In all this time, he was the first person to approach us wanting to know what we were arguing about. Without missing a beat, Joakim turned and asked him which term he preferred, Öresundsbron or Øresundsbroen? Shouting to be heard above Manu Chao’s “Bongo Bong” blasting from the speakers, I explained to Guang-ho that they were the Swedish and Danish names of the bridge between Malmö and Copenhagen. Then I repeated the question, Øresundsbroen or Öresundsbron? We continued, drunkenly, to repeat the name of the bridge to him, each of us in our own language, louder and louder, until Guang-ho finally silenced us with a gesture, like the conductor of an orchestra at the end of a movement. He lit himself a cigarette—striking the match against the thick heel of his boot—then told us, in his Korean-accented French, about a long-standing dispute between Korea and Japan over a group of little islands. The Koreans called it Dokdo and the Japanese Takeshima; everyone else called it the Liancourt Rocks. Even the name of the surrounding waters was disputed by both countries. Then he crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair, as though suddenly exhausted by his story. In Joakim’s face, I thought I saw something flicker and go out. Without another word, he downed the rest of his Desperados and slowly put the bottle back down on the table between us. Then he got up and staggered out of the kitchen. I spent the rest of the night talking to Guang-ho—who, it turned out, wasn’t a resident of the Maison de Belgique at all. (He’d started coming here for the French newspapers in the ground-floor reading room.) After that night, Joakim and I stopped preparing our meals together. I still ran into him in the kitchen, but things had cooled between us. Nevertheless, when I spoke to him—to ask how much longer he needed the stove, for example—I made an effort to Swedify my Danish.
5. The Errand
Guang-ho’s not-quite-ground-floor room (through the window one saw mostly headless passersby) was a few minutes’ walk from the Sorbonne Nouvelle, where he was a student. “Student” might’ve been an exaggeration—I had no idea when he had last spoken to his thesis director. (He’d told me they saw each other exactly once a year, when he brought over his annual offering of a bottle of wine in return for a signature on the matriculation form.) On his desk, a dark layer of dust covered a stack of papers—his thesis on Descartes—surrounded by old Styrofoam instant-noodle bowls filled with cigarette ash. For some reason or other, he could no longer receive the housing grants he’d been subsisting on, and now washed dishes at a Korean restaurant and freelanced as a tour guide for Korean tourists.
I went to see him when I had nothing better to do. He always welcomed me with the same bemused smile, as though my reasons for wanting to visit him in his hovel were beyond him. I suppose, in some ways, it was beyond me too. At first, I was simply curious: all of the Asians I’d met up to now had been girls, Scandinavian Korean girls, and Guang-ho was neither Scandinavian nor a girl. He was the first Asian I got to know who hadn’t been adopted. That he had grown up in South Korea, surrounded by people who looked like him, with parents who were Korean like him, was a source of endless reverie for me.
He’d left his country five years ago to finish his degree here in Paris, and, clearly, things had not gone as planned. Somewhere along the way, he had started to veer off course, and now it was too late, he’d gone too far to retrace his steps. To return home was to admit defeat, but to stay was to be reminded of it every day: he chose to stay. Every time I entered the squalor of his living quarters, he seemed that much closer to giving up the struggle once and for all. But then I would run into him in the street—more often than not, he was running an errand for his boss at the Korean restaurant—and he seemed a different person entirely, as though the cold, bracing air had made him temporarily forget his troubles. Or that was my theory: an hour or two spent wandering aimlessly through the streets of Paris was usually enough to cheer me up, especially after being locked up in my room all day. (There was always the possibility that I might run into Luce, the girl from the train. When I went out, it was often with the thought in the back of my mind, though I had read somewhere that one rarely meets the person one is hoping to meet—no more than three or four times in the course of a life.)
