The Venice Guggenheim

I wonder about Peggy Guggenheim living in her Venice house which to me smacks of a mausoleum with cold marble floors and concrete walls built in the most severe right angles to one another.  But the gardens – oh, the gardens!  The rear is something out of a Zen monastery exuding peace and calm.  But it’s the front that excites; looking out onto the Grand Canal with nothing to block the way except an amazing statue of a naked man on a wild horse, arms outstretched in flight, his gigantic penis, hard and erect, thrust straight out like a throbbing finger of virility and freedom.  How something of metal or stone could project such life, such electric vitality, is a wonder in itself.  It’s neither erotic nor sexual in the lurid sense; rather it’s a testament to youth and the fiery energy of life in all its orgiastic glory.  Even so, a father abashed at passing this work of art with his young daughter ordered her to avert her eyes and to walk on.

Venice is an Eel

30 April 2010

On a map it was pointed out to me that Venice is like a fish; actually it’s more like a pudgy eel.  The city has banned straight lines and has made them all into intricate squiggles.  It is a place without cars – where would they go?  Even bicycles are rare as you couldn’t ride them over the myriad of step bridges.  So people walk.  And when the labyrinth you are walking down hits an impasse – as it often does – you simply turn around and connect to another part of the maze of narrow streets, alleys, passages, tunnels and then – low and behold – a magnificent square, a campo, opens up like a giant field of cobblestone, bright and airy as the passageway is dark. You don’t know where you are, but it doesn’t matter anymore.  Everywhere is home.

Water defines this place like nowhere else in the world – at least nowhere I know.  The tapestry of canals is the city’s circulatory system – part of an urban biology that is unique and surprisingly liveable.  Everything that is done elsewhere by gas guzzling trucks and cars is done here by boat and barge – quicker, easier, safer, cleaner.

At first I wondered about the elderly and the disabled.  How do they ever manage such a complex obstacle course?  Surprisingly Venice has a higher percentage of elderly and retired than most Italian cities – the average age here is well into the forties.  So how do the elderly get around?  They seem to manage.  I’ve seen people on crutches negotiate the steepest bridge, step by step.  They do it slowly without complaint.  When I was lugging my heavy bag over yet another barrier, climbing narrow stairways that led over one canal after another and muttering to myself how life must be an endurance test every day for people who live here, I noticed a man older than myself taking a barrow of building supplies that must have weighed twice as much as my suitcase over the same bridge with an ease and agility I could only admire.  Perhaps people live longer here because they have managed to make their entire city into an urban fitness trail where they work out daily till they die.  And it’s rare, I’m told, for children to ever fall into the canal.  Only tourists do that. Then they’re quickly fished out since the canals are alive all hours of the day and night.  

The Night Train from Budapest to Venice

27 April 2010

What I'd forgotten to take into account when booking a night train from Budapest to Venice is that it goes through Croatia which isn't in the EU - so around midnight there was pounding at my cabin door by a border guard demanding to see my passport. She was a young woman, sleek and trim, with carefully varnished nails.  I noticed her nails because she was clutching my passport, holding it inches from my face so all I could see was the red of Great Britain and her painted fingers.  She was pleasant enough but for some reason she decided to give my document a thorough inspection and took it away with her.  I didn't see her or it for about ten minutes and by that time I was starting to wonder whether an old passport of mine that had been stolen some years ago hadn't fallen into the hands of drug dealers, people smugglers or (heaven forbid) the Israeli Secret Service.  After a half hour delay she finally gave it back.  But by that time I was already planning what to do if they held me for questioning after the train took off (not that I came to any sensible conclusion).  Thankful to be on my way again, I tried to go to sleep only to be woken once again at the other side of Croatia for exit checks and then at Slovenia for passport checks again.  By the time we reached Venice around 7 the next morning, I was exhausted.

The Universal City

27 April 2010  

I’m travelling through Europe at what clearly is a turning point.  The dreams of mutual prosperity that linked and empowered such diverse peoples and economies are quickly fading.  In Greece, where I will soon be, the economic masters of world finance are forcing ordinary working people to pay for the greed and corruption of the wealthy few.  There will be hell to pay for this.

In Budapest the streets are not filled with tourists with thick wallets anymore.  Like many cities of the east, its feet are mired in different camps – one in the command economy of the past; the other in the service economy of the supposed future.  Budapest itself has become a theme park trading on its history.  Everything is geared to pry out the little money that comes in with the dwindling crowds of holiday-makers.  So they sell whatever they have – memories of the Romans, the Turks, the Austrians and memories of the holocaust.  There are dens for sex and dens for gambling.   The city has become a service centre for fantasy and desire.  When you’re competing for the dwindling cash of the jaded tourist who has seen it all, you have to give it everything you’ve got.  But what does that mean for the people who live here?  As the money shrinks and belts are tightened, will they all have to compete to be cleaners, touts and whores?  Is that the fate of Eastern Europe?  No wonder the far right has once more emerged as the protector of the ordinary man and woman.  With so many promises betrayed, people revert to the wooden cross and the iron sword.

