The Girl from Krakow Read Online Free PDF Page B

the fees were manageable, and living was cheap. He’d have to learn Italian. No problem. Tadeusz was good at languages. But Italy was a fascist state, operated by a dictator who made Pilsudski seem like a democrat. France was a better choice. And besides, French was so much more useful a language than Italian. Most of all there was the allure of Paris. The Faculté de Médecine was on the Left Bank, a stone’s throw from the Latin Quarter.
    He had only to convince his mother. She held the purse strings.

    Paris didn’t make it easy to be a medical student. There was just too much to distract a young man with a world historical understanding.
    Tadeusz arrived in the early summer of 1932. Three months would be enough to learn the French he needed before the lectures began in the fall. He found a room on Monsieur le Prince, between the Boulevard St. Michel and the Place Odeon, at the back corner of the medical faculty. The first night he tried to treat himself to a meal at the Crémerie Polidor . The waitresses were famous for surly service to customers seated at communal tables. Frustrated trying to decipher the handwritten menu dropped casually before him at the table, he had to go back outside to study the posted printed one with his Polish-French dictionary in hand.
    Even through the language barrier, Paris was exactly what Tadeusz had hoped for. There were a few Polish medical students who eased his entry to the Fac’ while playing mild practical jokes on him. Sending him to a haberdashery for a capot —a condom—when he wanted a chapeau , a hat, for instance. As for the lectures at the Fac’, it didn’t take very long to see that they were not going to help much anyway. There would be an exam—the extern —at the end of two years, filtering those who were capable and serious from the rest. But these lectures wouldn’t help.
    Two years was a long way off that first fall. Of much more immediate interest were the risqué novels of André Gide and the work of a new author, Louis Aragon. They would help his French, which was just as important as anatomy or physiology. Even more seductive were the politics of the Third French Republic. The Socialist Party was led by Leon Blum; the Communists followed Thorez, who obeyed Stalin; the Trotskyites obeyed Trotsky (or tried to); and the anarchists followed no one at all.

    When he looked back on that time, it was smells he remembered most: acrid smoke from the blue cloud of a hundred Galois drifting below the ceiling of a café on a winter’s day, the smell of the ground coffee as he stood waiting for a morning express at the zinc , the ozone draft of a metro leaving the station at Châtelet while the portillon gates opened to a new scrum of passengers, the starch and bleach at a blanchisseur in the Rue de Vaugirard, all its windows thrown open on a hot day in May, and all the year round, the early morning aroma of boulangeries .
    The most permanent of these memories was the scent of Arpège perfume—an ineffable mixture of peach, iris, rose, geranium, and a dozen other hints he couldn’t identify. Anywhere, anytime, for the rest of his life, Arpège would instantly bring back the first time he encountered it, that second summer in Paris. It was wafting from the sloping shoulders of a young woman wearing an off-the-shoulder blouse loose enough you were sure it was about to fall below the breasts it clearly silhouetted. Her thick black hair was cut in a plain, almost Chinese style—bangs at the front, falling to a perfectly even length across her neck and shoulders. Her eye makeup suggested the Orient too, accentuating heavy lashes under dark eyebrows. Was it eye shadow she wore, or was it fatigue? He couldn’t tell. Below the thin muslin blouse, against which nipples visibly pushed, there was a dark peasant skirt, no stockings, and flat shoes. And the Arpège   .   .   .
    She was plastering a poster for the ICL on a wall of the Rue Racine side of the Ecole de