Were those the days?
Our social life has been revived recently (Clear! whumpf!), as people we never get round to seeing wake up the fact that we are not too long for this world (north of Calais is beyond civilisation, where dragons live. Not to mention baked beans), and we start getting invited to see their new house that they moved into in 2003, etc.
One such visit was to our Russian friend P., who famously left her husband for a pompier. This ended happily, and she is now respectably married to him with a baby daughter. Disappointingly, Mr Pompier (his real name is Jean hyphen something), was at work when we came by. P. handed me the pompier calendar. 'Here he is'. For a moment I was confused, then I twigged. She actually married the model for the fireman calender. Talk about getting straight to the crux of the matter.
P. now lives in suburban seclusion not far from Meaux, east of Paris. In the car on the way out, as we zoomed past the Gare d'Austerlitz on the right bank of the Seine, I started to get a strange feeling of jigsaw pieces falling into place. I looked across at hubski, who had a broad, almost paternal, grin on his face as he looked around him. 'Remember?'
Yes. We hadn't driven along that road for seven years. I remembered the station, the neon signs, the Chinese restaurant done up as a huge plastic pavillion. The bit of the River Seine that you never see on postcards.
That was the road we used to take when returning from Paris to Disneyland, in 'starushka' (the old lady), husbki's grey Opel (RIP). I haven't gone into the significance of Mickey Mouse in our lives. Disneyland Paris provided hubski's first steady job in France, after years of working for dodgy Russian start-ups (one of which was called, without a trace of irony, 'Igor International' after its venerable founder, whose first name was Igor). This was interspersed with odd jobs teaching Russian (in the course of hawking his CV around for one of these our paths first crossed), fruit picking, and studying for a BTS in 'Commerce International' which got him and most of the others on his course, especially the non-French ones, precisely nowhere.
Hubski arrived in France in 1991, with a language degree from a Russian university (highlights of which included 'History of the Communist Party' and 'Marxist-Leninist Economic Theory'), in the same way as I arrived in 1998, with a language degree from a British university (which also featured 'History of the Communist Party' and 'Marxist-Leninist Economic Theory', but from a rather different viewpoint). But jobs for Russians, even with working papers and first-hand experience of monolithic bureaucracies, were hard to come by. Every French company he applied for turned him down flat, a few openly stating their policy of only employing French or EC nationals. He finally got the Disneyland job, as a hotel bell-boy in 1997, a few months after we met. Even this lowly position was impossible to get through the official route. He was helped in through a friend of a friend.
I still have a photograph he sent me of himself on his first day at work. Achingly young and handsome, with unmistakably Slavic features looking out from under the brim of a top hat... made out of an American flag. He was also wearing a matching 'stars and stripes' waistcoat. The photo could have been captioned 'Don't mention the (Cold) War'. As one of my friends observed at the time 'It's tragicomic'.
Although hubski professes to depise nostalgia, he swung the car off at the usual exit, Marne la Vallée. 'Just to say goodbye'.
The village where we had lived, which hosted the 'cast members' accomodation, had changed beyond recognition, and was now a town. We got lost amongst the new houses, which were more than a little twee. You almost expected to see the Mouse himself skip out of one and wave across to Donald Duck, busy electro-strimming his hedge in the next-door garden.
We finally came across the residence, then new, now looking down-at-heel. I grinned as I remembered how uneasy I had been as a squatter there, as I didn't work at Disney and wasn't paying rent. Breaking a rule! In France! What a delicate little flower I had been back then.
I heard hubski mutter 'thank you Mickey', as we sped away. It's funny how he had forgotten the bad bits - the night shifts, the humiliating uniform, the room mates, the almost unbelievably poor wage. Every time I give a tip, I remember those days and add anther euro. But I said nothing. It was our first ever home after all.
One such visit was to our Russian friend P., who famously left her husband for a pompier. This ended happily, and she is now respectably married to him with a baby daughter. Disappointingly, Mr Pompier (his real name is Jean hyphen something), was at work when we came by. P. handed me the pompier calendar. 'Here he is'. For a moment I was confused, then I twigged. She actually married the model for the fireman calender. Talk about getting straight to the crux of the matter.
P. now lives in suburban seclusion not far from Meaux, east of Paris. In the car on the way out, as we zoomed past the Gare d'Austerlitz on the right bank of the Seine, I started to get a strange feeling of jigsaw pieces falling into place. I looked across at hubski, who had a broad, almost paternal, grin on his face as he looked around him. 'Remember?'
Yes. We hadn't driven along that road for seven years. I remembered the station, the neon signs, the Chinese restaurant done up as a huge plastic pavillion. The bit of the River Seine that you never see on postcards.
That was the road we used to take when returning from Paris to Disneyland, in 'starushka' (the old lady), husbki's grey Opel (RIP). I haven't gone into the significance of Mickey Mouse in our lives. Disneyland Paris provided hubski's first steady job in France, after years of working for dodgy Russian start-ups (one of which was called, without a trace of irony, 'Igor International' after its venerable founder, whose first name was Igor). This was interspersed with odd jobs teaching Russian (in the course of hawking his CV around for one of these our paths first crossed), fruit picking, and studying for a BTS in 'Commerce International' which got him and most of the others on his course, especially the non-French ones, precisely nowhere.
Hubski arrived in France in 1991, with a language degree from a Russian university (highlights of which included 'History of the Communist Party' and 'Marxist-Leninist Economic Theory'), in the same way as I arrived in 1998, with a language degree from a British university (which also featured 'History of the Communist Party' and 'Marxist-Leninist Economic Theory', but from a rather different viewpoint). But jobs for Russians, even with working papers and first-hand experience of monolithic bureaucracies, were hard to come by. Every French company he applied for turned him down flat, a few openly stating their policy of only employing French or EC nationals. He finally got the Disneyland job, as a hotel bell-boy in 1997, a few months after we met. Even this lowly position was impossible to get through the official route. He was helped in through a friend of a friend.
I still have a photograph he sent me of himself on his first day at work. Achingly young and handsome, with unmistakably Slavic features looking out from under the brim of a top hat... made out of an American flag. He was also wearing a matching 'stars and stripes' waistcoat. The photo could have been captioned 'Don't mention the (Cold) War'. As one of my friends observed at the time 'It's tragicomic'.
Although hubski professes to depise nostalgia, he swung the car off at the usual exit, Marne la Vallée. 'Just to say goodbye'.
The village where we had lived, which hosted the 'cast members' accomodation, had changed beyond recognition, and was now a town. We got lost amongst the new houses, which were more than a little twee. You almost expected to see the Mouse himself skip out of one and wave across to Donald Duck, busy electro-strimming his hedge in the next-door garden.
We finally came across the residence, then new, now looking down-at-heel. I grinned as I remembered how uneasy I had been as a squatter there, as I didn't work at Disney and wasn't paying rent. Breaking a rule! In France! What a delicate little flower I had been back then.
I heard hubski mutter 'thank you Mickey', as we sped away. It's funny how he had forgotten the bad bits - the night shifts, the humiliating uniform, the room mates, the almost unbelievably poor wage. Every time I give a tip, I remember those days and add anther euro. But I said nothing. It was our first ever home after all.
posted by francesca tereshkova | 3:05 AM
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