Paris Echo, Page 3

  It was hard to talk against the roar of traffic.

  Two

  Gare du Nord

  I lowered my cases from the train on to the platform at the Gare du Nord. ‘I’m sorry … Pardon,’ I said to the people behind me, as I flipped the pack on to my back and set off to drag my luggage up the length of the Eurostar. The castors roared on the concrete.

  There was no ticket collector at the gate, but as I headed for the taxis I was met by a man who, like many others circling, looked North African. ‘Où allez-vous, Madame? Where you go? You want taxi?’

  ‘Yes, I do. Isn’t there a line?’

  ‘Where you go?’

  ‘La Butte-aux-Cailles.’ It sounded odd when spoken aloud; in English, it was ‘Quail Hill’.

  ‘Eighty euros.’

  ‘What?’ Did I look especially gullible or was it just that I was female?

  ‘See here.’ The man produced a book of tables that looked official, like logarithms. ‘Is good price. Look.’ He jabbed a column. ‘C’est bon.’

  By now we were outside the station, where the taxi line doubled back beneath a glass-roofed awning.

  ‘Non, merci,’ I said. ‘J’attendrai un vrai taxi. I’ll get a real cab.’

  There was some muttering among the men, but they didn’t linger, seeing other confused travellers coming their way.

  ‘Salope,’ said one.

  ‘And fuck you, too,’ I said, at the back of the line but shielded from the hustlers by a later arrival. I felt like smacking a cigarette from its pack and had almost got as far as opening my bag before I remembered that after years of struggle I’d quit six months before. It was raining lightly on the roof of the shelter.

  The next North African was a licensed driver, who loaded my bags into the trunk of his Renault and waved away my apologies for how heavy they were. I sat back and sighed. Allez.

  He swept me down boulevards of obscure character – Magenta, Beaumarchais, L’Hopital, with travel agencies, peeling plane trees, refrigerator showrooms, offices, more travel agencies … What was there so urgent to escape? And could the journey really be this far? I’d always thought of Paris as compact within its various gates or portes. At last we came to somewhere I’d heard of, the Place d’Italie, after which the satnav took us down streets that seemed unfamiliar.

  I saw a name, the rue de l’Espérance, and thought it was an omen. ‘Dear Mom and Dad, I am living off Good Hope Street in Quail Hill.’ It sounded like a tony address in Boston; perhaps I’d be invited to a dinner given by the Lowells so I could meet the Cabots from next door.

  There was something strange about the narrow street where I was let out. The buildings were not on the usual Haussmann design of grand but repeatable efficiency; there were low stuccoed houses with iron railings in front. The street itself had the bare trees and flat light of an Utrillo painting; and, as in the Montmartre townscapes of Utrillo, there was no one there.

  The key was with the manageress at the laverie-pressing on the corner. A few minutes later, I’d hauled my bags to the door and let myself in. The apartment was on the first floor and it didn’t take long to get the feel of it. The living room or salon at the front had a small balcony; a hallway opened on a bedroom to the left with an internal bathroom. At the end of the hall was a tiny kitchen and a second bedroom, large enough only for a single bed and a nightstand. The original parquet was intact throughout the apartment under thin rugs; the main rooms were bigger than they’d looked in the e-mail attachment, but the furniture was cheaper and more worn. It was no problem; some flowers and a couple of woollen throws would fix it.

  After moving round the lamps and chairs, I had the salon set up as a place where I could work. The dining table was big enough to hold books, a laptop, city maps and papers. I wasn’t planning any dinner parties, so I could push it up against the wall. In the kitchen I found some UHT milk, but there was nothing else in the refrigerator. On a shelf in a cupboard were some half-used packets of pasta, folded over and held by elastic bands, and some ginseng powder capsules.

