Creativity. Excitement. Joy.

Passion. Emotion. Magic.

Bohemia.

Paris was all of these things and more -- so much more!

I found myself directed the first night to Montmarte, a borough inside of the city and home to "La Vie Boheme" -- The Bohemian Life. Even I had heard of Montmarte while in Moscow. One of Papa’s lawyer friends called it a ‘hot bed of indignity’. It was constantly whispered about in gossip columns as another member of the upper middle class ran away from home to find it.

This was a lost land of idyllic dreamers and illusions, a hidden place of heightened emotions and dizzying causes.

I was home.

I was told by a lady at the train station (using very rudimentary French from a travel brochure I bought) that there was a hotel where men could rent rooms by the week. I signed up and found myself within a matter of minutes rooming with a writer named Jacques who was only a few years older than me -- three to be precise.

Jacques was a strange fellow -- he had an odd obsession with writing about strange fantastical beasts -- but it didn't bother me much. We became friends right away.

He was tall and lanky, with red hair like a fire cracker and brown eyes with glints of gold in them. He spoke rapidly, which was hard for me to understand until I was able to master the very basics of French a la my Latin training in school.

My first night in Paris found me with Jacques in a cafe called Pomme de la Terre. Why it was named "Apple of the Earth" (in other words, a Potato) was anyone's guess -- supposedly the owners had gotten very drunk on a drink called Absinthe while ordering the sign and the rest was history.

The cafe was everything I had dreamed of. Beautiful women. Loud Ragtime music. Art. Poetry. Dance. Something called Transcendentalism. Freedom. Hope. ELECTRICITY.

I was washed in it, pulled in different directions under the dazzling lights as I tried to hungrily devour it all.

People danced. They talked. They drew. They wrote. They flirted. They drank. They played cards.

They created.

These people -- these Bohemians, free-spirits, travelers -- they were like me. They understood me.

They weren’t stuck in boring 1893 like the rest of the World. No, they were in the party of 1893!

Jacques introduced me to several Bohos like himself, older teenagers and young adults, as well as people that were almost fossilized -- at least to me. I was the youngest, the least experienced, and the most impressionable. Jacques said he "felt it his duty" to guide me in the way of these free-spirits.

And so he did.

Lesson One: cheating at poker.

I had never played poker, let alone expected to be able to cheat at it. I never lied either -- the only time I really had was after the almost one year showdown with Papa about the art.

"This is a full house," Jacques said, showing me an odd arrangement of cards. We were playing against two of his friends: Marcello, or Marc, an Italian actor with perfectly gelled dark hair, and a sandy haired painter everyone called Slaps for some reason or another, probably to hide a criminal record. Each was from a different country, and each spoke fluent, perfect French. Jacques said I could learn plenty about cheating by just watching them. They had promised to go easy on me my first few times, but I noticed Slaps adjusting his wager often to drive me broke.

Marc sighed, a long, fake stage sigh. "Ah, this reminds me of a scene in a play, a Greek tragedy I performed one year in Rome --"

"Rome's not in Greece, you imbecile," Slaps sneered through a thick English Manchester accent, upping the ante yet again. Marc snorted.

"Did I say it was?"

"I was just wondering why you didn't do a Roman play instead."

"Because it wasn't --"

"Oh shut up and deal the cards," Jacques snapped. "Mikhail's getting antsy."

I was far from antsy. I rarely saw people argue while playing card games, and especially about something so stupid as Greek plays in Rome. I found it fascinating.

"Tell us all about your talent," Marc asked me as he dramatically placed a card on the table. I had caught on quickly that he did everything dramatically. "Who is your Muse and what does she inspire you to do?"

I shrugged, trying to figure out if I held a pair or a flush. "I like to draw."

My two opponents exchanged looks.

"He really is quite good," Jacques said, drawing a card from the deck and scrutinizing it with twin hazel orbs. "A real talent. I saw his portfolio earlier."

“Beware, my young fellow,” Marc said, even though I wasn’t that much younger than him, “the realm of the muses is a hard and treacherous path to traipse through.”

Almost in response the music inside the cafe got quicker, lighter, livelier.

