He felt that now he could ask the questions Brossier had always answered vaguely before, and that this time, now that it was over between him and Bejardy, Brossier would explain everything, down to the last detail.
“I met Bejardy right after the war. Almost twenty years ago now…”
“That was when you ran a restaurant together, on a boat?” Louis said.
“Ah, yes. The Longchamp Schooner. Who told you about that? It was a real disaster. Roland wanted the waiters to wear Provençal cowboy outfits.”
He gave Jacqueline a mischievous kiss on the cheek.
“You’re not bored with these old war stories, are you, darling?”
Jacqueline kindly shrugged her shoulders and gave Odile a complicitous glance. They had reached the Denfert-Rochereau station.
“I met Roland when I was eighteen. He was five years older than me.”
He leaned toward Louis.
“Roland’s problem can be captured in a single sentence: ‘I want to, but I can’t.’ Let me put it more crudely, if you don’t mind: Roland always farted louder than his ass.”
Now this was the Brossier from Saint-Lô.
They got out at the Cité Universitaire station. A boy nearby was kicking a soccer ball and Brossier made a fake and managed to dribble the ball all the way to the stairs without the boy being able to get it back. He was over the moon at his accomplishment.
“Should we have a bite at the Turk’s place?” Brossier said. “It’s a little farther down.”
They walked down boulevard Jourdan toward Charléty Stadium. Pink and blue neon lit up a kind of glassed-in counter in the middle of the sidewalk, under the trees, with a few tables around it.
“Four club sandwiches and four pints of the blonde on tap,” Brossier ordered.
The wind carried the smells of Parc Montsouris over to them, and the night was bright enough for them to see the palace of the Bey of Tunis on the great lawn. Opposite them, on the other side of the empty street, was the Great Britain building, whose wood-paneled dining hall Brossier had said he liked. An empty bus appeared from time to time at the station a little farther up.
“What are you two doing for the holidays?” Brossier asked.
He and Jacqueline had decided to stay in Paris during July and August. In the mornings they would sunbathe on the Cité Universitaire lawns. In the afternoons, they’d play tourist — go visit Les Invalides, the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower, Sainte-Chapelle. At night, they’d have dinner on a bateau mouche. Maybe they’d venture out as far as Versailles, on a tour bus for “organized visits,” and “catch a sound and light show” at the Bassin de Neptune fountain.
“I love doing that kind of thing as a vacation,” Jacqueline said. “You should come with us.”
“The main thing,” Brossier said, “is to always go on group tours. Everything completely taken care of. With guides. You understand, Louis. Guides.”
He insisted on that. For a long time, he had felt an urgent need for “organization,” for “guides.”
But Louis was set on finding out how Brossier had met Bejardy.
“To begin at the beginning,” Brossier said, “I met Roland right after the war, at a family pension in Neuilly called the Chestnut Trees. He was living there with his mother and his fiancée at the time, an Englishwoman.”
And he, Jean-Claude Brossier, a fat young man of nineteen, got off the boat in Normandy and enrolled in the art school in Paris, École Boulle. But he soon forgot about art school and joined in the rhythm of their lives. They took drives around the countryside, sometimes as far as Deauville; went to the races; played bridge at night with Bejardy’s mother in the little living room at the Chestnut Trees. Roland had earned a Médaille militaire in Germany and was going into business. And Hélène, Roland’s fiancée… She was so lazy. One day, when a bag of coffee turned up at the pension — something rare in that period of rationing — Hélène had let out a sigh at the prospect of having to grind the beans.
Jacqueline Boivin chewed quietly on her sandwich. Odile had a cigarette at her lips, which Louis lit with the Zippo. And Brossier? He seemed sad, all of a sudden, from bringing up these distant memories. His face was drawn, and Louis was sorry he had asked him these questions.
“It’s true, I came here from Normandy to go to art school.”
He looked paler and paler, as though realizing that the satchel he had on his knees, his tracksuit jacket and student status, even Jacqueline herself with her gray pleated skirt and beige twinset, were no longer enough to protect him from the passage of time and the indifference of the world.
•
Louis started working again, as a watchman in the garage on rue Delaizement, mornings and afternoons. Or else he took letters to addresses in Paris and on the outskirts, the same as he’d done before leaving for England.
He had refused his commission, despite Bejardy’s insistence, and when Bejardy told him, in a voice of feigned indifference, that the movers were coming to take the furniture and the files out of the garage, Louis could sense disaster in the air, but he didn’t dare ask any questions.
“I’m liquidating the garage,” Bejardy told him.
It was already empty. The American cars had disappeared, the Mercedes too. The only car left was an old gray Simca with flat tires, all the way in the back, but it had never once moved from its place.
One afternoon, Louis helped Bejardy move the files down to where a brick chimney ran up the wall, next to the Simca. Bejardy put a couple of logs in the fireplace, opened the file folders, threw the pages into the fire one by one, and stirred the ashes with a long iron poker.
“Fire purifies everything,” he said, lost in thought.
“So, Brossier isn’t working with us anymore?” Louis asked.
“How do you know?”
“I saw him the other day.”
Bejardy, sitting on the running board of the Simca, studied one of the files. He raised his head.
“I think he’s in love. What can I do about that?”
“He told me he’s known you a long time…”
“Yes, we’re old friends, almost since childhood,” Bejardy said in an evasive tone.
“You met each other right after the war, in a family pension in Neuilly?”
A nervous look passed over Bejardy’s face.
“What else did he tell you?”
“Nothing. That you lived there with your mother.”
“I see. He told you about my mother?”
A hint of a smile. Then his face clouded over again.
“I’ve spent my whole life dragging Brossier behind me. Slowing me down. It often happens that way, you know, things like that.”
He stood up and went over to the fireplace to throw several pages in.
“He told me he wants to try to live his own life now, Louis.” And he let out a short laugh, more like a cough. “The only problem is, he’s too old. One day he’ll come looking for me again, with his tail between his legs, I’m sure of it. But by then I’ll be gone…”
Rays of sunlight shone through the windows in back, making a large patch of light on the floor. Louis and Bejardy stayed sitting in the middle of this patch, like hikers stopping for a moment in a clearing. The fire crackled.
“I’m liquidating my affairs here,” Bejardy said. “But I need you to do one last thing for me, my dear Louis.”
•
He came out of a cross street onto Quai Louis-Blériot and walked into the building, the green shopping bag in his hand. Bejardy opened the door for him.
“You’re sure you have all the rest of the files?”
“Yes.”
Bejardy quickly looked through the folders stuffed in the bag.
“Give them here.”
He walked ahead of Louis. From behind, with the shopping bag, he had a strange silhouette, like someone coming back from the market.