I don’t mean this to be taken in the wrong way, but there’s much about Budapest of 1970 that I enjoyed more than the contemporary version.  Back then it might have had a dour side but the city hadn’t been sold down the river in the way it has today.  It had integrity in so far as the State allowed. Budapest itself had a sense of community and its inhabitants shared something that made them unique.  Visiting the city was not like visiting Paris or Rome or London (though Paris or Rome or London were different then as well) since the Universal City hadn’t been invented yet.  Also the streets weren’t filled with beggars and unemployed kids trying to earn a bit of money by hustling tourists. Certainly tourists were hustled back then in different ways, but it’s the extent.  Today’s touts are young kids who have no other way of earning a living.  They don’t want to be hustling tourists.  In Cambridge college kids hustle tourists but they do it because they think they can make more money than doing something else – and maybe it’s considered cool.  In Budapest they have no choice.  They either hustle tourists or nothing.  There’s a big difference between having to do something and wanting to do it. 

The great malls and esplanades that have sprung up selling everything you can buy in whatever Universal City you go, exude the fragrance of truffled exploitation.  But that’s where the money is while the rest of Budapest is sucked dry.  Consider the Jewish quarter where communities are being rent asunder by big money buying up the aging tenements, remodelling, refurbishing and then selling them on.  Ironically (maybe not so ironically) a lot of this capital is coming from Israel.  So rich Jews, in a strange way, are responsible for pushing out the poor Jews from communities they had been brutally pushed out of not so many years before.  Still the old community exists and, to compound the irony, it might yet be saved by the recession (if that’s the proper word for financial Armageddon). 

The Cafe Spinoza

The Spinoza is in Dobb Utca, Zsido Negyed, the heart of the old Jewish community, and is literally right around the corner from where I’m staying.  A sign outside says a klezmer band will be playing at some future date but inside there is nothing that identifies it as culturally Jewish - though naming a café after one of the fathers of enlightenment who was a Jewish heretic and called himself Benedict instead of Baruch says something about intent.  This is more than a café and I can see why Agnes is meeting me here.  It also serves as a cultural centre with a small theatre and gallery.  (One of the past exhibitions I saw listed was ‘Jewish humour in graphics’; another was photos of old Jewish houses in the Zsido Negyed – so Jewish culture does seem to be a predominant theme.)

The café is in the front as you walk in; the restaurant and gallery are in the rear.  It was easy to find her as only three people were inside – a couple at one table and a lone woman with a bag of books at another.  She made a motion with her hand and her face – not exactly a wave, not exactly a smile but a universal language of recognition.

She’s a slight woman: slightly nervous, slightly intense, slight of size.  Later I thought her to be energetic, tired, vital, dour, hopeful and depressed – rather like my image of Hungary.  It’s what she, herself, said in the course of our conversation – Hungary is a land of contradictions: a great culture, a tragic history, innate brilliance and a pervasive inferiority complex (not her exact words, of course).  The same could be said for most of Central Europe, I thought. 

We chatted for a bit, trying to ferret out each other’s histories – me more than her.  She asked few direct questions; I asked lots.  Had she travelled much?  Her English was impeccable – had she lived in either the US or England?  I was amazed when she said she hadn’t.  Like the woman on the train, she learned English where she was.  I find that remarkable, to achieve such fluency without having actually lived in the English speaking world.  But perhaps that says more about the changing nature of the world – English has become the primary language of both commerce and culture.  Bright young people throughout Europe have found their own little English-speaking circles that include native speakers within that community.  You don’t have to leave your geographical region any longer to learn English – it comes to you on a platter, along with all the cultural artefacts of film, TV, music, books and newspapers.  It’s even more extensive than the days when academics throughout Europe conversed with each other in Latin from both necessity and preference.  Nowadays it’s everyone who buys into the phantom of the new world order where English is the language by default just as (ironically) the euro will be the currency by default throughout Europe (except in England).  And that provides for an interesting dichotomy – they know lots about us; we know little about them.

These thoughts stem from my conversation with Agnes.  She asked what my interests were in translation.  I prefaced my reply by saying that I am horrified at the literary provincialism in the English speaking world.  In both Britain and America there is little interest in reading authors from non-English speaking countries except for the ones who manage to win Nobel prizes.  I mention my experience in publishing the Armenian classic by Mahari – Burning Orchards – a brilliant novel that has been shamefully ignored.  I also tell her of the Visions of the City project which might be a focal point for a range of European authors and my fascination with Budapest during the Grand Epoch, the days when along with Vienna and Prague it seemed to me the most diverse and exciting place to be – outside of Paris, of course.  And what of her Budapest?

It’s clear from her response that her feelings are mixed.  At one point she wanted very much to leave, to escape from the rigid bureaucracies that made everything more difficult during the communist period – especially travel.  She wanted to study in America but that didn’t work out.  When she did first go on a month-long trip it was like seeing the world for the first time in colour – she spoke of it almost like Dorothy in the land of Oz. 

What was it that attracted her?  What memories did she bring back?  She said what struck her most  (like the young German woman I met on the train to Stuttgart) was how friendly people were.  But people are friendly here, too, I say.  Not in the same way, she tells me.  In America you can become best friends with someone on a bus and then never see them again for the rest of your life.  But in that moment they’ll tell you everything about themselves and the connection is strong.  And so is their positivity.   In Hungary people complain, tell you their misery, might not see you for years but will remain friends for life. 

