Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost

by David Hoon Kim

  She disappeared behind the door, and I watched the lift disappear into the ground like a genie in reverse. For a moment longer, I listened to the hum of the machinery and breathed in the aftermath of her perfume. Then I turned and went inside. The apartment smelled of cigarettes, sunlight, potpourri. On the wall was the giant Michelin map of Paris that had been René’s for as long as I could remember. It was just like him, a map of Paris in Rome. Every street and square, no matter how small, was meticulously named. How many times had I stood before this map, in René’s old apartment, playing little games to pass the time, such as trying to find a street named after a flower or starting with the letter “F,” a street with one of those hyphenated names that had always intrigued me, Nonnains–d’Hyères, or Brillat-Savarin, or—failing that—the elusive rue des Silences (which, incidentally, I never found), while René snorted one last line, or while Gém got ready so that I could walk her to school … Now I made my way into the living room, past the kitchen and into a somber hallway. I heard rap music, a muffled beat, and recognized NTM’s “That’s My People.” To my right, through a half-open door, I glimpsed an unmade bed, a pair of leggings slumped over a chair. Gém’s room. She would be at school now. I pushed open the door and took a step inside. The smell of trapped air, sweet and cloying, made me pause. Gém was normally very fastidious about her belongings; back in Paris, every item in her room had its proper, designated spot. She wouldn’t have let things go like this unless she was acting out, intentionally making a mess, going against her natural inclinations. Like when she finished everything on her plate but left the potato purée untouched, though she loved potato purée, just to see if René would notice. (Usually, I was the only one who appreciated these futile gestures.) From down the hall, a bit of the rap song reached me: “J’t’explique que c’que j’kiffe / C’est de fumer des spliffs…” That’s when I saw it, the objects arranged in a neat little line on her desk, amid the chaos and capharnaum. There was a zip, a button, a Lego piece, a miniature bolt, a pebble, an earring, a tiny bulb with the filament still intact. Staring down at the heteroclite offering, I swallowed something hard in my throat. Then I backed out of the room. I shut the door, softly. For the first time, I was glad I had come.

  * * *

  “Henrik! What are you doing here?” René was sprawled on the bed, dressed in a green loden overcoat with a fur collar, his head propped up by pillows. He had lowered the shutters, and the room was plunged into a thick, bluish fog of cigarette smoke that made the air heavy and dusty. I saw the end of a cigarette flare brightly, then grow dim again. Multicolored pill containers—most of them empty—littered the night table.

  “Gaëtane picked me up at the train station,” I said, trying not to shout above the music.

  René lit himself a new cigarette with the butt of the one he’d just finished. “No kidding. You’re the last person I expected to see here. First she tells me how nice it is to get away from the polluted air in Paris. Now she decides to bring the pollution here—so to speak.”

  “She asked me to help you.”

  “And just like that, you agreed? No questions asked?”

  “Listen, I can find a hotel if—”

  “No, no, no. I wouldn’t dream of it, mon vieux. The friends’ room is all yours. Stay as long as you want,” he said, and pushed himself off the bed, the abrupt movement upending the ashtray (which he didn’t bother to notice). “Come, walk with me.”

  I accompanied him out to the hallway and then to the “friends’ room.” Only the window saved it from being a closet, the dimensions barely large enough for a cot, which was the sole piece of furniture. After a few steps, René came to a stop, causing me to bump into him.

  “Hey,” he whispered, his lips almost touching my ear, “go to the window and tell me what you see. There’s no danger. Really, it’s OK. Trust me.”

  I made my way around the cot. “What am I looking for, exactly?”

  The window gave onto an interior courtyard. I saw an agglomeration of parked scooters, some bins for garbage, which I described to him, my attention focused all the while on the sill just outside, on the neat row of trinkets including a paper clip, a nail, another button, along with several objects I couldn’t identify.

  “Do you see anything else?”

  “Should I?”

  “The eucalyptus tree, at the other end of the courtyard. From there they have an unobstructed line of sight into the living room and kitchen.” He hugged the wall until he reached the window. I caught a whiff of naphthalin and old dust from his clothes. He didn’t seem to notice the objects on the ledge. “You see how the branches don’t droop?” he whispered. “That means most of them are elsewhere. But not all of them, obviously. There’s always one or two who stay behind, as sentries.”

