A Letter from Paris

by Louisa Deasey

  Michelle returned from London to Paris in 1950, as dad had travelled to Vienna and Berlin seeking work as a translator, before returning to France. In 1951, as dad embraced Parisian life by taking a room at the Hotel Floridor for a year while he taught English (in the 14th arrondissement), Michelle married a Frenchman and moved from the 16th the 18th.

  I wondered out loud, if Michelle ever saw the newspaper clipping about dad’s mistaken arrest, if she ever saw him walking the streets of Paris …

  Laurence looked at me thoughtfully, saying ambiguously that Michelle had always loved the film The Bridges of Madison County.

  Clém smiled, in the corner.

  ‘I think she was quite sad,’ Laurence continued. ‘When she divorced my father, in 1984, she started to talk of this man — Denison. And we never knew who that was. We didn’t know he existed until we found the letters.’

  I thought to myself, how different the story would have been if Michelle had known dad had died in 1984.

  We talked about art, and Laurence offered to take me on a tour of ancient ateliers, intrigued to know about dad and what I’d found in the memoir, which was that dad couldn’t sell his two original paintings by Foujita that Albert Tucker had given him — instead having a Parisian art dealer accuse him of forgery. Foujita had never been known to paint anything but cats before he’d gifted Tucker the paintings of Japanese girls. Laurence offered to take me to the Montparnasse apartment where Foujita had lived. They all cared about the history, wanted me to know it.

  I lingered for hours, not wanting to leave.

  When it was finally time to go, Arnaud insisted on planning our next rendezvous.

  ‘Louisa, I am certain your father would have gone to Les Closeries des Lilas. We are taking you there while you are here in Paris. You are not allowed to go with anyone else!’

  How I loved Montparnasse. The streets were wide and light and you could see the Paris streetscape down to Saint Germain. Clém left me to walk happily home from Denfert-Rochereau station.

  I had a little list of addresses in my pocket of places dad had visited or stayed — including the homes of Mademoiselle Moos and another Australian artist, David Strachan. They all seemed to be along the circuit from the Hotel Floridor, down the tree-lined Boulevarde Raspail towards Saint Germain.

  It was early evening on Saturday as I stopped at La Coupole in all its shiny, Art Deco glory and ordered an overpriced coffee. Well-dressed Americans posed for photos, and I visited the washrooms Alister had described in one of his memoirs. The taps he’d been graciously allowed to use due to his poet status were now the beautiful, glossy bathrooms of the 21st century, no longer holding the ancient plumbing he described.

  I walked another six kilometres down the Boulevarde Saint Michel, across the Pont Neuf bridge, and along the Seine to the Egyptian obelisk in the centre of the vast Place de La Concorde, before turning back through the stately Jardin des Tuileries to the pyramids of the Louvre.

  Drunk with beauty and history and shiny wet cobblestones in the late winter rain, I finally made it to my little Marais ‘home’.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Date de naissance

  Clém, who now called me every night for hours of chatting while she walked her two dogs, reminded me how to get to Orsay with a list of instructions. I didn’t want to wait until Saturday to see Gisèle again, so I made plans to catch the train on Thursday, five days after the first visit.

  But things were a little tricky without Clém to navigate me through the outskirts of Paris. I’d made a mistake with my phone plan and couldn’t add roaming wi-fi. More annoyingly, I only seemed to be able to call Australia, not numbers in France, unless I was connected to the internet.

  After seeing Gisèle’s face light up when I’d given her those photos, I’d printed more from my computer files at a shop near Place de la Bastille. I packed them up, as well as a pot plant for her balcony, for some colour to replace the ones she’d described losing in the storm.

  The Residence hadn’t answered when I’d called to alert them the day before, but it was a sunny day, maybe she would be strong enough to go somewhere for lunch?

  At 11.00 a.m., I walked to Saint Michel to catch the train.

  Once at the Residence, I was met by a Frenchwoman in a nursing uniform.

