Monsieur Mediocre

by John von Sothen

  * * *

  No, this wasn’t Amélie by a long shot, but our community, I was learning, was uniquely Parisian. And despite all its improbability and idiosyncrasies, it always felt safe. It was America that routinely freaked us out with its code oranges or anthrax scares or hurricane disasters or the sniper.

  My friend Pierre had been visiting the D.C. area during the infamous sniper attacks in 2002 and had assumed it was a TV series, not a news event. From his perspective, anything that had graphic lead-ins announcing “Coming up next, the sniper,” or man on the street interviews with questions like “What are your plans for tonight in light of the sniper?” had to be fiction. Pierre had been weaned on the straitlaced TF1 broadcasts at 8:00 p.m. and the BBC-type delivery of French news on the radio. He wasn’t versed in America’s 24/7 cable news phenomenon, nor could he wrap his mind around how the news had become show business. The upside, he told me, was that he felt he had D.C. to himself during the panic, waltzing D.C.’s street while everyone else cowered.

  Each time I return to the States, I feel more and more like Pierre. There was a palpable aggressiveness to America that I just didn’t find in Paris. It could have been the TVs overhead in the immigration line blaring on about Hillary’s email problem. It could be the “sir, what-is-your-reason-for-coming-here” syncopated delivery of the passport checker. Everything felt on steroids and by the book. The cops were huge. The atmosphere was military. Anaïs had to scrape her cornea on some eye machine. A solid three-week stay in August made me appreciate returning to France, where the energy was less in your face. There’d been terrorist attacks in Paris, mind you, and not just recently at the Bataclan or at Charlie Hebdo. Yet terrorism never seemed to preoccupy people.

  Instead it was chill, and those improvised dinners we did on a Tuesday evening meant you could be spontaneous without the harsh consequences that always seem to accompany postchild impulsiveness. It also made the drift into adulthood seem so slow and graceful, you might even miss the fact you were getting old.

  Yet despite all of this sangfroid built into the French system, the attack on Le Carillon hit me hard, and that feeling of vulnerability I experienced at JFK immigration resurfaced. A slow fatalism sank in, a feeling that perhaps we were just at the beginning and not at the end of a series of horribleness, which took me back to the few weeks in New York after 9/11, when I expected to hear the other shoe drop: that the Holland Tunnel had blown up or that an Amtrak had been derailed on purpose or that cyanide was in the reservoir. In France, on weeknights, we’d meet at Le Carillon on occasion for drinks after work and sit en terrasse while waiting for takeout from Le Petit Cambodge, the Cambodian restaurant across the street. It was a ritual done tons of times, with the kids in the stroller or running up and down the sidewalk, while we sipped wine and caught up with friends. The image of men rolling up in a car and firing Kalashnikovs into the crowd seemed as surreal as a plane hitting a tower.

  Soon the vestiges of grief and anger seemed ever-present. There were candles and flowers and printed-out photos of the victims taped along the fences of the canal. There were headlines of guerre and vengeance. And, of course, there were emails from friends in the States, the ones bearing messages like “We hope you’re safe,” or, “We’re thinking of you,” or, “We’re all in shock,” messages that were meant to bring comfort and that I appreciated, but that I could never find the right response to except for “Thanks, dude.”

  Suddenly, reporters from CNN and Fox and NBC camped out on the Place de la République, with their makeup and lights and bad hair. Their presence meant the Tenth had joined the ranks of places like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem or London in the seventies, places where cafés and bars would remain open, but with a cloud of fear hanging overhead just like the gas lamps.

  For me, Paris hadn’t been attacked as much as the Tenth and Eleventh had. The terrorists themselves agreed. For them, our neighborhood was a zone grise (gray zone), an abominable place in their mind, where Muslims and non-Muslims coexist on a daily basis. They could have attacked touristy locations like Saint Michel or the Pompidou Center, denser populations like the Marais, symbolic places like the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower, but instead they chose us.

  The Monday following the attacks, schools were open, and as Otto and his friends left our house, I scrambled to the window like any crazy fearful parent, craning my neck out at the street to make sure everything was okay. Watching them head off, I couldn’t help but wonder if the bill for the overgrown adolescence I’d been living had now come due. It was Paris’s and my turn to stop being so naïve, to put away childish things and wake up to the howling wind that was blowing through the door, a door that the Tenth, because it was so inclusive and never suspicious and a bit ditsy, had always left open.

  Within months, the city would morph into the fearful America I’d looked down on upon my return trips to the States. Otto would tell us at dinner that his class had practiced tuck and rolls at school, their professor teaching them to hide under the desks and to lock the doors. Green-bereted militia would promenade our sidewalks in threes with machine guns, followed by a sort of Humvee-type jeep with the word VIGIPIRATE decaled on the windshield. We’d even learn that some of the terrorists had grown up nearby.

  The John who assumed he’d one day be sashaying down a Montmartre street waving to his neighbors on his way to the market or bookstore was now at the Barbès metro embarrassingly racial profiling someone with a beard and tunic. The man in question had walked into the car holding too-large zippered shopping bags and a Muslim prayer blasting in his earphones. I had panicked and stepped backward out of the car right before the doors closed. And as the train pulled out, an immediate guilt mixed with anger mixed with “Fuck, I have to wait for another train” all hit me at the same time.

