Twins

My birthday gift from Richard this year was to be a cat. But on May 27 (in Gemini), no cat had appeared, despite our extensive search.

We didn’t know that the next day (May 28, still Gemini) two brothers were born in a family of five.

We didn't know how we would ever replace our affectionate, talkative Turkish Angora, Marley, who had moved with us to Paris.

We didn’t know that a Turkish Angoran mother was nursing five kittens as we searched.

We didn’t know that ten weeks later, we’d board a train to the town of Boissy-St-Léger, half an hour south of Paris.

We didn’t know that two of the five brothers were so bonded that we couldn’t adopt one without the other.

We didn’t know we’d board the train back to Paris with two kittens not yet named.

We didn’t know for a week what their names were.

We watched as they boxed and galloped around the kitchen and foyer, and thought of the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, of Greek myth.

These twins, a tamer of horses and a boxer, were so close that they were later placed in the sky by Zeus as the constellation Gemini.

What else could we call them but Castor and Pollux?

A Night of Accessibility

 

Whether your goal is to have the romantic time of your life, or to gorge yourself silly, or just to wander and discover tiny streets and massive monuments, most of the world agrees (tourists vote with their feet and currency) that Paris is THE destination. While the early kings named Henri gave that idea some traction in the 1500s, Louis XIV started showcasing the place as a world metropolis in 1670 when he ordered the defensive city walls torn down and the Grands Boulevards built on top of them.

More walls went up later, for tax collection purposes, but the impetus to create the Paris of today really took off under Napoleon III, Napoleon I’s nephew, who came back from exile in 1848 with a grand plan in his back pocket, and a willing Prefect of the Seine, Georges Haussmann, to hammer out the details. It’s their Paris of boulevards and monuments that people think of as modern Paris.

 

But this isn’t a history lesson, it’s merely preface to say that Paris is an OLD city.

And old cities are tough to retrofit for modern needs. Like those of the disabled. Those tiny, romantic sidewalk cafés with tables barely bigger than the average American's girth, narrow walkways between tables, and Turkish toilets in the underground caves, are useless to people in wheelchairs. And cobblestone streets that can barely be navigated in heels probably PUT people on crutches.

 

 

Even the Métro, one of the best in the world, first opened in 1900, long before the advent of disabled access, though the old wooden trains used to have seats set aside for the wounded of both wars. But how, one wonders, did they get into the station? Only the newer stations and lines have anything close to adequate elevators, escalators, and train access.

Paris Play had the privilege Saturday of working with a group of photographers from the Paris Photography Meetup Group to document the yearly gathering at Place Stalingrad of Jaccede.com, a group that works to spotlight and lobby for disabled people to gain the same kind of access that most of us take for granted.

 

Jaccede isn’t about demonstrations or agitation; it creates a survey of the town and offers an app that tells disabled Parisians (and visitors) which shops, Métro stations, restaurants, streets, etc., are most easily used by people with various kinds of disabilities, from the wheelchair-bound to the blind.

 

The night is also a social gathering of the disabled in large numbers, for dancing, playing, partying, hanging out with volunteer jugglers, tightrope walkers and clowns, and serves as a gentle reminder to the able-bodied who cut through the Place Stalingrad to enjoy a leisurely stroll along the beautiful Basin Villette that Paris is everybody’s city.

 

Some memories of that night below, and a celebration of some of the citizens that we might sometimes overlook. 

 

What Fresh Hell Is This?

 

Yes, he said, yes, he said yes!

We were at dinner at Anahuacalli, our favorite Mexican restaurant in Paris, and he asked me what I wanted for my birthday this year. 

A cat! I said.

Okay.

Seriously? You mean it?

Sure. If that’s what you really want. It's your birthday.

We’ve been having a certain dialogue for two years, since Marley died in July 2013. Still grieving, we both agreed that no cat could ever replace our white and gold wedding cake cat. But then I started yearning for, not a replacement, but a Marley brother or sister.

But we want to travel, Richard said, that's one reason we're in Europe. Although… if a cat came to our door the way Marley did in Venice in 1997 and asked to join this family, I’d say yes.

But what cat can wander in through our Paris courtyard, unlock the door to the building and find his way to the fifth floor and knock?

Right, said Richard.

We stopped at our veterinarian’s on Blvd. Saint-Germain for the first time since that summer, to ask if he knew any cats who needed a home.

