We won't always have Paris , or how the Intifada blew away my Paris pied a terre

 

By Robert Mendoza

 

I read the June 2003 Atlantic magazine with greater than usual interest. In "Who Shot Mohammed Al Dura?", James Fallows reveals how Palestinian propagandists faked the killing of a 12-year-old boy by Israeli soldiers. French television producers (Antenna 2) ensured that sensational footage of the boy cowering in his father's arms was seen around the world.

When the incident occurred (October 2000), my hotel room in Paris was not provided with a TV, so I was a day late getting the news. That morning, I walked into my usual bar for a coffee and to read the newspaper. I noticed that Le Parisien was not in its usual niche between the beer pumps, but was in the back booths. It was being violently swirled on its wooden staff by one of a group of livid, gesticulating beurs (Arabs resident in France ). I haven't any Arabic, but it was obvious that I wasn't going to be perusing that paper with my coffee anytime soon. I crossed the street to the more tranquil Au Bon Coin, ordered un café, and got my first glimpse of the boy and his father trapped behind that cement barrier in Netzarim.

About a week later, I was hanging up my hotel room key at the desk just as the Algerian manager walked in with a large sack of croissants. He beckoned to me and said, "Listen, what is the name of those little hats the Jews wear?" I was nonplussed. He was a dyspeptic, middle-aged beur who, in the three years that I'd frequented the Hotel Clairefontaine, had never engaged me conversation and only grudgingly acknowledged my bonjours and bonsoirs.

My mind was blank for almost a minute, and then I blurted out, "Well, the German Jews call them yarmulkes." He nodded as he went into the breakfast bar. I walked down the Rue Fermat feeling pleased that I'd been able to access my multicultural memory banks and formulate a response in French.

Life in the Clairefontaine was often fraught with emotional outbursts. About once a week, the manager and the owner's wife got into a screaming match. Having lived in Spain amidst similar goings-on, this did not bother me, and I much preferred Mediterranean volatility to the calculating, miserly, and dour ambiance of French-run budget hotels. The Clairefontaine residents (many of whom stayed on for years) were poor immigrants from East and North Africa . Several had families with children and managed to thrive in shabby miniscule rooms no larger than mine. The residents often quarreled as noisily as the management. However, I never felt any hostility directed at me. We exchanged solemn greetings as we met one another ascending and descending the threadbare staircase, or while struggling to open our doors in the dank hallways.

It was mid-October 2000 when the walls of the Metro, street kiosks, and even the glass front of the police substation beneath my window were plastered with lurid posters protesting the killing of little Mohammed Al Dura. Returning to the hotel one afternoon, I helped myself to the room key and left the office. As I walked towards the stairs, the owner's wife hissed something in Arabic in my direction from her perch behind the bar. I paused, and then continued upstairs. Five minutes later, she was standing at my door, asking me to confirm that she had been gentil (nice). "Je etait gentil, n'est pas?" I hastily agreed that she had been nice. Then the manager stepped into the room and they began arguing in Arabic. Apparently, he had rebuked her for being rude to the clientele. Eventually, they realized that it wasn't very gentil to yell at each other over my rumpled bed and went down to the office. I was relieved, not only to regain my privacy, but that they had been too agitated to notice my illegal camping stove. I soon forgot the incident, and nothing untoward happened during the last week before I returned to the US .

Almost a year later in October 2001, I landed at Charles de Gaulle, cleared customs, and ran downstairs to the train station. I disembarked the train at Denfert Rochereau, climbed the stairs, and angled on to Rue Froidevaux for the six long blocks beneath the plane trees that line the east wall of Montparnasse Cemetery .

Just before 11:30, I walked into the Clairefontaine, anxious to book a room, drop my bags, and hustle to my favorite neighborhood bistro in time for lunch. The manager glared at me and waved his hands as he noticed me close the door to the street. "There are no rooms. Non, absolutely non." "What about tomorrow?" I countered. "You remember me. Three years. I always stay for a month." "Non, and I don't remember you." As I turned away, gathering up my luggage, the Senegalese maid smiled over her mop and said, "I remember you, monsieur." But my little room was gone. Suddenly feeling very jet-lagged, I walked into the street, searching for the hotels I'd rejected three years ago.

Half an hour later, I'd found a room, but by that time, my bistro's dessert and cheese plates had been cleared and put away. I returned to the room with some take-out from the Monoprix, wondering what had gone wrong.

Then I remembered the "little hats the Jews wear." Apparently, I had unwittingly (and inaccurately) outed myself as a Jew. My first reaction was to laugh, recalling the scene in Annie Hall where Woody Allen, as seen through the eyes of Annie's Midwestern grandmother, is wearing enormous sidelocks beneath his maniacally bobbling black beaver hat. Then I looked around my squalid hotel room, my view of airshaft brick and pigeon droppings, all at a 65-franc premium, and I got mad.

It didn't help to remind myself that I'd avoided Sartrean bad faith by refusing to claim a gentile (if not exactly Aryan) identity. Like many people my age, I readily remember the political upheavals of 1968. That year in Paris , that most prominent of the revolutionaries, Dany the Red, was infamously dismissed by De Gaulle as un juif allemand (a German Jew). The next day, massed student rioters unfurled banners across the Sorbonne and throughout the Left Bank declaring, "We are all German Jews!" So here I was, a pissed-off German Jew in an overpriced, crummy room.

Henry Miller once famously asserted that he was a citizen of the 14th Arrondissement. I've never had the chutzpah to make such a claim, despite my nearly 25 years of frequenting that district. If self-bestowed citizenship is akin to staking out a home, as in "the place where they have to take you in," my reception at the Clairefontaine had disabused me of any notion that I was anything but an undocumented alien.

Subsequent to September 30, 2002, several Arab countries issued commemorative stamps featuring little Mohammed and his father behind their concrete barrier. Morocco now boasts of an Al Dura Park, and one of Baghdad 's main streets was renamed the Martyr Aldura Street . The faked image has become a Pieta of the Arab world.

As for my self-image, I have not been moved to return to the Clairefontaine. I'm convinced that, at that Parisian hostelry, my papers remain in disorder and I will be received with all the warmth reserved for the proverbial chien de crèche (dog in the manger).

--to be continued--