Paris Was Ours (11 page)

I walked by the African groceries and call shops of boulevard Ornano, then under the iron beams of the elevated Métro at Barbès, where men offered gold chains from their coat pockets. Past the Gare de Nord, then the Gare de l’Est, a voice inside wondering if maybe I shouldn’t just hop a train and try my luck in another city. Three times, my resolution faltered and I started back toward the hotel. But I always turned and continued on to Shakespeare and Company. There was really no other choice …

SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY
sits on the very left edge of the Left Bank. The store is close enough to the Seine that when one is standing in the front doorway, a well-thrown apple core will easily reach river water. From this same doorway, there is
an inspired view of the Île de la Cité, and one can contemplate the cathedral of Notre-Dame, the Hôtel-Dieu hospital, and the imposing block of the main police
préfecture
.

The bookstore’s actual address is 37, rue de la Bûcherie. It’s an odd cobbled street that begins at rue Saint-Jacques, runs for one block, hits the public park of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, then continues on for another two blocks before ending at the square Restif de la Bretonne. The bookstore is on the part of rue de la Bûcherie close to rue Saint-Jacques, where, thanks to a quirk of city planning, there are only buildings on the south side of the street, which is what gives the bookstore its splendid view.

This end of the street is reserved for pedestrians, but this is only part of the reason it retains a certain calm. There is also a tiny city garden that separates the bookstore from the racing traffic of quai de Montebello and then the sidewalk widens in front of 37, rue de la Bûcherie to create an almost private esplanade for Shakespeare and Company. For the coup de grâce, there are two young cherry trees on this esplanade and a green Wallace drinking fountain sitting majestically to the side. All this gives the bookstore an air of tranquillity that is shocking in the midst of the frenzy and noise of downtown Paris.

As for the bookstore itself, there are actually two entrances. As you face the shop, the main part of the store with the narrow green door I entered on the day of the tea party is on the right. It is here that one finds the famous yellow and green wooden Shakespeare and Company sign and the broad picture window. To the left of the main store, there is a second,
smaller storefront. This is the antiquarian room. Along with the shelves of centuries-old books, the antiquarian room has a desk, a lovely stuffed armchair, and, of course, a creaky but thoroughly sleepable bed.

WHEN I ARRIVED
after my coffee with Fernanda, it was nearing dark and the streetlights were flickering to life around me. The window of the main shop glowed a soft yellow against the early night, and at the desk there was an elderly man with a rumpled suit and a faraway look in his eyes. From the photographs I’d seen the day before, I knew this man to be George. Taking one last breath for courage, I stepped inside.

The door creaked to announce me, but George kept gazing out the window, deep in private thought. In the store’s irregular light, I could see his uneven tussle of fine white hair and the thin wrinkles that lined his face. After long moments, he shook his head as if awaking from a dream and turned to look at me. His eyes were an impossibly pale blue.

“What do you want?” he demanded.

His voice was so gruff that I took a step backward. My rehearsed lines disappeared, and stammering, I mumbled something about being a writer with no place else to go.

“I wouldn’t stay for long,” I finished. “Just enough time to catch my feet. I’ve hit a bit of a rough patch.”

He stood there, appraising me with those pale eyes, stopping time.

“You’ve written books?”

I nodded.

“Are they self-published?”

Using a vanity press is akin to buying sex, but more shameful
in a way. Visiting a prostitute is at least a private act, while paying to publish one’s book is a very public display of creative desperation. Despite my nervousness, I took affront to the question. Though the crime books I’d written were hardly works of great literature, I was proud of what I’d accomplished.

“No, not at all,” I replied, trying to keep the anger from my voice. “I’m not saying they’re the best books ever written, but I had a real publisher.”

George waved the back of his hand at me as if I were speaking nonsense, but a smile crept across his face.

“A real writer wouldn’t have asked; he would have just come in and taken a bed. You, you can stay. But you’ll sleep downstairs with the rest of the riffraff.”

And like that, things changed forever …

DURING THE WEEKS
of living cheaply at the hotel, I’d devised a series of maneuvers to eat at little or no expense in Paris. There was a restaurant on rue de Clignancourt that served limitless plates of free couscous and vegetables on Friday nights so long as you ordered a half glass of beer. The large American Church in the seventh arrondissement had an almost free all-you-can-eat pizza night with a minimum of sermonizing. Then there was the constant delight of the four-franc baguette and the endless cheeses that could be had so inexpensively at the city’s supermarkets.

A particularly sublime discovery came from a teacher at the French school I’d attended. Anne was a graceful woman who took the job as language teacher after her husband died. She thrilled in introducing neophytes to the enchantments of Paris and by chance took an interest in polishing my rather
rough crime reporter self. Anne suggested operas to see, offered books to read, and, most wondrously, introduced me to the nutritious world of the Paris vernissage.

Vernissage
is a derivative of the French word for varnish. In reference to the last shining coat that artists layered on their paintings the night before their shows, opening parties became known by this name. In an art-rich city like Paris, there was always some gallery launching some artist and they lured visitors with bottles of wine and plates of hors d’oeuvres. Though these pleasures were intended for the journalists and potential patrons, if one dressed correctly and knew how to behave, these events made for delicious meals.

Anne knew the best of the Left Bank vernissage scene, and while she toured these venues in search of new artists and old friends, I somewhat crassly focused on the food. The protocol was simple: browse the art with an attentive eye, compliment the artist, then hover by the food table for long enough to gorge on a day’s worth of calories. There was one night when a gallery on the Left Bank served hundreds of miniature spinach and salmon quiches; another time, it was sushi and rice wine on a boat moored in the Seine; my favorite was an event for a painter of Lebanese descent that featured hummus, tabbouleh, kafta, and a divine array of falafels.

