I am all alone in the world.
In my exchange application, I highlighted my sense of adventure and my resilience. Hana helped with that part and reassured me that even if some of my strengths weren’t technically accurate, it’s what they would want to hear. She said, ‘I’m sure that when you’re older these things might be true from time to time.’
I wrote about how much I love art and philosophy and how I’ve been wanting to visit France ever since I could remember, and I swear all of this came straight from my heart.
I’ve been really lucky already – between the exchange organisation and my host family, I’ve got a place in a high school, a lycée, for the Arts. Because of this, it might be possible to lay the foundation for going back to do Art in Paris for university. It seems like a very amorphous thing, but I popped it in my dream world. It fit there very nicely.
I wake up to my ears popping as the plane makes its descent, and I press my face to the window for my first glimpse. My eyes dart across the expanse of the big old city. Is that the Eiffel Tower? Maybe!
The flight attendant welcomes us in French. ‘Mesdames et messieurs, bienvenue à Paris Charles de Gaulle.’ The local time is 3.45 pm, and the temperature a cool two degrees Celsius.
Walking down the aisle, towards the exit, I start to feel giddy with anticipation. I climbed into a metal tube and, by physics and magic, have been catapulted across the world. I have flown across oceans and lands and places I’ve never been (because I’ve never been anywhere except for Wilsons Prom on family holidays, and to Sydney once).
I turn a corner and here I am.
In France.
Bienvenue.
Claudette and Léon are waiting between the gate and the baggage carousel, where we’d organised. And looking exactly like their photo: she is tall and slim, with sleek brown hair, shoulder length and just so. She wears a rust-coloured coat and her long, thin legs are anchored to the ground by a pair of neat boots. Léon is wearing a tailored winter coat and a short woollen scarf looped and knotted around his neck. He looks confident and has ruddy cheeks like an illustration of a farmer in a children’s storybook.
They recognise me, even though they’ve only seen a photo of a girl who has never left home. A girl in a floral blouse with a denim dress over the top. A girl with an at-home haircut, newly bobbed. That girl must look like such a child.
‘Bonjour, Sofie!’ they say, smiling. ‘Bienvenue en France!’
‘Bonjour,’ I say, and my voice is a squeak. I feel shy and somehow all the French words have escaped me, from bonjour onwards. The bags begin to travel around the carousel, and people push and jostle to be first.
The exchange organisation allocates you to a family that shares your interests, so I have been placed with the Durant family. Two parents, one child (around my age). Léon is an artist, Claudette works for a gallery, and their daughter, Delphine, goes to a prestigious music high school. We’d spoken once on the phone and they’d emailed me too, saying that they would be pleased to welcome me into their home. ‘And we speak a little English, too,’ they promised. They would introduce me to France, French culture, French food, French customs.
I looked up Léon Durant online back when we were first assigned to each other: he’s had a number of exhibitions in Paris, in Bordeaux and even in Berlin. The internet calls his work Post-Expressionism but also Dada, and I’m still learning art styles and art history so I can’t confirm or deny the internet’s truth. The works I found online were full of deep colour and strange, unsettling faces, and made me intrigued by the person who created them.
I imagine a garret apartment filled with heavy, old-fashioned furniture (passed down the generations) and thick Turkish rugs and red wine and paintings and a host of arty, sophisticated friends.
‘We can speak English with you tonight,’ says Claudette, her words cautious but fluent.
‘But French from tomorrow!’ says Léon. He’s tall and a bit plump, and his accent in English is thick and clichéd. I like him right away.
‘Okay!’ I say. Tomorrow my words will have returned, I’m fairly confident. I see my bag appear, the hot pink ribbon that Hana tied to its handle screaming frilly neon. I scoot over to grab it, feeling a mix of out of place, excited and grimy.
‘Now. It is very cold today, so it is good you have this coat.’ Claudette points to my jacket, which I’m clutching under my arm.
I quickly put the coat on and grip the handle of my grandfather’s suitcase. I follow close behind Claudette and Léon and I try to anticipate the weather. Through the doors is a grey footpath, a grey road, and the doors are opening and … it’s like putting my face in the freezer.
