III. Last voyage

Two years ago, we saved enough money, and left for Europe on the Air France. Max fetched an address of his old classmate - Andrei or Andres from Hungary, who had managed to succeed greatly in France, and who would be just happy to accommodate us anytime. Max called his busybody millionaire, never reaching him, giving me the receiver to listen to a recorded tongue-twister message from which I could understand practically nothing except the standard s'il vous plait coming at the end. I saw pictures of a guy outfitted in his colorful car-racing suit, straddling proudly a shiny designer motorbike of his.

"Just one from his huge collection", Max reminded me. "Enough calling-shmolling, it's much easier to find him right on the spot." And off we go.

Max's fear of flying happen to be even worse than mine, putting me in the role of his mentor. At the take-off, in the wild hubbub and rumble of the jet engines, Max grabbed strongly my hand with his sweating fingers, not weakening his deadly grip till the much later moment when we were having trays of the French snacks with complementary mini bottles of the Reims Champagne.

"Am I flying correct?" Max whispered into my ear. "You're doing all right."

Relax, buddy, look around".

Flight attendants, the smart Parisian chicks, have immediately figured him out, the natural womanizer type- the tall, hairy, long-necked Max. They showered us with free drinks above all allowable limits. We have graciously accepted it. Soon, forgetting for now the air pits and vibration, I was falling in the heavenly drunken vertigo, my head carelessly swaying and drifting away. I guess Max was feeling just the same. As a precaution still, I have lowered my window shutter because I dreaded to see an awful black snag dangling behind our double-concave window lens. Something looking like a huge dead tree was dragging along by our plane over the endless nightly snow fields. Hopelessly trying to have a nap, with my inner vision, I couldn't let go to the terrifying image of the snag tracking the unreal icy landscape. I couldn't help staying suspicious all the time, checking the steadiness of our engines' rumble; the rumble which I noticed first at the moment of taking-off, when the terrible noise had suddenly ruptured the initial silence, causing immediately the utter terror in my mind. The rumble had been shattering our walls, souls and chairs, threatening to explode any instant, while our plane was gaining speed, then became safely airborne and only after that the noise got somewhat attuned and weakened, almost died off into a long gentle hiss.

It's always a miracle to me, I have to confess, how a plane as huge as our Washington Heights apartment house, filled with hundreds of us - the naОve, trusting souls, how it gets up in the air, stays suspended in the virtually empty space, in nowhere, with nothing but these snow fields around. Sorry, but usual scientific explanations known to every school boy are not enough for me, not much of help in accepting such a presumably simple fact.

Time went by, but the winter scenery was hardly changing behind the windows until the moment when the early dawn had reddened the unchangeable snowy clouds. Suddenly, the unusually dazzling sun had rolled out, and in the bright morning light, the snag had turned into an innocent looking riveted aluminum wing structure. An hour or two later a bluish patch could be seen at the distance; the patch was widening slowly like an icy pond melting under the sun, it was growing bigger and bigger, developing within itself a venous capillary system, branches, roadways, and soon enough all the scenery becoming a brightly colorful geographic map.

Passengers around us immediately went out of stupor and became exited; rummaging now, shutting up their folding tables and readying themselves for exit, following the housecleaning reflex pretty strange here, still thousands of miles above the earth. That's when I noticed in our male passengers' eyes that certain French cancan and the suspicious symptoms of inveterate sex offenders. My Max was also affected big time. He got completely accustomed to the environment and practiced now a pip-show - by dangerously twisting his neck to the floor he followed through the aisle our mini-skirted flight attendants.

At times, he could regain his initial worrisome state; he could, for instance, start massaging his temples pensively, whispering to me, "Feel it here, Oleg. Feel it for yourself. You know what I got there under my skin? The skull!! Horrible isn't? - The bony skull, the part of my dead skeleton. O, my God!"

Other time, he would be fondling his big ears, concluding in a tragic voice, "That's it. I'm definitely getting old. Check it out; my old man's ears are terribly bushy and full of hairs."

Meanwhile, the blurry highways on the ground have gradually turned into the vivid dotted lines swarming alive with the tiny colored automobiles moving back and forth. Our airplane went into roller coasting, tilting up and down. Now and then my window was all covered by the land scrolling upward, while the opposite view, across the aisle, had nothing in it but the clear sky, and vice versa. Our Caravel was carefully maneuvering for the landing. Max had decided to help. With every turn, he tried to throw himself on me, in the direction opposite to the machine tilt, explaining, -"You see, this way we'll manage to better counterweigh our plane". Annoyed, I hit him hard to stop the madness. It worked. At the monitor screen, the cursor representing our flight has already crossed the destination point.

