Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost

by David Hoon Kim

  I’m not sure at what point I began to think that she might also be headed for Paris. Once the idea entered my head, it was as if I had always known. I imagined myself getting up from my seat and approaching her, striking up a conversation. The fact that she was sitting where she was took on a bright new meaning: out of all the seats, she had chosen mine. It was as if she had chosen me, and I would be a fool not to interpret it as a sign. Even then, I continued to sit there, unmoving. I knew myself well enough to know that I would do nothing; instead, I would go over the pros and cons until she left the train and out of my life forever. In that manner I was silently berating myself when I felt a presence at my side: the ticket controller. I hadn’t heard him enter the compartment. After examining my ticket, he informed me that I couldn’t remain where I was. Despite having only a moment earlier contemplated leaving my seat, I tried to argue with him, telling him that there was plenty of room—what harm could it do that I was not in my assigned spot? But he was intractable; he ordered me to move, and waited as I reluctantly stood up and started making my way towards the girl.

  Addressing her in French, I showed her my stub, which she studied as though she had never seen a train ticket before. The tears on her cheeks had dried and were impossible to make out if one didn’t already know that she had been crying. Her fingernails, I couldn’t help noticing, were short and square, as though she bit them regularly, and it seemed oddly appropriate that someone so beautiful should have such ugly fingernails. That was when she replied that she had been issued the same seat as me. Her voice was low and slightly hoarse. An error of the Deutsche Bahn—my father would have been delighted. I told her that if it were up to me she could remain where she was, but the controller had come by and hadn’t given me a choice in the matter. As I said this, I turned to point at him, but there was no sign of the man I had just argued with. For a moment I stared at the spot where he’d been standing. Through the sliding door I could see that he wasn’t in the next car, or in the car after that. It was beginning to look like I had invented him as an excuse to engage her in conversation. I was about to return to my seat (which wasn’t really mine) when I heard her ask me if I planned to stand there like that for much longer: I realized that she was inviting me to join her.

  “You’re not French,” she said as I sat down across from her.

  “No,” I said. On her lap was a copy of Blaise Cendrars’s Prose du Transsibérien.

  “How did you know I was French?”

  “Your book?” I said, pointing, and she laughed, though of course it hadn’t been the book, which until now I hadn’t noticed. I wanted to tell her that I had seen her crying earlier, that I had seen the tears streaming down her cheeks as I watched like a Peeping Tom through a gap in the seats.

  “The truth is,” she said at last, “I don’t have a ticket.”

  I stared at her.

  “I don’t usually do this kind of thing,” she went on. “I had my ticket when I left for the station. Somehow I lost it, and I had no money to buy another seat. But then I told myself the controllers don’t always pass through all the cars…”

  Maybe in France they didn’t. In Denmark, they went from one end of the train to the other with the ineluctability of a law of nature, even on regional trains.

  “Are you German, by any chance?” she suddenly asked.

  “No. Why?”

  “Something about the way you talk. You remind me of someone.” Then: “She was German.”

  I told her I was coming from Copenhagen, she told me that she had just left Amsterdam (“’Dam,” she called it), and I gathered that she had experienced some kind of heartbreak of her own there—hence the tears. She told me her name and I told her mine. We talked some more. Any moment I expected Luce to return to her book, but that moment never came. She had just informed me that she was originally from the south of France and starting her first year of medicine at René Descartes, when I saw a railway employee coming from the opposite direction, and as the door slid open I saw that it was the same man I had argued with earlier. How had he managed to reach the other end of the train without walking through our compartment? Without thinking, I took out my ticket and passed it to Luce, shooting her an appuyé regard and nodding, as though to say, He’s behind you. The controller, who had by now reached us, asked to see our tickets. There was no inflection in his voice, nothing to indicate that he remembered our earlier exchange. I saw the hesitation in Luce’s eyes, but she couldn’t give me back my ticket, not in front of the controller. When the latter turned to me, I stood up and told him I had gotten on without a ticket. At that moment a female voice over the speaker announced the next station (Mannheim), and we started to slow down. Conversely, everything else sped up, as in a dream, and before I knew it I was following the controller out of the compartment. Only afterwards, sitting in another Thalys headed for Paris, did I think to myself that I should have asked her for a phone number, at the very least. I didn’t even know her last name. All I knew was that we were both headed in the same direction.

