He looked at the photo of Tasha. She had a hold over him that no other woman had ever exercised. No, I don’t want to lose her, he thought. The memory of their first encounter plunged him into a state of feverish anticipation. He would see her soon. He extinguished the lamp and went back upstairs.
An elderly scholar, taking a break from the Collège de France, was reading aloud softly to himself from Humboldt’s Cosmos, while a balding, bearded man struggled to translate Virgil. Indifferent to these potential customers, Joseph was massacring a melody from Lohengrin while working at his favourite hobby: sorting and classifying the articles he clipped from newspapers. He had been behaving unpredictably of late, lurching from forced gaiety to long bouts of moroseness punctuated by sighs and incoherent ramblings. Victor put these changes of mood down to Kenji’s illness, but since he too was rather troubled, he found it hard to bear his assistant’s capricious behaviour.
‘Can’t you put those damned scissors down and keep an eye on what’s going on?’
‘Nothing’s going on,’ muttered Joseph, continuing his cutting.
‘Well, I suppose you’re right, it is pretty quiet. Has the doctor been?’
‘He’s just left. He recommended a tonic; he called it robot …’
‘Roborant.’
‘That’s it, with camomile, birch and blackcurrant, sweetened with lactose. Germaine has gone to the herbalist.’
‘All right then, I’m going out.’
‘What about lunch? Germaine will be upset and then who will have to eat it? I will! She’s made you pork brains in noisette butter with onions. Delicious, she says.’
Victor looked disgusted. ‘Well, I make you a present of it – treat yourself.’
‘Ugh! I’ll have to force it down.’
As soon as Victor had climbed the stairs to the apartment, Joseph went back to his cutting out, still whistling Wagner.
‘For pity’s sake, Joseph! Spare us the German lesson,’ shouted Victor from the top of the stairs.
‘Jawohl, Boss!’ growled Joseph, rolling his eyes. ‘There’s no pleasing him … he’s never happy … if I sing “Little Jack Horner sat in a corner”, he complains. If I serve up some opera, he complains! I’m not going to put up with it much longer, it’s starting to wear me down, and I’m fed up! One Boss moping in quarantine, the other gadding about!’ he said, addressing the scholar clutching the Humboldt.
Victor went softly through his apartment to his bedroom. He put on a jacket and a soft fedora, his preferred headgear, and crammed his gloves into his pocket. I’ll go round by Rue des Mathurins before I go to Tasha’s, he thought to himself. He was about to leave when he heard a faint tinkling sound.
The noise came from the kitchen. Victor appeared in the doorway, surprising Kenji in the act of loading a tray with bread, sausage and cheese.
‘Kenji! Are you delirious? Dr Reynaud forbade you …’
‘Dr Reynaud is an ass! He’s been dosing me with sulphate of quinine and broth with no salt for weeks. He’s inflicted enough cold baths on me to give me an attack of pleurisy! I stink of camphor and I’m going round and round in circles like a goldfish in a bowl! If a man is dying of hunger, what does he do? He eats!’
In his slippers and flannel nightshirt Kenji looked like a little boy caught stealing the jam. Victor made an effort to keep a straight face.
‘Blame it on the scarlet fever, not the devoted doctor who’s working hard to get you back on your feet. Have a glass of sake or cognac, that’s allowed, but hang it all, spare a thought for us! You can’t leave your room until your quarantine is over.’
‘All right, since all the world is intent on bullying me, I’ll return to my cell. At least ensure that I have a grand funeral when I die of starvation,’ retorted Kenji furiously, abandoning his tray.
Suppressing a chuckle, Victor left, one of Kenji’s Japanese proverbs on the tip of his tongue: ‘Of the thirty-six options, flight is the best.’
‘Berlaud! Where have you scarpered to, you miserable mongrel?’
A tall rangy man with a cloak of coarse cloth draped across his shoulders was driving six goats in front of him. At the entrance to the Botanical Gardens, he struggled to keep them together. Cursing his dog for having run off, he used the thongs attached to their collars to draw them in.
The little flock went off up Quai Saint-Bernard, crossed Rue Buffon without incident and went down Boulevard de l’Hôpital as far as Gare d’Orléans,3 where the man stopped to light a short clay pipe. The silvery hair escaping from under his dented hat and his trusting, artless face gave him the look of child aged suddenly by a magic spell. Even his voice was childlike, with an uncertain catch to it.
‘Saints alive! I’m toiling in vain while that wretched mutt is off chasing something to mount.’
He put two fingers in his mouth and gave a long whistle. A large dog with matted fur, half briard, half griffon, bounded out from behind an omnibus.
‘So there you are, you miscreant. You’re off pilfering, leaving me yelling for you and working myself to death with the goats. What you lookin’ like that for? What you got in your mouth? Oh, I see, you went off to steal a bone from the lions while I was chatting to Père Popèche. That’s why we heard roaring. But you know dogs aren’t allowed in the Botanical Gardens, even muzzled and on the leash. Do you want to get us into trouble?’
Berlaud, his tail between his legs and teeth clamped round his prize, ran back to his post at the back of the herd, which trotted past the Hospice de la Salpêtrière, before turning towards Boulevard Saint-Marcel and into the horse market.
Each Thursday and Saturday the neighbourhood of the Botanical Gardens witnessed a procession of miserable worn out horses, lame and exhausted but decked out with yellow or red ribbons to trick the buyers. They were kicking their heels in resigned fashion, attached to girders under tents held up with cast iron poles where the horse dealers rented stalls. Ignoring the auctioneers proffering broken-down old carriages just outside the gates, the goatherd pushed his flock in among the groups of rag and bone men and furniture removers in search of hacks still capable of performing simple tasks. Each time he visited, the goatherd found it heart-rending to see the dealers with their emaciated nags, whose every rib could be seen, making them trot about to display their rump, their face and their flanks to possible buyers.
‘Savages! Tormenting to death these poor beasts worn out by pulling the bourgeois along the streets of Paris! My brave horses, you certainly know what it is to work hard. And the day you’re of no use you’ll be sent to the knackers’ yard or to the abattoir at Villejuif! Dirty swindling dealers!’
‘So, here comes our friend Grégoire Mercier, the purveyor of milk direct to your home, the saviour of consumptives, the ailing and the chlorotic! Well, Grégoire, still heaping invective on the world? I’m the one who should grumble – you’re late, my fine fellow!’
‘I couldn’t help it, Monsieur Noël. I had so much to do,’ replied the goatherd to a horse dealer who was impatiently waving a household bottle at him. ‘First, at dawn I had to take the she-kids to graze on the grass on some wasteland at the Maison-Blanche. Then I had to visit a customer on Quai de la Tournelle