Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost

by David Hoon Kim

  Kids started emerging, and those who had been waiting outside greeted them with shouts and laughter and accolades. What was I doing here? It was all I could do not to break into a run. Perhaps the anxiety I felt had nothing to do with what had happened in the cemetery. And yet why was I nervous about seeing her again? By now, the sidewalk looked like a gallery opening in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, but there was still no sign of Gém. Had the crows gotten to her? No, I was being ridiculous. A vulgar gathering of birds, that was all it had been, only that and nothing more … Suddenly, through the crowd, I spotted her svelte silhouette. She seemed so alone, standing there in the midst of such familial bliss. Had she been waiting like that all this time?

  Gémanuelle, my godchild.

  * * *

  I was still drunk; the cemetery air hadn’t done nearly enough to clear my head, it seemed. I wasn’t thinking straight, or else I wouldn’t have taken her, without a second thought, to the nearest establishment—a restaurant of some sort or another—rather than back into the school, where a washroom would almost certainly have been available, a place where I could get Gém cleaned up. Had I not been so shocked by her appearance, I might have done just that, but I feared that the teachers would think me responsible for the torn stockings, the rips in her dress, which was smudged here and there with dirt and various inexplicable stains, as though, on top of everything else, a monumental food fight had just taken place at the school canteen.

  The restaurant was mostly empty, only a few customers scattered here and there, sitting at tables set unusually far apart. Everything was too brightly lit. There were thick electric cables on the ground, and I nearly tripped over one of them. Something wasn’t quite right. For one thing, there were no servers, and the only person working seemed to be the barman, who bore a striking resemblance to a young Marcello Mastroianni with his dark hair combed back from his forehead. He was engrossed in a book called La porta sull’estate behind the counter of the bar, and I made the mistake of asking him where the toilets were. Without looking up, he informed me in English—I had addressed him in my best Italian-accented French—that I couldn’t eat here. He had misunderstood me, but I couldn’t resist pointing out that most of the tables were unoccupied, and he repeated, more sharply this time, that I did not have the right to eat here.

  “I’m asking for my daughter, OK? It’s her birthday today!” I avoided looking at Gém as I said this. It had been a long time since we had last played the game; she might even have forgotten about it altogether. My interlocutor, frowning, put down his book, and that was when he saw “my daughter” standing beside me. I watched him take in the sorry state of her clothes. Then he turned back to me, as if seeing me for the first time as well.

  “What has happened to her?” He leaned over the zinc for a closer look. “Her vestments are”—he made a slicing gesture—“tutti strappati!”

  “She’s fine, she’s fine. It’s for a film directed by”—I paused—“the great Renato Amorese, il signore dei cannibali.”

  “Is your girl, you said?” He narrowed his eyes. “You find her where? You rapire her?”

  I felt Gém tugging at my sleeve, and my first thought was that she was going to correct me in front of Marcello Mastroianni: no, she wasn’t my daughter; no, I wasn’t her father. She said my name, and I did my best to ignore her as I explained, in a hodgepodge of French and English, that she had only recently moved here from Paris and was being harassed by her classmates for being different. With that, I pointed to her clothes.

  “Henrik,” Gém said, loudly, “I want to leave. Now.”

  Back out in the street, she started walking fast, not looking back, and I practically had to run to catch up with her.

  “You didn’t have to tell him all that stuff,” she said, without slowing down, and the way she had of throwing her shoulders back reminded me of Gaëtane, funnily enough.

  “Hey,” I said, “I’m sorry for telling him you were my daughter. I know it’s been a while since we—”

  “That’s not what I meant!” She stopped walking and turned to face me. Her cheeks were flushed, her small child’s chest heaving. “I didn’t fight with the other kids.”

  “But your dress…”

  “No one is harassing me.”

  “Then who did this?” I tried not to stare at what looked like a piece of chewing gum in her hair.

  “I did it to myself. It’s for my character. René says I need to put myself in Maya’s shoes if I’m going to play her in the film.”

  “Maya?” Since when had she started referring to René as “René”?

  “That’s her name,” she said. “Maya the psychic girl.”

  Across the street, the face of a building entirely overgrown with vines started to move and sway, ever so gradually, as though brought to life by a swarm of invisible hands. I stared in stupefaction for a moment. The wind, only the wind …

  “So it’s fine,” I heard her say, “if you want me to be your daughter. I can play that role, too.”

  “Come on,” I said, walking again, afraid I might start crying in front of her. “Let’s go find you a lavatory.”

  We came across a Chinese restaurant whose facilities were not so jealously guarded. There was even a public phone, its orange Bakelite casing scratched and battered. When Gém came out of the WC, she no longer looked like a tatterdemalion; her face was cleaned up, her hair more or less in order. “See? I’m OK. It was just pretend.” She made a turn for me, like someone modeling an outfit. I was impressed that she had managed to get rid of the stains on her dress, then realized that she was now wearing it inside out. I thought about what awaited her, the ersatz birthday party, which was little more than a screen test in disguise. In a way, she was already acting in René’s film; she just didn’t know it yet.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked her. “Shall we eat something?”

