Paris On Air

by Oliver Gee

He knocked on my door ten minutes later and came inside, impressed by the view from the apartment, but not by the size of it. In Paris apartments the ceilings tend to get progressively lower the higher you get up the building. In other words, those on the first few floors typically have the highest ceilings, while the apartments at the top are cramped and tiny. You can see it for yourself if you look carefully at the outside of Paris buildings, there’ll be a noticeable difference between the first and fifth floor, for example. You can often see it even more tangibly from the stairwell inside, where it takes fewer and fewer steps to get between floors. When these buildings were made, the wealthiest residents lived near the ground and left their servants and maids up the top.

  Anyway, my no doubt wealthier neighbour asked how I liked the building, and I told him that it was all good, besides my lack of internet connection. Weeks after my initial complaints, the internet team had finally visited and decided it was the fault of the telephone company, which had apparently cut the wrong wire. After more weeks of nothing happening, the phone team came out to repair that wire, and now I was waiting for the internet team again.

  “The French won’t do anything unless you get angry,” Andrew said, adding he’d lived in Paris for decades now and had seen it all before. “I can call them if you like.”

  “Be my guest,” I said.

  With that, he phoned the internet provider and when they started to make excuses he proceeded to let loose on them.

  “What’s the point of having this piece of shit internet box if there’s no bloody internet on it? I may as well throw it out the window! What kind of company are you running that you give internet boxes but don’t make sure they’re connected? This is bullshit.”

  Yikes.

  While he may have been firm - even aggressive, perhaps - on the telephone, he was a pleasant chap to be around, and the tough guy act seemed to work. After he hung up, he told me that the internet team would be around on Friday. Amazing. It was a valuable lesson: don’t let yourself be walked over or you’ll never get anything done.

  As the evening wore on, my guest took one more look out the window and tried to pinpoint his apartment below.

  “Ah, it’s lovely to have a kitchen window that looks over Paris,” he said. “And you know, sometimes you can see the most unusual things. Last week I could swear I saw someone’s washing fall down past my window. Then hours later, I saw it fly back up again.”

  2.4 The fruit flies

  It was summer in Paris, the air was crisp, the fruit was fresh, and I was about to annoy the architects again. I’d found that spending full days in front of the computer screen wasn’t doing anything for my health. My editor had no taste for long lunches or exercise breaks, so I decided to start bringing fresh fruit into the office. No harm in that, I figured. I’d bring in bananas, apples, peaches, and I’d place them in a fruit bowl in the middle of the room for the team - which was growing to include the occasional intern or two. It was a good plan, but it didn’t always go smoothly. One week I bought too much fruit for us all to manage.

  By the time Monday came around I got to work before anyone else in the office only to realize I’d left the bloody fruit on the desk over the weekend. The peaches had turned into rotten corpses and they were swarming with fruit flies. And I don’t mean just a regular swarm. I mean a swarm of biblical proportions. I had only minutes before the architects started to arrive, and I panicked. I threw the peaches into my little bin, tied the plastic bag tight, then ran it into the kitchen and launched it into the main kitchen bin. Then I came back to our glass-walled office for damage control. Shit, there were still hundreds of fruit flies - what to do? I opened the windows and shooed them out. Some left, but most of them stayed. I wasn’t getting anywhere. I waved my arms around, tried to swat them. Anything to hide the evidence that I’d been eating food in the office again. And I’m ashamed to admit it, but I murdered some of them too. Innocent fruit flies! But that’s how frightened I was of the architects, frightened enough to kill defenseless insects in cold blood.

  It wasn’t long until the architects started to arrive. Still very wary of me at this point, some said hello. Others ignored me, as usual. At this point there were only a dozen fruit flies remaining, so I left them alone, realizing it was better than attracting attention trying to get rid of them. I felt I’d escaped, gotten away with the perfect crime.

  I cracked on with the day’s work, irritated that I was having a slow start on one of the rare occasions that the editor wasn’t in the office. An hour or so into the morning I had well and truly forgotten about the fruit flies and was starting to feel the urge for a mid-morning cup of tea. I stood up from my desk and stretched, then turned to head for the kitchen. But before I’d taken one step, I saw them. The horror. The fruit flies, which had obviously been frightened away by my mad efforts to kill them, had by now figured it was safe to come out again. They had congregated in scores on the ceiling and all over the glass walls that separated me from the architects. Shit shit shit. But… what’s this? None of the architects had noticed. I could fix this. It could be worse. Yes, it could be much worse, I thought.

  I was right. And it was going to be.

  I headed for the kitchen, playing cool, acting like there weren’t around 200 flying insects in my office. The same office I’d allegedly let mice into, which is another story, and which also explains why the architects didn’t like me. And then I saw it.

