‘Ton frère,’ she said.
Was this a curse? Like saying ‘fuck your sister’?
‘Mon frère?’ I said politely. ‘Je n’ai pas de frère.’ I haven’t got a brother.
‘Non, non! Ton frère, ton frère!’ she shouted.
Eventually, after a lot of screaming and looking for bits of paper and pen, we got there. There was a big supermarket called Tang Frères. It wasn’t really old Baco’s fault. Ton, Thon, Temps, Tang – it’s all the same to them.
It was immense. I mean, we have a covered market in the medina which is big, with maybe forty stalls, but this was five times that. Every spice, every noodle, every type of cabbage from any country east of India was there. There was half a mile of ready-cooked stuff, but it cost too much. Ground pork was the big thing at the meat counter, but though I’m not religious it’s just not something I could eat, so I got some chicken pieces, very cheap, piles of noodles for almost nothing, a bag of five-spice and some greens and a container of hot soup. I also got a two-litre Sprite and lugged it all back to Sarajevo.
I had a go at cooking it, but Baco pushed me to one side and took over. I took in some soup to Sandrine to keep her going. It smelled a bit fishy, but she said it was fine. Baco did a pretty good job on the chicken and threw in a few bits of onion and garlic from a plastic bag above the door. The noodles expanded to fill a huge pan. I offered her some of it in return for the cooking, and afterwards I felt full for the first time since I’d left home. Almost too full, in fact. It occurred to me that since arriving in France I hadn’t had a dump.
It wasn’t great, that little apartment in the Chinese tower. I slept on the floor because Sandrine needed the bed. She lent me the spare clothes from her bag to pad the linoleum tiles a bit, but it was hard on the hip bones. Through the night the others came and went, banging doors, flushing toilets, talking in loud voices.
On the third morning, I went out and walked up and down the cold open streets. God, I was missing Laila. And Farida. And Miss Aziz. I was even missing my parents and the room where I was always overlooked. I was wondering whether this whole venture had been such a good idea.
I went into some restaurants with paper lanterns and asked if they needed help. Anything. Washing up. Sweeping floors. They just frowned at me, then gabbled oriental stuff I didn’t understand. I could tell they didn’t want me because I didn’t have a flat face like them.
On one of those windy boulevards, near Tang Frères, I ran across our original doorstep girl, the one who looked like the painting of Despair. She’d got a dog and wasn’t looking quite so miserable. I told her Sandrine still seemed in a bad way and I was desperate for some work. ‘I don’t think the Chinese like me,’ I said.
‘No. They’re racists. Why don’t you look in the banlieue? It’s full of people like you.’
‘How do I get to the banlieue? Does it have a Métro station?’
‘It’s the big blocks outside the city. Go up Line Thirteen. Saint-Denis, all round there. Are you a Muslim?’
‘Yes. Are you?’
She smiled. ‘I don’t believe in God.’
‘Neither do I. But I’m still a Muslim.’
‘Go on, crazy boy. Line Thirteen.’
She was laughing and I asked her why. Thirteen, she told me, was the line of despair – from Châtillon–Montrouge in the south to the souks of Saint-Denis beyond the northern city limits. The trains had no drivers, but the platforms had doors to stop you throwing yourself on the track.
Well, thanks for the tip, Doorstep Girl. There were other things about the Métro I was learning fast, like don’t change lines at mainline stations, especially Montparnasse, unless you want an extra fifteen-minute walk.
When I got there, Saint-Denis looked like it was home to people they didn’t want inside the city walls. Arabs and Africans mostly. It wasn’t like the casbah at home where everyone looks the same, comes from the same tribe. Some people here had black skin, some had brown. What they had in common was they all looked cold. They all looked wretched. They didn’t come from the good places of Africa or the Middle East, anywhere you’d actually want to visit, but from the bits that had been put on the map by famine and beheadings.
I spent the night in some sort of artists’ studios in a modern block with a yellow door. A guy of about my age told me I could sleep there free if I got in before it was dark and hid. This worked fine, but it was cold in there and it didn’t open up again till nearly ten the next morning. There was a toilet on the floor below, so I could take a pee, but I hadn’t brought a toothbrush and still hadn’t had a dump.
