Between Paris and Munich

I am somewhere between France and Germany as I type this, and that is a statement I never dreamed I would utter. We are on board a train, swiftly gliding past field and forest, and the sky is very blue, and a chubby-cheeked attendant has presented us with pink striped boxes filled with clear plastic containers of chicken wraps with mustard, melon and prosciutto, and squares of chocolate mousse.

Monte is reading The New Yorker and just pointed out a line in an article by Elizabeth Kolbert that says that 99% of all species that inhabited the earth are now extinct and so life as we know it might be considered not much more than a rounding error, but as it is my intent to try to focus on the moment, I refuse to go where that line of thought might take me. 

The chubby-cheeked attendant speaks just enough English to explain with regret that he has only French and German newspapers to offer us, but he just brought me a perfect little cup of strong coffee and seems genuinely concerned about my comfort. I adore him. His skin looks as soft as a child’s, his cheeks are truly rosy, his smile is sweetly cherubic, and if he once had aspirations other than being an attendant in the 1st Class section of the TGV from Paris to Munich, he does not make his disappointment my problem. He is a graceful host in a moving living room, and I cannot believe how luxurious and pleasant this feels.

I would love to think of myself as a traveler, but in truth I am a rather inexperienced one, and when I see the “where I’ve been” maps on the Facebook pages of people in their twenties who used to be my students, I am acutely aware of the fact that my own travel history is not very interesting. Ah, the places they have already been! Morocco. Patagonia. Zimbabwe. Indonesia. Vietnam. (And it is perhaps hard for young people today to fully grasp how profoundly my generation desired to avoid that last destination, and how many fundamental life decisions were shaped by what was happening there at the time.)

Still, many globetrotting, backpacking boomers took advantage of cheap airfares and managed to spend months wandering through Europe and beyond, or joined the Peace Corps as a way of broadening their horizons. For reasons too mundane and dreary to dwell upon, I was not among them, and I have no youthful journeys to report unless riding around on a Greyhound bus counts, or a miserable stint as a passenger in the back seat of a VW Bug from New York to Arizona, and brief moments of being foreign in Canada.

I had never even been on an airplane until 1970 when I was nineteen and went to visit my boyfriend in Chicago on what was then called a “student standby” fare which, if memory serves, was forty bucks. I finally made it to Europe in 1985, accompanied by my husband, and I have returned a few times since, but never with the same degree of excitement and wonder as that initial trip. I remember stashing my bags and running across the street from our London hotel just to wander in a city park where I was charmed even by pigeons because they were British pigeons, and an old man with a beard snoring on a bench.

In Italy, where I met my relatives in the village my grandfather had left eighty years earlier, everything was miraculous, even the dirt, a bit of which I brought home in a tiny bottle. I suppose there is a special kind of enchantment connected to one’s first visit to a long-imagined elsewhere, particularly when one is young and in the proper frame of mind.

But back to this train, which has just left a station called Karlsruhe, and where everything is an adventure to a woman in her 50s who is frayed around the edges and carrying psychological baggage far more weighty than that which we hoisted onto the overhead. The late afternoon sunlight is warming my arms, and I am lulled by motion and by morsels of conversation I cannot begin to understand, except for the prattle in German of two restless children shushed by a woman speaking universal Mom. 

Houses and trees are slipping by, backyards and bits of faraway lives, unlikely and fleeting glimpses.

And now I am someone who has been to Paris. Shall I tell you what I liked? I liked that its rhythm was slower than London’s, so much so that you could feel it as soon as you stepped off the Metro and onto the street. It felt less driven, somehow, less purposeful. I liked the aging grandeur of its buildings, its variety of worldly goods, its extravagant interest in edibles, and even at times its unabashed materialism. I liked its lightness, its conceit, its confident air of indifference.

Paris seemed unflappable to me. A delivery truck clogged a narrow street near the Museé Picasso, a bus pulled up behind it unable to pass or move forward, a long line of cars formed, and the bus driver looked as though he might just put up his feet up and have a cigarette break. Stylish women jauntily rode bicycles in streets I crossed on foot in terror. Workers paused in midday to watch tennis on a big screen in front of L’Hotel de Paris, or found a spot in which to stretch out and snooze in the sun, oblivious to sirens and exhaust fumes, while others lingered at street side cafés, the epitome of ennui.

Days earlier an Air France jet had disappeared into the sea and now a crowd was beginning to gather for a memorial service at Notre Dame, but someone was playing a saxophone along the Seine. Its music drifted towards us as we walked across the bridge at Rue d'Arcole, and life and sorrow mingled in the air.

I liked finding flakes of my morning croissant in my purse and having too many pastries to choose from. I liked having a hotel window that opened to let a breeze in at night, and the first café au lait of the morning. I liked the weather, unusually mild, and the way the light lasted, and the narrow streets of Le Marais, and, perhaps most of all, that single scoop of poire sorbet I had one evening by the Seine, ambrosia that it was.

I liked the bright affirmation of flowers against stone, and the iconic landmarks I had only seen in pictures, but I especially enjoyed going to the top of L'Institute du Monde Arab, where we sat outside and had tea with mint and a breathtaking view of the city.

I learned: 

That cigarette smoking is alive and well. That I should take more care with my appearance. That my high school French is worthless and no one is the least bit charmed by my efforts to use it. That it may be worth paying six Euros for a cup of coffee, but only once and under the proper circumstances. That the French have access to bread and eyeglass frames that are far, far better than ours, and I still can’t fathom why. That an annoying J’Adore billboard of Charlize Theron looking as glossy as gold is plastered everywhere, and she takes it all off in a television ad. That the prices of things in Paris are so staggeringly high as to defy credibility, and that’s just the way it is, but window shopping can be amusing. That a pause to sit on a bench in a park under leafy green trees is a sweet, free pleasure there for the taking. That you should always have coins at hand for the machines in the Metro station. That one must pass through a necessary barrier of discomfort in order to travel well. That the same old demons will somehow find their way all the way to Paris to haunt you in your hotel room in the middle of the night, but it’s still fun to wake up there.