In 1994 after a month long limbo in Penang I traveled from Malaysia to Paris on Aeroflot.
The Kuala Lumpur-Karachi-Dubai-Moscow-Paris flight time to Moscow totaled about 24 hours. None of them were comfortable in the flimsy chairs of the Soviet era jetliner.
Disembarking at night in Moscow, I discovered that my connecting flight to Charles De Gaulle had been delayed until the next morning.
A Norwegian couple with whom I had traveled from Kual Mumpur were in a similar predicament and I said, “It’s 10PM. What are we going to do all night?”
“Drink wine.” The husband pulled out two bottles of wine purchased in Dubair duty-free.
“I have two.”
“And my wife has two.”
We opened the bottles and sat on the floor surrounded by hundreds of stateless travelers trapped in the aeroport. Some looked as if they had been in this limbo for weeks if not months. After finishing the wine a refugee from Afghanistan sold us a bottle of vodka.
“I here one month. Can no go back Kabul. No go to Paris. My brother live there. Now this my home.” His name was Jameer.
The vodka was homemade. The liter lasted longer than the wine. Several other Afghans fleeing the civil war joined Jameer with other bottles. They spoke in dialects. After two bottles of the gut-burning samogon I spoke in tongues, and sang amy version of the Pashto song Da Hujrey Mijlas but was losing consciousness from the overdose of hard spirits and lack of sleep.
I awoke.
A gray dawn.
In Moscow.
“Russia.
Not Idaho.
“Your flight is now.” The Norwegian husband shook me hard and pulled me to my feet.
“I don’t care.” I wanted to stay in the aeroport. “Life simple here.”
“You have to go.” He and his wife escorted me to the plane.
“Bon Voyage.” I saluted them at the door of the Airbus.
Stepping on board I rejoined civilization and I stumbled down the aisle to my seat. The faces of the other passengers gauged my drunkenness better than a breathalyzer. No one wanted me to sit next to them. I fell into an empty row and buckled up for take-off.
Several hours later a stewardess shook my shoulder.
“We are in Charles de Gaulle Aeroport in Paris.”
“Already?” I was the last passenger on the plane.
“We’ve been on the ground for fifteen minutes.”
“Great.” I got to my feet and trudged out into the terminal. The time was 8:30. My friends were waiting in the city and it was Bastille Day or ‘le Quartoze’, anoter day of wine ahead.
In July of 1789 Paris seethed with anger against Louis XVI and the ancien regime of the nobility.
The prison’s most infamous guest was the Marquis De Sade, who shouted from the ramparts on July 2, 1789, “They are killing the prisoners here!”
The unrepentant sodomist was transferred ‘naked as a worm’ to the insane asylum at Charenton, but the fire had been lit and the on July 14 hundreds of workers gathered in the neighboring Faubourg Saint-Antoine seeking to seize the gunpowder within the Bastille.
Mythically recounted in Dickens’ THE TALE OF TWO CITIES a tumbril loaded with casks of wine axle an axle on the Rue de la Roquette and wine flow down the gutters to be consumed by impoverished Parisians. The shadow of the dreaded upper-class Bastille prison loomed over the narrow street and someone shouted, “A la Bastille.”
The Swiss Guards within the fortress defended the battlements against the mob, until the arrival of mutinous royal Bourbon troops armed with artillery. The commandant surrendered the prison, freeing its seven captives.
When Louis XVI was told the news in Versailles, the king asked an aristocrat, “Is it a revolt?”
His friend replied, “Non, mon Roi. It is a revolution.
Within three years after the Storming of the Bastille Citoyen Louis was sentenced to death and guillotined in Place de la Concrode before thousands of revolutionies.
I emerged from the terminal at noon and from CDG Aeroport a taxi sped to Paris. Traffic was light into the city of light. THe exit lanes were cramped with vehicles as they had been for decades carrying Paris to le Grande Vacannes ie 7/14 go 8/14.
Atop Montmatre rose Sacre-Couer.
After the 1870 Commune the Catholic Church had erected the Temple of Repression to remind Parisians that the Church ruled the Hearts and Minds of France, not the call to the ramparts by a perverse Comte.
The new Bastille.
My friend Tristam from the Musellmen Fumants was waiting at his apartment.
I wasn’t tired, only hung over. That afternoon we watched the military parade on the Champs-Elysees.
That night we partied with friends.
I drank to Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternitie.
Hundreds sang Le Marseilles.
I cried each time.
It was good to be out of Moscow.
People drink too much there, then again so do I.
A bas le Roi.