  In the hall, by the Wi-Fi router, there was a child’s exercise book with details of local services. The nearest supermarket was three blocks away, which would do for coffee, bread and milk for the morning; the notes recommended several better shops, but they could wait. And as for dinner … It was still only a little after six, but I was hungry – and what was the point of Paris if you couldn’t just wander into the street and find somewhere? I grabbed a book to read and, as I was getting ready to leave, remembered my parents and my brother Warren, who was currently visiting with them. I managed to send an e-mail on my baffling new phone, the loan of which had been my department’s farewell gift. The Wi-Fi seemed erratic, but it lasted long enough for me to hear the whoosh as the message left. ‘Arrived. All good. More later. H. x’

  As I was putting the phone way, it pinged. Surely my parents couldn’t have answered so quickly? No; but the connection had lasted long enough to download three mails. Two were junk and the third one read:

  ‘Hi Hannah, hope this finds you. I heard from Nathalie at UCL that you were bound for Paris, maybe even here by now. I’m still labouring over the Romantics (though Sylvie and I parted company some time back) and would love to meet up one day if your work allows. Best wishes, Julian F. x’

  Julian Finch was an Englishman I’d met during my first visit to Paris, when I attended some of the lectures in a literature course he taught. His specialities were French Romanticism and New Wave cinema (his course on Truffaut and Les 400 Coups was his big draw with the students). It would be interesting to see how he was getting along without the large Passy apartment that had belonged, I was pretty certain, to Sylvie.

  ‘Of course,’ I replied. ‘Just arrived. Maybe one day next week. H.’

  Before I could gather my things, Julian had e-mailed back, asking for my cell number. A minute later, my phone rang.

  ‘I don’t suppose by any remote chance you’re free tonight?’

  I looked again at my watch. ‘Well, I guess I could be.’ What was the point in pretending?

  ‘I live off the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. Bit of a comedown from the rue des Marronniers, I know. If you go to the Métro Strasbourg–Saint-Denis and start walking, there’s a bar on the right about five minutes up called the Mauri Sept. Could you make it by eight?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. The Morissette? Like Alanis?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Never mind. See you there.’

  The reason I’d first come across Julian ten years earlier – the reason I’d been in Paris at all – was that I’d applied for a junior-year program there. I was a history major and most people going on the course were language students, but there were two places reserved for non-linguists; the idea was that as well as some compulsory classes there would be time to research your own project. My knowledge of France at the time was limited to a half-semester’s work on the Algerian War of 1954-62 – in which the Algerians had defeated their French colonial masters in a conflict of insane savagery – and an essay on Léon Blum’s socialist Popular Front in 1936. I doubted that my high-school French would be good enough, and was excited when my application was accepted.

  I went on a crash course in spoken French in Boston in the summer and waved goodbye to my parents in September with a breezy ‘au revoir’. From Paris I sent long letters home that my mother and father, so they said, were delighted to receive. But did it ever worry them that I seemed to have time to write at such length? Shouldn’t I have been going to parties and exhibitions, or picnics on the Seine? Maybe my parents didn’t think like that; neither of them, for all their European roots, had ever left the United States.

  The truth is that, however much I may have been struck by Paris and its beauty, by its pavement cafés and its trees and bridges, by its cathedral floating on the stream and all the other charms to which no sane person could fail to respond a little, I was lonely. The language students stuck together and I found them childi
sh. I sometimes visited a boy from England who had a room in an old woman’s flat off the Avenue de la Grande Armée; but it was not enough to take away the sense of isolation. And as for making friends with any Parisians, the language seemed too great an obstacle. It was one thing being able to make myself understood in my faulty French, quite another to follow a Parisian conversation in a noisy bar.

  Everything changed one evening at the American Library. Julian Finch had alerted us all to the existence of this excellent refuge, well stocked and all but free to students, and he himself was that night chairing an event, which, having nothing better to do, I’d decided to go along to. There I met a man who put an end to my sense of isolation, but at a cost that ten years later I was still paying. For a few months, my letters home became euphoric. And then they stopped.

