Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost

by David Hoon Kim

  Several weeks into the second semester, I encountered yet another obstacle, this one of an administrative nature: I was asked to provide proof that I had indeed failed to finish my thesis in Copenhagen. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine why they wanted proof, given that I had already been admitted as a student. Why would anyone lie about failing something? I could understand them asking for proof that I had finished my thesis, but that I hadn’t finished it? As if proof of past failure were a necessary condition for studying at the Sorbonne … I was tempted to point out this absurdity to the woman at the secrétariat, but in the end I said nothing. I left the building and walked out to the square, weighed down by a growing sense of futility. At a nearby kébab place, I ordered a grec-frites and sat down at the counter, next to a tiny little sink jutting out of a corner of the wall. As I ate, I thought about my dilemma. The conclusion I arrived at was that proving one’s success was always easier than proving one’s failure. Success, completion, admission all resulted in some document or other: a diploma, a letter of acceptance. How does one prove that one failed an exam? How does one prove that one took it in the first place? One wasn’t given anything in the event of failure: there was nothing to give. That said, was failure any less real than success? Wasn’t the unhappiness associated with something lost always greater, in one’s mind, than the happiness associated with something gained?

  The days went by. In the connecting corridor at Montparnasse-Bienvenüe, I noticed someone on the moving walkway going the other way. All I caught was the back of a head, the cover of a book, but I became convinced that it had been her, Luce, the girl from the train. By now, I told myself, she had probably established a routine, formed new habits, a daily schedule. As the weeks passed without another sighting, I found myself imagining her life at René Descartes, where she was starting her first year of medicine. I imagined her in a crowded auditorium or bent over a book, alone, at the library. Or bent over a dissection table with other students in an anatomy class. In Denmark, dissections of cadavers didn’t begin until the second or third year of medical school. Was it the same in France? One day, I went so far as to visit the rue des Saints-Pères—not far from the École des beaux-arts—and loiter for several hours at the front entrance, watching people come and go. The only other things I knew about her was that she was from the south of France and that she had suffered a heartbreak in Amsterdam. “You remind me of someone,” she had told me on the train. It seemed foolish to place so much importance on a chance encounter with a stranger, and yet I couldn’t help but feel a connection between us, as though, even now, we were leading parallel lives intersected, at some point, by a third and unknown line.

  In the meantime, I continued to attend my classes, often in a sort of daze, and on one occasion my fading attention resurfaced in time to hear the professor say that “perchance to dream” could be translated as “peut-être rêver.” For lunch, I usually bought a sandwich from the student café and ate it sitting on the bench across from the (closed) door of my thesis supervisor, Madame Tousez. I spent a lot of time in the Beaubourg library. If I got there late enough in the day, the line at the entrance wasn’t too long, the reading room not quite as crowded. After the BNF, it was the least depressing place to study (especially compared to the library at the Sorbonne), though the toilets were atrocious, the raised urinals blocked up and on the point of overflowing, impossible to flush. Among them was a urinal perpetually wrapped with black tarp, which made me think of something monstrous and alive, an excrescence growing out of the wall itself. I avoided using the facilities when I could help it. Most evenings, I dined at the student canteen at Port-Royal, down the street from the municipal library. On my way out of the dining hall, I overheard a girl telling her friend, “Toi, tu es mince. Elle, elle est maigre.” (Small but not tiny, slim but not skinny.) The form of the sentence in French—more than its meaning—resonated inside me, within me, and all the way home on the train I repeated it to myself, over and over again, like a mantra.

  That same night, I wrote a letter to my former thesis supervisor in Copenhagen, asking him to confirm that I had failed to finish my thesis. In the letter, I asked about Ditte, how she was doing, whether she had finished her thesis, as if she were simply one of his students and nothing more. She had been studying the different manifestations of magic in the Elder Edda when we knew each other. My thesis, at the time, was a rereading of Oedipus Rex in light of Frazer’s The Golden Bough. After Ditte had left me for my supervisor, I hadn’t been able to go back to it. We had often argued about the paternity of the poems of the Codex Regius, or about the authenticity of the myths in the Younger Edda (I was pro-Snorri, Ditte was anti-Snorri). I didn’t mention any of this, of course. Perhaps he already knew, perhaps she had already told him. Instead of sending my letter, I continued to revise what I had written, sometimes in my head while out walking or waiting for a train. I was no longer sure who I was addressing—him or her, or the two of them—in these messages that I didn’t end up sending.

