A Snowbulb with the Eiffel Tower (eng)
unpublished, originally written in russian, 2014, Lisbon
The morning of January first I’m puking nearby the bus station at Porte Maillot. I’m spitting this vicious sour goo, and it dribbles down the bridge of my deaf weaned off lip – to rare post new-year´s eve taxis, thin and untrusty plumb-line thread trembling by the wind. Sorry, Max – I’ve never made it to piss on Sartre’s grave, neither did I vomit into the Seine – instead of all this, by firework salvos from Champs-Élysées (which are not, in fact, any fields, but just a street, smoky of fried chestnuts, three euro a bag) I was pushing that huge white antibiotic pill down my lymph nodes swollen by an unknown virus X – strain “Liteyniy-Belinskogo corner” – tossing and turning there in a bed, shaking under three blankets, while on the street they were screaming something about bananas – why the hell bananas – alright, girls have bought some tangerines¹ and even a cake with candles, but again one of them stayed untouched by my weakened breath on the very edge of this pretty chocolate circle – so for the rest ten days I had a great notion to bring it to Saint-Germaine or Sacre-Coeur altar – “cherry on top of Montmartre”, as Masha called it on that very first night, when we were wandering there on its empty 3-o’clock drowsy rues, and an ancient shamanic owl from Quebec descent flew off her ear and turned into a beautiful holy bum, who was treating us with candies from somewhere out of sleeve-pockets of his royal rags – vieux voyou! – which I was looking for after to no avail, rushing with my mad-looking yellow backpack in the fog of my last morning here, sweaty, grimy son-of-a-pardon – “pardon”, “pardon”, rattling on the pitiful chip of my skateboard past all these sketchy Arabs on Collette and last peacock Parisians in their soaking heavy coats – to give him away tequila (in a brown paper bag, of course), a leftover after that evening, when a thousand kilometers from here my 23rd birthday had begun.
Social relations fall off on a principle of a rocket stage: parents at home, than the fellows at the depot, and now the very last bus in the world takes her to the airport, while I’m staying here, dangling in this shitty aethereal bouillon of my own private long-awaited Weightlessness – no one said nothing, you all have already seen it, and fattened DiCaprio stares at me blaming from every poster on every desolated corner, something in between “We need to go deeper” and “My heart will go on”; I’m shoving a cigarette in my teeth, streets have naturally gone extinct, I feel blind, not noticing anything around me, but in the gloomy underpass peripheral vision picks up a writing on the oblique wall above subway entry: “WARNING PICKPOCKET AT THIS STATION” – so, gripped by panic, feverishly I’m grubbing my countless pockets on the run, with no idea which are already checked and which are not – alright, nothing seems to be missing, okay, bring your gargoyle-pokémon to this station, I don’t mind, I just need to take a tiny little nap, metro is still free, and the bike lanes remain empty (oh Gribovich! Oh “white russian”, oh cardboard trams on Mayakovskogo or Ligovka in the heart of a bleak Saturday night!), and I’m rolling in a silent subway car somewhere to Louvre, when all of a sudden ambient in my headphones is replaced with a soundtrack to Jarmush “Dead Man” – tamm-bamm-para-para-pam, thundering guitar riffs are shattering into my eardrums: Johnny Dep-p-ardieu comes back home in hangover delirium after partying his pants off with Ramzan, cheeks are stuffed with kilos of TNT, while les Arabes are slaughtering lamb in Petite Prince’s box, “this side up”, voila, cauldron is sizzling by lezginka sounds from Chinese cellphone, and Kirovsk Uzbeks are already hailing to this festive supper with their rough hands, as it was foretold by this scumbag Antonovskiy², whose sly d’Artagnanian moustache swept my way back home once and for all. Louvre-Rivoli, pardon-pa-ardon, which button all of you are pressing here to get out, merci, I came to Paris just to have some beer (maybe even with peanuts) in all these “proper bars” where half a century ago the old man holy drunkard Kerouac (“House-in-the-Field”) was sitting, yearning for sport columns in the morning papers and peanut butter, but instead of it once again I’m falling with my backpack onto this conveyor at the supermarket or broiler combine – in a word, this flat escalator takes me in a wrong direction, so I’m turning around, stuck in it, falling, going back but not moving anywhere, like in the worst kind of childish nightmares: “Dolly zoom” – term from Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” comes to my mind – obediently I’m going till the very end to take the right way this time.