  3. Two Korean Girls

  They could have been twins, dressed in identical black peacoats, long black hair tied back in a ponytail, mismatched only in height. Their presence in Paris on this cold autumn afternoon seemed to me an aberration, an enigma. Neither spoke a word of French or even English, and it was mostly with gestures and pantomimes that I attempted to express the idea of not being Korean. (I knew better than to attempt to express the idea of being Danish.) In the end, I wasn’t sure if they had understood me. It was impossible to know what they wanted. Were they in the habit of accosting random Asian-looking persons on the streets of Paris? When the shorter girl had called out to me, she had reached out a hand, and her cold fingers had brushed against mine for a brief moment. I barely knew anyone in Paris, but my first thought was to ask myself if she could be someone I had already met.

  I was coming from the Sorbonne, where I had gone to pay my university fees. A woman at the secrétariat had allowed me to defer (for several weeks) the 251 euros required for tuition. In Denmark, there wouldn’t have been any fees at all, and the added expense had caught me off guard. Afterwards, I had stopped at my thesis supervisor’s office—as it was in the same building—but of course she wasn’t there, her door closed. I had spent a few minutes on a bench outside one of the auditoriums doing nothing in particular, thinking about the empty hours ahead and how best to fill them. In front of the Sorbonne, I had watched students from the conservatoire perform something by Bach or possibly Handel, then made my way down the rue Victor-Cousin until I reached the rue Saint-Jacques. Near the entrances of Gibert Joseph and spilling out onto the sidewalk were the usual discounted books, packed so tightly in their bins that it was all but impossible to browse through them. I’d been halfheartedly walking among the tables when I noticed the girls coming towards me.

  In truth, I wasn’t entirely sure they were Korean—I had only the vaguest notion of what the language sounded like, and it was mostly through a process of elimination that I had ruled out Japanese and Chinese. The shorter one did all the talking while the other girl stared wordlessly at me, fixing me so intently that I wondered if she saw me at all. Unlike her partner, she was tall for an Asian girl, almost my height, and—despite what appeared to be a cold sore near her upper lip—unexpectedly beautiful. The other girl’s plainness only accentuated her own lack thereof, which her shabby clothes, ragged-looking hair and cold sore couldn’t fully mitigate. It might have been a combination of being stared at relentlessly by her while the other talked at me in a language I didn’t know—all of a sudden I wanted nothing more than to get away from them. As though remembering an urgent appointment, I blurted an apology in Danish and walked quickly away, all the while resisting the urge to look back, as I pictured them standing there, watching me go. Only after ducking into a Paul did I finally let myself peer out the window, but from my angle I could no longer see the sidewalk. Rather than going back outside, I decided to treat myself to a form
ule étudiant—a sandwich, a flan, a drink of my choice—which I ate at a table overlooking the street, all the while watching for a pair of black peacoats among the passersby. My meal finished, I doubled back to Gibert via an adjoining street, entering the bookstore through one of its other entrances and taking the escalator to the third level, my favorite (“French and foreign literature”). I spent the next hour happily going through first the used, then the new sections, looking for titles that weren’t available at the municipal library. After a while, I started to think about the two girls and the way I had just left them in the middle of the sidewalk. What had possessed me to storm off like that? (As if I might be in some kind of danger!) Surely, they must be long gone by now. I tried to concentrate on the books, but it was no use. Finally, I gave in and made my way down the escalators to the ground floor. I walked out to the sidewalk and retraced my steps. There they were, exactly as I had left them; it was as though they hadn’t moved at all. They hardly seemed surprised to see me. Breathlessly, I pointed to myself and said my name. After some false starts and quiproquos, the shorter girl communicated to me that she was Yun-su and her friend—sister?—was Min-ha. Then she said something else, another set of foreign syllables, which I realized must be the place they were from. I hesitated, not wanting to complicate matters further, but then I went and did it anyway: I pointed to myself and said, “Denmark.” I could only hope the name sounded similar in their language. I said it several more times.

