I knocked sharply on the door. “Hello?”
Inside, I heard the sound of someone moving about. Thank goodness; I didn’t know what I would do if I had to turn around again. Probably just get back on the train, I thought to myself. No. No, I wouldn’t do that. Definitely not.
“J’arrive!” a voice called, sounding slightly panicked. There was a clattering noise inside. I wondered what was going on.
Finally, the door was flung open. A gigantically tall man stood there. His skin was a dark olive color, his eyebrows black and bushy, his jaw bristly and jutting. He was wearing a patterned robe which didn’t appear to have much underneath it. He glanced at me without the slightest flicker of recognition or awareness whatsoever.
“Bonjour?” I said. “Anna Trent? From England?”
I worried suddenly that Claire hadn’t done it right, hadn’t managed to set it up, or there’d been some misunderstanding, or he’d changed his mind, or…
He squinted. “Attends,” he commanded. “Wait.”
He returned two seconds later with a huge pair of black-rimmed glasses. I sniffed. He smelled of sandalwood.
With the glasses on, he squinted once more.
“La petite anglaise!” he said, a sudden smile splitting his face. He switched to English. “Welcome! Welcome! Come in! Come in! I will say, I did forget. You will say, ’ow could you forget, and I will say…I will say…welcome à Paris!”
The second I stepped into the room, I could see there was absolutely no doubt that he had indeed forgotten. There was almost no hallway, just room for a hat stand with a collection of esoteric hats on it—I counted a fez, a trilby, and the head of a gorilla costume—then it opened out into a room. It wasn’t a large room, but it was incredibly stuffed. There were capes and material, feathers, scissors, fur stoles, pillowcases, ashtrays, empty champagne bottles, and an enormous red sofa with huge cushions strewn about it and over the floor. In the corner was a kitchenette that had blatantly never been used. The peculiar man straightened up, even though the ceilings were much lower than I’d expected and he could hardly stand up; he must have been six foot five.
“Non,” he said sadly, looking around at the mess. “I did forget.”
He turned to face me happily.
“But what if I said, yes, welcome, Anna Trent…”
He pronounced it “a-NA Tron.”
“…thees is always my house prepared at its best for visitor? You would not like that.”
I shook my head to indicate that I wouldn’t.
“You are cross with me,” he said. “You are sad.”
I shook my head. I was neither of those things; I was just a bit overwhelmed and tearful and exhausted with traveling and as far away from home as I’d been in my whole life really, and I kind of just wanted a table and a chair and a cup of tea, not some crazy bohemian workshop super mess, if that was all right with everyone. I had no idea who this guy was, except I knew I had to share with someone who didn’t work in the shop.
“What is all this stuff?” I said, gesticulating.
“Oh, I bring my work home,” he said. “I work too hard, this is my problem.”
This, I was to discover, was nothing like Sami’s worst problem, but I took him at his word.
It turned out Sami worked at the Paris Opera in their costume department, earning next to nothing at all, with dozens of tiny seamstresses, making clothes for the opera productions. He’d really come to work in one of the big couture houses but had had no luck and was practicing his trade letting out stays for singers and complaining about fat tenors and sullen sopranos who insisted they needed space in their costumes to sing but were, he confided, just too greedy.
But that all came later. Now it just all seemed a big mess.
“I have a room for you!” he said. “It is nothing like this.”
His face looked briefly panicked.
“Wait here,” he said and vanished through a door at the back. From a quick count of the doors, I ascertained, with some relief, that there must be another bedroom and a bathroom. For a hideous second, I’d thought that might be it and that I would be stuck in one hideously messy room with a distracted giant.
Within a few moments, and looking rather as if he were concealing something about his person, Sami returned rather sheepishly.
“It is prêt, ready for you,” he said, bowing from the waist. Sami would have, quite frankly, gotten killed at our school. Probably literally. It would have been on the news.
I followed with my clumpy bag, feeling very nondescript and plain, where he was pointing.
My old bedroom in Kidinsborough was very small, so it wasn’t like I wasn’t expecting it. But there’s something about being thirty and walking into something tinier than a prison cell…it was absolutely minuscule. Tiny. The size of the single bed they’d squeezed in there—who knows how—and a tiny chest of drawers crammed up against it and nothing else at all; there just wasn’t the space. I blinked once, twice. I wasn’t going to start crying. For starters, there was nowhere private to do it. I must admit, I’d fantasized, maybe a tiny bit. About a little bitty en suite, maybe, or some grand space; I’d seen them in magazines. Paris had all those grand apartments with the posh rooms and marble fireplaces and high ceilings and…this was basically a coffin. Probably where the maids used to sleep or something. It was painted totally white, with dark brown scuffed parquet on the floor.
“What do you think?” said Sami. “Isn’t it AMAZING?”
I put my head back out of the doorway.
Amazing? I wondered. What on earth must his be like?
“AMAZING!” he said. I blinked at him.
“Oh, AnNA Tron, she is very sad and cross with me,” he said, making his face go sad. “Can I get you something?”
“Tea?” I ventured.
“I ’ave no tea.”
“Coffee?”
“Mais bien sûr!”
He clattered happily over to the tiny kitchenette, while I advanced inside my little monk cell with my large purple bag. I put it on the bed—there was literally nowhere else it could possibly go—and clambered past the chest of drawers over to the window. And that’s when I saw it. I gasped.
The window opened sideways and was full-length. I thought briefly of how many children must have fallen out of it. But I didn’t think it for long before seeing past the net curtain and opening the catch, to find outside two extraordinary things: the tiniest balcony, only just big enough to fit a tiny wrought iron table and two wrought iron chairs, but directly in the path of the sun and, from six floors up on the Île de la Cité—Paris. Paris all around. The rooftops of the other buildings across the water, with tables out on their south-facing side. The road down, and the bridges all the way down the Seine. To my left, to the northwest, I could just make out the ominous looking black tip of La Défense, the great center of the financial district, which looks like a sinister black bridge. And everywhere, the teeming, pulsating life of the city, the noise insulated from six stories up—the little fruit van chugging its way furiously down the street; a collection of stunningly attractive people emerging from a sleek black car to a chic bar; two little lines of schoolchildren walking politely down the next street hand in hand. And if I craned my neck really, really far to the left, to the west, I could see it. The one and only unmistakable fretted iron of the Eiffel Tower.