Once and again we called Andres from the airport, with no apparent luck. Full of energy, happy be back on the firm ground, breathing at last the Parisian air, we ventured to the Latin Quarter on our own. When we reached that certain place on the Boul-Mich, we had discovered there not a private apartment we expected, not even any residence at all but, who'd imagine, an all-American franchise - the standard glass covered MacDonald's joint with its standard kindergarten-style furniture. We felt really upset by the discovery not only on the account of the lodging problem becoming critical for us now, but also we felt offended by the fact that in the heart of the gourmands' country, the Frenchmen have surrendered to such primitive fast food idea. Devoted Francophiles, we tried to avoid MacDonald's even in New-York. Who'd believe that we'd step in the place and where - on the glorious Boulevard Saint-Michel! For an hour, we just stayed there waiting for some waitress who supposedly had known Andres's whereabouts. With our bags under the table, we were just sitting there by the window, sipping decaf and watching women-pedestrians who were looking at us back with the exceptional love and interest, I should say. They couldn't see us, of course, not through the mirror glass. Some of them would stop, fidget checking their face and profile, performing dozens of secret manipulations - body twisting, caressing their thighs, pumping up their breasts with the bucketed palms, licking lips sensually, or pulling out an occasional eyelash. Others would just send us (to their own reflections, of course) a passionate kiss, with their eyes closed and lips protruding, with the gestures full of intimacy and adoration. Well, I have to confess that when an ugly lady was taking her spot at the window, we were paying for the bird watching in full.

At last, the phantom waitress was back, a bony teenager with her hair oily and sticky, I gather from the unavoidable hamburger's fat. She sized us with her non-blinking eyes, not the way the passers-by were doing it through the glass, but now in real. For minutes she kept staring at us with inimitable awe. Les Americains! She went on repeating. Then, regaining composure, she informed us that Andres is not anywhere around; that "the city of Paris, especially in summer, is merely a dusty junkyard. In summer you better look for good time somewhere down south, in particular, in the place around Marseille where exactly your Andres can be found now."

Tired, with our luggage getting heavier by the hour, we faced the real challenge to find just any place for the night, preferably a hotel rated with a couple stars; we could not afford any better. The beautiful Paris twilight, those colorful poster kiosks, the festive crowds strolling under the chestnut trees, all that Moveable Feast felt unreal to us. Feeling like a loser I pictured myself as a heavily sweating pater de familia looking in vain for a pauper bed on a fashionable sea resort; a loner among laughing suntanned beachgoers - the creatures of another, happier world. Max went searching for a lodgment in the street on the left, I - on the right. I had assumed them be parallel ones. That was a mistake. Paris is not subdivided in the rectangular clusters like Manhattan; it is rather a mish-mash of geometrical forms with its whimsically arranged segments and sectors. Starting on the adjacent streets, we, Max and I, were wandering further and further apart, in the different directions. Going in circles, as lost people do, I was hitting once and again the same by-street, ruelle, where two elderly ladies were chatting nose to nose like mirror reflections of each other, each looking identical to the other and both reminding me the famous sculpture of Voltaire by Houdon. Each lady was dressed in the same type of baggy hand-knitted cardigan, each holding a silky black dachshund dog on the leash. Only in the dense dusk (lilac colored, but of course), under the drizzling skies, I and Max had managed to meet each other in the same MacDonald's. The business was booming. The cafe was still full of the simpletons capable day and night to chew on their Mac and fries, pommes-frites as they call it there, in France. The Mac lovers had proven to be useful for us this time. One of them gave us an address of a budget hotel in the neighborhood, on Rue Cujas. God is merciful. Minutes later, breathing heavily we were climbing narrow squeaky stairs of a cheap old hotel sans ascenseur, where we fell dead asleep, practically at once.

Next morning, I woke up in pain, feeling every spring of my knobby deformed mattress and smelling funny stale odor of the bed sheets. Somewhere inside the walls, just by my bed, the poor plumbing was producing its terrible twangs, knocking and groaning like wild animals in a Zoo. Different, gritting noises were also rising from a garbage truck working just downstairs, near the hotel door. The cacophony of noises penetrated easily our broken window kept semi-opened on a piece of the hunger wire.

