Chapter Forty: Two Roads Diverge

In which our closest local friend and I make very different choices.

Current mood.

A quick word before we rejoin our unfolding tale. On the eve of the first round of the legislative elections, last night, Saint-Maxime had a sit-down dinner of spit-roasted suckling pig, co-sponsored by the Comité des Fêtes and the Pétanque Club. This is becoming a summer tradition, complete with karaoke (terrible French 80s pop only, s’il vous plait) and lubricated mingling. One of the most elderly men among us belted out Johnny Hallyday with the fire of a comeback rally in North Carolina. We were together, until, one imagines, today, when everyone sobers up and goes to vote to divide us more than ever.

I asked the mayor what time the vote count was, because I wanted to observe again. (If any of you are reading this missive soon after it arrives, I will likely be at City Hall observing the probable slide into authoritarianism via democracy, at the same time you are clicking open or whatever you do with this thing.) She told me it was at 6pm today, and then ensued a depressing conversation with one tiny spark of hope. I discovered that the mayor and I were both very worried about the village going for Le Pen’s National Rally party, based on how they voted in the European Parliament elections a month ago.

That a small village in a sparsely populated part of the agricultural world would vote hard right shouldn’t come as a surprise, even if we went overwhelmingly for Macron in the last presidential. But neither the mayor, nor I, nor Cassandre and Jean-Yves, nor Simon and Michel, like the idea that our goofy karaoke partners might be ushering in a small apocalypse of thuggishness and hatred. Were they aware just how many gay men there were living around there? (Hint: at my group of eleven last night, eight of were friends of Dorothy.) You can only hope they weren’t.

The mayor said ruefully: “I had people telling me that for the Europeans they voted Le Pen’s list to show they were mad at Macron, but that they’d come back around on the second round. I had to remind them that there was only one round in the Europeans.” Oops. Shades of Googling what the fuck Brexit was actually about only after having voted for it.

Maybe we’ll have a few more cases like this, where the Le Pen vote last time was an angry show pony, misunderstanding the difference in voting rules between France and the EU. (France’s one piece of true political wisdom is voting in two rounds.) I’ll find out tonight at the count, and again next week, when all the triangulation that usually happens to block the hard right likely won’t.

Our fate awaits.

And now we return to Spring, 2022. If you remember a few chapters ago, my friend Sasha had a nasty scrape with her dogs Hugo and Diana, who were kidnapped while off leash. Once they were returned to her, and the spring buds started to appear, life got sweet enough for the blessed event. Diana fulfilled one of her purposes, went into heat, and got knocked up with Hugo’s prized man juice.

As life was bouncy and fertile in one corner of the world, death was everywhere else. By now we were a few months into the war in Ukraine. Sasha, who is half Russian and had lived in Moscow for some years, was melting down. She barely had time to come back to earth from the botched shutdown of Afghanistan, when she worked the phones around the clock trying to help friends of friends and clients get out. Now, with Ukraine jumping off, she was about to collapse.

So what did she do? Pulsating with adrenaline, she agreed to house a bunch of Ukranian refugees. I will never be able to match Sasha’s generosity. She came to my aid more than once in a huge way, showing up ride-or-die style after the ex and I fell apart. But there are times that I question her judgment. I think you can tell I am being understated here.

What was supposed to be three women turned out to be six people, a few of them quite openly racist and homophobic, two of them a grandmother and a severely disabled young boy who needed round-the-clock care. Sasha said fuck it, these people have no choice, and gave them all the spare bedrooms in her place.

To me, this was a moral fork in the road. Moral, meaning, when the going gets tough, whom do we look out for, and how do we imagine the future? I didn’t raise my hand to put anyone up at my place. I needed to be alone most of the time for the world to make sense. I knew the war was heartbreaking, but I kept it at a distance because I could. For Sasha, taking care of others was clearly the first choice. I stood back and felt slightly ashamed and watched that play out.