  It also dawned on me that maybe I’d been playacting as a sophisticate for years, dressing myself up as some noble urbanite, who maybe deep down liked feeling rich around those who were less privileged. Just look. We had a country house like all the other bougie cardigan-sweater-wearing couples in Paris, and Bibi was already going to school in a different district, in a far-away arrondissement where people my age had grown out of their “keeping it real” adolescence. There on the platform an odd cry leaked out, one that I guess came from frazzled nerves, comical irony, and a touch of self-loathing. It was as if everything I’d been living and appreciating in France had just been twisted by a bad acid trip. My home was no longer what I thought it was, and neither was I.

  At school, Anaïs noticed smaller things, too. Fatima, whose son Yassine was in Otto’s class, was showing up to school now in a long black gown and matching hijab that covered her ears and forehead, something she hadn’t worn before.

  “Fatima, what’s all this?” Anaïs asked in a tone you might use when someone shows up at the beach in socks. Anaïs felt she could ask because they knew each other well. She’d helped Fatima’s husband, who was from Egypt, with his papers, and although the two weren’t close friends, they’d grown close in a sidewalk drop-off kind of way. I’d see them chat and wish each other bonnes vacances and even share a coffee on occasion.

  “Fatima sera toujours Fatima” (Fatima will always be Fatima), she replied. “Et Anaïs sera toujours Anaïs” (And Anaïs will always be Anaïs). But the way Fatima said it, Anaïs told me, repeating it in an almost mantralike way, looking straight ahead toward the school door instead of back at Anaïs meant, indeed, that something had changed.

  In the fall of 2015, Syrian, Eritrean, and Malian refugees began appearing in our neighborhood, because of its proximity to Gare du Nord, from which they hoped to eventually reach the U.K. by train. How they planned to do this was anybody’s guess, but their haphazard plans looked almost Swiss compared to Paris’s response to their arrival, which was a bad mix of denial, indifference, and ultimately forceful removal.

  For months, families would camp out in the basketball courts that sat in the mid
dle of the boulevard de la Chappelle, the two-lane thoroughfare fifty yards from our apartment that links the north of Paris east to west. There, the migrants would hang laundry and sleep in makeshift cabins built of cardboard. Their numbers soon grew, and then within weeks, there’d be concern of illness spreading; no toilets or clean water were available to them. Children in diapers would walk in proximity to passing cars, lines would form for impromptu food handouts, and all this time, residents like us in the Tenth would continue our daily lives, heading off to work and stepping over them on our way to the subway feeling almost numb.

  The refugees did their best to keep their camp clean, but their numbers would grow until police would eventually arrive in the middle of the night with buses and cleaning crews to evict everyone, taking them away to God knows where. The basketball courts would be hosed down, barricades put in place, but that didn’t stop the next wave of refugees from arriving the following week, starting the process all over again.

  For the most part, my neighbors remained stoic if not welcoming during this time. Anaïs’s theater troupe performed a reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses one night for those in the encampment. People volunteered to teach French. There were booths set up to help with medication, and all of this was done without the help of Parisian authorities, who still were operating under a “hear no evil see no evil” policy. The reaction of our neighborhood was noticeably different from that of the tony Sixteenth, which, when it was announced that the city was considering opening up a refugee center in the Bois de Boulogne, lost its shit. The fact that the center would be in the park itself and far from any residential area didn’t matter. Local news showed Sixteenth residents flooding their city hall meetings, old ladies pushing themselves through doors shouting at their arrondissement mayor and the city to rescind its plan. And it worked. The refugee center plan was scrapped.

  In December, protesters calling themselves Nuit Debout (Standing at Night), a French version of Occupy Wall Street, arrived looking to ally with the refugees. They’d routinely graffiti the street with “mort aux banquiers” (death to bankers) and burn scooters for no reason other than to sow chaos. In March, “les Sauvettes,” a form of yard sales for gypsies, began appearing on the boulevard, providing gruesome scenes of people bartering used tubes of toothpaste for 2003 Nokia phones, all on a bed sheet they’d spread out in haste on the sidewalk below our window. Then over the summer a salle de shoot (supervised heroin shoot center) opened near the Gare du Nord, creating wandering zombies, high or desperate, kicking in café windows and rummaging through garbage cans while they waited for the center to open.

  Our world was on fire, I felt, and having grown up in a posh Georgetown setting and attended a buttoned-up private school, I began wondering why the hell I was letting my kids grow up in such a place. That’s selfishness, Anaïs told me.

  As long as our neighborhood wasn’t dangerous, and it’s not, our family would choose (knowing we did have the choice) to stay here, keeping our sangfroid and living a life that ran counter to what we’d seen in the No-Go Zone blaring news. And in the end (and this is where it’s selfish, she said), our kids wouldn’t have to be so frightened as their peers, nor would they necessarily have the same sheltered worldview I had. A world of cushiness probably awaits them anyway, so until then, they will see what mass migration does to people on both sides, and the real effects of lingering civil war and the ravages of drugs. They’ll meet dentists who are living on the sidewalk, and they’ll be friends with children whose parents might be deported and who don’t have one-tenth of what they have, but seem happy and get better grades. That experience can’t be quantified, says my smarter wife, and it ingrains in a person a rare quality—something she feels will separate Otto and Bibi from their future peers—compassion, “which is a better fuel for life than obscure fear.”