LEAVING SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY
that night, Kurt and the rest dismissed my schemes as the work of an amateur. With everyone nearly broke and no proper cooking facilities in the lower part of the bookstore, the residents had become expert scavengers. They swore they would initiate me in their ways, and the lessons were to begin that very night. We turned
left out of the bookstore, crossed rue Saint-Jacques, and took rue de la Huchette. The narrow street had once been among the filthiest in Paris and home to a young Napoleon Bonaparte when he first arrived in the city. Now it was a garish tourist ghetto, filled with Greek restaurants that competed for customers with displays of skewered seafood and the scent of burning fat. Touts stood in the restaurant doorways, playing merry with the crowds and shattering cheap porcelain plates at the feet of the more promising herds.

Shakespeare and Company residents clearly weren’t worth wasting plates over, so we negotiated the street with ease. Emerging at place Saint-Michel, we cut past the spouting stone lions, along the flower shops and trendy bars of rue Saint-André des Arts, then down boulevard Saint-Germain until we arrived at a dismal gray building on rue Mabillon. Two guards stood slouched at the front door, but Kurt told me to walk straight in as if I belonged. We climbed two flights of stairs and came to an enormous
cafétéria
with row after row of benches and a long, snaking line at the food counter.

This was a student restaurant, one of more than a dozen in Paris. Subsidized by the government, a full meal cost fifteen francs here, just two American dollars. Technically, one needed a student identification card, but the line was full of other impostors like us: a family with three small children, a couple with shaved heads and scalp studs, a drunken man with a variety of stains across his shirtfront and down his pant leg.

In exchange for a colorful meal ticket, one received two bread rolls, a thick bowl of vegetable soup, a generous slice of brie, half a boiled egg with a squib of dijon mayonnaise as garnish, a main plate of grilled lamb, sautéed potatoes, and green
beans, a strawberry yogurt, and even a slice of honey sponge cake with sliced almonds for dessert. With each morsel of food added to my tray, the more inclined I was to agree with my companions: this was the zenith of the cheap Paris meal.

We sat at one of the long benches, and while we ate, Kurt acted as spotter. Whenever a fellow diner left behind a tray with an untouched piece of cheese or a fair-size chunk of bread, Kurt raced out of his seat to grab the bounty. The objective was to collect enough abandoned food to furnish late-night snacks for the entire bookstore family.

“Watch him well,” the Gaucho advised. “Next time, it’s your job.”

Throughout this strange meal, Ablimit asked questions about my work at the newspaper and freedom of the press in Canada. As the dictionary I saw him with that first day suggested, he was in fact from China, but not Chinese, he stressed. He was Uighur, an ethnic minority from the northwest of the country. For more than half a decade, he’d worked as a television reporter and documentary producer, but he became frustrated by the censorship and pressure to put a positive spin on the news. Two years before, shortly after his thirtieth birthday, he’d managed to get a visa and then headed west, stopping first at a kibbutz in Israel, then moving up to Paris and Shakespeare and Company.

“People just find themselves here,” said Ablimit, shrugging.

As I ate, I felt bliss. Part of it was the simple pleasure of a full belly. I had always been thin of frame, consistently weighing 170 pounds for my six feet and one inch in height. But during that scant month in Paris, I’d nearly starved myself trying to conserve money, eating one meal a day instead of three, fasting
entirely when I knew there was a promising vernissage that night. The week before, I’d passed a pharmacy that offered the free use of a scale and I’d availed myself of the service. The digital display read seventy-four kilograms, so the shock didn’t come until I scratched out the conversion in my notebook. It translated to just under 163 pounds. Between the forced diet and the long hours of walking, I’d lost seven pounds I could ill afford to lose. Now, thanks to the combination of George’s pepper soup and this plentiful
cafétéria
dinner, my body rejoiced in the sudden rush of salts and fats.

I was also coasting along on my bookstore high. It was nearly miraculous that I’d found such an exotic solution to my predicament, and I felt giddy that the fear of homelessness—or worse, being forced to beg for a loan from my parents—had been lifted. Of course, if I’d rationally analyzed my situation, I would have realized it was barely better than before: I still had no money, no job, no plans for the future, and the bed in the bookstore certainly wasn’t the height of stability. But the day you move into an infamous old bookstore certainly isn’t the day for rational thought. I was eating with three intriguing and gregarious men from three very different corners of the world; we were sharing stories and laughing like friends. It was all good.

Chantal’s Gift

T
O BE A WRITER
,” Chantal insisted, “you must come back to Paris.”

“But I just gave up my room at l’Hôtel des Rats!” I exclaimed.

“You don’t need a room. I have one. You can stay with me.”

Two days after Chantal left for Paris, I packed up my bags and took the train back into town. Chantal was always taking in stray dogs of one kind or another, so asking me to stay over in her apartment was nothing out of the ordinary. But as her flat was located on the edge of the city, she thought it best if we met near the publishing house where she worked, at a café on the rue de Buci.

“BONSOIR,” A VOICE
behind me said. “I have made you a gift. But it is at home. Shall we go? It is only a small walk.”

Tourist that I still was, I had no choice but to follow her on a one-hour forced march across half of Paris. On that particular night it was hot as hell, and still being very much of a New Yorker, I twice insisted on taking a cab. To this rather normal request, however, Chantal answered me with every Parisian’s favorite word: “
NO
!” So, we kept on walking.

“Are we there yet?” I asked, after crossing all of these very charming Parisian intersections, where one false step can result in a very long hospital stay, or worse. But Chantal just remained silent and we kept on walking. Then, finally, after an hour had elapsed, she looked up into the sky and said: “There it is.”