Jeanne walked down the avenue.  It was still daylight, and the air smelt good ­­– sweetish, with a tang of ozone.  Seeing that film has done me no good, she thought to herself.  She took a long, deep breath and walked on faster; then, noticing a child perched on the backrest of a bench eating an apple, she suddenly stopped.  What had she been thinking of?  Of course.  She’d left her shoulder-bag on the floor of the cinema, and the tea and biscuits which Marie-Aynard had asked her to buy were in it.  The very idea of having to pass the poster once more and go back into the cinema was distasteful to her.  She went back all the same.  The swing doors of the entrance were standing open, doubtless to air the place.  There was no sign of the usherette, all the lights were on, and as she went in a man stood up and held her shoulder-bag to her – the shoulder-bag she had always had, in which she used to carry her dancing-things when she went off to rehearsals at the Opera in Odessa, and which she later stuffed with all her combs and make-up when setting off for work at the studios of the illusions.

’I believe this is your bag,’ he said, in Russian.

His face, underneath a shock of grey curls, was surprisingly young-looking.  He was dressed in a work-tunic of the kind Levitsky, Jeanne’s favourite cameraman, used to wear to the studios every day, and he had something of Levitsky’s old maidish quality too.  These tunics, which seemed to belong half to the country and half to the town, had been fashionable in the Russia of the 1910s; one often sees photographs of Tolstoy wearing the same thing.

‘Yes, it’s mine,’ Jeanne replied.

‘It’s heavy.’  He moved towards the exit with Jeanne.  ‘Have you got far to walk?’

‘It depends.  I can either walk or take a taxi.  I’m going to the Gare Saint-Lazare.’

‘That’s not far.  Let me carry it for you.  It’s fine weather for walking.’

He spoke a pure, melodious Russian, the Russian of Moscow.

‘What did you, ah, think of the film?’ asked Jeanne.

He made no reply.  Out in the open air he seemed younger than ever underneath his great bush of grey hair.  Jeanne felt that his attention was entirely focused on her, although his gaze was directed elsewhere the whole time.  His arms were long and the sleeves of his tunic came only half-way down his forearms, giving him a rather clownish look.  But the grey of his hair, his long, muscular neck (similar to Mishinsky’s when tossing back his head in movements of abandon or joy) and his measured stride, on long legs with big feet, his head held upright, endowed him with an air of distinction, despite his odd clothes.

‘Have you been in Paris for long?’ asked Jeanne.

‘Since the war.’

‘The war of ’14 or the civil war?’

‘I came to Paris just before the outbreak of the war, in the spring of 1914.’

‘So all you know of Russia is the good times.’

‘If the “good times”, as you call them, are a matter of war or peace.’

Jeanne didn’t understand quite what he meant by this.

‘On account of the war and the Revolution, I’ve lost a man and a child, and several other people who were very dear to me,’ Jeanne heard herself saying, as though she were talking to herself without really knowing why … ‘It’s true I might have lost them without those events – accidents, microbes, assassinations, madness are always there to take their toll.’

‘I’m a friend of Gauer’s,’ he said.  ‘An old friend.  No one here is interested in this film the way we two are.  I recognized your bag without even having seen you in the cinema.  I said to myself, “That’s her bag!”  There are signs –‘
‘Watch out!’ Jeanne interrupted him, grabbing him by the sleeve.  A car was just about to run him down.  ‘Your days’ll be numbered if you go on crossing the road like that!  You might be good at spotting signs, but not motor cars … I’ve missed my train,’ she went on, looking over the roof of an omnibus at a clock in the Place de L’Opéra.  ‘And someone was supposed to be picking me up at the other end.  I must make a telephone call.  Could we go into a café?’

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