Ransacking Paris by Patti Miller

the silence, but at least I might be able to hear a few notes, pattern some scenes in Paris with music. There were pages of concerts in the Pariscope , every day of the week, and on Sundays performances in churches which were free or only cost a few euros: string quartets, solo sopranos, piano recitals, choirs, symphony orchestras, organ recitals, cello and violin duets, all over the city. I circled the notice for Mozart’s Requiem at the Madeleine Church and thought of Dina, long dead. There had been no requiem for her. Just a strange scratchy funeral in a modern cemetery chapel before the coffin slid behind the curtains, her pale-faced little boy looking as if the whole world had become a vast and terrifying blank. Music and singing and death were beginning to mingle in my story in a way that I hadn’t planned but which seemed inevitable. Death – and love too – has always needed music it seems. Words take us to the edge of their vast territories, but music can take us right through them; it can delineate the shape of every strange mountain and lost valley in those landscapes.
    I stretched out in the midday heat. As I extended my arms I felt a twinge in my shoulder; I must have been crouched in front of my laptop for too many days. I’d give the man with the marteau a little longer before I headed back to the studio.
    After leaving Madame Curie, I zigzagged through the narrow streets of the fifth arrondissement, along the rue Tournefort where Balzac’s characters in Père Goriot lived, and along the rue du Pot de Fer where George Orwell was down and out, and into the place de la Contrescarpe where Hemingway drank in the cafés. The streets were narrow and silent and occasionally smelled of piss but I felt a delicious sense of a world shivering into place around me, a pleasure that was soothing and exciting at the same time. The streets were not just ordinary three-dimensional roadways and apartment buildings and shops, they existed as stories, as places inscribed. Here was where Orwell heard ‘the desolate cries of street-hawkers’ and where Balzac’s fictional Rastignac began his long ascent into society and where Hemingway held up the zinc bar in the Café des Amateurs. Even though I’d never seen any of these streets before, I was aware of a curious sense that they were more real to me than the streets of my hometown. I could read these streets as well as walk them. They had been imprinted in my brain already and as the written image slipped over the actual, each street and café became imaginary. It was pleasurable, as if I were seeing a landscape unfold itself out from an open page and become real. I nearly laughed aloud – the world had become a 3D fold-out book and I was living inside it.
    The rue Mouffetard wound up from the place de la Contrescarpe. It was lined with cafés and there were more people about because it was lunchtime and the rue Mouffetard was a tourist street, noisy after the silent summer heat of the backstreets. A market was just beginning to pack up and vendors were crying out their best prices to get rid of the last of their raspberries and strawberries. There were lettuce and other vegetable leaves everywhere on the cobbled street, and the smells of salmon and prawns and cheeses, mouldy blues and Normandy camemberts, were overpowering. One man was selling honey and honeycomb and I stopped to look at the neat hexagonal shapes of the cells. How had creatures come up with such a precise way of making and storing their nourishment, stealing nectar so arduously from hundreds of flowers – it takes 150 flowers to fill each bee’s nectar basket – and then storing it in matching hexagonal cells until they needed it or until it was stolen by the beekeepers? It seemed a kind of alchemy, to turn flower juices into liquid gold.
    I decided to head back to the studio; the hammerer no doubt would have stopped for a long lunch by now. On the way