  Two-thirds into April, there was a student-wide strike at the Sorbonne. I arrived to find a large crowd assembled in front of the main entrance. I hadn’t seen the square filled with so many people since the Fête de la musique last year. They stood around in groups, smoking, as if at the theater during an intermission. I made my way past all of them and walked up the cold marble steps to the secrétariat, whose doors were, obviously, closed. The corridors were deserted. Moments later, I found myself standing, once again, in front of my supervisor’s door. I leaned forward and pressed my ear against the wood. I didn’t expect to hear anything—there was surely no one on the other side—and yet I remained like that for a long time, listening. When I had sent out inquiries to various professors in Paris (one at the Sorbonne, another at the Sorbonne Nouvelle, a third at Nanterre), asking whether they might want to oversee my thesis on Samuel Beckett, I had gone out of my way to choose only women. I went back down the stairs, and with some difficulty traversed the courtyard, where the ambience had turned almost festive. Someone was cutting through the crowd from the opposite direction. As he passed me, he held out a piece of paper, which I took, mechanically. It wasn’t a tract but a flyer for, of all things, a gallery opening. “A light shines in the darkness and the darkness doesn’t understand it,” the show was called. Below the title was a photograph of a girl standing on a bridge. I could make out a canal in the background, bicycles attached to a guardrail. Was it really her, the girl I had met on the train coming to Paris? I studied the black-and-white image, which had been shrunk to fit the flyer. The girl photographed was Luce, and at the same time someone else—a twin, a lookalike. She seemed to be staring directly at her photographer, and as a result, staring directly at me.

  On the D-day, I showed up at the gallery not knowing what to expect. No one gave me a second glance. I helped myself to a glass of white wine from a table and walked around the room. There were photographs and paintings by an artist whose Germanic name struck a familiar note in my mind, though I couldn’t have said why. The photographs consisted of desolate resort towns, sinister vistas, ruins lost in the crepuscular gloom. As for the paintings, they were done in an almost impressionistic style reminiscent of Spilliaert, whose works I had seen at the Louisiana, near Copenhagen. I guessed them to be self-portraits, though no one in the gallery looked anything like the tall, brooding woman depicted in the paintings, with her mane of red hair and her dark, androgynous nineteenth-century suit. I was so taken by them that I had half forgotten my reason for being there by the time I came across the photos. Placed near the exit, almost as an afterthought or an epilogue, they were different in style from both the landscapes and the self-portraits. I downed the rest of my wine and stared at the black-and-white images. In one of them, I could make out the words—LUX IN TENEBRIS LUCET—tattooed across the back of a neck I had never seen in real life. In another, she was sitting on the floor in front of a carton of pizza and using a pair of scissors to cut herself a slice. There was also the photo fr
om the flyer, and, seeing it full-size, I realized that she wasn’t staring at me but at a spot slightly to the right of the photographer.

  I had at last found her, yet I was no closer to discovering who she was. The following day, the courtyard of the Sorbonne was empty once more. People were walking in and out of the secrétariat, business as usual, as if the strike had never happened. In front of my supervisor’s office, I put my ear against the door and strained to hear something, anything. This time, though, I didn’t turn away. Instead, I took a small step back and knocked several times on the door. A moment passed. Then another. As I stood there, waiting, it occurred to me that I still didn’t have proof of my failure.

