I was falling behind, which meant I couldn’t see what they saw coming next.
I went to my room, dislodged the Swahili book from my bedside pile, and took it down to the shop. The street was completely dark. I’d misunderstood, or only half understood, the inscription. It wasn’t the lion that was scary, but the night, this night, which, as I stared into it, became terrifying. The book, the store, the window I was looking through, but most important, what Daphne had told me she’d seen, all of this was transforming the street outside and the city beyond from a place I thought I knew well into something once again foreign. I had to find a stool to steady myself as the feeling came over me that I no longer knew where, or who, I was. This lasted all of a minute, then everything returned.
I went upstairs to wait and see if Ellie would, too.
* * *
—
“We’re looking”: and indeed, Ellie and Asif had gone looking that night in Ménilmontant. I know that not because Daphne said so, and certainly not because her sister told me—Ellie arrived home at 1:00 A.M. and I did not rise to confront her—but because of Ellie’s phone.
Which I’d found because I did not confront her. Ellie slept with her phone at her side, flouting a rule I’d found impossible to enforce. Another rule: I was free to examine her phone’s entire contents whenever I wanted, without warning. I’d never enforced this rule (I didn’t like the Orwellian feel of it, but the Orwellian parenting website I’d gotten it from said just establishing the rule could suffice), but I’d never revoked it, which meant there was absolutely nothing wrong with sneaking into the girls’ room, sliding the phone off Ellie’s nightstand, and taking it to the kitchen, where six successive password guesses failed until a final one—her father’s birth date—succeeded.
I went straight to the photos. I skipped the texts. I wasn’t that kind of mom, I told myself. And so I tried not to look as I looked.
But I needn’t have worried; speed-skimming revealed a girl in love with Paris as much as or, if I had to judge by photography alone, more than with Asif. There were plenty of shots of him, yes, including one or two making a sinewy bicep. But there were many more of him framed by an archway: he would often be out of focus, but the colorful garden beyond, sharp and true. There were endless shots of him in cafés looking away from the lens, and not seeing what Ellie seemed to see—others looking at him, at them. Ellie, it seemed, saw what I saw, that Parisians enjoy life’s little dramas. What I enjoy about Parisians is that they expect drama.
And sometimes, although you are not a tenth the romantic your younger sister is, you create a folder on your phone solely devoted to photos of your missing father. Or so I had intuited Ellie had done. There was a folder for friends, for favorites, for Bemelmans (just two off-kilter shots of Notre-Dame and some of the Seine). And there was a folder for “Dad.” I hesitated before clicking on it. I’d feared that the girls missed him less now. I’d feared that I’d wanted them to miss him less. But the truth was, we all carried him in different ways. Sometimes Daphne set an extra plate at dinner for him, as we’d occasionally done in the States during his absences. But here in Paris, she just as often silently picked that plate back up and returned it to the cabinet before we started eating.
Sometimes, I caught myself crying. So did other people. Once, a girl not much older than Ellie, waiting with me for the light in order to cross the street, looked over and asked if I was all right. In French, in English. I swear I did not know I’d been thinking about Robert, much less crying about him. The light turned green. The girl was on a bike. She waited for me to answer. A bus waited behind her. Ding, ding: the warning bells of Parisian buses sound like they’ve been stolen from a boxing ring but still manage to clang so merrily it’s almost music (until the driver, patience spent, finally uses the horn). The girl pushed off. Then, as now, I wiped my face. I decided not to open “Dad.”
Instead, I found the folder that contained tonight’s images. I saw that Ellie and Asif had stopped at the chocolatier at the top of the street: Snap, tongues, an outstretched arm. A shot of Asif eating, smiling. A shot of Ellie kissing him on the cheek. A shot of a bus. A shot of an empty street. Another empty street, one I didn’t recognize, and the blue street-name placard on the nearest building unintelligible. A shot of Ellie pointing at a mural painted on the side of a small apartment building—it was hard to make out, but then I saw it, a giant red balloon, wrapping around the building’s top left corner.