Sometimes I would accompany Guang-ho on his errands, which consisted of bringing an item to a supplier in the quartier chinois or getting a few last-minute, ready-made items like dumpling skins from the big Asian supermarket in Lognes. But they could also be of a more personal nature, such as standing in the little alley behind the restaurant while his boss had his afternoon cigarette (I pictured Guang-ho leaning forward with the lighter), or sitting with him at the counter of the bar for a drink after everyone else had left, at the end of the night. I knew about these moments because Guang-ho told me about them, always with the same ironic smile, as though he wanted me to know every detail, making me a witness to his life in Paris. After a while, the errands no longer had anything to do with the restaurant, becoming progressively more random and sundry in nature (dropping off a bottle of rosé late at night, going out to buy a pair of nail cutters). Though he hadn’t told me in so many words, I had gathered that in addition to what he earned from his job at the restaurant, the man that he called “mon patron” had also helped him out of a few tight spots in the past. Over time, Guang-ho couldn’t help but feel more and more indebted to him as a result.
One night in late November, there was a knock at my door and there he was, Guang-ho, standing in the hallway, his leather jacket splattered with blood. How had he managed to get past the concierge in such a state? I was so surprised that I merely stepped aside and let him into my room. Immediately he went to the window, as though to see if anyone was in the street below. As I observed him, it dawned on me that the blood on his jacket must be someone else’s. He took out the pouch of tobacco, and his hands shook slightly as he rolled the paper for a cigarette.
The story he told me that night was difficult to believe. His boss had asked him to buy a pack of cigarettes at the nearby tobacconist. The restaurant had closed for the night, and Guang-ho and the other workers had just finished cleaning up the kitchen. By then, it was ten-thirty, and he knew that the tobacconist closed at eleven. When he returned with the cigarettes, he found the lights still on at the front of the restaurant. Something felt off. Then he heard a noise from the back, the sound of voices. He walked into the office to find three boys, two Arab and one black, standing around his boss, who was on the ground. He didn’t appear to be moving. Without another thought, Guang-ho ran at them, and one of them pushed him away, kicking him in the sternum so that he stumbled backwards, nearly falling. At some point, he managed to grab the fire extinguisher off the wall and started spraying it at them. That was when the three ran off—the same way they had come, presumably. It wasn’t until he was alone with his boss, who was barely moving but still alive, that Guang-ho realized he’d been screaming profanities in Korean the whole time.
They must have waited for the employees to leave before entering the restaurant through the back door, which often remained open while everyone was cleaning up, taking things out to the dumpster. Later, I came across an article in Libé about gangs whose specialty was robbing Chinese, or anyone who looked Chinese, on the assumption that they always carried large sums of money on them. Being illegals who didn’t know any French, they wouldn’t go to the police. And being Asian, they would be weak, unlikely to fight back. For what it was worth, Guang-ho’s boss didn’t fit any of these stereotypes. He had been in France for almost thirty years and had gone so far as to take a French name when he was naturalized (giving up his Korean citizenship in the process). But he knew that, no matter what, he would never be seen as a French citizen—that to most he was little more than a métèque, no matter how conscientiously he learned the language, no matter how thoroughly he assimilated to the culture. Not one to wallow in helplessness and self-pity, he found it easier to turn against those whose skin was darker than his, and after a while, he even came to derive a certain kind of pleasure, a certain kind of pride. He voted FN, he said, bec
ause the enemy of his enemies was his friend.
As Guang-ho fell silent, I suddenly realized who the blood on his jacket must belong to. He ran a hand through his hair and said, with his customary flair for the litote, “It hasn’t been a very good day.”
“What are you going to do?”
He smiled at me, shrugged. “What else is there to do? I’ll go back to the hospital and see if he needs anything.”
Of course. “Why did you come tonight? I mean, that is to say…” He had a number of Korean friends in the city, other people he could have gone to see.
“Are you asking me why I told you all that?”
I hesitated, then nodded.
