On Thursday morning, Didier met me at the airport and we got to work as soon as we arrived in the rue Tholozé (after we had eaten at a deli across from my apartment). We worked all afternoon. In the late afternoon, Pancake (Andrew (Pfannkuche)) arrived from Luxembourg. On Friday, we kept to the same routine. When we walked down our sloping street to shop in the rue Lepic, I nearly collapsed after mastering the upward slope and the narrow curving steps leading up to my door. Once, I even sank to my knees and had to crawl across the threshold into the kitchen. It’s shocking to realize that in the year since my previous stay in Paris, I have become a near invalid. But I should be grateful that I can walk at all, and I am in fact delighted to be here.
By Saturday, I’ve caught up on my sleep. With Pancake I’ve walked as far as the Place des Abbesses and in the opposite direction as far as the rue Caulaincourt. It’s good to return to what were my haunts off and on for two years. The higher end of my street is the passageway up to the Moulin Galette and then over to Sacré Coeur, an easy five minute walk which is now as unattainable as Mount Everest. I’ll have to let Paris come to me. As soon as the weather clears, I can watch it from my window.
The Café qui parle where we ate dinner filled up inside with what looked like a theater class, nice-looking young people in their early twenties of both sexes. Their table rapidly expanded across the full interior. They all had a certain flair. One was dressed and trimmed as a Charlie Chaplin duplicate. The din made conversation impossible, but it was an agreeable din nonetheless. The Café qui parle is a nice but not at all flashy corner café on the corner with rue Caulaincourt, the lower end of which is less touristy and less busy than what it soon becomes after a few blocks. I’m not in the least put off by the commotion of young people all around me. It’s the life that will go on. Pancake is enthusiastic and I share his pleasure being here. I’ll watch my step. I don’t want to leave with a broken limb.
I was reminded of a walk down the Nevsky Prospekt several years ago after drinking a little too much at a lunch date with the Buryat uncle of my Russian tutor. I felt dissolved in the crowd, the individual specimens of which struck me as quintessentially Russian. Finally, after taking refuge in a tiny park in the shadow of a regally enthroned Ivan Turgenev, I was shocked out of my reverie by the terrifying approach of a man whose face had been destroyed, whether by cancer or some disfiguring accident. The sight had reminded me of my deceased older brother, an alcoholic. I feel guilty for having turned my back on him to let him die alone. Paris has a back alley of memory into other back alleys of memory with side alleys of dream and precipices of death.
At times like this, I can imagine identifying with the cinematic fiction of multiple worlds. It’s as if you could fit into another realm of your life and leave the others behind. If only you could leave your illness and sorrow behind. People have always been tempted by the idea of doing this, even to the point of starting alternate identities with alternate families. But I would only want to merge my own into one.
Late Sunday morning, Pancake’s friend and classmate Hippolyte stopped by. He had been visiting his mother in a Brussels hospital and had decided to spend the rest of the long May Day weekend first in Paris and then back in Luxembourg. Pancake had rendezvoused with him Saturday night and invited him to stop by at our apartment. He is an exceptionally pleasant and articulate young guy with the enviably European attitude in matters of national belonging, a lightly worn adherence to his country combined with a well-informed interest in other countries. His English is excellent so that I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to speak French with him. I learned more about Luxembourg in a half hour than I had known before. Not surprisingly he affirmed that connections are as important there as in the Austria of my experience. He traces his family to an earlier wave of Italian immigration prior to the later Portuguese influx. I invited him to stop by again when in Paris and he extended the same invitation to me for Luxembourg. I wish I could take him up on it.
Signed
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 