Ransacking Paris

Patti Miller was raised on a farm in central western NSW.
Her many books include
Writing Your Life
(Allen & Unwin, 1994, 2001),
The Last One Who Remembers
(Allen & Unwin, 1997),
Child
(Allen & Unwin, 1998),
Whatever the Gods Do
(Random House, 2003),
The Memoir Book
(Allen & Unwin, 2007) and
The Mind of a Thief
(UQP, 2012), winner of the NSW Premier's History Award. She has taught writing for over twenty years, including at the innovative Faber Academy in Sydney.

For Charlie

Contents

1
— Arriving

2
— July

3
— August

4
— September

5
— October

6
— November

7
— December

8
— January

9
— February

10
— March

11
— April

12
— May

13
— June

Acknowledgments

Les abeilles pillotent de
çà
delà les fleurs, mais elles en font apr
è
s le miel, qui est tout leur; ce n'est plus thym ni marjolaine
.

Bees ransack flowers here and flowers there, but then they make a honey which is entirely theirs; it is no longer thyme nor marjoram honey.

Michel de Montaigne

One

Arriving

This great world of ours is the looking-glass in which we must gaze to come to know ourselves from the right slant.

Michel de Montaigne

The studio in the rue des Trois Frères on the slopes of Montmartre looked out onto a shadowy courtyard, just a couple of strides across. On the other side of the courtyard was a small theatre, Théâtre du Tremplin, which my dictionary revealed meant ‘springboard' or ‘stepping stone' theatre. In the foyer there was a poster for the next production –
La Grenouille mode d'emploi
, Frogs, How to Use – with a photograph of two frogs, one right side up, one upside down. One of the actors, young, dark-haired, hung out the back window overlooking the studio, smoking and talking to someone behind him.

The sky wasn't visible from where I was sitting – the studio was on the ground floor and the courtyard was too narrow – but there was enough light to see a scraggly locust tree in a pot under the actor's window. I'd noticed it as we dragged our suitcases in; it looked as if it needed more space and light with its spindly branches and some of its oval leaves yellowing. I stood up and stretched, arms over my head, feeling the kinks of twenty-four hours in flight straighten out. My joints clicked after being locked into place for too long. I sat down again and looked around the studio.

Our bags were half unpacked on the lounge. Dresses and jeans were thrown over chairs, and books – Montaigne, de Sévigné and Rousseau – were stacked on the floor. Stendhal and de Beauvoir and Annie Ernaux too, all writers looking out at ‘this great world' as Montaigne called it, trying to set down what they saw. They had come with me to Paris and I was hoping they might keep me company throughout the year. I had placed them in chronological order, but they made an unsettled, uneasy tower, threatening to slip into a heap at any moment.

‘
Ça va?
' Anthony asked. How are you? He was sitting on a kitchen chair near the French windows, holding his cigarette outside with one hand and a glass of wine with the other. His dark hair was greying but his eyes and smile were youthful, fully engaged and observant. He shifted his stocky body on the chair and leaned back to catch my distracted gaze. Beside him on a stool were the leftovers of a baguette and corner shop camembert we'd eaten as our jetlagged dinner. It looked like a tableau ready for a romantic painter: bread and cheese and wine in front of a window in midsummer twilight, the long soft embers of an evening that didn't want to end.

A kaleidoscope turned in my head, disjointed scenes, confusing and exciting at once; the green iron and glass fan of the Guimard-designed Metro entrance at Abbesses Metro, a busker's voice echoing Joni Mitchell's ‘Free Man in Paris' up the long spiral staircase from the platform, light glittering on the gold-tipped obelisk at place de la Concorde where a guillotine once stood, a gypsy woman in layered skirts in front of the Tuileries gate offering me a fake gold ring. We had walked around the gardens trying to stay awake. Children sailed boats in the pond, chestnut trees clipped into cube shapes grew in neat rows, the heavy-headed blossoms of asters and anemones and cosmos leaned in the summer heat, bees staggered from flower to flower. ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I; in a cowslip's bell I lie,' Ariel sang in my spaced-out brain. After lunch, Anthony and I sat in a café in the Tuileries, drinking Stella Artois, legs stretched out, shoes dusty from the white crushed gravel paths. Even then, our arrival at Charles de Gaulle airport that morning seemed a century ago.

