1.
G. doesn’t run anymore because of his knee. Instead, he skips ropes in a playground. He then does an hour-long workout in a nearby gym that looks out onto an ice rink. Weights and the elliptical, mainly. Sometimes a stationary bike. Then the sauna.
The playground where he skips rope has a poured rubber surface. Other men skip rope on it. G. has befriended most of them. I met one at a house concert, a man from New York who was once Jonas Mekas’s personal assistant in New York. He was buff. He radiated core strength.
Young Orthodox Jewish families also use the playground. As, of course, do other families, and other people, but the main users most mornings are deeply observant Jewish toddlers with their parents, or their nannies, some of whom (the nannies) are from West Africa and are probably not Jewish. The children do what children do in these types of playgrounds: climb the apparatuses, play pirate in the pirate boat or in the crow’s nest, and swing on the swings. The Jewish boys wear baseball hats. Their sisters wear headscarves. Some of their mothers wear wigs. One of these is a runner, G. and I used to pass her every morning, she ran around the park counterclockwise, we ran around the park in the other direction, clockwise. She wore a headscarf, a long dress and a wig. She never nodded at us or in any way acknowledged us. I haven’t seen her since the first Covid lockdown.
Jihadists ran in the park, too, as part of their physical training. This was before G. and I started running together. Many of them fought in Iraq. Some trained and fought in Yemen and Syria. Some were killed by American drones. Two, the ones who organized the jihadist running sessions in the park, brothers born in 1980 and 1982, orphans, victims of pedophilia, rappers, pizza deliverers, restaurant waiters, purveyors of child pornography and traffickers in counterfeit sportswear and shoes, were the gunmen in the Charlie Hebdo massacre. G. and I met on January 11, four days after the two brothers, whose names were Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, massacred a dozen people in the offices of the satirical weekly newspaper and two days after they were neutralisés by elite police marksmen outside of a printing company in Dammartin-en-Goële.
G. and his wife came to our apartment with mutual friends, and we walked together to Place de la République, where we joined the French president and prime minister, eleven former French prime ministers, a former French president, the German chancellor, the prime minister of Israel (who the French president, François Hollande, had asked not to attend), the prime ministers of Italy, Greece, Spain, Denmark, Britain and Poland, the presidents of Mali, Palestine and the European Council, the king and queen of Jordan and one and a half million other people in a silent march punctuated by the Marseillaise and enthusiastic cheering and applause for the police.
G. wore a New York Mets baseball hat, not because he is Jewish but because he is a New York Mets fan. He subscribes to MLB.tv. He also follows sumo wrestling. He lived in Japan on two occasions, once when he was young and single, and again, for most of a year, five years ago, with his wife and two children. He speaks Japanese. So, too, does Chabane Kouachi, the younger brother of the two jihadist assassins.
During one of our last runs, G. and I fished a jumper out of the lake. This was before the first Covid lockdown. I was going to write “We fished a jumper out of the lake in the Buttes Chaumont the other day” but then realised it was four years ago. Four years! Time slips more than it flies these days, at least it seems that way to me, more than it used to. I think we’ve all noticed this, but some people notice it more than others. G., for example. He sees things that I can’t. Or, at least, don’t. Trees. The park has thousands, chestnuts, pines, maples, Japanese sophora, exemplary trees of every imaginable species, including many labelled “remarkable”—“arbres remarquables”. In English-speaking countries, we label these “ancient” trees or “veteran” trees, though in France an arbre can be considered remarkable not just because of its age but for different reasons—singularity, size, site, symbolic power—and G. knows all their names and all the reasons for their remarkableness, all of them, just by looking at them, and the park’s many plants as well, one of which smells like curry. I’ve never seen him stumped. He can also tell you their medicinal values. He also takes excellent photographs. He collects old cameras, single-lens reflex, box, point-and-shoot, and polaroids. He has many Russian ones. Some date from WWII. I’m thinking of asking him to let me use some of his photographs to illustrate this text. I take terrible photographs. I have no eye. I’m pretty much faceblind. I don’t recognise much of anything.
Also in the morning, when G. skips, different groups of Chinese women fan dance next to him, in unison, to C-pop.
