Paris: A Love Story (6 page)

Rereading these letters for the first time I am struck by my frequent expressions of gratitude. “I can never thank you enough for this amazing chance you have given me,” I wrote in almost every single letter. “I cannot believe my good fortune to have you as my parents.” Yet I was a scholarship student, mostly living on my summer earnings. This was not gratitude typical of an American teenager. It was born of the still fresh memory of the long separation from my parents just a decade before, when they were jailed as American spies and my sister and I were left in the care of strangers in Budapest. As to a phone call home, that was beyond my means.

But my enchantment continued. “Spring arrived to Paris,” I wrote home on March 23. “All of a sudden all the cafés moved outside and everybody shed their coats. There are even more than the usual number of amorous couples in the Luxembourg.

“I bumped into Bruno in the afternoon and he said, ‘Let’s take off for Fontainebleau.’ And so we did, along with two French pals. Sunday we went to mass in the village church and had café and croissants with the locals, bought lots of food and cooked a great meal. We hiked all afternoon in the Barbizon forest, went to a local soccer match, listened to Bruno play his violin, made dinner, built a fire and drove back to Paris at 10pm.”

Discovering the bargain bins on the rue St.-Placide, I gradually transformed myself into the facsimile of a chic Parisian girl. Well-cut pants (instead of baggy jeans) and a trench coat became my uniform. And, of course, I learned to tie scarves.

I was studying in the hushed library of Sciences Po, on the rue St.-Guillaume, working on two term papers, one on Proust’s moral satire, and another on Rimbaud’s fatalism. I heard the low rumble of a demonstration on the nearby boulevard St.-Germain and suddenly realized I was virtually alone. And then abruptly, my enchanted Parisian life exploded in chaos. “This week has brought Revolution to the Quartier Latin,” I wrote home on May 10. “For the past couple of nights I’ve had
gaz lacrymogène
(tear gas) in my eyes, was clubbed as I left the Restaurant Universitaire on the rue Mabillon, by cops who do not differentiate between anybody who attends the Sorbonne, where, by the way, I no longer have classes. I have been locked inside cafés and apartment buildings, where I was forced to take refuge when the battle got overheated. It’s my first taste of street violence since Budapest.”

•   •   •

Roughly one decade after the revolution that ended my childhood and forced my family to flee, I was caught up in another uprising. This one was not my own.
Les jours de mai,
as it has come to be known, started partly due to those hangar-size
classrooms, and distant professors who disappeared immediately after they delivered lectures, unchanged for decades. The spark was lit in the suburban campus of the University of Paris at Nanterre. It seemed such a trivial issue. Boys camping out in the girls’ dorms. But the uprising had a fiery leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, “Danny le Rouge” (so named for his politics as well as his fiery hair), who brought a few hundred supporters to the Sorbonne to carry on the protest. (It so happened that on the same day, my future husband arrived as the youngest delegate to the Vietnam Peace Conference across the river, at the Élysée Palace. But we would not meet for almost two decades.)

So the uprising moved into my neighborhood. The Grand Amphi, where the week before we were listening to a lecture about Montaigne, became ground zero of the revolution. My first impression was that this was hardly a serious business: all talk and theater, as far as I was concerned. But then the Sorbonne’s rector called in the police to clear out the place, and the protests turned violent.

They arrived in buses; the dreaded CRS, Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, the riot police, trained for mob busting. Their buses snaked up the Boule Miche and stayed there for weeks, a powerful, menacing sight that transformed the student quarter. We peered inside those big blue buses and observed frightening, extraterrestrial creatures. Their large bodies were padded and ready for combat. Even hunched over their card games, awaiting orders to attack, the CRS appeared menacing—and middle-aged, to my eyes. I could imagine how
bored and itching for action they must be in their claustrophobic confinement. When they poured out of their buses, and, with their rubber truncheons swinging, sprang into action, it was hard to get out of their way. That is what happened to me leaving the university cafeteria, and I had sore shoulders for weeks.
“CRS assassin!”
we chanted, even as we dashed into buildings and cafés for cover.

Battle lines were drawn right in front of my building. Place Edmond Rostand, rue Gay Lussac, and rue Sufflout were rich in paving stones. All night, an army of students dug up those stones and built barricades. It was impossible to sleep. Police cars, ambulances, shouts, and shrill slogans right outside my window touched a deep childhood fear. I could not join in the excitement of my fellow students. To me this was not an adventure but a bad and dangerous memory.

Opening my window the next morning, I was shaken by the sight. The students had turned over cars to block the CRS advance. Small cars were easy to lift and set on fire, especially if you stuffed trash inside. They smoldered for days. The rain, which never seemed to let up that May, gave the whole neighborhood the sodden feel of a war zone. The students had cut down ancient plane trees to reinforce the barricades. Tear gas hung in the air. My eyes itched but I knew enough not to rub them. My beautiful
quartier
was stripped and terrifying.

The sight of the red flags the students brandished as they linked arms and sang the “Internationale” agitated me, bringing back images from my first revolution. At the beginning, the Budapest uprising was like an exuberant parade. In an attempt
by the Hungarian authorities to appease mounting prerevolutionary ferment, my parents were released and we were reunited as a family. I was euphoric. The early, hopeful days of the uprising matched my own excitement at having my parents back. But the revolution quickly turned violent—and then hopeless.

Caught up in the swirl of street scuffles between students and police in Paris, I was haunted by memories of Hungarian secret police agents lynched by angry mobs, images of my family’s desperate rush to cross the Danube to sanctuary at the American Embassy, one step ahead of Soviet tanks.