  9. Shroomsterdam

  It was raining when I arrived in Amsterdam, and the first thing I did was walk into a café and order a beer, four euros a pint, cheaper than in Paris. From my table, I gazed out the window at the canal, though I ended up focusing on the rivulets making their way down the glass instead. There was a television mounted near the ceiling, a football match in progress (Netherlands–Czech Republic, I later learned, the last match before the quarter-finals), and everyone in the café was watching. Everyone, that is, except me and three guys sitting at a table near the door. If not for them, I might have felt that I was completely alone. Almost despite myself, I found myself glancing at them, which amounted to observing their hunched backs from across the room. They appeared to be deep in discussion, like three co-conspirators. I wondered what could possibly be more interesting than the game, only to remember that I myself wasn’t interested. At last they got up and left, and not long after that, I finished my beer and left as well. Out in the street, I expected to see her, Luce, at every corner. I had reserved a room at a hotel, in reality a converted boat docked near the port. It was nicer than I had expected, with cable and two porn channels. I left the “botel” (as it was called) and, mostly to get out of the rain, went to the Van Gogh Museum, an ultra-modern building near the canals. I spent a long time looking at the paintings of his room in Arles, which made me think of my own room at the Cité U. I then lingered in front of the Paul Signac landscapes, which had always reminded me of patterns used for detecting Daltonism. It was starting to grow dark when I left the museum, and I walked around aimlessly for a few hours, only to find myself in the red-light district. I walked past the windows, lit up like department-store displays, though the lighting—pink-and-blue neons—was more gaudy and the “mannequins” were human (I was startled the first time I saw one of them move). That night, I dreamt about the trio from the café; they were poring over something on the table between them, but even in my dream I couldn’t see what it was.

