Alan Friedman
INTERNATIONAL LOVE
Mostly I ate out in Paris, the cheapest places. But the few
staples I did buy, I bought in the store just downstairs from me, so
two or three times a week I got to talk to the greengrocer. "You didn't
know? But yes certainly." My greengrocer's eyes and ears went up
together, a child's fat face with a big moustache, and he told me he
hated her frothily: standing amidst his lettuce and leeks, into the saw–
dust he spat freely. I gathered that my landlady Madame Dijour was a
rent-gouger. She owned four or five houses in the neighborhood and
she was charging me three times the rent I should have been paying.
"Miser and pig, ah, she's well-off but you can get nothing from her,
not if your wall folds or your ceiling rips. But her husband, ah that
was a jewel, a good man, a gentleman, and in this neighborhood a
friend, a leader. Well of course, yes in the Resistance, tortured by the
Nazis, killed. God will pay them back what they did to him. But she,
the one upstairs, the Queen, he left her all this, and she's worse than
the Nazis, you don't know the half, I assure you. The way she
treats that little
girl
of hers, that alone, they could hang her for."
I had heard noises downstairs, whimpering noises I couldn't iden–
tify. My landlady had me worried. She was a dyed blonde whose
plump face must have become unappetizing somewhere along the
line. Mter I'd heard the story of her husband's torture, I seemed to
see it in her face and voice. Each of her eyes had a different shape,
sagging and rimmed like two healed cuts on a tree trunk. When she
talked to me in her skeptical, twittering French - "Good evening?
What time is it. Early for you?" - question marks came out in all
the wrong places.
The idea of going home at night began to make me nervous
