NEEDLING

MOONSHINE

The entrance hallway of my building smells like a fermenting sock with a slight after-bite of petrol. I’m half suspecting the concierge’s husband to be experimenting with the distillation of his own personal liquor/ moonshine. Possibly in their WC which gives right onto the main hallway of the building. The smell started about two days ago. At first I thought that it might be an old cheese they’d left on their kitchen window sill to air out a little and kill a few pigeons, but the smell has not only persisted, it’s gotten a little more intense from day to day.

I like my concierge, I want to make that clear. They’ve been great. They’re a Serbian couple who’ve been living in and out of France for the last twenty years and they’ve been the concierge at my building for approximately the last three years.

Last year at Easter time the husband found himself at home alone, as his wife had gone back to the village – in the ex-republic of Yougoslavia – to celebrate Easter with her family and especially their many children, none of whom live with them being their all grown adults. Serbian Orthodox Easter is on a different day than not only the Catholic Easter, on account of the Gregorian vs. the Julian calendars, but also on a different date as the Greek & Russian Orthodox Easters… for what reason I don’t know. I asked him at the time a year ago if he was sure of this information, and he responded that definitely he was sure. I have not looked this up anywhere to get any kind of validation. I guess it’s possible that the different Orthodox pontiff set Easter on different Sundays just to make sure everything religion-wise remains complicated. Easter also happens to be their most important holiday, more important than Christmas, and he was feeling lonely so he invited me into the concierge lodge to have a drink with him, during which time he would pull out pictures of saints and tell me their stories. Unfortunately, since he couldn’t always express himself in coherent French, he would often use Serbian words, or switch completely to Serbian when the stories became too complicated. As the glasses of whiskey multiplied, I started understanding some of the stories, or thought that I understood them. Before switching to Serbian, he would often go into great pantomimes to make a point, or deliver more clearly a particularly important image in the saint’s life, or more often than not, a saint’s martyrdom.

This last new year, as is the custom in France, I gave my concierge an envelope with some cash in it. To that I also added a nice bottle of wine. Like I said, I like my concierge, and last year they were particularly helpful in several situations. I usually give them a bottle of wine whenever I ask them an important favor. I think it’s only fair, and anyway in France it’s very important that the concierge be your friend, especially if you’re leasing. For example last time I left my place for eight months to bum around the States from Maine to Texas where I visited many of my friends and made quite a few new ones, and that I subleased my place – a common yet mostly illegal practice in France – I knew I had nothing to fear as far as the concierge went. They kept my mail, gave it to my friend whenever she came over to pick it up, and as far as anybody was concerned, the young man in my studio was a distant American cousin of mine who was taking care of my plants while I was away.

At new year’s, when I gave them the envelope and the bottle of wine, they insisted that I come in for a drink. They wouldn’t take no for an answer, and if I insisted they would have taken it as an offense, so I went in the lodge and sat down. At first, they offered me a cup of coffee and I accepted with relief. But then the husband went reaching into the bottom cup-board in a dark corner of the room and came out with a 1.5 liter plastic bottle, those bottles designed strictly for mineral water. He had a big smile on his face. He held the bottle with extreme care, with reverence even, like a small child or a porcelain vase from Chinese antiquity… yet it wasn’t any of the above. It was a dirty plastic bottle with clear liquid that had a slight greenish lime color. I gulped. I was scared.

“This is just like we find it in the village. My friend, he lives here now, but he’s from the same village, he makes it and he sells it only to friends. Just like in the village.”

The word “village” I find is used by immigrants, wherever they might be from, in relation to something important, usually it has something to do with family, with weddings or funerals, or with religion… or a custom related to one of these rituals. Anyway, there’s almost always some sort of respect in the manor which it is spoken. And every single time he said the word, I got a little more scared. There was no way out of the lodge without having a drink of whatever was in that bottle without offending them.

“You want to try?”
“Uhmm… only a little… just a very tiny bit, just to get a little taste of your village, but you know, I have to work this afternoon…” oh yeah, I forgot to mention it was barely eleven in the morning.
“What time do you have to be at work?”
I can’t lie to save my life, so I said the truth, “13h00.”
“That’s in two hours, no problem,” he said. I should have said in half an hour.
“Ok, ok… but just a drop, ok?”
He gave me a tumbler the size of sowing dice, and poured himself one the same size.
“So… they make this stuff in your village?”
“Yes, it’s a tradition. This here is very close to the stuff they make in the village. It’s the closest I’ve found so far.”
“How strong is it?” I asked, then suggested an answer, “about fifty proof?”
“Fifty proof! No.” I was relieved, but then he went on, “it’s at least 75 proof, but then we have no way of knowing for sure.”

I held my breath and downed the tumbler. Strong, yes, but it didn't tear up my entire throat, not as much as I expected. He poured me another one before I could hide the tumbler.

“Just a little more,” he said, really proud of himself.
“I really shouldn’t, I have to work this afternoon.”
“That’s no problem, just a tiny glass, it can do no harm.”

I was able to exit with only two and one half tumbler all together. By the time I arrived at the hotel, I kept looking at myself in the mirror, as it felt as if I had a baseball on fire instead of a nose hanging on to my face. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t all red. I kept having heat flashes throughout the day for no reason whatsoever, and the world, two hours after the ingestion of that lime green clear petrol-like liquid, had become a haze in which I had to keep constant concentration to keep it in focus.

He told me his friend sells these 1.5 liter bottle of jet fuel for a mere 15 Euros.

I’m afraid he might be experimenting in his WC to produce this gasoline extract himself, and thus save himself the trouble of paying his friend the money. Soon, the several hundred people who live in my building, might start walking around in a haze, after having to breath those fumes coming from the concierge’s lodge.