none at all,’ I said, backing off – and immediately regretted it. The move had been thoughtless; I had lost a good strategic position. I compounded the error by adding, even more foolishly, ‘C’était seulement une question pour entretenir la . . . dialogue.’
She could not let such an advantage slip away. ‘Pas la dialogue,’ she corrected immediately, ‘mais le dialogue; dialogue est masculin. In this case, however, you should have said conversation, not dialogue. That’s one point. And the other is that the subject today is cemeteries and gravestones, not higher education, and particularly not mine.’
It was a classic move. Whenever anyone exceeded some limit, especially if they began asking questions, she would first tell them off for bad grammar and then put them firmly in their place.
But this time her thrust hardly touched me. I had what I wanted, and the mess I’d made of my bold, indeed frankly insolent, last charge – after all, asking when she got her degree was tantamount to asking her age – left scarcely a scratch. The only bothersome thing was the way I’d bungled it; that stung a little, and to appease the sting I decided to turn it all into a joke. ‘If I used the word dialogue instead of conversation,’ I said, ‘it was just to avoid the rhyme.’
‘Comment? What rhyme?’ Her face twisted with regal displeasure. I pursued calmly, ‘Si j’avais dit: “c’était seulement une question pour entretenir la conversation,” ça ferait des vers. Can’t you hear it?’
‘Qu’est-ce que c’est que ces bêtises!’ she said impatiently and, waving me away, told me to sit down.
Material for the Report
That same day, straight after school, I presented myself at the Department of Romance Languages at Warsaw University. There I said that I was a pupil in my final year at a school that the Ministry of Education, in its wisdom, had decided to transform into a bold experiment with French as the language of instruction, and that I had been delegated to approach the department with a certain request. The circumstances of this request I explained as follows.
I had been entrusted with the task of writing a report about the study of Romance languages at the university. It was to be mainly about the entrance exams and programme of study for each year, but was also to contain a so-called historical sketch – this had been stressed – outlining the department’s work over the years and supplying brief portraits of its most distinguished figures, including some of its former students who had excelled in some way or gone on to interesting careers.
Now, while I had succeeded in obtaining the data for the main part of the report (the entrance exams and programme of studies), as well as for its historical part (the history of Romance language studies and the famous professors), and indeed on these subjects had more material than I knew what to do with, I had no information, absolutely none at all, about any interesting or distinguished students, and God knows I had done my best. I’d pestered everyone with questions, I’d tried to find the right contacts – nothing. I was directed straight back to the department, every time – here to this very office, where all the records were. So I would be most obliged, and naturally my superiors would also be grateful, if the department would kindly make the relevant records available to me.
The secretaries in the dean’s office gazed at me with such concentration that their faces contorted with the effort, as if I were speaking some exotic language. But my exposé sounded so convincing, and the cause so worthy, that they couldn’t bring themselves to send me away empty-handed; they merely remarked that they weren’t sure they had quite understood and asked what exactly they could do for me.
‘I don’t want to put you to any trouble,’ I said politely. ‘Perhaps if I could just see the lists of graduates? That shouldn’t be too much of a problem, should it?’
They gazed at me in blank astonishment.
‘I just want the basics,’ I said, conciliatorily. ‘The year of graduation, the title of the MA thesis, that sort of thing.’
‘For which years?’ one of them, presumably the senior, finally asked.
I performed a rough mental calculation, and decided that Madame couldn’t have finished university before 1955. ‘Well, let’s say from the mid-1950s.’
‘From the mid-1950s!’ the Senior One gasped. ‘Do you know how much of it there is?’
‘It can’t be helped, I’m afraid, that’s the task I’ve been set,’ I replied, and spread my arms in a gesture intended to express helpless devotion to duty.
She rose, went up to an enormous cupboard, placed a ladder against it and ascended. Reaching up to the top shelf, piled with stacks of bulging folders, she extracted an unimposing-looking file, shook the dust off it and came back down.
‘There you are,’ she said, handing it to me. ‘From 1955 to 1960.’
Struggling to contain my excitement, I sat down at one of the desks and began to peruse the documents entrusted to me.
The pages were divided into five columns, headed ‘Name’, ‘Date of birth’, ‘Title of thesis’, ‘Supervisor’ and ‘Final mark’. I took a notebook out of my briefcase and slowly, page by page, began to go through the list of graduates. From time to time, when I felt the eyes of the secretaries upon me, I made a show of copying something down in my notebook.
Madame’s name was not on the lists for 1955, 1956 or 1957. This wasn’t seriously disturbing; indeed, in a sense it was a relief, for it also delayed her date of birth: she was younger than I’d thought, and that could only be in my favour. In this situation, every year that reduced the age difference between us was worth its weight in gold.
The tension did not begin to mount until I had gone through the list for 1958 and still hadn’t found her name. The chances of finding her now were swiftly diminishing: there were only two years left. If she wasn’t in those, I would have to ask for lists from the following years, and the secretaries might find this suspicious; besides, I didn’t want to abuse their patience, already sorely tried.
I turned over the page with ‘1959’ inscribed on it in an elaborate calligraphic style. And there it was, finally, on the very first page. A shiver of relief and anticipation ran through me. I took in at a glance the data entered in the five columns, and became the possessor of the following knowledge:
– that in addition to the name by which she was known, a graceful but popular one, she also had another, much rarer: Victoria
– that she was born on the twenty-seventh of January, 1935
– that her thesis was entitled La femme émancipée dans l’oeuvre de Simone de Beauvoir
– that her supervisor had been Dr Magdalena Surowa-Léger
– that her final mark had been the highest and rarest: an A
A little dazed and slightly overwhelmed, I stared at this information and wondered what to do next. I had what I wanted; I had made progress. But this only whetted my appetite. I was still in the woods: my new knowledge gave rise to a whole new series of unanswered questions, and made me realise how much more there still was to find out. In fact, of the things I had discovered one alone was entirely satisfactory: her date of birth. I now knew that she was thirty-one years old, and that in three months she would be thirty-two. Everything else cried out for further