Doctor McCarthy (who revealed to us once that he was really a cat) wasn’t in, but in the waiting room, a woman in army fatigues with a cocker spaniel suggested we go to the SPA weekend offering at Bastille that weekend, a once-a-year event (by the French equivalent of the SPCA). What timing! What a stroke of luck! 

Saturday, we walked over two Seine bridges the twenty minutes to Place Bastille to find a temporary exhibition hall set up under white tents. The canvas cages, with plexiglas windows, were set cheek-by-jowl on top of rows of tables, the cats hunched inside. From the next room, came a staccato cacophony of dogs. We walked through the rows. The first cat I saw was a white beauty who looked like Marley. But no, we couldn’t duplicate him—why even try?

We looked at tiger-striped and calico cats, and various-colored kitten siblings. But the kittens were all sick with coryza, a common shelter cold that comes from close living with other cats, which can be serious.

We chose three cats who appealed to us. But petting them, you could see that they weren’t that affectionate. We returned to the white cat. He’d been adopted two minutes before. I offered to give the woman adopting my card in case the cat wasn’t compatible with a cat she had at home. Oh, no, she said, she would never give up a cat once adopted. Bien sûr, neither would we.

We decided to come back earlier the next day, since a new batch of chats et chiens was arriving. Sunday morning we felt lazy, didn’t want to get out of bed.

Let’s just hop in a cab and go over there and see, Richard said. And so we did. We had a plan. He would start at one end, and I at the other. We each noted a cat that appealed to us, then checked out each other’s choice. No, no. Then went back to look at a tortoiseshell female, three years old, a bomb-shell beauty, with black, red and white patches.

I had the thought that she was like our friend Edith who recently died, who only wore black, red and white. Her papers said she could live in either a pavillon (a house with grounds) or appartement, but advised she needed to be the sole cat in the place, and that we shouldn’t have a child or dog.

I unzipped the cage and cautiously held out my hand. The cat, Jade, came over and lowered her head, asking to be petted. She was sweet and câlin as the French say. A cuddler.

What do you think, Richard?

He put his hand in her cage and she moseyed over to him for more petting.

We asked the woman in the orange vest if we could hold her. Yes, she said, and turned the cage around to unzip and free her. Richard picked her up. She was câlin, then balked, and scratched his hand. Natural for a cat caged and surrounded by chaos, we figured.

We glanced at each other. Yes?

Yes.

Signed the ream of French paperwork, showed our identity cards, paid 90 euros, got a certificate that she’d been sterilized and received all her shots.

We stood on the curb and tried to flag a taxi. None stopped, though many were free. A French couple on a nearby bench railed about the rude cab drivers in Paris. 

One finally stopped, but seeing the cat in our carrier, said, Not in the car, in the trunk.

No, we said, we can’t do that to this cat, we just rescued her from prison at la Bastille.

He relented and as we headed home, told us he adored cats, but was allergic to them, was so sad to have no cat in his life. But if you’d told us that, we’d have understood, we said.

At a stoplight, he turned around in his seat to get a closer look at Jade. Oh la la, qu’elle est belle! he exclaimed.

At home, we put out food, water, and lined with a trash bag a temporary litter tray cut from a cardboard box. We’d walk the next day to get another litter box at the department store near city hall, having thrown Marley’s away.  

We sat at our oak table and watched Jade pad along the edges of the living room, and then every room in the apartment, sniffing, investigating. And then she settled on the couch, looking regal and quite content. We’ll let her come to us, we decided. Let her determine when she wants contact.

That night, I stretched out on the couch to read All the Light We Cannot See. She approached me gingerly, hopped up and walked across the blanket from my feet to my hand. She butted up against it, looking for affection. I stroked her head, and she ronronnait. (You know what that means.) Then suddenly, no warning from ears or tail or viper mouth, she bit and scratched my hand, hard. It hurt.

It was probably a sign she’d been traumatized with all those dogs and other cats and humans, and being in a cage, and so we’d be patient.

Later that evening, she approached Richard in his office and bowed her head to be petted. Then turned on him and slashed his hand, with no warning.

We went to sleep uneasy. Something felt wrong about this creature. She did not speak, only squeaked as if she’d never been to meowing school.

