Tuesday 9 novembre
[letter]
Madame Degen has just appeared at my door with a hesitant beam and a
scrap of blue: "I thought I'd better bring this right up to you,"
she said, and I very nearly hugged her because it's was the letter I've
been waiting for and grumbling about: every morning I've been hanging around
waiting to see if the mail will arrive and every evening I've felt around
on the stairs in the dark to see if there are any letters on the eighth
step where Madame Degen usually puts them.
I particularly enjoyed the evening you took all the furniture to Slave
Lake - it's easy to imagine the excitement and the furor when it all arrived.
How typical of Uncle Bill to go straight to the record player (and, I imagine,
stick to it while Auntie rocked and Esther organized everything else with
Ruthie smiling and smiling and Nathan sitting on everything at once - and
Uncle firing a word of wisdom about furniture arrangement in general between
records, totally ignored by Esther who has her own ideas about where things
should go. Do I have it right? I see it very vividly. And I can hear
the exact tone of Uncle's voice too.
About the KK news service [Konrad Klan, must be] I would certainly like
to hear from everyone, but I cannot contribute myself because I haven't
postage even for letters to Olivia.
I owe both Father and Judy some money, quite a lot! But until the loan
comes through I can't pay it. If it doesn't come soon I'll get a job, which
wouldn't be at all unpleasant because it would be a quick way to learn French
at any rate.
Paul - there's a type of car here which I would dearly like to bring
home for you: it's a big black animal, huge, heavy, wide and low as the
bottom half of a bus sliced in half. The fenders are especially enormous
and the interior is barn-sized. Férdinand tells me it's a Citroën
with the motor turning the front end wheels rather than the back. He also
says that it holds the road superbly - it should, it's an elephant - and
that one can buy them here as cheaply as 500 francs. I find them very appealing
because they are "bourgeois jusqu'aux ongles" - bourgeois to the
fingertips.
In yesterday morning's class I found myself sitting beside a boy with
swarthy skin, very fine features and crisp black hair - Abdullah, whose
father is the Minister of Finance of Arabia.
I promised last time to tell you about Frédéric Conrad:
he's going to be a very good and interesting friend. He says he is thirty
seven but he looks older, with the thin sharp face and large clear eyes
of my imagined Sherlock Holmes - he is, in fact, the archetypal image
of Sherlock Holmes because he is very tall and thin, with long thin fingers
and large bones, a high forehead (receding hairline), a ridgy nose, high
cheekbones, and a very delicate mouth. His eyes are his most remarkable
feature because they are very straightforward and intelligent. His personality
is many contradictory things: both cunning and childlike, both tough-minded
and incredibly generous. Although he enjoys simple things as much as any
child, he is without most of the illusions that nearly all adults I know
wrap themselves up in. His understanding of human nature amazes me as much
as his sympathy for the people he understands too well. And - this I'll
admit is one of his most charming characteristics - he likes me for all
the right reasons!
He tells stories very well and doubtlessly he exaggerates a little, but
even without exaggerations his life has been very interesting. To begin
with, his ancestors were Huguenots, early French Protestants persecuted
by the Catholics. His parents lived in Germany from the time shortly after
his birth, however, and he speaks only German. His family was extremely
poor and he left school at sixteen to go to work. Then at seventeen the
war took care of his education: he was in Hitler's Luftwaffe until, when
the war was nearly over, he was captured by the Canadian forces and held
prisoner on an island off the coast of Germany. Among the work the prisoners
had to do was the netting and dismantling of the mines which floated into
the area just off the German coasts - extremely dangerous work. To supplement
their diet the prisoners dug a sort of shellfish and, with 'sea roses' they
cultivated and ground to a paste, made a gourmet special of the mussels
baked in a shell of dough.
One day, however, Frédéric decided he was fed up with risking
his skin by rescuing mines, so he ate a whole lot of the mussels - caught
in July, one of the months in which the shellfish spawn and are poisonous.
His comrades assured him that he would be very sick but that they would
call a doctor for him in time to prevent his dying. It all happened according
to plan and he was transferred to a hospital in Germany proper, locked in
but unguarded, taken care of by German personnel who had more sympathy for
him than for his Canadian captors. As a result, as soon as he was strong
enough, he escaped through the window and fled, traveling only at night
and eating only the sugar beets left in the fields. After several weeks
he reached his home town and lived in hiding there until he managed to get
some false papers. The war was over, the country was devastated, no one
had any money and there were no jobs. He and his brother set out to seek
their fortunes, first by hitchhiking about Germany and France picking up
jobs wherever they could, accepting a meal as payment. Then one day they
came upon a man with a truck, stalled in the road, trying to fix his engine.
At that time petrol was extremely scarce and many people had converted their
trucks to steam by building a wood-burning steam engine on top of the cab
and stopping every once in a while to pick up fuel in a forest. After he
and his brother had helped the man, the German, formerly a farmer, told
them he could give them both jobs if they were willing to work for food
and lodging and whatever else he could spare. They were glad for the offer,
stayed on with the man, and eventually bought the truck from him. With the
truck they set out again, traveling as far as the Netherlands and Austria.
When they met refugees carrying all their possessions on their back or on
crude sledges they transported the belongings for the refugee families,
for payment in jewelry or watches or whatever the refugees could manage.
Eventually the brother married into a wealthy industrial family and now
commutes to New York every week.
But Frédéric's luck was running the other direction. About
six years ago he met a young German girl, eighteen years old, pregnant by
an American, a GI, but unmarried, full of high spirits and very pretty.
He fell in love with her, paid her medical expenses, bought her a fur coat
and himself an expensive car, and got himself badly in debt in the process:
he managed to pay the bank by selling most of his property, but because
of the many private debts he had and couldn't pay, he fled Germany for France.
Not long afterwards the girl, whom he intended to marry, ran away to Germany
with a boyfriend, in his car, which contained about $2000 in savings; worse,
he discovered that she and the boyfriend had been using his car for a marijuana
smuggling operation over the border from Germany to France. ("Den Jung
hette ich irh erlaubt; ich war verliebt bis über die Ohren. Aber noch
dieses ...") So there he was in Strasbourg with twenty francs in his
pocket and his car and money gone. He was 36 - hardly the time for starting
over. And exiled from Germany once more, not only by his debts now, but
by the gossip and scandal mongerings of his old friends and his family.
