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Paris
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paris
July, 1982
the taxi is pulling them from the airport, moving through cornfields and hayfields. Miscellaneous weeds are overtaking the steel barriers on the highway median, a green intrusion. Sarah spots a wild dill plant that must be five feet tall, tall as her. Her mother puts up mason jars of dill pickles every summer, the aunts competing for whose are the best. Dill from the garden, one clove of garlic in each jar, one hot pepper for zip. Bottle them the same day you pick them, that’s the trick to keep them crunchy. Her mouth waters. Winnipeg.
But they’re here, in Paris. Almost.
Sarah had pictured the Eiffel Tower planted like a pointy little chess piece beside the river, but as they were landing the city itself was nowhere to be seen. She feels thick with jet lag. The airplane was choked with cigarette smoke, and her head is clogged with smoke, and next to no sleep, and the time change, six hours. The traffic slows and then speeds up mysteriously. Flash of a tile-roofed farmhouse, a memory of a time before the highway. The thickness in her head is making it hard to read the new landscape. Cédez le passage under a red-bordered triangle must mean yield. Chaussée déformée. What can that mean? Something deformed… The sign is gone before she can figure it out. Translating is the only job she has now and she can’t even get it right. The taxi is moving them through suburbs now; she can just barely see low, ordinary-looking buildings above and beyond the concrete scallops of the barriers enclosing the highway.
Where is she? She touches the penny in her pocket. Lucky penny. Lucky her. Whether she deserves it or not.
The barriers recede, they’ve moved off the highway onto the surface roads. The cab stops at a red light and something inside her stops. She sees this woman, a thin young woman standing at the curb in a thin print dress. The woman’s right hand is crossed to stroke her left cheek, what seems to be a scar on her cheek. It looks new, raw still. Sarah thinks of Barb, the scar across her palm still new-looking, as if it hadn’t really healed. The young woman at the crosswalk and Sarah – they must be about the same age, the same height, weight – briefly exchange glances. The woman’s eyes are the same deep brown as Sarah’s. Doppelgangers. Strangers mirroring each other. They look for a moment, then look away. The woman hesitates, seems to pick a direction, and turns, walks away from the intersection. There’s something both determined and defeated about how she holds herself. Sarah’s mirror self. But the woman is someone who belongs in this city, who isn’t a stranger in it, a foreigner, like Sarah. Maybe.
They’re in the city itself now and more faces slideshow past, vignettes of expression: surprise, amusement, indifference, hauteur, appreciation. People’s features are supposed to be shaped by the language they speak. The French have these sharp, fine features, like foxes – canny and wary and smart. All those complicated vowels to get your mouth around. What’s going to happen to Sarah’s own face here? Will she get to be someone else, someone other than her old useless self, the one the penny let her shuck?
Two boys in their mid-teens walk down a narrow lane that’s shadowy in the brightness of the day; they’re unselfconsciously holding hands. There, down those side streets, those lanes, people are allowed their private lives, which are both more and less than the official tourist version the city proposes. That thin woman with the scar back at the intersection, her thin print dress, what life or half-life is she allowed?
When Sarah finally spots the five- and six-storey buildings with the angled-back roofs that she remembers from her first visit, something in her suddenly tightens in happiness. She’s been waiting for this. Mansard, she tells Michael, after Mansart, the architect who invented them in the 1600s. How did the t turn into a d? On those top floors behind the slanted windows are the chambres de bonne, maid’s rooms, with sloped ceilings cutting into the space – the garrets where artists are supposed to starve. And now they’re in the Marais, where their apartment is, the driver announces, speaking slowly and carefully for them. Sarah can tell that his French is heavily accented, he’s probably Moroccan or maybe Algerian. Sarah’s been reading up on the area a bit. The whole neighbourhood used to be a nasty marshy wasteland: marais means marsh in French.
The taxi pulls up at their address, and they tumble their bags out onto the sidewalk. While Michael pays the cabbie, counting out his francs, Sarah checks the elaborate handwriting on the cramped chart at the door for the concierge’s doorbell, rings. They can hear the chime faintly through the heavy wooden door. It opens, and a roly-poly little woman duly lets them in, chattering away rapidly in a French Sarah can’t begin to understand – so much for her French being a big help – oui, oui, merci, all she can manage in response. The concierge is a flawless Parisian concierge. She couldn’t wear anything but what she’s wearing, the worn flowered apron protecting her worn flowered housedress, her sense of propriety, proprietorship. She hands them the impressive, heavy keys with some formal little phrases Sarah doesn’t understand either and then waves them on, closing the door to her suite, where they can see laundry hanging off a little wire rack in the middle of the living room. A smell of carrots, beets maybe, boiling. The apartment is on the deuxième étage, second floor – second floor in France, which means the third in Canada. The ground floor is called the rez-de-chaussée, which accounts for the mystery of the ‘RC’ on elevator buttons. Sarah thinks, though she’s not absolutely sure, that chaussée is an old French word for ‘road’ (that must have been what the highway sign meant, chaussée déformée, uneven surface, under construction, something like that) and rez means something like ‘flat’ or ‘level.’ So it’s like street level. And ‘SS’ on elevator buttons, that’s for sous-sol, which means basement. So much to figure out. Not that there is an elevator in their building.