  “Are we talking about birds?”

  “I’m talking about crows.” He stared at me, pop-eyed. “They watch my comings and goings, not only from the eucalyptus but from other vantage points, from all over the neighborhood. They have access to all the coves and alcoves. As soon as I leave the apartment, they’ve already spotted me before I can take my third step. I know this because I hear them calling to one another.”

  The look in his eyes made me pause. I knew that look.

  “Are you high, René?”

  He gave me an indulgent smile. “No, Henrik,” he said, slowly, “I am not high, unless you mean from all the sleeping pills I’ve been ingesting nightly and the cigarettes you saw me smoking when you burst into the room like a madman.”

  “I had to ask.”

  “You and Gaëtane both.”

  He must’ve thought I was going to say something, because he held up a hand. “Since I started working on the film, she’s been against it. I understand, you know. At dinner, when I’m telling Gém about her character, she feels extraneous, Gaëtane does. I don’t mean to exclude her, or act like she’s not in the same room with us. It’s what the art requires. Because, voilà, I really believe in the project. Renato believes in it. You can’t take what she says about him too literally. Those animals weren’t really killed, by the way. It’s all camera angles and tomato sauce. He explained it to me.” René’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. “This is the first time anyone’s thought of me as something other than a pen-pushing technocrat. In Renato’s eyes, I’m an artist! A legend, he is, and he believes in me!”

  He was barefoot, his hair uncombed, wearing his pajamas under the loden coat and looking like he hadn’t shaved in several days. How well did he know Gaëtane? I felt sorry for him, but mostly, I felt sorry for Gém.

  In a careful tone, I said, “Is Gém OK? The move to Rome must be hard for her.”

  René made a dismissive sound. “Don’t worry, she’s really taken to her character. A natural, she is. I always knew that she had it in her when she started modeling for those catalogues. You remember the spread for Baby Dior? Renato saw one of the test shots on my desk and was like, Che ragazzina! I can still see the look in his eyes. He’s talking about directing the film himself. Tonight he’s coming to Gém’s party so that he can observe her in her element. This could be it, my big opportunity. Did you know that, in Chinese, ‘crisis’ and ‘opportunity’ are the same word?”

  “No.”

  “I suppose you wouldn’t.” He was lying on his back on the cot and staring dreamily up at the ceiling. “I have to go pick up Gém in a bit, but first I want to show you around San Lorenzo. It’s a charming little neighborhood.” He sprang up, as though struck by a brilliant idea. “There’s a place nearby with merguez—it tastes just like the ones in Paris. My treat, OK?” At the doorway, he turned around, and I barely managed to avoid bumping into him again. “I’m glad you’re here, man. It’s good for me to get out like this.”

  Back in the bedroom, he disappeared into the walk-in closet. While waiting, I cleaned up the spilled ash on the bed. When René came out, I almost didn’t recognize him. Or, rather, I didn’t recognize him at all. Gone was the loden coat, r
eplaced by a tasseled horsehide jacket and seersucker pants with elephant cuffs. A surprisingly realistic beard—though it clashed with his hair—covered the entire lower half of his face and a pair of oversized frames hid his eyes. Even his eyebrows seemed transformed, more bushy, as if he’d attached hairpieces to them. (I decided not to ask.)

  “Renato knows some wardrobe people at Cinecittà. Everything I have on, everything but the horsehide jacket—that’s mine—came from them. The Italians have left the studios to film on location, and now there are entire warehouses full of set pieces, just sitting there in the dark, neglected and abandoned … These days, it’s about making things look as real as possible, but if all of it looks real, does ‘real’ mean anything?” He waited, as though he expected an answer from me. “Anyways, I have to do this so they don’t recognize me.”

  “The crows, you mean.”

  “Obviously.”