A wind whips around and actually takes my breath with it for a moment, with an audible whoosh.
Claudette and Léon laugh, which makes me laugh too, in spite of being horrified.
Where have I arrived? It is like another world. It’s only a five-minute walk through the car park but I take that time to rethink my every action.
My case hardly fits inside their tiny car and completely fills the boot (what’s the word for boot in French?). We all pile in like popes in a Volkswagen, and drive on the wrong side of the road, winding around and around, until we eventually pop out of the maze of the airport. Both of them grumble about the cost of parking, which makes me feel a smidge more at home.
Claudette is driving, and Léon has his phone in his hand. They speak to each other in fast French, and I feel bulky in my coat. They seem cross or exasperated by something.
I watch suburbs and concrete freeway barriers pass by the window, mesmerised and just a little bewildered. So far, France is cold but it isn’t very interesting. Or, at least, it isn’t very French.
Bare trees stretch their scraggly arms into the white smudgy sky. I sketch them on my knee.
‘I’m sorry, Sofie.’ Claudette speaks over her shoulder. I can see a fine silver earring dangling from her ear. ‘Our daughter, Delphine, is telling us she will be out tonight.’
I wonder if Delphine is out in a café, smoking cigarettes and discussing philosophie. In our French textbooks the teenagers go to le jardin zoologique and la fête de la musique. Maybe Delphine is doing that, or perhaps she’s at a dance party. Maybe she’ll invite me along to dance parties – not something I’ve done much of, if I’m honest, but I’m here to broaden my experiences and my mind, so why not?
‘Yes, we asked her to be home to meet you, but—’ Léon shrugs a what-can-you-do kind of shrug. ‘She is going to a piano concert after her running training. Our daughter, she is very dedicated.’
A piano-playing athlete. I’m intrigued.
After about half an hour, Claudette pulls the car off the freeway – I flinch as we turn the ‘wrong way’ into one street after another. I feel quite lucky that I can’t drive yet, and so won’t have to.
I will have to be careful when I cross the road though.
‘This is Belleville, our quartier of Paris,’ explains Léon. The way he pronounces quartier, the word for neighbourhood, like Cartier, like the jewellery.
‘Oh,’ I say. Belleville is … not quite how I imagined Paris. It is certainly not the Cartier in the jewellery box of this city.
There are no wrought-iron balconies. No window boxes with colourful flowers (to be fair, it is the middle of winter), and all the buildings are grey and dingy and plain. They’re modern, boxy, grubby, like the commission flats back home. There’s rubbish on the footpaths, in piles.
We pull up outside one of the grey-brown buildings, and Léon parallel parks in between two cars that look very much like theirs. They help me pull my suitcase towards a very secure-looking gate, and Léon punches in a long code to open it.
When I step into the flat, I feel the dream move another step away. I try to hold onto it as they show me around. I take in everything: the furniture, the décor, the art on the walls. Eve
rything is clean and nice … it’s all just a bit plain. Pale wood and sleek modern chairs, tables, low grey sofa. It reminds me of … it’s all very Ikea showroom, if I’m being honest.
There’s a pile of sheet music on a side table – classical, from what I know of music – and I imagine going along to one of Delphine’s piano concerts.
Claudette and Léon show me where the mot de passe for the wifi is written down in idiosyncratic French handwriting, on a Post-it note underneath the computer keyboard. I connect and excuse myself to type out a ‘we’ve arrived, everything is fine (everything is not exactly as I’d imagined)’ message to my family.
There is some art on the walls, though, and I wonder which pieces are Léon’s.
‘Do you paint at the apartment?’ I ask.
‘No, no, no.’ He waves a hand and I’m reminded of my sister’s gesturing. ‘I have an atelier in the fifth. That is where I work.’
An atelier! What a dream! I hope he’ll let me look around it while I’m here; I have an instant daydream of setting up in a corner as Léon guides my painting and gives me tips, us working together with light streaming in the windows. I already feel like I’ll create wonderful art in Léon’s atelier.
