Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         And so back to school, realm of bullies and the bullied and of me, who was neither.

         I spent thirteen years at the International School of Geneva, through all its grades and forms, in two languages, English and French, with smatterings of four others, German, Russian, Spanish, and Italian; doing well in some classes, badly in others, and making a few friends along the way. The school’s great virtue was its heterogeneity. Like all large schools in all large cities, it was a good place to grow up free of prejudice among kids of different backgrounds. But Ecolint (thus abbreviated from its French name: Ecole Internationale), went a step further and made internationalism its creed and mine, too—and I stress the distinction between internationalism and the cultural self-abnegation represented by certain elements of contemporary politics. Ecolint was a many-faceted preparation for life for which I have always been grateful. There I was educated in the Western canon, and I grew up alongside Christian, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist, and Communist; black and brown and yellow and white. Some were fools, some not. Thus is humanity divided up; thus do I judge it. Regardless of origins, are thou an idiot? This universal truth I keep close to my heart.

             The school had a French side and an English side. In each one the other’s main language was the obligatory second language, so no one who stayed for any length of time emerged monolingual. I attended the English side, where most students were American or British, or satellites thereof, like Canadians or Indians and Pakistanis, although there were one or two Taiwanese, and Argentineans, and a Brazilian or two; and I remember a solitary, gawking Japanese boy who simply disappeared one day, probably back to Japan rather than into thin air.

              Is he a prosperous and paunchy salaryman today, riding the 7:18 into Tokyo every day from his dormitory suburb?   

              The school sat on the upper north slope of a gentle valley, overlooked by the Salève Mountain. The main school buildings were at the high end of the slope, and the grounds then fell away for a few hundred yards to an outdoor amphitheatre, called the Greek Theatre, which had been carved out of the hillside sometime in the ‘40s, and where in clement weather graduation ceremonies took place and plays were performed: I remember a pretty bad Macbeth, and some pretty good Molière. Beyond the Greek Theatre were the playing fields, each section kept neatly flat and grassed, marked out for rugby, soccer, cricket (for the Commonwealth kids), baseball (for the Americanos), or track, according to the season. At the bottom of the lowest slope were some ragged woods, and just where the grass of the playing fields yielded to the woods were several small barrack-like buildings used by the school’s physics and chemistry departments. This was the demarcation line of the English side; everything else, including the old chateau, was in the French-speaking sector. The “English” and “French” in “English side” and “French side” referred not only to the languages spoken on either side but to a certain way of doing things. On the French side all the teachers were French or Swiss-French, and that half of the school was run along the brisk and officious lines of a provincial French lycée, which is in essence what it was. On the English side most of the staff was British, and there was a distinct air of downmarket English public school about it, together with more than a touch of shambling but endearing Britishness: wet boots in the corridors, dog-eared textbooks, tweed jackets, etc. We had headmasters and headmistresses and pipe-smoking teachers of Latin and physics and literature with bumbling and shy personalities, most of them congenial if somewhat dim; but we did have a smattering of good teachers. The best, and of course I never told him so (but I am doing so now), was a thoughtful, humorous, espresso-drinking and chainsmoking (Mary Long filters, a local brand) Franco-Lebanese intellectual named Maurice Achkar, who communicated his love of the French language to me and others—but to me in particular, I always felt—and who admired the works of Samuel Beckett, of whom I had never heard until one day a poster appeared on the wall of M. Achkar’s classroom advertising a play called Oh Les Beaux Jours (Happy Days) then playing at the Odeon theatre in Paris. M. Achkar went up to Paris once a month for the theatre and to meet friends over drinks and browse the bookstalls along the Seine, and he went especially to see the works of Beckett.

              “Oh, Oh Les Beaux Jours! Cela vaut le voyage, Monsieur Roger,” he told me after he’d seen Happy Days. “A woman who sinks slowly into the sand while reciting the inanities of her everyday life…c’est magnifique. Does anyone understand banality and the tragedy of banality as well as Beckett? This woman, she sounds just like my wife. Non, mais non, c’est magnifique.”

         (Read an expanded version of this episode in my Boston Review essay on Beckett.)

        Then there was Endgame. What could be more thrilling than the apocalyptic minimalism of a play featuring two people who lived in dustbins? It went through the bourgeoisie like a knife through cheese, said M. Achkar. But I didn’t care for the political angle, and still don’t. In fact, I don’t believe there is one, or Beckett wouldn’t be the immortal he is; but M. Achkar was a standard left-wing intellectual of his time, blossoming in the fertile soil of the Sixties, keenly attuned to the rumblings of ex-colonialism and the pronouncements of Le Monde. He tried to pass on his politics with the French language, but I swallowed one and spat out the other, and all credit to both of us: me for my tone-deafness, then as now, to politics; him for his near-genius as a teacher of French. When he started teaching me, I was still making reluctant recon missions into the enemy territory of the ambient lingo. By the time he’d finished with me five years later, I’d conquered that alien domain—or at least I was fluent enough not to be too incongruous lounging about in Geneva’s smoky cafes over renversés and ballons de blanc and blathering about Anouilh and Sartre and Ionesco…and Beckett, whom I approached cautiously, as if fearing contagion. (After all, how many bona fide French intellectuals were also rock-solid Irishmen? It was a combination I relished, and feared.) France and French literature were the focus of M. Achkar’s aesthetic interests: vulgar America did not engage him, and his own “Third World” could have been in another galaxy for all the attention he gave it. But his limitations were his virtues: he shepherded me with great finesse through the thickets of French literature, never pausing long enough for me to feel hemmed-in by dense Racine or overgrown Hugo, but indicating with a casual gesture shining pastures new (Voltaire on the left, Rousseau further left, Mauriac on the right, Céline way out there), and none was newer or more shining to me then than Beckett, unless it was that whole left-bank existential culture presided over by Sartre and de Beauvoir that so winningly combined despair and a sense of style. So one weekend, at Achkar’s urging, I returned to Paris, my old hometown, with the intention of seeing a play, preferably by Beckett; but Sam, as it turned out, wasn’t on the menu at the Comédie, so I settled for Anouilh’s Le Voyageur Sans Bagages. The play was forgettable, or at least I’ve forgotten it; but being at the sacred Comédie was quite memorable, with the Parisian bo-bos so studiously well-read and up on all the jargon and me feeling like a spy in on a secret. And eternally memorable were the barricades and piles of bricks and stones and blue police vans on the boulevards outside, for it was May 1968 and in the Latin Quarter the soixante-huitards were reliving bygone romantic uprisings by pasting the cops with paving stones and water-filled balloons and the CRS were responding with fire hoses and tear gas and Billy clubs. All very bracing, but I ducked out of history’s path and followed my old chum the metro down to the 7th arrondissement and had dinner in a Vietnamese restaurant on the Avenue de la Bourdonnais with a student and amateur fortune-teller named Maria Boullard or Bouillard, whom I'd met through the girlfriend of a school friend…are you reading these words, Maria, and where and who are you now? You read my palm that night and made predictions that came true. Including one that was entirely under your control: that I would soon pay the bill, and accompany you to a certain double oak door down the street... More about girls, etc., later, but no more about Maria. She was there one night and gone the next; not so much a one-night stand as a visitation. No more about May 68, either, except: Yes, reader, I was there. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, etc., but ‘twas a false dawn after all, so I lost nothing by respecting the code of the Boylans in tough times and buggering off.