"Why, hello there." Slaps was trying to suavely flirt with a cigarette girl who had happened to wander by -- evidently his version of flirting was to try and put his hand up her skirt.

She gave him such a hard slap I thought I heard his teeth shake.

There was a moment of shocked silence.

"So THAT'S why they call him Slaps!" I announced proudly at my sudden discovery.

Jacques patted me on the shoulder and looked at Marc and Slaps happily. "Didn't I tell you he was a smart kid??"

~*~

By now we’d reached Lesson Two: Gambling.

Betting on horses was my next big adventure. Marc recited half a dozen theatrical lines having to do with horses and Jacques said his own poetry far outdid Shakespeare’s on the subject. Slaps was busy elsewhere, and I didn’t care. He wasn’t my favorite person to be around due to his shifty, beady eyes and mind that worked a bit too much in his favor.

I had my sketchbook safely in one hand and a cigarette in the other as we took our seats in the large green bleachers at the track. Marc had lent me a pack and smoking them made me feel ‘adult’ and exciting. Mama would have had a fit.

Mama...my mind drifted to her. I wondered how she was doing -- even more if she and Natty got along. I hated to think of her bright energy being held captive by Nataniel’s inability to return it, no matter how hard he tried.

Was she safe? Happy? Content?

Did she think of me as often as I thought of her?

“In this pretty lullaby, my child, there lie many prophecies. Some day you'll be wandering in the wide world,” I sang quietly under my breath, matching her familiar, lyrical gait as I eyed the track around me.

“What’s that?” Jacques asked, leaning an ear towards me as he read the racing statistics sheet and touts.

“Nothing,” I said casually -- I‘m a very casual person -- propping my sketchbook in my lap as I did and flipping to a page while my companions bickered over which horses to bet on.

I stared at the sheet, letting the blankness speak to me. Most people I’ve discovered hate such starched vacancy. They think it’s dull and, I secretly believe, find it scary. It represents a beginning of something new -- and most people hate new adventures.

I love them, and I love a blank sheet of paper almost as much as the final masterpiece that comes from it.

My eyes focused on a man across the stands. He was seated by a little boy, his son maybe, who was eagerly asking him questions. The father was pointing out horses as they talked, occasionally smiling widely at one of the boy‘s jokes. They both ate thick, sweet ice creams. I noticed they wore matching cloth hats of red tartan.

There was a bond between father and son, a magical memory being formed of great galloping stallions and sticky, cream-covered fingers.

I blinked once, then opened my eyes again.

I now saw them as an artist does -- lines, shapes, colors, shadows, and most importantly...emotions.

I slowly made a stroke across the page, feeling the familiar surge of art pacing through my fingers from a special spot inside my brain. I hadn’t drawn, really DRAWN, since Papa had taken my art supplies away. I’d doodled on the ship, sure, but never had I let my soul invest itself in something like I felt it doing now.

It’s a dizzying feeling to blindly stroke across the page, the rough charcoal scraping across your hands as you work, begging for attention, but you, uncaring, ignore it.

You draw a line, then another, then another, then connect them all in a great swirl of movement. You glance up, see the subject, then return your eyes to the paper, drawing as much as comes to mind as possible, refusing to turn from it until absolutely necessary. The world around you blocks itself, courteous of the artisans who capture it for eternity.

It’s going to be something. You realize this. You work towards it. All it asks is that you lend it a few things: your supplies, your hands, your vision, your heart, your belief that it can be something great once it’s done.

Then, suddenly, it‘s there.

The father and son smiled at each other, both across the stand and in the paper in my hands.

I could almost feel the devotion of family.

Jacques and Marc were strangely quiet. I glanced over at them -- they were staring, shocked, their eyes shifting between me and the sketch.

“Wow,” Jacques finally muttered.

The little boy had seen me drawing them. He nudged his father and they both waved at me from across the track.

I looked at my portrait, signed my name and the date, then quietly stood.

Folding it a few times I had the perfect paper airplane, a skill I‘d perfected in boring math classes. Giving it a good shove off it flew over the heads of the onlookers and the great bushy manes of the horses, and soared -- soared past it all like a magnet drawn by a metallic heart, an invisible thread, a connection, whatever you want to call it.

