The Crowded Grave

movies, usually the
version originale
to improve my English.”
    “And where do you live? You gave me the address, but what’s it like?”
    “Just a single bedroom apartment off the rue Béranger, near the boulevard Voltaire in the Troisième. But I have my eye on a small house, one of a row of artists’ studios with lots of glass, just off the rue de la Tombe-Issoire near the Métro Alésia. I went to a party there and fell in love with the place, but I can’t afford it yet. If you come and visit me, I’ll take you there to see it and walk you round the parc Montsouris.”
    “Not named after our own Communist councillor, I imagine,” Bruno said. “He always asks after you, by the way. You made a conquest there.”
    “A Communist admirer, just what my career needs.” She smiled. “There’s another Prévert poem, not in the book I gave you, about two lovers embracing in a tiny second of eternity, one morning in a winter’s light in the parc Montsouris of Paris.”
    “A poem for every occasion,” Bruno said, smiling.
    She reached across and touched his hand. She sat straightup, swiftly changing her mood as if by an act of will. “And I recognize this cheese, it’s the one your friend makes.”
    “Stéphane’s Tomme d’Audrix, and some mâche from my garden to go with it.”
    “I haven’t eaten like this since last summer. In the hospital, it kept me going, remembering dishes you made.” She paused. “I have to go back in a couple of months. They want to use plastic surgery to make my thigh look better. I can’t stand looking at it.”
    Bruno nodded, trying to understand. “Coffee?” he asked.
    “Yes, and I’ll have one of my rare cigarettes, if you don’t mind.” He gestured permission and she lit a Royale filter. He rose and went to the dresser, opened the drawer and pulled out an ashtray and a half-empty pack of the same brand and put them on the table beside her.
    “I found the cigarettes after you left. There were moments when I was even tempted to smoke one.” He took the plates into the kitchen. He had barely started to make coffee when he heard her come in behind him and say his name softly.
    He turned, and she raised one side of her skirt. She unhooked her stocking from the garter and rolled it down to her knee to reveal the savage crimson scar and the crater in her flesh, the thigh markedly thinner than the other as if the muscles had withered.
    “Other than doctors and nurses, you’re the only one who has seen this,” she said, a catch in her voice that was almost a sob and an appeal in her eyes that he could not ignore. Her other hand reached out to him. “Oh, Bruno …”
    Instinctively, he knelt swiftly and kissed the scar, the marks of the stitches still obvious. His hand gently stroked the side of her thigh, and he could feel under his fingers the parallel scar of the exit wound on the back of her leg. He felt her hand touch the back of his head, her fingers curling in his hair. Shewas whispering his name. He rose, and saw that her eyes were closed and her lips were trembling. Very softly, he kissed them, picked her up in his arms and carried her to his bed, aware only of her heart beating fast against him and the passion of her mouth against his own.

31
    He had woken alone. She had left just before midnight, leaving him to his tousled bed and memories of her rolling the stocking back up and fastening it again to the garter belt so that all he saw was the whiteness of her flesh, the darkness of her eyes and nipples and the glorious geometry of black and white, pubis and stockings, that stretched so invitingly below her trim waist. Before he slept, he had taken down the Prévert and read again.
    And now with Gigi trailing along behind, he was astride Hector, glowing from the gallop that his horse had unleashed along the ridge, as if Hector understood Bruno’s strange, almost magical mood of contentment and energy, the pistol he so seldom wore now thudding a tattoo against his hip. Descending to lift Gigi onto his horse’s back once more, Bruno let Hector again pick his way across the ford at the river. He waved a greeting to the sergeant from the CRS who sat high on the back of one of Julien’s mares, his machine pistol braced on his thigh.
    “We just got confirmation,” the sergeant said, as Bruno let Gigi down to earth again. “The meeting’s being shifted here. They’re putting up the wind sock and painting the big
H
forthe helicopter now. They found a