  In the kitchen was a second swarm of fruit flies. Some idiot had taken rotten fruit and dumped it in the kitchen bin an hour ago. That idiot was me. But at least no one knew that. I felt like a child again, facing imminent trouble from the adults. In a blind panic I grabbed the kitchen bin bag and smuggled it out of the office and into the elevator, then out onto the streets where I dumped it in a city bin. I ran to a nearby shop and bought fly spray, then raced back to the kitchen. Then, as much as I hate to say it, I sprayed the fruit flies to death until they were dropping all over the kitchen table and floor. I did this all without the architects knowing. I couldn’t let them couldn’t know. I was already a terrible guest. I swept away the corpses of the fruit flies from the kitchen table and opened the windows to get rid of the smell of the fly spray. And miraculously, no architects came in during the entire slaughter.

  Sure, there were a few left in the kitchen, but not enough to notice, I thought. So I moved back to my cubicle and spent the rest of the morning trying to get rid of the evidence. Like a lizard catching flies in a terrarium, I sneakily disposed of the remaining fruit flies in my little glass office one by one until there were none.

  But fruit flies are apparently stubborn little buggers. The survivors in the kitchen turned out to be a mini swarm. The architects found the invasion at around lunch time, and were baffled as to where it came from. Where was the fruit, they wondered. No one could figure it out and I wasn’t about to turn myself in. I’m ashamed to say it, but they were still killing the flies when I left the office that evening. And I never said a word. It marked the last time I brought fruit into the office, and our diet returned to English biscuits and the occasional French croissant.

  2.5 The lessons

  Speaking French on the phone makes me nervous. Especially having to do it in front of other French speakers. And this was an unavoidable part of my job as a journalist in Paris. Even though the editor was aware of my terrible French, he insisted that I make phone calls to interview French people. So, often when I was covering a tough story, I would dread having to pick up the phone for an interview, especially if it was about something difficult or sensitive. I didn’t even know the word for raw bacon, for God’s sake - how did I get to be interviewing French people on the phone? And let’s not forget, the phone is harder than face-to-face conversations because you miss all the visual cues.

  In those early days, by insane luck, a lot of the people I rang spoke English, or at least good enough English to fill in the gaps fo
r me. But often they didn’t, and I massacred their language just as I had massacred the fruit flies. Shamefully, regretfully, and with a great deal of embarrassment I butchered the French language, so badly sometimes that the person on the other end just went silent. Yes, my French was atrocious, and I felt guilty about it. This wasn’t just going into a bakery and ordering a croissant. Who cares if you get that wrong, especially if you’re just a tourist and you’re never going to see the baker again. Get your croissant and run, I say. But when you’re in a little office where everyone can hear everything you say, speaking French on the phone felt like being naked.

  So it was a relief when the new semester of language classes began. And there I was, studying again and realizing that there’s nothing more boring than learning French at a school in France - at least if you do it at a traditional school with traditional teaching methods. I’d hunted down a cheap course not far from my office in the 19th arrondissement. Twice a week after work I’d go to the class, but twice a week I’d dread that too. The teacher I had was as fastidious with his verb conjugations as he was with his facial grooming. And he was horrible. I don’t think he meant to be horrible, he was probably perfectly friendly outside the class, but I think he taught us the same way he’d been taught at school himself - and as I understand it, learning in France is not a process that’s meant to be enjoyed. The teacher would throw grammar rules at us and hoped they’d stick. He’d go through example sentences on the board, then whip around the room asking students in turn if they could conjugate the verbs. I never knew the answers, and would plan ahead to try and find the correct response to the teacher’s question. When it got to me, I’d often have no idea and would just guess. But if someone got it wrong, he wouldn’t explain it. He wouldn’t teach it. He’d just wait until the student eventually got the right answer.

  The irritating part for me was that at this point, I wasn’t skilled enough to discuss the topic, the problem, or even why I couldn’t answer it. I could only sit silently, like many of the other students. When you’re learning a language, one of the biggest achievements is reaching the level where you can explain what you don’t understand. It’s a huge moment. Sure, you might be way off fluency, but a new world opens up when you can say: “Hang on, what does that particular word mean? I’ve never heard that one before.”

  I still hadn’t reached that crucial turning point, and my teacher with his overplucked eyebrows wasn’t making life easier for me. I remember one time he was going around the room asking students to conjugate verbs into the subjunctive. It’s one of the hardest tenses in the French language, irregular and basically impossible to guess. I decided that instead of guessing, I would just tell him that I didn’t know.

  “Oliver, c’est quoi le subjonctif ici?” he said.

  “Je ne sais pas,” I responded. I don’t know.

  The rest of the class waited expectantly.

  Then, the teacher did the weirdest thing. He mocked me.

  “Oh, Oliver, you don’t know?” he said in a high-pitched baby voice. “Well maybe you could try and figure it out.”

  I wasn’t expecting that. But there was no way I could figure it out. So I went for a lighter touch and said that I had no idea at all: J’ai aucune idée. And as unbelievable as it was to me, he mocked me again in the same child-like voice.

  “Oh, Oliver, you have no idea at all, do you?”

  I was so shocked. So embarrassed. I was lost for words. I sat there gaping like a stunned mullet while the teacher waited. I knew what he was trying to do. Like some kind of French python toying with an Australian mouse, he was trying to squeeze an answer out of me. But he was doing it all wrong. He was actually squeezing the confidence out of me. Finally, in shame, I broke eye contact with him, and he triumphantly moved on to his next victim.