The next day, the scratches and bites were worse. For both of us. We were now on guard when Jade approached. It was the same pattern; ask for affection, then attack without warning.

That night she bit me so hard that she raised a lemon-sized bump on my right hand that began to turn half-purple. Now I was feeling more than uneasy. I was beginning to be afraid of her. She did the same thing with Richard, biting his finger and drawing a drop of blood.

The next morning, she awakened us with a crash. She’d knocked a sculpture my sister, Jane, made of a bumble-bee bird from the mantel to the floor. Its wing was damaged at the tip.

I had a feeling that morning that I’ve never had about a cat: hatred. Her eyes were not golden, they were urine-yellow like a goat’s. She didn’t cover her shit, had never learned to do so. Was clearly a wild cat. My hand hurt, and I was worried about infection. I said to myself, I cannot live with this cat. I will never love this cat. But I’m married to a man who lived in and out of foster homes from the age of 12 to 14. To bring a cat back to the SPA, how traumatic for the cat. Unthinkable.

I had appointments that day, including a visit to my doctor. She examined my hand and said, I’m sure it’s okay, just bruising. But returning home, I felt a deepening dread of this demon cat and the decision we had to make.

Later that night Jade raked Richard’s hand so badly the wound looked like a red zipper. He called it his Heidelberg dueling scar.

With leaden hearts, we made the decision to return her to the pound. Richard made the call. After 13 weeks of study at the Sorbonne, he was able to navigate a phone conversation in French, describe the adoption, the cat behavior, find out where we could take her back that required no car. 

Street art © 2013 by JAZ

And that is how my birthday began: we rounded her up, cornered in the kitchen, hissing (she knew!), lifted her wrapped in a towel to immobilize her razor-sharp claws, got her into Marley’s old carrier, and boarded the RER train for an hour ride to the nearest shelter at suburban Gennevilliers.

The first French woman we spoke to at the shelter was skeptical and thuggish. No, they could not take the cat there because she didn’t come from this pound. Richard explained that the central SPA office, hearing that we didn’t have a car to drive to the cat’s shelter of origin several hours outside of Paris, had given us permission to bring the cat here. 

She shook her head in that French fashion that says, I will find a way to obstruct this, that is why I exist.

The second, third, and fourth employees were sympathetic. Oui, they said, they would take her, though it wasn’t the center from which she came. 

In our interview, we learned some French as it applies to cats. Câlin, we knew. Pavillon ou appartement? We’d thought it was a rather snobbish way of saying, Certain cats must have estates in Paris, with grounds.

Mais non. Pavillon means: This cat is so wild, so unsuited for living with not just dogs, other cats, and children, but even adults who worship cats. She can only be adopted by humans who have their own private jungle where jaguars can roam.

Street Art © 2014 by Toc Toc

Elle n’est pas une écaille de tortue, this is not a tortoise shell, said one young woman, Morgan, named after the sorceress in the medieval King Arthur’s tales. It’s a tricolore. They are always female, and they’re known for having caractère. 

Caractère translates in French to bitch. (Our cat-whisperer friend, Lisa Fimiani, told us, “Male cats are supposedly more friendly—females can be bitches, however it all comes down to the cat's personality and their interaction with you.”)

Égratigner means to shred the skin of a human.

Mordu means bitten to the bone.

They looked at our hands and nodded gravely. This cat cannot live indoors.

No, we said, she’s the demon cat from hell.

(We didn’t really say that. We know that cats understand everything you say.) We walked away feeling years lighter, and said it to each other. 

Street art © 2015 by M. Chat

* Footnote: A line attributed to American author/critic/poet and wit Dorothy Parker, who is reported to have exclaimed, "What fresh hell is this?" when her train of thought was interrupted by a telephone. She then started using it in place of "hello" when answering the phone or a knock at her door.

Magicians

Street art © 2015 by E.L.K. 

I was walking past the little café on rue des Écoles where all the kids stand in a clump smoking. I like to hold my breath as I pass them, so as not to inhale the smoke. It’s just one drug among many, I thought, but it’s probably my least favorite.

Richard tells me they’re starting to show a gangrenous foot here in France on cigarette packs; the images are much more vivid than on American cigarette packs, but then a larger percentage of French people smoke. It hasn’t become unfashionable here yet.

