I Looked for the One My Heart Loves

  I Looked for the One My Heart Loves

  A Novel

  Dominique Marny

  Translated by Jean Charbonneau

  1982

  Anne rushed to get to the Cimitière de Montmartre before it closed. Along the main path, tourists worked their way toward the exit, along with the guide who had led the tour. The graves of countless celebrities lined the trails. Degas, Feydeau, Guitry, Fragonard, Offenbach, and Stendhal, to name only a few, always attracted admirers who placed flowers on their graves. After walking past a gardener pushing a wheelbarrow filled with weeds, Anne reached the roundabout beneath the metal bridge linking the Place de Clichy to Montmartre. Turning left, she climbed a few stone steps and began walking among the tombstones. She could’ve found her way with her eyes closed. In her hand was a bouquet of dahlias. Hearing footsteps, a black-and-white cat scampered under a bush. Hordes of them made their home among this kingdom of the dead. Anne walked more quickly. She’d never come so late. A traffic jam near the Saint-Lazare train station had held her up.

  As she turned down the final path, Anne stopped in her tracks. Thirty yards or so away from her, a young man stood praying in front of the very headstone she was heading for. Not wanting to make her presence known, she hid behind a chestnut tree. Then she observed the visitor, whose back was turned to her. Brown hair, average height, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, he looked like a student. Anne glanced at her watch, hoping he would leave soon. Finally, he took a step back and, with a pensive look, walked away. She waited until he was gone to move toward the headstone, on which only one name was inscribed. As she’d done for the past four years on this day, she placed her bouquet on the ground. …

  1939

  1

  With a piece of chalk, Anne drew a hopscotch grid on the sidewalk.

  “It’s not straight,” her friend Agnès said.

  Anne shrugged, erased a line with the tip of her sandal, and gave it another try. When she was done, she numbered the squares from one to nine, and wrote earth in front of the first one. At the opposite end, Agnès wrote heaven.

  Anne fished a pebble out of her dress pocket and tossed it. She hopped on one foot from one square to the next. And then her brother, Bernard, and another boy appeared out of nowhere, blasting her with water guns.

  “Stop that!” Agnès said before she, too, was sprayed.

  This was followed by a race across the square, but soon the boys caught up to them.

  “I’m going to tell my dad,” Agnès said.

  “And I’m going to tell my mom,” Bernard said, imitating Agnès’s whiny voice.

  She kicked him in the shin.

  All the while, Anne tried to free herself from the other boy, who was holding her arms behind her back.

  “Gilbert,” she said, “stop it!”

  “Don’t act so stuck up,” the boy said.

  She wanted to spit in his face. She could feel his hot breath on the back of her neck. Frazzled by the quarrel, a dog came over and began to bark. Scared, Agnès screamed.

  “Okay,” Bernard said, “get the hell out of here.”

  As Agnès pulled her hair back from her face, he turned to Gilbert and said, “Let’s go!”

  “I’m not done with your sister!”

  “Come on, let’s get the hell out of here!”

  Voices and bursts of laughter rang out, and three young teens emerged from an alley. Wearing short-sleeved shirts and cotton canvas shorts, they all carried roller skates. One of the teens saw Agnès crying and Anne trying to free herself from Gilbert, so he quickly turned serious.

  “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “None of your business,” Bernard said.

  “Why is she crying?”

  “She’s just a crybaby. …”

  Gilbert let go of Anne, who rubbed her aching wrists. A feeling of shame overwhelmed her. With her rumpled clothing, her red face, and her braids half undone, she must have looked horrible. She didn’t want to meet the gaze of the boy who had just chastised her brother, and for this reason she pulled up her socks.

  “You’re going skating?” Bernard asked.

  “Yeah. We’ve got a little while before the movie starts.”

