He had been told that he knew this place, but his memory, if it was a memory, had to do with fields and a picnic. No one met him. He shared a taxi through soft snow with two women, and paid his share — actually more than his share, which annoyed the women; they could not give less than a child in the way of a tip. The taxi let him off at a dark, shiny tower on stilts with granite steps. In the lobby a marble panel, looking like the list of names of war dead in his school, gave him his grandmother on the eighth floor. The lift, like the façade of the building, was made of dark mirrors into which he gazed seriously. A dense, thoughtful person looked back. He took off his glasses and the blurred face became even more remarkable. His grandmother had both a bell and a knocker at her door. He tried both. For quite a long time nothing happened. He knocked and rang again. It was not nervousness that he felt but a new sensation that had to do with a shut, foreign door.
His grandmother opened the door a crack. She had short white hair and a pale face and blue eyes. She held a dressing gown gripped at the collar. She flung the door back and cried, “Darling Richard, I thought you were arriving much later. Oh,” she said, “I must look dreadful to you. Imagine finding me like this, in my dressing gown!” She tipped her head away and talked between her fingers, as he had been told never to do, because only liars cover their mouths. He saw a dark hall and a bright kitchen that was in some disorder, and a large, dark, curtained room opposite the kitchen. This room smelled stuffy, of old cigarettes and of adults. But then his grandmother pushed the draperies apart and wound up the slatted shutters, and what had been dark, moundlike objects turned into a couch and a bamboo screen and a round table and a number of chairs. On a bookshelf stood a painting of three tulips that must have fallen out of their vase. Behind them was a sky that was all black except for a rainbow. He unpacked a portion of the things in his knapsack — wrapped presents for his grandmother, his new tape recorder, two school textbooks, a notebook, a Bic pen. The start of this Christmas lay hours behind him and his breakfast had died long ago.
“Are you hungry?” said his grandmother. He heard a telephone ringing as she brought him a cup of hot milk with a little coffee in it and two fresh croissants on a plate. She was obviously someone who never rushed to answer any bell. “My friend, who is an early riser, even on Christmas Day, went out and got these croissants. Very bravely, I thought.” He ate his new breakfast, dipping the croissants in the milk, and heard his grandmother saying, “Well, I must have misunderstood. But he managed…. He didn't bring his skis. Why not?… I see.” By the time she came back he had a book open. She watched him for a second and said, “Do you read at meals at home?”
“Sometimes.”
“That's not the way I brought up your mother.”
He put his nose nearer the page without replying. He read aloud from the page in a soft schoolroom plainchant: “‘Go, went, gone. Stand, stood, stood. Take, took, taken.’”
“Richard,” said his grandmother. When he did not look up at once, she said, “I know what they call you at home, but what are you called in school?”
“Riri.”
“I have three Richard grandsons,” she said, “and not one is called Richard exactly.”
“I have an Uncle Richard,” he said.
“Yes, well, he happens to be a son of mine. I never allowed nicknames. Have you finished your breakfast?”
“Yes.”
“Yes who? Yes what? What is your best language, by the way?”
“I am French,” he said, with a sharp, sudden, hard hostility, the first tense bud of it, that made her murmur, “So soon?” She was about to tell him that he was not French — at least, not really — when an old man came into the room. He was thin and walked with a cane.
“Alec, this is my grandson,” she said. “Riri, say how do you do to Mr. Aiken, who was kind enough to go out in this morning's snow to buy croissants for us all.”
“I knew he would be here early,” said the old man, in a stiff French that sounded extremely comical to the boy. “Irina has an odd ear for times and trains.” He sat down next to Riri and clasped his hands on his cane; his hands at once began to tremble violently. “What does that interesting-looking book tell you?” he asked.
“‘The swallow flew away,’” answered Irina, reading over the child's head. “‘The swallow flew away with my hopes.’”
“Good God, let me look at that!” said the old man in his funny French. Sure enough, those were the words, and there was a swallow of a very strange blue, or at least a sapphire-and-turquoise creature with a swallow's tail. Riri's grandmother took her spectacles out of her dressing-gown pocket and brought the book up close and said in a loud, solemn way, “‘The swallows will have flown away.’” Then she picked up the tape recorder, which was the size of a glasses case, and after snapping the wrong button on and off, causing agonizing confusion and wastage, she said with her mouth against it, “‘When shall the swallows have flown away?’”
“No,” said Riri, reaching, snatching almost. As if she had always given in to men, even to male children, she put the book down and the recorder too, saying, “Mr. Aiken can help with your English. He has the best possible accent. When he says ‘the girl’ you will think he is saying ‘de Gaulle.’”
“Irina has an odd ear for English,” said the old man calmly. He got up slowly and went to the kitchen, and she did too, and Riri could hear them whispering and laughing at something. Mr. Aiken came back alone carrying a small glass of clear liquid. “The morning heart-starter,” he said. “Try it.” Riri took a sip. It lay in his stomach like a warm stone. “No more effect on you than a gulp of milk,” said the old man, marveling, sitting down close to Riri again. “You could probably do with pints of this stuff. I can tell by looking at you you'll be a drinking man.” His hands on the walking stick began to tremble anew. “I'm not the man I was,” he said. “Not by any means.” Because he did not speak English with a French or any foreign accent, Riri could not really understand him. He went on, “Fell down the staircase at the Trouville casino. Trouville, or that other place. Shock gave me amnesia. Hole in the stair carpet — must have been. I went there for years,” he said. “Never saw a damned hole in anything. Now my hands shake.”
“When you lift your glass to drink they don't shake,” called Riri's grandmother from the kitchen. She repeated this in French, for good measure.
“She's got an ear like a radar unit,” said Mr. Aiken.
Riri took up his tape recorder. In a measured chant, as if demonstrating to his grandmother how these things should be done, he said, “‘The swallows would not fly away if the season is fine.’”
“Do you know what any of it means?” said Mr. Aiken.