  “Hello, Dan Mark,” the shorter girl said, and I started to correct her, but, seeing her smile falter, I quickly accepted the hand she held out in greeting. It felt as cold as when her fingertips had brushed against me earlier, and I was the first to let go. Her mismatched twin, to my surprise, also offered me her hand, mutely, and hers was even colder, as though the two of them had been out walking since the smallest hours of the morning. I could feel the hardness of her callused palms. The shorter girl was holding something out to me, and I saw that it was a slip of paper, so worn and frayed that it looked like a piece of cloth. On it was an address, written in a typically French hand with European-style “1”s. My classes at the Sorbonne hadn’t yet started; the only thing waiting for me was an unmade bed and a stack of paperbacks with reinforced slipcovers from the municipal library. Suddenly, another uneventful evening seemed to me a burden rather than a gift. Until a few days ago, I had reveled in my solitude: eating alone at the canteen; long, exhausting walks through the city; the pleasure of thoroughly picking my nose in the tranquillity of my room. Other than my weekly visits to the Crous to buy a booklet of meal tickets (“Un carnet, s’il vous plaît”), I could go for days without talking to anyone. It was a change from Copenhagen—my first time living in such a densely populated place, and yet I had never been so alone in my life.

  We left the rue Saint-Jacques and then the Latin Quarter. Several times, I stopped to consult a map as the two girls, behind me, talked urgently amongst themselves. In the end, I was able to find the address indicated on the paper, a nondescript building in the Marais. Had they come here to meet someone? Or was this where they were staying? I wondered if this was the moment to take my leave of them. After all, I had done my duty. Yun-su punched in the entry code and pushed open the large door. Min-ha turned to me then, and her expression was like an invitation. Why not? I figured. The ascending steps looked very steep and narrow. “A gentleman never goes up the stairs behind a woman,” I had read in a novel by Hubert Monteilhet, “even when she is wearing pants.” The girls led me up at least five or six flights, and didn’t stop until we’d reached the last floor, which had only one apartment. Yun-su unlocked the door. Inside, the place was as dark as a cave: all of the shutters were lowered and the curtains drawn. As I followed them through the unlit rooms, I had the thought that I could be walking into a trap of some kind. They led me up a further set of stairs, this one narrower still, and through a door so low I nearly hit my head. The room it opened onto was smaller than my living quarters at the Maison de Belgique. There was only one window, about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, and a cord dangled from the ceiling next to a bare bulb. In the corner, a cheap-looking blanket—the kind displayed on the sidewalk along the rue Vieille-du-Temple—had been rolled up like a carpet. A small black crucifix hung on the wall. Other than a valise on wheels, there was nothing else. How had they found this wretched place? Why was the apartment below so dark, and who was living down there if the girls lived up here? How had they ended up in Paris in the first place? I wondered for the nth time, and it occurred to me that I would probably never find out.

  Yun-su started to speak in a soft, droning voice, and I thought she was reading something until I saw that her eyes were closed and I understood that she was praying. Min-ha had also closed her eyes; I could make out the whiteness of their breaths. As if they were two paintings in a museum, I continued to stare at them. First Yun-su: the uneven part of her hair, her chapped lips. Then Min-ha: the skin of her eyelids, her flushed cheeks, the cold sore above her upper lip. I felt foolish, not to mention a little stupid, for not having grasped what should have been obvious from the start: they had brought me here to convert me, though neither of us spoke a common language. Finally, Min-ha opened her eyes, and I looked away. The utter hopelessness of their task made me feel sorry for them. Yun-su was leafing through a book with a black leather cover and thin, gossamer pages. She handed it to Min-ha, who started to read a passage. The intensity of her concentration was such that I could almost hear the blood pulsing at her temples. Abruptly, she stopped reading. They both turned to me as one person, and I found myself wondering if they had invited me up here or if I had invited myself, taking advantage of the language barrier to follow them up the stairs, driven by a familiar mixture of boredom and curiosity and despair.

  4. The Bridge

  The first person I befriended in Paris was a Swede named Joakim. He was completing his doctoral thesis on logic design (his domain, which he tried explaining to me, had something to do with “two-dimensional iterative logic”). It was his second year at the Maison de Belgique, where we were both residents. We had met in our floor’s communal kitchen—he had guessed that I was Danish from the way I pronounced my “t”s—and after discovering that we liked to eat at around the same time, we began to prepare our meals together, a Dano-Swedish (or Swedo-Danish) collaboration not unlike the bridge that connected Copenhagen to the Skåne region of southern Sweden (which had once belonged to Denmark). Back home, it might have been harder to ignore the mild but omnipresent aura of competition originating from centuries of rivalry, not to mention a long and prolific succession of wars waged, most of the time, for no particular reason; but here, as the only Scandinavians among the Belgians and the French in our residence hall, one might say that we felt something like a bond between us.