It landed near the little boy and he ran to get it. He quickly unfolded it. I watched his eyes light up as he laughed happily, then showed his father.

The man recognized the love I had drawn into it and knew that now he’d never forget this outing with his son, no matter how old the child got or how far away he drifted from home.

I could almost see the diamond tears twinkling in the father’s eyes as he looked at me and gave me the greatest gift anyone ever could to a lost little boy smoking cheap cigarettes who thought he was a man.

He smiled.

~*~

Lesson Three: Drinking.

I’d had plenty of wine growing up, especially at holidays, and even the occasional hidden shot of vodka away from my parents‘ eyes. I was too young to drink hard liquor in Russia, though, while in Paris it seemed like even five year olds were sipping tall glasses of brandy.

I wasn’t sure what going to drink had to do with being an artist unless it meant food, which I was craving. My kopecks had long since been spent (I‘m reckless with money), and now the four of us were living hand to mouth entirely. Jacques, however, assured me that no artist could live in Paris and not love a good night at the bar sipping alcohol while laughing with his friends.

My eyes were pulled in all directions once we entered the bar. I had never been in a public house (called “pubs” for short) before, although I’d often tried to peek in the foggy windows as a child. The thought of a pub hadn’t enticed me as much as the private clubs that normally were connected to them, though, and I found that even in Paris I felt the same way. Everyone knew that pubs were for cheap people who couldn’t afford to enter it’s nicer, more opulent neighbor.

People littered the public bar, strung across it like limp, dusty noodles. Everything had a fine mist over it, a kind of texture that was almost refining, almost dulling. I blinked a few times to adjust my eyes to the darkness and smoke.

Men came here to search for ointments to their loneliness, nursing their wounds on a half-forgotten drink and the kisses of cheap women who hung on their arms. They were tattered and beaten, yet still laughed twice as loudly as the people outside, sang twice as off-key, drank twice as much, and danced twice as fast. It was different from the cafe we went to every night, where people had fiery discussions on bohemianism, writing styles, politics, and art movements. Here topics like those suffered in the breeze of the cigarette smoke, while old jokes and pale one-liners ruled supreme.

Marc’s favorite drink was bourbon with something called Ginger Ale, while Slaps enjoyed a very strong beer brew. Jacques sung the praises of something called Absinthe, ‘le fee verte‘.

“Je le prends avec du sucre!” he called happily to someone who was swishing the last of a green liquid in a clear decanter. The two men embraced, kissing each other on the cheek and motioning to the bartender for ‘two’.

“Who’s that?” I whispered to Slaps.

“Who knows,” was the curt reply back as the painter studied a few scantily clad women.

“They don’t know each other, Mikhail,” Marc said, picking up for Slaps and offering me a sip of his bourbon.

I peered curiously at Jacques and the stranger. “Then what’d he say to him?”

“I take it with sugar.”

My face drew itself into a confused pout. “What’s that mean?”

It seemed like everyone in the bar turned to stare at me with huge, amazed eyes.

Jacques gasped. “Quickly! Buy this boy a glass of Absinthe immediately!”

“What??” I was pushed towards the bar, not sure if I was more offended by the shove or being called ‘boy‘ by Jacques, who was only 18 himself. I stumbled against the heavy oak divider and had a smooth, clear glass of green liquid shoved in my hands.

“What is it?” I asked, holding it up to eye-level to study.

“EVERYONE does Absinthe,” Jacques said. “It’s the soul of the Muses. The green fairy!”

“You can’t be a Bohemian without Absinthe!” the other man piped in, grabbing my glass from me and lining it with another dozen. Marc tossed half his matches to the man. They both grabbed slotted spoons and dipped them quickly in a green-encrusted sugar.

My face contorted. “What is that on there, mold?”

“It’s been pre-dipped in Absinthe,” the bar-tender said. He had joined in scooping the sugar onto slotted spoons, and handed one to me. “Just hold it over the fire when it’s your turn.”

Marc lit a match under my spoon and I watched as the drugged sugar slowly melted into the shot glass. Liquid oozed through the slits, evaporating and turning the drink a milky greenish white.

Men and women both took glasses. I quickly snatched mine back. Jacques raised his proudly.

“To la vie boheme!”

“To la vie boheme!” was the jovial reply as everyone clicked their shot glasses and drank the concoction in a dramatic swoop.

I feebly raised the rim to my lips, my eyes crossing as I tried to peer into the drink. Wishing I could hold my nose and still look ‘adult‘, I swallowed.

Heated waves tumbled down my throat, gurgling into acid. Absinthe tasted like turpentine -- or at least as I had imagined turpentine to taste. I quickly put my hand over my mouth to keep from gagging.

Jacques slapped my back heartedly. “Wonderful isn’t it? You don’t feel much until the fifth glass, though.”

I wasn‘t sure about this, considering that I was all ready getting a warm sensation from feet to head.

“Care for another?” Marc handed a prepared glass to me. Everyone was taking a second round.

“No,” I managed to squeak out, my throat dry and crusted.

“Oh c’mon, Moisse,” Slaps said, raising an eyebrow at me. “Don’t ya want to be a big boy for once?”

This stung. Slaps was eight years older than me, unlike Jacques and even Marc, who was only twenty-one. They had both left home at fifteen, like me. Slaps, however, had been raised in the Bohemian life by his parents -- he was almost like the Buddha of La Vie Boheme.

I wanted more than anything to prove him wrong about my maturity -- I wanted to be the Buddha of Bohemia for once.

I tried to ignore the nauseating taste in my throat and slapped my hand to the table. “Another round!”

To Jacques’ word, after four drinks I saw stars -- literally.

~*~

I woke in total pain. My head hurt, my legs hurt, even my back hurt. I felt like I’d been thrown in front of a speeding carriage. I’m not good at describing things like this, so you’ll just have to take my word for it -- I was in PAIN.

A few crumpled sheets of paper were under me. I slowly lifted my head, noticing I had drooled on one.

They were drawings, beautiful ones at that. A gorgeous woman smiled at me; buildings seemed to beam; rivers ran and birds flew. It was some of the best work I’d ever done -- I assumed it was me by the lopsided signature I’d put in the lower corner.

The problem was that I couldn’t remember drawing any of them.

Jacques came out of the hallway with a cup of coffee. He was whistling some ragtime song and trying to read a letter. He swiftly handed the beaker to me, then kicked a wastebasket to my bedside.

“I’m sure you need some.”

I groaned. “How can you be so damn chipper after last night?”

He couldn’t answer right away because suddenly I was reliving myself into the wastebasket for a full three minutes.

After I’d gotten cleaner and had hesitantly tried to keep down a sip of coffee, he replied.

“I’m used to Absinthe. Well, that and...”

“And?”

He pointed to his own bed. I glanced over -- and gasped at what I‘d missed in my illness.

A women was laying under the covers, giggling and batting her eyelashes.

I jumped up, trying to smooth my wrinkled pants and tuck in my shirt. I straightened my suspenders, only to have them flop pitifully at my sides again.

"I...I didn't..."

"Of course YOU didn't," Jacques said. "I did."

She introduced herself as Jeannette -- I recognized her from one of my Absinthe-induced drawings. Evidently she and Jacques had got along smashingly at the bar, both frequent drinkers of Absinthe (not to my surprise).

Jacques got Jeannette out of there in record time as I paced nervously, gulped down more coffee and refused crackers, and tried to figure out what had happened the night before. He claimed I’d been in a drawing fury and that the ‘green fairy’ had visited me.

Years later I learned that Absinthe was far from healthy -- it held a toxic amount of an herb called wormwood inside the alcohol that led some to beautiful masterpieces while killing others in heart-stopping seizures. It seemed to have the former effect on me, and three of my favorite drawings were produced that night.

I decided that I didn’t want anymore Absinthe, however. I had been drunk once before (behind Mama’s back, of course), but a hangover from vodka felt nothing like one from Absinthe. It took me a whole pack of cigarettes to start feeling better, and I lost my appetite for an entire day.

Besides, I could get creativity and skill from myself -- I was prideful, and found myself ashamed to admit the beauties I had made that night were because I had been under the influence of ‘la verte fee’.

~*~

Marcello was leaving Paris six months later, and Jacques and I had decided to go with him. I’d lost my infatuation for the City of Lights -- now I dreamed of the gentle canals of Venice, Marc‘s homeland.

“You’ll love Italy,” he told me one afternoon as we planned our trip. “Beautiful women, plenty of scenery, and no Slaps!”

I was more than a little glad to be leaving Slaps behind. His rough English ways were crude next to Marc and Jacques’ more refined Romanticism. I savored their ideals of the truth behind Bohemia, while Slaps’ only faith lay in cheating and conniving.

In Jacques I’d found a brother, in Marc another. We bonded through the mantras of the importance of love and independence, things my real brother barely knew existed.

Or did he?

The day before our departure I received a telegram from Moscow. I had sent one to our neighbors months before, who had secretly passed it on to Natty and Mama. It told them where to contact me -- but to do it discreetly, and not to panic if I no longer lived there when they finally found a safe time to write.

It was addressed to Hoshama Matvei -- my Jewish name and a Russian cognate of my Grandfather Matityah’s -- to throw off the law enforcement. I smiled. Nataniel had probably thought of it. He was brilliant at things like that.

Hoshama stop

Political meeting in London the 21st of June stop That 4th of July where you live stop Please come stop Mama and I not be there stop Would come if could stop Try to make it stop Important stop

Nataniel Geriiovich Moisse stop

Typical of Natty. No hi, no how are you, no ‘love, your brother’, not even a ‘Natty‘ at the end. I felt more emotion from the arbitrary telegram ‘stops’ than I did from his wording.

“Hey, look at this,” I said to Jacques, reading the Cyrillic telegram to him and trying to translate as best I could with my meager French.

“Political meeting?” he said, glancing at Marc. “What do you think that means, ami?”

“Probably some protest of some sort. London has more political meetings than Paris has beautiful women. Are you going there instead of with us, Mik?”

“Of course not,” I announced, packing my last shirt. “I wouldn’t be caught dead at some political meeting. What would I have to protest against, anyway?”

A day after our arrival in Venice I passed a corner newspaper boy barking out headlines.

“Russke Anarchist Meeting in London!” he shouted at me as I passed. “One injured and two dead in police break-up!”

I grabbed Marcello’s arm and dragged him to the boy.

“What kind of political meeting was that again?” I asked the kid.

“You’ll have to buy the pape to see,” he said through a smirk, waving the paper enticingly in front of me.

“Oy!” I shouted in frustration, looking at Marc for help. He said something in rapid Italian to the boy, who answered back with an even bigger smirk.

“You’ll have to pay him,” he finally said, shrugging helplessly. “I’ll chip in half.”

We scraped together a few pennies and tossed them at the boy. He raised an eyebrow.

“What, no tip?”

I grabbed my paper from him. “Sure, I’ll give you a tip.”

He held his hand out expectedly. I slapped it.

“Your tip is to stop smirking. It makes you look like a rat.”

After a brief scuffle with the angry newsboy (who’d have thought that little kid could punch?), we ended up at the room the three of us had rented over one of the Venetian Canals.

Marc translated the article for me. A group of escaped Russian convicts -- most of them of Jewish descent -- had held a protest against the Czar. They were demanding an absurd amount of things, yet all were rights given to Russians but not them. Chaos had ensued once the Czarist friendly British police walked in.

I didn’t learn much, except I was glad that I’d refused to go. I had been given a peep, however, into Natty’s beliefs. So he really WAS involved in an underground group of Jews and Jewish sympathizers. The article mentioned a man by the name of Karl Marx -- no doubt a leader of some sort, or at least a philosopher.

I made myself put the paper aside. I didn’t need politics. Let Natty fight the battles of the world -- they gave him a rush of heat he couldn’t get any other way. I found that heat everywhere, though, and didn’t need it from being beaten by police.

“Let’s go, Mikky!” Jacques said, tossing my coat to me. “Marc’s brother got us free tickets to some kind of show.”

I forgot all about rallies and Nataniel as I stepped into the warm Italian air. I was Bohemian now, and I’d trust only in La Vie, study only it’s hedonistic theology.

This was, I believed, the way life was supposed to be.

But if it was, why did I still feel so empty?

Jacques and Marc both agreed on the cause. I was sixteen now, and they suggested it was time to move up to Lesson Four.

Women.