10. Paris Is a Party
Q are there ghosts in this room
A most of the objects here are ghosts
Q really
A have you been to Paris
Q no
A Paris is a ghost
—Anne Carson, “Ghost Q & A”
At a party for first-year medical students of René Descartes, I told a number of people that I was going away for a while. I told them I was going up north, to Kiruna, above the Arctic Circle in Swedish Lapland. Why Kiruna? Was it because I had spent part of a summer there when I was eight? This was just before I started at the Stockholm International School, where, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t the only black-haired kid in my class. Afterwards, I had returned to Denmark to finish my upper-secondary. Of my time in Kiruna, I remembered the way the sky looked at midnight as the sun was setting; the lake whose waters were clear enough that I could see to the bottom; the leaves of the katsura trees behind the cabin; the rapeseed field that I had to traverse on my way to the moraine, which overlooked the whole town.
I said that I was leaving to escape the heat growing worse with each passing day. Even in the early-morning hours, with the windows open, I found little relief. Several deaths had already been reported among the elderly. Fans were becoming a scarce commodity, entire inventories disappearing from stores (I had bought one of the last at Darty). I don’t know how many people I talked to in the course of the night; people told me their names and I forgot them immediately. Not that this kept me from swearing oaths of eternal camaraderie and everlasting friendship. Most of the parties I went to were hosted by people I didn’t know, and I would have been incapable of recognizing anyone in the sober light of day. On one occasion, I had crashed a birthday bash in a bowling alley off the place d’Italie, where the beer was served in tall cylindrical containers called “giraffes” and I got so drunk that I sent a bowling ball rolling backwards into the seating area behind me. At another soirée, because others around me were giving speeches, I got up on a chair and recited, in Danish, a piece of doggerel by Halfdan Rasmussen:
When the reserves shall mobilize
to tear the world apart
I will write with curly parsley
the world’s shortest epic.
Everyone I knew had left for the summer, but I had chosen to stay in Paris and work on my thesis, because without my supervisor’s signature on the inscription form I wouldn’t be able to renew my student card, provider of sundry benefits like meal tickets at university restaurants, health insurance, a room at the Cité U—in short, nothing to scoff at for a person of modest means like myself. I watched a lot of movies alone, up to three or four some days, thanks to my UGC Illimité pass. The dark, air-conditioned projection room was a welcome respite from the heat. And yet. I began to feel the same creeping boredom that had plagued me on my arrival in France a year ago. Those first months had been among the loneliest of my life, and things I would never have noticed or paid attention to began to acquire an ineffable significance of their own. Every evening, walking back to the métro from the Beaubourg library, I would pass a traiteur asiatique and glimpse through the window a girl working in the kitchen. It was hard to tell her age; I only ever saw her from the back. For several months I walked past her, like clockwork; and then, one day, she wasn’t there anymore. In all that time, I never once saw her face. Her disappearance had a disproportionate effect on me, left me inconsolable for a week, and after that I took another path to the station, though it meant a more circuitous walk. Then I grew busy with my classes at the Sorbonne, I got to know my fellow residents at the Cité U. My life, all of a sudden, seemed a little less humdrum. But I was sometimes overcome by an unfathomable sadness, an almost exhilarating loneliness, as though I were the last of my kind.
Towards the end of August, I decided to take a break between two chapters of my thesis and crash a housewarming party. The place was hard to find, and reluctantly I stopped to ask passersby, who turned out to be tourists. (It was August, after all.) When I at last found the building, it turned out to be located along a cramped little street ending in a cul-de-sac. There was a porte cochère (no code, thankfully), an interior courtyard with a small fountain. At the door, I stood for a moment, listening to the sounds coming from the other side, like a ghost needing to be invited in by someone from the world of the living. The apartment itself was peculiarly laid out, with no hallway, one room leading directly into the next like adjoining hotel chambers. Another particularity: there were two entrances, at opposite ends of the apartment, and in the center, sandwiched between the rooms, a kitchen with a bathtub. All in all, a strange layout. Perhaps it was the heat, but the air seemed faintly charged with electricity. I had been there for less than an hour when I spotted her near the doorway. She wasn’t talking to anyone, and for a moment her gaze seemed to meet mine. Then she turned away, and I saw her disappear into the next room. She had shaved her head, close enough to the skin for me to distinguish the contours of her scalp. A bit thinner too, olive skin a bit paler, as though only recently it had been tan. But it was her, Luce, the girl from the train.
I started to make my way through the crowd, fighting against a sea of bodies determined to keep me from her. The music, a frantic techno beat, seemed to be getting louder and louder. In my eagerness, I shoved someone a little too vigorously, a girl, and she shoved me back. Her angry face was framed by an impressive crinière of frizzy brown hair, and she stared at me with hostile contempt. On another night, I might have shrugged it off, or even apologized, but tonight I told the girl in no uncertain terms what she could do with herself. Her response was to fling the contents of her drink in my face, and the gesture was such a cliché that I started laughing and couldn’t stop. It was only after the girl had turned away from me in disgust that I realized I was crying, and also laughing, at the same time. Tears were streaming down my face.
