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complained.'
     
'Omar, that pig, would happily eat out of the toilet . . .'
     
'You do not like your neighbor?'
     
'I don't like the fact that he woke me in the middle of last night, demanding his television, which you took away.'
     
'No, I didn't.'
     
'All right, Joe Smoothie here took it away.'
     
Sezer said something in Turkish to Mr Tough Guy. He shrugged his shoulders in bemusement, then hissed something back.
     
'My colleague informs me that he didn't touch the television,' Sezer said.
     
'He's lying,' I suddenly said in English.
     
Sezer looked at me and smiled.
     
'Out of respect for your safety I won't translate that,' he said back in perfect English. 'And don't expect me to speak your language again, American.'
     
'You're a crook,' I said, sticking to my native tongue.
     
' Tant pis ,' he said, then continued on in French. 'But now Omar is upset. Because I told him that you sold the television to buy the new toilet seat. And he is such an ignorant peasant that he believed such stupidity. My advice to you is: buy him a new television.'
     
'No way,' I said, returning to French.
     
'Then don't be surprised if he comes home drunk again tonight and tries to break down your door. He is a complete sauvage .'
     
'I'll take my chances.'
     
'Ah, a tough character. But not so tough that you couldn't stop crying last night.'
     
I tried not to look embarrassed. I failed.
     
'I don't know what you're talking about,' I said.
     
'Yes, you do,' he said. 'Omar heard you. He said you cried for almost a half-hour. The only reason he didn't come looking for you this morning to demand his television money is because the idiot felt sorry for you. But, trust me, by tonight he will be in a rage again. Omar lives in a perpetual rage. Just like you.'
     
With that last line, Sezer had trained his gaze on me. It was like having a white-hot light shined in your eyes. I blinked and turned away.
     
'So why were you crying, American?' he asked.
     
I said nothing.
     
'Homesick?' he asked.
     
After a moment, I nodded. He took his gaze off me and returned it to the window. And said, 'We are all homesick here.'
     

Six
L A VIE PARISIENNE .
     
Or, to be more specific about it: ma vie parisienne.
     
For my first weeks on the rue de Paradis, it generally went like this:
     
I would get up most mornings around eight. While making coffee I would turn on France Musique (or France Bavarde, as I referred to it, since the announcers seemed less interested in playing music than in endlessly discussing the music they were about to broadcast). Then I'd throw on some clothes and go downstairs to the boulangerie on the nearby rue des Petites Écuries and buy a baguette for sixty centimes before heading down to the market on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis. While there, I'd shop carefully. Six slices of jambon , six slices of Emmenthal, four tomatoes, a half-dozen eggs, 200 grams of haricots verts (I quickly learned how to calculate metrically), 400 grams of some sort of cheap white fish, 200 grams of the cheapest cut of steak that didn't look overtly rancid, three liters of vin rouge , a half-liter of milk, three liters of some generic bottled water, and I'd have enough food to live on for three days. And the cost of this shopping expedition would never be more than thirty euros . . . which meant that I could feed myself for around sixty euros a week.
     
On the days that I bought food, I'd be back in the apartment by twelve thirty. Then I would open my laptop and let it warm up while making another coffee and telling myself that it was just a matter of five hundred words. As in: two typed pages. As in: the daily quota I had set myself for writing my novel.
     
Two pages, six days a week, would equal twelve pages. As long as I kept up this output without fail, I'd have a book within twelve months. And no, I didn't want to consider the fact that I only had enough money to cover a pretty basic existence for the three months of rent I had