Approaching my café I saw one of my favorite waitresses off to the side, smoking furtively. She ducked her head as I came near. I could see by her body language that she was ashamed of smoking. I stopped and we talked. I asked her her birthday. In August, she said. I predict that by your next birthday, you’ll quit. I’d like to, she said, but first I need to have less stress in my life.

Street art © 2015 by PopEye

I told her the story of how I quit. I picked a date, which happened to be Valentine’s Day. I thought about it for a month ahead. Fourteen days in advance I smoked my usual fourteen ciggies. The next day thirteen. And so on, until the last day, on which I awoke, took a puff, put out the cigarette, put it in a baggie once it had cooled, lit it up later, took a toke, put it out, until at the end of the day, I got into bed and lit up the little snippet I had left. I took a deeeeeeep breath, and the ember fell on the dusky rose duvet and burned a nice big hole in it. I looked down and said, That’s it. Never again. 

For the next two weeks I exercised like a lunatic, hung out in the sauna and Jacuzzi, and two weeks later the urge was completely gone. 

Acupuncture is also good! she said. 

It probably is, I agreed.

 

After my usual salmon and veggies, I opened my computer and chomped through a short story that I’d taken to a workshop the week before. I’d tried an experiment, making a draft of the story with everyone’s comments included in bold, with initials indicating who had made the comment. It served as a meditation on other perspectives. In rereading this draft, I could then make decisions: good suggestion, irrelevant suggestion, and skip over the spots where I wasn’t sure. Certain typos were no-brainers. Some of the suggestions involved adding to the story. As I made a decision about each comment, I eliminated it. Except one: someone in the workshop suggested changing a central metaphor in the story, because it was too familiar to her. But it wasn’t familiar to me. It seemed intrinsic to the nature of the character. I mused on this, and couldn’t decide. 

At that point, this same waitress came up to me shyly, and asked in French (we only spoke in French), if it wasn’t indiscreet, could she ask me a question? Of course, I said. What do you do? I’m a writer, I said. What are you writing? A short story, I said. But I wasn’t sure if the word in French should be conte or nouvelle.

Nouvelle, she said. A conte is more like a fairy story. 

Or The Thousand and One Nights? I said.

Yes, or Le Magicien Dose, she said.

I couldn’t quite translate that: Dose?

She said it again, and I laughed, The Wizard of Oz? D'Oz!

Yes, she said. 

Street art © 2015 by Fred le Chevalier

That’s magic, I said. I was just writing about the Wizard of Oz; it's a central metaphor in my story. 

She smiled and scurried off to wait on another table.

So that was the metaphor that I was weighing whether to keep. Why did she mention this book, of all books? It was a sign to keep the story as I’d originally written it. 

Hours later, I told her this. 

Yes, she said, everything in the world is magic. Only some of us are open to it, and some are not. Some are closed and fearful. 

We had each given the other an answer to a question neither of us had voiced aloud. But I’d heard her desire to stop smoking. She’d heard my question about my story. The nature of the world is magic, sympathetic magic.

A Day of Mourning in Paris

 

Walking home from a delightful feline evening with three women friends at Le Café des Chats, the café where cats have free rein, Anna and Sion turned left at rue de Rivoli, and Rachel and I headed to the Place de Parvis Notre Dame, where she headed right and I turned left along the rue du Cloître Notre Dame on the north side of the Cathedral. The moon was directly overhead, slightly past full, shining on the gaping mouths of the gargoyles. They looked like monsters, mad dogs, straining to attack, held back by the force of the church and centuries of solid stone, radiance all around them. 

I passed over the Pont de l’Archevêché, heavy with love locks. Paris attracts romantics from around the world, and the weight of their yearning for lasting love threatens to collapse the bridge. Four young men across the street were leaning down to examine the locks. I listened, looked, scanned for danger. They spoke French (which tends to give me a sense of relief), were laughing, seemed safe.

Turning east along the Quai de la Tournelle, I headed home along the Seine, whose ruffled surface mirrored a fractured moon.

Another four men advanced toward me, heavy-set, middle-aged, talking amongst themselves.

I stood waiting for traffic to pass, alert again to possible danger. Out of the side of my eye, I monitored how close they were, before crossing the street.