It took me two days, going into almost every shop or builder’s yard, until I finally got lucky at a fast-chicken place called Paname Fried Poulet. The owner was an Algerian with a pockmarked face and they churned out fried nuggets in striped buckets to eat in their front room or – if you had any sense – to take away. I could be a kitchen help for eight euros an hour. He didn’t ask to see any ID. It was cash, the Métro was free so long as I could leap the barrier, so I told him yes, I’d start the next day. I just needed to go home and tell my girlfriend (I thought this sounded good, like I was settled or responsible). The Algerian, who said his name was Hasim, gave me an odd look, but said okay.
Four
Strasbourg–Saint-Denis
In the morning, Sandrine seemed better. I fixed her up with coffee, bread and jam; as an afterthought, I also left out some cheese and a banana. The night before, after she’d taken a long soak in the tub, we’d sat up talking for an hour or more; she told me she was trying to escape a violent husband and had plans to stay in England. I loaned her some clean clothes, including a sweater my mother had given me at Christmas – which I’d packed only for fear that she’d be offended to come across it still in my closet at home.
‘I’ll be back later,’ I said. ‘If you’re feeling all right, we’ll get you back to your apartment. There’s a key here if you need to go out before then. Read any of the books you like the look of. There’s a television, though I don’t know how it works.’
‘Thank you. You speak good French.’
‘I can speak it okay. My problem’s understanding it.’
Soon I’d forgotten about Sandrine. I took the Métro to École Militaire and cut through the rue Saint-Dominique to walk up the windy Avenue Rapp. Most people thought the Seventh arrondissement was dull, a lesser version of the Sixteenth across the river. But there were some fantastic art nouveau designs high up on the avenue’s big apartment buildings; there were backstreets with cheap hotels and small delis if you knew where to look. In a narrow clothes-mending shop a woman sat at a treadle in the window, staring out, as she might have done in the days of Victor Hugo. And for me there was the added attraction of the American Library in rue du Général Camou, where, bewildered and alone, I’d first found refuge among the accents of Boston and the Midwest.
Almost nothing had changed there. I took out a six-month subscription and had my photograph taken at the issue desk. The stacks were warm and full; they covered every discipline, but I always thought their specialty was the Franco-American story, the long unrequited passion of one nation for another. Here you could find all the early pilgrims, drunk on sex and fine à l’eau, the lovers of the racetrack at Enghien, the Train Bleu, the zinc bars and the clubs of Pigalle. Then came the wartime reminiscences of doctors and diplomats and soldiers, men like Ambassador Bullitt and Sumner Jackson of the American Hospital in Neuilly who’d helped save Paris from the Nazis. In the ten years since my last visit, there seemed to be a new generation of young men in horn-rims who had come to lay their tributes at the feet of the indifferent mistress.
The chairs in the reading room were still hard, and the ban on food and drink was still in force; the only change in the years was the patter of laptop keyboards. I photocopied ‘La nuit de décembre’ from the Collected Poems of Alfred de Musset and sat down to look at it. I expected it to be fey and feeble, something with which I might dare to tease Julian
when we next met; but at first glance it seemed to have a mournful music. Coming to the American Library when my real material lay elsewhere had been a frivolous thing to do; but I’d wanted to reconnect with my past before I pushed out into the unknown.
Although my student room in those distant days had been north of the river, near rue Charonne, ten minutes’ walk from Bastille, I’d spent my afternoons on the Left Bank, like many dreamy students, straining for the ghosts of Hemingway and Sylvia Beach. But I couldn’t afford the Closerie des Lilas and all I found near the Boulevard Saint-Michel were souvenir shops and doner kebabs; the terraces of the Saint-Germain cafés were full of foreigners drinking expensive coffee. I saved up for two weeks to go to the brasserie where the existentialists had met their publishers, but it gave me food poisoning with a forty-eight-hour fever.
