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out.
    “You should wait here in the hall until the storm ends. My husband doesn’t know who you are.”
    She squeezed my hand.
    “If Francis ever comes back, you’ll let me know right away—promise?”
    She switched on the hall light and put her key in the lock. She glanced back at me one last time. She went in and I heard her call out in a shaky voice, “Hi, Gil.”
    The other kept silent. The door shut behind her. Before the hall light went out, I just had time to notice their mailbox, hanging on the corridor wall among the others. On it, in ornate red letters, were the words:
    Nicole
and
Gil
Mime     Poet
    The sound of furniture falling over. Someone slammed against the door. Nicole’s voice:
    “Leave me alone …”
    It sounded as if she was struggling. The other was still silent. She let out a muffled cry, as if he was strangling her. I thought of intervening, but instead I stood frozen in the dark, under the entryway. The rain had already formed a puddle on the sidewalk in front of me.
    She cried out, “Leave me alone!” louder this time. I was about to knock on the door when the sliver of light went out. After a moment, the creaking of bedsprings. Then sighs and Nicole’s husky voice saying again, “Leave me alone …”
    It kept raining while she emitted staccato whimpers and I heard the creak of the bedsprings. Later, the rain was no more than a kind of spittle.
    I was about to walk out the entrance door when the hall light went on behind me. They were both in the hallway and he was carrying his suitcase in his hand. His left arm was around Nicole’s shoulder. They walked by and she pretended not to know me. But at the corner she looked back and gave me a brief wave.

One sunny afternoon in May, Jansen had surprised me at my labors. I’d told him about Nicole and he’d listened, looking distracted.
    “She’s a nice girl,” he’d said, “but I’m old enough to be her father …”
    He didn’t entirely get what it was her husband did for a living and, remembering the evening when he’d seen him slap Nicole in the restaurant, he again expressed surprise that a mime could be so violent. Personally, he imagined mimes as having very slow, gentle movements.
    We’d gone out together and had barely taken a few steps when I recognized the silhouette stationed at the corner of the walled street that bisects the graveyard: Gil the Mime. He was wearing a black jacket and black trousers, with an open-necked white shirt whose wide collar covered his lapels.
    “Well, well … There’s a familiar face,” Jansen muttered to me.
    He waited for us to walk by him, arms folded. We continued down the opposite sidewalk and pretended not to notice him. He crossed the street and planted himself right in our path, legs slightly parted. He crossed his arms again.
    “Think it’s going to come to blows?” Jansen asked me.
    We walked up to where he was standing and he blocked our way, hopping from foot to foot like a boxer about to throw a punch. I shoved him aside. His left hand landed on my cheek as if by reflex.
    “Come along,” Jansen said to me.
    And he led me away by the arm. The other man turned toward Jansen:
    “Hey, you! Shutterbug! What’s your hurry?”
    His voice had the metallic timbre and overly stressed diction of certain members of the Comédie Française. Nicole had told me he was also an actor and that he’d recorded himself on the soundtrack to his show, the last excerpt: a long passage from Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi . He was quite attached to it—apparently, it was the purple passage and crowning touch of his act.
    We kept walking toward Place Denfert-Rochereau. I looked back. In the distance, beneath the sun, I could make out only his black suit and brown hair. Was it because of the graveyard’s proximity? There was something lugubrious about his silhouette.
    “Is he following us?” Jansen asked.
    “Yes.”
    Then he told me that twenty years earlier, on the day when he was caught