Michael is staring at her, holding back a grin.
What?
“You’re turning into a Parisian chatterbox, Sarah. Back home I don’t think you’d normally string this many words together in a day.”
She’s just excited that she’s managed to figure out a few things that are probably a mystery to Michael. She wants to help.
“Now don’t go mute on me again,” he says. “You know you’re here as my interpreter and personal guide to Paris.” Personal guide. She won’t be much good at that either. She was here for four days five years ago. She doesn’t know anything. Michael starts picking up the two biggest suitcases. She’ll let him this time. She really is tired, although she can also feel this surge of adrenaline, or joy, just because she’s here. Paris.
They have to trudge up two tight, narrow flights of stairs which hairpin at each floor, then figure out how to turn the elaborate lock with the impressive key. But there’s a pay-off when they get in the door. The apartment is just one big room all right, as Michael’s Parisian colleague Laura, the one who found it for them, described it. But the ceiling rises to twelve feet or more and, after the heat of the sunny sidewalk and the climb, the room is beautifully cool. Two ten-foot French doors open out to minute balconies, more ledges than balconies. Room to shake a mop, Abe would say. Plus there’s a double bed for them, a real double bed, not two singles tied together which, in Sarah’s experience, inevitably, slowly, separate in the middle of the night if the occupants try to get close enough to spoon…or anything else.
And the whole place, with its kitchen nook and modern bathroom, looks spotless, not the grime Sarah was expecting. She finds some sort of a mysterious French cleaning product perched beside the sink. Does détersif mean cleanser or detergent? Whatever it means is suspended in translation, which feels, at the moment, as if she has to wrench herself from one way of understanding the world to another. And this is her job, now, translation, guidance; the only job she has.
Michael has stretched himself out on the bed, yawning at the same time he’s grinning, and he’s going on about what lucky ducks they are, getting to live here, even if the Marais isn’t exactly the fanciest part of Paris. The Jewis
h quarter. It’s been more or less a ghetto since the 1300s, Jews living here off and on, depending on how tolerant the regime in charge was. Sarah stands in the windows’ sunlight looking out on the two half-timbered medieval buildings that Laura promised in one of her letters. They’re among the oldest in Paris. The roof-lines are pointed, triangular, like a child’s drawing of a house. They’re special because there aren’t many left. In the second half of the 19th century the city was ‘modernized’ and most of the old buildings demolished. Sarah tries to picture the narrow medieval streets. The city she sees now printed over what the city used to be, translating itself.
Right below their balcony ledge is a sculpted head protruding from the wall. Michael is beside her now. “Have you met Georges? Zhat’s Georges with an s,” he says in a bad fake French accent. He pulls her back into the room, into a kiss. “Feel good being back here?”
Yes. Yes she does. However useful or useless she is.
“Even if you’re stuck spending every night with some ignoramus who doesn’t know the Left Bank from the Right?” His hands under her shirt.
“Uh-huh,” she says.
He’s starting to run his tongue along her earlobe.
“I should shower, Michael. I feel so grubby.”
More kisses. “We could shower together. It’s a nice big tub.”
“Sounds dangerous.”
He starts unbuttoning her shirt. “You’re a dangerous woman.” He’s kissing her collarbone, her shoulders. “We need to get these jeans off.”
“Michael, I’m stinky.”
He sniffs at her neck, licks her shoulder. “You smell good to me.” She’s kicked off her sandals. The jeans are gone. He pulls the comforter back, gently pushes her onto the bed. His mouth on her throat. He turns her over, kisses the back of her neck. She’s heard somewhere that geishas never powder the napes of their necks because it’s the most erotic part of the body. The geishas are probably right. Michael’s mouth is on her nape, his fingers are counting the nobs of her spine. Glorious.
~
She wakes to the sound of someone fiddling with the lock. A bit of sun is coming through the white-painted wooden shutters. The door opens and Michael comes in, his hair still damp, a white paper bag in his hands. “Good morning, Merry Sunshine. Did you just wake up?”
She did. Slept in a big double bed with Michael in Paris with no dreams, no waking or half-waking.
“I got us fresh croissants. And strawberry jam. And crème fraîche.”
“What’s crème fraîche?”
“Laura introduced me to it when I was here last time. Fancy stuff. It’s like sour cream, but not as sour. You’re supposed to put it in sauces or on tartes, but you are not supposed to put it on croissants. Laura is an expert on everything Parisian – even though she’s from Saskatoon by way of Tobago – because she’s been living here three whole years. She’s perfected her savoir faire and her comme il faut, not to mention her je ne sais quoi, and so according to Laura, crème fraîche on your croissant is not the thing to do but,” he bends over to kiss her, “we’re going to do it anyway, aren’t we?”
Now who’s the Parisian chatterbox?
“So I recommend you put the strawberry jam on top of the crème fraîche.”
To be fancy. “What time is it?”
