394
ALAN FRIEDMAN
because she seemed to be lying in wait for me. Regular as clockwork,
after an evening of coffee and pernod on the boulevard, I used to
start worrying about Jacqueline and her mother. I lived on the top
floor. I used to sneak in at the ground floor entrance like a burglar
-I'd wait one minute until the timer had turned off all the lights
on the stairs - and then I'd tiptoe upstairs, trying to slip past my
landlady's door on the first landing.
It
got so that I was afraid of the
door itself - morbidly nervous about the way it had of suddenly
snapping partway open ... because the stairs would squeak, and
Madame Dijour would catch me more than half the time. "You're
going to bed" - with that chopping innuendo - "Now?"
Her voice was bright, steely. She knew not one word of English.
With her French participles she seemed to be snapping her longnailed
thumbs; imperatives and subjunctives flashed round me this way and
that with a sneer and a controlled hiss. "Turn it so, insert the key
softly, incredible hour, I might suggest you remove your shoes
before."
Even matters of information were delivered with hints and barbs–
"Rushing in again, no, not you, your countrymen, the news looks bad
tonight?" And in her simplest phrases something vaguely indecent.
"You're going to bed? You're going to sleep? Everything all right?"
Not seductive - she'd never invite me in. She'd just begin by com–
plaining about the noise on the stairs, then switch to the international
situation, her favorite topic - swaying there in that yellow doorslit
of hers in her opaque nightgown at midnight or 1: 00
A.M.
and asking
me if I'd heard the latest news bulletins.
So it wasn't until the afternoon her door suddenly opened
wid~
and she invited me in that I finally got to see what the whimpering
noises were all about.
The gendarme in her parlor startled me. "It's all right," my
landlady said. "Don't stand there like a donkey. You've done nothing
wrong."
As
usual I was wrapped in brown burly secondhand clothes.
But I felt neither very warm nor well enough concealed. In the dry
winter air the points of my hair stood out, dishevelled and electric
like my thoughts.
"Monsieur," the officer inquired, "Monsieur
what?"
His voice
wavered in its pitch, suggesting that my real name could hardly be
whatever I was about to claim. I didn't think but I
felt
he had come