My only regular human contact was with my landlady, a foul-mouthed Lyonnaise, from whom I picked up an accent that was almost French – a rare thing for an American, people told me. Comprehension was a different matter, and I struggled to understand the rapid talk, which seemed to have too few vowel sounds. With reading, there was no problem: the spelled-out words offered all the variations you’d expect. But in speech … How could they get through life, I wondered, making the same sound for teint and thym when the words had only one letter in common? Context, said our language tutor. But in conversation with Parisians I began to speak less fluently than I could; I allowed my accent less Lyon and more Boston in the hope they’d slow down and give me a chance of distinguishing between ont, ans, am, ent, ant, en, on, emps, ang and all the other ways of making the same sound.
After a few weeks, my loneliness became self-perpetuating and I began to make excuses. I did talk, it was true, to the teacher when it was my turn during evening language classes, but my attempts afterwards to lure the other students out to a café met with excuses of work and home. In silent libraries and in the seclusion of my rented room, I could fill the hours with study and research. There was then no online world in which to find virtual companionship; there were only books, by reading which I was being a good student, while the girl eager to make friends could be shut away.
On that first important evening at the American Library, I noticed a man sitting in the next row, reading a book while we waited for the event to begin. He looked up for a moment and glanced round the room over the top of his glasses, perhaps to rest his eyes. I met his gaze and half-smiled, as if I knew him, or had once been introduced. His eyes swept past me, then returned to his book, leaving me to wonder why I’d given this twitch of recognition.
The librarian introduced Julian Finch, who gave a résumé of the life of the main guest, an American travel writer, a fleshy woman in her fifties who looked unwilling to be there. Julian did his best to prompt some anecdotes or some reflections on what ‘travel writing’ really meant, but the writer was both conceited and unresponsive, and I had time to look again at the man whose eye had caught mine. He had untidy chestnut hair and a darker brown beard with some grey in it; he wore a fawn corduroy jacket and a pale blue shirt. He looked scruffy yet clean. I guessed he was in his early forties, twice my age at the time. In my mind, I had him down as a publisher – of poetry, perhaps. He lived with a difficult French wife and two small children somewhere in a place with a view of the river. Near Bastille. Even rue Charonne maybe.
Holding a glass of wine afterwards, I found myself next to him. It was easy enough to start talking. ‘Have you read …’, ‘Do you know …’ I lost him for a moment in the crowd, but lingered in the cold doorway as the library staff began to close the building.
‘Hannah, come and join us all at dinner,’ said Julian, including me in a group of eight people going to a restaurant.
No one questioned my right to be at the table. I was at least on nodding terms with two of the librarians – American women in their thirties, friends with one another. The conversation was conducted in English; with its flow of wine and sense of camaraderie (which came, I guess, from relief that the event, while hardly a success, was at least over and done with), it was the kind of noisy evening I’d envisaged being part of every night in Paris. The man whose eye I had caught was Russian and his name was Alexander (or perhaps ‘Aleksandr’, I thought, leaning across to hear what he was saying.) He was a playwright, though it seemed he also had something to do with the Russian embassy or its cultural department.
As we were all standing up to leave, I asked (with a daring fired by loneliness and a half-litre of red wine) if he had a card so I could be in touch about ‘some research’ I was doing. He had no card, but wrote a phone number on a piece of paper I tore from my notebook. A few days later, I began a month of afternoon visits to his apartment off Boulevard Barbès. He was separated from his wife in St Petersburg and had come to Paris to ‘shake up the pieces of my mind’, as he put it. He was restless and critical and always seemed amused by what he saw when we went together to a café or a cinema. He was able to take everything in his stride: there was no mishap or rudeness, no piece of good luck, that he couldn’t make part of his commentary on the world. It was two weeks before we kissed and another week before we slept together, which was when, in retrospect, I was immediately out of my depth. It hadn’t felt like that at the time, though; it had seemed then to be exactly right – tout à fait comme il faut, as though it had been preordained.