With classes canceled, the Sorbonne closed and the action shifted to the Odéon Theater, a few minutes’ walk from my apartment. Every wall in the neighborhood was plastered with communist-style posters featuring some ironic wordplay:
Sous les pavés, la plage!
“Under the paving stones, the beaches!” promised one.
Il est interdit, d’interdire,
“It is forbidden to forbid,” and so on. Posters of Lenin, Marx, Marcuse, and Mao adorned walls stripped of the Odéon’s theater placards. Most shocking to me was a poster of Stalin. Stalin! Did these “revolutionaries” have the faintest notion of Stalin’s cruelty? My enthusiasm for this adventure was rapidly evaporating. I wanted my beautiful Paris back.

The tear gas was so thick in my neighborhood that some nights I could not enter my building. My elegant high-vaulted lobby now sheltered injured students, the
quartier
’s new heroes.

The radio no longer played “Paris s’éveille.” Instead, an agitated announcer came on with a stream of battle reports.
Five hundred people were wounded in street fighting. Soon the whole city was paralyzed: most of the subway lines stopped running, shops in the neighborhood lowered their iron shutters, and even the cafés closed. Trash piled up in front of the great iron gates of Luxembourg Gardens, which were padlocked.

There was no fresh produce, and even cheese—the French staple—disappeared. Madame Koumarianos’s wartime experience manifested itself in the varieties of potato dishes she served for lunch. But my landlady seemed somehow satisfied that the outside world now matched her inner gloom. See, Kati, her pursed lips seemed to say, what a bitter thing is life.

With only a few subway lines still running, and the cafés closed, I felt claustrophobic and depressed. It was an exceptionally cold May. I took shelter in the library of Sciences Po and tried to prepare for my upcoming orals. I could not afford to miss a year’s credits. A friend and I decided to hitchhike around France together. Anything was better than being hungry in Paris and breathing the foul, eye-stinging air. But I really wasn’t enjoying the picturesque hamlets of Normandy and Alsace-Lorraine. I felt cut off from my parents. There was no mail service. Unlike the Sorbonne “revolutionaries,” who could go home in the evening to the safety and warmth of their parents’ homes, I was far from home. Also unlike them, I had been frightened before. I had one place to turn for help: the Paris offices of the Associated Press, my father’s employer.

Sitting in the AP’s office, off the Champs-Élysées, surrounded by a bank of teletypes and shirt-sleeved reporters
banging out copy, I felt on familiar ground. I composed the following letter, which a colleague of my father’s then teletyped to Papa. Written in Hungarian, the language in which he and I generally communicated, it was dated May 28, 1968.

Dearest Papa,

As you know, France has been turned upside down. It is astonishing how fast a beautiful city can be destroyed. Nothing works, and, quite frankly, I am depressed and tired. To get away from the barricades and gas bombs, I have been hitchhiking to Deauville and Alsace. I was unable to enjoy these lovely places because this situation is very upsetting to me. It is my first taste of violence since ’56.

I can’t tell you what my plans are because there are no flights, but I shall certainly return sooner than expected, early July I think.

Please Papa don’t worry about me! I am a big girl and intelligent to boot. As soon as you can please send me money and I will hop on a charter. I don’t know if I shall stay in Paris for the general strike. It is completely dead. Wherever I go I shall keep in touch. Hope you got my telegram from Colmar. Please trust me. Kati.

How different from my ecstatic reports of just weeks before. My parents had lived through the Nazi and Soviet occupations of Budapest, imprisonment, and revolution and its bloody aftermath, followed by escape to the West. Their younger
daughter suddenly caught between barricades and truncheon-wielding riot police must have been a chilling image for them. At the time, frightened as I was, I never thought of what that evoked for them.

Then, on June 6, my morning radio program did not begin with a report on the number of cars burned or students injured in the Latin Quarter. The news was from Los Angeles, and it was shocking: Robert Kennedy, shot in a hotel kitchen, at the start of his run for the White House. I was reeling. Had the world lost its head? Was no place on earth safe? (Across the Seine, my future husband felt Bobby’s death even more sharply—and personally. “I was one of those people,” Richard wrote Bobby’s widow, Ethel, “who were at just the critical moment of decision about their future when JFK was President. I really did enter the government because of him . . . There was hope and then it was gone—and then it returned, and now it seems gone again.”)

This act of mindless violence followed on the heels of Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis just weeks before. The world seemed a dangerous place now. I had no phone so I walked down the eerily quiet boulevard St.-Michel to Bruno’s parents’ apartment and placed a call home, my first in almost a year. The sound of my mother’s “Katika” reduced me to tears. All my bravado, all my determined self-sufficiency vanished. Suddenly my plans to hitchhike to Italy seemed the ridiculous dreams of another era. I wanted my parents. I wanted to go home.

The next day, I wrote them. “I’ve just reserved a place on Icelandic Airlines for the 16th of June. It’s all set except I’m still
waiting for the money which should arrive, now that mail service is back . . . I can’t wait to be with you now. The world is too crazy and I’m tired. I spent the day listening to students at the Sorbonne who have little else to do but talk and shout. I cannot recover from the senseless killing of two brave men and need you to reassure me that sanity exists somewhere.”

Before leaving, I took my oral exams at Sciences Po. I faced the legendary professor Jean-Baptiste Duroselle in an empty hall. He asked me to discuss the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after World War I. The great man peered down with a bemused smile at the determined American girl who had been chasing him for weeks to schedule her orals. Perhaps for that reason, he was generous with my final grade. I also turned in my term papers on Proust, Rimbaud, and Montaigne to the Sorbonne. Frightened and homesick I may have been, but no revolution was going to derail my progress.

Charred cars lying on their sides like wounded animals still disfigured my beloved Quartier Latin when I said
au revoir
on a blustery June morning. My final glimpse of Paris en route to Orly Airport was of a cold, gray, battered city. But I knew I would be back.