People in East Germany, I reply, say they don’t miss communism but the sense of community that surrounded it.  In America community is fluid by design.  People come, people go – like on a train. 

Her love of America fascinates me.  It is something she’s retained all these years later – even after the collapse of the economies America promised to prop up in exchange for losing basic welfare rights like homes, jobs and health care.  

And what of Budapest now? I ask her.  It’s difficult, she says.  And things are getting worse.  The economy is in crisis.  There are no jobs and people have little hope.  For the first time since the fall of communism, the far right is gaining a voice in Parliament.  But the socialists who were in power till now have betrayed the people while fattening their wallets.  I don’t care if someone is a millionaire, she says, but if they are politicians and pretend to be working in the people’s interest and then become millionaires themselves - that I can’t abide. 

Agnes has two sons, one twelve and the other a few years older.  She’s clearly concerned about them – about their future in a country that has no hope – not that there is no hope for Hungary, it’s that hope for the future has dissipated.  It hasn’t vanished entirely but young people aren’t filled with excitement as her generation was in the 90s when Budapest was in full flower and dreams became real. 

But Eastern Europe has been through this all before – again and again – as armies, either martial or commercial, march in, colonise the place and then march out again.  That is why fatalism is in their blood.  It’s part of their historic survival mechanism.  

Night Train to Budapest

24 April 2010

The problem with taking a train at midnight in Munich is that the station cafes all close down by eleven and the waiting room closes at nine.  Curiously, the last of the cafes to shut its doors was Starbucks and, even more curiously, it was located adjacent to the track that the night train to Budapest was to leave from.  By the time I got there, the staff was cleaning up, preparing to make their get-away.  I was all coffeed out so I asked for a fruit drink.  The young woman whose command of English was good enough for Starbucks anywhere and probably better than those who work in Starbucks California, informed me apologetically that they had already cleaned the machine and all they could now serve was tea and coffee.  I chose tea – green with lemon grass – which sounds very Starbuckian and reminded me of the lovely young woman I knew many years ago who worked at my neighbourhood café and won the San Francisco Barista competition to the dismay of the macho Italians who hugely resented that she could make a better cappuccino because 1) she was a woman and 2) she didn’t have Italian lineage and 3) her café wasn’t located in North Beach.  I found out later that she had moved to Seattle where she helped start the Starbucks chain which she left after several years when she saw what her corporate masters had in mind for it.  The young woman in Munich who made my green tea with lemon grass (something the young woman in San Francisco - who’s now old - wouldn’t have done without questioning my motives even if they had green tea with lemon grass back then which they didn’t) looked nothing like the San Francisco barista except they were both blonde but at this time of night after a tiring journey where I had missed my connection and had to lumber through gargantuan stations pulling a blotted dinosaur and hobbling because my left foot was giving me problems, I was tired enough for my brain to make very peculiar connections. 

I had half hoped that the midnight train to Budapest would arrive early and open its doors to passengers who wanted to go to sleep.  That isn’t the way it works, however.  A train comes in, a train goes out; even at this hour the platforms are in constant use.  Except this one, platform 12, at the very edge of the station which only has a few people like me who have arrived early from other destinations and are waiting because there is no other place to go.  Most of them look like refugees from ex-countries like the former Yugoslavia – some of the bizarre types out of a Kusturica film.  An old man in particular had the hardened look of someone who has seen too many terrible things – his gaze darted nervously about from eyes set deeply in darkened sockets and, though it might have been interesting, I wondered what it would be like to share a confined space with him (and the more I considered this possibility, the more I thought I’d rather not).  When you travel alone, you do not choose your seat partners on a train.  You might be able to change your seat, but you can’t easily change your bed.

When the night train finally pulls in, after what seems like interminable waiting – and by now the air has turned cold – I am very happy to see its arrival even though this is certainly not one of those flash modern jobs like the breezy, light, aerodynamically sculptured models that had been gliding in and out the station over the course of the day.  This one is more a relic of the 50s – of the east before glasnost.  It is heavy, ungainly and solidly proletarian.  But I don’t want luxury, I just want a bed.

I’m welcomed aboard by an unsmiling Russian (who might well be Hungarian but looks to me like the pictures of those hefty mothers of the revolution who served the tea, cleaned the station and then went home to milk the cow.)  But in her own way she is charming if not solicitous – attentive with both a frown and a twinkle.  She shows me my cabin.  It’s both larger and smaller than I expected – roomy for one, cramped for two.  It also looks like it was designed by the people who made the Tribant or the Lada: everything serious steel and just barely workable.   She knows just a few words of English and is unhappy I can’t converse in her second language – which is German.  But a few words are all we need as most everything is self-explanatory. 

I wait to see who my room-mate will be and hope it’s not the gaunt and nervous man I had seen on the platform.  I have already staked my claim on the lower bunk – as the upper bunk is as high as the roof and the iron ladder to reach it, though heavy and upright, seems to me slightly unstable.  The minutes tick away.  No one comes.  I asked the attendant who popped in to make sure I have settled if the top bunk will be occupied.  She tells me that, yes, someone has reserved the space but whether it will be occupied depends on whether the person comes.  The train makes many stops on its way to Budapest.  If the person who reserved the space comes later, she will wake me.