My previous experiences with men hadn’t amounted to much. In my freshman year, mostly to please Jasmine, my ever-encouraging room-mate, I’d gone out with a couple of boys in the year ahead. I enjoyed sex up to a point, but found it difficult to see why or how this led to anything like a ‘relationship’ when the boys’ interests were so different from mine. The following year I took up with Max, a young man I met at a charity fundraiser. We spent months together in bars and clubs and in the back bedroom of the apartment he shared with two other students. Our discussions sometimes lasted most of the night and I felt myself grow close to him; I couldn’t keep my eyes from smiling and feet from running towards him when we met after any sort of break. But Max seemed to back away from my attempts to give expression to this tenderness, and I began to think his deeper feeling was for other men. Or maybe that was an excuse. Maybe I just wasn’t pretty or alluring enough.
In a way, it was a relief. I could tell Jasmine that I’d tried. I hadn’t been priggish or anything like that; I’d ‘slept around’, a bit; I’d had my heart broken, half-broken anyway, by the last boy, Max. But this dating, pairing thing was a relic of some prehistoric necessity (food, warmth, money) coloured up by novelists anxious for a story; and as for sex, well, it was fine, more than fine sometimes, but it was just a moment, really, while the great world of the past – of injustice, of vanished, valuable lives – lay all undiscovered out there.
At four in the afternoon, reconnected with my twenty-one-year-old self, aching a little, bleeding a little, I left the American Library. On the way home, I stopped at the Carrefour and bought some food for dinner; then, in the hope that Sandrine would be up to joining me, I put in a bottle of wine as well.
When I let myself into the apartment, I heard voices from the sitting room, where I found Sandrine on the couch. Opposite, in an armchair, smoking a cigarette, was a young man with curly hair.
Sandrine stood up. ‘This is Tariq. I found my way back to the Olympiades and left him a note. I hope you don’t mind.’
‘No, that’s fine,’ I said. ‘Have some tea.’
‘Thank you. Tariq and I were sharing a room. On the twenty-first floor of Sarajevo. We met at … well, we met at a cargo terminal.’
I filled the kettle and laid out some cups on the kitchen counter. It was one thing looking after a young woman in distress – and I was intrigued by Sandrine; but this uncouth boy smoking in the apartment didn’t figure anywhere in the matrix of my obligations.
Over green tea, I found out that he’d run away from his home with no fixed idea of where he was going. His mother had been half French, the daughter of a F
rench colonial settler and an Algerian woman; as a result, he not only spoke good French but viewed Paris as some sort of lost motherland (not that he put like that: I had the impression that his first aim in the city was to find a girlfriend). He seemed shallow and self-obsessed, narcissistic almost, though there was some comedy in the way he described his work in a fast-food shop in Saint-Denis.
I was on the point of getting up and making it clear that he should be on his way, but he anticipated me.
‘Would it be all right if I slept on the floor of Sandrine’s room? Just for tonight? It’s so cold back in Sarajevo.’
‘You’d better ask Sandrine.’
‘Maybe one night, if that’s okay,’ said Sandrine. She looked me in the eye, woman to woman. ‘He’s no trouble.’
‘All right. One night. But he can’t smoke.’
‘Thank you,’ said Sandrine. ‘Tomorrow we’ll go back to the Olympiades.’
‘Oh God,’ said Tariq. ‘Baco and the shared toilet.’
That evening, I looked out the photocopy of ‘La nuit de décembre’ and for my own amusement began to write a translation. The language was mostly simple. It told a story of how, at each period of his life – schoolboy, lover, libertine and so on – the poet was visited by a figure in black who resembled him as a brother – ‘qui me resemblait comme un frère’. To begin with, it was charming, especially in the schoolboy scene, when the figure read the poet’s own book, resting his forehead on his hand, ‘thoughtful, with a sweet smile’. Later it was more menacing; so, for instance, when the poet was kneeling by the deathbed of his father, the dark figure came and sat beside him, his eyes red with weeping and ‘son glaive dans sa poitrine’.
I tried to go online to find a translation of ‘glaive’. I wondered if it was some religious symbol that was in the chest or ‘poitrine’ of the apparition. The Wi-Fi refused to give me a single saucer of connection, but I was intrigued enough to go to the storeroom and ask for Sandrine’s help.
Paris Echo Page 5