In the kitchen, standing over the bathtub, I rinsed the beer off my face. Floating forlornly in the water were a few tall cans of Kronenbourg, all the ice having melted long ago. On the wall was an old poster for a Guy Debord symposium (Agent der Kritik gegen ihre Anerkennung). The lukewarm water felt good, and I leaned down to soak my hair, which was too long and always poking me in the eyes. Normally, I got it cut with my father, a ritual between us. He was the type to get his hair cut like clockwork five times a year, but he didn’t mind being a little late and waiting for me so that we could go together. After my graduation from gymnasium, I had gone with him not to our usual coiffeur but to a fancier one in Vesterbro, where they tried to charge a supplement for my cut, citing my stiff black “kinamand” hair, apparently more difficult to sculpt than my father’s blond Scandinavian follicles. In the end, he had paid the higher price, but for both haircuts, placing the extra money on the counter like he was leaving a tip. That was the kind of person he was. On the phone, I’d told him I still had my thesis to finish, which was only partly true. I didn’t want to admit that I couldn’t afford the train ticket; I didn’t want to turn down his inevitable offer to pay for it.
No sign of Luce in the next room. Had it really been her? Every few steps I raised myself up on tiptoe to look over people’s heads. What were the chances of running into her like this, a year later, at a stranger’s housewarming party? I had dreamt about her, dreamt of just such an encounter, from which I always woke up with the impression that the real dream was now starting, so that all I wanted was to return to that other world, the one I had just left, more or less unwillingly, right in the middle of things, right when it had started to become interesting. Countless times, I had imagined her life in Paris, her first year of medicine at René Descartes …
I reached the last door without finding her. Beyond it there were no more rooms; I knew this, but I turned the lever anyway, like a dead man. In my mind, I could already see my empty room at the Cité U: the towel draped over the radiator, the photo of Samuel Beckett (a postcard, really) on the wall, the desk with its mess of papers, th
e pile of books from the municipal library, one of them lying facedown on the unmade bed … And then, suddenly, there she was, standing with her back to me, waiting for the toilet, a stand-alone cabinet located on a landing outside the apartment proper. The party, muffled by the door, called out to me like the lights of a distant town at night. After all the cigarette and hashish smoke, emerging onto the landing was like a breath of pure air. There were two people in front of her. She shifted her weight but didn’t turn around when I got in line behind her. Leaning forward, I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply. For a long time, I remained like that—not exhaling, not moving a muscle. When I opened my eyes again, there was no one in front of her: the two of us were alone (in a manner of speaking) for the time being, and I realized that, one, I was more drunk than I had thought, and, two, I needed to pee rather urgently.
I focused on the nape of her neck, and on the words tattooed there.
“The light shines in the darkness,” I said to her, slowly, as if reading the words, “and the darkness doesn’t understand it.”
She didn’t react right away, as though thinking about what I had just said. At last, she turned around. Now that all of her hair was gone, there was nothing to focus on but her face. Despite her paleness, she seemed more beautiful, more herself, the Luce whose memory I had been carrying around in my wallet all this time like a worn ticket from a concert long past. I hesitated. And her? Did she still remember me?
At that moment, the door to the toilet opened, and she glanced back at me one last time before going inside. She hadn’t said a word. I couldn’t decide whether to interpret that as a sign or not. I tried not to picture her in there doing her business. And that was when it hit me: all those parties I had gone to, all the strangers I had talked to … I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself, but I was looking for her. I heard the water going down, and she emerged at last. With her newfound paleness, she resembled more than ever the (presumed) portrait of Lucile Desmoulins that I had seen in the catacombs. As I opened my mouth to speak, the thought of making a fool of myself, of saying the wrong thing, once again brought me up short. Would she, after all this time, still remember our encounter on the train if I brought it up now? Or would she shake her head in incomprehension, as though it had never happened? Better, perhaps, not to ask at all; better to pretend I already knew the answer, I told myself, trying to ignore the throbbing of my bladder. One thing was sure: if I continued to stand there any longer, I was going to wet myself in front of her. That would give her something to remember. In the end, I was the first to look away, brushing past her and ducking into the cabinet, though not before blurting out that I would be back, I’m ashamed to admit.