  The movies! Anne was dying to go to the movies. But her parents wouldn’t let her go out without them. “You’re only nine years old,” they kept telling her. She would’ve given anything to have a magic wand tapped on her head, turning her into a young, attractive, and independent Parisian woman. Just like the ones she’d seen in Place de Clichy, walking around in high heels, wearing stylish clothes and multicolor hats. For Anne, those women were the ultimate role models. But for now, she had no choice but to live the life of a schoolgirl and ignore her romantic soul, which was hardly an easy task when the one who made her heart beat stood just a few feet away from her. His name was Alexis Messager, and he was eleven. Anne had first seen him during the wine harvest festival, shortly after he’d moved to Montmartre. Not very tall, he had disheveled hair, piercing eyes, a straight nose, and lips that were full and curled. It all gave him the air of a rebel not afraid of anything. He had such a presence that everyone stared at him when he walked into a room. Every time Anne saw him, she flushed and became speechless.

  Later that afternoon, her mother gave her an earful over the state of her clothes.

  “I fell off a wall,” Anne said

  She never snitched. Not so much for fear of Bernard’s reprisal, but rather because her brother sometimes took her with him to the pharmacy that sold the kids’ magazine La Semaine de Suzette.

  “Go change up for the night,” Monique Chastel said.

  In her room, Anne removed her pinafore with its torn hem. Then she opened the armoire’s doors. Folded on the shelves, her clothes gave off the sweet smell of Marseille soap. Button-down camisoles, cotton panties, half-slips, and poplin blouses sat piled next to heavy wool sweaters knitted by her grandmothers and bobble hats. From a wooden coat hanger hung the navy blue skirt she wore to school, next to her organdy dress. Instead of her nightgown, Anna put on her leotard. Since the beginning of the year, she’d been taking lessons from a former ballerina. In a studio on Rue Berthe, she learned to be poised and to hold arabesque positions. So that her parents wouldn’t keep her from her favorite activity, Anne made sure she had good grades in school. In the Chastel household, discipline and learning were not taken lightly. Every Sunday, her father made her recite her history and geography lessons. He was even more demanding with Bernard. Sometimes Anne’s brother had to spend hours working on his arithmetic problems or some paper he had to write. With his index finger up his nose or the tip of his pen in his mouth, Bernard would long to go out and play with his friends. But instead, he was stuck in the house, racking his brains to describe his first trip to the ocean or what his home looked like or some Christmas spent with his family. …“Help me,” he asked his sister.

  Anne could’ve written about the life of a geranium and made it interesting, she had so much imagination.

  Bernard even went as far as complimenting her once or twice, saying, “You remind me of Alexis!”

  “Why do you bring him up?”

  “Because he’s always at the top of the class in French. Dictation, writing, grammar: he’s good at all that stuff. But of course he is, his father sells books!”

  “Ours is a pharmacist. That doesn’t make you good at science!”

  Anne walked to the mirror. The leotard she was wearing showed off her narrow shoulders and long, skinny legs. The medallion that her family had given her on the day
of her first communion dangled around her neck. Her brown hair was almost dry, and she tied it in a ponytail. Then she examined herself some more. She had large, dreamy eyes under well-defined eyebrows. She turned her head to the side. Her nose was a bit bigger than she would’ve liked, but it did give her face some character. As for her mouth, ever since her permanent teeth had replaced her baby ones, Anne had tried to smile as little as possible to hide her slightly crooked front teeth. She took a couple of steps back and raised her arms in a crown shape, making sure her head was perfectly straight. For twenty minutes or so, she practiced her moves and positions. From the opened window came the familiar sounds from the courtyard down below. All over the apartment building, women began to prepare for dinner. Pots and pans clanked, and people chatted around the water pump. The next-door neighbor’s radio played a Maryse Damia tune. She usually woke up around this time. What did she do all night? Every time Bernard asked the question, their mother said she was a nurse. But that answer did not fit with the young woman’s appearance, with her heavy makeup and her heady perfume, which, mixed with the smell of cooking meat in the stairwell.