  Outside, perhaps it was the disguise, my friend seemed more at ease and even to enjoy his role as my cicerone. He pointed out a fleet of three-wheeled Ape cars in a parking lot, an Alfa Romeo Giulia (“Pasolini died in one”) in front of a pizzeria, the street corner where Joyce first had the idea of Ulysses, and a hundred-year-old sign prohibiting littering. He told me that a decree forbade the construction of buildings higher than the dome of Saint Peter’s, which was why Rome never felt like a big city, more like a succession of cramped villages. Along the way, we ran into two different film crews, and René told me that for every one we saw, there were ten others out there, many of them scouting for potential locations—especially those not requiring permits—which included (but were not limited to) condemned hunting lodges, underground bunkers, abandoned water reservoirs, manor houses once owned by the Mafia, seemingly derelict plazas, memorials of long-forgotten griefs and the shadowy back alleys of municipal parks. All of Rome, he concluded, had become a movie set. I still hadn’t gotten used to his altered appearance, and from time to time I caught myself staring at the bearded stranger walking next to me like a vagrant Virgil. Finally, he took me to a café-bar with a maritime theme: expanses of netting (crabs and sea stars caught in them) suspended above our heads, tableaux of ships at sea on the walls, which were painted a sickly, blue-green color. Conque shells lined the liquor shelf behind a counter where the barman, sleeves rolled back, distractedly polished glasses while talking to someone on the phone. He kept the receiver cradled against his shoulder as René bought a bottle of wine from him. “I don’t know how many times I’ve been here,” René said as we sat down at a table, “and our good man at the bar has yet to figure out that it’s always the same person buying the bottle of red.”

  He poured our glasses, then with a certain ceremony set down the bottle between us.

  “You think I’ve lost it, don’t you?”

  I made a noise, and he waved me away as if I had just blown smoke in his face. “I understand, of course. I’ve become unrecognizable, no longer the René you knew in Paris. The humdrum translator of old is no more. These last few months have seen me experiencing so many changes in my life. Things will never be the same again. But it’s me, underneath all this, it’s still me.”

  He drained his glass, and I saw that part of his beard was starting to come loose. “Not long after moving here, I had the most terrible nightmare I ever had. It was the most horrible dream I ever had. Gém was in the courtyard and she was surrounded by crows, hundreds of them. I was standing in the friends’ room and I could hear them, cawing and murmuring at one another, like they were enumerating my daughter’s crimes. Meanwhile, she stood there, calm and composed, as though she knew she deserved it.” He let out a shudder. “I would have thrown myself out the window there and then to save her, but it was like I was nailed to the spot, unable to do anything but watch. When I woke up, I went straight to my desk and wrote down what I remembered. A few days later, looking at my scribblings, I realized that I had a story, or the beginnings of one.

  “After that,” my friend continued, “I began seeing them everywhere, circling in the sky. You wouldn’t believe how many crows there are once you start noticing them! They say it’s all the garbage in Rome, but I’m convinced it’s all rubbish, no pun intended.” He looked around the café, which was empty: we seemed to be the only customers. “Did you know,” René said, lowering his voice, “that Rome was founded because of crows? That’s what they should have on all the trash containers in the city. People used to spend all of their time watching them, listening to their cries, recording everything in a ledger. The smallest variation in flight, in the way they…” He paused to imitate, at the top of his voice, several different types of caws, clacks and cackles, and I saw the barman (still on the phone) glance in our direction. “Anyway,” he went on, quietly again, “it was very rigorous, very complicated. Everything meant something. The augur had to stand on a deserted hilltop, or lock himself away in his auguratorium, where the only opening was above him. Completely alone, day in and day out…”

  He closed his eyes, and I waited for him to reopen them, but he continued to sit there like a scarecrow, his lips stained dark with wine. I was beginning to wonder if he had fallen asleep when he said, “Sometimes I think about the loneliness of the augur and I’m filled with a great and unfathomable sadness.”