The world sucked so I nested. I’m not saying I’m right, but look at that beefcake.

Her lodgers cleaned the house like champions and helped with a few other jobs, but mostly, as befits people who have just had to tear up their lives and flee to a foreign country, they had needs. They needed paperwork in French, they needed to be taken to and from appointments. The kids needed to get into school and find a way to get there. For all of this, they relied on Sasha.

And then sometimes they didn’t when they should have. They needed to learn French, and the teenagers were mostly just on Facebook and meeting boys online rather than applying themselves to their lessons. (Again, when you are traumatized, you need comfort. But you also need to learn French.) They needed to find housing, which they did eventually, with Sasha’s help, after, if memory serves, about six months.

Nothing shows you the limits of your own generosity like having a very generous friend. But I also saw how often Sasha suffered from having to problem-solve to a factor of six while still holding down a job as a freelance public defender of refugees. She got into fender benders all the time because she was exhausted from constantly driving back and forth three hours, through hellish traffic, to the asylum courthouse in Montreuil. And she was snappy and shouty to her friends, and broke down a lot emotionally.

Every time we talked about how overloaded and stressed she was, I said, “Do less.” Which, coming from the do-nothing friend cooling out working on a ghost writing project for quite decent money, might have sounded suspect. I had the right ideas about the world, but I was doing fuck all about it other than tending my garden, screaming on social media and trying to be nice to people. When Sasha seemed unable, ever, to do less, I worried. I knew she was a savior personality. I benefitted from it myself. But it also started to feel wounded. And knee-jerk.

In the middle of all this, the puppies were born. Eight of them. That meant one less bathroom for her household of seven, as the mini-Hugo and Diana squibs needed a closed-off place. They were magically cute, as sweet as their parents, and as calamitous. One was always sneaking off somewhere getting lost, which occasioned a four-alarm panic. Sasha needed to find homes for seven of them—the plan was always to keep a mini-Hugo and let the rest go—but that wasn’t an automatic process.

So then what did she do? She bought two horses. She had never owned or raised or housed horses before. Her motivations made sense in the abstract: they would keep the pasture mowed, and eventually, she might lend them out to a friend, a therapist who had lost a son and wanted to start a retreat for people undergoing intense grief. But it meant preparing the barn and a lot of vet visits. And then the squirrels ate all the electrical wiring in her house.

To help with the horses and dogs, after the Ukranians moved on, an Afghan refugee came to stay. He made great biryani, but every other skill he said he had, including equine, turned out to be, let’s say, exaggerated. So now he was going to need to go, and it was just so much management that even thinking about it made me want to take a nap. Still Sasha was racing to appointments to try to get other desperate people out of their temporary hells and into the shelter of France. (A France that may soon be far less sheltering of anyone from somewhere else.)

I kept seeing our instincts radically diverge. I had come out to the country for many reasons—economic, emotional, a need to slow down and reflect, an instinct that nature could be healing. It meant cutting most of what I knew out of my life, while I burrowed and licked my wounds. I think I still am burrowing and licking (sorry that sounds gross), now two years ahead of the events you’re reading about here.

I have mostly made self-centered choices in this chapter of life. I don’t congratulate myself for that or claim to be right. It’s a function of incredible privilege. I think in her own way, though, Sasha was too. There was a fury around how she kept adding layers and projects and complications. There was a huge amount of heart as well. She has always wanted to directly do her part to make the world a better place and she made a difference every time, even if she was swirling in chaos. But there was something unexamined in how she would always reach into the breach. There was something else she was trying to fix that was beyond today’s or tomorrow’s war.

Maybe I wished we could each take a leaf from the other’s page, but I was still making my mind up about that.

Speaking of pages, this chapter is something of a setup for a future eventuality. I am trying not to write long novels to your inboxes, so forgive me for something that doesn’t wrap up right away.

Wish Saint-Maxime luck today, and next week. I am personally not hopeful. Will let you know.