Max has already being awake and silently moving his lips. "Listen, dude, to the chat of these fucking pigeons, how lustful it is", he pronounced slowly and with a deep sigh. "It smells the great history, dude. Imagine, Oleg, all the debauchery that had been happening on these very beds, for centuries before us." Out of the bed he dashed to a rusty sink, the only 'convenience' in our room. Humming La Cucaracha, with strong smashes of the twisted towel, he killed two cockroaches on his way. (In the accurate correspondence with the two-star rating of our not so fancy hotel.) "No water," Max concluded, "Stinks of urine, that's all". And, he yelled a complex, multistory, hardly translatable Hungarian curse, approximately meaning: "the-mother-fucker-hotel's-tap-water-cock-at-the-high-fourth-floor-without-the-elevator..." Then, Max has parted aside the moth-eaten red velvet curtains covering the narrow tall window doors, and naked, as he was, ventured to our rudimentary, two-feet wide, balcony. The bright warm sunshine stripped by the blinds, flashed into the darkness of our room. In the open doorway, behind the wrought-iron balcony fender, the trees and Parisian rooftops appeared in all their glory. Everything was surrounded with the tender morning light aureole one can see nowhere but in Paris. Framed by all this beauty, the pinky buttocks of Max were protruding from out of the curtains.

"Stop this instant!" - I exclaimed. "I see Matisse".

"See what? What do you see? I'm sorry", Max jerked back into the room and under his blanket.

On our first walk to the city, at the nearest street corner, we bumped into the stocky classical Pantheon. We turned back. On the other corner, there was the Sorbonne University, then - La Seine, Ile de la Cite... Wherever we went, we saw these historic landmarks standing conspicuously in our way, routinely covered with the antic cracks and ivy, with the commendation boards and memorial plaques. We reached the Chatelet square where the morning crowds had already assumed their elegant poses displaying a joie de vivre pantomime as if composed especially by movie set extras - strategically positioned at the coffee tables with the golden brioches and croissants, with green bulbs of Perrier and other quelque chose. On the roof terrace of the Samaritaine department store, where we were having our first breakfast, I suggested various tours for the day, but Max stayed adamant, "All the cultural shit for later. At the nice day as today I go hunting. I have to get myself a leggy chick for the clean start! Have you seen by the Sorbonne this morning - the snotty teenagers fondling, kissing each other with no shame whatsoever? What a city!"

The July sun has been already rising, causing no stifling heat whatsoever, as it happens in our blessed tri-state area. Cool tender winds were waltzing from the glistening Seine, when I ventured by myself for the best possible tour through Paris - turning corners at random as if in a dream - first alongside the river, then, over the Carrousel Bridge, by the Louvre, around the ponds and flower beds of the Tuileries gardens... Here and there, grey-winged wild pigeons fluttered in the air filled with aroma of flowers, gasoline, tobacco, fruits and wine. Gravel of medieval backyards was crunching tastily under my foot; the metal garden chairs were scattered across the green, inviting for siesta... What can I say? Descriptions are powerless and even futile. Everything what can be said about this city had already been said long ago. The famous quotes and metaphors are preserved in libraries, claimed by the world renowned names; parroting all this is but ridiculous enterprise. Nevertheless, you know, there is always a chance for a sensitive soul to get initiated in order to re-enact in some ingenuous personal way the experience of people who had been here before you. That's precisely what happened to me at the moment when leaving the garden bushes I stepped out in the vast open spaces of the Place de la Concord. I got my first vertigo right there at the colorful street carnival with the endless merry-go-round of cars encircling the Luxor Obelisk Island sided by the shooting fountains. The pompous Alexander-III Bridge glittered on my left with the Empire gold of its winged statues, at distance to the right; the Madeleine temple boasted its roman portico with the dark rainy stains looking so perfect that no artist could ever have done it better. Straight on my course, there were the rampant Marly's horses unveiling the entrance to the great marches of the Champs-Elysees... All the landmarks were obediently appearing one after another; everything from a textbook, everything comme il faut. But when you see it in vivo, for the first time in your life casually strolling by, it can sweep you by a flood of sudden emotions which you've never suspected to exist. I'm not sure how to properly explain the feeling in plain English which is my second language. I must be simply a sucker for such particular sort of things, an unbalanced personality prone to the 'episodes' and all such sort of things including the sudden emotional avalanches. A proverbial spark can easily put me at fire, catching me by surprise. Is it what they call being sentimental? Well, then I am. The only thing I can assure you that when it happens, beware - Paris ambushes you, teasing, playing havoc with your senses; your heart skips a beat or two, and, then, starts racing uncontrollably, madly. Ah, Paris!

Дата добавления: 2015-09-04