Paris Was Ours (28 page)

On the other hand, Thanksgiving in Paris was a dead ringer for Thanksgiving at home, save for the much-missed butternut squash and the fact that everything tasted better. I don’t know whom we have to thank—I fear it may be Hallmark—but Parisian butchers have come a long way since the first time I ordered a
grosse dinde
in November, nearly twenty years ago. “Oh, is it for your American rite?” asked the butcher, with a
squint of the eye generally reserved for Jewish-Masonic conspiracies. Now those
grosses dindes
come with a side order of miniature American flags. In New York we are Pilgrims, but in Paris we are Americans.

We had one great advantage over Franklin: we spoke French. Franklin rarely acknowledged that minor handicap, although he did refer to contracts that had been signed in his first year, when misapprehension was the order of the day. Even a bilingual family came in for its share of surprises, however. There was the hockey coach who chain-smoked on the ice. (There were also the unforgiving stares to be endured in the Métro when traveling with an eight-year-old in full hockey equipment, especially as that child was a girl.) School recess may well have taken place in the magnificent parc Monceau, but one did not (a) set foot on the grass, (b) throw a ball, or (c) throw anything resembling a ball. In turn, the flying scarves, the chestnuts, the bottle caps were confiscated. The school week is cleverly configured to keep mothers from working (home for lunch; half day Wednesday; four-hour birthday parties). The academic calendar is configured to keep teachers from having to work more than three weeks straight.

Some of the frustrations were maddeningly familiar. The problem is less one of language than of the sterling example set—and the expectations harbored—by North American efficiency. It is almost impossible to shake the Anglo-Saxon concern that you are holding up the line, a qualm that does not exist in France, where it is one’s privilege and responsibility to do so. Quite simply, ours is a service economy. France’s is not. A café waiter is meant to do his job, but that job is most decidedly not to guarantee the satisfaction of his customer. Rather it is
the customer’s job to admire the professionalism of the waiter, the expertise with which he can flick a baguette crumb into oblivion, his unerring capacity to make change. Stocking the larder is a full-time job, more so even than in Franklin’s day, when the fruit seller and the pâtissier and the
laitier
delivered their goods to the door. (Judging from his household accounts, Franklin had a hearty and prescient taste for apple pie.) Early on the ten-year-old delivered up the paradox of Parisian life: In that city, one accomplishes precisely half of what one sets out that morning to accomplish. Which means that if one heads out with only one thing to do, one has a problem.

France is a country hidebound by regulations; the national sport consists of gracefully subverting them. The trick is not to follow the rules but to avoid getting caught breaking them. It is Casablanca on a grand scale. One adapts quickly but sometimes ambivalently, especially since this is not necessarily the lesson one cares to impart to one’s American children. Two thousand two was an election year in France, which meant several things. It meant there was a strike of some kind pretty much every minute; one might call the Louvre to confirm that the children’s weekend class was in session, only to hike across town to discover that, indeed, class was not canceled, but that the building was locked tight. (The opposite might also be true: the post office was open, but the employees were on strike.) The library staff might well be in place—except those who delivered titles from shelves
L
through
S
. Under the highly regulated exterior all is chaos: The order at a piano recital is whoever wants to go first. The TV news starts at a set time—and continues until the news is finished, a signal triumph of content over form. There may be a hockey bus to
convey the team to Meudon, or there may not. (Naturally this nontruth requires three phone calls to establish.) There is no such thing as a Gallic work ethic, and in an election year there is no constituency that is too dignified, or too disenfranchised, to strike. In the course of the year, the emergency room doctors, the gendarmerie, the teachers, the unemployed, all walked out on strike. Everything is predicated on the crucial “except,” and
exceptionellement
quickly became our favorite word in the French language. The exception of the day became a staple of the dinner conversation.

Election year brought with it lessons apart from the political ones. As every Frenchman knows, all driving violations are promptly pardoned by the incoming
président de la république
. It is his gift to the people of France; it is the modern-day version of royal prerogative; it is the tradition every candidate must vow to uphold. Which means that for the months leading up to any presidential election, all speed and traffic laws are de facto suspended. (Road fatalities rise accordingly.) Essentially what this means is that any piece of Parisian surface—sidewalk, driveway, bus stop—suddenly qualifies as a parking space. Quickly we went native; our children seemed ambivalent about what they termed our “rural parking.” What kind of lesson, they asked, were we imparting? The lesson we were imparting was, should our children ever settle in France, they had better get with the program, or they will be circling the block eternally.

And then there is that staple of French life: the specious argument. After a full day’s drive to the country, fully wilted, we inquire in a restaurant at 5:00 p.m. if there might be anything on hand to eat. No, is the answer. Not even an ice cream? Well,
yes, of course, comes the reply. We got very good at playing Go Fish. Also at heading off the brand of logistical display we had encountered years earlier on an Air France flight, when we attempted to settle the firstborn in the airline’s bassinet. He did not fit. The bassinet was for children under two. Ergo, reasoned the indignant stewardess, the child was not under the age of two. (As his passport duly attested, he was nine months old. Under other circumstances, my outsize American children have elicited plaudits, of the kind a Great Dane wins in a city of poodles. “Ça, madame,” offered a well-dressed gentleman in the jardin du Ranelagh one day, pointing to a different nine-month-old, “Ça, madame, c’est un bébé.”)

