Almost French (13 page)

‘
Alors, à bientôt, uh
.’ Well, see ya later. I may as well have said
bisou
and blown him a kiss. I put down the receiver, barely able to believe the conversation I just had. Shit, shit, shit. That was spectacularly awful, like being on a driverless train hurtling faster and faster towards self destruction.

Half an hour later, his secretary called back. The general would like a word. I braced myself. After all, the French are renowned for their impatience with foreigners who can’t speak their language.

But his tone was kind, avuncular almost. Yes, actually, he’d be delighted to be interviewed. Does such-and-such a day suit? Astonished and almost speechless, I wondered what made him agree to the interview. Was it simply his desire to state France’s case? Or did my embarrassing performance earlier elicit an act of kindness? Whatever the reason, I was immensely grateful. At the end of our brief exchange, there was a small pause. Still unable to believe that he had said yes, I wondered what was coming. The name of a good French teacher? A request that a translator be on hand during the interview? (I planned to bring one anyway.) But no, it seemed he just wanted to say goodbye.

‘
Alors, à bientôt, uh
.’ It took a second or two for me to realise this was a perfect echo of my totally inappropriate farewell earlier. Beneath his grave tone you could almost hear him wink.

By early September, the evening air has cooled. Nature is preparing for its long confinement. Chestnuts will soon fill the city’s gutters, petals will fall. Leaves are curling, dying. I feel spent too. My pile of replies from companies answering my request for sponsorship now numbers more than forty. All of them are negative. The months spent researching the relevant people in the right companies—not to mention letter writing and embellishing my CV—have been futile. My hopes of doing the Journalists in Europe program begin to crumble, leaving an awful void.

Then, towards the middle of the month, a spate of replies from French companies fills our mail box. The business chiefs are back from their summer holidays. As with the letters from Australia, these answers are mostly variations of a
theme. Only the message is entirely different. When the first one arrives, I have to reread it several times for the words to sink in.

‘
We would be very happy to assist you with your endeavour to do the Journalists in Europe program. Please contact so-and-so to arrange a meeting
.’

I can’t believe it. This isn’t true. Each new letter sends me flying to telephone Frédéric, practically hyperventilating with excitement. He is stunned, ecstatic, speechless. By mid-September most companies have responded and we have a final, triumphant tally. Sixty-four negative responses. But six companies have agreed to meet the total cost of the course. All of them are French.

Without the nuclear tests my quest for funding would probably have failed. The truth is, Chirac’s timing is incredibly fortuitous for me. As it turns out, the companies I targeted—French companies with business interests in Australia—are among those hardest hit by the fallout over the nuclear tests. Suddenly, Australia no longer wants their champagne, aeroplanes or water pipes.

In meetings with my sponsors to finalise the payments, the executives say the escalating furore made them sympathetic to my letter. To argue my case for doing the Journalist in Europe program, I’d mentioned the need for nations to have an understanding of each other’s cultural and social contexts as well as at a political level. Giving journalists the opportunity to further their professional knowledge by living and working abroad will make the mainstream media more informed, I wrote. As incendiary anti-French headlines splashed across the world’s newspapers, suddenly my bland message seemed meaningful. Except for correcting a couple of press releases in English, my sponsors don’t ask for any
thing in return for their money. No doubt their private wish is for me to write balanced articles about the issue.

Another reason for their support emerges at these meetings.
La lettre
. Who wrote it? they enquire as tactfully as possible, having immediately divined from my spoken French that it couldn’t possibly have been me. Heads shake in admiration over
les belles expressions
and
les mots bien choisis
. It is a powerful lesson in the importance of literature and language in this country. Frédéric’s carefully crafted phrases which I’d attacked for being too long and flowery were, to these business chiefs, a thing of great beauty.

And so my first autumn in France begins with great expectations. The season turns out to be more eventful than I expected—although not exactly in the way I imagined. In mid-October, a few weeks after the JE program begins, railway employees across the country stage a strike. Demonstrating in the street, they deliver a noisy forewarning: ‘This is just the beginning, the beginning, the beginning!’

Autumn is often
chaud
, I learn now. Not ‘hot’ temperature-wise, but hot in ambience. After their long summer holidays, the French return to work with surplus energy. Rested and revived, they are ready. Not for work, though. The autumn of 1995 turns out to be one of the coldest and one of the hottest in a long time, the plummeting temperatures contrasting with the heat on the streets. Throughout November and December, the country is paralysed by the most severe rolling general strikes in twenty-five years. The one-day protest called by railroad workers snowballs into a nation-wide movement uniting the variously disgruntled—students, postal workers, teachers, employees at the Louvre,
bus and metro drivers. Mostly, workers are livid about the conservative government’s plans to cut France’s extravagant welfare spending and overhaul the unprofitable railway system. Determined to retain generous health benefits and rights such as the ability to retire as early as fifty on a full pension, they aren’t going to accept these heartless capitalist reforms without a massive fight. The battle makes Prime Minister Alain Juppé—perceived as clever but arrogant—the most hated man in France.