“I’m not sure.” He looked down at the cigarette between his fingers. I noticed a small cut on his hand, the only visible injury from the scuffle. “Your place was on the way home.”
He rummaged around inside his jacket for something, then took out a crushed pack of cigarettes: the Marlboro Lights (or Liktts, as some kiosquiers in Copenhagen pronounced it) his boss had sent him out to get.
“And you,” he said, “why do you listen to me?”
I looked at Guang-ho, and we both laughed. I walked him down to the street, and then to the RER station on the opposite side. It was past midnight, but I saw that the kébab place at the end of the block was still lit up, a bright little square in the night. As we were taking leave of each other in front of the station, a rowdy group of kids came out, laughing and shouting amongst themselves. One of them suddenly turned to Guang-ho and, an unlit cigarette between his lips, demanded loudly, “Got a—” He made a flicking motion, his thumb centimeters from my friend’s face. Guang-ho, maintaining his affable smile, said calmly, “Désolé, mais je ne fume pas.”
The kid, with an audible snort of contempt, turned back to his friends.
For a moment after they left, we stood there in silence; then Guang-ho said, “I know why I tell you all this.”
I waited for him to go on.
“I tell you,” he said, “because I know that you will listen.”
6. Empire of the Dead
I met Sang-hoon through Guang-ho. The two of them freelanced as guides for Korean tourists to Paris. It was a part-time job, and they were called in by an agency whenever a tour group arrived. They drove everyone around the city in a van, helped them take photos in front of the Eiffel Tower, accompanied them to Versailles (“the palace of camera flashbulbs,” Guang-ho called it). Sang-hoon, in many ways, was the opposite of Guang-ho. Heavyset, taller than most French people, he had a family who had come with him to France. He was also working on his thesis and needed the extra income. At his spacious apartment in Antony, just outside of Paris, where I had been invited along with Guang-ho and a few others for the end-of-the-year réveillon, he told us that he liked to show his countrymen a side of Paris they otherwise would never see. Of course, he did the usual—the Sacré-Coeur, the Arc de Triomphe, and so on—but he made sure to approach the latter, for example, not via the Champs-Élysées but by one of the other avenues—the Grande Armée, for example—where all the high-end motorcycle dealerships were. He took genuine pleasure in clearing up misconceptions. In his group, there was always someone who thought that the French drank only wine, and who was amazed to discover that one could buy beer in Paris. After spending the day driving a group of strangers from one location to another, he could return home to his family, satisfied and reinvigorated. By that point in the evening it was just me, Sang-hoon, Guang-ho, a guy named Ji-sook and two girls, Ji-hae and Na-min. (Sang-hoon’s wife and two kids had already gone to bed.) The talk moved to other subjects, and soon there were several conversations going on in tandem. Guang-ho put on Serge Gainsbourg’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” and Sang-hoon told him to lower the volume. I was chatting with Ji-hae and Na-min, who were going to visit the catacombs the next day. No doubt Sang-hoon had convinced them to go—he often saved the catacombs for last, as there were fewer people towards the end of the day, and also because, he said, it was a fitting way to finish a tour. Ji-hae, beside herself with excitement, seemed constantly on the verge of bursting into laughter or tears, or both. She and Na-min made an unlikely pair. Ji-hae was flamboyant, pretty in a childish way, quick to laugh, whereas Na-min was moody and at least ten years older. She was the only one among us who wasn’t a student; instead, she had a real job—at L’Oréal, no less—something to do with marketing and sales. Ji-hae had come to Paris to study at the École des beaux-arts but had dropped out after a month; now she was taking remedial French-language classes at the Sorbonne. Despite all this, the two seemed to be best friends, their friendship the kind only possible abroad, where the fact of their being Korean overrode all other considerations. It was Ji-hae who invited me to accompany them to the catacombs, throwing out the invitation in her characteristically impulsive manner, and I had the impression that Na-min wasn’t pleased. Moreover, I’m not sure why I accepted. It was true that I had never been to the catacombs, only one RER stop from the Cité U. The idea of making my way along dimly lit corridors