  And, sure, we could have moved to another neighborhood in Paris, where streets were cleaner and ruined lives were less in your face, but those places were equally upsetting, just in other ways. Instagram-addicted mean girls had bullied Bibi during her first year at a select international school. Other kids were having druggy blow-out parties while their parents were in Deauville. A couple we knew who had a scrumptious apartment in the Seventeenth was living (literally) paycheck to paycheck although both had good jobs. And when we did consider other apartments in other neighborhoods (only after I insisted), each place seemed stuck in a time warp or cut off from reality, at least from our reality. Whether it was in the Fourteenth or Fifteenth, even Montmartre, everything seemed so clean and functioning, it almost seemed fake. The gourmet delis and Lacoste boutiques and chicken rôtisseries and crayon-colored vegetable stands all of a sudden seemed rich to me, as in German chocolate cake rich, indigestible, too much. Touristy even. Something I’d once assumed was the embodiment of French wonderfulness, which now I couldn’t stomach.

  So, we’ve stayed.

  Minutes following France’s victory in the 2018 World Cup, we found ourselves en famille, flowing down the bank of the Canal Saint Martin, caught up in a parallel river of high-fiving revelers and ecstatic fans dancing in the street, waving flags, and holding up those in cars who were stupid enough to drive after a World Cup victory.

  Soon we were at Place de la République, in the same spot we’d come to years earlier to honor the victims of the Bataclan and Charlie Hebdo attacks. But instead of a solemn candlelit vigil, the place was pandemonium. Some fans had even managed to scale the sixty-foot bronze statue of République, clinging to her smaller sisters Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, hanging over each a sign saying “Cimer Les Bleus” (the Verlan version of Merci Les Bleus). Caught up in the moment, I mistakenly let Bibi jump on my shoulders, forgetting she was sixteen now. And while she waved her French flag and her bony hips dug deep into my collar bone, I grinned through the pain, because it seemed like only yesterday she lived on those shoulders, eating her Nutella crepes while we walked through these same parts, searching for the Place’s carousel.

  Later that night, we passed by Le Carillon, which resembled more a beach shack at high tide than a Parisian café. The beer on the floor measured almost half an inch by then, and outside, where just a few years earlier bodies had littered the sidewalk covered in emergency aluminum space blankets, people hugged and sang the “Marseillaise” and vomited off to the side while still pumping their fists. Joy had reclaimed its place here. The sangfroid was red and pumping.

  We then made our way home, limping on sore feet, Otto and Najl-Adams walking ahead of us, wrapped in their French flags, looking like old ladies with shawls. Like many on the national team, both were French kids and sons of immigrants. Both made fun of their fathers’ accents, and both had laughed at their dads’ respective country’s teams that had failed to even qualify for the Cup.

  And as we all sang a slew of recently penned soccer chants celebrating les bleus and our Tenth Arrondissement’s shining moment, it hit me. What better place could one live in right now? Nothing interesting or original would ever come from my hanging out in the Café Flore or walking the Seine or rewatching the film Amélie, which (and the critics were right) totally looks dated and clichéd now.

  Better to be on the front lines in Paris’s No-Go Zone, a place where men chased men with bricks, and all you had to do was sit back and watch it from your Berlusconi, knowing nobody in Paris had such a good view.

  Huge in France

  I’ve learned that if you live in France and you’re American, chances are you didn’t come here for the job prospects. It could have been that bar exam you failed, or the yearlong sabbatical that became five, but it’s rare to find the expat who tells you “My career just took off, and they sent me to Paris!” And if by some miracle you are successful here, it has less to do with your talent and more to do with the French not knowing any better. The French, I’ve found, are a lot more suspicious of other French than they are of Americans. You could be a fugitive sought by Interpol, but if yo
u say you’re bilingual and have experience, they’re happy to take your word for it. At least that’s how it has worked for me.

  Before I became a fancy-pants magazine writer, I took whatever job came my way, not only because I had mouths to feed, but also because the immigrant experience lends itself to that kind of create your own adventure mentality, giving you the illusion you’re fulfilling some sort of passionate bucket-list, traveling-abroad Hemingway journey when in fact you’re just translating the Pullman Hotel catalog. With its 15 percent unemployment and measly 1 percent annual growth, France isn’t the place one expects to find immediate work. But that’s the beauty of moving to a foreign country. You get to reboot not only your address, but your CV, too.

  I’ve written ad campaigns, done voice-overs, translated Pilates for Dummies, I even acted on an SNL type weekly TV show, and never once was I the most qualified or the best suited for the job. I was the most American, however, and that has always carried the most weight. I’ve found there’s an endearing quality about an employable American living in France, something the French always seem to gravitate toward. And since many want to think of their company or product as global, the chance to work with a real live flesh and blood American is too good to pass up.