Some of you may remember the story I related a few weeks ago about serving as Duty Officer in Paris during Christmas week my first year in the Foreign Service. The story involved the well-meaning if rather dim American whose friends had sent him marijuana for Christmas. His ill-advised efforts to straighten things out – with me trying to persuade him to leave it alone – ended with him in jail.
My adventures that week didn’t end there.
As I explained in my previous blog, the duty officer takes after-hours calls for the embassy, many of them from Americans who have gotten themselves into trouble of one kind or another. Another responsibility, at least in Paris, was to go into the embassy on Saturday morning to see if any cables had come in from Washington that couldn’t wait for a response until OOB (opening of business) Monday.
I spent perhaps an hour going through every cable that had come in since Friday evening. None of them seemed particularly urgent, and I was about to head back home when I got a phone call from Post One, where two Marines were stationed in a fortified booth inside the main entrance to the embassy.
It seemed that an unknown Frenchman had come in with what he claimed was a box of chocolates, a Christmas present for the Ambassador’s wife. The package, however, was wrapped, meaning the Marines couldn’t confirm the contents.
It had been a dangerous year for the embassy community. The defense attaché had been shot dead on the street by terrorists a few months earlier, and the Consul General in Strasbourg had been shot twelve times as he pulled out of his driveway, heading for work. (Astonishingly, after going through the car window, none of the small-caliber bullets had penetrated the CG’s leather coat, and he escaped unhurt.) More recently, a string of terrorist bombings had badly rattled the city. A plot to bomb an embassy building had been foiled by French intelligence only a few weeks earlier. So, the report of a mysterious package at Post One raised alarms.
To my surprise, the Marines wanted guidance from me, the least experienced officer in the embassy, on how to deal with this package. Fine. I suggested they run the package through the x-ray machine to get a look at its contents.
“Yessir,” said the Lance Corporal on duty. I felt very grown-up with him calling me sir. “But we haven’t got an x-ray machine, sir.”
Ah. “Have you run a metal detector over the package?”
“Yessir, we did that.”
He didn’t add more, so I had to ask him, “And what was the result?”
“It reads positive, sir.”
Yikes. “Does the gentleman have an explanation?”
“Yessir. He says the chocolates are wrapped in foil.”
That sounded plausible, but we needed more than plausibility.
“I suppose we’ll have to put it in the bomb barrel and see what happens.” I suggested this having only the vaguest idea of what a bomb barrel was or did. As I say, I was new in the service.
“Yessir. But we haven’t got a bomb barrel either, sir.”
Long sigh. “Well, Corporal, I’m afraid someone is going to have to open that package.”
“Yessir.” A slight pause here. “That’s why we called you sir.”
Well, just wonderful.
They may have been thinking that, with all the expensive training they had received, letting me blow up instead of them was a better use of the taxpayer’s dollar. In any case, I couldn’t have the Marines thinking I was a wuss, so I made my way down to Post One.
My fears were allayed the moment I walked into the room. Though appearances can deceive, I suppose, the man looked much more like a central casting idea of a French chocolate maker than a terrorist. Paunchy, fifty-ish and mustachioed, the gentleman took no offense at our caution, said he understood perfectly. Though my first notion had been to stand inside the heavily reinforced guard room with the Marines and tell the man to open the package, I decided it would be good enough to have him stand beside me as I opened it. In retrospect, that probably wasn’t the best way to approach it, but it worked out fine. I opened the box of chocolates, apologized to our Gallic candymaker for the fuss and promised to forward it to the Ambassador’s wife.
Everyone walked away safe and happy. But I gave the Marines the stink eye on the way out.
Lately, I’ve been trying to include in each blog post an appropriate passage from one of my books. However, I don’t have any passages of such low comedy. So I’ll sign off with a few paragraphs from the opening of my latest novel, “Sri Lanka.”
No one writes songs about Paris in the winter. There’s little romance in the chill and the rain, it’s hard to find poetry in gray and gloom, and when night falls, the upper floors of the city’s darkened buildings dissolve into the leaden sky, leaving only the yellow glow of lighted rooms.
I turn up the collar of my raincoat and jam my fists deep into my pockets. The two-mile walk from my place, on the Place du Pantheon, to Frank Schaeffer’s apartment, near the Ecole Militaire, varies with the season. December's rain and gusting winds have robbed the city of autumn’s agreeable melancholy, and the normally pleasant stroll along the boulevard becomes a head-down trudge between the lighted café windows and the bare, rain-dripping trees.
I could have taken the Metro, but I’d taken it to work and figured I'd breathed in enough dead air for one day. Besides, I know the city well enough now that its ancient curving streets don't throw me off as they did during my first posting to Paris. Seems impossible that more than twenty years have gone by since then.
It's funny. Memory gets in the way of memoir. I don't mean the memory of what happened. Even now, what happened to me back then remains more vivid, more real than most of what happens to me now, perhaps because life itself seems sharper, clearer, more immediate and worthy of our full attention when we are young.
Memory, however, is a faithless guide. Many of my sharpest recollections are of things that never happened. My life is larded with such beloved false friends. What I've often retained is how it should have happened—which carries its own truth, I guess. But not the truth, whatever that means.
. . .
A sprinkle of rain brings me back to the present. I hunch my shoulders and walk past the kids playing soccer in the rain on the Champ de Mars, the pitch lit up like daylight and the Eiffel Tower rising like a dream at its far end. I look at my watch. I don’t want to show up promptly for dinner—a singularly American trait in a city where American traits are not counted among the great virtues.