Clouds Over Paris by Felix Hartlaub

Author:Felix Hartlaub
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2022-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Pleasure boat

A dull morning, the sky stuffed full of sluggish clouds, beginning just above the roof of the admiralty building. The Sacré-Cœur a smoking cone behind curtains of rain, which slowly close in around it. Any minute now the first drops will break upon the leaves of the trees in the Tuileries, hard and grey from the hot, airless night which waited in vain for the storm.

Faint twittering and tootling floats across the water, from underneath the bridge. Half-obscured by the arch, hard by the retaining wall, a little pleasure steamer full of soldiers in grey; an approaching train of barges has to be let past. A grey awning has been stretched across the upper deck, a narrow funnel protruding only a couple of hand’s widths above. The soldiers sit knee to knee, hands on thighs; one cannot hear any conversation, their faces trained on the embankment wall. The stone seems soft, spongy; huge iron rings have been driven into it; the mouth of an égout, cemented round, gushes silently. Above, the pot-bellied posts along the balustrade and the sky bedecked with plane-tree pods. – In the stern, tightly framed by the braid of NCOs, a few nurses, with hunched backs. A stewardess in white linen, apparently selling cigarettes, fights her way through the abattis of legs and boots. A large sailor’s hat with a red bobble sits perched at an angle atop her dark blond mane of hair. Her slim, nimble waist, her protruding slender hips are the only things to draw the eye. An adolescent crew in blue sailor suits practise gymnastics along the handrail; the decks are too crowded.

Finally, one spots the band. Four pallid hired civilians on rickety garden chairs, tucked away in a cramped corner between the bridge and the railings, a saxophone player among them. The long golden-brown toe of his boot, which sticks out over the deck, keeps time. He looks past his large nose at the people leaning towards him across the railings on the bridge. His lean jaw is mercilessly clean-shaven, the pale, firm, bulging cheeks above working tirelessly. – The steamer has a boat in tow, the back of which lies deep in the water under the weight of three motionless French policemen.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.