  ‘Bonjour,’ I said confidently, ‘Je suis venu pour visiter Madame Satoor …’

  The nurse looked confused.

  12.30 was apparently sleeping time, and I had to wait until after one for the ‘residents’ to be woken for lunch. I waited in the downstairs reception while the nurse brought me a miniscule glass of water, and at 1.00 p.m. on the dot caught the lift upstairs to knock for Gisèle. The hallways were silent.

  The nurse, by my side, made a sleeping motion with her hands and said the word dormir, but I didn’t really believe it. I knew Gisèle slept late in the morning; to be asleep again at 1.00 p.m. just didn’t seem right. Finally, after we’d knocked and said her name a number of times, there was a slow creak of a nearby door. An elderly lady crept out to the dark hall, speaking in French to the nurse.

  I heard Gisèle’s name, I heard the word ‘ambulance’, the woman made a movement to express pain in her chest and then something about coeur and dimanche. Gisèle had been taken to hospital for heart troubles on Sunday.

  The nurse, seeing how distressed the news made me, took me down to see ‘Sandrine’, who apparently knew what was happening with everyone at the Residence. Sandrine had been the one who spoke to Coralie, just a week earlier, when I’d still been in Australia.

  But where was Gisèle? I tried to keep my thoughts calm.

  Another tiny glass of water was delivered as I sat with Sandrine and the potted petunia, which now made me sad. Because we were unable to understand each other’s language, we typed, assisted with a series of mimes, on Google Translate from her computer.

  Gisèle is in the hospital.

  Why?

  She had heart palpitations on Sunday, she forgot to take her medicine.

  Where is the hospital?

  Next to the station.

  How long will she be there?

  It’s complicated. She can’t return without medical care, and we don’t have the appropriate piece of paper.

  What is the piece of paper? Can I get your email and phone number?

  More typing …

  When the exhausting dance was over, and I had instructions and names, written by Sandrine, I stood up to leave. A crowd of curious onlookers banked up at her door, I hugged Sandrine impulsively, and they looked on, bewildered.

  There is one more thing to tell you. She sat down and typed again in French and I saw it translate. When I told her you were coming from Australia to see her, she looked better than I’d seen her in a year, since she had the stroke.

  I couldn’t help but worry that all the tears and emotion of my visit had made her forget to take her medication.

  Onwards I marched with my pathetic petunia and my poor French making me feel stunted and powerless, down the hill and back past the mairie, finding the hospital.

  Thankfully, remembering Gisèle’s full name and birthdate by heart, I was able to hand it to a woman at the emergency triage station, who looked as bewildered as the residents at why an Australian who spoke very little French was looking for a sick ‘family’ member in a semirural French hospital. But knowing Gisèle’s date of birth seemed the vital key. I could never have found her without that precious date de naissance. The date de naissance Coralie had given me, via email, just two weeks earlier.

  The woman called over a nurse to escort me upstairs.

  Deuxième étage. Chambre 512.

  Gisèle was in the surgery wing, which made me even more worried. Perhaps it was her time. Perhaps that was all this was for: one final goodbye, that chance to see her on Saturday, the chance to touch her, a first an
d final gift …

  At last, I saw door 512, and gently pushed it open to find tiny Gisèle bent over a small plate of lunch on a plastic hospital serving plate.

  ‘Gisèle?’

  ‘Oui?’

  I made my way over to where she could see and hear me properly. Then, there it was — a click. A turn of the key.

  ‘Ah … Louisa!’ That smile. That beautiful smile.

  She called me closer to her and stopped eating her lunch. And there we were together again, Gisèle speaking fluent English, back in Australia where the cockatoos screeched and dad’s brothers and sisters had welcomed her to the family.

  ‘They were so kind to me,’ she kept saying, about Kathleen and Alice.

  I wasn’t sure whether or not to give her the petunia, for she seemed to have only a small tray to store her things. But the room had completely bare walls and no window. She needed something. I pushed it towards her.

