Last Train to Paris (2 page)

Even though it was a blazing hot summer night, most of the men wore fedoras. They had their shirtsleeves roughly rolled up, some with their cigarette packs stored in a fold, the top buttons of their shirts undone, their ties loosely knotted. Cigarettes were burning in ashtrays or hanging from their mouths. My unremarkable black trousers were sticking to my legs and my wilting white blouse was a mistake. The sweat made it stick to my back and stomach, making my brassiere and breasts obvious, and my feet were swollen and sweating in a new pair of flat-heeled black shoes. I stood transfixed–actually, scared–at the top of the stairs, and scanned the room.

Some of the newsmen looked out through the tall open windows onto the street. Others faced the damp interior walls. The walls were decorated with discolored newspaper clippings, water-stained foolscap, and beautiful, but faded, engraved maps of Europe dating back to before the Great War. Scattered on top of a carpet of scrunched-up balls of paper, ripped from typewriters in frustration, were cigarette butts, slimy cigar ends, and empty beer bottles. Tucked into dark crevices were grimy-looking brass spittoons. A few men were talking, but most were yelling at each other across the room; there was the sound of the Teletype machines, and the insistent, nerve-shattering noise of honking taxis outside. It was familiar—reminding me of my previous newsroom, in New York. As I glimpsed my first Parisian cockroach, I also realized that I was the only woman there.

“What can I do for you?” asked one of the men, drinking a beer while reading a galley.

“I'm looking for Mr. Ramsey, the managing editor. Name's R. B. Manon,” I said, and we shook hands.

The beer-drinking man gestured toward a glass-enclosed cubicle. “There he is,” he said, “the master of chaos. Good luck to you.”

 

Mr. Ramsey was a short, heavyset man with tiny hands and feet and short arms. He had straw-colored hair with a distinctive cowlick at the top of his head. His nose was small and red and pimply; his eyes were blue and quite pretty. He was wearing a bow tie with blue polka dots on a white background. “Well, well, they've sent me a young lady,” he scoffed. “I thought you were a man with a name like R.B. Was wondering why they assigned a guy to the social desk. Assumed he was a queer,” he said, and shook my hand, trying to show me how strong he was.

I kept a straight face and looked him in the eyes. “My name's Rose Belle Manon. You can call me R.B.”

He looked at me strangely. “Well, it's good you're not a looker. It'll be easier to work with you.”

 

My new home was on the Left Bank, the Hôtel Espoir on the Place de la Sorbonne. The name of the hotel was deceptive; it was a sad-looking fleabag with blistering gray paint over gray stone. My room cost fifty cents a day. The hotel had five stories, with two dormer garrets on the top floor. The rooms opened off long corridors, dimly lit with cold blue bulbs. There was no elevator. Fortunately, I lived on the second floor. Few of the locks on the doors worked–it was like a ranch bunkhouse. I wasn't used to people barging into my room, and at first found it disconcerting. The rooms were almost identical, and people joked that after too much drinking, you shouldn't be surprised if some morning you woke in the wrong bed. My room had one of the few sinks, although no hot water, and the sink was decorated with unpleasant mineral stains that were impossible to clean. Above the sink was an old, golden-clouded mirror. The rooms were long and narrow and each had one tall French window that opened out onto either the street or, as in my case, the trash-strewn courtyard. An old woman, who I called Madame Canari, lived across the way. She was always wearing a starched pink apron with a flowered red kerchief on her head. ‘Good morning,' she would yell across to me, no matter what the time of day. She had pet canaries that never wearied of filling the courtyard with their lovely song. They would flutter about, reminding me of a forsythia shrub whose yellow flower petals were being blown by the wind. I was grateful for a touch of nature and the woman's neighborly ways.

Having inherited a narrow and rather lumpy bed, I covered it with my Indian blanket, brought from Nevada. There was a ratty, dull-brown armchair whose arms were encrusted with ancient dirt, but it was comfortable. Between the chair and my bed was a brown fringed lampshade that shimmied when people walked on the stairs. My favorite piece of furniture was the Técalémit radio that I bought at Marché aux Puces, the flea market at Porte de Clignancourt. As time went on, and the world was on the brink of war, I needed music more and more. Above the bed I hung a poster, of the turn-of-the-century dancers,
Bal Musette,
which I had bought at a green metal bookstall along the Seine. I also bought four pots of red geraniums, which I placed on the narrow wrought-iron balcony outside my window.