and emerging somewhere else, somewhere completely different, sent a shiver of excitement through me. Ji-sook must have overheard our conversation, because after the girls went off together to the toilet, he approached me to say that I should be careful around them. From his tone he seemed entirely serious, and I was surprised enough by the warning to ask him what he meant by it. Were the two of them more than just friends? At this, Ji-sook started to laugh. All evening, he had barely opened his mouth, silently nursing his glass of Orangina (he never drank alcohol) and keeping his distance. He had been in France the longest of them all, at least seven or eight years, Guang-ho had told me. He lived frugally, never went out, and his place, located in one of the seedier areas of Château Rouge, was supposedly even more of a hovel than Guang-ho’s. With government aid and student restaurants, it was possible to get by. He was working on some kind of thesis (most of the Koreans were), and, unlike Guang-ho, he really seemed to be working on it. Instead of answering my question, he went on to say that the catacombs—the real catacombs—were far larger than what the public was allowed to see. Most of the tunnels were inaccessible, the openings walled off or blocked by grills. They stretched farther than anyone suspected, miles and miles of nothing but emptiness and silence (“rien que le vide et le silence” were his words). In the areas forbidden to the public, there was no light at all, and over the centuries a number of unfortunate souls had died trying to find their way back. He then asked me to imagine being surrounded by darkness like a solid wall that went on forever in every direction: what must it be like (he wondered aloud) to realize that there was nothing beyond this darkness? After a while, it would no longer be possible to know if one was still alive or already dead.
The next day, I woke in my room at the Cité U still wearing my clothes from the night before, my scarf tangled around my ankles. Glancing at the digital clock, I realized that I was going to be late for my rendezvous with the girls. I felt horrible from all the vodka and wine I had spent the evening drinking and considered not going, except that I didn’t have their numbers. At least I was already dressed; all I had to do was get up and walk out the door. I had agreed to meet them at the corner facing the statue of the Lion of Belfort, but they weren’t there when I arrived, forty-five minutes late. The day was overcast, and I didn’t see a single person waiting in line for the catacombs. Stranded in the middle of the intersection, the Lion looked forlorn and sad amidst the passing cars and the holiday guirlands suspended above the streets like giant cobwebs against the paleness of the morning sky. I wondered if they had gone ahead on their own, and was thinking about going in after them when I heard someone shouting my name. A moment later Ji-hae ran up to me, out of breath, her cheeks flushed from the cold. She was wearing a puffy jacket and her hair was tied back in a neat little bun. Na-min wasn’t with her. We hurriedly kissed each other on the cheek, and Ji-hae told me that her friend wasn’t feeling well. They too had overslept, she confessed, laughing, and
I had a brief image of the two of them waking up in the same bed. We bought our tickets and then started making our way down the steps. I could feel the air growing less humid as I stared at the back of Ji-hae’s head, breathing in her hair, which smelled as though she had just washed it. The interminable steps finally debouched onto a gallery of sorts, and on the walls were illustrated panels detailing the history of the catacombs, along with an exposition on various personalities of the French Revolution—Madame Élisabeth, Fouquier-Tinville, Robespierre, Lucile Desmoulins—whose remains had ended up in the catacombs. There was a portrait of each, and when I came to the one of Desmoulins, I couldn’t help but stare: the resemblance with the girl I had met on the train to Paris was undeniable. The description mentioned that the portrait was a presumed likeness; it was thought to have been painted when she was eighteen or nineteen—the same age, more or less, as Luce, the girl from the train. Next to me, I heard Ji-hae yawn loudly. I reluctantly left the room behind and followed her down several narrow, low-ceilinged corridors. According to a sign on the wall, we were walking beneath the parc Montsouris where it juxtaposed the reservoir of the fourteenth arrondissement. We seemed to be descending gradually deeper underground. The last corridor opened onto a series of quarries, and I saw