Finally, the policeman appears. He’s out of uniform, and the tailing operation begins, on foot. Simon follows the man as he crosses the Pont Saint-Michel and goes up the boulevard until he reaches the junction with Saint-Germain, where he takes a bus. Simon hails a taxi and, uttering the strange words “Follow that bus,” he feels as if he has wandered into a movie, though what genre of movie he isn’t yet sure. But the driver obeys without asking questions, and at each stop Simon has to make sure that the plainclothes policeman has not gotten off the bus. The man is middle-aged, of average height and build and not easy to spot in a crowd, so Simon has to be vigilant. The bus goes up Rue Monge, and the man gets off at Censier. Simon stops the taxi. The man enters a bar. Simon waits a minute before following him. Inside, the man is sitting at a table at the back. Simon sits near the door and immediately realizes this is a mistake because the man keeps looking over in his direction. It is not because he has identified him, just because he is expecting someone. In order not to attract attention, Simon looks out the window. He contemplates the ballet of students entering and emerging from the metro station, standing about smoking cigarettes or gathering in groups, still undecided about what will happen next, happy to be together, excited about the future.
But suddenly, it is not a student that he sees coming out of the metro but the Bulgarian who almost killed him during the car chase. He’s wearing the same crumpled suit and apparently hasn’t thought it worthwhile to shave off his mustache. He looks around the square, then comes toward Simon. He is limping. Simon hides his face behind the menu. The Bulgarian opens the door of the café. Instinctively, Simon shrinks back, but the Bulgarian passes without seeing him and heads to the back of the room, where he sits down with the policeman.
The two men begin a conversation in low voices. This is the moment that the waiter chooses to take Simon’s order. The apprentice detective asks for a martini, without thinking. The Bulgarian lights a cigarette, a foreign brand that Simon doesn’t recognize. Simon, too, lights up, a Lucky Strike, and takes a drag to calm his nerves, convincing himself that the Bulgarian hasn’t seen him and that his disguise means no one has recognized him. Or maybe the whole café has spotted his too-short trouser hems, his too-baggy jacket, his shifty amateur air? It isn’t difficult, he thinks, to perceive the dichotomy between the envelope he is wrapped in and the deeper reality of his being. Simon is overwhelmed by the awful feeling—yes, familiar but more intense this time—of being an impostor, on the verge of being unmasked. The two men have ordered beers. All things considered, they don’t seem to have noticed Simon, just—to his great surprise—like the bar’s other customers. So Simon pulls himself together. He tries to listen to the conversation by concentrating on the voices of the two men, isolating them amid the general hubbub, like a sound engineer isolating a single track on a mixing desk. He thinks he hears “paper” … “script” … “contact” … “student” … “service” … “carrr” … But perhaps he is the puppet of a sort of autosuggestion; perhaps he is only hearing what he wants to hear; perhaps he is constructing the elements of his own dialogue? He thinks he hears: “Sophia.” He thinks he hears: “Logos Club.”
Then he feels a presence, a shape that glides past him. He didn’t notice the current of air released by the opening of the café door, but he hears the sound of a chair being pulled back. He turns and sees a young woman sitting down at his table.
Smiling, blond, high cheekbones, eyebrows in a V. She says to him: “You were with the policeman in Salpêtrière, weren’t you?” Simon feels sick. He glances furtively over at the back of the room: the two men, absorbed by their conversation, can’t possibly have heard her. “That poorrr Monsieur Barthes,” she adds, and he shivers again. He recognizes her now: she is the nurse with the slender legs, the one who found Barthes with his tubes removed, the day when Sollers, BHL, and Kristeva turned up and made a scene. More important, he thinks, she recognized him, which undermines his confidence about the quality of his disguise. “He was so verrry sad.” The accent is light, but Simon detects it. “Are you Bulgarian?” The young woman looks surprised. She has large brown eyes. She can’t be more than twenty-one. “No, why? I’m Rrrussian.” From the back of the room, Simon hears laughter. He risks another glance. The two men are clinking glasses. “My name is Anastasia.”
Simon is a bit muddled, but all the same he does wonder what a Russian nurse is doing in a French hospital, in 1980, a time when the Soviets have begun to relax certain restrictions, but not to the point of opening their borders. He also didn’t know that French hospitals were recruiting from the East.
Anastasia tells him her life story. She arrived in Paris when she was eight. Her father was head of the Champs-élysées Aeroflot office. He was authorized to bring his family with him, and when Moscow summoned him back to headquarters, he applied for political asylum and they stayed, along with her mother and her little brother. Anastasia became a nurse; her brother is still in high school.
She orders tea. Simon still doesn’t know what she wants. He tries to calculate her age based on the date she arrived in France. She gives him a childlike smile: “I saw you through the window. I decided I had to talk to you.” The sound of a chair scraping on the floor at the back of the room. The Bulgarian gets up, to piss or use the phone. Simon leans forward and puts his hand to his temple to mask his profile. Anastasia dips her tea bag in the hot water and Simon sees something graceful in the movement of the young woman’s wrist. At the counter, a customer is talking about the situation in Poland, then Platini’s performance against Holland, then the invincibility of Borg at Roland-Garros. Simon can sense that he is losing concentration. This young woman turning up has unhinged him, and his nervousness is increasing every minute. And now, God knows why, he has the Soviet national anthem in his head, with its cymbal crashes and its Red Army choirs. The Bulgarian comes out of the toilets and goes back to his seat.
“Soyuz nerushimy respublik svobodnykh…”
Some students enter the café and join their friends at a noisy table. Anastasia asks Simon if he’s a cop. At first, Simon protests: of course he’s not a cop! But then—he has no idea why—he makes clear that he is acting as, let’s say, a consultant to Superintendent Bayard.
“Splotila naveki velikaya Rus’…”
At the table at the back, the policeman says “tonight.” Simon thinks he hears the Bulgarian reply with a short phrase containing “Christ.” He contemplates the girl’s childlike smile and thinks that, through storm clouds, the sunlight of freedom is shining on him.