// creative //
Fall 2013
Nuages
Kalman Victor
I breathe in and the air is saturated with the smell of the canal and leaking gasoline. I’ve been here many times before, but only by peeking from the margins of a page into imaginations outside of myself. Being in Paris is like falling into a coal-engine. Everything I think and do is fodder for a project that’s totally beyond my apprehension, the industrial manufacture of countless Parises to be shipped off in neat little packages for people who need a place with a name to store their dreams. I can’t help but ask myself whether the cloying, inescapable wonder I’m feeling is some semblance of the one that captured Hemingway’s imagination, but I feel trite even thinking about him here. Everything is cliché in Paris, even if it’s not.
We go and watch the men play bocce in an enclave of green called Jardin Villemin, cordoned off from the pallid cityscape studded with beauty parlors and hair salons. The neighborhood somehow manages to trick you into thinking it’s quaint and so authentic, a word which Dad is using incessantly, like a child who’s just learned to talk. I can’t blame him for feeling the same way I do, for falling into the same traps, but I wish he would just shut up about it.
The players suddenly pack up as the clouds gather in the sky, and Mom suggests a lunch break. When we hit the main street, named for some saint drowning in consonants, I stare at a woman in rags suckling a child on an outspread cardboard box. I try to feel like what I’m seeing isn’t inexplicably beautiful, try to shatter the Paris that doesn’t really exist with the Paris that does. But even the oversized computer monitors and rotary-dial phones in the windows of the bazaars are sweeping me off my feet.
Soon enough, Dad makes us sit down in a dingy Turkish place, ranting about multiculturalism and his favorite trope: the importance of shaking up our upper-middle class snow globe lives every now and again. When he reads my writing for school, he always makes sure to comment on its skewed sense of realism, which for him seems to mean that anything that feels familiar couldn’t be farther from actuality. If I cared more about his opinions, I’d ask him about Paris—it’s the most predictable, familiar city in the world, but also the inspiration for some of the most genius creative works of all time. The Classics major in me, the part that rarely seems to shut up, wants to say that Paris can exist in so many shades because it’s already become a mythic entity. Like Bacchus or Cupid, it has its own face, personality, will, and everybody is so sure they know what it should represent that there’s no longer any way to tell where the symbol ends and the symbolism begins.
But I don’t have time to languish in my internal monologue because we’re actually here, in the belly-of-the-beast, so anything that drifts into the theoretical immediately seems unreachably distant. And it’s not the majesty of the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower that envelops my thoughts, but the sour smell of the meat twirling in a waterfall of fat behind the counter. If anything I told myself rings true, why should the stench of a shitty dive still feel inexorably special, still feel tinged with something otherworldly?
As we’re handed the menus, I notice Mom is cradling her stomach in preemptive concern. Dad taps my shoulder, says that the kitchen smells just like Istanbul circa 1996—so authentic. He winks at Mom, who chuckles and diverts her eyes to the technicolored meats and kebabs in her menu.
My brother chokes back a cringe, then points to rotating slab of meat. “That was what killed Morrison.”
A grunt of laughter escapes my nose, and Dad orders in clunky French. When the waiter leaves, he motions out the window towards the battered train station across the street—the railroad, he explains, was one of the fundamental steppingstones to progress; modernity roared into the world on the back of a locomotives, another area of his expertise. Then the lilting music from the kitchen morphs into Django Reindhart’s Nuages twanging in my ears, and Dad’s voice seems to concede to the crackling melody.
Wads of bread and kufta resist sliding down my throat, and I wonder why we’re eating Turkish food in Paris, of all places; I wonder whether I like the Manhattan summers with their damp and nappy heat more than the constantly looming rain here, a rain that nobody seems to acknowledge exists.
“Let’s feed the ducks in the canal! It’ll be just like Rosh HaShanah. Probably a little different than Riverside Park, though” Mom says. “We can throw our sins off that bridge over there, like it’s the New Year, like we’re starting over again.”
“Why not wait till September? I haven’t finished all of this year’s sinning yet,” my brother replies, deadpan.
“Oh come on,” Dad laughs. “You guys used to love it when you were kids. You remember, don’t you?” I don’t answer. Of course I remember, but I remember Paris, too, and this is my first trip here.
We pay and step out into the cinereous light of the blocked-out sun. The littered street and wigs lined up on expressionless white heads try to dull the sound of Nuages in my head, but each chord remains edged and distinct. A decrepit looking train screeches into the station and Dad looks back at us, smiling and raising his eyebrows, as if we were witnessing the fulfillment of some sort of prophetic vision he had in the restaurant. I notice a wispy ball of hair rolls passed my feet, and Mom starts to laugh.
“Hey, look—it’s a tumbleweave, ha ha. Aren’t I clever?” she says, and I smile at her smile.
Plumes of cigarette smoke from the couple walking in front of us waft into my lungs, the air heavy with a feeling of false intimacy. When we decided to vacation here, I guessed the City of Love would make me swoon, that my heart would speed up when I turned every corner expecting to see the Parisian muse in her beret, smoking a cigarette up against a wall. I could maybe bum one from her, maybe strike up some small talk and get to know her, but all I’ve gotten so far is second-hand and stale.
I’m still heaving deeply, and I can’t tell whether the warmth in my lungs is soothing or choking, whether the strings in my head are screeching or singing. Dad insists above my silent confusion, as if it were the answer to all the problems in the world, that he’s just trying to show us an authentic Paris, a Paris “off the beaten track.” Nuages crescendos, drowning out his tour guiding as it bounces off the walls of my perception with limitless energy. As if on cue, he gets more enthusiastic, talks louder and waves his hands while I bite down hard and try to stymie Django’s wild strumming fingers. But I can’t extract the facsimile that’s nested in my brain, the Paris made of alien stories and visions that aren’t mine; I can’t seem to outrun graying clouds that hover, unmoving and colossal overhead.
Finally, we get to the water and toss in a few chunks of bread to a lone duck, who seems impassive, unimpressed by Mom’s throaty r’s in her calls of “canard, canard.” I hurl the last piece as far as I can while Mom and Dad laugh, remembering when I used to take running starts to launch the stale hunks of challah as far as I could from the jetties of the Hudson.
We stare for minutes in silence, waiting for the duck to accept our offering, and then the sky opens up and rain pours down, gray on the concrete backdrop. Mom reaches into Dad’s backpack and takes out an empty hand.
“Dammit. Did you bring the umbrellas, hon?”
“Shit. Must’ve forgot. Sorry guys. Let’s find an awning.”
My brother’s scowl penetrates the rain and lands hot on Dad’s neck. We walk away and I look back at the chunks of pita floating there in the canal, swaying in the droplets’ ripples, bloated and unabsolved. The pattering of the rain fights with the careening melody of Nuages, and I think, for the first time, that I may have caught a glimpse of my Paris.
// KALMAN VICTOR is a sophomore at Columbia College and Creative Editor for The Current. He can be reached at [email protected]. Photo by Flickr user olivier vancyzeele.
We go and watch the men play bocce in an enclave of green called Jardin Villemin, cordoned off from the pallid cityscape studded with beauty parlors and hair salons. The neighborhood somehow manages to trick you into thinking it’s quaint and so authentic, a word which Dad is using incessantly, like a child who’s just learned to talk. I can’t blame him for feeling the same way I do, for falling into the same traps, but I wish he would just shut up about it.
The players suddenly pack up as the clouds gather in the sky, and Mom suggests a lunch break. When we hit the main street, named for some saint drowning in consonants, I stare at a woman in rags suckling a child on an outspread cardboard box. I try to feel like what I’m seeing isn’t inexplicably beautiful, try to shatter the Paris that doesn’t really exist with the Paris that does. But even the oversized computer monitors and rotary-dial phones in the windows of the bazaars are sweeping me off my feet.
Soon enough, Dad makes us sit down in a dingy Turkish place, ranting about multiculturalism and his favorite trope: the importance of shaking up our upper-middle class snow globe lives every now and again. When he reads my writing for school, he always makes sure to comment on its skewed sense of realism, which for him seems to mean that anything that feels familiar couldn’t be farther from actuality. If I cared more about his opinions, I’d ask him about Paris—it’s the most predictable, familiar city in the world, but also the inspiration for some of the most genius creative works of all time. The Classics major in me, the part that rarely seems to shut up, wants to say that Paris can exist in so many shades because it’s already become a mythic entity. Like Bacchus or Cupid, it has its own face, personality, will, and everybody is so sure they know what it should represent that there’s no longer any way to tell where the symbol ends and the symbolism begins.
But I don’t have time to languish in my internal monologue because we’re actually here, in the belly-of-the-beast, so anything that drifts into the theoretical immediately seems unreachably distant. And it’s not the majesty of the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower that envelops my thoughts, but the sour smell of the meat twirling in a waterfall of fat behind the counter. If anything I told myself rings true, why should the stench of a shitty dive still feel inexorably special, still feel tinged with something otherworldly?
As we’re handed the menus, I notice Mom is cradling her stomach in preemptive concern. Dad taps my shoulder, says that the kitchen smells just like Istanbul circa 1996—so authentic. He winks at Mom, who chuckles and diverts her eyes to the technicolored meats and kebabs in her menu.
My brother chokes back a cringe, then points to rotating slab of meat. “That was what killed Morrison.”
A grunt of laughter escapes my nose, and Dad orders in clunky French. When the waiter leaves, he motions out the window towards the battered train station across the street—the railroad, he explains, was one of the fundamental steppingstones to progress; modernity roared into the world on the back of a locomotives, another area of his expertise. Then the lilting music from the kitchen morphs into Django Reindhart’s Nuages twanging in my ears, and Dad’s voice seems to concede to the crackling melody.
Wads of bread and kufta resist sliding down my throat, and I wonder why we’re eating Turkish food in Paris, of all places; I wonder whether I like the Manhattan summers with their damp and nappy heat more than the constantly looming rain here, a rain that nobody seems to acknowledge exists.
“Let’s feed the ducks in the canal! It’ll be just like Rosh HaShanah. Probably a little different than Riverside Park, though” Mom says. “We can throw our sins off that bridge over there, like it’s the New Year, like we’re starting over again.”
“Why not wait till September? I haven’t finished all of this year’s sinning yet,” my brother replies, deadpan.
“Oh come on,” Dad laughs. “You guys used to love it when you were kids. You remember, don’t you?” I don’t answer. Of course I remember, but I remember Paris, too, and this is my first trip here.
We pay and step out into the cinereous light of the blocked-out sun. The littered street and wigs lined up on expressionless white heads try to dull the sound of Nuages in my head, but each chord remains edged and distinct. A decrepit looking train screeches into the station and Dad looks back at us, smiling and raising his eyebrows, as if we were witnessing the fulfillment of some sort of prophetic vision he had in the restaurant. I notice a wispy ball of hair rolls passed my feet, and Mom starts to laugh.
“Hey, look—it’s a tumbleweave, ha ha. Aren’t I clever?” she says, and I smile at her smile.
Plumes of cigarette smoke from the couple walking in front of us waft into my lungs, the air heavy with a feeling of false intimacy. When we decided to vacation here, I guessed the City of Love would make me swoon, that my heart would speed up when I turned every corner expecting to see the Parisian muse in her beret, smoking a cigarette up against a wall. I could maybe bum one from her, maybe strike up some small talk and get to know her, but all I’ve gotten so far is second-hand and stale.
I’m still heaving deeply, and I can’t tell whether the warmth in my lungs is soothing or choking, whether the strings in my head are screeching or singing. Dad insists above my silent confusion, as if it were the answer to all the problems in the world, that he’s just trying to show us an authentic Paris, a Paris “off the beaten track.” Nuages crescendos, drowning out his tour guiding as it bounces off the walls of my perception with limitless energy. As if on cue, he gets more enthusiastic, talks louder and waves his hands while I bite down hard and try to stymie Django’s wild strumming fingers. But I can’t extract the facsimile that’s nested in my brain, the Paris made of alien stories and visions that aren’t mine; I can’t seem to outrun graying clouds that hover, unmoving and colossal overhead.
Finally, we get to the water and toss in a few chunks of bread to a lone duck, who seems impassive, unimpressed by Mom’s throaty r’s in her calls of “canard, canard.” I hurl the last piece as far as I can while Mom and Dad laugh, remembering when I used to take running starts to launch the stale hunks of challah as far as I could from the jetties of the Hudson.
We stare for minutes in silence, waiting for the duck to accept our offering, and then the sky opens up and rain pours down, gray on the concrete backdrop. Mom reaches into Dad’s backpack and takes out an empty hand.
“Dammit. Did you bring the umbrellas, hon?”
“Shit. Must’ve forgot. Sorry guys. Let’s find an awning.”
My brother’s scowl penetrates the rain and lands hot on Dad’s neck. We walk away and I look back at the chunks of pita floating there in the canal, swaying in the droplets’ ripples, bloated and unabsolved. The pattering of the rain fights with the careening melody of Nuages, and I think, for the first time, that I may have caught a glimpse of my Paris.
// KALMAN VICTOR is a sophomore at Columbia College and Creative Editor for The Current. He can be reached at [email protected]. Photo by Flickr user olivier vancyzeele.