A reporter, Andy Roth (originally from Golden, Colorado), whom I'd known since my stint at the
New York
Courier
, welcomed me to the hotel. “I live two doors down from you. I know this is a dismal joint, but you'll get used to it.”

Wherever I looked, there was fodder for stories. Having come from a small town, I was amazed at the variety of people. “I could write forever here,” I told Andy. “The entire world's represented under this roof.”

Quickly I learned that the hotel was a haven for émigrés. They were living under assumed names, carrying false papers, vulnerable; they were hiding from hatred and the constant threat of death. They were Jews, communists, homosexuals–people living on the edge of the political knife. The concierge and her husband, Madame and Monsieur Pleven, called themselves Marxists. Although they had a picture of Marx hanging on their wall, I never had a conversation about Marxism with them–though I certainly tried. Perhaps they thought it was fashionable to belong to the movement. I don't know. But I do know that they managed the hotel well, and took great pride in protecting everyone from the authorities. Whenever the police arrived to conduct a raid (a monthly occurrence), Monsieur Pleven alerted the residents and they would quietly go to the basement and leave by a nondescript door that led into another building. If I happened to be in my room, I didn't bother to hide. My
étranger résident
card, American passport, and newspaper credentials were always in order.

Besides a few other newspaper people, whose typewriters were clicking away day and night, there were three prostitutes, one with hennaed hair, one a peroxided blonde, and one with coal-black dyed hair; a wealthy, generous, and serious female drunk from London who loved young boys; a Polish communist who sold Persian carpets on the boulevards; two German Jewish lesbian couples who came from the same village near Berlin; a Romani bookbinder who spoke only Yiddish; a Russian cellist who practiced six hours a day, and his wife who worked in a Russian bookstore at the
Exposition Internationale
; two male Serbian exiles from Belgrade who often hid in the dark hallways and always greeted me with a whispered “
Dobra dan
” (good day); an Italian Jewish maker of fashionable shoes who sent money in shoeboxes to his family in Rome; a Pole and his wife who were so frightened that they rarely left their room; a male dancer with Les Ballets de Paris who lived in the hotel with his wife and two children; the Finnish gardener at the Jardin du Luxembourg, who tended the English-style gardens; Mademoiselle Ruska,
Voyante Médium, Hindique
(originally from Ohio, and stranded in Paris for lack of money), who often tried to convince me that she could show me the destiny of my “fractured soul”; and a French taxidermist and cold-weather hand-muff maker, whose specialty was household cats. “Look, Miss Manon,” he once said. “If you rub yourself with this cat-fur mitten, it will keep you warmer than those ridiculous, useless coal stoves that we have in our rooms.” Facing the park on the second floor was Mr. Hin, an exiled Chinese poet of note and an earnest member of the PCF, the French Communist Party. We became friends. There was also an elderly woman who had lived there since the beginning of the Great War. She wore only black and owned a wool shop around the corner. Arrayed on her shelves were pasteboard boxes filled with skeins of yarn in every color—lively vermilion, carmine, vibrant orange, emerald, ultramarine, Indian yellow. Her establishment reminded me of my Aunt Clara's button-and-trimmings shop in Brooklyn.

There were no toilets in the rooms, but each floor had one at the end of the hall. I didn't like this at all. I've never liked sharing such an intimate room with anyone and his brother.

ABSOLUMENT AUCUNE CUISSON DANS LES CHAMBRES
, the black-on-white enamel signs warned on each landing. No cooking allowed in the rooms—but most residents had spirit cookers and locked larders, both to keep the mice away and to hide the stoves. The aromas of food wafted through the hallways; nothing was a secret. If someone was in the money, the halls smelled of frying meat. Otherwise, there was an abundance of cabbage. Every morning, if a tenant had paid a small extra amount, Monsieur Pleven would bring him or her a steaming cup of coffee with a small pot of hot milk and a freshly baked croissant from the bar at the corner of the boulevard St. Michel. I liked that amenity. I would buy the evening newspapers and save them for the morning's coffee in my room. Every once in a while, when Andy and I missed the American breakfasts of our youth, we would go to a restaurant run by a former Pullman porter near the Eiffel Tower. The Chicago-Texas Inn specialized in fried eggs, corned-beef hash, and thick griddlecakes dripping with butter. It also had a private stash of American-made bourbon, saved for special customers. On occasion, there was genuine maple syrup. As soon as the syrup arrived, the word would go out to the American newspaper community.

