Is Journalism Worth Dying For__ Final Dispatches - Anna Politkovskaya [177]
The atmosphere, too, had been preserved. A young girl-artist, very proud of herself – like all Parisian girls – and instantly tipsy, eager to find happiness with a young boy-artist sitting some distance away, headed rapidly towards him through a historic, narrow space and sent a bottle on our table flying. There was water everywhere, in my handbag, on our clothes, in our shoes. So what did this select, impulsive fledgling of Montparnasse do about it?
Well, actually, nothing. Women in Paris are very proud indeed and have their noses in the air while managing simultaneously to seem entirely available. Our artistic mademoiselle politely, but not too politely, cooed “Pardon” and quickly found the joy she had fluttered in here to find, in the company of her Pierre, who was perhaps an as yet undiscovered Derain, or Matisse.
The names, of course, are deliberately selected. Derain, Matisse, and indeed Picasso, Cocteau, Max Jacob, Henry Miller, Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway himself had sat at these same little tables at which the early twenty-first-century Montparnasse avant-garde had given us a good soaking.
What more could a former Soviet citizen want in order to be happy? At this moment in life, nothing, unless to feel their backside in contact with the tattered armchair which had been scuffed by the threadbare trousers of the young Hemingway as he sipped the same cocktail as you. He was select, and you are select.
The waiters of Le Select, incidentally, are men of advancing years, if not just plain old. And yet, how proud they are, standing out even among the proud Parisian crowd. In vain will you seek to attract their attention, for you are no Picasso. Your predicament, however, is that you don’t want to rise irately from your seat and storm out, having lost patience with the arrogant garçon. For some reason you understand and forgive, for you are still only in the foothills.
The waiter eventually deigns to come over to you, a débutante here still far from conquering Montparnasse. He brings you the water you requested long ago, naturally in a 1920s tumbler. The glass is thick and coarse, without a hint of gentility, and openly proclaims its primary function as being not to get broken too soon. The clientele have always been a bit rowdy. Give them half-decent glasses and you would have been permanently in debt, even if some of them did go on to become Nobel Prize winners, the crème de la crème, champions of the world.
You have to sympathise with the glasses. As he bangs mine down on the table, the waiter does not favor his non-regular customer with so much as a glance. The party next to us are “his.” He and they belong here, guffawing, flirting, twining themselves around each other, even though one brings the coffee and another pays for it. Naturally the garçon can only look down on me.
He is haughty, but not actually rude. He even appears partly to forgive me for being a nobody in Montparnasse. You get a strange feeling from your mute contemplation of this old Parisian professional’s game. You catch yourself trying to be noticed by him, supercilious though his glance will be, and are glad when you see he has forgiven you. You want to jump up straight away and pursue the bluebird, to stand out from the crowd, if only for an hour, but most certainly to be a hero. Such, they say, are the antics provoked by Montparnasse. We may not be the greatest on its slopes but neither are we going to be the least.
But now, farewell, proud Le Select! You may not have known it, but in fact we were not such nonentities. Tomorrow we too would begin our conquest of Paris. The “pre-publication marketing” of our book was about to begin. What in Russia we would call the hype. How was it? Bruising. Russian public relations firms have no idea: from an early breakfast to a late supper inclusive there were press conferences, interviews, parties, presentations, conversations. By evening I was hoarse, and the next morning everything began all over again. There was a whirl of journalists who for some reason were interested