  It was almost four in the afternoon by the time we left the café. I realized, outside, that I was drunker than I had thought. René glanced at his watch, swore under his breath and said that he knew a shortcut, the neighborhood Jewish cemetery. The cemetery had no name, and there was no one famous buried there, which meant no tourists either. It would cut down our walking time by several minutes, and walking through a cemetery, he said, helped to clear the mind. Who was I to argue with that? The afternoon sun felt good, despite the chill of the hibernal air, as I made my way down the narrow sidewalks and winding little streets. Just like old times, I thought. René and I had often taken long, meandering walks through Paris back in the day, when we were students at the translation school, sometimes from one end of the city to the other. If we didn’t feel like retracing our steps and the first métro was still hours away, we’d climb a fence and wait out the night in one of the parks, whichever happened to be nearest. In that manner, over the years, we had slept in Buttes-Chaumont, Montsouris, Choisy, Monceau, even the square Récamier, and on one occasion the courtyard of Normale sup’, during the Fête de la musique. Back then, it often seemed to me that the city itself was one immense park. As we entered the cemetery—our comfortable silence punctured only by the gravel beneath our feet—I felt pleasantly soused, happy to blink back tears of nostalgia. Near the entrance was a plaque with the words QUI TUTTO È FERMO written on it. The cemetery was much larger than it appeared from the outside. I had just noticed the delicate rows of pebbles on top of the headstones, most of them decorated with a Star of David, when I heard a croak, soft and hoarse, to my left. The cemetery was full of crows, unless they were ravens, enormous black shapes along the wrought-iron fence, on the branches of the old trees and in the grass, all of them staring, heads askance.

  In a half-whisper, I called out to René several paces ahead. He was standing there, unmoving, with his back to me. It seemed that he, too, had only just noticed them.

  “They must’ve smelled the alcohol in my blood. Corvids can sense that kind of thing. Suetonius mentions it in one of his works. Or was it Livy…”

  It was one thing to hear him go on about the crows in the courtyard, and another thing entirely to find myself, without warning, surrounded on all sides by hundreds of them. Or what seemed like hundreds. Where had they come from, and how had they managed to get so close without our noticing them? I made a small forward movement, and saw the ravens, or crows, or whatever they were down in the grass, do the same—quick, hopping steps—while their confrères up on the headstones and on the branches contented themselves with pivoting their heads in what I thought was a distinctly scornful manner.

  “It’s me they’re interested in,” René said,
through clenched teeth. “Not you. They don’t know you, they don’t care about you.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You keep going while I double back to the apartment. Maybe I can lose them along the way.”

  He started taking off his jacket, then the scarves, the sunglasses, tearing off his beard and the rest of the accoutrements (it turned out that he had, in fact, been wearing eyebrow extensions), until there was nothing left but my old friend, the René I knew, transformed back to his recognizable self.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  René gave a little shrug with one shoulder. “I’ll be fine.”

  “What if some of them follow me to the school?”

  “They won’t. Trust me.” Seeing that I wasn’t convinced, he added, “Beyond the cemetery is hawk territory. The crows rarely venture there. They won’t follow you.” He gave me a pat of encouragement, then hurriedly kissed my cheeks, left, right, left, right, scratching me with his stubble. When he detached himself, I saw that his eyes were wet. “Go on, Gém is waiting for you.”

  With his jacket and scarves tucked under his arm, he turned and started walking back the way we had come, retracing his steps. He didn’t turn around. The crows followed him, either on foot or with their black, beady eyes. The ones perched on the fence flew up to the branches with a felted flutter of wings, as though to better monitor René’s egress. I watched as my friend disappeared behind a row of sepulchers.

  True to his prediction, they did not follow me. I noticed that there were no crows on the branches of the trees outside the cemetery, as though they really were that scrupulous about the perimeter of their territory and the territory of the hawks, where one ended and where began the other.

  A small crowd had already gathered in front of the school entrance—no doubt the afternoon habitués, a sodality of mothers, fathers and older siblings. Unlike me, they were all warmly dressed, with the allure of responsible guardians. In more ways than one, I felt out of place among them, an interloper, maybe even the kind of person Gaëtane, at one point, had accused me of being (“a thirty-five-year-old who ruins six-year-old lives,” she’d once called me). And maybe, I thought, as I stood there shivering, she wasn’t entirely wrong. She didn’t know that when I wasn’t at work I spent most of my waking hours at the Forum des Halles or Bercy Village. That was what my weekends looked like since René had moved to Rome with Gém. For a flat monthly fee, I could watch as many films as I wanted, and in a typical day I sat through five or six showings. Revenge fantasies, ensemble-cast romances, Korean anime, Holocaust documentaries, dubbed Hollywood thrillers, it didn’t matter. I rarely saw the same movie twice, although I once spent an entire day watching one thing, over and over. By the end, I had no recollection at all of what I had watched.