There is that buzz of excitement I’d been feeling for weeks, for a year, since Hana first raised this whole thing as a possibility. Never mind the Ikea bookcase – I’m in Paris!
I long to go for a walk and let this buzzing circulate, but it is already well and truly dark outside. It’s probably not the done thing to go walking at night in a city you’ve only just arrived in. It would probably reflect badly on Léon and Claudette if I got lost or stolen on my first night.
I am in Paris and I cannot get to sleep.
I lie in bed and I am excited and scared and exhausted and pumping with adrenaline. I am in Paris I am in Paris I am in Paris.
I wonder if I should get back up again and unpack. Claudette had indicated each drawer in turn as she showed me where I could put my things, and she pushed across some coats already hanging in the cupboard to make room.
I already knew that a drawer is un tiroir but had to learn that a coat hanger is un cintre (it will be a challenge to get my tongue around that sound … cintre cintre cintre). And I was delighted that French people truly say bonne nuit at night-time.
I feel like I will never go to sleep. I look out the window for a while, but all I can see is the dark of the night, the grey concrete of the building next door in the shimmer of a yellow street light. I imagine painting the light in thick oil paints.
The word for car boot in French is le coffre.
Boots that you wear on your feet are les bottes.
I wonder when Delphine will come home. I half listen for the front door or for footsteps along the hall, as I sit in bed with my sketchbook on my knee.
… then the next thing I know my alarm is trilling a wake up wake up tune, and I am still sitting up in bed with my sketchbook only just slipped from my hands. I can’t believe I fell asleep like passing out. Like I died momentarily and then was revived.
Lucky I was using a pencil. Imagine if I’d ink-stained the Durants’ sheets on my first night.
I don’t think I dreamed. Or if I did, I dreamed about lying awake in this tiny room and all the funny smells. The funny smells aren’t bad ones: a laundry detergent I’ve never smelled before; coffee wafting from the kitchen; my own body taken out of context.
I get dressed right away, shoving my pjs under the pillow and pulling up the doona roughly, so the bed looks made (I hardly ever do this at home). Jeans, long-sleeve top, jumper, my wombat brooch for luck.
I feel strangely anxious about leaving the bedroom that will be my bedroom for the next five months, but I have a talk with myself and run through the morning-time vocab I’ve practised so many times in class:
Bonjour. Hello.
Tu as bien dormi? Did you sleep well?
Oui, merci. Yes, thank you.
Pour le petit déjeuner, je prends un croissant, un chocolat chaud et un jus d’orange. For breakfast I have a croissant, hot chocolate and orange juice.
The crappy illustrations in our French textbooks always made us laugh – the funny cartoon people enjoying their very French breakfast.
I walk down the hallway that will be my hallway for five months, into the kitchen that will be my kitchen for five months, following the low voices and morning sounds of bowls sliding onto the table and cutlery clinking that will be my sounds for the next five months. How bizarre is it to be on the other side of the world?
‘Bonjour, Sofie,’ says Claudette.
‘Tu as bien dormi?’ asks Léon.
‘Oui, merci,’ I say, and my voice is very small. It must be hungry, this little voice. I am sure I am braver than this.
‘Tu bois du café?’ Claudette asks.
I pause. I consider faking it, pretending that I drink coffee all the time. Then, ‘Non, pas souvent,’ I admit. ‘Errr. Non, merci.’
‘Un chocolat chaud?’
I can’t believe this moment has walked out of the textbook, out of the daydream, and into reality. Hot chocolate for breakfast? I mean, YES PLEASE.
‘Oui, s’il te plaît.’
In front of me is a baguette. I watch Léon, who uses his hands to break off a piece, gouges it into two with his thumbs, then picks up his knife to greedily smear butter and jam onto each wodge of baguette.
‘Tartine?’ he says through a mouthful, as he pushes the baguette towards me.
I copy his actions. As I am spreading the butter from an oval-shaped plastic container with the word Président on it, Claudette places a bowl in front of me. Ikea. We have the same at home. They are my favourite cornflakes bowls. It makes me smile. Then she pours hot chocolate from a saucepan into the bowl – what seems like litres of it.