I’m climbing up Louvre, climbing up Montmartre – the hell is this, flat escalators and heaving upward streets. Why did you take so much unnecessary stuff with you, Nikitin? Now you’re carrying the whole house on your back like a logy-ass snail – oh no, no, they eat snails here, don’t even start, and no, I’m not talking to myself, it’s unsafe, I better go talk with someone on the street, ask for directions or something – but there’s nobody in the streets, its tidy sides are filled with bikes and scooters of all kinds, and only weeny toy-like electric cars are stirring around – at the same moment in Hong Kong´s suburbs its powerbanks are being produced by pushy crowdfunded start-ups – empty unreal double-deck RER cars are spurring alongside, plunging down the ground to catch up with me again somewhere on the dreary outskirts, it’s not nineteenth district anymore, but some ninety first, I turned a wrong way, alright, I’m wading through the pandemonium of street hucksters under the viaduct and checking my pockets again – here it is, my hostel, the cheapest dump one can find in the city, no, I did not book a room, wha-a-at, 43 euro per night, yup, January first, well, I got it – Chinese cleaning lady passes by with a rubbish bin and naturally splashes it off right outside – merci, I’m throwing my backpack to a park bench and wait for don’t-know-what.
“The main rule in Paris is to always look back” – says Masha after our brief and endless ascent through the night all the way up to Sacre-Coeur – church of the Sacred Heart, “Secret Cherry” exposed to everyone’s view on the most prominent place in the city, much safer and serene here on this tremendous humble hill, than all these Notre-Dames and classy restaurants built upon ancient catacombs that gnawed through the core of two small islands in the middle of Seine, which is ready to swallow them any minute by its carnivorous, ruthless waters, just like it happened to Atlantis before; and so as I sit on the curb across Notre-Dame one evening, munching another fat kebab or oriental-pita, fries falling out the greasy carton folded for me by His-Majesty-the-True-High-Born-Sheikh-Ahmed-ibn-Brahman wearing an apron with hearts all over it at Saint-Michel, and as I’m getting wet almost not feeling rain anymore on the bench in Rodin museum garden (the museum itself is closed, plaques in the vestibule proudly announcing that it’s nearly the only exhibition in France which exists without any government subsidies, and with all the dignity apologizes for temporary inconvenience), slack-jawed I dig there in his “Hell Gates”, or “Gates of Hell” – fantastic bronze do-o-ors of perception, tightly locked up forever, but miserable men and women, starving, hysterical, naked in their suffering like infants, who’s also right here by the way, along with everybody else, this old maniac didn’t give a flying about their apparent innocence, everybody are equally sinful facing Judgement day, even the Angel with broken wings will not avoid it, and so altogether without any exceptions they’re falling down from these sooty gnarly ledges, still trying to hold on climbing, and in these very last moments they’re finally clinging each other in an agonizing move of mutual help, pulling their hands, frantically squashing their close ones bodies, not even suspecting that among the privileged crowd of dispassionate Thinker hides (and here I spring back terrified from the telescope barrel, set up here for visitors amusement) a skeleton with ravenous jaws wide-open on his bare skull, thus if any squirt will ever make it to the top from lower levels, he will be immediately pushed back by this bony hand – now I know how the doors of my medicine cabinet are supposed to look like – suddenly I see a miniature young Asian girl separates from her tourist group, which for some reason blows up laughing during lusciously intonated explanations of their guide, and as she asks her friend to make a photo of her, smiling with her fingers crossed in “peace” sign in front of this monumental live “memento mori” – that’s when I have a vision of Future Paris, every corner of which is flooded by oblivious offsprings of the new generation, who don´t know nor do remember anymore, what to do with all the colossal legacy of this great culture, and making up a barbershop in “la Rotonde” and meat market in la Madeleine, just taking out a thousand of Stendhal-syndromic Japanese tourists per minute, lined up in procession to Eiffel Tower lift from the very Gallieni, to tie their hands with bright-colored threads for them to be able to freeze for a moment in a synchronous jump on a photo card (which is also no card anymore, but just a muddy-violet picture in holographic purgatory of Instagram), as these Rodin sculptures froze in the garden, caught here astonished forever in torture by antique medusa of his muse.