I crawl into the narrow bed with, as per custom when you share the room with strangers, my clothes on.  I read a bit and glance out the gigantic window that runs almost from the floor nearly to the ceiling.  But it is dark – which is the problem with the night train.  You can look out the window at the passing view but you will see very little even if the moon is full.

So I curl up with a book and every time the train stops, I listen for the knock which never comes.  But I had a hard time sleeping, though I think I did drift off several times over the course of a very long night where twice I got up to pee (thankful I didn’t have to make my way down the dark, ungainly ladder).  Unfortunately the toilet down the corridor of my coach was bolted shut for some unknown reason (reasons on this train, I think, are rarely known) so I made my way to the adjoining car where a group of unhappy men were camped out in the passage way.  Stumbling over their luggage in order to find the toilet, I wondered what on earth they were doing there.  Certainly the train wasn’t full – there were barely fifty people on the platform by the time we left.  Perhaps they boarded later and were just travelling a few stops.  From here Midnight to Budapest seemed like a refugee train that was repatriating prisoners of war. 

In the early hours of the morning as the light melted through the darkness, I was able to see the passing scenery again.  I hadn’t pulled the shade as the night had been so dark but now I was wide awake and watched the rolling vista, thankful for the pathway to mental peace and calm. 

The scenery had changed overnight from boring flatlands of farms and pastures to one of hills and dales and lakes and forests.  The land here was green and fertile but the small villages that we passed looked poor and unkempt with ramshackle buildings that might have been in disrepair but probably were always like that. 

I cleaned up at the sink (the one touch of luxury in an otherwise barren cabin) and changed my clothes.  The attendant – who overnight transformed into someone both smiling and solicitous – brought me breakfast on a tray which was kind, I thought, even if it was inedible. 

We pulled into Keleti Station over an hour late because during the night the train had stopped in the middle of nowhere and remained, immobile, with everything including the terrible air-conditioning turned off.  It was about two in the morning.  A little after three we began moving again.  I thought we had broken down and were waiting for another relic from the ex-socialist republic to come rescue us.  But whatever happened it was either repaired or the engineer woke up and so we lumbered into Budapest, tired, a little worse for wear, but thankful to be near somewhere I could shower and have a bed of my own without waiting for intrusions.

Strangers on a Train

22 April 2010

The trains travelling east leave from Gare de l’Est.  It’s a stone’s throw from Gare du Nord, the station I’m more familiar with.  Compared to its bigger neighbour, Gare de l’Est is a citadel of calmness and serenity – that is to say it’s very low key – except, of course, for the perennial CRS police sporting their submachine guns.  Eventually, I suppose they blend into the background – though I’m not sure they ever would for me.  Their presence and, even more, the acceptance of their presence, is a strong statement that is both in your face and subliminal.  But if you can ignore them and the many gypsy women who are the most tenacious beggars I have ever come across, then the atmosphere is almost tranquil.  So there’s the contradiction of Paris in a nutshell – on one hand, the CRS parade around train stations brandishing machine guns while, on the other, the gypsies are free to harass tourists and are not rounded up (as yet).  One could call this tolerance with an iron fist.  Perhaps it’s in the French nature to balance repression with anarchy.  Some find this sort of duality appealing; for others it’s a constant headache.

I arrived at the station early so I would have time to suss out the situation there as the first leg of my journey is divided into two: Paris to Stuttgart and then Stuttgart to Munich.  To make my connections takes rather fine timing as the Munich train is due to leave only fifteen minutes after my arrival in Stuttgart.  I was told this was not a problem here – though it’s something I would never attempt in England.  However, since there is only one night train to Budapest, I must be in Munich by 10 PM.  So, as a safety precaution, I booked the earlier train to Stuttgart. 

The TGV is full – every seat is taken, so reservations are essential.  I am seated next to a young German woman who has been teaching in Nancy and now is applying for a job as a supervising librarian back home.  She, of course, speaks English very well and is keen to practice on me as (she thinks) her English isn’t that good - at least not as good as her French and Spanish.  She tells me not to worry about connections as here the railways see to their customer’s welfare.  I’m not sure what that means but I am willing to accept her assurances.  And I feel quite relaxed until I find out that the train is going to be ten minutes late.  One of the problems is that even if I take the later train from Stuttgart, I have seat reservations on the first.  I asked my seat mate about that and she replies that in Germany seat reservations aren’t required.  (That’s all well and good, I thought, but considering how crowded the trains are, a seat reservation would come in handy rather than catch as catch could.)

