Woman in the Fifth

‘As you remind yourself every hour of every day. Because that’s how guilt works.’

I stood up and started to get dressed.

‘Leaving so soon?’ Margit asked, sounding amused.

‘Well, it is close to the “witching hour”, isn’t it?’

‘True — but unusually you’re the one leaving without a shove for a change. Now why might that be?’

I said nothing.

‘Answer this question honestly, Monsieur Ricks. The person — I presume it is a man — who did you harm … Wouldn’t you want harm to befall him?’

‘Absolutely. But I’d never perpetrate it on him.’

‘You’re far too ethical,’ she said.

‘Hardly,’ I said, then added, ‘Three days from now?’

‘You are a fool to be pursuing this.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Three days then,’ she said, reaching for her cigarettes.

Later that night, as I sat at my desk in my windowless office, Margit’s story continued to rattle around my head. The sheer terrible randomness of it all — the way life can come completely asunder in a moment — nagged at me all night. It also explained plenty about Margit’s emotional reticence and the way she kept a certain distance from me. The longer I dwelled on it, the more I realized just how haunted she was by this appalling calamity, and how the grief would only end with her own death. Margit was right: there are certain tragedies from which we never recover. We may eventually adjust to the sense of loss that pervades every waking hour of the day. We may accept the desperate sadness that colors all perception. We may even learn to live with the loss. But that doesn’t mean we will ever fully cauterize the wound or shut away the pain in some steel-tight box and consider it vanquished.

I finally got back to work, cranking out the usual thousand words. But when 6 a.m. finally showed up, I couldn’t break free of my confinement, as this was the first night when I agreed to a twelve-hour marathon in exchange for a day off. The extra six hours dragged by. I forced myself to write another thousand words. I read another fifty pages of Simenon’s La Neige etait sale, gripped by his account of France under German occupation. Eventually I found myself pacing the room and actually doing situps on the concrete floor in an attempt to keep blood circulating and my brain awake. There were a few callers in daylight. Their images were clearer on camera. They were all men of seemingly Turkish origin, and they all kept their heads turned downward as they uttered the necessary password into the speakerphone. Who, I often wondered, was Monsieur Monde? Someone you don’t need to know.

When noon arrived, I found myself blinking into the sunlight and needing to take in extended lungfuls of air and staggering home without the usual croissants and remembering to set the clock for 7 p.m. that night, and falling into a vast empty sleep, and waking with a jolt, and thinking how strange my existence was now: an all-night non-job, a sortof girlfriend who would only see me every three days, and the realization that — even though this was allegedly my ‘day off ‘ — I would be staying awake all night, as I couldn’t suddenly break the sleep-by-day schedule I had been living since starting this idiotic, wretched job.

So when I came to during the early evening, I hurried off to the Cinema Grand Action on the rue des Ecoles where a new print of Kubrick’s Spartacus was being shown at 20h15. When it let out at 23h30 I kept thinking, Margit’s apartment is just a five-minute walk from here. But I turned away and found a Mexican place off the boulevard Saint-Germain that did very authentic guacamole (or what I took to be authentic guacamole) and even better margaritas, and wonderful enchiladas washed down with Bohemia beer. The meal cost me fifty euros and I didn’t give a damn, because I had just worked twelve hours, and this was my first night off in almost two months, and I was determined to throw financial caution to the wind tonight and get a little smashed and fall about Paris like a pinball. So when I finished my meal, I stopped in a tabac and bought a Cohiba Robusto and sauntered across the Seine, puffing happily on this absurdly expensive Cuban cigar and eventually reached Chatelet and a string of jazz clubs on the rue des Lombards. As it was almost one thirty in the morning, the guy on the door let me into Sunside without hitting me for the usual twenty-euro cover charge. I threw back a couple of whiskies and listened to a so-so local chanteuse — thin, big frizzy hair, a reedy voice that still somehow managed to swing with the Ellington and Strayhorne standards which she sang with her backing trio. When the set finished and the club emptied, I found myself on foot toward the Tenth arrondissement. It was well after two. This corner of Paris was deserted, bar a few entangled couples, and the street people who would once again be sleeping rough tonight, and the occasional drunk like myself. I followed the boulevard de Sebastopol most of the way home. As I got to Chateau d’Eau the smattering of Africans on the street looked at me as if I was a cop, taking a step back as I strode by. The rue de Paradis was shuttered — the Turkish workingmen’s cafes long closed. Ditto the bobo restaurants. The occasional street lamp cast an oblong shaft of light on the pavement. There was no traffic, no ambient urban noise — just the percussive click of my heels punctuating the night … until I heard the tinny beat of shitty pop music up ahead, and saw that my local dingy bar was still open.

The barmaid — the same Franco-Turkish one I had seen there before — smiled as I entered. Without me asking, she poured me a beer, set it in front of me, and then turned and retrieved two glasses and a bottle and poured out two shots each of a clear liquid. Reaching for a pitcher, she added a drop of water to both drinks. As the liquid went murky, she raised a glass to me and said, ‘Serefe.’

Turkish for ‘cheers’.

I raised my glass and clinked it against hers and, following her example, downed the shot in one go. As it traveled down my throat, all I could taste was its pastis-like flavor. But as soon as it hit my stomach, the alcoholic content kicked in: a one-hundred-and-ten-percent proof burn that made me grab the beer and drain it. The barmaid saw my discomfort and smiled.

‘Raki,’ she said, pouring us two more shots. ‘Dangerous.’

Her name was Yanna. She was the wife of the owner, Nedim, who was back in Turkey helping bury some uncle.

‘You marry a Turk, you find out they are always burying some fucking uncle, or sitting in a corner with a bunch of their friends, conspiring against someone who dared to make some pathetic slight against their family, or—’

‘You’re not Turkish?’ I asked.

‘Supposedly. Both my parents came from Samsun, but they emigrated in the seventies and I was born here. So yes, I am French — but if you are born into a Turkish family, you are never really allowed to escape its clutches. Which is why I ended up marrying Nedim — a second cousin and a fool.’

She clicked her glass against mine and threw back the raki. I followed suit and accepted the bottle of beer she handed me.

‘Raki is good for just one thing,’ she said. ‘Getting smashed.’

‘And every so often,’ I said, ‘we all need to get smashed.’

‘Tout a fait, monsieur. But I have a question. Omar — le cochon — tells me you are American.’

‘Absolutely.’

‘So why do you have to live in his proximity?’

‘Ever heard the expression, “a struggling artist”?’

‘I’ve never met an artist. In this work, the only people you meet are assholes.’

‘Artists can be assholes too.’

‘But they are probably interesting assholes.’

Then, over three rakis — interrupted by the final orders of the two drunks semi-passed out in a corner — she gave me a rambling version of her life. Raised in this ‘shitty arrondissement‘ when it was still primarily Turkish, always getting crap in school for being the child of immigres, working in her father’s little epicerie when she was seventeen, very strict parents, pushed into this arranged marriage with Nedim three years ago (‘My twenty-first birthday present from my fucking parents’).

‘It could be worse,’ she said. ‘At least it’s a bar, and not a laverie.’

But Nedim was a slob who expected her to play the traditional wife when it came to picking up after him. ‘I