My diary sat on the kitchen bench alongside the laptop, and pages of the manuscript I'd begun back in Australia were still lying in the suitcase. The manuscript was the story of a friend who had died from a brain haemorrhage and of her baby son who has become part of my life ever since. In Paris, away from ordinary life, I thought I might be able to piece together their stories, Dina's and the child Theo's, and mine. Our paths had crossed and become tangled and then she had died. A young mother dying and leaving a child bereft is an old story, a story from the beginning of stories, but it was the first time it had arrived in my life.

It was still the evening of the day we arrived and time had acquired a stretching quality, as if the day had lasted several lifetimes, as if time, in fact, didn't pass but circled forever. Perhaps it was days since Anthony asked me how I was. His cigarette smoke went straight up in the still twilight.

I looked around my new home. The one-metre-square kitchen was delineated from the rest of the studio by a bench; the remaining space contained a lounge, a desk and another chair, and the bedroom was a futon on a mezzanine up a steep ladder and so close to the ceiling we would have to be careful sitting up in bed. The only separate space was the bathroom with a toilet and shower, both of them, we soon found out, as temperamental as cheap camping equipment. The only picture on the wall was a poster advertising an exhibition of Aboriginal art at a gallery in an outer suburb of Paris.

‘
Ça va
,' I answered. All going well. I loved every little thing about our studio. It was just as I had imagined it all these years. Even the small cement courtyard and the dodgy loo and the bed platform I couldn't stand up on were perfect. I could hardly believe that it had somehow happened. We were together, our two boys had grown up and we were young again. Maybe you could set time back to start again. To gain a dream long after it seemed possible made the world glow as if the light that comes after the sun has set had spilled gold on everything.

*

Thinking about that year it seems as if it were outside time, or a dream. It's not an unusual dream; it's so common that if I say it aloud I have to use an ironic tone or an American accent:
who doesn't wanna be a writer in Paris?
Part of me shifts uneasily – not another writer in a garret living in illusion in Paris – but another part feels tender. It must mean something, a dream that can propel you to the other side of the world. Couldn't it be the heart wanting something it needs, this longing for elsewhere? After all, we are all strangers wandering around this planet, apparently lost most of the time, looking for something or someone – or some place. And then, when we arrive there, we await revelation, or we impatiently turn things over, demanding answers.

Montaigne wrote, ‘Bees ransack flowers here and flowers there, but then they make a honey which is entirely theirs; it is no longer thyme nor marjoram honey.' I ransacked all year; I'm not sure if I was the hard-working bee or the beekeeper who simply bided her time until the honey was ready, but it doesn't matter as both bee and beekeeper are thieves. I feel a bit twitchy admitting that, a propensity to theft, and it's not something I can defend except to say that I've always been that way.

In childhood I had a great uncle who kept bees. In memory he's an unshaven, wrinkled bloke in shabby clothes who turned up at my grandmother's house in town once a year with a battered drum of honey. I thought he lived in a hut in the hills behind the town although I'm not sure about that now. When we drove home after visiting Gran, through the hills along Bushrangers Creek Road to our farm, sometimes we would see his bee-boxes up under the gum trees, so that may have led me to imagine he lived there as well. Thinking back on it he was probably shy, perhaps a recluse, and the honey was his offering to his sister, his connection with the world. When we were visiting, I sneaked into the washhouse where Gran left the drum and put my finger in to steal a scoop of eucalypt honey.

*

I glanced at the poster for the ‘
Exposition d'Art Aborig
è
ne d'Australie
'. It was reassuring and unsettling: a dot painting in ochre and brown and black painted in the Western Desert, thousands of kilometres from where I lived on the other side of the island continent. It described country, the sacred sites of the desert places, where the rainbow serpent had slept and where waterholes could be found. I was born on Wiradjuri country in eastern Australia and walked on it every day of my childhood; I had no painting of it, but the shape of every fold of land, every rocky outcrop, was printed, is still printed, in my memory. I can see the anthill by the dry creek, the slope of the fallow paddock behind the house-yard, the muddy hoof prints of sheep and cattle around the shrinking dam. If that landscape was erased from me I am certain I would no longer exist. Why had I left it behind? What else did I think I would find here? It was something to do with an imaginary life, that much was obvious, one that had begun when I was still a child and that bore small resemblance to my actual life.

*

At the end of January during the long 1960s drought of bare brown earth, blue skies and bony animals, the new French teacher, Mrs Berman, walked into my classroom at St Mary's high school in a country town 300 kilometres west of Sydney. It was a parish convent school, run by Irish nuns who taught the sons and daughters of the poor – cocky farmers and struggling shopkeepers – and a few Aboriginal kids from the Mission. We were a ragtag lot, some of us dressed in hand-me-downs, but not wild. Religion had a strong hold, keeping us mostly obedient and believing the rest of the world was on the road to hell.