At the present Frédéric is building up a business for himself,
one he invented by himself and has tailored to his need for freedom and
his love of travel: called Euro-Contact, it is an agency for making contacts
between various countries. For instance, if a German firm needs a French-speaking
agent to travel to France, Frédéric looks for the Frenchman
and arranges the rendezvous, for a fee if the deal goes through. He's a
glorified middleman with contacts all over. (As a result he can tell interesting
tales about Strasbourg too, both underground and overground.)
He lives in a tiny room five stories above a bake shop where he eats
with the family. He renovated the room himself and so gets it very cheaply:
like me, he's a frustrated architect - interior decorator. We understand
each other well - or seem to - and are mutually useful since he can take
me with him when he travels about the region on business (he loves castles,
woods, and the French villages and countryside as much as I do and likes
to have appreciative company) and give me a good meal in a Strasbourg débit
once in a while; in return, I can help him with his English correspondence.
He's witty, wise, and excellent company. You'll hear more -
But now there's room only for un tres petit mot about my other very special
friend, Férdinand, about whom you've heard before: from the Cote
d'Ivoire in Africa, he has 'burning' black eyes and a little curly black
beard, and like most Africans, is built compactly but very sinuously. Unlike
most Americans, Frenchmen, etc, he loves many things and his personality
in total is as direct as his enjoyment of jazz blues and bread and butter,
and his mother! And he's unbelievably poor - clothes full of holes - a part
time job in a garage to keep him alive and he wants to take me to a movie
on Saturday. I am amazed by my life!
Tuesday 9 novembre
[letter]
I've just posted a very fat letter to you but haven't run out of words
yet - and while I was fussing around finding the paper and getting ready
to continue my soup boiled over. The French word for absent minded is distrait
and which also means abstract. This happens to me all the time - last time
it was a pot of apples that burned black and filled the house with smoke
while I was blithely taking a bath. I remember Father saying, last fall
when I was home, that he could understand my letting a pot burn because
I had things like France to think about, but now I'm here and I'm
still letting everything burn onto the bottom!
A few snippets of news:
I'm taking Spanish in night courses, with instruction given in French,
learning two foreign languages at once while most of the class (very diverse,
several older men and women and one or two couples) can only learn one.
The professor is a lovely and very womanly Spaniard.
Pierre, the Cameroonian from the room next door, is learning a little
English from me in return for his help with my French.
Nicole says she is going to invite me for a weekend (she lives in a small
town near here) sometime before Christmas.
Last night, coming home on my bicycle in the dark and the fog, my light
stopped working and I who hardly ever see a policeman was stopped by seven.
All of them reacted differently. One was hugely amused by my efforts to
speak French to him and even more amused by the fact that I hadn't ducked
into an alley when I saw him. "You don't avoid policemen in Canada,
then?" he said, and winked, and told me I should walk my bicycle until
I was out of sight. "And if you turn the next corner, you'll be out
of sight sooner," he added as I walked away. The policeman nearer to
Neuhof wasn't quite so young or quite so French - he had a very German accent
and a very earnest manner. He didn't know what to do with me so he kept
looking at my identity cards with his flashlight and saying "Hm, canadienne,
hmm." Then he took me to two other police, thrust my cards at me after
looking at them once more, and left me with them. Then they demanded
my cards, asked me how old I was, and told me to walk the rest of the way
home. (I walked to the next corner.)
I dream about Joyce Detweiler often. Her death was a kind of underground
shock to me both because I respected her very much, and admired her to the
point of hero worship, and because I identify her with my future self: child
psychologist, single, a little eccentric but amazed by life. Once I dreamed
I was looking at the pictures she had taken throughout her life, and another
time I dreamt she was telling me very kindly that I really must take care
of myself or I would get tuberculosis! The implications of that last one
are pretty obvious: in identifying with her I identify with her death as
well. The human psyche is so full of nuances - I can't see 'my work' ever
becoming either tedious or academic - future work that is, to be tackled
seriously after this bit of luxury learning.
The French are sentimental without embarrassment, especially the public
French. No American newscaster or journalist would dare come up with the
things I read and hear every day in France. I like it but I'm still a little
embarrassed by the fact that I like it. My American upbringing leaves a
certain aftertaste which spoils some of the French sugar and jam - but in
many ways France is beginning to seem much more comfortable. I'm beginning
to like it and want to understand it. Everything here, even the small, ugly
houses on the way home to Neuhof, seems surrounded by echoes. When I drive
back at night and the streets are empty, it isn't difficult to visualize
these houses, looking the same, during the war and during the German occupations.
Alsace is a province with a great deal of history and a more varied history
than almost any - besides Ile de Cité in Paris.
I find that if I take two old tea bags, saved from some afternoon's tea-date,
and boil them violently in a small saucepan, the room is filled with a wonderful
smell of roast chicken.
I have a museum card, which allows me to visit all of Strasbourg's six
museums as often as I like, for 1 franc. Ordinarily I would pay 2F50 for
each visit, but this is 20¢ for the year. A student can go to a movie
for 30¢, go to concerts for 40¢ to a dollar in rare cases like
Rubenstein. The usual price of a good concert is 80¢. And here is me
who has yet to go to one! I do have a large red poster announcing the Brandenberg
Concertos up on my wall tho'.
A few nights ago Peter and I had coffee together after a meal and for
once started to talk torrents - afterwards Peter said very snidely-but-friendlily,
"I don't know what happened: we had a marvelous conversation."
And it all started from your two last letters Mother, which I lent him to
read. Now he's being unfriendly again, I don't know what sort of cycle his
moods are on. I'm beginning to think he should get married and have five
kids to tyrannize and forget about being bitter because the world's not
what he thinks it should be.
vendredi, le 12 novembre
[journal]
Money has become a problem - I'm down to my last three francs and have
finished my meal tickets, and in four days the rent is due. It is becoming
colder and colder: I have neither boots nor a winter coat and certainly
can't afford bus tickets.
Today, in a wind that worried at my bones "jusqu'aux os," I
looked for jobs with Ferdinand - feeling sorry for myself because of the
cold and a fatigue which is my own fault because I sat playing metaphysics
with Peter and Rick-from-the-Bronx until 12:30. Ferdinand was alternately
solicitous and fâché because I would not borrow a ticket from
him - but "Je suis content" when I agreed to work 'the system'
with him at FEC. The goodness and faithfulness of Ferdinand are surprising
and touching.
