Incongruous situations

[Deleted]

Real life sometimes deals us some real surprises, that we might not even believe if we saw it in the movies.

For example, a friend of mine recently left his wife and sought refuge with a friend/colleague of his. He was warmly received but he cannot sleep there every night, because he quickly discovered that his colleague is his wife's lover and she comes over regularly.

In my own life (but this one, we have all seen in the movies), one of my arch enemies became a close friend just because we were both involved with the same infuriating woman, who of course has gone on to other people since then. At one time, he was officially with her, and she was the one who would ask me to house him temporarily and/or them together because of peculiar housing problems that they both had. And I did it -- talk about masochism! I would serve them dinner! I think that the fact that we both suffered so much is what made us friends.

Anything happen to you that made you wonder "how on earth did I get in this situation?"

[Deleted]

Yeah, I know what you're all thinking. "Only in France..."

[lagatta]

Not only in France...

Can't your friend stay with you until he finds a place?

[Deleted]

He is staying in 3 different places. Even though I am the least inconvenienced by his presence, my place is the most inconvenient for him since he works in the southern suburbs. So I will be helping out only on certain weekends.

[fumobici]

My life is stultifying by comparison ;D

[bazfaz]

This is not so much incongruous as deeply disturbing.

My father worked for a multinational company which meant frequent changes of country. I was in England for 3 years - 1947-50 - and went to a primary scool. Then I left and returned to South Africa, came back to university in England, got a job there and settled.
Thirty-eight years after I left that primary school in England I was at home alone one night while my (ex) wife visited her mother in London. I was eating dinner when at 8 oçlock there was a knock at the door. A man I didn't recognise asked if xxx was my name. Yes. He introduced himself as Jimmy McCarthy. The said JM was a boy I had known at the primary school but who was no great friend of mine then and with whom I had had no contact in all the intervening years. And I mean no contact at all.
I asked him in and he sat at table while I ate my meal, sharing my bottle of wine. After half an hour he left.
Now, I was so taken aback, stunned, shocked, by this episode that I didn't ask all the questions someone in my trade should have. How did he know where I lived? Why had he come? Why had he chosen a night when my wife wouldn't be home? Was he hinting that I was being watched by some government agency? Was it a warning?

[Deleted]

Write down all of those questions for his next visit.

[bazfaz]

If he knocks on my door in the Lot I shall become seriously paranoid.

[fumobici]

I'd set up an interrogation room in the cellar. Just in case, you know.

[lagatta]

Look at the lovely département where bazfaz lives and writes! www.tourisme-lot.com/

[bixaorellana]

Baz, I know you write under your own name -- was it in the phone book at the time of that visit? But still, primary school?! Yes, disturbing.

I can remember various permutations of the types of situations Kerouac describes, but that was back when I was in my thirties. I do remember looking around at the various couples in a popular bar where I lived and thinking, "Whew. Change partners and dance!"

[bazfaz]

Bixa, this was someone I had had no contact with for 35 years. We last knew each other as 13 year old boys before I left England to go to South Africa. He simply turned up in the dark on an evening when I was alone. He gave no explanation as to how he had tracked me down (or why) except that he had asked at the pub at the bottom of the road. Bad mistake that - I had never been to the pub. And he never explained how he got to the pub at the bottom of the road unless he had found out where I was living.
I truly was a fool not to press him but, to be honest, I was disturbed and even a little scared by his sudden appearance.

[Deleted]

Baz, that is really weird, I think I would suddenly turn quite paranoid too. There are some strange people out here, that look normal on the outside.

[bixaorellana]

The thing that gets me is the how brief his stay was, along with not having some ready explanation as to why he'd suddenly be interested in seeing you after decades. Well, all of it is creepy. Errrrggg ~~ maybe he was a ghost!

[bazfaz]

Naturally I think of my writing. As research for my books I had travelled to a lot of communist countries: Hungary, Czecho, East Germany and Romania. I had had a cousin at Moscow university for a year as part of his Russian degree course. The same cousin had then worked for the European Space Agency in Germany. Following that he had been staying with us and said we should track the launch of a European space probe. Using my telephone he used a few magic phrases (I still remember him saying: Give me Voice) and got patched through to a tracking station somewhere - South America I think.

So why do I think this person I had last seen aged 13 was working for MI5?

[Deleted]

Well, apparently you did not say the secret password in your conversation, so he was unable to make the bank transfer to you for £2 million.

[tillystar]

I wouldn't be surprised Baz. In the late 70s and early 80s my parents travelled a lot in those same countries. We also took part in an exchange programme with a family in Moscow. There were some very odd goings on shortly after the exchange and our phone started clicking and being heavy with static and they were convinced it was bugged.

We heard from the couple fromthe exchange years later and they spent a 10 days with us in summer of 1991. My brother and I spent the week being whizzed round in taxis from museum to museum, to the Zoo and bein allowed whatever we wanted in terms of treats and the wife spent lots of money in Oxford street buying 10s of pairs of shoes and records for her friends. Of the week they spent with us there were 2 days that they wanted to spend alone sight-seeing and left early and came back late. We realised later that it was the 2 days of the G7 summit in London that Gorbachev attended.

Of course it could just have been a huge co-incidence and maybe Moscow's cab drivers (which is what the husband did) were doing very well for themselves in those days...

[bazfaz]

I wonder if anyone remembers when the USA was having a new embassy built in Moscow. When the Americans got to inspect it they discovered a mass of bugging devices. So they had it ripped to pieces and rebuilt. This time they weren't going to have any KGB operati=ves posing as electicians. No sir. They hired workers from Britain, a staunch ally, and flew them over to do the job. One of the builders they hired lived half a dozen dors away from us in our lane. He is the only person I know who actually read The Morning Star, the communist newspaper...

[bjd]

I remember that. I didn't know that the US had hired Brits to do the rewiring though.

At university I studied Russian language, literature, history. When I first came to France, the CP was still doing very well (20% of the vote if I recall correctly), and they subsidized trips to the USSR. I spent a month in Moscow learning Russian and wandering around. When I applied for French citizenship a couple of years later, I had a visit from the DST (French equivalent of the FBI I guess) who asked me all kinds of questions about how long I had stayed in the USSR, etc, etc. My mother was extremely surprised when I told her and said, "I thought the Communist Party was legal in France?" Any French person I have told was also very surprised.

[Deleted]

Well, if you examine the real life Farewell case, you discover that President Mitterrand sabotaged the entire Soviet spy industry in 1981 while having Communist ministers in his government.

(They code-named it 'Farewell' in English so that the Russians would think that the Americans were behind the plot!)

[bjd]

Looking in the fount of all knowledge, all Mitterand did was hand over the file that a Soviet defector had. This is akin to Reagan's bringing down the Berlin Wall by saying "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall" two years before it actually happened. Both played a bit part in something much bigger.

And by 1981, I imagine Mitterand could smell which way the wind was blowing.

[Deleted]

The main motivation for Mitterrand was to cowtow to the United States, which was horrified by his election and the arrival of communists in the government. This was the first time that communists had been in power in Western Europe since De Gaulle's first postwar government in 1945, and you know how paranoid certain countries can be.

Reagan's advisors had clearly never studied Mitterrand's past to know where he was coming from.

[bixaorellana]

Nov 25, 2009 21:38:36 GMT kerouac2 said:

This was the first time that communists had been in power in Western Europe since De Gaulle's first postwar government in 1945

What about Italy? I thought they had several communist govt.s

[Deleted]

No, they had the strongest communist party, but the communists were always kept out of the government.

[fumobici]

Seeing these posters everywhere during the 2006 election took a bit of getting used to.