Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost by David Hoon Kim

Author:David Hoon Kim
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

8. A Ghost in Paris

For some time now, I had been trying to see my thesis supervisor. It was true that, at first, I hadn’t been trying all that hard. In Denmark, there was a get-to-know-one-another cocktail, a chance to meet professors outside of the auditorium and in a more casual setting. Here, in France, one had to flush them out, hunt them down. It was like a game of cat-and-mouse, in which I was the mouse hunting the cat. Each time I came by, I found her door shut. On one occasion, there was a sheet of paper taped to the door: “Mme Tousez est souffrante.” She was ill, indisposed, and all of her courses had been canceled. I couldn’t have said why, but suddenly I was convinced that it was a lie, a subterfuge, and that in reality she was standing behind the door, ready to pounce. I placed a hand against the hard, unyielding wood and tried to imagine her on the other side. We’d started out communicating exclusively by post, then electronically, and for the first several months she had been little more than a name, words on paper, lines on a page. Even now—after a handful of visits to her office—a vague mental image, partially obscured by the stacks of papers on her bureau, was the best I could muster.

Several weeks into the second semester, I encountered yet another obstacle, this one of an administrative nature: I was asked to provide proof that I had indeed failed to finish my thesis in Copenhagen. Frankly, I couldn’t imagine why they wanted proof, given that I had already been admitted as a student. Why would anyone lie about failing something? I could understand them asking for proof that I had finished my thesis, but that I hadn’t finished it? As if proof of past failure were a necessary condition for studying at the Sorbonne … I was tempted to point out this absurdity to the woman at the secrétariat, but in the end I said nothing. I left the building and walked out to the square, weighed down by a growing sense of futility. At a nearby kébab place, I ordered a grec-frites and sat down at the counter, next to a tiny little sink jutting out of a corner of the wall. As I ate, I thought about my dilemma. The conclusion I arrived at was that proving one’s success was always easier than proving one’s failure. Success, completion, admission all resulted in some document or other: a diploma, a letter of acceptance. How does one prove that one failed an exam? How does one prove that one took it in the first place? One wasn’t given anything in the event of failure: there was nothing to give. That said, was failure any less real than success? Wasn’t the unhappiness associated with something lost always greater, in one’s mind, than the happiness associated with something gained?

The days went by. In the connecting corridor at Montparnasse-Bienvenüe, I noticed someone on the moving walkway going the other way.

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