The first uncoupled coaches derail and hurtle into the wall. The next coaches telescope into the first. The last ones leap on top, wheels grinding on to roofs and skulls. A hurricane lamp spills and the wood and the kit bags and the wooden seats of the coaches catch fire. In the crash that night eight hundred die. Fifty survive. I don’t die of course.
I was at the memorial service held for them at Maurienne sixty years later. I went with the Widow Bosson who used to make dresses for me when I was little. A few old survivors from the crash came from Paris. They stood close together, like the Corporal told them to do in the train. The Widow Bosson and I were looking for a man with one leg. And there he was! The Widow Bosson squeezed my hand, left me and edged her way over towards him. I knew what she was going to do, she had told me. She was going to ask him whether he had ever married? And, if he had, whether he was now a widower? I thought she shouldn’t do this. I had told her so. But I was only a kid and, according to her, I hadn’t yet learnt how hard life could be.
The Widow Bosson was fifteen on the night of the accident. The whole town of St-Jean-de-Maurienne was awakened by the noise, and hundreds of people rushed to the wreckage, guided by the flames. There was little they could do. Some soldiers who were still alive were pinioned under the iron debris, trapped in the fire. One soldier begged the bystanders to take his rifle and shoot him! Another spotted the fifteen-year-old who was to become Madame Bosson. Angel, he pleaded, fetch an axe quick! She ran home, found one, and came running back with it. Now get my leg chopped off! he ordered her. The heat of the flames was infernal. Somebody did it. Sixty years later the Widow Bosson half hoped to marry the one-legged man whose life she’d saved that night.
From the station at St-Jean-de-Maurienne to the Lycée is a few minutes’ walk. I take my time, and as I walk, I tell myself: I want to leave this murderous fucking valley, I want to see the world!
7
Blindness is like the cinema, because its eyes are not either side of a nose but wherever the story demands.
On a corner where the No. 11 stops, the woman driver of the first tram of the day smiles at the smell of newly baked bread which she breathes in because she has jammed the tram windscreen open with one of her shoes. Five floors up, Zdena smells the same bread. The window of her room is open. Long and narrow, so narrow that a single bed arranged lengthwise barely leaves enough space to walk between the bed and wall, the room is like a long corridor leading to the window which gives on to an acacia tree and looks down on the tramlines.
Ever since her daughter’s visit, Zdena has called this “corridor” Ninon’s room. From time to time she comes here to look for a book. Whilst looking for one, she picks up another. A book by a poet who was once her lover. Or the letters of Marina Tsvetayeva. Then she sits down in a chair to finish reading what she has begun. And when this happens, when she stays in the corridor room for an hour or so, it is as if she can see Ninon’s dressing gown still hanging from the hook on the door.
Zdena started sleeping on the narrow bed in this room a few days ago in the hope of feeling closer to her daughter.
I don’t know how he knew the song about my name: Quel Joli Nom de Ninon. But he did. He said he was a cook. I thought he was an army cook. I thought he had recently stopped being a soldier. His hair was still cropped and his ears came out sideways. I asked him whether he came from the north and he smiled with his blue eyes and didn’t answer. He certainly looked as if he did. He had a pale skin and a lot of hollows and clefts on his body — such as under his cheekbones or between the two muscles of his upper arm, or behind his knees. As though your hand might suddenly slip between two close rocks into a deep pool farther in. He was all knuckles.
I first saw him walking down the middle of a street by a quayside in Toulon. He was doing this so as to be seen. Like an actor or like drunks do. He was grinning. On the back of his cropped head was clapped a soft hat. He was carrying two boards, joined together by webbing shoulder straps, and the boards reached to his knees. On them, back and front, was written the menu of a fish restaurant. A cheap restaurant for most of the dishes cost less than 50. The word Moules was written at the top, under his chin. Below were listed different ways of cooking the mussels. Américaine, Marseillaise, Bonne Femme, A l’Indienne, Reine Mathilde, Lucifer … the list was funny. Tahitienne, Rochelaise, Douceur des Isles, Pêcheur, Hongroise … so the Hungarians have a Hungarian way of cooking mussels! The Czechs, like my poor mother, must have one too! Our national dish, she joked one day, is knives and forks! I loved it when she laughed. It was like discovering a tree was still alive, although it had no leaves because it was winter. I never understood her knife and fork joke. Poulette, Réunionnaise, Italienne, Grecque … I loved it when she laughed. Now I was laughing, too.
He saw me. He saw me laughing at his menu, and he bowed. He couldn’t bow very low because the bottom of the sandwich board hit his shins.
I was sitting on a bollard above the yachts and motor launches in the port. It was the mussel man who spoke:
We shut at four. You’ll still be here?
No, I said.
On holiday?
I work.
He took his hat off and put it farther back.
What’s your line?
Car-hire service. Hertz.
I didn’t tell him it was my first job. He nodded and readjusted his shoulder straps.
They bite into you, he said. I do this till I find something as a cook.
No joke.
Like a trip in the yacht there? He pointed at one called Laisse Dire.
How do the Hungarians cook mussels? I asked him.
Like a trip in the yacht there?
He was as stupid as the menu on his back.
I’m going to be late, I said, and walked off.
Zdena, lying on the narrow bed in the corridor room in Bratislava, lets out a breath — as after a sigh or a sob.
I came out of the Hertz office at 10 p.m. and the Mussel Man was standing beside the newsagents in the railway station.
How long have you been here? I couldn’t stop myself asking.
I told you, we shut at four.
And he stood there. He didn’t say anything more. He stood there smiling. I stood there. He had no hat and he was no longer carrying the boards. He wore a T-shirt with palm trees on it, and a studded leather belt. Slowly he lifted up a plastic bag and took out a thermal packing.
I bought you some moules, he said, cooked à la Hongroise.
I’ll eat them later.
What’s your name?
I told him and that’s when he hummed my song. Quel Joli Nom de Ninon.
We walked down the main boulevard towards the sea. He carried the plastic bag. The sidewalk was crowded and the lights were still on in the shop windows. For five minutes he said nothing.
You walk all day with your menu? I asked him.
They turn the lights off in the shops here at 3:30 a.m., he said.
We walked on. I stopped to look at a coat in a window.
Bullet-proof glass that, he said.
I dream about coats, dresses, shoes, handbags, tights, headscarves. Shoes are my favourite. But I never stop before a jewellery shop. I hate jewellers. He stopped in front of one. I didn’t wait for him.
Hey, he said, there could be something you like here!
So?
You just need to tell me.
I hate jewellers, I said.
So do I, he said.