Then a shot that was a blur; something had jiggled her arm. Another fumbled shot, another, a whole rapid-fire sequence of them, murky or light-blown, all blurry. And then what looked like Asif’s hand, stretched toward the lens as if to cover it up.
And then, on her phone, a video she’d taken, time-stamped tonight. Its first frame was pitch black.
But when things became visible, I became so absorbed that I failed to realize that the sound, which I should have muted, might draw someone to see what I was doing.
Ellie.
She came up behind me and didn’t say a word until she reached over, stopped the video, and took the phone. “Nice,” she said, cool and quiet.
“Ellie,” I said.
“I mean, I guess, you did have that rule. I just didn’t think—while I was sleeping, Mom?” she asked. “How long have you—”
“Ellie, never,” I said. “This is the first time. I just wanted to—Daphne said—”
“Daphne?” Ellie said. “Daphne said what?”
“Nothing, El, nothing about you anyway, she was more talking about—” Ellie circled around the tiny table and sat across from me. “She said you were looking for him,” I said. “Dad.”
“What?” Ellie said.
“Shh,” I said, nodding toward the sleepers’ rooms.
“Yeah, keep it quiet,” Ellie said. “Maybe mute the fucking phone next time you’re snooping.”
“Ellie!”
“Mom!” Ellie said. “When were you going to go looking? It’s May, nine months since we got here, thirteen since he’s been gone. Daphne’s like, ‘she’s going, she’s going looking when we’re at school, maybe,’ and I said, ‘okay, then why isn’t she telling us about it,’ and Daphne’s all, ‘well, maybe she’s not finding him.’ And I said, ‘well, maybe she should look harder.’” Ellie started flicking through her phone.
Do you talk about me behind my back all the time, I wondered, or just when I’m screwing up? I wanted to ask this, but couldn’t, so instead I said, “Is Asif okay?” I’d not seen much of the video, but enough to see Asif take a spill.
Ellie looked up at me. “Yeah.”
“Because it looked like he tripped? He fell?”
“It wasn’t pretty, but yeah,” Ellie said, eyes back to the phone.
“Are you sure he—”
“Asif is fine, Mom,” Ellie said. “Super embarrassed. Though he shouldn’t have been—that rat was as big as a dog. I jumped, too—if I hadn’t, I could have caught Asif before he fell.”
“Where were you filming? It looks like some sort of park.”
“Oh, Mom, c’mon,” Ellie said.
She scooted her chair back around the table toward me. All wasn’t forgiven, but for the briefest moment, I pretended it was: she was right here, next to me, she was warm and alive and safe, and she’d moved beside me so that if she’d wanted to, she could hug me.
She didn’t. Instead, she pressed PLAY.
* * *
—
Ménilmontant. Paris’s Alps, an almost vertical stretch of the city, long famous as a film neighborhood: the light’s good up there. Jackie Gleason shot a maudlin vanity pic, 1962’s Gigot, in Ménilmontant and played the title role, a mute clown. Famed director Dmitri Kirsanoff’s silent-film masterpiece Ménilmontant, supposedly Pauline Kael’s favorite film of all time, was shot there in 1924–25; its violence still shocks. And of course, thirty years later, The R
ed Balloon. Lamorisse knew what he was doing when he set his “children’s” film in Ménilmontant. He needed the light, sure, but the dark, too.
Ellie’s own video was exceptionally dark and fairly short. She narrated it now; she’d long wanted to visit le quartier du ballon—the balloon neighborhood, our slang, not Paris’s—but she reminded me that I’d long been opposed; it wasn’t “safe.”
And it wasn’t, or so other parents in our timid corner of the Marais assured me: Ménilmontant wasn’t wealthy and hadn’t been for centuries. Who knew what happened there at night?
I was about to find out.
Ellie is the cameraman, Asif the offscreen, and quite anxious, narrator: Ellie, Ellie, I think we should go back. The streets wind and climb, higher and higher, until the ascent grows so steep the sidewalk finally gives up and becomes stairs. Ellie had shot herself an almost perfect noir film, the night blue-black beyond the occasional streetlamp’s glow. I was even a little jealous. All those years I’d dreamed of making films, and here Ellie had made one, if unconsciously. Asif plays his own role well: let’s go, he hisses, suddenly urgent, like he’d just seen something Ellie hadn’t. But they continue to climb the stairs. To their left, bricks, a wall, a building, buildings. To their right, perfect darkness. For a minute I thought it was a cliff, but then a distant lamp’s glow summoned trees, grass, a terraced park. Ellie climbs, the POV bounces, up, up, she turns to study the neighboring building, and Asif shouts. Squeaks, really. Brave Asif. The camera spins and two of what had looked like trees now animate, split, and become two men with beards. They walk up to Ellie and Asif. They smile, nod, and when Ellie and Asif stutter a reply, the men smile again and say bonsoir and disappear.
“See?” Ellie says to Asif on the film, and to me as I watched. “It’s not dangerous up there. It’s perfectly fine.” A moment later, Ellie urges them higher one more time—we’re almost to the top, and that’s, like, a famous shot in the film! This is when the rat (like all good movie monsters, it goes unseen) startles Asif, who stumbles and falls, along with Ellie, along with the phone. The last seconds of the video are shot from the ground, nothing visible but the flare of a lamp and the black sky beyond. The audio’s clear, though: Asif and Ellie swear and apologize to each other. There is a discussion of blood. Of glass. Of being out too late. I’m so sorry, Asif says, your mom’s going to kill me.
Ellie has the last words, before a hand crosses the shot to turn the camera off. She’s angry with him now. And by him, I mean her dad, but Asif is the handy proxy. Or I am: Don’t worry, Ellie says, she doesn’t care.
After Ellie and I finished watching, we fell silent. Robert’s manuscript took that family to Paris, no farther. There was, as I said, suggestion of a trip to Ménilmontant in its pages, but no actual scene where anyone in the family did just that.
“So there’s no reason to be scared,” Ellie said.
I shook my head.
“But you still are, aren’t you?” she said.
* * *
—
Nine months in Paris, and I had not been to the neighborhood where the subject of my abandoned thesis was filmed. Even though Eleanor recognized that I was relieved to be rid of the thesis—some part of me still burned to make a film, but nothing made me want to finish that paper—she would ask about The Red Balloon’s “backyard” occasionally on Skype. I had various ways of evading the question. I didn’t say that I was worried I might bump into Robert, though I now think that that was some irrational part of it. Another part was that I’d secretly been saving it up, the last chocolate in the box, because what would top it after? The movie of (and, my deluded self insisted, about) my childhood, come to life once more.
In the meantime, though, I’d fended off Eleanor with clever speechwriterisms. I wasn’t interested in the “real behind the reel” but rather the art, the film, the film whole and complete. If I wanted to see Ménilmontant, I could just press PLAY.
But now I had, on Ellie’s phone. And now I had to go.
Ménilmontant rises northeast of central Paris, between Montmartre and the Père Lachaise cemetery, but attracts none of their tourists. That’s in part because there’s little in Ménilmontant for les touristes, nor even for scholars and obsessives of The Red Balloon. A wide swath of the neighborhood, including the rickety catwalks that helped residents traverse the precipitous heights, was razed in the 1960s in an aggressive slum-clearing effort.
And so Albert Lamorisse’s film, shot in just two months at the end of 1955, got there just in time. To review: a large red balloon and a sweet little blond-haired boy (and briefly, a cat) meet atop Ménilmontant at dawn and then pal around Paris; some jealous bullies eventually hunt the balloon down and attack it with slingshots. The balloon sinks lower and lower, until one of the bullies finally puts a foot to it, and then the balloon lies there, crumpled and spent, just another piece of windblown trash in a vacant lot scabbed with dirt. Then comes the odd ending Daphne and I distrust, when the boy floats over Paris with dozens of other balloons that have rushed to his side, while the boy’s great love, that red balloon, lies trampled and forgotten. Lamorisse’s original script called for the boy to fly all the way to Africa. In the final cut, Pascal hardly makes it out of Paris, but still, the soaring mood is jarringly literal. To me, the film’s real, if unintentional, message is unnervingly dark: beauty is fleeting; jealousy kills.
