OK, you should now have built an immunity to Dobry's prose, enough to take this in one large dose...
Excerpt from Chapter 14...
14
A stay in Paris longer than three months requires a Carte de Sejour. To obtain this Carte de Sejour, which is the American equivalent of a Green Card, one must go to the designated prefecture, with the required documents, and apply. For some reason, and my memory may be playing tricks on me, I think it was the Pal De Justice on Boulevard Du Pal where I went to obtain the Carte De Sejour.
The very fact that this event is a blur to me has much relevance to the story I’m about to tell.
Like I’m apt to do, I let this very important matter of obtaining a Carte De Sejour, which is mandatory for non-citizens if they are to remain in France longer than three months, wait until I had already been living in France for exactly two months and twenty-nine days, literally the proverbial last-minute!
I do remember vividly, a conversation I had with an Israeli girl, Rebecca, a student at the Sorbonne, about all the troubles she was having with extending her stay in Paris. She was a raving beauty and I wasn’t really listening to a fucking word she was saying. I was watching her mouth form words, her hands punctuate sentences and catching whiffs of her sweet breath and perfume, who knew what the fuck, or cared for that matter, what the hell she was talking about? Yet, somewhere in all her nonsense of words, noises and theatrics, something she said actually got my attention. I thought I heard her say, "I lost my Carte De Sejour with my purse and…" I thought to myself, "Carte De Sejour? Hmmm…. Carte De Sejour, where the fuck did I hear that before? " I knew it was important, but I had long ago forgotten why.
You see, the first time I went to the Pal De Justice to obtain the Carte De Sejour, the line of people waiting to get Carte De Sejour’s extended half-way around the building. It was a line not unlike the one I had waited in at Orly airport with the hygienically challenged immigrants from Beirut.
I just said, "fuck it"! I’ll come back "tomorrow", which I did. The problem was, on my return visit, the next day; the line was even longer! In my mind this lethal combination of long lines, ninety-degree heat, thick humidity and foreign immigrants from any country where a camel is the preferred choice of travel, equated, in my mind anyway, to one big, fucking, red flag! I told myself I’d take care of the Carte De Sejour matter when the lines weren’t "so long".
By now the three months had elapsed, so I just figured, " Oh well, I tried! There’s really nothing I can do about it now anyway; the three months have expired. I’ll get around to remedying the situation when I have more time."
I interrupted her mid-sentence, by this time she was rambling on about something to do with her father’s "dual citizenship" or some other bullshit I couldn’t give two fucks about. I said to her, "Carte De Sejour? What happened with your Carte De Sejour?"
She backtracked to allow me to catch-up, she said, " Weren’t you listening? Ugh! What I said was … that my purse was lost, though I believe it was stolen … but I won’t get back on that topic. When I attempted to leave France for the holidays, I was detained at customs because I didn’t have a Carte De Sejour! They wouldn’t let me leave the country! "
I figured I’d better do something about my residency status toute suite! I assumed everything would be fine. I had all the documentation required to obtain the Carte De Sejour, I’m sure that the officials would be sympathetic to the reason for my tardiness. Shit! I might even grab one of the stinky fucks out of the line and make the clerks perform a sniff test on the rancid motherfucker, " Smell the stinky fuck for yourself! Can you blame me? Any motherfucker who smells this ripe should be admitted immediately into a fucking hospital, eh?" They might just give me dual citizenship status and issue me a French passport for my trouble!
I, again, stood in line with all the other fucks seeking to obtain a precious Carte De Sejour. The line was long and I estimated that in the half an hour I had already been waiting in it, that we had moved maybe one foot! I estimated that I was standing about one-quarter mile from the doorway leading into the bureau. I figured it this way … there’s approximately five-thousand and two-hundred feet in a mile, divide that by four and that gives you approximately one-thousand and three-hundred feet in a quarter mile. At the speed of two feet per hour (one foot every thirty minutes)…. To travel the one thousand and three hundred feet, it will take…. (Where the fuck’s Fabrice when you need him?) One hundred and fifty-six thousand minutes, or …one hundred and eight days, or … fifteen weeks, or … three and a half months!
After doing the math, I gave my space in line to some curry-soaked, soap-deprived immigrant motherfucker from some middle-east country that has a strong disdain for water, and I was on my merry fucking way! "Fous-moi!"
I think I finally understood the method to their madness. By this time I was a veteran of waiting in lines comprised of stinky, immigrant fucks from all over the world. Shit, by this time I had waited in lines with stinky fucks from Pakistan, stinky fucks from Iraq, and stinky fucks from Iran, just to name a few. It had become crystal clear to me why it was done this way!
The three and a half month wait it would require to wait in line to obtain a Carte De Sejour, in and of itself, by law, according to my math, requires a Carte De Sejour! It dawned on me that this was by design, to keep all the stinky fucks outside, in the fresh air, until they could all be deported! |