  She exclaimed at its beauty, but then had a thought. Something I’d done seemed wrong. ‘Don’t waste your money, this is your precious time in Europe.’

  Still, she held my hand and kissed it, and we sat huddled like conspiratorial sisters. She was sorry that she couldn’t offer me somewhere to stay.

  I pulled out the photos I’d printed and blown up so that she could see them properly, and she repeated, just like she had on Saturday, ‘Can I keep it?’, kissing the backs of my hands when I said yes, like she was a little child.

  ‘Ah. Australia …’ She smiled. ‘The Deaseys were so kind to me. So kind.’

  ‘Of course, Gisèle, they loved you.’

  ‘No!’ She shook her finger.

  ‘Not “of course”! Not everyone would be so kind …’ She left it there, and I remembered the comment about her scrawled thoughtlessly on dad’s school records.

  ‘The Deaseys treated me like family. My family.’

  She talked of conversations from seventy years ago, of songs and events and a party where she made her own dress, which was in a photo I had brought her. She told me stories of the aunts and uncles I’d never had the chance to meet and their lives and conversations, which meant so much to her, and every once in a while she’d point at the roof again and shake her head.

  ‘Mon mari est dans le ciel.’

  After an hour like this, she looked at me with her twinkling eyes.

  ‘What are you eating? Your place in Le Marais — is it okay? What do you do for the little hole in your tummy?’

  She remembered where I was staying … Gisèle asked me to pass her bag, the little purse I’d seen her carry on her neck back at the Residence, the purse with all her essentials. From her bag, she slowly pulled out an unopened box of French sweets.

  And suddenly, despite another patient hacking beside me in the awful hot hospital room with no window and no natural light, we were in her apartment in Paris. Her space. Her rules.

  And I could see why she’d survived. From being sent to a Catholic boarding school in Montparnasse from age six to eleven as her parents still lived in Sumatra, to surviving the German invasion of Paris when she was a teenager, to losing her dad for four years and enlisting in the army to find him. And how she’d travelled on her own to London at only twenty-something and she had so little money she had to lie to the cab driver and insist he drop her an hour away from some sort of boarding house where young French girls slept in dormitories and had to be out by nine in the morning to go and look for work. And she had found work, as an au pair, just like Michelle, until she was fired from a job because the mother thought Gisèle had stolen a pair of stockings. So she’d become an artist’s model instead, because they liked the unusual angles of her face.

  Gisèle was so proud, so determined to be happy.

  The way she behaved, even in hospital, in this torrid room, as though she were hosting me in an apartment which overlooked the Eiffel Tower. The same flat where the Australian Embassy had been built, slightly blocking her view, making her remark with a beautiful smile, ‘my life has been obscured by an Australian’.

  ‘Where did these sweets come from?’ I asked, stunned by the appearance of a box of delicacies in this hospital room.

  ‘My friend Johnny has a car. I asked him to buy me something, in case I had a visitor.’ She smiled, insisting I eat four, then further insisting that I wrap more and put them in my bag for ‘later’.

  I marvelled at her ability to find a friend with a car who went to the shops for her. Her instinct for survival and propriety. Ordering sweets so that she’d have something to offer a visitor.

  On the train back to Paris, I kept remembering Gisèle’s words. Let’s be happy. And Aren’t I lucky, when she’d seen the petunia. Just as she’d said decades earlier, when she took mum and I to dinner. They were her orders. Her resolutions. The words that kept her alive so long, outliving dad and Alice and all her contemporaries and even my mum, tucked away in a room on the outskirts of Paris.

  No matter where you are or what you’re doing, you decide to be happy. You find a friend with a car who can buy some sweets that you can share with an unexpected visitor, transforming the most miserable hospital ward into the kind of exchange only you can foster, remembering songs you once sang and how pointy was Denison’s chin and how that beer in Australia made the buttons on his shirt too tight and how all of that was funny and how fascinating Australia was, and how much you loved that job at the radio in Melbourne, broadcasting all the way to Paris with the miracle of telecommunications.