  The next morning, I visited the Anne Frank House. Like the Van Gogh Museum, it was a sleek and modern structure, all slate-gray panels and mortar, built squarely around and over the original house, though all of the original furniture, disappointingly, had not survived. There was a replica of the house—faithful to the smallest detail, according to the accompanying card—as well as various items that had once belonged to Anne Frank, everything displayed inside transparent cubes. Her journal was opened to a page where she had copied down passages from her favorite books (“The rich perfume of roses embalmed the atelier, and when the light summer breeze disturbed the trees in the garden, there came through the open door a heavy odor of lilacs…”). Afterwards, outside, I sat on one of the banks and ate a sandwich. A man walking past called out to me, in English: “Have a good appetite!” Amsterdam seemed strangely quiet, almost deserted, like a city under curfew. I considered renting a bicycle but it was too windy, too cold. In the end, I took a ride on a bateau-mouche while sipping a Heineken. I also visited a café that sold weed (not as numerous as one might expect) and examined the selection of chichas, narghilas, bongs, maslocs, lighters and old-fashioned tobacco boxes. The items were displayed under glass, like at the Anne Frank Museum. There was even “instant” weed that could be applied to a cigarette: three drops were enough to turn one into a joint, according to the man behind the counter. I didn’t buy anything. Instead, I walked into a bar, the first establishment I came across (they weren’t as numerous as one might expect, either), and once again there was a football match playing on the television. I thought about the three friends again and their hunched, conspiratorial postures—like three anarchists in a Paris café—though my memory of them might already have been tainted by my dream of the night before. I looked around, but there was no one who wasn’t watching the game (Czech Republic had made a surprise comeback to beat Netherlands during yesterday’s match, I later learned), and after finishing my beer I decided against having another. What was I doing here? What had I expected to find, exactly? I was heading back to the botel with the intention of taking a nap when I came across three Danes in the reception area. They were arguing in Danish about whether the Van Gogh Museum only had works by Van Gogh or works by other painters as well—a rather heated discussion, as though their decision to visit the museum was riding on it. Perhaps because the one claiming the museum had works by other painters was outnumbered by his two (misguided) friends, perhaps because I was feeling a bit lonely, I couldn’t help interjecting. For a second, they all stared at me, and then one of them, the one whom I had spoken up for, asked if I was from Copenhagen. His name was Mads, and his friends were Nikolaj and Ulrich. They were from Aarhus, first-year students at the university, and they didn’t ask me about my ethnic background, the way most Danes back in Denmark would have. At that point, Mads asked me to settle another argument for them. He took out a plastic baggie filled with several rather pitiful-looking stalks. They had come up with three possibilities: the Van Gogh Museum, the Anne Frank House, the Vondelpark (the city’s largest and most popular green space). In retrospect, the best place to take the mushrooms would have been here at the botel, relatively familiar and sheltered from unpredictable elements, but since they deemed me an authority, I opted for the Vondelpark, if only because I had already been to the Van Gogh Museum (and because the Anne Frank House just seemed like a bad idea). One thing led to another, and I found myself walking with them to a pizzeria (“New York Pizza,” the sign read), and it was only after the four of us were seated at a table that I thought to wonder if I had accepted their invitation because they reminded me of the three conspirators from the café. Ulrich solemnly sprinkled the shriveled little stalks on the pizza that he’d ordered for us. The mood at the table was subdued, almost grim. It didn’t help that we were the only ones in the restaurant. I noticed that the tip of one of the mushrooms on my slice of pizza was blue, a blue such as I’d never seen before, and I remembered someone telling me that it was impossible to overdose on shrooms. The others finished the remaining slices, though there was nothing on them (i.e., only normal toppings), and then the four of us started walking around, not saying much, waiting for the effects to kick in. We paused to watch a street performer—a contortionist—performing a routine with two chairs. Suddenly, I felt something, though it was much too soon, barely a quarter of an hour had gone by. I glanced at my companions, but they seemed oblivious; they were watching the contortionist and didn’t seem to notice that the cobblestones had come to life, slowly moving up and down like piano keys. My center of gravity descended several notches. I thought of letting the others know that it might be time to head to the park, but before I knew it we were moving again, though I didn’t recall any words having been exchanged. On the sidewalk, complex geometric patterns appeared without my having to concentrate on them. At times I was walking behind Mads or Nikolaj, and other times Ulrich was beside me and all of our movements were synchronized, our shadows playing against the sidewalk in perfect harmony. It seemed to me that we would never reach the park, but I didn’t mind; I could have walked alongside them like this forever. Of course, nothing lasts forever, not even sadness. I wasn’t sure who had started the argument; I became aware of voices, distant at first, then overwhelmingly close, so close that it felt like they were inside my head. They were arguing abo
ut the capital city of Germany: Nikolaj was convinced that it wasn’t Berlin but Bonn, and Mads and Ulrich were trying to convince him that he was mistaken. But Nikolaj wouldn’t budge from his position, insisting that it was a misconception, one of those received ideas like humans using only ten percent of their brains or the King of Denmark wearing a yellow star during the war. Then he started going on about Denmark during the German occupation, saying that the real war had been between the Danish resistants and the Nazi collaborators. I wanted to tell him to stop talking, but I realized that I no longer knew the words in Danish (though, somehow, I could still understand everything). As though I had no other choice, I addressed my companions in French, which none of them understood, obviously. Little by little, the world around me began to change, color seeping progressively away, until it became something else entirely. Cold and reptilian. Everyone I passed on the street appeared to fix me with suspicion and contempt. Their whispers reached me as though funneled through a tube, hitting my left or right ear but never both ears at the same time, in a sort of pseudo-stereo, and several times I heard what sounded like Luce’s name among the half-intelligible jumble of words. We finally arrived in front of the Vondelpark, but the street we had to cross loomed impossibly wide, twenty-five lanes of traffic at least. I was wondering how we would ever get to the other side when someone whispered what sounded like the words “lux in tenebris lucet” in my ear. I immediately turned towards the voice, but there was only the four of us on the roundabout. Suddenly, as if by magic, the cars waiting at the intersection were gone and the sun was shining (where moments earlier, the sky had been overcast). As I walked through the park entrance, I noticed two individuals next to their bikes, and one of them smiled at me—a knowing, conspiratorial smile—as though we both knew something the rest of the world didn’t. Once inside, the four of us found a place to sit, and that was when things really started to get weird. I lost all idea of who I was; it was like seeing myself struck with amnesia, but in the third person. Like being locked out of my own mind. I had been exiled, and Mads, Nikolaj, Ulrich were my fellow exiles. With some reluctance, I came to accept the loss of my Danish identity. What was done was done, I told myself. How many years had I been sitting there, in the park? At one point I seemed to be in Copenhagen, then at the parc Montsouris, and I realized that I had been repeating over and over to myself, “Time is a slope, not a curve…” In Danish, no less—my Danish had returned! I turned to the others, I wanted to tell them the good news, but they weren’t there. I was alone. For a long time (or so it seemed), I watched two people throwing a Frisbee back and forth. Then it started to rain, and I finally stopped peaking. As I walked back in the direction of the port, I felt strangely, inexplicably happy, and also relieved to have recovered my mind, which I thought I had lost. The city seemed even emptier, a house after all the partygoers have gone home, but as the sun began to set, everything looked very calm and beautiful. At an intersection, I stopped to stare at the sky, the movement of the clouds, and at some point I noticed that the rain had stopped. The light made everything around me seem unreal, sharpened to perfection. It felt like summer. All the way to the botel I couldn’t stop smiling, while another part of my mind kept wondering, kept asking itself: What happened, what just happened? What in the world was that?