“Always look back” – says Masha and looks at me solemnly from the other end of the Universe, and three or four days later I’m stretching out in pale afternoon light on my bunk in this hostel at Rochechouart and taking my eyes off one of these guidebooks, that were presented to me back in Saint-Petersbourg, when I finally showed my hand to start it over with this old song about Great Journey: fifth floor, large and narrow as gothic stained-glass, my balcony door looks straight to Montmartre, the very Cherry of it – oh Lord was I lucky, being a poor, pathetic imposter yet somehow honored to firstly take a glance at it in the night, when it exalts so patronizingly-noble above dark and empty streets – even now, when I look at it from afar, I feel wrong, cause during the day it mostly looks like a dove toppled on an anthill, raising a broken wing of one of its domes above another, begging for mercy; but the siege of these old insatiable European reapers keep tightening up – colliding antennas of their photoflashes, they’re ganging up to get inside her flesh and stick out her eyeholes, as I read in the guidebook that in fact Sacre-Coeur is the most unsafe building in the city, cause its hill is also carved with numberless tunnels, and its groundwork took hell knows how many years of reinforcement – but it doesn’t matter anymore, cause even in daylight I’m already able to see those flashes from its very peak, realizing my last chance is gone, and it was all in vain when I was rushing up these stairs earlier in the morning, cursing my addictions to nicotine and long breakfasts on the neckbreaking run in an attempt to make it to morning mesa – cause when completely out of breath and with a stablike stitch I’m finally flying into this unbelievable brown door-in-door, priests are only giving me their severe looks, taking away regalia, so I’m saying “ah, man”, but pronouncing “Amen”, which is already something.
And as I finally look back, I see the last four years of my life are carried away to the junkyard by Sasha, winking out of our trustful “Gazelle”³ truck, dropping several parts from its holey trailer on Primorskaya, Ladozhskaya and Liteyniy; but instead of taking up to write about it all at this finest desk which seems to be made of solid wood, with two snug drawers covered by partly flakey brown varnish – which is right here in my room, but instead I’m only pacing around it on creaky parquet, back and forth, examining if all that stuff of mine is still in its place, and all the other stuff, not even thinking if I myself am in the proper place – and smoking on the balcony so desperately, that soon enough I have to go out to tobacco shop, bonjour, there are seven different kinds of “my camel” behind the counter, may I please have that one, yellow – “quack-quack, meow-meow” – what the hell do you need, you damned froggy, just give me my damned cigarettes, goddamit, and all of these old men who’re hanging out there all day long with their lottery tickets are staring at us, while I’m explaining what I need by fingers for an entire five minutes, and then constantly I can’t find my way back, straying amidst a QR-code labyrinth of these rues and boulevards, while a small scrawny dark-skinned lady sleeps in the pissed sleeping bag on the corner of Vilette and Menilmontant right on the sidewalk under the railroad bridge, or another one – that puffy-faced young Arabian with glasses on, howling and slobbering on the bus stop: “S’il vous plait, monsieur!” – so I stop with my idiotic “What-happened”-boner right on the driveway at 3 a.m.; it comes to my mind that all these street tramps also just got lost one evening, confused between rue Cotte and Cotteau, and since then they sit with their “S.V.P.” scribbled on the other side of free touristic maps – and then on the embankment I see a bus with lifesaving-familiar number on it, only in the very last minute realizing that it will not take me home at all; so I’m just gripping my small swiss knife firmer in a pocket and quickening my pace, hurrying for the traffic light but stopped by two pushy punks – straightening my shoulders, I’m trying to understand their broken English, though it’s clear anyway that they’re not here for talking, when suddenly one of them swears in Russian – so the next moment we’re shaking hands: it turns out they were just trying to ask for directions. As we bid farewell I’m even letting one of them borrow my skateboard for a moment, and he completely nails it down the street with a furious glee, which affects me on the rest of my way over the local kissing bridge, where, as it turned out, I’ve made my only photo in Paris, in the rain and with locks hanging all over the handrails in the background.