And I have work! All day Monday and Tuesday, part-mornings Wednesday
and Friday, for at least 55 francs a week. I can go to operas and plays!
Movies! Concerts! Buy my own coffee, have a tranche of pastry, and
an apple once in every few days! Write letters! Buy some new green stockings!
I may even be washing dishes 6 nights a week at the dirty black restaurante
chinois!
Friday
The letter from Mme Heimburger (after seeing Belle des Nuits with
Richard and riding out along the Rhine with him on his scooter) saying "Je
regrette qu'il me faut vous decevoir ..."
Saturday 13 novembre
[letter]
It took me several minutes to focus on your letter when it arrived -
laid out dramatically on the napkin by Madame D - on the breakfast tray
this morning. In fact Madame D had to tell me twice, "J'ai apporté
ton courier," before I understood what she meant and pousse-d
the little cri she was expecting.
With your letter was the one I've been waiting for three weeks now, the
answer to my Canada Student Loans application.
- But before I destroy your suspense I'll tell you another story. I have
three centimes left - three fifths of one cent. I'm out of meal tickets.
My rent is due on Tuesday, 120 francs. To mail this letter I need 65 centimes.
It's begun to snow today and I haven't any boots. My green stockings are
falling apart. At the end of the month I'll owe 30 francs more for breakfasts.
I haven't bought any books yet, and haven't even an exercise book to make
notes in.
- And my letter from Mr Passey of the Canada Student Loans Plan says
"Dear Miss Epp: From the information provided you are not a resident
of Ontario. You should therefore apply to the appropriate authority in your
own Province, which is ..."
I hope you're laughing because I am - after the first moment's worth
of cursing both Mr Passey and bureaucracy in general. The timing of the
letter's arrival is altogether perfect. It is balanced on three weeks' expectation
and one week's desperation.
- But, like most grasshoppers who fiddle while the sun shines instead
of saving up for winter - and who insist on going to France when they haven't
any money - I have a good grasshopper-sympathetic angel who has been taking
care of me. First it was the twenty five dollars Uncle Harveydyck gave me,
officially for looking after the three little Dycks when they went to Washington
but actually as friendly much-appreciated charity. Then the angel found
me 8 rue des hirondelles. Then, in front of the monkey cage at the zoo,
it sent me Frédéric Conrad. (And in the meantime it was arranging
a few other good-and-true friends.) Then it caused me to pay 43 francs too
much to the authorities here, so that I still have the 43 francs - which
in grasshopper manner I'd have spent weeks ago - coming to me. And best
of all, yesterday it sent me a job looking after a professoresse's two small
daughters for 22 hours a week in an arrangement which not only gives me
several meals, but which also provides me with enough money for all my expenses
while leaving me time to go to school. The professor speaks exquisite, clear
French as well, giving me the bonus of a constant good example. Besides
that job I may have a short term job washing dishes two hours a night in
a French Chinese café - an experience I don't want to miss.
In the meantime, before I start my job as garde d'enfants with Madame
Heimburger, I'm eating well under the 'system' with Ferdinand who's turned
out to be an exceptionally good-and-true.
It is Saturday afternoon and I've just done all my laundry in the bath
water and am drying it on top of the oil stove. As soon as I smell the scorching
I know it's dry and take it off; better than an automatic dryer with a buzzer
and just as fast. And I've discovered a way to take showers for free whenever
I like to. If I sneak up the back stairs of Gallia, the woman's residence
here, I can take a shower in their shower rooms and sneak back out in peace.
And for 7 francs I can swim all year as often as I like in the Municipal
Baths (yes there's at least one bathhouse in every town, where you can take
baths or swim or have a massage and a manicure, all in the Roman style of
several centuries BC. Even the architecture is Roman!)
I must finish telling you about Ferdinand. He's astonishingly
poor: his room costs him 50 francs plus heating and electricity, per month.
That is about ten dollars, or a few cents more. He eats at student restaurants
at 26¢ per meal or buys a bit of bread and coffee for other meals -
butter is for the real occasions when I come to see him on a Sunday afternoon
and we feast on a 10¢ package of soup I've brought, with bread and
butter and a little sweet vermouth from a bottle he's hoarded for a month.
[Cinzano Rosso] We both enjoy these feasts enormously - we 'relish' them.
Sometimes we even have a candle stub!
His room, in spite of its meagerness and cheapness, is quite large and
he keeps it very clean. He got it cheaply because when he came it was uninhabitable,
a hole. But he papered it and scrubbed it and furnished it with various
sizes of boxes, and now it's very nice. His one luxury, and really his only
luxury, is his record player (connected to an old cheap radio for stereo
effect) and his collection of jazz and blues records. The covers of all
his records are tacked up on the walls together with clippings of Dr Schweitzer,
of photographs he likes, one or two cartoons and postcards - like me, he
has a museum curator's instinct which makes him create a sort of exposition
of his life on his walls.
He has very few clothes - I've seen about two sets - and they are in
a very motley state because the French laundromats tear holes in them. And
he patches all of them, no matter what color, with thick white thread. In
spite of - or because of, in his case it's possible - all this poverty,
he is a wonderfully joyous person. He dances to his records, has a tiny
glass of cognac on Sundays, makes enough money in the garage where he works
to pay his rent and have three meals a day, works until midnight every day
on his beloved mathematics, puts two lumps of sugar into his coffee,
argues African politics with swarms of friends (I keep meeting new ones
- he calls them all, not amis, but frères), laughs
at me when I stare into pastry shop windows, is offended when I refuse to
borrow meal tickets from him, and thinks he's rich! (He is homesick for
the sun though.) Tomorrow night we have a date - to watch television together
at the centre for Protestant students, free.
It's snowing today, mushy big flakes that fall in sticky piles on the
evergreen branches, outside my north window. It's beautiful but I'm glad
it won't stay long.
Paul, there is another automotive curiosity here that I've been wanting
to tell you about. Also made by Citroen, it is a beetle-backed tin can,
'unlined,' with just the tin and the seams to be seen from the inside, very
humped with a raised back end that makes it look like an insect when it
has just landed, "Schwanzchen in der höh." It's called a
Deux Chevaux, a "two horses," which means approximately that its
horsepower is two. French horsepower isn't quite the same as ours tho' and
I don't know how to translate it. The transportation hierarchy here goes
something like this: first, old bicycles, then new bicycles, motor bikes,
scooters, motorcycles and Deux Chevaux. After that come the cars, beginning
with VW's of course.
