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He inquired if Blatand, my name, was English, and, resisting the urge to say yes, I admitted that I was from Copenhagen. Turning away from the building, I told him I was calling about the ad I was convinced it had been there for months. “Clarisse has seen fit to move the telephone yet again,” he went on, “thence my difficulty in answering it sooner.” His French, ponderous and antiquated, was straight out of the Littré. An open window in the middle of winter? I was counting off squares when, on the ninth ring, a man finally answered, introducing himself as Raoul de Gadbois.
#DARKROOM BOOTH LAYER LOCKED WHEN NOT LOCKED WINDOWS#
Near the top, I noticed a solitary blind eye, one of the windows failing to reflect back the sun’s dying rays. I could see my residence hall from the booth, and I tried to find Fumiko’s room among the tiny mirrored squares, her last words to me- your voice, your voice, your voice-echoing in my head. I was, if nothing else, a modest dreamer.Īt a telephone booth, I dialled the number. It was grand and impressive, but not quite the Champs-Élysées. The Grande Armée was the B side of the Champs-Élysées, radiating from the opposite edge of the Place de l’Étoile. Closing my eyes, I imagined myself earning two thousand euros a month, sitting in the back seat of a taxi, Fumiko next to me, as we cruised down the Avenue de la Grande Armée. One of the beggars making the rounds growled when I didn’t drop anything into his grubby outstretched hand. On the way home, I pictured my employer-to-be introducing me to other colleagues-i.e., hypothetical physicists of theoretical physics, in need of a translator. I checked to see if anyone was watching, then tore off the piece of paper. Yet the prospect of translating something-of not having to churn out anything in the way of original thought-appealed to me.
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10 euros / page.” Since abandoning my dissertation, I’d earned what money I could by giving private English lessons to French high-school students, teaching unruly adolescents how to pronounce their “h”s and haggling with their stingy parents over my hourly rate. Theoretical physicist seeks Anglophone to translate treatise. Among ads for au-pair girls and cheap health insurance was a typewritten note pockmarked with unevenly aligned letters: “Urgent. The benches were empty, no one waiting to see their thesis director. I walked past Philosophie, Histoire, Littérature Française, stopping at Littérature Générale et Comparée, my former department.
In the snack bar, empty white plastic cups stained with coffee littered the countertop. The marble-floored corridors were unheated. Students loitered in groups in the main courtyard, bulky scarves wound elegantly around their necks. The guard at the entrance let me through, barely glancing at my expired identification card. Eventually, I wandered into the Sorbonne. Because of the heat from the subway tunnels, the nearby trees hadn’t yet lost their leaves and the air smelled of mimosa and chestnut, even though winter was well under way. After getting off at Saint-Michel, I lingered a few moments at the station entrance. It wasn’t yet evening, and the Métro was abnormally quiet: a lull between rush hours. I decided to take the air, visit the Latin Quarter. Then I heard her say, “ J’ai froid”-“I’m cold.” Or it could have been “ Ta voix”-“Your voice.” The fact that so many French words rhymed with each other, coupled with Fumiko’s difficulties in pronouncing them, resulted in frequent misunderstandings between us. As I walked away without knocking, I could almost hear my father’s voice in my head.Īnother long silence. There was an expression my father sometimes used, back in Denmark, kæreste sorg-sweetheart sorrow-to describe the sadness one feels at the thought of a love affair nearing its end. Fumiko had locked herself up before, though she always emerged from her self-confinement after a night or two. The last thing I wanted was to get deported.
My student identification card, along with my student visa, had expired a long time ago. I was an illegal resident of the Cité-U-a crumbling twelve-story dormitory named for a dead postwar French writer I had never read. On the third day, I went to see the superintendent I got as far as his door when it occurred to me that I could be making a terrible mistake. She lived three doors away, coming and going as she pleased, and it took a whole day for me to notice that anything was amiss. One minute she was sitting on my bed the next minute she wasn’t. No amount of pleading or bargaining seemed to sway her resolve not to come out.