I’m looking for Kerouac in “La Gentilhommiere”, and even in “the restaurant across”, but its staff had never even heard that name, and not hurrying at all to bring me my coffee or onion soup, so I just walk straight to the toilet, sliding my hand along the bar surface: over the last half a century these “proper bars” grew summer terraces around them, and now in the original parlor there aren´t even any chairs anymore, it is now turned into some sad sort of utility room; I’m looking for Gazdanov⁴ at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois, and can’t help but notice a gravestone, with a flattened bronze angel, and it´s resemblance to the Rodin one – what a dumb ass am I to come all the way here from Russia, but never bethought to grab at least a handful of Russian soil for this last true Russian soul, so as I’m sharing one of my crumpled cigarettes remaining from the last pack I have from Saint-Petersbourg with him, the guard misses me during his patrol in the dusk of the late-evening Parisian suburb and locks the cemetery, so when I knock on his cabin door with a skateboard he doesn’t believe that I’ve made my whole pilgrimage from Montmartre “on this thing” , but finally explains to me how to get back. The bus driver also does not understand my insane long run-on sentences, I’m not even sure that there are such language constructs in English, “quack-quack”, alright, here are your three euro, just bring me to the closest stop of these double-decker commuter trains you got here – I’m staggering through an empty bus to the back seat and watching the horizon line dangerously slant down on every roundabout.
Amongst all this vanity I find myself walking out the flea market one day, struggling through the heat and horror of its inhabitants, when someone puts his bare-knuckled hand on my shoulder from the back – that’s it, you knew it would happen, now be brave enough to face your doom; so I’m turning around and see Egor – one of these Russians I’ve met on the street. Only now I’m noticing his bizarre look: longhaired, thin and tall, dressed in some kind of a weary synthetic fur coat, cheeky-chinned, smiling sharp and crooked – we’re passing some blocks together, as he explains to me that he’s in Paris for a week due to his part in some high-class fashion show, which he doesn’t care about too much anyway, just using his chance to have some fun for free – like this hotel he lives in, a luxurious building with red carpet in front of its entry. What he does care about – he continues on its stairs – are skateboards and gals; he makes decks back in Russia, but he never took any of them on this trip, and now he misses it, gazing upon all these surreal hills from panoramic window in his room, completely stoned, by the sounds of “people are strange”, and I see this cool quiet flame in his eyes: “Ma-a-an, y’know what we have to do? Pick up some of these sweet little French creatures and light their fire right there on Père Lachaise one night, oh wee!” – we promise each other to hang out together someday, but by now he has to go try on some catwalk costumes.
“Suddenly the sun broke out on Rochechouart and I discovered Montmartre – Now I knew where I would live if ever came back to Paris” – and all of the suddenest I feel that someone is forgiving me, as I read these lines from a “Lonesome Traveler” copy, sitting under the ladder at “Shakespeare and Co” (all the remaining evenings at exactly ten:fifty-five I would come here especially to help bring street racks inside the shop while it closes) – that’s where I actually meet old man Ti Jean, who would have thought; I walk out laughing as a damned psycho, not even afraid anymore to glimpse inside of the Notre-Dame – my forehead burns with a kiss of an unnamed force, so I have to scoop up some water out the font bowl with my ugly knobby hand and splash it to my face, and then I notice, that on the four sides of this bowl it says in four different languages: “I am the one who lead travelers by their ways” – and the next evening I finally get to this church of Saint Louis on the second island and sit there, waiting for the service to begin, but it’s sixteen minutes to seven already and nothing’s going on, and I’m getting worried again, but at fifteen to seven exactly the bell tolls from somewhere out the back of the altar, and three priests – African, Arabian and French – are coming out there, books and other things in their hands, and quietly they are starting the worship in a small side-hall, while I, a mesmerized clubfooted Russian fugitive, suddenly realize what I have to do – I’m sorting through my pockets, taking out 20 cents, care-ful-ly putting it in a charity box, paying back after my older French-Canadian brother and walking out without waiting for the service to end – I’m no catholic, what else do you expect me to do here after all.
