Across the Bridge - Mavis Gallant [59]
There, you see, M. Wroblewski would tell his friend. There are chinks of light.
This is a soft autumn, moist and mild. Between showers the broad boulevards fill up with people strolling as though it were summer. He sits in the Atelier, the new place just next door to the Select, composing and rejecting an answer to his friend. His hat and stick are on a chair; his dog, an obedient one, lies under it. The Atelier opened in the eighties, but he still thinks of it as “the new place.” It seems to have been in Montparnasse forever. The table mats depict a mature model posing for a life class some three generations ago. Newspapers are on wooden holders, in the old way. The waiters are patient, except when a customer’s reaction to a slopped saucer is perceived as an affront. Across the street the mirrored walls of the building that now rises above the Coupole reflect an Île-de-France sky: watered blue with a thin screen of clouds. If you sit at the front row of tables you may be pestered by foreign beggars, some of them children. M. Wroblewski keeps loose change in his pocket, which he distributes until it runs out. There have been many newspaper articles warning him not to do this: the money is collected for the brutal and cynical men who put the children on the street.
His friend in Warsaw is completely alert, with an amazing memory of events, sorted out, in sequence. If he were here, at this moment, he would find a historical context for everything: the new building and its mirrors, the naked model, the beggar girl with her long braid of hair and the speck of diamond on the side of her nose. Who, after hearing the voice of an old man over the radio, could sit down and compose a threat? All M. Wroblewski can see are a man’s hunched shoulders, the back of his thick neck. But no, his friend might say: I have seen his face, which is lean and elegant. What do you still hope for? What can you still expect? So much for your chinks of light.
And so they would exchange visions through the afternoon and into the evening, with the lights inside the café growing brighter and brighter as the trees outside become part of the night. Perhaps his friend would enjoy meeting someone wholly new, remote from the dark riddle of the man and the death letter. Unfortunately, most of M. Wroblewski’s Paris acquaintances have vanished or moved away to remote towns and suburbs (everything seems far) or retired to a region of the mind that must be like a twisted, hollow shell. When he reads his wife a letter from Canberra he takes care to translate the English expressions Teresa puts in as a matter of course. Magda used to understand English, but even her French is fading now. Before he reaches the end of the letter she will have asked four or five times, “Who is it from?” – although he has shown her the signature and the bright Australian stamps. Or she may surprise him with a pertinent question: “Are they coming home for Christmas?” There is no telling what Magda means by home. She may say to him, “Does my father like you?” or even, “Where do you live?”
She uses his diminutive, says “Maciek and I,” but knows nothing about him. She can play a game of cards, write a letter – it is never clear to whom – and he pretends to stamp and post it. By the time he has invented a plausible address, the incident has dissolved. She stares at the envelope. What is he talking about? She is poised on the moment between dark and light, when the last dream of dawn is shredding rapidly and awareness of morning has barely caught hold. She lives that split second all day long.
This morning, when he brought in her breakfast tray, he found a new letter astray on the carpet. Her writing is larger than before, easy to read:
My Dearest Dear!
Maciek is teaching and so am I! At the Polish high school in Paris! He teaches French. I teach algebra and music. Our pupils are well behaved. We have Nansen passports!