“The French are great optimists: they seize upon every good that flies, and revel in passing pleasures,” Washington Irving wrote, and this is how it seemed in my dream, where life was gentler than back home. Mother and I meandered along the river, which shimmered beside us and splashed against its banks. The moon shimmered, too, like a big gold coin, and for a moment the grinding of gears on the motorway and the bustling city above seemed to halt. As we watched the light mirrored in the river, the city seemed to be as old as time itself.
“Every man has two mother countries: his own, and then France.” I think Benjamin Franklin said this, and this was the feeling of my dream, in which sweet, sweet cherries were being delivered at the market, along with the delicious Cavaillon melons, which are smaller but tastier, like a poem compared to a novel. Suddenly it was time to say goodbye, and Mother was carrying the worn suitcase her own mother brought from the old country, Asia Minor, in which there was a dress made of rough fabric, almost as rough as burlap, with five gold buttons sewn into the hem to help with the new life she would make in Marseille.
But I do not want to say goodbye. Come back, I cry, though I know she cannot. “Remember to put more commas and semicolons in your life,” Mother says. And I tell her I will. “Remember to reveal the soul’s capacity for compassion, sacrifice, and endurance,” she says, and I promise to strive to do this. Then she disappears, like smoke from a train, or oblong rain clouds. Some dogs joined me in my walk along the Seine. I could see from the markings on their coats and in how they held their tails and moved their ears that they were all related to one another, as we are. Sniffing one another, gamboling, and licking each other’s coats, they seemed to be teaching me something.
Part XVI
“WHAT DO YOU WRITE ABOUT?” the coiffeur asked. I was sitting in his shop near the rue Cler, with a bright sheet tied around my neck. It was the end of a long rainy day, at the end of a week of rainy days. There were rivers in the gutters. When I was a boy, I sat on a kitchen stool out on the back porch, with a towel around my neck, as my father gave me a military crew cut. I had thick, curly brown hair then and squeezed my eyes shut at the sound of the clippers, but now, in middle age, I looked in the mirror with wide-open eyes at my changing face. I was embarrassed to tell him I wrote about evil, suffering, death, and, occasionally, paradise. “And how do you write?” the haircutter asked, tapping his black comb against polished scissors to get the loose hairs out.
Each day, I wake up and look at the small clock next to the dusty lamp with a lightbulb burn on the shade, and at the books and magazines scattered on the floor from my reading the night before. I want to go to the toilet, but I stay under my covers a little longer. Without sleep, it is impossible for me to concentrate. I sit down with paper and pencil, but there are no little explosions that result in some lines of poetry.
How do I write? Standing barefoot in the kitchen, I stare at the espresso pot. Did I forget to buy demi-écrémé milk? Isn’t today Jean de La Fontaine’s birthday? He is the French Aesop. His poems have body and soul, by which I mean a narrative and a little moral. They were written for adults, though mostly children read them now. They have a stoicism, tenderness, and dignity.
How do I write? I walk along the Seine, where I sit on a concrete bench and watch the gulls ride up and down on the wind. The river is gunmetal gray, with little whitecaps, and very moody. Walking helps me to clear out the cobwebs of the night. Suddenly, a gull catches a fish that is too big to swallow, and he or she must spit it out. This is a metaphor for writing poetry, I think. I want my poems to seem rebellious but also to be the servant of order. I want them to be definite, self-sufficient, and true in what they represent, like expressionist paintings.
Look, a woman is leaning from a window above the quai. She waves a dust rag at a young man on the street and tosses a coin for him to buy her a baguette. Nearby, handsome horse-chestnut trees are blooming. I feel like a human plant striving for sustenance. With a nice fountain pen, purchased on the rue Saint-Dominique, I write something down and cross it out and then write it again, changing only one word. Then a cell phone rings in the distance. Perhaps caffeine will help me to concentrate, I say to myself. And on and on this goes, with life intervening upon creation. Not rough but gentle. Soon it is late afternoon, and I am walking beside the river again. Is it possible that all of life is like a river? We must either yield to it or struggle against the current. At home, I watch the news, with the intense faces of migrants floating across the screen. Then the telephone rings, but instead of answering it I sit down on the floor and write out a sentence, and another, which come to me out of nowhere, like small boats appearing in the valley of the Seine.
MY GRANDMOTHER VARTERE (which translates as “roses”) Bedrossian’s first husband, Sarkis Sarkisian, was killed by the Turks six months