  I eventually gave up on the French classes. I stayed long enough to finish the semester (and pass the final tests, thankfully), but I never went back after that. The teaching wasn’t for me and I figured there were better ways to learn. Eventually, through sheer time, effort, and language exchanges, I managed to build up my French to an acceptable level. Fluent by some people’s standards, sure. But even years after moving to Paris I wouldn’t feel comfortable during a fast-paced conversation at a French dinner party. I suppose it didn’t matter at the time, because I wasn’t being invited to any.

  And just for the record, I still can’t use the subjunctive tense.

  2.6 Making friends

  Nine months had passed since I had moved to Paris, and I was finally settling in. The worst of the admin was over, my grasp of the French language was improving, and I had made a solid group of friends, a mix of expats and French people. Most of us were fish out of water, strangers in a strange land, or strangers in a strange city. Even the French guys, all of whom were originally from elsewhere in France.

  A lot of my friends were also Australians, which surprised even me. During four years in Sweden, I’d typically walked in the other direction when I heard an Australian accent. I think it was a mix of wanting to fit in with the Swedes and wanting to feel unique. In Sweden there aren’t many Australians at all, and meeting another one ruined my illusion that I was doing something special. Imagine if you were exploring a remote village in Mongolia, then found your neighbour from back home at the village pub. It was like that.

  But when I moved to Paris it was different. I knew from the outset that I wasn’t unique. There’s nothing special about an Australian in Paris, so why try to avoid them? Rather, I found myself embracing them and wanting to spend time with them. What’s more, they’d been through the same challenges I was facing with opening bank accounts, getting social security, paying taxes. Some of them even had the benefit of a French partner, which made the journey easier for them, and sometimes for me too (indirectly).

  In any case, my group of friends in Paris all lived in a big triangle, with the Canal Saint-Martin at the centre. Naturally, the canal proved to be the magnet that would draw us all in, a watering hole where we could grab a beer or a wine. Oftentimes, when the weather was good, we would sit by the canal with a picnic dinner and chat away into the night, like the Parisians did. It wasn’t strictly a summer activity either. As the autumn came and went, we continued to congregate at the canal, savouring the last moments of sunshine and preparing for another winter.

  In mid-November, in what seemed like the last of the warm weather for the year, I headed back to Sweden for a weekend to tie up loose ends and hang out with Lina. And, as it happened, almost my entire group of friends had decided to take a weekend away as well, all separately. That’s the thing with international crowds - they all have a second home to visit, or in-laws to see, or will jump to explore nearby European cities. Even my editor had decided to head back to England for the weekend. We were all taking one last little holiday before the Christmas break at a typically quiet time of the year. And it was during that weekend that Paris as the world knew it was to forever change.

  2.7 Terror in Paris

  I was in Stockholm on the night Paris was attacked. In fact, I was in a theatre watching a musical. And I had an uncomfortable feeling throughout it. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but something felt wrong. It may have just been the all-too-familiar feeling for journalists of going too long without checking their cell phone. When the show finished, I took my phone out of my pocket and saw there were way, way too many notifications. Dozens of missed calls, loads of texts and emails, and the first of the many news flashes from the French news sites.

  “Shots fired in Paris.”

  “Dozens injured in Paris.”

  “Several killed in Paris attack.”

  And that was just the beginning.

  It was the night that would change Paris and I wasn’t there. At the time I learned of the attacks, I had a journalist’s response and my first thought was that we had no one to cover what seemed like an enormous story. The edito
r was in the remote countryside of the UK with no internet. I was in Sweden. That was our entire team at that point. I raced for my laptop and saw the news flashes as they started streaming in. More and more victims. More and more and more. 30, 40, 50. The updates came all night. 60, 70, 80.

  For those first hours I was in an almost robotic journalist mode, filtering out the emotions to concentrate on writing the tragic news. I was seeing the horrific footage on social media, scanning frantically through the French press, translating whatever the officials were saying, and telling the news to the enormous number of people around the world who were reading about it.

  As the night wore on, and the scale of the attacks became clear, the strangest whirlwind of emotions was going through my mind. The first was the shock. The second was wondering if everyone was OK. My phone, like everyone else’s in Paris, was flooded with messages from friends and family around the world. “We just heard what happened, are you alright?” I got the same form of messages from people I hadn’t talked to in years. Facebook rolled out a “mark as safe” feature, in which people in Paris could tick a box to show they were alive. It was an unheard of move for Facebook to make, and the company would later face criticism for it, but it certainly seemed at the time the quickest way to let people know if you were safe.

  The third strongest emotion for me was disbelief that the series of attacks were not only so indiscriminate, but in the exact areas where I spent my social time in Paris. Four of the bars that were hit were in the canal area where we always hung out. My mind wandered. I’d have been out if I were in Paris on that Friday night. Where would I have been?

  But I was so swept up in covering the story that my mind mostly stayed in news mode. 90, 100, 110 dead. My phone was ringing off the hook, news stations from around the world calling for updates. The international journalists couldn’t speak French, so they were calling our paper to hear it in English. I stopped answering the phone.