‘
Bonjour mes enfants
,' Mrs Berman said. She smiled as we sat in puzzled silence, none of us daring even a ‘
bonjour
'. There were only six in the French class; the rest had sensibly enrolled in Commerce. I gazed at her critically; she wasn't French. She was just a nice, plump Australian woman about the same age as our mothers; she dressed in the same quiet skirts and neat cardigans, had the same short tidy cap of hair and spoke with the same Australian accent.

I was thirteen years old and young for my age. I still read Enid Blyton schoolgirl stories and had met Mam'zelle, excitable Mam'zelle, her dark hair in a bun with wisps that kept escaping. She stamped her foot with un-English temper and had a great sense of humour and was afraid of mice and beetles. The girls played merry pranks on her and she scolded ‘ze girls like ziz'. That's how a French teacher was supposed to be.

‘
Comment allez-vous?
' asked Mrs Berman and then she smiled and began handing out a French textbook with a red cover. ‘You can find the question in here – and the answer,' she said. I was hooked already.

Although she was calm and correct and Anglo-Saxon, nothing like Mam'zelle, Mrs Berman did love French and, most impressively, had been to Paris. We learned the conjugations of
avoir
and
être
and
aller
in the first few weeks and a new vocabulary list every week until, by the end of the year, we could all ask
Comment allez-vous
and answer
Je vais très bien merci
or
J'ai mal à la tête
with only the usual amount of stumbling.

I complained with the others about the never-ending lists of ‘vocab', but I loved being able to say
le chien
and
le chat
and
mon frère
and
ma soeur
at home on the farm. It was like having a secret language, one that set me apart. Having some small distinction was at times necessary amongst eight brothers and sisters, but it also hinted at the possibility of another kind of world, the faint beginning of awareness that there was a connection between language and perception. Other words for things created the idea that there was another way of seeing, of thinking, of knowing, that things didn't have to be what everyone agreed they were. Not that anyone in my family was impressed.

‘
Bonjour Maman
,' I said.

‘Oh for heaven's sake,' my mother said and handed me a tea-towel.

Mrs Berman brought in madeleines and éclairs, which she made at home and let us eat in class, and told us about the cafés in France where everyone sat outside at round tables and drank wine with their meals. We sketched maps of the ‘hexagon of France' with the Dordogne, the Rh
ô
ne and the Seine rivers marked, the Alps and the Pyr
é
n
é
es cross-hatched, and Provence, Languedoc and all the other provinces outlined; we learned that Napoleon crowned himself emperor in an ermine-lined purple cloak decorated with gold bees, and that Marie Curie was a woman scientist who won the Nobel prize. It was a pure, old-fashioned version of France.

Mrs Berman also told us about the novels of Balzac and Zola and we read Guy de Maupassant's stories and the short essays by the exquisitely truthful Michel de Montaigne, for whom I was not yet ready. I started to dream that one day I would go to Paris, but apart from Mrs Berman, I didn't know anyone who had made such a miraculous journey. There didn't seem to be any way for a girl from a scrabbling farming family to get to Paris.

When I sat on the broken veranda at home, I could see patchy grass, the pepper tree, a sagging chicken-wire fence. Outside the fence was the dry creek, windmill, dams and paddocks, and to the west, the farm sheds and, in the distance, Baron Rock, the monolith behind my childhood. To the east was the lane out to the road which went past the tin church we prayed in on Sunday mornings and then past the one-teacher school where I spent seven years, then twenty kilometres through the bush-covered hills to town where there were shops, a wheat silo, a high school and another, bigger, brick church. I had been to Sydney once that I could remember. That was the size of the world, except in books.

The only other French writer I remember reading in high school was Camus.
The Plague
was set for English; I'm impressed now that the nuns were willing to set existentialism loose on bush teenagers in the 1960s. I sat on the back veranda on my great aunt's old rocking chair, which we eventually rocked to pieces, and ploughed my way through the tumult in Algeria, a country I'd barely heard of. It's hard to recall now the effect of existentialism and the absurd on a fourteen-year-old girl, but I do recall a feeling both of pride in reading something which I knew to be ‘literature' and a worrying sense that the world was much stranger and more frightening than I had been told.