Paris bulletin 4 2010

I am on the metro. It’s 8.45 am and the carriage is full. A young man sits down to my left across the aisle. He’s carrying a briefcase, a large green apple and a pastry wrapped up in a screw of paper. Breakfast. He’s on his phone when he sits down, talking loudly to someone he knows well enough to say ‘tu’ to, about a plumbing problem chez lui.

‘Les problèmes que j’ai eus l’année dernière?… oui, mais j’ai bouché tous les trous…. Oui, ça a marché pendant un temps mais tu sais, ça marche plus maintenant. ça sent super mauvais chez moi.... Non, non, c’est pas les waters. Les waters sont nickel. Non, j’ai l’impression que ça vient plutôt de la cuisine, en dessous de l’évier… ben, j’ai regardé mais je n’y vois rien. .. tu sais, je n’ose plus toucher au robinet non plus. …D’accord. Alors tu me rappelles plus tard ? OK ciao.’

Fin de la conversation. He starts to munch his way through his pastry. It looks like he’s bought an almond croissant. Whatever it is he’s getting in a mess with it, switching the apple from one knee to the other, dusting the flakes of pastry off his trousers every two seconds. I catch his eye and smile. He pulls a sort of ‘woe-is-me’ face and I say, ‘Il vaudrait peut-être mieux tout manger d’abord, avant de faire le nettoyage ?’ He smiles at me with twinkly eyes. ‘Vous avez raison, madame. C’est pas facile assis comme ça.’ Then his apple falls off his knee and rolls yards down the carriage. It gets back to him and he secures it in his lap. He’s reading a newspaper over the shoulder of another passenger as he finishes off the croissant, nodding his head enthusiastically as he does. He catches my eye now and tells me they’ve just sentenced a third surgeon at la Clinique du Sport where between 1988 and 1994 a large number of patients developed serious post-operative infections. The latest to go down is the head man and he’s going be doing a hefty whack of prison ferme for his crimes.

The drinking water supply in the clinic was found to be contaminated with a mycobacterium ‘xenopi’. The same water supply was used to wash the surgical instruments, thus ensuring that patients ingested the bugs in every way possible. Plus he and his pals were in the habit of reusing single-use disposable surgical equipment. The woman on my right joins in at this point ‘They’re going to appeal, ‘she says. The man with the stinking kitchen gives a big grin – ‘They’ll not get off though. Not this one because the prosecutor wants them inside. And none of that ‘sursis’ (deferred sentence) malarkey for this lot either.’ This seems to make everyone in the seats roundabout feel quite pleased. It doesn’t often happen that some of the big boise get knocked off their pedestals but judging by the smiles roundabout me, people are quite happy when they do.

Paris is easing itself into spring. .The temperature has risen over the past three days to reach a respectable 15+ degrees and there’s a pale spring sun showing up the muck and dust of the year end. The cafes are full and the pavements too – lots of beggars at present, some familiar faces among them but quite a few new ones. I stood behind a couple of little women (about half my height), in Ed the grocer’s the other day. One of them had no more than two good teeth in her mouth. Both were in the usual long skirts, layer upon layer of upper garments and flower-patterned head scarves. They were each buying a packet of waffles and a pot of crème fraîche. One was also buying a large bottle of coke, the other a 2-litre bottle of bleach. They paid for their purchases with a mini-mountain of small brown coins. The toothless one lost it with the girl on the till who told her she was 15 cents short. She vomited a string of incomprehensible injures at her and found some more coins in an inner fold of her jacket.

Raising our eyes from the small lives of the metro travellers and the beggars we may notice Boris and Gleb, two early Russian saints, gazing out at us from the hoardings. They have been called upon to advertise one of the key cultural events of the spring, a temporary exhibition at the Louvre of  ‘l’art de la sainte Russie’ (opened recently by Sarkozy and Mevedev as part of a year-long celebration of France in Russia and Russia in France). Loads of treasures, wonderful icons of the virgin and child, scarcely a single image of the crucified Christ, the Christ in agony, until you get right round to the 17^th century part when Russian painters began to be much more influenced by western artistic traditions. Boris and Gleb have pride of place near the start of the exhibition. They look modestly down along those long thin noses of theirs, Hieratic, aloof, timeless. None of which adjectives could be applied to the man on the metro or the women in the supermarket queue or any of the rest of us going about our daily business. But that’s the point of an exhibition of sacred art isn’t it? To lift you into another state of mind for an hour or so – so you’re less bothered by your plumbing problems and slower to shout invectives and abuse at your fellow men.