Paris On Air

by Oliver Gee

  I also figured there was more to Europe than just Sweden, of course, and it was time to move on after four years. But I felt a tinge of regret leaving, as it seemed I’d made a name for myself in my last week in Sweden. I’d been in the far north of the country filming a YouTube video about the unusual way some Swedes say the word yes. Instead of saying “ja” (pronounced ‘yah’) like the rest of the Swedes, they do a sharp intake of breath as if they were shocked or surprised. We made a 90-second video where I walked around asking locals about this bamboozling sound. It turned out it wasn’t just me who found it amusing. The video went viral on YouTube. It had millions of hits in just days, and the story made headlines around the world. On the day I left Sweden, our little story was on the front cover of the biggest newspapers in the country. We’d tapped into something - a little language oddity - and people around the globe were curious about it. Sure, it was a silly story, but it made a big splash, and it seemed like a fitting bookend to my time in Sweden. As I boarded the flight for Paris, I was getting messages from Swedish media for my thoughts on this strange phenomenon. But I had to say no (as much as I’d have liked to have given a sharp intake of breath, instead). Yes, I was getting on a flight to Paris, a one-way flight, and it was time to move on to the next challenge. There’d be no radio or TV interviews because I wasn’t looking back. And there was no way to do a call from the flight either, so it was impossible anyway. Of course, I felt a regret too. When anything goes viral like that, there’s often a ripple effect that you can potentially surf into the sunset. But there was no way I could ride that particular wave in France: I’d have to try and start new ones.

  Yes, I was leaving Sweden and perhaps I’d never come back. That’s what I thought. How wrong I was. But that’s for later in the book.

  I arrived in Paris for good in late January, 2015. My first week in Paris didn’t seem real. I was so focused on the Charlie Hebdo attack that I didn’t stop to think. But now it was different. I got off the plane at the Charles de Gaulle airport and I was hungry. Hungry for the food, the language, the people. Hungry to figure out France, and whether Paris was as incredible as everyone seemed to think. And I was curious to investigate the culture, observe the idiosyncrasies of the French, and marvel at the oddities of their language.

  But, as I strode through the arrival hall at the Charles de Gaulle airport, all I could think of was the telephone booths. Real, old-fashioned phone boxes. The kind I hadn’t seen in years, the kind that had been stripped from the streets of tech-savvy Sweden long ago. Stockholm is so advanced that even the homeless people accept payments by credit card (seriously). But in Paris there were still functional phone booths at the international airport. I don’t know why it made such an impression on me, but those phone boxes stuck in my mind. I suppose it kind of felt like I was stepping back in time. I surveyed the rest of the grotty and unimpressive airport, which is regularly ranked among the worst in the world. And I thought, how on earth can a world capital like Paris be giving its visitors such a lacklustre first impression? I splurged on a taxi to my new home, understanding now why a friend in Sweden had warned me to take cash - the taxi drivers didn’t accept card payments. And mine didn’t seem to accept the use of online maps either: he got us lost while trying to use a map book to navigate central Paris. Was he hustling me? Was he taking me the long way? At the time, I didn’t know where we were going either - I didn’t have any internet on my phone - and I was no savvier than any of the thousands of tourists taking similar trips each day.

  The cab driver pulled up on my new street, rue Greneta, and parked on the kerb outside my new front door. Immediately, all my concerns about “old-fashioned Paris” were dashed away when I took in that entrance. I was gobsmacked. What a doorway! The kind of doorway that might make a Paris Instagrammer stop in their tracks. It was enormous, wide and tall enough to let through horses and carriages once upon a time. The double doors were set in an impressive stone archway that stretched up to the top of the next floor. The door had an inbuilt window, behind which the gardienne (building manager) lived. The wooden doors looked far too heavy to open, but a closer inspection revealed a normal-sized door hidden within. To the side of the doors were mysterious stone ornaments that I’d later learn were in place to stop wagon wheels from damaging the frame. I stood there gaping at the building as the taxi driver pulled away. And just as my jaw finally closed, it was set to drop again. The landlady, a young French woman, opened the door and revealed the courtyard.