  And you smile. And you focus on the things you want to bring in, and block out all the rest, like the hacking woman just a metre away.

  Let’s be happy, she’d said, and I could feel her saying it to dad almost like a memory in my own body. How her steely, beautiful strength and companionship, her warm little hands, her beautiful smile must have propped him up in his ‘suffering’, and made it less.

  And she remembered the first thing he said to her, which was the last thing she said to him, on the telephone from Paris the night before he died.

  ‘Why do you take life so seriously?’ he’d said, when she was stewing by the fire over her liaison that had ended, after David Boyd’s pottery show.

  And she’d said it to him on the phone before he died, and he even laughed.

  Why do you take life so seriously, Denison?

  He’d laughed, and known he was loved, the night before he died.

  She was so tiny, and so strong. Power comes from who you are, not what you have. And she was Gisèle. Enduring.

  Still, I hated to think of her stuck in that hot, windowless room with the very sick woman beside her. Gisèle deserved better. She needed to be back with her books and her photos and her flowers.

  ‘Oh no, Lou, I’m so sorry about Gisèle.’ Clém was devastated by the news, and arranged to meet me the next day so we could make a series of phone calls together to sort out the precious ‘paperwork’ Gisèle needed to be allowed back to the Residence. I hadn’t asked in front of Gisèle, but I’d learned she had been taking her medication at all different times and had no daily nurse to check on her in the Residence. But they wouldn’t let her out of the hospital unless she had a piece of paper saying she would have that daily care.

  ‘I’ll do it in a very careful way, don’t worry, I understand her pride.’

  At Le Pain Quotidien over cake and coffee on the Rue des Archives, Clém made four long calls to various doctors and Sandrine, to-ing and fro-ing like she was coordinating the care of her own mother. At one stage I heard her say ‘ma cousine Australienne’ and she smiled at me, like it was just simpler.

  I remembered, with horror, that instead of saying the French word for godmother, marraine, to the doctor the day before, I’d said the French word for husband, mari. She is my husband. Argh!

  ‘Okay. So, what’s happened is Gisèle signed something when she entered that Residence which said she di
dn’t need medical assistance. And Sandrine can’t give it to her unless she asks. So the doctor won’t let her go back without it.’

  I could just imagine Gisèle’s sense of privacy and pride, not wanting a daily check-up. But she was ninety-one. And on too much daily medication that needed to be taken at the same time every day. It had to be done. The mysterious piece of paper had to come from Gisèle’s Parisian doctor, for the hospital to hand over the care.

  My time in Paris was passing, quickly. In a few weeks I’d be back in Australia. I hated feeling so powerless to help.

  ‘Don’t worry, Lou, we’ll get the piece of paper. And even when you go back to Australia, I’ll check on Gisèle,’ Clém said, reading the worry in my face.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Contradictoire

  A series of emails and messages ping-ponged from Clém to Sandrine, cc-ing me. Clém wouldn’t rest until the situation with Gisèle’s paper was sorted.

  On Sunday, Edouard and his beautiful wife, Catherine, arranged to meet me for lunch in front of the Marché des Enfants Rouges, the oldest covered market in Paris, and he found me swooning over the giant selection of cheeses. Gregarious and enthusiastic, he was so excited to meet, like all the family had been, taking me to lunch nearby at a bistro in Bastille. He was friendly and protective — just as Clém and Coralie and their parents and Marie had been — and decisive and funny at the same time. He was unafraid to talk about the family history, about the complicated times in which both our parents lived.

  At one point, Edouard moved my bag, which I’d left on a nearby chair. ‘You need to be careful with your bag in Paris, Louisa,’ he said with a frown. He was telling me off, but it came from a place of care. It was like my brother was in Paris.

  My salad was delivered with a giant slab of camembert, and I audibly swooned.

  ‘You like French cheese? That’s it!’ Edouard pounded his fist on the table. ‘We will have a cheese night, at my place.’