Riding the Iron Rooster Read Free Page A

people have heard of it. But do they have any, is the question. I'll bet they don't have any on the Trans-Siberian, and how much do you think they'll have in Mongolia, huh?"
    No one was laughing at Blind Bob now. The thought of crossing Asia without toilet paper made everyone thoughtful; there was a sort of hum of reflection in the carriage after he had spoken.
    We came to Paris and were met by a bus and brought to a hotel. This was in the 14th arrondissement, near the end of the Métro line, in a district that was indistinguishable from the outskirts of Chicago or South Boston. It was mainly postwar apartment blocks that had once been light stucco and were now gray. There were too many of them, and they were too close together, and people said: Is this Paris? Is this France? Where's the Eiffel Tower? The center of Paris is a masterpiece of preservation, but the suburbs such as this one are simple and awful. The brutal pavements and high windows of St.-Jacques seemed designed to encourage suicide.
    Then I was told ("funnily enough") that Samuel Beckett lived in one of those apartment houses and indeed had been in it for years. That was where he wrote his stories and plays about the sheer pointlessness and utter misery of human existence. I thought,
No wonder!
I was told that he often came over to our hotel, the Hôtel St.-Jacques, to have a morning coffee. The hotel was a newish spick-and-span place that resembled the lonely hotels that are found just outside American airports, where people stay because there is nowhere else. Beckett came here for pleasure?
    I walked the streets, I lurked in the coffee shop, I prayed for him to appear; but, nothing. It was a lesson though. When people read
Samuel Beckett lives in exile in Paris
they did not know that it meant a poky little apartment on the fifth floor of No. 32—a tall gray building in which residents waited for Godot by watching television. And it was a dozen stops on the Métro from the center of Paris, the Left Bank, the museums.
    We went to the Jeu de Paume, the museum devoted to the Impressionists. I wandered behind the group, listening and looking at pictures.
    In a room full of Sisleys, Richard Cathcart said, "I don't like any of these."
    We passed Monet's series of Rouen Cathedral, bluish and purply and rose tinted.
    "Now I would not mind having something like them in my home," Mrs. Wittrick said, and the Gurneys agreed and said they'd like to cart them back to Tasmania, except that they'd probably be arrested!
    Of Rousseau's
La Guerre. La Chevauchée de la Discorde,
Rick Westbetter said, "Hey, I like these. These are good. These are more like American pictures."
    A child staggering behind his parents in the Van Gogh room said, "But
why
was he mad?"
    A little crowd formed around a Monet of Venice.
    Bud Wittrick was saying, "That's the Grand Canal. That's Saint Mark's. That's where the Bridge of Sighs is—down that canal. And see, that's the hotel we stayed at. Of course it wasn't a hotel in those days. That's where we walked, and there's where we had the spaghetti, that's where I bought the postcards."
    It rained, it snowed, and the snow silenced both pedestrians and traffic. Early one morning we left for Berlin.

    It was a wet, black morning in Paris, the street sweepers and milkmen doing their solitary rounds by the light of the street lamps, and just as dawn broke over the eaves and chimney pots we plodded out of the Gare de l'Est. I thought we had left the suburbs behind in the Rue St.-Jacques, but there were more, and they were deeper and grimmer. The people in the group, with their faces at the windows of the train, were shocked and disillusioned. It wasn't gay Paree, it wasn't even Cleveland. The Americans looked very closely. We were unused to this. We put up suburbs too quickly and cheaply for them to wear well. We expected them to decline and collapse and be replaced; they weren't built to last, and they look temporary because they are