Go Fish is a game I can play. A different tournament will forever stand between me and French nationality. That is the sport essential to French life: I pontificate, therefore I am. Between Passy and Saint-Germain, a royalist taxi driver worked himself into a fever one night over Chirac’s misdeeds and the pressing need to reinstall the Bourbon heir (rather than the Orléans pretender) to the throne of France. His diatribe, and his reliquary of a taxi, may be the last thing our children forget about the year abroad.

Some mysteries of our new life went unsolved. Is there anything the French can’t advertise with cleavage? How is it possible that twenty-first-century Paris could still boast Turkish toilets? Why does the milk not need to be refrigerated? Why does the shampoo not lather? Certain things were best left unexplained, like the gaggle of short-skirted teenagers who congregated across the street from the apartment, rain or shine. “Have you ever wondered when those girls go to school?” asked the eight-year-old. Fortunately, she never noticed that those
prodigies spent their day getting in and out of cars with out-of-town plates, cars that reliably delivered them back to the corner an hour later. At least they dressed respectably, as opposed to their sisters (and faux sisters) a block deeper into the Bois de Boulogne. There were two jogging itineraries: my Felliniesque own, and the less scenic route, which I took when running with the children.

In the end, though, the pleasures exceeded the familiar physical glories and culinary delights. One lives better in Europe, not only on account of the cheeses and the three-hour lunches and the enforced weekend. One does so thanks to SOS Couscous, whose deliverymen ladle dinner from dented metal casseroles; on account of pediatricians who pay house calls and orthodontists who take appointments until 9:00 p.m.; because the playgrounds are vastly superior, free as they are from liability issues. There is good coffee and
steak frites
even at the hockey rink, where the adults are blessedly oblivious to the game. And the parent of a school-age child saves countless hours: there are no bake sales, no safety patrol, no home games. The last thing any French school administration cares to encounter in its hallways is a parent. We came nearly to take for granted those built-in privileges of a socialist country: when making travel arrangements, when buying shoes, when visiting a museum, we were entitled to a discount as a card-carrying
famille nombreuse
. (Woe to any
famille nombreuse
that attempts a dinner in a good French restaurant, however. At least until the two-year-old orders oysters.)

As it happened, we had something else in common with Franklin. While I waited to pick the children up from school one fall afternoon, my Parisian sister-in-law called to report
that a plane had flown into the World Trade Center. I assumed she meant that a crazy student pilot had done so until I got home and turned on the television. From that moment on Americans in Paris were few on the ground. As it had been in the eighteenth century, America was naked and vulnerable again. “Nous sommes tous américains,” blared the headlines, and any cabdriver who heard a whisper of English was happy not only to ask where we were from—for once New York was the proper answer, rather than California—but to offer sympathy and thanks for 1945. For the worst reasons imaginable, we enjoyed a taste of the fervor for the New World that Franklin had so effectively cultivated in the Old. A friend who was treated to a rare viewing of original Proust papers asked afterward why he had been so lucky. “Consider it repayment for June sixth,” he was told, just after the fiftieth anniversary of D-day. Say the words “Benjamin Franklin” and you elicit a smile from a Frenchman. On days when I wasn’t smiling, I made a point of coming home via the place du Trocadéro, over which a bronze Franklin presides. Sometimes I felt closer to him there than I did in the archives. That is the blessed thing about France: the history is always close to the surface. I suppose it was why we went.

Litost

I
T BEGAN WITH
a word:
litost
. My six turbulent years in Paris were launched by a reading of Kundera’s
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
and, specifically, by this one word. Described in Michael Henry Heim’s translation as

a Czech word with no exact translation into any other language. It designates a feeling as infinite as an open accordion, a feeling that is the synthesis of many others: grief, sympathy, remorse, and an indefinable longing. The first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog.

Kundera, in trying to describe the elusive sense of this word, touched a nerve deep within me.

Under certain circumstances, however, it can have a very narrow meaning, a meaning as definite, precise, and sharp as a well-honed cutting edge. I have never found an equivalent in other languages for this sense of the word either, though I do not see how anyone can understand the human soul without it.

Suddenly, my quest to understand my own indefinable sorrows and longings came to include a desire to learn this
language, one that had a word for this range of human emotion that English and all others lacked—a set of emotions so close to my heart. How could I think and write without knowing it? An aspiring poet and language autodidact—I had taught myself bits of Gaelic and Latin in addition to my high school French and German—I craved something from language and literature. I just didn’t know what.

Michael Henry Heim happened to be visiting Harvard at the time, and a friend studying at MIT, who’d been having trysts with members of the Cambridge literati, connected us. I went to meet him to describe my love of Kundera and to ask how he’d learned the language, and how I might. “Do you speak French?” he asked me, seemingly nonsensically. Passably, I replied. “Well, you can’t go to Prague” — this was 1985, and the wall had not yet come down — “but you can go to Langues O’ in Paris and they’ll teach you Czech.” Langues O’ was the nickname for INALCO, the l’Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales. Kundera was living in Paris by then and had begun writing in French. “You might meet him,” Heim added. And that was that.

I was amused to find that
orientales
for the French meant anything east of Germany, and south as well—dozens of African dialects were taught at Langues O’. It was ridiculously cheap: fees for the year were less than two hundred dollars. Where would I live? My MIT friend—we ourselves had met by chance on a train to Berlin in the mideighties, each on a postcollege European tour—had a friend who had studied abroad and could connect me to one of her friends there. This man was incredibly helpful and spoke great English; he developed software and so was usually up half the night, convenient
for calling from the States. A friend of his was on sabbatical in Silicon Valley; I could rent his studio, just south of Paris but with a view of the Eiffel Tower. Would that be OK?