The TGV is fast and comfortable – perhaps not quite as sleek as the Eurostar, but certainly adequate.  Time slips by as I chat with my train friend about her trip to New York that she took independently a few years ago.  Quite brave of you, I tell her.  She is pleased I think she’s brave.  I ask what her impressions of New York were.  She loved it, she said.  It was an exciting city and she walked every inch of it from Central Park to the Bowery.  But she was curious about America.  Americans she found quite friendly – much friendlier than either French or Germans.  I thought that a gross generalisation and told her that she was quite friendly and she was a German.  Besides though Americans could be quite friendly, it’s not often that you could have an intelligent conversation on the train with them.  She asked about Obama and why I thought he was more popular in Europe than in America and why so many people were opposed to national health care.  I said that Obama probably could win another election in the States, but not by much of a margin.  It just seems that he’s unpopular because the opposition to him is very loud.  About health care, I said that it is curious how people could so easily work in ways that were against their own interests.  But many Americans have a misguided notion of what liberty and freedom are all about – or at least have a curious and convoluted notion of those terms they brandy about like shibboleths to ward off the demons.  Finally, she asked why I decided to live in England.  I told her that ‘decided’ is hardly the word I would use – more ‘ended up’.  People rarely decide things like that; rather it’s a combination of circumstances, some in their control and others not.  

She told me that she had quit her job teaching in Nancy and was staking everything on getting the librarian’s post even though there were eight over people being interviewed.  The requirements were high.  She needed to be fluent in four European languages and know about library systems throughout the world.  So she asked me about the British Library and I told her what I knew about it.

I could see she was a bit nervous, having staked so much on this position.  And I told her, whatever happens it would probably be for the best.  I’m not a fatalist but where jobs are concerned, if you don’t get a position it’s often because it’s not right for you.  Whether she believe that or not, it seemed to ease her mind.  She left the train after Strasbourg; I shook her hand and wished her well.  I thought she was quite a remarkable young woman – self possessed yet intellectually open.  But strangers on a train are often open with each other – they share a moment and then they’re gone. 

The search for Vel d'hiv

21 April 2010

Sometimes you learn more by not finding something you’re looking for than by finding it  – at least right away.  I wanted to visit the Vel d’hiv monument which I read was located on the Quai de Grenelle near the Eiffel Tower.  The Vel d’hiv, charming as it sounds, was actually the indoor cycling stadium (its real name is Velodrome d’hiver) that was used by the Vichy government as a temporary collection point for the Jews who had been rounded up prior to being shipped off to the death camps.  What is striking about this roundup is that it was enacted entirely by the French gendarmerie under the supervision of the Vichy government and, in particular, the head of the national police - René Bousque.  It was only in 1993 that Francois Mitterrand (who maintained a friendship with Bousque to the bitter end) commissioned a monument to be built near the site.  However, it wasn’t till 1995 that an official apology was given by Jacques Chirac.  In his speech of contrition he said, “France, home of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man, land of welcome and asylum, France committed that day the irreparable. Breaking its word, it delivered those it protected to their executioners.”  More than that, it delivered its citizens to the gas chambers. 

I’m not much interested in visiting sites of gruesome murders.  I’ve never been to Auschwitz, Dachau or Buchenwald nor do I intend to.  However, I’m glad they’ve not been bulldozed and ploughed under like many state sponsored crimes have been.  But Vel d’hiv is different.  The Germans have gone through their period of atonement.  Every German school child was told what the Nazi state had done in their parents’ name.  France, however, allowed the mythology of their heroic resistance to flourish while laying flowers each year at Petain’s grave.  René Bousque prospered under the Fourth Republic and never spent a night in prison.  The vast majority of French know nothing of Vel d’hiv – even less today then back in the 60s when Marcel Ophuls filmed his extraordinary documentary, The Sorrow and the Pity.

Like Ophuls, whose father fled Paris early enough to save himself, my father fled Paris as well – though as an infant in his mother’s arms during the First World War.  But my maternal grandmother’s family remained and though I know that a few survived I haven’t yet been able to trace them.  Were any held at Vel d’hiv, with just the clothes on their back and a small valise of last minute items thrown together after that terrible knock at the door? Clutching the hands of their terrified children, no one knew what would come next.  Perhaps we can at least be thankful that no one knew. 

Deciding to visit the Vel d’hiv memorial was, in a way, connecting to those of my family who disappeared without a trace.  Whether some of them were taken to Vel d’hiv, I will never find out.  But the heart of their community was ripped out so part of them died there as well.

It’s not on the tourist map.  In fact the velodrome itself burned down years ago.  But the memorial was built near to the site and I had seen pictures of the sculpture which even in two dimensions was moving and inspirational (it was created by a Polish artist whose own parents had fortunately survived the roundup.)

I had no address – just the  Quai de Grenelle near the Champs de Mar station.  But an important monument like that, I felt, would be easy to find. 

After walking a while along the embankment and seeing nothing in the distance that evoked any idea of a memorial, I stopped to ask one of the gardeners trimming a hedge.  But he shook his head.  There was no Jewish memorial here, he said.  And looking at me intently he told me – nothing either for the Algerians.  He might have been Algerian, himself, by his appearance.  I wondered if Chirac had ever apologised to them. 

He was quite insistent, the gardener.  And he worked there.  Wouldn’t he know of a memorial if there was one?  Then I began to wonder whether it had been moved.  Perhaps my information was out of date. 