I have to pick it up with both hands. As I blow on the top of the hot chocolate to cool it, I look around the kitchen – how absolutely strange to think I am going to live here for five months! There are mugs hanging on little hooks, a rack of spices on the wall, big pots and saucepans on a shelf, and floral wallpaper that seems very unlike Claudette and Léon (not that I know them well at all yet).
I drink and play it cool. It is absolutely delicious, the hot chocolate. But also this new life.
For breakfast I eat a tartine with jam and drink a giant hot chocolate. This is exactly what I’d wanted. I know it’s just breakfast. But it’s what the breakfast represents: a dream, a lot of work, and a lot of luck. How lucky am I? Even as I am thinking it, I know I’m being silly, and at the same time I feel very strange in an anticipatory kind of way. But mostly I feel like dancing with joy.
‘Elle est où, Delphine?’ I ask. (I’d practised this too.) Where is Delphine?
Claudette sips her coffee and speaks to me in slow, clear French. ‘Delphine’s gone to school already – she has running training before classes start. Do you enjoy running?’
Crow and I would have snorted with laughter if we’d been together and heard this question. But now I fold my hands politely in my lap (I keep feeling the urge to be very small and not take up much room). ‘Un peu,’ I say. A bit. ‘I walk a lot, at home in Melbourne.’
Smiles all around. I’m speaking French! We are so polite! We strangers who now live together.
After breakfast, I need to hotfoot it to meet the exchange coordinator.
‘Are you ready, Sofie? I’ll accompany you on the métro.’
Claudette is going to come with me on the metro, yes, I understood that. I feel relieved because I know I’ll be lost as soon as I step outside.
I run to my bedroom and grab my bag, making sure I have some cash. I fan out my euros. There are a lot here for now – enough, I hope. I put a twenty euro note in my purse and stash the rest.
Back in the kitchen, I throw my backpack on and squash a beanie on my h
ead.
‘Okay,’ says Claudette. ‘Let’s go!’
Claudette helps me buy a travel card, and we pick up a map of all the metro lines, and then I follow her down to the platform.
There are funny little handles on the metro doors – they look a bit like the window winders in Mum’s ancient car. I watch people come in and out so I’ll know how to use them when the time comes.
We travel from Belleville on the blue 2 line, through the stops Colonel Fabien, Jaurès, Stalingrad, La Chapelle, Barbès–Rochechouart (I practise saying this, because it’s tongue-twisty: bar-bess rosh-esh-shwar), Anvers, Pigalle, Blanche, Place de Clichy, Rome, Villiers, Monceau, Courcelles, Ternes. So many places to explore.
At the metro stop Charles de Gaulle–Étoile – named for both General Charles de Gaulle, President of France in the 1960s, and also l’Étoile, the roundabout that the Arc de Triomphe sits upon – Claudette pushes me gently towards the doors and says, ‘À ce soir!’
And then I am off the train, and the train is leaving with Claudette on it, and I am on the platform and on my own. On my own IN PARIS.
I find the exit and climb up to street level, feeling hot in my new-old coat borrowed from Mum. But when I get out and am slammed with an icy wind, I’m so grateful for it. And for my scarf. I pull my sleeves over my hands and shove my hands in my pockets. I remember I need to be aware of pickpockets, though I try not to look too worried so I won’t be an easy target. The guidebooks all say to take care on the metro. So far, I still have all my stuff.
Then, I forget all about pickpockets and icy blasts because – there it is.
L’Arc de Triomphe.
The real true Arc de Triomphe, in its grey-beige stone iconic beauty. I am seeing it with my own two eyes and my own one heart is leaping.
Paris, Paris, Paris, Paris!
Cars hurtle dangerously around l’Étoile. I’ve read that they do this – it was in our school textbook. There are twelve roads that all converge at the massive roundabout, giving it a star shape if viewed from above (perhaps from the top of the Arc de Triomphe, which is right before my eyes!) – which is how it got its name.
This One is Ours Page 2