Les mecs

Lauren Elkin on the joy of a ramshackle flat in Paris, where she brought her baby home

Saint-Laurent is in the 10th arrondissement of Paris, at 68 bis Boulevard de Magenta

Our building on the Boulevard de Magenta had seen better days, but the rent was cheap and we were in a hurry: I was eight months pregnant and we needed a place to live. It was a run-down old Haussmannian building above a Franprix and a job centre, but up on the fifth floor there were sweeping views of the rooftops and the Église Saint-Laurent, and we fell in love. Never mind that outside our door hung a massive set of curling cables and wires, like an Eva Hesse sculpture, blithely unconnected to whatever they were supposed to be connected to. Or that the plaster on the walls in the stairway was grey with dirt and decades of cigarette smoke and crumbling in places. Or that the elevator had holes in its carpeted walls and actually bounced, chunk-a-chunk, when it arrived at our floor, making you fear for a second, one long second, that it might actually plummet to the ground.

The boulevard itself is one of the rougher streets in Paris. I tried not to think about the friend of a friend who got stabbed nearby. We regularly opened the front door in the morning to find a McDonald’s cup balanced on the doorknob, or a puddle of urine right in front of the entryway. At night, scores of men gathered around a garbage can to play some kind of card game. They formed a circle three layers deep, some standing on folding chairs to see the action. They shouted and whooped and made such a racket we heard them even up on the fifth floor. They were a nuisance, but we were fond of them. Les mecs, we called them.