November 18, Friday
Another friend, met through Peter, is Rick Behrmann from the Bronx, New
York. Like Rasheed he is incredibly thin, black-eyed, and a nervous thinker
- a "chain thinker." (He is neither so graceful in his thinness
nor so explosive in his thinking, though.) He has his BA in physics and
while he is officially here to learn French so that he can get out of the
stream of American physics into the less crowded stream of European physics,
his real reason is that he has come to Europe, to the Mecca of Western Civilization,
to 'find himself' - and to get out of North America. We get along well because
our undergraduate philosophies are expressed in the same language. Evidently
Queen's and the American colleges are not so different.
We have been working on a French play by Giroudoux, a symbolistic play
that has many ambiguities. Last Monday morning we bumped into each other
after the nine o'clock class, and after deciding to go for coffee and talk
about Giroudoux, ended up going for coffees and talking about Giroudoux
for the rest of the day. Yesterday evening when I saw him before a music
class, he greeted me with the shout, "I've figured it out!" and
he had deciphered the play. He is also keen about music and understands
it so much vastly better than I do that I like to have him along for music
class so he can whisper "I don't like it" in his long-vowelled
Bronx accent just when I'm saying to myself that this passage is really
good.
Then there are the three Hydes: brothers, Londoners, adventurers. Earl
is the eldest, enterprising, witty, intelligent, cheerful, the organizer.
The two younger brothers are about the same age, both just out of high school,
one dark and frizzy-haired, a mulatto maybe, the other fair and blond-haired
with pink English cheeks. He looks entirely different from either Earl or
Melvyn so he may be adopted. The younger two tag along on Earl's adventures.
All of them came here on bicycles; took jobs in Germany and are working
part-time to support themselves. Earl has a five a.m. job delivering vegetables
for instance. The younger two are first-rate cooks whose specialty is roast
chicken stuffed with rice. They're a little shy of girls but Earl is twenty
five and shy of nothing! I like them all. And next they're thinking
of buying an old car and driving it to India. The two younger members of
their family, eleven and fourteen I think, have just spent a year in New
Zealand. When I asked Earl what the conditions of adoption into his family
were, he said "You've got to be completely insensitive to anyone's
opinion, you can't give a damn what the neighbours think. You've got to
be ready to go anywhere at any time, And um you ought to bring a lot of
money," all of this in his clipped London accent.
Money seems to be an every-other-paragraph topic in this letter. It must
be a topic I'm catching from the French, who are all as "spahrsam"
as Mother. French notebooks have incredibly close-set lines. In French apartment
buildings the hallways are unlit or else the lights are timed to go out
as soon as you're halfway up the stairs. If you ask for a glass of water
in a restaurant, you pay for it. To flush a toilet you turn a knob to make
sure no more water is used than necessary. A tiny cup of black coffee costs
twenty cents, considerably more than a beer.
Yet, entertainment is cheap. And the 'good things in life' like pastry
and imaginative (fantastic!) underwear, though expensive, are popular. Everybody
worries about money yet they spend it willingly for luxuries. I think they
are like me in that they begrudge every cent spent on minor comforts like
lighted hallways and hot water but gladly spend piles of it on "Quetschkuchen"
and the opera and lavender lace bras. (Don't let me complain next time I
run out of meal tickets because I spent 8F on three prints of Klee, Picasso
and Georges de la Tour. The pictures are lovely: one is an abstract, The
Magic Fish by Paul Klee, with fish and flowers floating in a black well
while a red blob fishes for them with a clock in a cage for bait. The Picasso
is a very gentle sketchy picture, one of his earlier ones, of a man and
woman holding their child, called The family. The other is early
Renaissance, about 1620, a Nativity scene which I wish I could send you
for Christmas because it is so lovely: Mary dressed in a stiff red dress
is holding a Christ who is tightly swaddled and very newborn, very sound
asleep, except for the fact that his head radiates the only light in the
picture (not in beams but as natural, intense light) and that Mary is holding
him so carefully. I love all three very much. Ferdinand in his tactful way
says that one must be a grasshopper and buy pictures instead of meal tickets
sometimes in order to keep up the morale. (He should know - he has a new
record.) He says that if your morale is high, you can always find a way
to make more money to feed yourself eventually but if your morale is low
you situation stays on the barely-nourished level anyway - better to have
the pictures.
Tuesday, 22 novembre
[journal]
A lesbian dream last night as I was recovering from a cold-of-the-kidneys
- Indra Kagis was whom I was caressing with such childish affection, rib
to hip bone.
November 24
[letter]
Hello Judy, because the radio has just begun to play the Mozart Divertimento
you gave me for Christmas my first year at university. For today it is the
mot juste in theme music because today is like the Medieval calendar picture
you must have seen a thousand times in our encyclopedia: the month of February
in the Duc de Berry's Livre de très riches heures (XV century):
small, black, bare trees in the fields full of snow, the village in the
background, the feeling of distance which is much different from distance
in La Glace where distance is much bigger and farther and barer. (I'm imagining
the dramatic sweep of snow you see from the dining room table and tho I'm
not sorry to miss your snowed-up driveway and your cold beds, I do feel
a small twinge.)
But I've yet to explain why the Mozart Divertimento is like the Duke
of Berry's calendar picture: both have a neatness and clearness which is
joyous rather than careful and formal.
I'm convinced that life is especially good, today, because I've just
had three days in bed reading and listening to Pierre's radio and working
a little, due to something Madame Degen calls a "cold of the kidneys."
She's been much kinder than the ordinary landlady. She's given me several
meals when I couldn't go to the student restaurant, and even brought me
a box of pink suppositories with the brief explanation, "Faut pas les
manger" - they're not to be eaten.
Also I'm enjoying studying. This year is a sort of educational experiment
for me because first I'm studying only things that are far from my major
(though not at all far from my reason for choosing psychology as a major),
and second, I'm not writing any examinations and so lack all external discipline.
What I learn is my own responsibility and I have to think of very very good
reasons for spending time on any subject or in any of the classes. It is
so lovely to be able to reject all the classes and professors that
are slow and useless, and all the courses that are pointless!