  “My parents called her a slut,” Agnès once told Anne. Agnès lived on the first floor. “I heard them!”

  “A slut!” Anne had said, stunned.

  “She works at the Moulin-Rouge.”

  The two girls often walked by the famous cabaret. Though they didn’t know precisely what went on in there, they sensed that it was a disreputable place. For one thing, both their mothers told them to hurry when they passed the cabaret and its large posters of women wearing feathers. Was that what a slut looked like?

  As Anne finished a series of pirouettes, Monique Chastel walked into the room.

  “You haven’t washed up yet! And did you study your catechism?”

  “Not yet.”

  The girl washed herself, put on a nightgown, then turned to the page with the heading “To Know and Love God.” Did it mean that you had to dedicate yourself to him if you didn’t want to go to hell after you died? For the nuns teaching catechism, there was only reward or punishment. Nothing in between. While in the confessional, Anna did her best not to forget a single instant of laziness, the time she ate too many sweets, a lie … Behind the screen, the priest listened to her in silence before giving her a penance and then absolution for her sins. Once, only once, he’d asked her if she had impure thoughts. Anne had hesitated. Was it impure to watch lovers kiss on park benches and hope that she’d do the same with Alexis when they were grown-ups?

  Looking morose, Yvan Chastel sat in an armchair in the living room and opened the Paris-Soir. After a day at the drugstore, he liked to go over the news. Today, he was preoccupied by the signing of the Pact of Steel by Germany and Italy.

  “This doesn’t bode well at all,” he said to his wife as she placed some fruit in a bowl.

  Monique Chastel wasn’t very interested in politics, even less so in foreign affairs. Admittedly, she had been alarmed by the news of the German army marching into Prague. But as long as her own family wasn’t threatened, she refused to worry about what may or may not happen. Like clockwork, she got up every day at seven, gave her children toast and milk for breakfast, and drank a cup of coffee with her husband. Once everyone had left, she began cleaning the apartment. Then she headed for the market, and once home, started making lunch for three people. After noon, when Bernard and Anne left for school again, she tackled her sewing, mending socks and whatever else needed fixing. Monique took comfort in those familiar chores. She enjoyed the smell of clothes soaking in the washbasin’s piping hot water before she hung them to dry in the backyard, where the building’s tenants had lines strung from every window. She also loved the smell of starch that she used to stiffen her doilies.

  She’d just gotten married when someone mentioned to her an apartment in Montmartre that would soon be available. For their first visit, Yves decided that they’d take the funicular. Once on top of the hill, they both lost themselves for a moment gazing at the city down below. The narrow streets, the shops and small business all over the place, and the cats napping on the window ledges had disoriented Monique, who had only ever known her native Touraine. The apartment was on the third floor of a building with decrepit walls. The building four floors and offered a nice view of Rue Gabrielle. A bit apprehensively, Monique watched her husband’s expression. He was the one making the decision. More than anything else, it was the low rent that won him over. A month later, they were hauling in their meager possessions, and they had never left.

  Monique called her children into the kitchen, and Bernard and Anne took their usual seats at the round table. The meal began in silence. No one was to speak before the head of the family did.

  “There’s no way we’re going to avoid a war,” he finally said.

  “You said the same thing last year,” Monique said. “And nothing happened!”

  “It was only a bit of a reprieve,” Yves said.

  Bernard stopped eating and began paying attention to what his father was saying. Suddenly, there was an exciting change of atmosphere in a room where things were always the same.

  “Hitler is preparing,” his father said. “He’s going to invade Poland next.”

  “That’s so far away,” Monique said, forcing a smile.

  “Maybe, but France and England won’t let him do it!”

  “But that would mean …”

  “General mobilization.”