It’s strange that Lamorisse’s film makes anyone wistful for postwar Paris, because he takes great pains to show how immediately post- the war still was: Pascal and his balloon are pursued over rubble-strewn lots and the rocky ruins of old apartment blocks; tufts of grass dot the earth here and there, but it’s no park.
A half century later, it is.
Some parts of Lamorisse’s Ménilmontant still exist, however, starting with the bus line Pascal (and the balloon) take in the film and which I took the next morning, after seeing everyone silently off to school. The 96 climbed steeply up and out of the Marais, eventually letting me off at Notre-Dame—another, smaller Notre-Dame, Notre-Dame de la Croix—which boy and mischievous balloon get thrown out of (by an usher in Napoleonic dress) during the film.
Then it was down rue Julien Lacroix and up the staircase that felled Asif. I can see why Ellie was so interested in the location; the stairs here look much like those in Lamorisse’s film, but were actually built much later, around the same time as the terraced Parc de Belleville that the staircase threads through. A couple of young men, smoking, looked up at me from a bench as I passed, one of those long, focused stares that I have become somewhat more accustomed to while living here—France is the land of the frank appraisal—but they didn’t smile. I kept moving.
At the top of the stairs, I suddenly found myself short of breath but told myself it was from the steep climb. Still, Lamorisse had been here. Pascal had walked there. The cat, that lonely, long-ago cat, the first living thing the film chooses to put on view, had sat right there while Pascal meandered into frame from my left at 00:00:05, endured the boy’s friendly scratching at 00:00:16, and stayed put once Pascal, at 00:00:30, headed down (roughly) the same stairs Ellie and Asif had found. (Part of what’s always delighted me about the film is how improvisational it is, and how lucky Lamorisse had gotten with his improvisers, be they cats, kids, or balloons.)
They’d all been right here. My daughter, too. Had Robert? I gripped the railing and breathed. Robert would love this, I thought, and thought of Ellie. I love this. I took in the view Ellie had sought.
In the film, the panorama is wreathed in smoke and fog, but today was startlingly clear. It’s a shame tourists flock instead to the views a kilometer or so northwest in the pickpockety heights of Montmartre; it’s quieter here, and the Eiffel Tower easier to spot.
But I wasn’t thinking of tourists. I was thinking of Ellie.
And Daphne. Not long after we first arrived in Paris, Daphne stopped on the sidewalk of some street—s
omewhere in the Left Bank, narrow, residential, pretty enough, but nothing notable in view—and said, “I think I’ve been here before.” After some requisite talk about reincarnation, time travel, and wormholes—both Ellie and Daphne love Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time—we chalked it up to another Madeline, Bemelmans’s, and of course The Red Balloon, and all the girls’ years of French immersion schooling. For much of their childhood, these girls had lived in Paris in every way but the real way.
So had I. But I’d never felt quite as Daphne did about any spot in Paris until I’d reached this one. Here was the view I’d first seen from Wisconsin thirty-two years earlier, when I’d first seen the film, first read the book. I wanted to shout; I felt shaky. I went into a bakery to steady myself, to tell the baker, bonjour, hello, I’m back!
Instead, I just stood there, breathless, grinning stupidly.
He said nothing. Neither did the only other person in the store, a customer clutching a very full paper bag.
Seconds passed. Reality spasmed. The customer vanished.
And the baker began to explain that I’d interrupted a holdup.
But I was already out the door, not thinking, just running, because the thief—the other customer, with the full bag—had also stripped me of my purse.
Behind me came the baker. Ahead of me, the thief.
And then, just behind the thief, closing in much faster than I, someone new. Unfortunately, the first thing that came to mind was an idiom I’d just learned for driving fast: appuyez sur le champignon, step on the mushroom. (Another reason I don’t drive in Paris: I understand that certain older French cars have pedals roughly the size of dimmer switches—or mushrooms.) The idiom wasn’t necessarily appropriate here, but I didn’t have time to reflect on that, only enough time to dub this new person Monsieur le Champignon—if nothing else, the word sounded like champion, and this he proved to be.
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