  As lovely as the Frenchwoman was (and she was indeed a lovely Frenchwoman), it was the courtyard that stopped me in my tracks for the second time in a row. It looked like a rainforest. The alleyway, paved with huge, uneven cobblestones, was open to the early evening skies above. It was lined on both sides with a wild array of greenery, trees several metres tall, and the windowsills on each side were crowded with plants and vines. And there at the end of the alley, stretching seven floors high, was the building I was to call home for the next two years.

  The landlady pointed to the sloping grey roof at the top, which had two windows facing in our direction, and said it was my apartment. She looked me up and down. I had a suitcase in each hand, my whole life.

  “Is that all?” she asked, in English, thank God. I nodded. “You know there’s no elevator, right?”

  Yep, I smiled, and lifted both suitcases in one go. We crossed the courtyard and got to the winding, polished wooden staircase. The landlady hit the stairs with gusto, leaving me lagging behind with my heavy luggage. And I can tell you, even with the adrenaline that was pumping through my veins from this new chapter in my life, I didn’t make it up the stairs without a few pit stops. Who’d have thought climbing seven flights of stairs could be such a chore?

  But when I finally made it to the top, where the landlady was waiting for me with an open door, my weary arms and tired legs were soon a distant memory. I stepped into the apartment; and while it was tiny and bare, it was also incredible.

  The front door led into a living room with a sofa and a surprisingly big desk by a narrow window. It looked over Paris to the west. Behind a curtain was a separate kitchen, minuscule, but with a fridge, a sink, a stove plate, and big windows facing the north.

  “Look, that’s Sacré-Coeur in the distance,” the landlady said, pointing towards Montmartre across the rooftops. “Not a bad view for while you’re making your morning coffee, non?”

  The sun was setting and I watched as the lights flicked on across the city.

  “Not bad at all,” I responded, amazed that I could count the sight of such a monument among my daily views.

  She continued the tour, leading me into the bedroom. It too was tiny, but arranged in such a way to make it seem spacious. The bed was a futon, positioned under the slant of the ceiling. Above the bed was another window, and the woman heaved it open, a tricky task considering it was built into the sloping roof. This meant you had to lift the whole weight of the window, then use the latch to prop it open. But the effort was worth it - Paris to the south stretched out before me in the crisp January evening, and it was glorious. Our building appeared to be a little higher than all the other ones, so we had a bird’s eye view of the city. And thanks to the long tree-lined courtyard below us, there was a good distance before the nearest block of flats, which was much smaller than ours. All this added a superb effect of openness, perhaps a trick of depth perception; meaning it felt like we were outside of Paris and looking in on it. And the rooftops - of which we could see hundreds - were a beautiful mix of grey zinc sheeting and terracotta tiles, adorned with the same red chimney pots, and laid out all higgledy piggledy to the horizon. I’d already seen this view, of course. It was the one from the photo. But that picture hadn’t done it justice. I could see for miles. The fresh air was a little too fresh for the landlady, who closed the window and brought me back to reality.

  The tour wasn’t finished. Partly hidden by some big wooden saloon doors wa
s my new bathroom, complete with a bath (also under the slanted roof), a handheld shower head, and a sink. Behind another closed door was a toilet. By my count, this was a five-room apartment. The magic of Paris indeed.

  “This seems a lot bigger than 20 metres squared,” I said.

  “Oui, they don’t include the space under the slanted ceiling,” she responded. “So technically, your whole bed is in a kind of negative space. It isn’t counted. Neither is the bathroom.”

  She explained to me that most apartment blocks in Paris had tiny rooms like this on the top floor. They’re called “chambres de bonnes”, or maid’s quarters, and were once homes for the servants of the wealthier residents below. Now they’re mostly used by students or people looking to save a few euros on accommodation. So, for a young man like me who was keen to live centrally, it made perfect sense to be living in a chambre de bonne.

  I was learning so much, but as pleasant as the conversation was, it wasn’t long before I got my first taste of French admin.

