I went to Paris the day after Putin/Russia invaded the Ukraine. It felt almost perverse to go off to enjoy spring in the City of Light when the forces of darkness wreaked havoc in another part of Europe, but it was planned and paid for, so off I went.
It was a perfect weekend for strolling around, and boy did we walk, my Parisian friend and I. But try as I might to shake it off, the spectre of destruction seemed to follow me everywhere. On the other hand there were also signs of human ingenuity and the indomitable spirit that turns bad things into good.
We went to see Notre Dame, still a building site with no access for the public after the devastating fire three years ago. And yet hundreds of craftsmen are working to catalogue, repair and restore every last bit of debris and rubble, aided in no small part – and I love this! – by the fact that a team of computer game developers had mapped every inch of the church prior to the fire, in order to recreate Paris anno 1789.
Across the water from Notre Dame I drag my friend into Shakespeare and c:o, the most Harry Potter-y store I know outside of Diagon Alley. The bookstore has been run by the same proprietor for five decades, and now his daughter has taken over. Come hell or high water, Covid-19 or Amazon.com, this L-space-bending Mecca remains open and enchanting, books door to ceiling. Heck, books form walls and pillars and caves in here, creating snug reading corners where you can enjoy a book inside a fort made of books.
We explored the Pletzl (or small place) area of Le Marais, which is the Jewish quarter in the Old Town. Everywhere you go there are searing reminders of the thousands of people who were brutally expelled and transported to death camps because it was a crime to be born into that faith, and yet while Nazi Germany is an ugly memory this is now once again a bustling, colourful part of the city where people queue up outside of minuscule restaurants and bakeries to enjoy their falafels and poppy cakes. I partake of both specialities and can vouch for their scrumptiousness!
As I bask in the sun, wolfing down my falafel, three young women stop by to bum a cigarette off another man seated on the same bench as I. He doesn’t have one, so the one who asked the question turns, looks at me for the briefest of moments, only to say ever so politely: « ça n’a pas la peine de vous demander: vous n’avez pas la tête d’un fumeur; vous mangez des pommes et faites du vélo, vous » . (No point in asking you: you don’t look like a smoker; you eat apples and ride bikes, you.) My friend collapses with laughter. So much for me being mysterious and interesting…!
Then we venture outside of the center to see some other lovely examples of how the old and ugly can be recast as things of beauty: the Belleville area with its Lilliputian garden city, and the Buttes-Chaumont park in the 19th arrondissement that used to be an open air quarry, a nasty gash in the landscape. It has since been turned into a green park with the most dramatic garden design imaginable, centered around a lake at the bottom, surrounding a rocky outcrop of an island, on top of which sits the Temple of the Sibyl. It’s like something out of a painting of Arcadia, risen quite literally from the bottom of a pit pf despair.
The same can (almost) be said for La Petite Ceinture (the little belt), which is an old railroad that used to connect the city’s main train stations. When the advent of the Metro made it obsolete the railway fell into disrepair, but it was later turned into a pedestrian zone from the elevated viewpoint of which walkers could take in the city high above the congested roads. It was so popular that other cities like Brussels and New York copied the concept, but alas, it proved popular with les sans abris (homeless people) too, and now parts of it is once again closed to the general public. The current mayor has big plans, however: she intends to ban cars in the city centre altogether, so hopefully this remnant of a coal-powered era will soon be an integral part of pedestrian Paris.
Be that as it may, as news of Ukrainian résilience et resistance is cabled across the world I find reassurance in these examples of how good triumphs in the end. It may not be as pithy as ”Russian warship: go f**k yourself.”, but rebuilding and recovering is what humankind does best. If Paris can survive fires and Nazis and unfettered capitalism, and bounce back greener, wiser and more beautiful, then the same can be true for Kyiv and Moscow. Hope springs eternal.