So, the crucial question, which you are thinking but not asking, is am
I doing anything at all other than having butterbread breakfasts in bed
and making some friends? Mais oui! I'm learning French, I have to, to convince
my French friends that I'm neither so stupide nor so simple as my conversation
makes me seem: pride is the motivation.
I'm studying art, Alsacian, Medieval, Renaissance and later modern; and
studying it, not for facts but to decipher what it said to the people of
its century and what it says to me. I find myself very serious about this
year, maybe too serious, but Peter has the same seriousness and so does
Richard-from-New-York: maybe it's a characteristic of our age, but could
we call Peter a retarded twenty year old too?
Even without being serious everything here is learning: strangely
French literature has much more effect on me than many English books because,
when I read them in French, I suddenly understand concepts I've been over-familiar
with when they're expressed in English. I've at last finished Simone de
Beauvoir's 700 pages; and yesterday actually read, aloud (badly)
a whole French novel in about the time it would have taken to read it in
English. And, I think, with better comprehension. Is the cure for
people who think they are stagnating mentally to start reading only in a
language new to them?
I am out of work because for some reason Madame Heimberger the professor
decided that she was "vraiment désolée" but she
could not employ me! I wept thoroughly over her letter. I think she found
a French girl. I'm disappointed (the French word, déçue, can
also mean deceived, betrayed) but it shouldn't be difficult to find another
job. However I'm nearly positive that my subconscious invented this siege
of cold of the kidneys because it didn't want to face a job hunt. Tomorrow
I'll bundle it up and take it to the public notice board in spite of its
reticence and see whether it feels less menaced when I've assured it next
month's breakfasts.
Sunday
Two events since I last called to you: on Thursday after an unsuccessful
morning's job hunting I had lunch with Peter, who told me that - this being
the American Thanksgiving - the US Air Force base near here was sending
a bus to the university to pick up the American students and take them back
to the base for a special Thanksgiving dinner and party afterward. I sneaked
in among all the Americans, enjoyed the hootenany on the bus, enjoyed the
free food, talked to some of the Air Force boys stationed at the base (one,
from Kentucky, complained that the French girls don't bathe often enough
and smell: but he told me "Chee, your hayer smells real nice"),
met a whole lot of typical Americans and also one atypical and very likeable
American boy who is passionately Catholic and is going to be a priest. He
loves to sing and has a huge very fine baritone voice - his favorite songs
(outside the delicate and very beautiful church songs he knows) are Silver
Bells and O Shanendoah (can't spell it) which we bellowed in
harmony, four times each in succession. His name is Jim.
And yesterday evening, the Alliance Francaise had a reception for all
the foreigners attending university here, "vraiment grande chose,"
with many officials, many young girls passing around much food and much
drink, loud music, some interesting dancing, a couple of Japanese girls
in national costume, lots of Canadians who all seemed to know someone at
Queen's whom I don't know, milling crowds of well-dressed people
with many pretty girls - I made use of the evening to gorge myself (two
meals' worth) of course, but it was also good to have an occasion to wear
the black dress and the hairpiece! A couple of Canadian boys from U of T
took one of everything that was passed to them and we put it all in my handbag
for Ferdinand who couldn't come because he isn't a foreigner. One of them
is especially nice - Mitchell [Bornstein], who is studying languages because
he loves languages - he and his friend Irving have invited me to hitchhike
to Spain with them for the Christmas holidays, to the Costa Brava where
there is sun, if I don't have to work. If only that loan would come!
26 novembre
[journal]
Ennuie: I have never suffered from ennuie as much as I do this year,
in France: I am ashamed more than disappointed, and I cannot admit it to
anyone, but I am tired of being here. I dislike the cold and wet, the continual
lack of money, the half-friendships, the bad, unhealthy food, the lack of
purpose in myself, the isolation of Neuhof, the inability to live as I live
naturally, in a room which is me, eating what I like, dressing as
I like rather than revoltingly and humiliating according to necessity, the
Americans I know, the inability to live Strasbourg and explore Strasbourg,
the financial disappointments, the inability to go anywhere or even to afford
concert tickets, my appearance, the lack of hot water to bathe and the inability
to dry clean my clothes, my peculiar disturbing health - all of these are
petty trivialities, material mostly, that make me feel ugly and lumpy and
charmless. My morale is usually very low except for bursts of joy that do
still appear. How can I change this year to something memorable? Without
money? When it is too cold to travel? If only my money would come! It may
never come: I haven't found a job yet. Ferdinand says I can always
go to the social security and ask for a bit of charity -
And how I hate worrying about such pettinesses.
Sunday
I wonder if the sadness of compromise will become stronger than the desire
for goodness, in this thing with Ferdinand. Today I have begun to think
it will, and it saddens me that I am too cold to need him and too selfish
to give to him without needing him.
To keep a journal of these last weeks would have been ennuyeux: I don't
want to remember them because they have been so flat and so trivial and
so disappointing: and I am sad to want to lose any part of my life!
Monday, November 29
[airgramme]
Your letter's arrival this morning was well-timed - the angel's doing,
because my morale has been very feeble for the past half week and definitely
needed some warm words from home, especially since Mr Passey of the Canada
Federal Loans seems to have none - he has just written again to inform me
that I am so a resident of Alberta because the $200 I marked down
as from my parents makes me officially a dependent and therefore - now
I have to write to Alberta for application forms, I have to fill them out,
send them to you to sign, send them back to Alberta, wait for a reply. But
I'm seeing about a job as femme de chambre in Strasbourg's biggest hotel
this afternoon. That should be interesting.
[journal]
Bouleversement, as always when I get very low: but it is my luck, not
me, which is manic depressive.
Hôtel Sofitel: "Tiens, nouveau!" from a passing garçon
in the corridor (cap and apron!).
The dark, blue streets of 7:30 this morning, with massive clouds moving
quickly: cathedral tower, a concentrated sun in one small spot between clouds,
steep tiled roofs in succession - to the cathedral. Madame Matter, with
her fat face become thin and flabby, her small child's eyes and mouth, her
vast chest and dwindling hips, her word and laugh for everyone, her tears
and her childish way of wiping them away with her elbow, when she spoke
of Charles (who died of poisoning from eating Wurst: the dog died eight
days later: Mitchell says this is funny even if it does happen to people),
"Pour moi, on m'a demandé trois fois si je vais me marier, mais
je ne peux pas, je ne peux vraiment pas, j'ai trop aimé mon mari.