That morning, though, four years ago, as always back then when G. was still running, usually three, maybe four times a week, after meeting on his street, rue de L’Equerre, so named because it is made of two angled sections (équerres), we ran up the hill and circled half the park clockwise from the south end—the top of the park, down the west hill, catching up—chatting about what we cooked the night before, what we watched, what are wives did or said, what our children were up to, what our plans were for the coming days. Our runs were conversational, we weren’t training, we were just running, at a steady, slow, relaxed pace, rounding down past the Rothschild hospital, past Gustave Eiffel’s suspension bridge—not “le pont des suicidés”, off which the jumper had jumped—to the flat part at the bottom in front of the Mairie du 19ème. Then we circled onto the tighter, inside path that curls around the lake—we were by then on our second or third lap. We usually did eight laps of the lake before pulling out wide again up the hill on the east side, past the fake thatched-roof gazebo and the fake Swiss chalet and the faux-bois toilets and gatehouse to the top of the park again, running and chatting right through the middle of the giant tai chi class near Rosa Bonheur, with the old man who disappeared when Covid hit, the walrus-mustachioed man who looked like J.W.W. Turner, and then past a second group of Chinese women fan-dancing to blaring C-pop—but we’re getting ahead of my self, and ahead of G., because back at the lake on our second or third lap—SLAM!—down came the jumper right into the water in front of us, no more than six feet away, so close my shoes were splashed with mud. Which won’t come out, I remember thinking this, the first thought in my head, and feeling grieved, or aggrieved, or whatever the correct term is for mud on my fucking brand-new shoes. They were the nicest shoes I had ever owned. Amazon had delivered them just the day before. Meanwhile, the jumper was faceplanted in the eelgrass, sinking down into the rank mud beneath the still-disturbed surface of the water. They were also the most expensive shoes I had ever owned (I’ve since had others that were more expensive) and he was our second jumper, there had been another jumper in January—we hadn’t seen the first one jump, he had already jumped, off the fake cliff just in front of the Temple of Sibylle—it was all made, the temple, the cliff, in 1866, the year my great-grandfather, the socialist activist and dentist Simon Bernard died in the lunatic asylum of Guy’s Hospital, and like everything in the park, the mountain, the outcrops, the waterfall, the rocks in and around the stream, the stream bed itself, the grotto, the rustic huts and the wooden fences, the faux-bois benches and the faux-bois handrails and parapets, out of reinforced concrete and cement. The first jumper had gone off the fake cliff in front of the fake temple on the fake island in the centre of the fake lake, and he was much further away from us than the second jumper, unreachable, and probably already dead when we arrived, or at least too far gone—too damaged—to survive much longer. So we stood there in default mode with the other onlookers tsk-tsking the oh-my-god lying on the island shore. And then we started running again, lapping the growing crowd every three and half minutes (we tracked our pace and heart rate on our Garmin watches). On one lap we saw the firetruck and an ambulance arrive, on the next, we saw a rowboat crossing over to the island. Then the police helicopter, hovering near the temple, sending down a cable to which the damaged half-dead body on the stretcher was attached and off it went, soaring up over the fake mountain like in a TV show to a hospital somewhere southeast of the park.
I checked the news and Twitter throughout the day, but there was nothing. There never is. Suicides are not reported. No statistics are released.
Buttes Chaumont was built during the Second Empire. It was a gypsum quarry until 1850. Before it opened as a park—in 1867, the year of Canadian Confederation and the second Paris World Fair—it was a dump and a rendering and processing station for manure, excrement, animal fat and animal hair, and before that a place where the executed were put on display. A gibbet. The day the park was inaugurated, Anton Berezowski, the son of an impoverished Polish nobleman from Ukraine, shot at Tsar Alexander II in the Bois de Boulogne. The tsar, who had come to visit the second Paris World Fair—the Exposition Universelle of 1867—had just returned from a military review with his two sons and Napoleon III. Berezovsky's pistol misfired. The bullet wounded a horse. The inauguration of the park was delayed till the early evening. The Tsar did not attend the inauguration.
Gawking jackdaws
muttering deep disquietudes,
exhaling steamed puffs
of anguish at the water’s edge. Baudelaire, I think, but I can’t find it anywhere.
