. We have to deal with that. As best we can. Anyway, no-one’s listening.” Then she moved away from me, lifting her hand above her head and giving me a little wave of goodbye.
That is the memory of her that I keep. The warmth of her skin on my lips. And then that hand waving above her hair, like a wing. And her fathomless gaze and her smile that I try to summon in the evenings when I feel the abyss sucking me down. Because I tell myself that if she was capable of smiling like that, of producing so much light and warmth and spreading it all around her, then I should have the strength to remain, to carry that flame, to stay on my feet and keep moving forward a while longer.
One Friday evening, Suzanne was waiting for me outside my building, something she never did. As soon as I reached her, she collapsed in tears into my arms. The day before, about six in the evening, Hélène had thrown herself under a metro train in the gare de l’Est.
We went to a café, holding each other up because we might easily have fallen, exhausted, there on the sidewalk. People moved out of our way, as they would have done for a drunken couple. We ordered a cognac and the alcohol brought more tears to our eyes and Suzanne told me what she’d heard from someone who’d been at the same camp as Hélène: how she’d been forced to carry her mother’s dead body, among others, to the crematorium. The sort of madness into which she’d sunk, refusing to eat the little they gave her, explaining that, like this, her mother would have more, and the way she started dancing, unsteadily, whenever a kapo entered the block or approached the work commando. Other than that, she remained lucid, continued to help the weakest in spite of her own exhaustion, and would tirelessly discuss the end of the war, analyze the courage of the Soviet people in Stalingrad, dream of what she would do when she returned to France. Apparently she already had it then, that smile which could resuscitate those who were close to death.
“Me? I dance.”
Afterwards we stayed there, not saying anything, sitting across from each other and watching the people and the cars passing on the boulevard amid the murmur of conversations and the clinking of glasses.
The day of her funeral—this was June—the burning sun scorched our eyes and the heavy air left the red flags hanging like damp dish cloths from their poles. I remember the silence. The crunch of gravel under our soles. A woman spoke. Her voice was powerful and calm. I don’t recall what she said. She talked about Hélène, of course, about her courage and her devotion, probably. All those banal and true things that get said when people like her die. Listening to her, I imagined Hélène on the platform, among the crowd, watching out for the train under which she would throw herself. But I couldn’t imagine her face. What her face was like at that moment. When the woman stopped talking, someone started humming the “Chant des Partisans” and then all of us—a hundred or a hundred and fifty of us, standing in that humid heat, dazzled by the pitiless light—we all hummed it while the coffin was lowered into the ditch.
At that moment, I regretted not having taken her by the waist and held her against me to kiss her. I found it unbearable that I would never again see her shake her hair or feel her drape the black veil of her gaze upon us . . . upon me. I realized then that we must love the living because the dead don’t care and will leave you for the rest of your days with your remorse and your grief. Olga, Hélène. I had let them leave without doing anything, incapable of understanding, of living.
We saw each other a few more times, Suzanne and I. But there was someone in the room with us, watching. Or pacing the floor, from the door to the window. When I mentioned this to Suzanne, she stared around her, panic-stricken, in the silence of that winter afternoon where the only sound was the whispering of the rain. So we didn’t dare anymore. Or didn’t want to, I don’t know which. We shared exactly the same sensation of that presence with us, between us. We felt the same terrified sadness. One night, when I was alone, I saw Hélène, forehead pressed to the window, holding the curtain back with one hand. I sat up in bed, hopeful that she would turn around and give me one of those smiles that would dispel the darkness, but her image was absorbed by the lights in the street.
She came almost every night for a month. I did start talking to her but she never replied, just turned her sad face towards me. I asked her if she could dance, if she could still do that where she was now, but she remained immobile, her hand always holding back the curtain. Then I didn’t see her anymore. I woke up at night, about two in the morning, and I scanned the shadows in search of her. I think I even wanted to make out, in the bluish gleam from the window, her long silhouette and the disorder of her curly hair around her face, but it was over: the curtain remained motionless and heavy, only a few vague traces of light from the street penetrating the room. It seemed to me that she was there though, around me. I thought I could see the shadow of her eyes in the darkness. I was waiting for her ghost and I was angry with myself for this superstitious hope. Then she left me. My solitude deepened, bit by bit. Some days I managed not to think about her. My nights tormented me, full of shadows and cries and bodies that I felt on top of me, everywhere, all around, trembling with fever and fear.
I bumped into Suzanne at a protest march the following year. She was pretty and fresh-looking, on the arm of a tall, shy man. We embraced like old friends, happy to see each other, and we told each other what we were up to. She was going to get married. She would invite me, but she didn’t have my address. Then a movement of the crowd around us swept her to the other side of the boulevard. I saw her looking for me. I took advantage of this moment to go home, my throat lined with sand, my heart so swollen that I could hardly breathe.