  2

  Up until the end of the school year, Anne didn’t give her father’s alarmist views much thought. Too many other things occupied her mind. First, there was the trip to the Louvre with the cultural society of Montmartre, which organized outings for both adults and kids in and around Paris. The children had already been to Versailles and the Château de Chantilly, and now they explored the treasures of ancient Egypt. Alexis kept close to the tour guide and lingered in front of every display case. Anne had never seen him with such an enraptured expression! Intrigued by his enthusiasm, she joined Alexis, and little by little, found herself interested in the Nile and pyramids where pharaohs were buried. In the middle of the tour, she suddenly realized that she and Alexis were the only ones paying attention to what the guide was saying. The other kids yawned and whispered among themselves. They couldn’t wait to get out of the museum and go play outside. At the end of the tour, as the group reached the exit, Alexis closed the notebook in which he’d jotted down a few notes. Anne would’ve liked to ask him if he could lend it to her so she could transcribe his notes, but she didn’t dare.

  On Awards Day, Alexis took first prize in French and geography, and second prize in history. Each time, he climbed onstage to receive a large book with red-and-gold binding. Unfortunately, nothing of the sort happened to Bernard! Sitting next to her parents, Anne wondered if her brother would at least receive a certificate of merit. He did … for gym.

  “We’re deluding ourselves,” Yves Chastel said bitterly as he walked out of the school hall. “Our son is never going to be an intellectual.”

  Intellectual. Anne wasn’t sure what the word meant.

  “Is Alexis an intellectual?” she asked her mother.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “He won a lot of prizes!”

  “His father is an intellectual,” Yves Chastel said. “And no doubt a Communist! Just take a look at the books in his store’s window!”

  To Bernard, who’d just joined them, he added, “Even if that kid works hard in class, I don’t want you and him being friends. And I certainly don’t want to see him in my home!”

  Alexis left for summer vacation before Anne. Since Anne knew that she wouldn’t run into him on the street or in the square now, she couldn’t wait to leave Montmartre as soon as possible. Two days before Bastille Day, she filled her suitcase with the treasures she didn’t want to be without: a notebook that contained the beginnings of a stamp c
ollection, some postcards, a few paper dolls, two packs of miniature cards that she used to play solitaire. Every summer, the Chastels took their children to the Touraine region to visit Monique’s parents. In Cormery, a village known for its abbey and its macaroons, Anne joined up with the local kids. They could usually be found hanging out in the main square skipping rope, or playing tag or dodgeball. But the thing she most enjoyed was picnicking on the banks of the Indre. Swimming in the river and playing charades distracted them from the heavy atmosphere that seemed to worsen every day among the adults. It was when Anne overheard a conversation between her grandparents that she understood just how serious the situation had become.

  “Thankfully, you’re too old for the draft,” Yvonne Biron said. “But what about Yves?”

  “With two children, he should be okay. …”

  Anne suddenly felt anguished. Was her father going to go to war? And, maybe, die?

  She walked into the kitchen.

  “Daddy isn’t leaving us, is he?” she said, startling her grandmother.

  “You were eavesdropping?”

  Seeing tears fill the little girl’s eyes, she stroked Anne’s hair.

  “Don’t worry. Everything is going to be fine.”

  Anne wanted to believe her, but the poisoned seed was planted in her mind. Later, as she played with stickers in her grandparents’ small backyard, she thought of what she’d been taught about the Great War of 1914–1918, the trenches, the killing fields … Thank God, Bernard was too young to be a soldier! The same for Alexis! But what would become of everyone? Thinking about it all made her heavyhearted, even though she loved being here, with her grandmother’s rituals in the house and the warm atmosphere in the kitchen as she cooked. Without having to be asked, Anne peeled the potatoes, removed the stems from the green beans, pitted the cherries for the pie, kneaded the dough. Everyone had his own tasks, and every hour was punctuated by the chiming of the clock. As soon as he came in from work, Marcel Biron did crossword puzzles and chain-smoked. He was a carpenter, and his shop was near the church. On rainy days, Bernard visited him. With a hammer and some nails, he tried to build things.