Oooh,” the second man moaned when he resurfaced. Not a pretty picture. He had landed in the eelgrass in the muddy shallows right next to where we were running and he was still alive, or at least partially alive, eyes glazed with shock, blood seeping into the water from the wounds on his face and leg and soft moans of pain leaking weakly out of his thin-lipped mouth. “Ooh-ooh-ooh,” very quiet, almost under his breath, as if embarrassed, as if trying not to be heard. His left leg was snapped in half somewhere near the knee, skewed off backward at an ugly angle. There was a little red chandelier of blood—a blossoming cloud—in the muddy water above the snap and a bloody gash on the side of his head, next to a tiny blue-ink tattoo of a cross.
Hard to say how old he was. I clapped my hands, trying to get his attention, hold his gaze. G. was on his cell, walking towards the front of the lake, calling the pompiers. “Ho! Monsieur! Ne dormez pas!” I did not think he should sleep, and I did not know what else to say. “D’accord,” he whispered. He had a sweet, shy smile and perfect teeth. It was impossible to say how bad his wounds were. When we first arrived on the scene—I mean, when we recovered from the surprise of the splash and the mud—there was nothing to see, just the eelgrass, then a few bubbles. Then his white sneakers surfaced out of the murk. Then his legs and his backpack and the rest of him, rolling over and upward, eyes open, breathing, then moaning, quietly, as if in a dream, far away.
The only other bystander, a buff young Asian man, stripped off his shirt. “Help me get him out,” he said.
“We shouldn’t move him,” I said. “He may have internal injuries.”
The floater’s eyes closed, and his nose slipped under the water. He sputtered, resurfaced.
“We need to get him out of the water before he loses consciousness.”
“He may have snapped his spine,” I said.
“He will drown.”
And sure enough, just as the buff Asian man said this, the floater’s nose slipped under the surface and he thrashed a little, then sputtered more water.
“We need to get him out now,” he said. He was now stripped down to his underpants.
I didn’t move. The buff man glared at me. The floater submerged, sputtered, re-emerged.
I undid my new shoes and took them off, and then my socks, and slid over the cement wall after the buff Asian guy into the mucky water, up to my thighs in rank sludge. Was G. there by then? I don’t remember. He’ll tell me when he reads this. But he won’t correct, counter or contradict anything I have written here. With the possible exception of the baseball hat. “On three,” said the Asian guy. “Un, deux, trois.” We seized the floater by the collar, floated him between us the length of the lake and dragged him half up onto the concrete ledge at the shore.
“Monsieur!” Clapping my hands together next to his face. “Don’t go to sleep!” And so on. Still smiling, glassy eyes glazing, closing, opening, closing. About ten minutes of this, then the firetruck came, and G. and I left.
Is the fact that the Asian was Asian important? And buff? Young buff Asian or Buff young Asian? The force of order. No idea how this works. Intuitive, I suppose. Age, shape, race, gender. New expensive Nike shoes. Expensive new Nike shoes. Dazed, critically injured, bleeding, moaning. And underpants: this is the second time in this life that I have written the word underpants. Third. It may also be the first time—third—that I’ve seen underpants written. Fourth. Underpants. Fifth. Rembrandt’s Underpants. How about that for the title? Underpants underpants underpants underpants. The eggplants in my underpants. I have now seen and written the word underpants ten times. I keep seeing his face in the water. Eleven times. Twelve times!
“Are you awake?”
“Oui,” he whispered. And the fingers on his left hand moved. A truth that’s told with bad intent / Beats all the lies you can invent. William Blake. Sorry. The jumper threw me a bit. I see him still, lying in the water. Smiling, sheepish. Apologetic. I see him from the same point of view as then, but I also see myself and G., leaning over him, snapping our fingers, trying to be encouraging.
I wonder now, having researched this a little, what was going on in his brain. They say suicides have more methylation in their hippocampi and fewer GABA receptors in their Brodmann area 10s, especially the frontopolar cortices. I’ve never felt this impulse, but I understand it. Like a portal in the brain, opening onto new options. New endings. New beginnings. The end of the world as we know it. Will I ever be able to get rid of his face? Erase it, I mean. The memory.
Is he dead?
End of Part 1. Part 2, “Ravel, unravel…”, will appear in this space next Sunday.
Thank you, Augusta! That's great to hear. And reassuring. I thought I might have tipped too far into the weird this time.
Gripping. Also, dying to meet whoever "G" is. And, I'll definitely be using that William Blake quote.
Thanks for another great piece. Underpants, underpants, underpants!