Fifty steps away from the Hôtel Espoir's front door was Henri's Café, the local bar, with the nearest public telephone. All the newspaper people who lived in the area would check each day to see if any messages had been left with Monsieur Henri, who was the owner, the waiter, and the bartender too. If so, the message would be written on the back of an old receipt in Monsieur Henri's spidery nineteenth-century handwriting. He would place it at the end of the wine-stained bar with a shot glass on top.

Outside the café was a dingy green kiosk selling French and international newspapers, and it also had the tobacco concession for the neighborhood. On the upper part of the kiosk, directly below the dull bronze, pineapple-shaped dome, each day's headlines were printed on cheap paper and applied with thick wheat paste. The French bought between three and five newspapers a day, more newspapers per person than any other country in the world; this was one of the characteristics of France that I loved. Each time I approached the kiosk, the newsagent, Monsieur Villières, was there with the same greeting. ‘Ah, Mademoiselle Manon.
C'est la fiction! C'est toute fiction
!” (It's fiction, all fiction), he would say as he handed me copies of
Paris-Soir
, the
London Times
, and the
Berliner Morgen-Zeitung.

 

I hate to sound like a curmudgeon, but today's newspapers aren't written as well as the ones from that time. Before the war there were more choices, more published differences of opinion, more column inches to tell long stories. And I miss my print-stained hands and that heavy, wonderful smell of ink.

 

When I first arrived in Paris, I thought it would be thrilling to have a chance to go to China as a correspondent for the
Paris Courier
. In Simon's Creek, Nevada, where I was born, there were many Chinese people who had come to work on the railroad and then settled there. Having learned Mandarin as a child from my nanny, I had many people to practice with. But in Paris I had met only one Chinese person, my new friend Mr. Hin. If the weather was nice, Mr. Hin could be found in the morning sitting on a bench in the small square just outside the hotel, reading a newspaper or a book, or writing, his wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. Tall and thin, he was a straight-postured man with his long hair worn in a braid. His face was ancient, reminding me of an ivory Chinese figurine. He wore the robin's egg blue, heavy-cotton clothes of a French laborer, but interrupted that look with a faded red-and-orange embroidered cap.

Andy had introduced me. “Mr. Hin, please meet my friend R. B. Manon. She's new here and lives on the second floor, two doors down from me.”

“Happy to meet you,” I said. “What are you reading?”

“Glad to meet you too. Cigarette?” I was happy to take his offered Gauloise Bleu. Although I had to force myself to inhale the heavy Turkish tobacco, I felt more French than American, which pleased me no end.

“I'm reading
Les Fleurs du mal et oeuvres choisies
by Baudelaire.”

“I'm impressed!” I said.

Then I felt embarrassed for implying that it was unusual for a Chinese man to be reading in French, and Baudelaire to boot.

Mr. Hin smiled at my discomfort. “No, don't worry, Miss Manon,” he said. “French is my second language, too.”

“Please,” I replied. “Call me Rosie.”

Meeting Mr. Hin had made me homesick. How odd, I mused, that to me the American West felt Chinese.

 

I don't like admitting it, but I'm still smoking. And to tell the truth, I love it. I don't know if it's the pure delight of taking the first puff, or the shock on my friends' and colleagues' faces when I light up. I'm not stupid—I know it's not good for me. However, I appear to be one of those people for whom smoking has no lasting ill effects. My doctors simply shake their heads. I think they're envious.

But I do know that the smell of old cigarette smoke is quite unpleasant to many people. While I was still in Europe, I stopped smoking for more than a year because tobacco was so hard to come by. It was then that I understood the awful odor of stale cigarette smoke. It was everywhere. There was always, no matter what season, a sweet-and-sour smell of sweat and cigarette smoke that permeated Parisian cafés, public buildings, and the Métro and city buses.