  Or so I thought.

  Right off the bat, there was the question of how we would address each other. With Norwegians, it was customary for me to Norwegify my Danish, bending my accent and favoring cognates whenever possible, the understanding being that my interlocutor would do the same—i.e., Danify his Norwegian, as a matter of politeness more than anything else, given that Norwegian and Danish were practically the same language. (One of my father’s friends had been in Denmark for forty years and continued to speak Norwegian to everyone.) With Swedes—especially if it was a superior—I sometimes spoke Swedish, which I happened to know better than most Danes, thanks to my school years in Sweden. Otherwise, I spoke Danish—Swedifying it, of course. This was what I did with Joakim, who in turn Danified his Swedish.

  Every night in the communal kitchen, we continued to cook our meals together. For a while, we got along well, chatting late into the night, about the typical things one talks about in the first weeks in a new city: school, home, France, the differences and similitudes between the three. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what we were discussing when Joakim made his remark about the lakes in Sweden. Thinking back on it, I wonder if he might have taken
exception to my observation that Sweden boasted the highest number of unsolved crimes in Scandinavia (never mind that the figure was almost certain to be lower than the murder rate in Paris alone). In any case, what he said was: “It’s what happens when you let everyone in.” Then: “All the same, I shouldn’t forget how much smaller Denmark is.” Before adding: “And to think that there are lakes in Sweden larger than your country…”

  And that was how it started. Back in Denmark, I had never been much interested in football and found the very practice of watching a sport puzzling at best. Now, for the first time in my life, my show of nationalism was, I realized, entirely sincere. It felt strange not to have to pretend for once; I finally understood the fervor of my classmates each time the national team faced off against Sweden. The possibility that Joakim might consider me less Danish than he considered himself Swedish—that he might allow himself to say things he would not have said to a blond-haired Dane—had the effect of making me feel more Danish, which of course made him seem, in turn, even more Swedish. Was this what every football fan went through during a match?

  Sometimes, residents from our floor would walk in on us arguing, Joakim in his Danified Swedish and me in my Swedified Danish. We had by then moved on to other subjects: Danish vacationers buying up property in Skåne (because it was cheaper), Swedes stocking up on alcohol in Copenhagen to take back to Sweden, Danes going to Stockholm for prostitutes, Swedes going to Christiania for drugs, Danes being unwilling to take in refugees, Swedes taking in refugees for the wrong reasons (i.e., a guilty conscience). One evening, I found a feast for two set out on the table and Joakim waiting with what I thought was a tight Swedish smile of satisfaction. He told me, as I sat down, that it was silly to go on the way we had. He added that he had always been against the Sweden Democrats and people like Jimmie Åkesson. There were cabbage rolls, beef patties à la Lindström, slices of jellied veal, even some surströmming, which he informed me was a Norrland specialty. That night, we talked politics, each of us trying to outdo the other in progressiveness. I went so far as to posit myself as the product of my parents’ “progressive” decision to adopt from outside of Denmark, adding, for good measure, that Carl Th. Dreyer had been adopted. Things might have gone on in that manner, with each of us trying to outdo the other, if a Korean named Guang-ho hadn’t come over to our table during one of the “kitchen parties” that our floor began to be known for as the year progressed, and which could last all weekend as partygoers ran to the nearby Franprix for two-euro bottles of merlot, six-packs of Desperados and other vital provisions. Guang-ho must have been intrigued by the sight of two guys—an Asian and an Aryan—sitting across from each other like chess players at the eleventh hour. I had already noticed him a few times in the kitchen—making instant ramen or smoking a cigarette on the window ledge, the lone Korean among the Europeans. He was slight of build but had the coiled grace of a dancer, or someone on the qui vive, always dressed in the same black jeans and worn leather jacket, his thatchy hair falling past his shoulders. It was difficult to guess his age, though something told me he was a bit older than the rest of us.