He’s getting plain white plates from the cupboard. “I got us ground espresso coffee too. We can’t have plain old Canadian coffee while we’re in Paris. I remembered seeing one of those little French octagonal or hexagonal or whatever coffee pot things.” A brief clinking and clanking among the cupboards. “Here it is. Ten. It’s actually got ten sides. I got milk too.” He’s setting everything out on the counter. “You slept sixteen hours. It’s 8:00 in the morning. I got up less than an hour ago myself. I was sure I’d wake you, but you were dead to the world.”
Michael is filling the bottom of the coffee contraption with water, tamping down the coffee into the middle part. As he lights the stove with a wooden match, the gas catches with a quick whoosh. “This really is the Jewish neighbourhood, Sarah. There was a shop selling bagels right beside the French bakery. And this guy walked by me as I was leaving the bakery and I could have sworn he looked just like your dad.”
Abe. What’s her dad doing now? And Pat? Rose? “I thought we would have a phone.”
He sits down on the bed. “A phone. Right. I noticed that as soon as we got in. I didn’t check when we rented the place because I just figured there’d be one. But I asked at the pâtisserie – the girl spoke some English, it was great – and she said that there are booths where we can make long-distance calls at the post office right in the City Hall. It’s not five minutes from here. What’s the French word again for City Hall?”
“Hôtel de Ville.” The phrase just popped into her head – the jet-lag fog must be lifting.
“Or we can use pay phones, but then we have to have coins, or tokens. I can’t remember which. But I’ll find out.”
A grinding and screech outside their window. Michael goes to it, opens the shutters and sun brightens the room. There’s a huge tourist bus right outside. They hear the babble of voices, sounds that seem to be German or Dutch. “They’re gawking at those old half-timbered buildings.” The smell of coffee starts to soak through the room.
After breakfast, they head downstairs, through the lobby with its fug of cabbage stew seeping from under the concierge’s door, and out into the sunlight, the day already warm.
“Where are we going?” she asks. Michael has taken her hand, is walking purposefully down the street.
“Just follow me,” he says, giving her hand a light squeeze.
“I don’t want to follow you. I want to know where I’m going.” Which way are they supposed to go? Sarah feels in her pocket, but she’s left the penny in the apartment.
“City Hall is just a little ways up here.” They’ll have to wait till after 3:00 to make the call or they’ll wake her parents up, but Sarah wants to check the place out, make sure the girl at the pâtisserie had it right about being able to make a long-distance call.
A few doors on they pass a tiny shop barely the size of a closet that’s crammed floor to ceiling with roughly-cut logs. They must still have working fireplaces here, though Sarah can’t imagine anyone wanting a fire in this weather. A bearded old man in shirt sleeves looks up and then through them, goes back to sorting through the logs. Business must be tough.
A little ways up there’s a small supermarché, the grocery carts stacked in the entry miniatures of the ones at home. Entrée libre a sign says – it means free entry or admission but that can’t be right, they’re not going to charge people to go into a supermarket. Maybe it means self-serve, something like that. Another puzzle that it’s Sarah’s job to figure out.
They pass pâtisseries, hardware stores, fabric stores, their windows crammed with goods. Fruit and vegetable shops with elaborate displays: intricate pyramidal mountains of cherries, carefully heaped, orderly piles of white asparagus-like stacks of logs. Sarah’s mouth waters. Can she be hungry again already? There’s an awning that says boulanger, boulangerie – it means baker, bakery but why both? And what’s the difference between a boulangerie and a pâtisserie? One means bakery and the other means pastry shop. But they sell bread at the pastry shops, and pastries at the bakeries, so what’s the difference? Maybe there’s some arcane French rule about what you call yourself here: only someone with sixteen years of training in puff pastry assembly gets to call themselves a pâtissier…Sarah knows the term for puff pastry: pâte feuilletée. All those flaky layers that make up a croissant. She does want another croissant. And here’s another puzzle for her: those odd, red lozenge-shaped signs that say tabac, she does know that it means that the shop is licensed to sell tobacco, but they sell stamps and newspapers as much as cigarettes. So what’s that about? All these fine distinctions, refinements, specialization within specialization. She has to sort them out, get things right.
Sarah looks around. She’s b
een so busy taking everything in, trying to parse every word, that she’s lost track of where they’re going. No penny to help her decide, just Michael certain he knows. “Michael, are you sure we’re heading in the right direction for the City Hall?”
“Hang on, hang on,” he says, looking up and down the street. “Uh-oh. I forgot to bring the map. And I have this feeling that if we’ve gone this far without seeing it, we might be headed in the wrong direction.”
Follow me. Without knowing where they’re going.
“Don’t worry, it can’t be more than five minutes away.” He squeezes her hand again. “It’s okay, we’ll check it out, make sure you get your call through.”
~
She’s waited most of the day so she can make the call without waking her parents, then waited again until one of the old-fashioned booths in the post office has become available. Sarah closes the door, lets the privacy of the polished wooden walls close around her, and listens to the hum and buzz as the line connects and then rings. She’s got her penny tight in her fist.
“Hello?” It’s her mother’s voice, clear and close, as if she weren’t an ocean and half a continent away.
“Mom? Mom, it’s Sarah. I’m in Paris.”
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