On the street level below, I asked a man who ran a tourist kiosk, but he waved me away with the flick of his hand.  Further I asked a quick sketch artist, showing him the information I had written on my notepad.  He shrugged but suggested I ask someone in the official looking building behind him.

A sign said it was a centre for the research and documentation of youth.  I could hardly guess what that meant but upon entry it appeared to be a European project to establish a range of programmes for teenagers.  It was empty except for two middle aged women who were staffing the information desk.  I went up to them and repeated what I had told the others.

One of the women seemed to understand.  She knew Vel d’hiv and told me that it doesn’t exist anymore.  But why? I asked.  Because it burned down.  Ah, yes.  That I know.  But it’s the memorial to the Vel d’hiv roundup I’m looking for.  Memorial? she said.  Is there a memorial?  As far as she knew there was only a plaque where the building once stood.  And once a year, yes, there is a memorial. 

I left in despair and half thought of calling it quits.  This was my last day in Paris and I didn’t want to spend it all on a wild memorial chase.

But walking further down the street, heading to the Bir Hakem metro stop, I saw in the distance what looked like the top of a sculpture with a man sketching it.  Mostly it was hidden from view because the embankment was raised and the entrance at this point was blocked by a fence erected by workmen who were repairing the wall. 

Gaining entry meant walking about a hundred yards further and then circling around till I could find the path that led along the Quai.  And then I found it.  In fact there was, at this particular point, a sign saying what it was.  The man who I had seen sketching, however, wasn’t drawing the sculpture.  He was just using the plinth as a base to sit upon while he drew the Eiffel Tower.

I stayed there a while communing with spirits past and then took some photos on my digital camera which I brought back to the ladies behind the desk at the youth centre.  It exists, I said.  And it is something that your youth should know of.

20 April 2010

Pelouse Autorisee says the sign.  I’m in the Luxembourg Gardens because 1) it’s a sunny day and 2) I read that some of the parks in Paris are now wifi enabled and I thought what a lovely idea it would be to sit in the Luxembourg Gardens and write.  Not that I couldn’t have done it the old fashioned way – and many times I have.  But somehow Mr Netbook who I purchased especially for this trip has an insistent idea that it has become my pen, notebook and sketchpad combined and I’m going along with it – for a while anyway. 

But first things first.  Am I not in Paris?  The same Paris where it is strictly forbidden to walk on the grass let alone sit?  As a young man I came here and enjoyed the anarchic game of sitting on the grass along with a multitude of Parisians of all ages until the gendarmes came and swept us off the pelouse, then they left and we all went back onto the grass until the next wave and so on.  It was one of those lovely cat and mouse games that Parisians were (and are) so proud of.  So along comes the Ken Livingstone of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, who not only facilitates free internet access in the parks but also rescinds the law forbidding people to walk on the grass.  What fun is that?  (I had written an entire children’s book based on that premise.  Now what am I going to do?)     

Once it became legal to sit on the grass with a sign that declares it such everyone is doing it.  In fact entire classes of children are picnicking on the green.  So there’s hardly a space to sit.  When it was illegal, plenty of people sat on the grass but there was always room.  Now it’s legal and there is no room.  What does that tell us? 

Actually, I did find a little plot as lunch was coming to an end and the children were packed up and marched off, hand in hand, to indoor school.  So I found a place, sat down in the glorious sun, took out Mr Netbook and turned it on – or tried to turn it on, that is.  Nothing happened.   I think the gods are trying to tell me something.  But whatever it is, I cannot hear.  Bloody gods.  Bloody Monsieur Delanoe.  Bloody Mr. Netbook. 

Then I think, it serves me right.  Technology just gets in the way of good sense – and probably good writing.  What were pens and paper invented for anyway?  I will just go to a stationary shop and buy a proper notebook and that will be that.  Except I’m a little disappointed.  I bought the netbook especially for this trip and the whole idea was being multimedia and being able to combine words and photos and stuff into an amazing blog (whatever that is and why would anybody read it – but that’s another story, isn’t it?)  So, yes, I’m a little disappointed.  Why didn’t it turn on?  Maybe the battery is dead, I thought.  But I used it last night plugged in, so the battery should be fully charged.  It has now become an intriguing mystery.  The reason I bought this thing a month before leaving was to give myself a chance to break it in and get used to it  I read somewhere that if a computer is wonky you usually find out in a matter of days.  If you use it for a month without problems, it’s probably OK.  Except then there was the Hungarian who swabbed it at the train station when I left London – so he’s probably to blame.  Most likely there was something in that noxious stuff he spewed over the keyboard that created more problems than the full stop not working anymore unless you stomp down on the full stop key.  He was a sweet young man but sweet young men have been known to do terrible things  Now I’m so pissed off I decide to go back to my studio to see if Netbook works when it’s plugged in and if it’s only that the battery is wonky.  So I take the RER from Luxembourg to the Gare du Nord which is the quickest way home (a term I used advisedly). 

The RER is not the Metro – though within Paris you can use the same ticket.  It is somewhere between a commuter train running workers into the central city from the suburbs and a (supposedly) inner city rapid transit system.  The problem is that it doesn’t go many places and you have to know the entire system of tunnels and connecting labyrinths – otherwise it’s probably faster taking the Metro.  But the Luxembourg Gardens are only serviced by the RER so, if you’re going from the Gare du Nord, it makes sense to take it. 

