I'm on the third day of a two-week vacation. Originally, S. and I were going to spend this week moving her belongings into our new apartment, and then next week vacationing somewhere not-too-expensive to recover from this week. But in May I awoke in a classic alternate universe scenario. You know the drill: change one pivotal event (the South wins the Civil War, Oswald misses, the Supreme Court hands the 2000 presidential election to George Bush) and explore the ramifications. So, I'll be moving into the new apartment by myself.
I suppose "the move" has been in progress for close to two years and won't be completed until my belongings, which I put into storage when I moved to Paris in October 2002, complete their leisurely trans-Atlantic crossing. In the meantime, I've lugged over the astounding number of books I've bought since I blew into town, which has made my current abode, a furnished studio apartment, a bit more roomy. S. was kind enough to set up accounts for me at Electricite de France and France Telecom. I bought a microwave oven and brought it over on my little luggage cart, and today two young mecs from Darty brought over my new refrigerator. Because an unfurnished French apartment is really unfurnished.
Unfortunately, the new refrigerator is not humming away because the electricity is out.
I can puzzle my way through written French, which is how I was able to check out the refrigerators at Darty, order one off their Internet site, and figure out that they were going to deliver it today between noon and 8 p.m. And I can grasp enough spoken French so that when Darty called shortly before noon today, I could grasp that they expected to be by in about 20 minutes (although, by the time nearly an hour had passed, I wondered if they had said they'd be by at 20 hours, which is 8 p.m.). I probably even have enough French to call EDF and ask what's up with the lights. I'd sound like an idiot, but I think the sympathy that tends to engender among the natives is my greatest asset. But I certainly don't understand French well enough to puzzle out an EDF representative's reply to my pidgin inquiry.
Which is how life is here. I can bump along for days without incident, kind of skimming along the surface of the culture. I can order at a restaurant, buy movie tickets, navigate the bus and Metro. In a store, I can ask where the shoelaces are (if I first look up the word for "shoelaces"). But if I have to go one level deeper, I start floundering.
There's ways around it. If I walk to the EDF office, bill in hand, I will certainly find someone there who knows at least enough English to understand me. Odds are, in fact, it'll be someone (either customer or employee) who speaks perfect English. I can ask someone at work to make a call for me. I could even ask the gardien at Rue Bleue for a hand. She doesn't understand English, but I can flick the light switch, point to the circuit-breaker box, wave my paid-in-full EDF bill and look defeated.
My plan now, though, is to read a couple more chapters of Jane Kramer's fine collection of New Yorker columns, The Europeans, and hope the problem kind of goes away by itself.
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