  When I finally returned home that July, I’d lost almost twenty pounds in weight and my parents were shocked by the sight of me. Reluctantly, I agreed to a course of weekly visits to Dr Pavin, a psychotherapist, though she seemed to think my problem had its roots in childhood. No sympathy from my mother or arm round the shoulder from my father could persuade me to confide in them – though at the beginning of my senior year, back in college, I did sit up one night talking with my room-mate and best friend, Jasmine Mendel. Even with Jasmine, I was unable to describe the extent of my unhappiness. There was nothing in my own experience or in my knowledge of the lives of others with which to compare it; so I thought it best to lock it all away and try to think of other things. My mother told me I seemed ‘cold’, and I found it impossible to convince her that when you’ve found yourself so far out of your depth you cling to certainties, things you know you can deal with. And you keep clinging for as long as it takes.

  During all that time in Paris – the lonely part and the ecstatic later days – Julian had been a background presence. To some, not me, he was more than that. He was not what you’d call handsome and he had this sort of British reserve, but I think many of the female students were a little in love with him. It happens. He was both professional and happily married, or so we thought, to a Frenchwoman called Sylvie, who made the occasional appearance at functions or readings, looking friendly in a bored sort of way, smoking and checking her phone for messages. The male students also liked him because as well as movies he sometimes talked about soccer (which he called ‘football’) and he didn’t condescend to them.

  In the course of the year, Julian quite often had lunch with a group of students at a café on the Boulevard Raspail. He always ordered a pitcher of Côtes du Rhône for us all to share, though I didn’t drink wine in the middle of the day; and almost every time, I remembered, he got a beer, a demi pression, then the eggs mayonnaise with anchovy. The only time we’d ever met à deux was when we had dinner after seeing a student play near the Bourse and I embarrassed myself by confusing ‘onglet’, a cut of steak I’d never heard of, with the identically pronounced ‘anglais’. He teased me about being so serious; he called me ‘Mrs Jellyby’ after a character in Dickens who was obsessed by helping the African poor, and once wondered out loud if I was a born-again Christian.

  His sense of humour wasn’t the same as mine, but I could see he meant no harm and I liked the way he dealt with his students. Perhaps I also sensed something strained or unhappy in him then – a sense that the large apartment in the Sixteenth, the glamorous wife and the offer of publication of his book were not as satisfying to him as others presumed. But probably I’m imagining that, because at the age of twenty-one I’m afraid I was too preoccupied by my own feelings to wonder about people older and more secure than I was.

  Dinner with Julian, I decided as I took a bath and washed my hair, would help ease me back into Parisian life. I chose a black wool dress that showed I’d made an effort. I wore it with boots, a leather flying jacket and a silvery costume necklace. For a moment I worried that it all looked a bit much, like a rock star attempting a comeback, but the outfit made me feel safe.

  I was early at the station, so I walked up and down the noisy main road to kill some time. At the junction with the Boulevard de Strasbourg, middle-aged Chinese women with shopping bags and parkas were leaning against the rail in pairs, catching the eye of solitary men. It was a strange version of domesticity: come home and pay me for sex, but not till you’ve helped unpack the shopping.

  Going up the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, I found it hard not to smile at how different it was from the smooth stone expanses of the Sixteenth, where Julian’s married home had been. On the rolled-down metal blinds of the shopfronts were the solid blocks of graffiti that had shocked me when I’d first seen them as a child on the New York subway. This was an old street that seemed to have lost itself without finding a new identity; its life was only in the people outside the bars, smoking cigarettes. I passed several such places, heard music, but couldn’t find a bar called the Morissette. I had by now been walking for ten minutes so it was clear I’d gone past it. Retracing my steps, I came eventually to the red awning of Le Mauri 7.

  The Morissette, the Mauri Sept … Of course. Typical of my problems with French. Inside, everyone seemed to be twenty-three years old and most were playing table football. Julian was sitting near the door. When he had returned with drinks, I apologised for being late and explained my confusion over the name of the bar.

  ‘Alanis Morissette was a big thing back in ninety-six, the year I was last here,’ I said. ‘We all listened to that record “Jagged Little Pill” a hundred times.’

