Gauloises

It's Deirdre.

There's a cafe nearby where he's a regular, and he's always asking for Gauloises and can't get them.

They keep giving him Marlboros.

And they also keep on giving him hot chocolate, which I didn't realize that's what's happening.

But my mother and I, we came.

We returned to Ankara early on, and so from that environment in Strasbourg, which was full of students, you know, smoking Gauloises, reading lots of leftist books, and that's the environment that I have in my memory, in my mind.

I was zoomed into a very traditional, very conservative, inward-looking, quite patriarchal neighborhood, a middle class neighborhood in Ankara.

This was my maternal grandmother's world.

Anyway, they had a blissfully happy marriage, and when he was too old to do it himself, she'd put his makeup on for him.

She used to smell of Gauloises and Chanel, and she was hilarious.

She did wonderful caricatures for me, um, when I was sort of sitting on my pot.

pot.Uh, of course, my father jabbered away in Russian to all his family, but, um, he never spoke Russian to me or my mother, so, um, I never learned to speak Russian, which is quite sad.

In France, there are not a lot of places for young people to do sports, and they've done-- been better about that.

Uh, you know, I mean, sports are not exactly part of the program in French lycées, and they run around the, the, you know, they run around the gym twice, and they're all hacking and coughing and grasping for their Gauloises.

Uh, but, you know, they've been doing better now, and one of the reasons that, that France does so well in soccer is because, you know, they're, they, they take, uh, particularly young minority, uh, youth who are very good, good soccer players, and, and they get good training, and, and, and that's why...

You know, when Fr- when we won the World Cup in 1998, and Jean-Marie Le Pen said, uh, the new leader of the National Front, he said- He said it wasn't a French team that won.

The worst

... they're probably stood at the side with a Gauloises going-

Yeah

... "Yeah, whatever.

I had to get there close to listen to them talking, 'cause they were captured and I wasn't.

And then a German came up to me with a cigarette.

I was smoking a cigarette, a Gauloises, 'cause it was in keeping.

[laughs] Could he have a light? So I held my cigarette up, and fortunately I was able to keep my hand steady while he lit his cigarette from [laughs] my Gauloises.

Uh, dear.

And then we got on the train, and we got to Paris, and, uh, we get off there, and I follow him.