  “Alors, we have to go through the condition of everything in the apartment,” said the landlady.

  Sure, I agreed, that sounded reasonable. What I didn’t realize was that she literally meant we had to go through everything. Everything! We spent the next hour walking around the apartment and checking the condition of every wall, window, and piece of furniture. We both had to write bon état (“in good condition”) as every last item in the home was reviewed. If there was a scratch on the wall or a crack in the window we had to both write “mauvais état”. I thought it was a joke. I suggested we simply agree on the things that weren’t in good condition, but that didn’t fly.

  “Non, this is just how we do it in France,” she shrugged.

  Turns out I’d be hearing that one again, and again, and again during my first months in Paris. The French have their own way of doing things, and if that involves plenty of paperwork, then all the better. The apartment papers were just the same: two full copies, handwritten, and meticulously cross checked. When the documents were all finally signed, there was a mood shift and the landlady brightened up. We got to chatting again. She explained that her parents had used the apartment as a backup home, but had taken to renting it out in recent years. She told me that every tenant so far had been Japanese, all of whom had liked the practical use of space. She said, with a worried smile, that I was by far the tallest tenant, too, adding that she hoped I didn’t find it too small. I’m six foot three, and she had gauged it pretty well. The apartment was way too small for me. Especially the shower, which I ended up using while in a Gollum-like crouch.

  She glanced at her watch, noticed that the evening had truly set in, and said it was time for her to leave. She handed over the keys.

  “One piece of advice,” she said from the doorway. “This place gets freezing cold in winter and boiling hot in the summer. You’re right under the rooftops, so there’s not much you can do to fight the elements. Just use some extra blankets in the winter and get a fan for summer. It’s like that with all the chambres de bonnes… you’ll get used to it. Oh, and you’ll get used to the stairs too. It gets easier after a while.”

  She went to shut the door.

  “Oh, and I forgot to mention. There’s a communal toilet just outside of your door, but no one uses it. Most apartments have their own toilets nowadays, including yours. But check it out when you have a second, you can see the Eiffel Tower from the window.”

  I played it cool and smiled as we said our au revoirs. But as soon as I heard her footsteps fade down the stairs, I threw open the front door, rushed into the tiny bathroom, stretched myself over the toilet and pressed my face up against the window. And as promised, there she was. The Iron Lady, La Tour Eiffel - granted, quite far away - but right outside my window, with nothing blocking the view. Before I even had time to take it all in, the tower lit up in sparkling lights, as it does for the first five minutes of every evening hour. I suppose it would have been quite a romantic moment, but I was all alone. And I was leaning over a particularly unkempt communal toilet. But I was in Paris and I could feel the magic in the air.

  1.4 Rue Montorgueil

  Rue Montorgueil is among the best streets in Paris and the hardest one to spell. Right from the beginning, I thought it was the epitome of Paris. The road was lively in the morning as the fishmongers and grocers set up their stalls. The cafe terraces were crowded during the day and the bars were buzzing at night. It was unique, it was interesting, and it was a stone’s throw from my front door. I spent those first few weeks much like a nervous tourist might. I often looked into the restaurants, but felt too self-conscious to take up a full table to myself. I picked a few spots that seemed to work for lone diners and favoured them to begin with. I still wasn’t even remotely confident speaking French and I ended up eating a lot of takeaway food.

  But while I didn’t like eating alone, I had no problems exploring alone. Rue Montorgueil was fantastic itself, but the whole quartier was rich in history that was in plain sight and still unfolding each day. Not long after I moved into the area, renovation workers found several mass graves under the local Monoprix supermarket. They uncovered the skeletons of 200 people, presumably the victims of a disease or catastrophe. After all, the supermarket was built on the site of a 13th century hospital. But what was strangest of all for me was how no one seemed to care. The supermarket didn’t even close down, and Parisians continued their daily shopping while archaeologists excavated the site below. My own street had once housed an 800-year-old hospital. And likely there had been buildings there before it, maybe twice as old. And there I was, an Australian man in his twenties, trying to make sense of it all.

