“Perhaps.”
He gripped my arm very hard.
“Tell him Sonachidze still thinks of him a lot.”
His gaze lingered on me:
“Maybe Jean’s right after all. You were a customer at the Hôtel Castille . . . Try to remember . . . The Hôtel Castille, Rue Cambon . . .”
I turned away and opened the car door. Someone was huddled up on the front seat, leaning against the window. I bent down and recognized the bride. She was asleep, her pale blue dress drawn up to the middle of her thighs.
“We’ll have to get her out of there,” said Sonachidze.
I shook her gently but she went on sleeping. So, I took her by the waist and managed to pull her out of the car.
“We can’t just leave her on the ground,” I said.
I carried her in my arms to the restaurant. Her head lay against my shoulder and her fair hair caressed my neck. She was wearing some highly pungent perfume which reminded me of something. But what?
3
IT WAS a quarter to six. I asked the taxi driver to wait for me in the little Rue Charles-Marie-Widor and proceeded on foot until I reached Rue Claude-Lorrain, where the Russian Church was.
A detached, one-story building, with net curtains at the windows. On the right, a very wide path. I took up my position on the pavement facing it.
First I saw two women who stopped in front of the door opening on to the street. One had short brown hair and wore a black woollen shawl; the other was a blonde, very made up, and sported a gray hat which was shaped like a Musketeer’s. I heard them speaking French.
A stout, elderly man, completely bald, with heavy bags under his Mongolian slits of eyes, extracted himself from a taxi. They started up the path.
On the left, from Rue Boileau, a group of five people came toward me. In front, two middle-aged women supported a very old man by the arms, an old man so white-haired, so fragile, he seemed to be made of dried plaster. There followed two men who looked alike, father and son no doubt, both wearing well-cut, gray striped suits, the father dandified, the son with wavy blond hair. Just at this moment, a car braked level with the group and another alert, stiff old man, enveloped in a loden cape, his gray hair cut short, got out. He had a military bearing. Was this Styoppa?
They all entered the church by a side door, at the end of the path. I would have liked to have followed them, but my presence among them would have attracted attention. I was having increasing qualms that I might fail to identify Styoppa.
A car had just pulled to one side, a little further off, on the right. Two men got out, then a woman. One of the men was very tall and wore a navy blue overcoat. I crossed the street and waited for them.
They come closer and closer. It seems to me that the tall man stares hard at me before starting up the path with the two others. Behind the stained glass windows which look out on to the path, tapers are burning. He stoops as he passes through the door, which is much too low for him, and I know it is Styoppa.
The taxi’s engine was running but there was no one at the wheel. One of the doors was ajar, as if the driver would be returning any moment. Where could he be? I glanced about me and decided to walk round the block to look for him.
I found him in a café close by, in Rue Chardon-Lagache. He was seated at a table, with a glass of beer in front of him.
“Are you going to be much longer?” he asked
“Oh . . . another twenty minutes.”
Fair-haired, pale-skinned, with heavy jowls and protruding eyes. I don’t think I have ever seen a man with fleshier ear lobes.
“Does it matter if I let the meter run?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
He smiled politely.
“Aren’t you afraid your taxi might get stolen?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Oh, you know . . .”
He had ordered a pâté sandwich and was eating with deliberation, gazing at me gloomily.
“What exactly are you waiting for?”
“Someone who’ll be coming out of the Russian church, down the road.”
“Are you Russian?”
“No.”
“It’s silly . . . You should have asked him when he was leaving . . . It would have cost you less . . .”
“Never mind.”
He ordered another glass of beer.
“Could you get me a paper?” he said.
He started searching in his pocket for the change, but I stopped him.
“Don’t worry . . .”
“Thanks. Get me Le Hérisson. Thanks again . . .”
I wandered about for quite a while before finding a newsstand in Avenue de Versailles. Le Hérisson was printed on a creamy green paper.
He read, knitting his brows and turning over the pages after moistening his index finger with his tongue. And I contemplated this fat, blond, blue-eyed man, with white skin, reading his green paper.
I didn’t dare interrupt him in his reading. At last, he consulted his tiny wrist watch.
“We must go.”
In Rue Charles-Marie-Widor, he sat down behind the wheel of his taxi and I asked him to wait for me. Again, I stationed myself in front of the Russian church, but on the opposite side of the street.
There was no one there. Had they, perhaps, left already? If so, there was no hope of my tracking down Styoppa de Dzhagorev again, since his name was not in the Paris directory. The tapers still burned behind the stained glass windows which looked out on to the path. Had I known the ancient lady for whom this service was being held? If I had been one of Styoppa’s frequent companions, he would probably have introduced me to his friends, including, no doubt, this Marie de Rosen. She must have been far older than us at the time.
The door they had entered by and which must have led into the chapel where the ceremony was taking place, this door which I was keeping under constant watch, suddenly opened, and the blonde woman in the Musketeer’s hat stood framed in it. The brunette in the black shawl followed. Then the father and son, in their gray striped suits, supporting the plaster figure of the old man, who was talking to the fat bald-headed man with the Mongolian features. And the latter was stooping, his ear practically touching his companion’s lips: the old gentleman’s voice must certainly have been hardly more than a whisper. Others followed. I was watching for Styoppa, my heart pounding.
Finally, he emerged, among the last. His great height and navy blue overcoat allowed me to keep him in sight, as there was a large number of them, forty at least. They were mostly getting on in years, but I noticed a few young women and even children. They all lingered on the path, talking among themselves.
The scene resembled a country school playground. The old man with the plaster appearance was installed on a bench, and each of them in turn came up to greet him. Who was he? “Georges Sacher,” mentioned in the newspaper notice? Or an ex-graduate of the School of Pages? Perhaps he and Marie de Rosen had lived out some brief idyll in Petersburg, or on the shores of the Black Sea, before everything fell to pieces? The fat bald-headed man with the Mongolian eyes was surrounded by people as well. The father and son, in their gray striped suits, circulated, like a pair of dancers at some society ball, moving from table to table. They seemed full of themselves, and the father kept breaking into laughter, throwing back his head, which I found incongruous.
Styoppa, for his part, was talking soberly with the woman in the