And I had two thoughts: after years of living in Los Angeles, and before that, Santa Fe, New York City, Boulder, and Cambridge—after attacks by men in Berkeley, Cambridge and New Orleans, all averted by a weapon I hadn’t know I had, my voice—screaming in one case, talking calmly in two others—I still have the habit of scanning for threatening men. 

And once again, I felt happy to be living in a city where I feel safe, where I can walk alone at night, even late, as now at 11 p.m., or even later, like returning from a favorite writing café at 2 a.m., though I’ll probably never lose the habit of scanning for danger. It seems to be an intrinsic part of being a woman.

 

The following day came the shocking news of the murder of twelve journalists and staff at the office of the satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, by two terrorists with Kalashnikov rifles.

Horror. Grief. Sorrow. One state of mind bled into another. Richard and I cried, talked, and read newspaper articles online, many from links on Facebook. What a stunning locus/web of community and news. Friends in the U.S. and beyond sent moving messages of empathy, many wishing us safety.

We watched French news stations, and BBC. We heard President Obama and John Kerry extend their sympathy and support of democratic ideals to the French (Kerry in passable French—bravo, Monsieur Secretary of State!). French journalists and intellectuals discussed the events with nuanced intelligence, the absence of hysteria, and invited Muslim imams to voice their condemnation of the terrorist acts. President François Hollande declared the following three days to be days of mourning.

At the Place de la République, we gathered spontaneously with fifteen thousand other Parisians, lit candles, stood in solidarity with the victims. “Je Suis Charlie,” said the signs. I am Charlie. Such a respectful gathering of grievers. Standing in silence, then the waves of applause, and the chant, Char-lie, Char-lie, Char-lie. Then silence, then repeating the clapping and chant. No speeches, no politicians; the police present only to direct traffic, not in their Robocop outfits. 

That first day we heard no anti-Muslim sentiment expressed, just deep gravitas, grief, and a sense of unity. One French Muslim woman interviewed on TV wept, Ceci n’est pas Islam! Je suis Française! Je suis Française! (This is not Islam. I am French.)

On Thursday, I awakened feeling flattened by sadness. Over the course of the day, I found myself circling through the stages of loss and grief again. In reading the news and Facebook posts, I saw a few of bitter hatred, ones that urged killing the terrorists, that kind of thing. 

That seems to me to be a far greater danger than another terrorist attack in Paris—the massing of hatred, the backlash, the rise of anti-Muslim scapegoating, fueling more terrorism in a murderous feedback loop. In this decade, we’re already seeing a mirroring of the reactionary xenophobic spirit and crimes of the 1950s—the McCarthyism that had a devastating effect on so many artists and intellectuals, including the career of a writer relative of mine, and his actress wife.

So what is needed? For one thing, understanding. How does a lively young French man of Algerian descent descend into such barbarity? Look at Chèrif Kouachi, the younger of the two brothers, in this video, a 2005 investigative documentary about jihadism. 

Chèrif Kouachi might have gone in another direction. Like so many young men growing up in a western culture, he liked rap music and pretty girls. Like so many young people, he had no sense of direction, but was searching for guidance. He met a teacher, Farid Benyettou, who told him that, “The scriptures showed the virtue of suicide attacks. It’s written in the scriptures that it’s good to die as a martyr.” Farid “gave me a justification for my coming death.”

His doubts vanished. He was trained in the use of Kalashnikovs, was on his way to Syria in 2005, hoping to go to Iraq, when he was arrested by police, along with Farid Benyettou, and spent time in prison. When he was released in 2008, he apparently convinced others that he’d put all that behind him.

At the Café des Chats on Tuesday night, I’d taken off my feather necklace, and dangled it in front of two sleepy cats. The small tortoiseshell leapt to the game, following the feathers with her marble eyes, batted them, snatched the leather cord and trapped that bird beneath her paws. 

The big gray cat seemed indifferent, even contemptuous. After Anna and I played birdie with the small cat for another few minutes, the big cat suddenly whacked the tortoiseshell hard across her cheek, shocking her into stillness. 

“Woah!” we exclaimed. A second later he sank his claws into my index finger, breaking the skin. Game over. 

I had the thought today that these two Kouachi brothers somewhere along the line had turned into cobras. Deadly, hooded serpents who, when provoked, killed. 

What turns a young man into a cobra?

Let’s take a break here, and return to this subject in our next Paris Play.

Artwork (and stencil) © 2014 C215