Il etait bel, cet homme, o la la!" Her joy, her philosophy, her religion,
is his grave and his memory: vases, flowers, statues (le bon Dieu avec les
moutons, c'est tres joli"), trucs, visits to the cemetery at
six a.m., "Dors bien, Charles."
December 2
[letter]
Aren't you proud that your eldest daughter, heritor of the ancestral
ring, hope and joy and pride and all, is a chamber maid in a hotel. Seriously,
I am working eight hours a day six days a week in the Sofitel, wearing a
blue uniform and a little white cap and apron. When the guests get up in
the morning I grin obsequiously and say "Bonjour, Monsieur," in
my sunniest tone. Where the hallway is narrow I say "Pardon, Monsieur"
(for existing in the same atmosphere my lord). I'm anxious about lint, every
molecule, and I'm careful to put the ashtray at the angle calculated to
make the guest read "Sofitel" on it at first glance. I know that
the foot end of the bed must be tucked in first, I believe it with all my
heart, although I can't understand why. In short I'm a dedicated chamber
maid. It's play acting and the work isn't hard, so I enjoy it. I have to
speak French all day (but my accent is going to decay because hardly anyone
at the hotel speaks French French: Darinka who works with me speaks pigeon
Yugoslav French; Jean-Jacques the chef's boy speaks Swiss French; the Algerian
patissier who told me I had eyes like stars speaks Algerian French; one
of the garçons speaks Austrian French - and as for the guests, they're
Russian, German, English, Greek ...).
I can shower every day, I get breakfast free, fifth floor has a view
of the cathedral at sunrise when we do the first room at 8 a.m., the croissants
that guests leave on their breakfast trays are delicious: all of these are
fringe benefits, and here is a SALARY in addition. I'm planning to work
a month or so if they keep me, and if I haven't a loan by then or if I give
up trying to get one, I'll go to another city or another country and get
a job there.
I began work yesterday morning: Mademoiselle Jacqueline, who is the Gouvernante
in charge of all domestic personnel, is a very girlish and very sympathetic
thirty - looks twenty: it was she who got me the job and it was she who
handed me over very gently to Madame Matter yesterday morning. Madame Matter
is the fairy godmother of the hotel, half fairy (bottom half) and half mother
(top half): the reason for the line of demarcation is that Madame Matter
was quite stout not long ago but has lost thirty nine pounds. Peculiarly
she lost it all from her hips and abdomen, so she is fairy-like below but
still broad and bosomy above. She's fifty two (she asked me to guess, so
I guessed and subtracted ten, and said fifty two, and I was right). Madame
Matter is also some percentage Santa Claus. She's full of jokes and joviality:
every morning she says hello to every one of the personnel both in the basement
among the pastry shops and kitchens and on the five floors. Every evening
she kisses the older cleaning women on both cheeks à la française
and shakes hands with everyone else. She is the "première femme
de chambre," first lady of the chamber maids, both by self election
and by the fact that she was the first to arrive when the hotel was opened.
When she meets a guest in the hall she is full of good will and solicitude:
Did you sleep well sir? How are you this morning sir? I'm afraid it's going
to rain sir.
Often she refers to herself not as "moi" but in the third person,
as "Madame Matter." When she forgets something and has to go back
for it, it's "Imbécile, Madame Matter" and when she is
explaining why she is so careful to get the last sniff of dust from under
the bed, she says "I get so anxious, what if I should get sick and
another chamber lady should come and find some dust? Madame Matter, Première
Femme de Chambre."
The one thing in her life which is more important than her Hotel Sofitel
is her husband Charles. "You see these two rings? You know what it
means? It means my husband is dead, yes." Later in the afternoon we
were vacuuming and a petite panne d'électricité gave us a
break she showed me her wallet full of photographs of Charles and of her
German shepherd dog.
(Letter interrupted by a visit from Peter Dyck who hadn't seen me in
classes for four days and wanted to see whether I was sick or starving.
And just after he arrived Frédi appeared too. It turned out that
yesterday had been Frédi's birthday, and someone had given him a
bottle of wine. So he went home and got it, and we had a soirée to
celebrate the birthday and my job and Peter's having sold his car so that
he is no longer a poor student.)
Back to Madame Matter: she went on to tell me how she goes to the cemetery
twice a day in summer, twice a week in winter, always with flowers, to visit
"mon beau, pauvre Charles." She listed the sums she had paid for
an urn, a statue of the beau Christ avec les petits moutons, and various
gadgets. Then she described the various portraits of her husband placed
carefully in the centre of tables all around her house, surrounded by flowers,
and the one she takes to bed with her. Every evening when she leaves the
cemetery she says "Dors bien, mon Charles."
Living her fantasy life completely in the past (she's not religious)
she manages to live her day-to-day working life completely in the present.
Her dedication to the art of chambermaiding is a sort of desperate grasp
at justifying a life that has no family to occupy it now: and it works.
The inventiveness of the human psyche is fantastic! (I may be learning more
psychology this year than French, in spite of myself?)
I'm a very happy chambermaid (this is Sunday). Who'd have thought I would
enjoy making beds and scrubbing bathrooms 48 hours a week? I do. I love
the perfectionism of the Hotel Sofitel, I like the broken French camaraderie
of the personnel. I like the play acting, I like the physical work. Today
was especially good because there's little work on Sunday. First of all
I get up at the cracka, or slightly before, and ride to work while the sky
turns pink. There's Jean-Jacques all smiling in the staff dining room. When
I arrive he gives me a large bowl of café au lait and I help myself
to bread and jam while other staff arrives and says bonjour or "gouda
Morgja" which is Alsacian. The room is small and bare with a television
on a high shelf, four small tables, and auditorium-like wood and steel chairs.
The Alsacians all tear their bread to bits and put it into their bowls of
coffee and slurp it up, but I don't like soggy bread! So I put lots of butter
on it and luxuriate - the crusts are very thick and very hard. Our bread
arrives in loaves about 3 feet long and we chop off several chunks for ourselves
with the chopping knife. The funny little janitor with a floor-length apron
tied around his middle says "Good morning, good morning. Iss very fine
day, very fine." He was once in Montreal for a winter and so is proud
of his "very fine" English. However, "good morning"
and "very fine" are the limits of it, the outer limits. Usually
some of the garcons are eating breakfast at the same time and have something
witty to say. Madame Matter (not Marterre, after all) arrives and is hailed
by everyone. She's the hotel's queen, the social director and trouble-shooter.