  There were more people than at the pseudo-restaurant we had left, and here they were eating, talking, making noise. The clientele was at least half Asian, always a good sign, for a Chinese restaurant. It meant the food couldn’t be all that bad. We chose a table with a view of the street. Near us sat a group of young students, or such was the impression they gave off. They were Asian, and, listening to their laughter and chatter, I felt a kinship with them, though I didn’t understand a word of Italian. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched them as they served themselves from the splayed-out dishes, everyone having a bit of this, a bit of that, rather than each person eating only from his own plate with no sharing, no crossing of chopsticks from opposite ends of the table. When the server came by, Gém ordered for both of us in Italian. She seemed to know exactly what she wanted, and I asked her, as casually as possible, if she had already come here with René.

  She shook her head no. “I read the menus when I walk past them,” she said. “They’re in front of all the restaurants.”

  I remembered that we weren’t far from the school. “René isn’t always there to pick you up?”

  “Sometimes he’s busy. I understand. He’s writing my character.”

  “René would have been here today,” I said, “but something came up at the last minute. Really, I’m not making excuses for him. If it hadn’t been for your father’s heroic act, I wouldn’t have been able to come pick you up at all.”

  As I recounted the run-in with the crows, Gém listened without a word. I thought that she might find the story amusing (she was at that age when she preferred reading to being read to, though in the past she had appreciated my stories, the ones I made up as I went along), but her expression remained resolutely somber as she played with the seasoning containers. When I finished, she didn’t speak, a pensive look clouding her features. She had placed the containers, and our plastic cups of water, in a straight line, like the pebbles on the headstones of the Jewish cemetery. I asked her if she was OK, and she shrugged.

  “Gém,” I began, “the bric-à-brac of things outside the window of the friends’ room…”


  No reply.

  “And on your desk…”

  Her eyes slowly widened. “You were in my room!”

  I could see her whole face working: she was trying to decide whether to be upset or not. Someone had finally noticed the mess in her room, someone who understood its reason for being—to serve as contrast with the curated bibelots on her desk.

  “The door was open. I shouldn’t have. Do you forgive me?”

  She sat back and crossed her arms. “Only if you promise not to tell René.”

  “OK, sure, but why can’t I tell him?”

  “Because they’re not supposed to be my friends.”

  “Who?”

  “The corbies. They like to give me things. Presents.”

  “The corbies?”

  “Tsk, that’s what they’re called.” Her tone had grown confidential, like René’s at the café. “The ones in Rome talk the same as the ones in Paris. That’s why I understood them right away. And why they understand me.” She added, quietly, shaking her head: “But they don’t want me to do the film.”

  “The corbos, you mean.”

  “Corbies.”

  “Gém”—I looked her in the eye—“you don’t have to do the film if you don’t want to.”

  “But I want to, Henrik. Honest, I do.”

  “Understood. It’s the corbies who don’t want you to.”

  “In the film, they’re supposed to be the bad guys.”

  “Is that what René told you?”

  Instead of answering, she shrugged in the same one-shouldered way René had, and I realized that she was imitating him. I wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t listen to his mumbo-jumbo, but was it really my place? Did I have the right?

  When the plates arrived, we followed the examples of the Asian Italians. (Gém had ordered several types of stir-fried noodles, potstickers and soup-based dishes.) Everything was delicious, more than delicious—nothing like the heat-lamp fare at Tang Frères. Never in my life had I eaten Chinese food like this before.

  “Much better than the resto we left, right?” I said. “What a strange place that was. And the service! No wonder it’s practically empty.”

  “Henrik,” she said, laughing with her mouth full, “it was a movie set. Didn’t you see all the lights and stuff?”

  “Lights?” I remembered the peculiarly spaced tables, but not much else. “Wait. Movie set?”

  “It’s like the time René and I went down to the RER and the platform looked different. There were all these people doing things, and I saw Mathieu Kassovitz, who smiled at me.”

  Had I been that drunk?

  I watched her finish off the last of the fried dumplings, then got up to pay, and when I came back, Gém was playing with the scraps of food left on her plate. Sitting back down across from her, I saw that she was arranging the bits in a neat line. She worked with such concentration that I found myself involuntarily holding my breath. I didn’t want to interrupt her, but I thought of René, waiting at the apartment. Dressed in Cinecittà hand-me-downs, smoking one cigarette after another and making last-minute preparations for Gém’s so-called party. Was he nervous about Renato’s visit? Did he wonder why we were taking so long? As we were leaving the restaurant, I heard a small electronic beep. My watch. It was time. I turned to her and said, very solemnly, “Happy birthday, Gém.” She smiled, a shy sort of smile, and in that moment she looked somehow different, if not a bit older. Something about her had changed—there seemed to be less childish fat around the wrists and arms covered with little blond hairs that, too fine to make out normally, now caught the declining light.

  Gaëtane had been wrong: Gém did have friends, lots of friends, all over the city. They had feathers and they all knew how to fly.

  The sun had already gone down by the time we walked through the porte cochère into the interior courtyard, illuminated by the sole lights of the windows above us. Where had the time gone? In the half-darkness, the eucalyptus was different, the whole tree leaning slightly forwards, as though deep in thought. The crows had returned; they were in the tree, their tenebrous presence weighing down the branches.

