Notre escalier

by David Benjamin

 “Stairs can kill us, if we do not walk circumspectly.”  — Blaise Pascal

 

PARIS — When I’m out and around, I don’t think about the stairs. I just face them when I get home and slog my way up—more slowly than when we bought this place—five floors up and just beneath the roof.

When this apartment, with all its steps, was suggested to us, we scoffed. “Sorry,” we said, “not again.” By that time, in the course of exploring seventeen possible Paris apartments in four days, we had seen several other fifth-floor walkups, each with idiosyncrasies that sent us scurrying back downstairs. 

One, for example, had a funky toilet, called a broyeur, that had to be pumped, like the “head” in a sailboat. Another had a “normal” toilet but no bathroom, just a large basin in the kitchen, where one could bathe standing—like a Degas nude. Another kitchen contained a fullsize cast-iron ceramic bathtub, mounted strangely on a pedestal, like an altar to Sequana, goddess of the Seine. One kitchen was circular, or perhaps cylindrical, built to (awkwardly) fit a space that had previously been a staircase. Another flat we turned down, not on the fifth floor but deep in the bowels of the building, was darker than Dostoyevsky’s philosophy of life.

And so, twice and thrice burned, we had no interest in a garret, five floors up, in a 17th-century former barracks, fleabag and whorehouse on rue St. Séverin. We only relented after repeated entreaties by an eager-beaver realtor, who had formed an alliance with Roberta, our guardian angel. “Oh, f’Chrissake, fine!” I finally said to Roberta. “We’ll climb the damn stairs.”

There’s a passage in A Tale of Two Cities, in which Ernest Defarge leads Jarvis Lorry and Lucie Manette up five greasy flights of staircase in a crumbling tenement to the bleak garret occupied by Alexandre Manette, Lucie’s father, who has gone catatonic after eighteen years’ unjust imprisonment in the Bastille. A sentence from that chapter describes precisely the impression I felt after climbing four flights toward an apartment I knew I did not want: 

“… At last, the top of the staircase was gained, and they stopped for the third time. There was yet an upper staircase, of a steeper inclination and of contracted dimensions, to be ascended, before the garret story was reached…”

So, two centuries later, clunking reluctantly up steps twice as steep as the previous ninety, we reached the landing. Gasping for breath, but smiling, the real estate lady let us in. As we stepped inside, we understood finally why the woman was so gung-ho. The entire garret had been reconfigured, remodeled, refitted, repainted and timbered. Where once had been a claustrophobic maid’s quarters, M. La Combe’s house architect had created a soaring scalene, with a fifteen-foot wall slanting down to twin dormers gushing sunlight. Two skylights added to the glow. Mezzanines in two rooms doubled the living space. The kitchen was cozy but functional. The salle de bain, with two sinks and a vanity mirror, offered a view of zinc roofs, chimney pots, pigeon roosts and Notre Dame across the Seine.

To our infinite surprise, it was worth the climb.

We’ve been here ever since. We’re often elsewhere, too, but we always come back, up those imposing but obligatory stairs. Our ancient escalier—until that last cruel flight— is broad and polished, darkly grained oak from forests destroyed for farmland a century before the French Revolution. The oak has petrified. Try to drive a nail into our stairs and it simply bends over. 

The prospect of our staircase hasn’t deterred visitors and boarders, although some have proven more challenged than others. When my mom came to see Paris, my sister Peg repeatedly schooled her about the long, long climb up the steps. Forewarned, Mom braved the stairs stoically—and slowly. But she bridled when she learned that Paris is literally a jungle of staircases, plunging into every Métro station, all through the Louvre, and down, down to every café restroom. A devout Catholic, Mom contemplated conversion—to atheism—as she glared up the staircases of St. Sulpice, St. Trinité and the towers of Notre Dame. 

And then, there was the Opera Garnier: “I’m not going up there!”

“Okay, Mom.”

Mom negotiated our stairs by creeping step by step, with exquisite graduality. Junko’s dad, Pa Yoshida, who was approaching eighty when he visited, chose to move briskly but then pause on the third landing. There, he would lean on the windowsill, peruse the sky above our courtyard and enjoy a moment of Zen. His method recalled another Dickens line:“Yielding to his own disturbance of mind, and to his young companion’s agitation, which became greater every instant, Mr. Jarvis Lorry twice stopped to rest.”

In the past few years, our French daughter, Léa, has lobbied us to think about finding new quarters in Paris, in a building equipped with an ascenseur. Léa sees us getting older. We actually considered this proposal, but as we did, we looked back to our apartment search, with Roberta, twenty-odd years before.

In particular, I recalled a fifth-floor walkup on rue de Rennes, where the sounds of the city—trucks roaring and scaffolds clanking, buses and motorcycles, shouts and laughter—filtered up from the street. The apartment was bare and battered, walls stained, floors scuffed, plumbing ancient, kitchen cramped. But there was lots of space. The realtor—a different one—told us, through Roberta’s translation, that the flat had been occupied for decades by a woman who finally died there near the age of ninety. 

From her, we took an object lesson. Once, we assumed, the old parigote had shouldered her load of provender—purchased at the nearby marché on boulevard Raspail—thrice a week, and hurried nimbly upward, taking 120 steps in stride, drawing a deep breath at the top, shifting her load and turning her key—home at last. Every week, every month, every year, moving a little more circumspectly as time rolled by.

Day in, day out, she kept climbing, never anticipating the ascent until she reached the first step at the bottom and flipped the switch that lights the staircase. She never counted how many steps, never wished for an elevator, never pondered the immense ordeal of moving away, perhaps into a nice ground-floor efficiency. This was home. These steps were hers. If she died on the third landing, her heart and lungs finally uneven to the struggle, well, so be it. 

Of course, the stairs did no such thing. They were not her undoing. On her last day, whenever that was, she finished her last climb and cleared her last step, opened her door and came home. She died there that day—or perhaps later, unable to move, watched over by offspring. But it was something else—not the stairs, not the climb, not forty years of heavy breathing and pauses on the landing … something else killed her. 

We know—the realtor said so—that her death was at home, the sounds of the city, horns honking, steel doors crashing, dogs barking, pigeons cooing and church bells ringing her last lullaby.

So, like her, we’ll stay.

Today, I came up briskly without a break, didn’t stop, didn’t hesitate on Pa Yoshida’s landing, made it all the way. Wasn’t even breathing hard … 

… well, not much.