After she has said her round of hellos she comes over to me, shakes my hand,
and says "Hello Nelly" - or sometimes "Hello Lilly,"
"- Ca va?"
Then we climb the stairs to the next floor and say hello to the gouvernante,
Madamoiselle Jacqueline. Then the elevator to cinquième. Uniforms
- wish you could see me in my uniform: blue short sleeved dress, large white
apron, white cotton caplet; pockets bulging full of sugar packets rescued
from breakfast trays, and scrap paper from waste baskets, and huge bunches
of keys. It is not at all unbecoming, worn with a high chignon (and in my
case the four pairs of stockings I wear for driving to work!) and, on Sundays,
earrings! Sundays are slow days because most businessmen go home for the
weekend, so we remind each other, "doucement," "langsam."
The other femme de chambre on the cinquième étage is Darinka,
a Yugoslav who speaks very little French but has invented a jargon composed
of several French and Alsacian nouns and several verbs which she knows in
only one person and one tense; with these she makes herself understood,
and we enjoy aping it. From her, we've picked up the word "polarko"
which is Yugoslav for "Take it easy," the phrase I taught her
in exchange. Polarko, doucement, langsam, Takiteasy all mean "If we
want to have something to do until quitting time, turn on the radio and
rest a while." This Sunday the radios which are built into all the
rooms were broadcasting opera: we were can-canning in our stockinged feet.
Early morning views over the Strasbourg rooftops toward the cathedral and
over the courtyard of Saint-Pierre-le-Jeune.
Our clients are often interesting - the Greek ambassador to the Council
of Europe whose 'seat' is in Strasbourg, a little Englishwoman who translates
for the Council, a funny Englishman, crazy I think, with a flowing moustache
and a wine-colored striped jacket who after he left sent me a postcard from
Paris! A journalist, honeymooners, a raucous American woman from Ohio, a
dear little Irishman who said "Good morrrning, Ellie," to me every
morning of his stay, Germans, Italians, Scandinaves, Chinese. I snoop, naturally.
"We chambermaids live vicariously, you know."
At eleven o'clock we go downstairs for lunch in the staff dining room
- I gulp it, and run back upstairs for the rest of my noon hour to read
and write for a little while. In the afternoon we've usually finished early
so we work slowly and sit for a while in the bathroom and gossip. Darinka
tells me her life story in patois: we understand each other perfectly although
our language is barbaric. (She's beautiful, girlish, lively.) Or
else Madame Matter tells me of her and Alsace's war experiences, her romance
with her husband. Or she gossips. She likes me very much for some reason
and I adore her: every evening she kisses me goodbye, one on each cheek
in the French manner.
Five o'clock comes eventually, after we've had our showers and washed
a few clothes and read the magazines we've confiscated. Many goodbyes to
people hanging around the service door - "Salut Jean-Jacques, à
demain!" Then the bicycle ride home or a ride over to the university
to have dinner with Peter or Richard or a group of students who happens
along. And time for a little De Beauvoir before bed .... Next morning, the
alarm clock early, ouch!
[undated scrap of journal]
Ferdinand was humorous and dramatic by turns: we sat in the long room
upstairs at FEC with our elbows on the greasy table (I remember making patterns
with my finger prints and then rubbing them out as he argued, pled, laughed,
leaned forward to touch my wrist) and I tried to tell him that the reason
it is fini is neither that I am well off now and don't need him,
nor "Richard," nor "l'autre." ("Tu étais
bien contente avec lui l'autre jour, le samedi, quand je t'ai laissé
comme ça. Qu'est-ce que tu lui as dit, 'C'est un fou amoureux: je
m'en foue'?" "Je n'ai rien dit et il n'a rien dit. Je ne sais
pas ce qu'il a pensé. Il n'a rien dit.")
But I was cold. It is true that I was appalled by his dirty sheets and
his smell of sweat ("Est-ce parce que avec moi tu étais retourné
au naturel?" and he laughed) and the ugliness of his room and his buttonless
frayed clothes - ("Est-ce parce que tu avais faim?" and again
the white-smiled laugh and the warm eyes) ("Je vais te regretter."
"Ici?" "Oui." "C'est vraiment fini alors?"
"Oui.") and it is true that I don't know how to live in 'intimacy'
with both him and Mitchell. ("Tu es vraiment méchante."
"Oui, je suis terriblement terriblement méchante." But
let me go, don't touch me, let go the bicycle, I'm a little sorry but let
me go, don't hold me. "Je me sens enfermée, serrée. C'est
pas assez." "Il y a deux choses dans ces rapports: le désir
d'etre bon" ("Toi aussi?" "Oui") "et
la compromise: je t'ai dit que je peux t'aimer un peu. Mais c'est pas assez."
- "C'est assez pour moi" - "Mais pas pour moi. Nous ne sommes
pas amis, nous n'étaient jamais des amis, c'est trop difficile, je
ne peux pas te parler et tu ne peux pas me parler."
Sunday night, December 5
[journal]
Remember this picture: I am sitting in the chair in front of the centre
panel of the closet mirror, with my knees drawn up, in my green monk's gown,
with my hair just washed and standing out around my head - drawn to one
side, thick and shiny - with my eyes large and my skin evenly colored. My
right hand is covered by my left - my fingernails have begun to grown longer,
and the hand looks elegant, but the forearm is thick and muscular. The robe
falls sideways off the edge of the chair, and its falling line is balanced
diagonally by the curved back of the chair. I am looking completely serious.
This is the nearly-belligerent expression that Mr Mann said he had seen
a thousand times. My mouth is beautiful: I have just realized its similarity
to Mother's, and to all the sensitive Konrad mouths. There is an imbalance
in the position of my eyes in relation to my mouth - the distance between
them is too great. It is this which makes me ugly sometimes and which prevents
me from being pretty but which does not prevent me from being beautiful
from time to time.
I want to keep this picture in order to juxtapose it with the other,
in the basement mirror at Grandpa Konrad's, the September before I left
for college.
I am very little different. Now perhaps the sight of myself in the mirror
is less a celebration of arrogance than a celebration of the edge of reality
from which I see it. The world becomes more strange. I long for wisdom and
I long to know what to do with my love of it, and I long to know what to
do with my love of its people. I long to know how to speak to people that
I love, I long to be able to take them with me to a rock where we can overlook
the world and speak real speech.
