Evicted: the Night Before Christmas
Here’s a holiday tale, with a melancholy tinge and an ultimately hopeful ending.
It was December, a couple of weeks before Christmas. It was Paris, and although it may have been the holiday season, in the terribly misnamed City of Light it was monochromatically gray and drizzly, as it almost always was from November through March.
It felt cold and cold-hearted, which matched our mood.
We felt alone and adrift. I mean, really alone in a way that’s really hard to be these days.
We had moved to Paris a year and a half earlier, mainly because we had wanted to and we could. Without kids, without jobs that tied us down, we were young and flexible, somewhat adventurous and reasonably foolish. And of course we had absolutely no idea what we were getting into.
Today, people who choose to live overseas mostly never really leave home; they can bring their home with them, check in on Facebook, hang in with WhatsApp, do The Times’ Spelling Bee online. The grocery and the doctor’s office in their new place are pretty much like the grocery and the doctor’s office in their old place.
But in that primitive pre-internet, pre-Amazon, pre-CNN, pre-FedEx era, pretty much everything was different. We were essentially cut off from everything and everyone we had known. We were living in a much less-Americanized, much more foreign culture, in a foreign language, among people who really knew how to use the subjunctive tense.
Our friends and families were 3,000 miles and an airmail letter away.
It was not, that is, a particularly joyous holiday season for us when late that cold night in mid-December there was a knock at the door of our Left Bank apartment. A court officer, a kind of bailiff, was there to hand us a legal document saying—after we deciphered the bureaucratic French—we had to vacate our apartment within a month. He was serving us an eviction notice.
It turned out, we eventually discovered, the man who had rented us the apartment was, in fact, a renter himself and didn’t have the right to sublet—or to charge us 2,000 francs a month while he was paying the actual apartment owner 500 francs. Innocents abroad, we had no idea. He must have seen us coming.
At some point, the real owner found out about the scam and got the eviction order. We had 30 days to get out.
Three thousand miles away from what had been home almost all our lives, with few friends and ever fewer resources, facing an implacably impenetrable bureaucratic system, at sea in a different language and culture, we had no idea what to do. We peremptorily checked with a French lawyer, who said we might possibly prevail if we went to court, but bringing suit would be prohibitively expensive and we might still have to vacate the apartment.
What could we do? Where could we go?
For the moment, we decided to go nowhere and do nothing except stew in our own dejection.
It was Christmas Eve now, and depressed and disconsolate, we decided—with nothing much else on the schedule—to watch television.
It turned out that for the first time in many years, French television—then just three national networks—had decided that evening to broadcast the classic American film The Wizard of Oz. We jumped at the chance to see something familiar and homey.
In front of our tiny little set, we watched the familiar characters, the cowardly lion, the tin man, the wicked witch. We sang along with the familiar songs. We smiled at the familiar lines.
At then, at the end of the film, when Dorothy says, “Oh, Auntie Em—there’s no place like home!” we knew exactly what she meant and went to pieces. We both cried.
Fifteen days later, we vacated the apartment. We returned home, to the states, for several months, couch surfing across New York. And then, foolishly but intensely determined to not leave our adopted country with our tales between our legs, we actually came back. And lived in France for seven more years. And finally left only when we chose to.