its little harp of exposed fibres. Then there was a society girl with bony shoulders who wore flannel suits and shoes with canvas spats. Sometimes she wore a monocle at parties. Another woman sold charity badges on the Rue de Rivoli; her curls were the colour of marmalade. He met her in June, and in the sunny mornings found orange hairs spiralled on the pillow beside him. He befriended a whore at the Café Napolitain who was slight and flat chested, and addressed Midhat as “Mon Exotique.” After a month of evenings in rented rooms and breakfasts by the Seine this girl left the city for Provence with her mother, and Midhat regretted the loss of her scornful voice and her firm thighs. He began to visit the whorehouses in Pigalle, in part searching for another such woman, in part simply for the physical release.
Two whores he visited, but soon there was only one, for the first became syphilitic and was transferred to the local infirmary. The other was a woman named Pauline, whose skin was very soft and who sprayed herself with rosewater to mask the sewer-stench that reached the windows in summer. Pauline had a comic pout. When the Americans joined the war effort and filled Paris on furlough, she mimicked their voices with a wah wah drawl and swagger of her head, and lighting a cigarette watched Midhat produce the franc notes to pay the madam.
But after a while he began to feel the dullness of paid pleasure, and, of course, with all the soldiers on rotation one needed to be careful of venereal diseases. Still, on occasion, when induced by cheap wine, he could happily leave a bar in a group of men to carouse in the foyer of Le Chabanais, and accept without much forethought whichever boudoir he was shown into.
Through all this, Jeannette lived on in his mind. The more experience he gained, the less he could commit to any of these women he met in the Folies Bergère, or the Concert Mayol, or in the salons of cocktail parties. Sometimes in the dark he felt Jeannette’s lips, and sometimes smelled her over some woman’s head. Emerging from the fantasy to find a stranger in his arms, he would hear a high ringing sound and make love half in disgust before returning to Saint Germain heavy with renewed shame and longing. That sound moved into and out of his awareness for whole weeks at a time, and yet he carried his longing with him always like a crest of seriousness, and it gave him a gravity both real and performed, which the women of Paris sensed on him like a cologne and were captivated by.
One day, in the summer of 1916, he crossed the Rue de l’Odéon on his way to the university and caught sight of the back of a woman’s head through the window of a bookshop. With a leap in his chest he recognised Jeannette’s hair. She had cut it short again, it was blooming out the back of her head. What was she doing in Paris? She could not know he was here, he had left no forwarding address. There she was, Jeannette, in a matching shirt and skirt, pale grey.
But as she turned to face the window through which Midhat was staring she moved under the sheen of the reflected sun, and he could not tell if she had seen him. His body trembled as it took him through the tinkling shop-door. She was facing away, picking up a book to examine the spine.
“Jeannette.”
At his voice, she turned. It was not Jeannette. Her brow furrowed, she blushed. Her eyes were small and lower down than they were supposed to be, and she was too short, and although she was perfectly fine looking the sight of her was to Midhat monstrous. She was at the counter, and now she was approaching him, whispering, “Excuse me”; he fumbled aside to let her exit, and the door chimed shut. Her face haunted him for several moments. A panic loomed: he could not remember what Jeannette looked like. He tried to conjure her face, but all he could see was this new anonymous woman with her low eyes and her grey skirt. He walked out in a concentrated daze, ransacking his memory. Then—at last—there it was: the little chin, tapering, the eyes, the look in the eyes, the smiling, the kiss, the ending. She was still there, intact.
It seemed the universe would not