that several adjoining galleries had been closed off. We reached the ossuary, whose entrance was marked by a plaque near the ceiling with the admonitory words: “C’est ici l’empire de la mort.” Inside, there were galleries of different sizes, all of them decorated with bones and plaques with quotations from famous nineteenth-century authors in French or in Latin. Ji-hae let out a cry of delight, running around and marveling at a fountain made entirely of tibias. I wondered if I might still be drunk from the night before. Everywhere I looked there were bones—skulls, femurs, tibias—all neatly aligned in an impeccable pattern, though on closer inspection I discovered that, beyond the first layer, disorder reigned, a chaos of skeletal remains. All the while, we were the only ones in the galleries. I began to lose all sense of time: I felt that several hours had gone by, though it probably hadn’t been more than half an hour since we had entered the catacombs. The gravel underneath our feet sounded too loud in my ears. I strived to keep up with Ji-hae, whose breath I could make out in the gloom. We came to a large room dedicated to the pre-Romantic poet Nicolas Gilbert, whose verses were engraved on the walls (“Au banquet de la vie, infortuné convive, / J’apparus un jour, et je meurs…”). There was a gravestone—the only gravestone in the catacombs—belonging to Françoise Gellain, who devoted her life to freeing an inmate from Bicêtre after coming across a letter he had written and thrown from one of the prison windows. She didn’t even know what he looked like until he was released, twenty years later … I saw Ji-hae disappear through an opening at the other end of the ossuary. Hurrying after her, I glanced back at the light coming from the chamber we’d just left, and for a moment I stood there, like someone given a glimpse into his past. Seeing the light grow fainter with each new step, I sensed myself making a terrible mistake, but what else was I to do? By the time I caught up with Ji-hae, the light from the ossuary no longer reached us, and I told her we should turn back, but she only laughed and said that we couldn’t turn back, we had already paid for our tickets. It had grown much darker, and I could barely see where I was going. The air felt different; I noticed that the corridors were no longer illuminated, though the vague shapes of things remained visible, which meant that light still reached us from another source. Had we taken a wrong turn somewhere? Impossible, of course: there were no bifurcations in the catacombs, at least in the part open to the public. I remembered what Ji-sook had told me, and began to wonder if I might have died without realizing it. And if I was dead, then what about Ji-hae? I could no longer see her silhouette ahead of me. Strangely enough, I felt no alarm and found myself thinking once again about the girl I had met on the train. Was she really the reincarnation of Lucile Desmoulins? At that moment, it seemed to me that the darkness surrounding me had changed. I saw before me the outline of an immense wall composed of countless vertical and horizontal lines—like a sheet of grid paper whose squares suddenly began to break down into complex geometric motifs, right before my eyes. Perhaps my brain, unable to cope with such unrelenting nothingness, had filled the void with symbols and signs—the way one is tempted to see shapes in the clouds or patterns in the ceiling—or so I later reasoned to myself. Something told me not to continue staring at the grids, and, despite not being able to make out anything in front of me, I started running as though for my life. I saw a faint light up ahead, and without warning I emerged into the blinding late-afternoon sun shining down on the sidewalk, a nondescript street with parked cars and two bicycles—one missing a seat, the other a wheel—chained to a barrier. Ji-hae was, once again, next to me. I looked back at the door we had just walked through, and there was nothing to indicate that behind it was the underworld, Hades, purgatory, death. For a moment I considered trying the door, then thought better of it. I looked over at Ji-hae, and she silently returned my gaze. Her face was pale, and I wondered what the past half hour had been like for her. We went to a café-tabac nearby and tried to talk about it, but we didn’t get very far. There was nothing to talk about, really. I ran into her again a few more times after that, mostly at Sang-hoon’s. At some point she and Na-min had a fight about something and stopped seeing each other, though that’s another story altogether.
Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost Page 10