However, it does not make sense taking the RER to the Gare du Nord unless you are a masochist or an intrepid explorer or both (usually they are one and the same).  I’ll tell you why.  But first …

Northwest Paris is black both in the British sense of everyone being black except blue eyed, blond(e)s and in the American sense of people whose immediate ancestors originated in Africa.  The RER line B is a fascinating social anthropological model of what’s happened to metropolitan Paris.  If you get on at Gare du Nord, you could probably count the number of pale white faces on one hand (I don’t include myself in that category).  But after Les Halles, you could count the number of black faces on the same hand and come up with change.  If you closed your eyes when you got on and then open them ten minutes later, the car you’re travelling on would be just as crowded but it would seem as if a digital trick had been played and a positive print had been turned into a negative (or the other way around). 

Paris has always been a city of immigrants.  If you’re travelling east to west, there’s not much further you could go without falling into the sea.  So, in that sense, France is like California.  Similar in its absorption but different.  You don’t really find black ghettos in Paris like you do in the inner cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco (the banlieu is different).  But there is a curious dividing line that seems to separate the French-French from the immigrant French speakers – though I’m not really sure what or who the French-French are (and France is probably not that sure either).  During WWII the Vichy government tried to make a distinction between the native French Jews and the immigrant Jews, suggesting that it was the later who should be rounded up and sent to the gas chambers.  But that broke down when it became unclear who actually was an immigrant and how far back you were prepared to travel.  Also a good many French-French are swarthy enough to fit into the British definition of ‘black’ so I think we’re getting into angels on pins territory here.  The point I’m making, I fear, was lost several sentences back.  It does have something to do with travelling on the RER, however.

I was going to say why it was more difficult taking line B back to Gare du Nord.  The reason has to do with the subterranean world of that particular station which ranks with Les Halles-Chatelet as the most infuriating rabbit warren in which to take a wrong turn this side of Lewis Carroll.  Following the signs that say ‘sortie’ does absolutely no good.  You must know exactly which sortie you want and if you don’t then you might as well sit down and wait for the CRS police armed with submachine guns to sweep you up in their net for at least then you might find the light of day without wearing out a pair of perfectly good shoes in the process.  I blithely figured one sortie was as good as another.  It isn’t.  And I know Paris – sort of.  But when I was eventually spewed out into the light of day, I had no idea in the world where I was.  Nor did anyone I asked.  Because no one spoke either French or English.  Wherever it was, Gare du Nord was nowhere in sight.  I must have walked for thirty minutes before I could find someone to ask the directions to Rue Magenta.  By then I was suffering from dehydration.  My feet were as swollen as they would have been after a forced march through the Sahara. 

I did make it back eventually to my cosy little nest that seemed very cosy indeed after this unwanted adventure. 

I plugged my netbook in and it worked.  So did the battery.  What do you say about that Monsieur Delanoe? 

Day 1 - Departure and Arrival

19 April 2010

The journey begins!  We are gliding out of St Pancras after a much easier boarding than I had expected since all the news has been about the many hundreds –if not thousands – of people who were stuck because of the cancellation of their flights due to the volcanic eruption in Iceland.  Of course the train is filled to capacity as any spare seats were quickly sold to those multitudes queued up outside the ticket office.  Even so, an announcement as we left said that as this was a direct train to Paris, anyone was free to exchange their seat for an empty one.  Since there are no empty seats in our carriage, that isn’t an option.  Never mind.  We’re off!  And as adventures go, this one had a rather shaky start as, over the last few days, the news had been full of frenzied travel stories – 150 or 200,000 Brits stuck around the world trying desperately to get back to their families, their jobs, or just because home was beckoning and they were tired.  Because chaos was in the air, that was the expectation.  But maybe the chaos had been played out in great orgiastic waves over the prior days so people were now resigned to their fate whatever it was

St Pancras was not the frantic scene of displaced travellers that I thought would await me.  In fact, there was a certain serenity upstairs where I had gone to photograph once more the Brief Encounter statue and to have a drink while I waited for my hour to cometh.  I had pictured (in my minds eye) starting this journey with a last drink at Carluccios where their outdoor seating juts up against the statue; but it was filled with their lunchtime crown.  Curiously, the pub on the other side of the statue, which had just as nice a view of the Eurostar boarding platform, was almost empty.  And since I only wanted a beer, it suited me fine.  So my last drink was at Betjeman’s, a fine writerly name for an unpretentious pub, rather than the trendy Carluccio’s which trades on its Italian ambiance and inflated prices while the Betjeman is laid-back British (no one bothers to come and take my order so I have to go inside to collect my drink from the bar).