The cabinet was remarkably small, the size of a telephone booth—or a coffin—and as I lowered my zipper, I breathed in the air around me, but there was no trace of her odor, to my disappointment. My urine came out as clear as drinking water, and before the stream weakened I attempted distractedly—an automatism more than anything else—to dislodge a pubic hair stuck stubbornly to the edge of the bowl. There was a door at the bottom of the stairs, through which the two of us could slip out, unseen. Except that I had nowhere to take her. The roof? No, it was probably crammed with people. A bunker deep beneath the ground? A swimming pool filled with ice cubes? If only I wasn’t so drunk. The answer I wanted, it was there, in front of me. If I could only … And then it came to me: Kiruna. In the winter, the sun hardly came up, and for a few weeks it came up not at all. A perpetual dusk reigned, the blå time, which was nothing more than a reflection of the sun against the surrounding snow. Of course, I had been there during the summer, when the sun never went down and I had to sleep in a room with blacked-out windows. The Kiruna I had known was full of light, blinding and pure, the light of a camera flash frozen in time … My mind continued to race over recollections, images, fantasies, all of them useless to me, all of them beyond my grasp, as I stood there, sweating and peeing. Evacuating urine was one of those things that felt so much better when one was drunk, and I almost wished I could stay here, in this cabinet, forever. It was turning into the longest pee of my life; I had no idea if anyone would be waiting for me when I came out.
III
AFTER FUMIKO
Crow the Aesthète
1. Maryvonne
I became a student at the school for translators and interpreters in Paris because I thought it would be easier than the doctoral thesis I had abandoned. My languages were English and French; neither Danish, my native language, nor Swedish, which I also knew, was part of the school’s curriculum. Had my German been better, I might have had an easier time as one of the three-language students, translating into my native tongue but never out of it. (Those who only had two viable languages had to translate in both directions.) To an outsider, working with two languages might seem easier than working with three, but it’s always easier to translate towards the language one knows best than away from it.
There were two others like me: Maryvonne, a Frenchwoman in her seventies—by far the oldest student at the school—and René, who had grown up in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Léman and in the French commuter town of Annemasse. (His father was a career diplomat.) He spoke French and English with equal proficiency, his English devoid of the telltale French inflections, the English of a French-speaker educated at an international lycée. He would have been at home among the Anglophones or among the Francophones, though I saw him with neither group. Mostly, he kept to himself, and my few attempts at conversation had met with such blank unresponsiveness that I had soon given up. Maryvonne, on the other hand, I ended up befriending—if such a word could be used to describe what happened—during those first weeks, when it seemed to me that we were always running into each other. Otherwise, we had nothing in common, or so I thought. From the start, she addressed me in English, and though it was clear to me that my French was better, I went along and answered her in kind. Her English was nothing like René’s—an English learned in France, with frequent cognates and the occasional false friend. Every morning, I would see her walking ahead of me as I emerged from the subway; every evening I would spot her at the other end of the platform, and after some hesitation, I slowly made my way over to her. That was how we came to be study partners. In the train, we often had to stand because all the seats were taken, her face so close to mine in the crowded car that I was able to make out the little hairs above her upper lip as I tried not to press up against her. She always got off before me, at Étoile, where four subway lines intersected, which meant that she could be going to any part of the city. I could have asked her where she lived, but I never did.
I had no idea what had made Maryvonne decide to become a translator at this point in her life, but I had only to observe her, matter-of-fact and businesslike in Fauchier-Delavigne’s class (where we translated from English to French) but timid and hesitant in Michaels’s (where we translated from French to English), as a rule deferring to the Anglophones in matters of grammar, to see that I was much the same, albeit the other way around: faltering in front of Fauchier-Delavigne, more at my ease with Michaels. It was perhaps only logical, and inevitable, that a partnership should form between us. We spent a lot of time in the school’s bibliothèque, modest even by French-university standards and usually empty, especially since the computer posts were in another room. Sometimes an entire afternoon could go by without another student coming in. At a table in the corner, we would work on our assignments together, articles from Le Monde or The Times that we translated from French to English and from English to French in preparation for the next exam, where we wouldn’t be able to use the dictionaries we had lying open around us. I once tried asking Maryvonne about her reasons for studying translation at the school of translators and interpreters. Right away, I sensed her ready to change the subject, as she leafed slowly through the dictionary in front of her, first in one direction, then in the other, like someone unable to decide what word to look up.
There are ghosts ever
ywhere, she finally said. The city is filled with them. It’s become a giant cemetery. When I asked her what she meant, she looked around at the nearby shelves as though we might not be the only ones in the bibliothèque. A few days earlier, on the train, she had nodded silently at an empty corner of the otherwise packed car. It could have been a puddle of vomit or a dog dropping, but Maryvonne had said, A ghost. After that, whenever I noticed an inexplicable gap in a crowd or a mysteriously vacant seat on a bus, her words came back to me. She was a little like a ghost herself, carrying around an invisible burden, it seemed to me. I sensed a distant trauma from her youth responsible, somehow, for her presence here. Watching her make her way through a crowd of students less than half her age, I couldn’t help but notice how everyone in the corridor moved aside without a glance in her direction—like tightening the collar of a coat without bothering to verify the provenance of a chilly breeze.
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