  With slow, almost hesitant steps Gém approached the tree, and I followed, walking behind her. I could make them out now: black, indistinct shapes huddled close to one another. They looked to be asleep, though it was hard to be sure. I thought she would start talking to them, but she remained silent, and I was reminded not so much of René’s dream, or of the way he had described seeing his daughter surrounded by a tribunal of crows; rather, I found myself thinking about the end of “The Seven Ravens,” when the heroine is reunited with her lost brothers. It seemed to me that she was communicating with them, albeit without words, the way it’s sometimes possible to do in dreams. Or perhaps—a year later, in another city, another reality—some part of her was still searching for her vanished feline friend.

  At last she turned away, and in that moment, though there was hardly any light left in the sky, I saw her future more clearly than ever. I knew her better than she knew herself. Nevertheless I had brought her back to René. After all, who was I to stop her from following the river of her destiny? We crossed the courtyard in silence and entered René’s building. As we waited for the lift to arrive, Gém asked me how long I planned to stay, and I answered—truthfully—that I had no idea.

  “Will you come back and see me?”

  “But I haven’t left yet!”

  “Will you?” she said, her voice breaking a little.

  “I promise.” I wasn’t sure if she believed me, or if she wanted to believe me. Something told me that I wouldn’t be the first or the last to disappoint her. Once again, I recalled the day we had spent scouring the neighborhood looking for Bors. In the vestibule, after watching her disappear up the stairs, I had stood there for a long time, long after her footsteps had faded away and all I could hear was the dull throb of the rain coming down on the asphalt. As I was leaving the building, I had seen it, the missing cat, eating one of the scraps that Gém had dropped along the way. Its once-white fur was tangled and streaked with dirt and little clumps of mud. At that moment, it had looked up at me, and even from a distance, something in the animal’s gaze told me that the Bors Gém had known and loved was no more. A change had taken place, and there would be no going back to the way things had been. For a long moment, we stared at each other like old rivals. When the cat finally darted into an alley, I made no move to run after it.

  Stazione Termini

  He wasn’t waiting for me at the station. It was just like René, of course. I’d told him that I would be arriving on the overnight train, the Paris–Rome, and he had promised not to forget. For several long moments I stood there, in the vast concourse of Roma Termini, holding my sac de voyage, still hoping to spot him among the morning crowd. Despite the early hour, most of the benches were occupied, and everywhere around me was movement, chaos, boredom. But no René. I hadn’t slept much on the train—I’ve never been one to sleep in trains—and now I was starting to feel a dull, nameless weight bearing down on me, threatening to cloud my judgment. There was a payphone—possibly the only one—at the far end of the concourse, but when I got there I remembered that I didn’t have a card. Or change, for that matter. But nearby was a Relay, and I went in and bought a bottle of water and a telephone card. When I went back, I found someone else, a woman—a fellow Dane, no less—using it. I knew she was Danish because she was speaking Danish. Even without the high heels, she probably had a good few centimeters on me. She was talking to someone, a boyfriend, a husband. “Jens” had screwed up, and she was upset about it. He was to join her at the station, but something had held him up. If he didn’t get here soon, they risked missing their train. For a moment she stopped talking, as though she had sensed my presence behind her. I sipped my water and tried to remember the last time I had heard Danish spoken in public.

  “I’ll tell you when you get here,” I heard the woman say. She had briefly raised her voice, before lowering i
t again. “No,” she went on, “I’d rather not say it on the phone.” She glanced over her shoulder, and I saw that she was older than she appeared from behind, closer to my age than the age I had initially assigned her. “There’s someone behind me,” I heard her whisper. “What if he understands what I’m saying?” There followed several “no”s, each more exasperated than the last. “I don’t see why it matters. And the restaurant in Munich? Yes, the black girl. The one I told you was eavesdropping on our conversation. You thought I was being paranoid.” There was a pause. “Danish isn’t a secret language spoken only by the two of us. We need to be careful if—” She let out a sigh. “No, he’s not black.” She had begun whispering again, though loudly enough that it didn’t make her any less audible than someone speaking in a normal voice. “I’m not going to tell you,” she said. “I have to go.” She walked away without looking behind her.

  I picked up the receiver she had been holding; it was still warm, with a trace of what looked like lipstick on the mouthpiece. I dialed René’s number, and was not overly surprised when no one answered. Then I remembered him telling me they were filming today, a location shoot in Trastevere. It was possible that he had just left the set and was, at this very moment, on his scooter, weaving through the morning traffic. I felt a hard tap on my arm, and found myself being leered at by a young beggar, possibly North African, though he could have been Italian, I suppose. He was standing close enough for me to make out the darkened pores on his unwashed face. In a farrago of Italian and English, he was asking me for change. To bring this point across, he shook a paper cup filled with coins in my face. I told him I didn’t have any money, but he stood there as though he hadn’t understood, an expression of dazed contempt on his face. I left him there like that, and moments later, glancing behind me, I saw him approach a fair-haired couple, then continue meekly on his way after the man dropped one or two coins into his cup.