After reading the rest of the Guardian (all about travel insanity and Nick Clegg – not that the two are related, though they might be) and taking some photos and film clips of the Eurostar platform just within reach but separated by a translucent barrier – I go back down to the main rotunda where the International waiting room is located.  I’m an hour early but it’s just as well to go inside as I’m somewhat fearful that the crowd will descend and I don’t want to be rushed or hurried.  Besides, I’ve printed out my ticket on the computer and there’s a wonky smudge that’s not exactly a barcode but seems to serve the same function. You’re supposed to scan it at the gate to allow entry – but I don’t believe it will work because it looks more like a pigeon dropping than a proper bar code sort of thing.  Fortunately there’s an attendant outside the automatic gate who takes it from me and scans it herself.  And, lo and behold, it does let me in.  Then on to the luggage inspection where I manage to lift the dinosaur of a bag (more on this later) up to the conveyor belt without rupturing anything organic.  Nothing whistles or buzzes when I go through the body scanner so I think I’m in the clear – but, no, I am waved aside by a pleasant young man who apologetically tells me that I’ll have to open my bag for inspection.  If he wasn’t so nice, I would have considered it a bad omen but he’s friendly and chatty and when he asks me where I’m headed and I tell him that Hungary is one of my destinations, he perks up saying that he’s from Hungary himself and have I been there before?  And when I say not since 1970, he informs me that things have changed somewhat since then.  He says this while swabbing my computer keyboard for traces of explosives (and I suddenly understand why I was pulled over because you’re supposed to take your computer out of your bag for the xray machine to scan and I hadn’t).  As those things go, it was fairly good natured and since I was so early there wasn’t any concern about delay.  The main thing was repacking my bag and making sure everything was put back inside – which is always difficult when there’s a queue of people behind.  It went smoothly though and then going through passport control I found myself in the waiting room and lo and behold there was a long counter with powerpoints and notices of free internet connection.  I was happy to take advantage of the opportunity and again unpacked my computer and hooked up to the St Pancras public wifi network only to find that, yes, I could get onto the Internet, and, yes, I could get into

Google mail but, no, I couldn’t open any of the messages even though I was still connected.   It was quite frustrating as I could see there was one from Olivier and I was waiting for his response to see if he would meet me at the station.  After several tries I gave up, thinking that since I hadn’t expected I’d be able to connect there really wasn’t any loss.  So, instead, I walked over to the waiting room café and ordered a beer.

As I said, it was an anticlimactic departure.  After all the hoopla of the  exploding volcano and the similar eruption in the  election campaign following the first debate when Nick Clegg suddenly became the British Obama, my leaving in a atmosphere where everyone else was trying to get home seemed like plunging into the eye of a tornado.  But now it’s happened I’m feeling quite relaxed about whatever lies in store.  I dust off my antennae to enable my sensors again.  There is a shift going on that has yet to be analyzed – if it ever will.  And I want to record this remarkable time – if not for posterity at least for myself. Whatever is happening, it’s making people reconsider the world they live in.  Everyone knows there is something unusual taking place, socially, economically, spiritually.  How this will affect people’s daily lives is not at all clear.  But they know change is upon them – that’s why they are so eager for it.  If they didn’t think it was happening or if they didn’t think it was possible, they would simply go on the way they did for it’s both easier and more comfortable to allow the status quo to continue even if it’s boring, even if it hurts.  But when change is in the air, you don’t need a weather reporter to say which way the wind blows.

There is very little to distinguish one side of the tunnel from the other -  the same flatness, the same scraggly trees, the same fields of hesitant green, the same concrete highways, the same boxy warehouses of corrugated steel.  But every once in a while on this side of the tunnel you see something Gallic - a church spire perhaps or a rustic farmhouse - but you have to look closely for we’re in the Eurozone of Sameocracy.  I want to see a Vache qui Rit; instead there’s just miles and miles of pylons and connecting wires to electrify this overcast world.

The train ride to Paris is smooth, quick and uneventful – more like a proper commuter run than the start of an International Adventure.  When Eurostar works well, it works very well.  When it doesn’t, there’s hell to pay.

We sail into Gare du Nord like a sleek successor to a glamorous coal-fired queen.  I let people off before me so I can descend without hurry, gracefully (if you can tug a dinosaur that way).  So I am the last one off to walk the very long platform that leads to the hurly-burly circus-like world of this outlandish terminus.  It’s an entry into delightful, head spinning anarchy after a quiet transition through the euro birth canal.  And in the distance I am pleased to see my old friend has come to greet me.    

Steam – the grand old stations with great, arched ceilings reaching high into the sky now provide cover for trains that are electrified and, though we perhaps breathe easier, the romance has slipped a notch as the billows of mist from the iron beasts chugging in and out the station oozing viscous oil (like ersatz sweat and blood) provided a veil of mystery through a soft, gauzy lens. Electricity just isn’t the same; it might be clean but instead of the wonderful hiss from the release of pent-up boilers - a universal language of power that could take us over the highest mountain top - all we have now is vibration and buzz. 

But the engines themselves are sleek enough.  The aerodynamic noses speak of jet propelled speed rather than the snubbed and sooty frontage of the ancient black beauties and their mighty wheels that could get you there but slower with a hypnotic rhythm now banished in the ultra-modern smoothness of an age that requires things be fast and faster in a world shrunk in size by the terrible aeroplane.  Yet despite all this maudlin reminiscence by an aging man grasping at the lingering images of his youth, the romance of the rails still persists in the form of a monument to Brief Encounter in the superbly refurbished St Pancras International Train Station.