Missing Person Read Online Free Page A

can talk."
    In Rue Julien-Potin, after we had passed through a gateway, we crossed an open space surrounded by apartment buildings. We took a wooden elevator with a double latticework gate and, because of our height and the restricted space in the elevator, we had to bow our heads and keep them turned toward the wall, so we didn't knock brows.
    He lived on the fifth floor in a two-room flat. He showed me into the bedroom and stretched out on the bed.
    "Forgive me," he said, "but the ceiling is too low. It's suffocating to stand."
    Indeed, there were only a few inches between the ceiling and the top of my head and I had to stoop. Furthermore, both he and I were a head too tall to clear the frame of the door leading into the other room and I imagined that he had often bumped his forehead there.
    "You can stretch out too ... if you wish ..." He pointed to a small couch, upholstered in pale blue velvet, near the window.
    "Make yourself at home ... you'll be much more comfortable lying down ... Even if you sit, you feel cooped up here ... Please, do lie down ..."
    I did so.
    He had switched on a lamp with a salmon-pink shade, which was standing on his bedside table, and it gave out a soft light and cast shadows on the ceiling.
    "So, you're interested in the Emigration?"
    "Very."
    "And yet, you're still young ..."
    Young? I had never thought of myself as young. A large mirror in a gold frame hung on the wall, close to me. I looked at my face. Young?
    "Oh ... not so young as all that..."
    There was a moment's silence. The two of us, stretched out on either side of the room, looked like opium smokers.
    "I've just returned from a funeral," he said. "It's a pity you didn't meet the old lady who died ... She could have told you many things ... She was one of the real personalities of the Emigration ..."
    "Really?"
    "A very brave woman. At the beginning, she opened a small tea-room, in Rue du Mont-Thabor, and she helped everybody... It was very hard ..."
    He sat up on the edge of the bed, his back bowed, arms crossed.
    "I was fifteen at the time ... When I think, there are not many left..."
    "There's ... Georges Sacher ...," I said at random.
    "Not for much longer. Do you know him?"
    Was it the old gentleman of plaster? Or the fat bald-head with the Mongolian features?
    "Look," he said, "I can't go over all these things again ... It makes me too sad ... But I can show you some photographs ... The names and dates are there on the back ... You'll manage on your own ..."
    "It's very kind of you to take so much trouble."
    He smiled at me.
    "I've got lots of photos ... I wrote the names and dates on the back, because one forgets everything ..."
    He stood up and, stooping, went into the next room.
    I heard him open a drawer. He returned, a large red box in his hand, sat down on the floor and leaned his back against the edge of the bed.
    "Come and sit down beside me. It will be easier to look at the photographs."
    I did so. A confectioner's name was printed in gothic lettering on the lid of the box. He opened it. It was full of photos.
    "In here you have the principal figures of the Emigration," he said.
    He handed me the photographs one by one, telling me the names and dates he read on the back: it was a litany, to which the Russian names lent a particular resonance, now explosive like cymbals clashing, now plaintive or almost mute. Trubetskoy. Orbelyani. Sheremetev. Galitsyn. Eristov. Obolensky. Bagration. Chavchavadze ... Now and then, he took a photo back and consulted the name and date again. Some occasion. The Grand Duke Boris's table at a gala ball at the Château-Basque, long after the Revolution. And this garland of faces on a photograph taken at a "black and white" dinner party, in 1914 ... A class photograph of the Alexander Lycée in Petersburg.
    "My older brother..."
    He handed me the photos more and more quickly, no longer even looking at them. Evidently, he was anxious to have done with it. Suddenly I halted at one of them,