So five hours before my flight I’m waking up on the very outskirt of Parisian suburb, in this wild squat – someone tries to pull the phone out of my pocket, nomadic reflexes kick in, I jump up and look around – Fred laughs at me together with this tattooed lesbian – don’t remember her name, but it was her who took me and Egor here the last night on that mad midnight taxi from Ménilmontant, where we were hustling amongst closed bars – and later on, playing all crazy Russian cat there, a third nephew of Jimmy-the-sweet-nipple (Morrisonin or Morrisonski or something like that), crouched at a glass table I’m encouraging myself to blow in the very first white line in my life, prepared for me by this stunning great African biker, a musician and – yea-haw! – a voodoo sorcerer or a kind-hearted cannibal, whatever, that’s how this Fred looks like, totally, the real Morpheus; with sincere concern he explains to me that it’s only my choice, and if I don’t feel like it, than I don’t have to, and bla blah – so I scream like c’mon gimme your freakin straw, I’m now gonna finally DIG IN properly in all of your dark subterranean businesses, and what you’re doing here anyway – while Egor settled himself pretty fine there on marvelous neat knees of that redheaded mulatto – alright, so Fred sits back in the chair, naturally a mountain in his red sweater, profound and secure, ready to cover me, to come and rescue in any nanosecond, and watches how slowly I am leaning over this thin white thread on the glass with the pipe by my nose, every little grain of it imprints on my retina – and then automatically, as if before vodka shot, by the last exhale, desperate and sharp – I blow away all this muck: oh shit sorry sorry shit ah man (Amen!) – laughingly, Fred taps my shoulder and says that it means it is not my day yet; and so here comes the morning, and another lad leads me through the whole building of this forlorn film studio to brew me a coffee with these delicious Breton cookies for a breakfast – the best breakfast I’ve had over all these ten days! Following his instructions, I easily find the RER station, jump over the turnstile after some local drifter, who passed underneath it – straight to Saint-Michel, then took the blue line to Gare du Nord – in half an hour my stuff is packed in the hostel, and as my last stogie flies down the balcony, I’m already sending a postcard at the closest post office, and even manage to grab a coffee in “Championnet”, where I was sipping a beer that very first evening, looking for girls and waiting to turn twenty three.
***
When I was just contemplating over my upcoming journey, studying “Satori in Paris”, leaning against the Gazelle window on our way to another gig, half-jokingly Sasha asked me to bring him “that ball, you know, which you should shake (at this moment his face gleamed with a look so familiar to me, blissful and fantasizing, as he kept on peering above the wheel) – and it’s snowing there, with the Eiffel tower inside of it”. He told me he’ll let his daughter have it for amusement. I told him back then, that it’s ridiculous: it’s snowing like once in three years in Paris, so it’s the most absurd souvenir one can think of – but still I’ve promised him to bring it. All the ten days I’ve spent in Paris I was looking for an IDEAL ball with the Eiffel tower, and due to the lack of my English I’ve invented this strange term, and in every souvenir shop I’ve passed by I was asking for “that snowbulb, ya know” – but all of them were disgustingly vulgar, with a golden (and mostly tilted) tower, or with sort of a glitter instead of snow, or just with the Notre-Dame and Arc de Triumphe along next to the tower, or something else. So that last evening, I was about to give up in despair and buy one of these tacky Chinese knickknacks – just before heading to Ménilmontant, and then blast off with that frenetic taxi to Ivry at 3 a.m., to Fred and others – I’ve ran into one lonely tent in some backstreet in-between Petit Pont and Saint-Michel. In the very back of it my trained sight spotted the only single one long-desired not vulgar ball. An ideal one, with a bronze-glistening bottom and just enough of “snow” – but along to the tower there were the Notre-Dame and the Arc again. I was examining, weighing it on a hand, trying to figure out if it’s not too heavy to dangle in my backpack for the rest of the road, and when an Arabian huckster showed up from somewhere out the tent’s fabric, I’ve asked him if he has the same thing but without the Arc and stuff, with the tower only in the middle of the ball. “They do not exist” – was his answer; flinched, I looked at him, and – I swear by Pigalle massage parlors! – he winked at me with a lazy eye, and the next moment, as if recovered, quickly had he found out where I came from, and jabbered in lame Russian: “d’scheevo”, “krro-seeveau”⁵. I’ve bargained down to five euro, took my snowbulb and went toward Montmartre.
¹ There is an old tradition of having tangerines on New Year’s Eve table in Russia.
² Igor Antonovskiy – modern Russian writer, known for his metamodernistic prose book “Suburbs of the Land Oz”.
³ Soviet truck model, popular due to its price and serviceability.
⁴ Gaito Gazdanov (1903-1971) – Russian émigré writer, author of “An evening with Claire” and other novels; at the age of 16 joined Wrangel’s White Army in Civil War, and when it was defeated, had to leave the country and spend the rest of his life in Paris, where he is buried at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery.