Ho Chi Minh came to Henri, he thought it was because of sleeping pills, missed dinners, too many Red Bulls, a brain stuffed with facts strained by a Baccalaureate that was impossible to pass and slept in tight jeans contorted in a two room apartment shared with his grandmother. He heard Ho in nightmarish words you don’t normally hear him say. The old man with the wispy white beard, white suit, he’d caused all Henri’s troubles, made him a boat person, was standing as an apparition between bed and bedroom window which looked out onto nothing but a white rendered brick wall of the adjoining high-rise. Ho wasn’t calling Henri comrade, saying revolutionary, traitor, defector, the people’s republic, independence. He was in Henri’s face with the sweetest aroma of a fine Bordeaux, the scent of an excellent beef reduction sauce and said,
“Escoffier is pacing up down around the kitchen, twisting his hands, waiting for perfect soft peaches, waiting for her, the Dame, Helen Porter Mitchell, who’s coming to the Ritz after twenty seven years. I have to make the fine spun sugar but it’s too cold and damp for spun sugar.”
Henri woke, panicked, stared at the yellowing paint on the ceiling, questioned if it was something, a meaning of some sort? The room was cold, the window was open, the heating broke, he shivered under blankets, shifted his gaze to the pool behind his desk with its circular water ripples, rings of azure blue in light/half light. It’d taken him a week to paste up the mural. It diverted him from studies, his mind desired its simplicity, swimmer’s body yearned for lap after lap, but in this minute it looked freezing. He rolled out of bed walked next door like a junky with bed hair.
Grandma, a frail minute seventy two years old woman, was up in the combined kitchen lounge dining sleeping area, in her silk day wear which resembled pyjamas, with a cup of coffee. She’d folded her bed into the wall cavity, slid the bookshelves over, placed a pot of beef jus on the dinning table, it was on the stove all night. She started the dish three days ago, it was one of Bao Dai’s, the last Emperor of Vietnam, the first/last Nguyen, favourite recipes. There were many food tasters in her time, the White House had a team for presidents of the war, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, George W’s made an appearance on TV, and Bao Dai considered her one of the best.
Henri told her about Ho.
Laughter made her hunch over, “It’s time the communists stop making incursions into our lives. Will Emperor Bao Dai who died on the right bank make an appearance tomorrow? In the interest of equal time, French democracy?”
Then her face stiffened, the responsible grandmother emerged, for less than a moment.
“Concentrate on your studies.”
He saw the drug conversation face, they did the talk. In their world no meant no.
“No drugs this year, I’m not sure study’s going well.”
Don’t reply with some cliché about hard work and rewards, he thought, or the ambition to get into La Sorbonne would be fulfilled with registered effort, less time in Asian nightclubs in the fifteenth, sixteenth.
“Maybe you capitulated ate at the Ritz or it’s from class? Where else could Ho, Dame Nellie Melba, Escoffier come from? Ho worked at the Ritz in the 1920s, so he claimed.”
Waltzing to the Ritz wasn’t part of his manifesto, he loathed the Paris of despotic third world leaders, former Vietnamese presidents, and Arabic strongmen. He preferred Paris regular, real people, long work hours, which lies somewhere along the buttery yellow limestone of the left bank. But she reminded him.
“There was a girl.” He said
She smiled. Ten girls, five pregnant, she could handle. A grandson fucked by Ho was unpalatable, unmentionable to any psychiatrist and the girls at cards.
“I was on the metro, between Montparnasse and Etoile, this girl got on, sat next to me on a empty metro, and recited the next page, Camus, the text for the exam, she smelled of sugar cinnamon, recited the entire page before I could flip to it.”
“You think the girl inspired all this?”
He shrugged, “She gave a great explanation of the book, I exchanged numbers, promised coffee. Felicité Mentier, she said. After we got off, she was on the opposite platform going back. I hadn’t seen her since.”
“Take this Sunday off, go out, do something else. That’ll put a stop to Ho version rubbish 2.0. And if he comes back we’ll talk about it.”
The words made him pout and silent.
Grandma shook her head, you were going anyway, she thought.
Henri wandered off, showered rugged up, Michelin man in grey, and rode the lift down to make a day away from books, damp rooms. The lift didn’t stink of piss, it wasn’t the banlieue, the building wasn’t run down public housing (his late grandfather bought the apartment with a French-Vietnamese public service pension). But outside he was reminded, time and again, that Asians lived in the thirteenth arrondissement because no one else wanted to. Bauhaus and modernist style built in uniformity, resembled Soviet housing, didn’t leave the same impression as Haussmannians stacked side by side to a uniform height, width along wide boulevards.
In minus five degrees, an hour after sunrise, he walked, other footsteps followed echoed in the soup air, suspended in soft rays of street lamps, which was rich in fish sauce, fried rice, delicious pork fill of banh cuons (soft rice rolls) aromas. Their flavours sharpened, ebbed, flowed with the density of the mist. They beckoned him over Avenue d’Italie and Avenue de Choisy to Mr Anh and his children’s (on their day off from school) breakfast stall at the market.
There trucks were beeping on reverse, families descended, sounds of tables chairs righted filled the former railway hall.
Six black men with cropped spiral black hair, about a millimetre off the bone, beards that resembled designed one day growths, were wolfing, swallowing down every rice roll on their plates at the Anh stall. Dressed in parkas which hung loose and jeans a few sizes too large, they mistook Henri for an Anh, rose from their plastic stools, said bonjour, their names (in bad French). Four were tall, at two metres, and two were shorter at about one point seven metres. Henri heard Heathcliffe, Darcy, Holden, Atticus, Jay and Jake. Before he could ask how they got their names, Mr Anh, who was almost family, said in French,
“they are good boys, they do nothing illegal, they don’t speak much French, no English. You help them. They’re living in the warehouse on Avenue George Eastman. It will be demolished soon.”
Henri waited for the boys to finish and a plate.
Heathcliffe swirled a rice roll around the fish sauce soup, asked, “Do you like our names? Our customers love English names.”
“from English books.” Darcy said.
“This month from English books they got cheap.” Mr Anh added.
Atticus kicked at a box at their feet. It was full of books that were all thumbed, the covers were dirty or falling off. You thought one of the book sellers along the Seine were tossing them.
“We get a box a week, and if it’s got a capital letter it’s a name.” He said.
“What do you do?” Jay asked.
“I got the idea I should be cooking.”
“Like Escoffier.” Jay said.
Henri smiled.
“What names were you born with?” Henri asked, smiled again.
“I’m Iheden from Benin without papers.” Jay volunteered. The others said nothing.
Henri looked at the ground.
Iheden continued over the pause, “come selling with us at Quai de Grenelle. We start at ten after we shower, dress.”
Henri looked at Mr Anh puzzled.
“They are good boys from Africa, we lend them keys to market showers, toilets.” He said.
“Come.” Iheden repeated.
Henri fell intoxicated with primal hunting gathering in a metropolis, you could eat if you sold, he didn’t care what, made a Euro or five. Ten o’clock it was. He didn’t offer to text, exchange mobiles numbers – there wasn’t any point dipping into an embarrassing topic. He waved himself off until he was up the road and saw them.
They weren’t there, neither was an empty bike rack, when he rode in. He pushed the pedals across Champ de Mars, circumnavigated the avenues until an empty rack appeared, and when he walked back they were divided into two groups across Quai de Grenelle and Boulevard de Grenelle with a closed box. He waved.
“Sit there and yell when you see a bus.” Heathcliffe screamed.
Henri understood they were on the look out for tourist buses which crossed the river or went up the boulevard, parked, or turned before Tour Eiffel. It was too cold to sit on stone, the temperature dropped further. He brushed off some snow patches that melted through his jeans, saw distance buildings turning into little gateaux with white icing on top. An outline of Felicité Mentier half covered by a tree, hidden by a book over her lines of sight, was in his vision. What was she doing, he wondered.
“Bus” Someone shouted.
They all looked up the road, Henri saw a double decker, blue vehicle still some distance away with the letter C and I in white at the front but the rest of the name was under mud or dirty snow. As it came closer he saw it was full of girls. A knowing smile wiped across his face, he’d met these types before. The girls were dressed lightly, maybe because it was twenty five degrees and chilling territory inside the bus. He’d never been on the bus. He could see through the approaching windscreen blondes, brunettes, nipples, full round breasts poking through barely there T-shirts.
Last year, he hooked up with a girl on this tour at Club de Havana, until morning broke. In heat, amongst hundreds of semi naked bodies, underneath brown, grey, plumes of cigar, pot, cigarette exhausts, he danced, she danced or rubbed herself against him in her quest to discover foreign and smoked his hash. She nibbled in his ear take me home, but Grandma was at home so he offered a park bench in Jardin Atlantique and she counter-offered her room which was a quad share but it was empty and she held his champagne, her champagne and he went at it like she was handcuffed until she poured the alcohol over him.
“Henri.” Iheden called, waved his hands in front of his chest in a cupping motion.
“Want to show her a good time?” You yelled.
If Samantha, Erica, blonde or brunette wanted a good time, after she managed, je m’appelle, he would pay for a room, or call in favours for a room for Iheden or any of them, tell them to get between her legs hard to give her a belly. It was their best chance grâce au gouvernment for health care and white, green, blue papers they needed.
Church bells rang out from Notre Dame.
“The car-park over there.” Atticus shouted, pointed to parking spaces in the corner of the block.
And the boys ran off with their box like they were chased yet no gendarme was at rear of the pack. Their feet arched and pushed. The road gave up no sound until they were over pebbles in the car park. Stones, fine sand crunched, gave off gravelly noises when they bunched up before the bus door. Other tourists turned stared since normal people stroll, ambulate around Paris. Henri saw muted unsympathetic faces asking where were the police?
“Smile, but don’t show teeth, and raise your hands.” Jake screamed as he distributed goods from the box.
Henri estimated (he mouthed the count) they had about 10 seconds for a sale after the bus door opened, the time for the girls to stomp down stairs out of the bus’ shadow. Beyond this imaginary triangle, Paris occupied their attention. But today it would amount to naught. These girls, with their rosy cheeks, well rugged up in their puffy designer parkas, weren’t going to take off their mittens for the boys in this weather. No money could change hands. There was also a problem with the merchandise but the boys were too engaged to notice.
All of them were waiving their raised hands, shouting, “regarde, regarde.”
The boys’ black, brown steel Eiffel towers, like all steel, constricted in the frigid conditions. At minus eight, down from fifteen above yesterday, the shrinkage was huge. Henri saw how each tower had a slight twist in it, or had bent in shape. The entire stock was dead, hundreds of Euros of worthless twisted metal. They couldn’t return it to their dealer now. Iheden’s collection was just peeled paint on warped metal. Word would get round and no-one was going to trust them with another consignment even if they could pay for this one.
Henri ran over fast, the last girl off the bus was shaking her head at them, pointed at the metal raised above their heads. For under a second they didn’t comprehend, then their faces turned, their eyes widened, like an animal knowing it had just been shot. They didn’t tear their clothes, razor blade their veins but he suspected these thoughts crossed their minds.
Then Jake said, “we have to ditch and run.” with the same sort of voice Henri would use to order a sandwich and a coke from Brioche Doree. He sensed Jake would be good to have around if one of them decided to jump in front of a metro.
“But before we do, one last night in the moveable feast.” Jake laughed.
They all laughed. Some brightness crept back on a few faces. They loved this funny phrase from Hemmingway’s book, Mr Anh explained it meant Paris.
Henri gathered metal bits off the gravel before following their lead back to the squat. The decision wasn’t discussed, it seemed intrinsic. They weren’t dressed for clubs. Henri guessed they couldn’t risk drinking along the river even on a cold day. On the way, they pooled their money, Henri chipped in twenty Euros, which was enough for three red wines and Atticus bought something in an alley.
Dark grey skies, snow settled in by the time they were in the fourth floor of the warehouse. The stairs up were covered with broken glass and smelled of shit. But it was the contents of their quarters that shocked Henri. He smelt books. All around the mattresses, a decoupage of covers and foam, were hundreds or thousands of books, some were still in boxes, liked the ones at the market, others were stacked in metre high piles underneath the large cracked industrial sized windows. Their tattered pages, yellowing form, in the faint winter light that filtered through dirt smeared windows, depressed him. He wondered if they were using laws which worked for Van Gogh, Picasso and any post-modern artist – any unused site could be legally squatted for artistic purposes.
A battery operated boom box pumped rap, Petit Fille, La Vie de Crime, from a radio station. Henri sat down on a mattress around the fire Jay was building. He started with loose sheets of paper as kindling, then tossed on a couple Russian authors and soon the flames roared, warmed the room with generous amounts of light. James Joyce, Xavier Herbert, Carl Sandburg were waiting in the next pile, there was enough fuel for an eternity. The last time Henri saw this, he was in down town Saigon, Ho’s men rooted the neighbourhood of all evil, namely books, and used them as a burnt offering to Dear Uncle.
The men sat next to Henri around the fire and shared wine from the bottle. He took a swig then passed it on. Atticus handed over a baklava, said he got it from the shop in the lane way. They were all eating the little square flaky golden pastries. Henri crunched it down, felt more than sugar in his system.
“What happens now?” He asked.
“We give the stock back, leave it outside the dealer’s house in the morning, move to Marseilles.” Iheden replied.
The others kept silent, their gaze on the fire. A book flew off someone’s hand into the fire. A second or maybe the third bottle passed again.
Henri asked, “Will it work out?”
Another book flew into the fire, sparks flew off, little wispy bits of burnt paper floated into the air, La Danse du Hip-Hop played and there wasn’t a reply.
khaibui 