No sooner has my much anticipated journalists’ program started than I can’t attend it. There are no buses running, no metro. Short of walking almost two hours, I have no way of getting into the city centre to the Journalists in Europe headquarters. Our lectures have been cancelled. For the millions of people who live on the city’s outskirts, getting into work has turned into a three-hour car crawl. Those who don’t own vehicles simply don’t go to work. The
grèves
, as strikes are called in French, become the country’s sole news story. Every morning the papers publish fascinating
grève
trivia such as the total length of traffic-jammed roads into the capital from the day before (usually around 300km). The evening news shows aerial images of Paris by night, the stationary headlights forming pretty ribbons of golden beads.

At first, the
grèves
are a novelty. Rollerblade sales soar and the streets and pavements fill with skaters in work suits. Invited to a dinner at Bastille one evening, Frédéric and I cross the entire city riding the motorbike on footpaths to avoid the trailing traffic jams. Paris resembles a slightly surreal playground, and during demonstrations there’s even quite a party buzz. The Australian wharfies and north England coal miners look decidedly dour compared to these French
grévistes
marching down the streets in happy, singing parades which
radiate camaraderie. They are well organised and well looked after. Hot dog vans follow behind in case of hunger; a fleet of green street cleaning trucks sweep up their food papers and streamers as quickly as they can drop them. I attend several protests to write stories and every time I’m amazed by the gaiety, the spontaneous party mood which seems so at odds with the social restraint I’ve noticed at dinners. Even the poor people trapped in traffic jams remain remarkably good humoured. I’d expected pathologically impatient Parisians to be maniacal with rage but instead they are calm, sympathetic. Resigned.
C’est la vie. C’est comme ça.

In the French press, the atmosphere in Paris is described as
prérévolutionnaire.
For a while anticipation builds as both the strikers and the government refuse to cede a centimetre. The city appears to be on standby, poised for something, although I don’t know what. The tough-looking CRS anti-riot police who man every protest provide a clue. We are waiting for
événements.
Some cobblestone throwing and shop window smashing which will be smartly answered with truncheons and tear gas.

But instead of culminating in a repeat of May 1968, the strikes just drag on and on. The novelty wears off. The desire to see French history unfolding in front of my eyes is replaced by a craving for normalcy. I am fed up with being stranded at home, tired of this forced detention. Alicia is stuck too, only on the other side of the city. Desperate, we make ambitious plans to meet at a city café, halfway between our homes. Allowing for a leisurely lunch, for both of us the return trip will take pretty much an entire day. Travelling from the city’s far east, she has a marathon journey on foot. Coming from the west, I plan to glide into Paris on my shiny new blades.

It is snowing when I set off around ten in the morning. After skating moronically along a couple of boulevards, I swap my rollerblades for the running shoes in my bag. Head bent into the blizzardy wind, fresh blisters busily sprouting on my feet, I curse the fact that things have to get
chaud
just when the weather turns arctic.

I arrive at Le Café on Rue Tiquetonne in just under two hours, a few minutes ahead of Alicia. Noses streaming and cheeks flushed with icy roses, we are both in dark moods. Jugs of steaming, nutmeg-flavoured wine help us thaw. It’s like being in a bloody war zone, we grumble. There are even rumours that some fresh food supplies might run out because of striking truck drivers. Alicia is worried about getting back to England for Christmas. Train travel is out of the question, of course. Even driving is fraught with hazards—what if the Channel ferry drivers strike? And I’m panicking about my planned Christmas trip to Australia. The thought of not being able to go is devastating; my ticket has been booked for months. But how can planes take off when the air traffic controllers are in the street instead of in their watch towers?

Finally, after almost five weeks of idleness, the metro—my lifeline to Paris and all things interesting—surges back to life. It’s like opening prison gates, a passage to freedom from bourgeois boulevard induced boredom.

The most wonderful thing about the Journalists in Europe program is, quite simply, Europe. The chance to discover and write about this continent where so much that is marvellous and tragic has occurred, where so many borders have shifted and continue to shift; one corner of the world so drenched in history and diversity that unity seems utopian. I go to Sarajevo and Serbia, Seville, Northern Ireland, delightful Tallinn in Estonia and spend ten days in a remote, alcohol-soaked village in Romania’s Danube Delta. I love these trips, the thrill (tinged with apprehension) of arriving alone in a strange place, absorbing the different language, the hand gestures, the coffee, the way the taxis drive, the hundreds of details that would elevate my stay to adventure. Just as I’d hoped, they also enhance my freelancing efforts. Suddenly I can offer harder news features from places where publications might not have a correspondent. A few times I end up being in the right place at an extraordinary time, like being in Belgrade when the Dayton Peace Agreement was reached and crazy crowds flooded the streets to celebrate the end of the war. I feel lucky, elated.