And, Mitchell, if I must stop your kiss and stare at you, it is because
I am overcome by my tenderness for you and my longing to know you: your
long eyebrows, your eyes with their long lashes, your soft hair, your enormous
uncertain mouth, your fragile shoulders, your stride on the sidewalk beside
my bicycle: I feel so much affection for you that I am trembling, but your
mysteriousness paralyzes me so that I can only hold you wordlessly on the
eiderdown.
It will be Christmas soon. My candle on the dresser top lights the Nativity
of Georges de la Tour that I have taped to the mirror. I love the solid,
thick red of Mary's robe, and the light from the child's head on Elizabeth's
profile. This picture will be my symbol of Christmas here, I think.
Le 19 décembre, Sunday night
[letter]
I've had no time to realize that Christmas is so close and that I've
not even sent a card yet, or a letter, for more than two weeks. You must
have worried, because you don't even know I have a job. I am sorry. Time
has been sliding out from under my feet at a very terrific pace since I've
been spending ten hours or more a day working or at least on the way to
and from or at the hotel; also I have a boyfriend who has taken up three
or so evenings a week; also I have a girlfriend. I've so much to tell you!
The dress turned out beautifully, Mother - thank you: a "four-dollar"
"used" dress, and I think it is stunning (and thank YOU Judy for
your firm directions, c'est grace à toi, je le sais bien. I'm wearing
it for the first time Wednesday night when Mitchell takes me to dinner in
the nicest, oldest, most atmospheric restaurant in Strasbourg to celebrate
his birthday and his departure for Christmas in Spain. With it I'm wearing
a new pair of shoes (the old black ones have fallen to pieces because Strasbourg's
cobbled streets are so hard on them) and pale, pale beige lace stockings,
very yé-yé and chic, Judy. The shoes are very French. I'm
sure the style hasn't arrived in Canada yet.
Christmas in Strasbourg: the old streets are hung with white lights; all the squares
have Christmas trees; Place Kleber, downtown, broadcasts Christmas carols
by loudspeaker; the Cathedral is just as it always is, but needs no decoration
for Christmas because its dim long nave and its candles always remind me
of Christmas; all of the long-familiar shop windows along the route to Neuhof
are transformed and in one of the small squares near the chestnut seller
boy's place, an old man in a long muffler is selling sapins de noël,
Christmas trees; Place Broglie is like a fairground and I love to promenade
between its rows of stalls. The place is a long square with the high-pillared
Opéra at one end and imposing municipal buildings flanking its two
long sides. In the square, an avenue of booths has been set up, surrounded
by silvered Christmas trees, and at the end of the square just under the
opera house, a dozen tree-sellers have set up a forest of evergreens with
inspection paths running through it. In the stalls, ropes of tree-decorations
swing and glitter with the wind and piles of candy lie in paper cones under
alluring signs advertising the candy-coated hazelnuts and the halvah. One
stall is a gaufre stall: rows of steaming irons bake waffles while the custom
waits. In another stall a man in shirtsleeves and a white apron stands twisting
cotton candy very gravely onto a stick while his wife stands beside him,
hands folded proudly over her abdomen, and crowds of children watch. Carols
come thinly from Place Kleber; the cheap toys and swinging bundles of mistletoe
and holly reflect colors among the candy and the boxes of geometrical ornaments;
there is a whiff of evergreen with the steam from the waffle irons. I love
it; it makes me sentimental. I'm going to find some evergreen branches and
Madame Matter has promised me a few of her extra candles and ornaments for
them. I have some large white candles, and I have the Nativity picture by
Georges de la Tour: I will have Christmas, although I'm working.
And I'm glad for Michèle, who's my French girlfriend. We met one
day in the restaurant across the street from the hotel, where Jean-Jacques
[the patissier's boy] and I go every evening after work for a coffee. The
tables were all full, so we sat down next to an Algerian-looking boy and
a long haired girl with large eyes and little pointed face who sat with
their chins in their hands not saying anything. They listened to our conversation
for a while and then the girl couldn't contain herself and joined it: we
began talking about going barefoot. When Michèle said, in French,
"I go barefoot all summer. If I could I'd go naked too," I knew
I liked her, and when I told her I was studying child psychology, she knew
she liked me, and that was the beginning of my first friendship with a French
girl. On Friday night we made a rendezvous at the same restaurant and walked
arm in arm through Place Broglie (brilliant after rain) eating chocolate
bar sandwiches and candied hazelnuts out of a cone and catching up on talk.
She's invited me to her place to stay for New Year's Day, which I have off:
I'm excited.
And that is why I am happy again: and the hotel is why I am affluent
again. No more money worries; I like the work as chamber maid; I'm making
new friends; I'm talking French; I've so much to tell you and can't get
it all in because it's late - I get Wednesday off every week and spend it
windowshopping and going to museums and visiting Peter or Rick or all the
people at the university that I miss.
Last Wednesday - the first time I had money for a very long time - I
reverted straight back to grasshopperism. Did I pay the rent first? Did
I pay off my debt to Peter first? Did I buy a pair of shoes first? Nope
I bought four paperback books and a bottle of Tosca perfume and a pair of
lace stockings, and I spent nearly a dollar in a classy patisserie. And
then I went to a museum and then I bought two apples and two bananas and
then I went to see Peter who's just left for Christmas in Italy.
Paul, do you think you can manage a correspondence in French? My good
friend Jean-Jacques, who is also sixteen, wants a correspondent in Canada.
He's witty, adventurous, everyone's friend; he likes fishing and hunting
and motorcycles and stamps. He wants to travel. He's wise and mature because
he's been earning his own living for two years.
So many other things: a Bach concert in an old, dim, church; a Chopin
concert in a modern radio station; a gospel-song concert by an American
Negro group; coffee in little restaurants; French movies; a "petit
verre de vin blanc" in the old quarter of Strasbourg; discussions,
visits, walks at night; the beautiful morning rides to work before the stars
disappear; window shopping at pastry and lingerie shop windows; books and
music; a growing knowledge of the real, non-academic, working France; and
Christmas almost here. I'll tell you how it happens.
part 3
- raw forming volume 5: september 1965 - september 1966
- work & days: a lifetime journal project
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