  Flanking the supermarket, at the eastern end of rue Greneta was rue Saint-Denis, a road that stretched from the river Seine towards Montmartre. The street bisected mine amid a handful of sex shops, which sold porn DVDs with dusty covers, and all manner of sex toys. But I didn’t know this at the time - if I was too nervous to walk into a restaurant, you can bet your last euro that I wasn’t browsing around in sex shops. I checked them out much later in a drunken and giggly haze with the woman who’d one day become my wife. But I’m getting ahead of myself again. The sex shops were hard to miss: they were lit up in garish neon, often with ageing strippers on the doorstep, smoking cigarettes and beckoning to the passersby. Or maybe they were prostitutes. Hell, maybe they were neither. I never stopped to find out. But those neon lights caught my attention. There was nothing like this in Sweden, and absolutely not in the part of Australia where I’d grown up either. I felt like I was at the centre of the universe.

  And if all this wasn’t enough, the district boasted exquisite covered passages from the 19th century, built so Parisians could go shopping without getting their feet muddy. The closest one to me was the remarkable Passage du Grand Cerf, built in 1825. Its glass ceiling three floors above let the sun sparkle down onto a curious collection of shops selling everything from jewellery to antique furniture. This was the kind of elegant attraction that people crossed the world to see - and for me it was just a shortcut to the Metro.

  Yes, it was safe to say that I loved my new quartier, but not everything was running as smoothly back at the apartment. Several weeks into my stay I still had no internet. I had bought a new internet box, but it didn’t work. And I found out pretty quickly that the only thing harder than living without internet in France is trying to get internet installed in Paris. Getting online was the first of my many bang-your-head-against-the-wall forays into getting anything done in France. And it wasn’t a problem limited to just my apartment. On one of those early days, when ducking out to the shops, I met my neighbour on the top floor for the first time. He was a young guy, curly brown hair, and was smoking a cigarette by the communal window at the top of the stairs.

  “Salut, mec,” he said with a broad grin.

  I’d never heard the word mec before but I didn’t want to betray my lack of Fre
nch know-how this early in the relationship. He introduced himself as Stephane, a student who’d come to Paris from the city of Grenoble in the French Alps, and he had just moved in too. He asked if I’d managed to get internet up here on the top floor. I told him I hadn’t, but must have said so in such diabolical French that he decided we’d continue in English.

  “I also ‘ave no weefee, wino,” he said. I figured weefee meant wifi, but it would be months before I figured what he meant by wino. “But eef you get weefee, maybe you geev me your weefee password and we share?” he said with a wink.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Ah, merci,” he said, putting out his cigarette in an ashtray that apparently lived on the corridor’s windowsill. He turned to leave. “A plus, mec.”

  A few thoughts were going through my head as I walked down the 118 stairs (I’d counted them by now). First, why did he keep calling me mec, and what did it mean? Second, it was clear that both Stephane and I were rubbish at each other’s language. Perhaps we could teach each other, I thought. And third, how was I going to solve this blasted internet problem?

  1.5 The raw bacon

  Unlike the Stockholm headquarters, our Paris office in the 19th arrondissement was very petite indeed. It was just a startup at this point, with only one other employee, the British editor who considered it his duty to Frenchify me as quickly as possible.

  “You look like a Swede, mate, what’s going on with that haircut? What’s that jacket? You’re in old Europe now,” he told me when we first met in January. “And have you got a French girlfriend yet? It’s part of the contract, you know?”

  The editor wasn’t thrilled by my lack of French and figured a French girlfriend would be the quickest fix. But there weren’t any French girls in our office (and our office had no space for them, anyway). We worked in a room with glass walls, boxed off from an architecture firm that occupied the whole floor. As I walked to my desk each morning, the architects would raise an eyebrow and examine me. These architects would turn out to be my main source of understanding the French in those early days. But from the beginning, they were the ones who were observing me, as if I were some Australian lizard, trapped from 9 to 6 every day in their glass terrarium. And they didn’t seem pleased with their catch either. Their first complaint against me came within days of my starting the job, and my editor was the messenger.