The Bay of Foxes Read Online Free PDF Page B

knows he needs a haircut. He has done the best he can with his appearance, but perhaps she has forgotten what he looks like, how dark his skin, or even how young he is, how thin? Perhaps she has forgotten the encounter altogether? Is it possible she was drunk? Does she regret her act of generosity? Does she wonder suddenly if he will steal her silver or put a knife in her back?
    She tells him to come inside and shakes his hand solemnly in the large entrance hall, as though they were meeting for the first time. Her hand is icy cold. She has tied a smallblue scarf stiffly around her long neck. He does not know what else to say, and she does not say anything. She does not offer him anything to eat or drink. Had they not talked about Africa, about the large families, the way people helped one another? Had she not put her arm around his shaking shoulders? Is she going to send him away? But she tells him to follow, turns and walks rapidly. They cross the shiny parquet floor, the sound of their shoes loud in his ears. They go through a
grand salon
with a black leather chaise longue and a fireplace at one end, a
petit salon
with a Louis XVI desk, soft blue and red Oriental rugs with animal designs, filled bookcases, and pink flowers fanned in glass vases. They walk through a formal dining room, with a silver bowl in the center of a long mahogany table. All these rooms look directly onto the Luxembourg Gardens and, across them, just visible through the first yellow-green leaves, the Panthéon. Even the kitchen looks through French windows onto a small terrace and the gardens.
    They go down a dark, narrow corridor, where the rooms are much smaller and look over a courtyard, shadowy rooms once or perhaps still used for the staff. There is a little sink in the corridor, and closets that seem to go up to the ceiling.
    At the end of the corridor, she pushes open a door. There is barely room for a single bed, with its dark green counterpane and an old frayed armchair with a small white towel over the arm, and to his surprise and delight, a battered upright piano with a candle-shaped lamp on top. She shows him at the end of the corridor a back entrance to the apartment, through which he can come and go as he wishes. She presses the key into the palm of his hand and tells him the room ishis, as well as the small bathroom with a shower and toilet next door.
    He can only thank her, bowing his head. She cuts short his thanks and says he is free to use the kitchen, too, during the day.
    He steps into the room, walks over to the window, and looks down into the courtyard with the green dustbins, plants, and the entrance to the back staircase. Briefly he wonders who inhabited this room before him, and why she had asked him to come three days after they had met. Has he displaced someone? And if so, what has happened to him or her? He looks around, just as he had in his cell, to see if there were messages written on the walls, wondering if the previous prisoner had survived.
    She leaves him “to settle in,” she says, though he has nothing with him but a small plastic bag with a change of underwear, socks, a pair of shorts, and a few toiletries, which he lays out carefully by the basin, then stacks by the bed the three paperback books that he has picked up on the quay: a copy of Baudelaire’s
Fleurs du mal
; Marguerite Duras’s short stories,
Whole Days in the Trees
; and Dostoyevsky’s
Crime and Punishment
.
    Alone in the room, he puts the precious key in his pocket and shuts his door. He takes off his worn shoes and stretches out on the bed, opens up his arms, and stares at the ceiling, the voice in his head loudly recording all of this. He falls into a deep, dreamless sleep. When he wakes, he gets up and drinks some water from the basin in the corridor. Then he opens the piano, a German one, a Schimmel. He looks at the yellowed keys. He places his fingers on them, shuts his eyes, and feelshis way, playing from memory the simple pieces from his