  ‘I had you down as more of a Joni Mitchell type,’ said Julian, clinking his beer glass against mine.

  ‘I liked her too. They know how to pour their hearts out, those Canadian girls. So you live nearby these days?’

  ‘Yes. In a small street just up there. It’s what in London they call a mews. It’s where they used to keep horses. I live above a brasserie. I originally had my eye on a place in the Passage du Désir, just up the road, but the gates into it were closed when I came and I never got to see it.’

  ‘So your way into the passage of desire was barred?’

  ‘Story of my life.’

  I didn’t mind providing the feed. I knew Julian had always thought of me as a humourless social campaigner, and I liked it that he had me slightly wrong; it gave me some extra protection.

  ‘And what exactly is your project in Paris this time?’ he said.

  I felt myself pushing my hand back through my hair as I exhaled. ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘There’s a short version?’

  ‘Yes. I’m here to research the experience of women in Paris under the German Occupation, nineteen-forty to forty-four. It’ll make a chapter in a book my head of department, Professor Putnam, is putting together.’

  ‘It’s a fascinating period. But someone told me you’d given up university after your doctorate? I thought that was a shame.’

  ‘I did for a time. I went to work in Africa for two years on an AIDS education program. When I got home I was a little lost. My old friend Jasmine Mendel suggested I apply for a position as a postdoc. The department had some money for once.’

  I felt the short version of my life had gone on long enough. ‘And what about you?’ I said. ‘Are you still in the nineteenth century?’

  ‘Yes. I’m half way through a biography of Alfred de Musset for an English publisher. You know who I mean?’

  ‘A Romantic, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. Famously George Sand’s lover. He wrote plays, a memoir and a lot of poetry. Not a front-rank poet, I suppose, but an interesting one.’

  ‘He wasn’t the guy with a pet lobster on a lead?’

  ‘No. That was Gérard de Nerval.’

  ‘And there are publishers in London who’ll take a book on a not-front-rank nineteenth-century French poet?’

  ‘Luckily there’s one. I’m putting quite a lot of stress on the autoscopy angle.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Autoscopy. It’s when you have the sense of being outside yourself a
nd seeing yourself as another person. Auto, self, scope, vision. De Musset had it a lot.’

  ‘As a poetic device or a nervous symptom?’

  ‘That’s the question. Both, I think. But it’s not the doppelgänger thing, it’s more interesting. Sometimes he found himself walking towards himself in the Tuileries.’

  ‘That sounds good.’

  ‘Yes. He made it very sad. In his best poem, “La nuit de décembre”, he describes this person who’s dogged him all his life, in different cities, at different ages.’

  ‘And who is it?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you. You’ll have to read the poem for yourself.’

  I stood up to go to the bar. ‘You were always good at tantalising your pupils. At tricking us into reading more.’

  ‘I never really had a gift for teaching, I’m afraid,’ said Julian. ‘I always looked on it as a nuisance that took time away from my own work.’

  Returning with the drinks, I said, ‘I was sorry to hear about Sylvie. What happened?’

  ‘God, you’re quick off the mark. Not even waiting till dinner.’

  ‘I didn’t know there was a set time for personal questions.’

  ‘Between the main course and the cheese, I think,’ said Julian.

  ‘You used to like me being frank. Or “American”, as you called it.’

  ‘I like your honesty. The way you admitted to being free tonight.’

  ‘A Frenchwoman wouldn’t do that?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry if I seemed pushy. I’ve become rather impulsive, living on my own. But I knew you’d be—’

  ‘Hungry?’ I said, putting down my beer glass.

  Two hours later, when I was walking home from Tolbiac station, a little flushed by wine, I saw a figure slumped on a step at the end of my street. It didn’t look like a regular doorway sleeper, a clochard; in any case, the Butte-aux-Cailles was not really hobo country and this was not a bearded man but a young woman, in dirty but once-good clothes.

  ‘Are you okay?’