This isn't a jolly story - and it's quite long - but I hope you'll read it.Close to our house, the Rue Bourbon is an odd mixture of the almost new, and the very, very old. On our side of the street, the gardens of the houses run down to the slender remains of the moat and the great gated ramparts that formed part of Cardinal Richelieu's grand design for a perfect city at a time when a perfect city necessarily included gates, ramparts, a moat, and arrow slits in the otherwise windowless out-facing walls. The steps that lead down from the houses into the gardens are stone and - like the wooden stairs inside the houses - the steps have been worn away by countless feet over countless years so that they all have dips in the middle. Inside or out, no floor is level on this side of the street.
On the other of the street, though, there's a small block of flats. It's fairly new - in fact it's the only new building in the whole town - so all its steps and all of its floors are straight, and it hasn't yet started to lean this way or that. When it does, it will probably just fall down. It definitely wasn't built to lean, last, or grow gracefully old, picturesque, and inconvenient.
M. Titoukh lived in the flats, and his flat was directly opposite our house, so we saw him often, standing on his balcony watching the street.
He was a 'local' person, and like most 'local' people he would probably have preferred to live inconveniently and coldly moated on our side of the street rather than wrapped in warm breeze block on his side of it - and he would almost certainly have been better off had he had the freedom to go out into a garden - but he had no choice of accommodation. M. Titoukh was never very well, so he lived where local government put him: isolated in a flat one floor up from the street and a world away from it and everything else that would have made his life more interesting and more worth living.
For the first three or four years that we lived here, we never saw M. Titouhk outside his flat - and we observed that he had no visitors save for the woman (sent by the excellent French health service) who came to clean the flat for him. We spoke to him, of course - we and all our immediate neighbours - he above and we on the street below, and we were all very pleased when, last year, he seemed suddenly to get a lot better.
Last year M. Titoukh got a ginger cat. He got an old bicycle and rode it. He went out and shopped. He played boule under the plane trees on the wide boulevard on the other side of the ramparts. He went to the Cardinal's wonderful park that is all that is left now of the Cardinal's once magnificent palace. He began to smile and talk - and he became a known person and an accepted neighbour to all of us, and (at last!) an important part of the street-level life of the Rue Bourbon.
Whenever M.Titoukh had to go into hospital for this or that - which was quite often - he fell into the habit of putting the cat Caramel out into the street. We assumed that he did that because he had no one else to call upon to look after it, so we fell into the habit of looking after it amongst ourselves - Madame Vallee, Madame Pariat, my next door neighbour Christine and me - until he came back. No one minded - least of all the cat. Caramel enjoyed the fuss, the houses, the gardens, the moat and the lizards on the walls - and he certainly liked being overfed. But nothing could replace M. Titoukh for Caramel. At the first sign of M. Titoukh, Caramel would disappear into the flats - incarcerated until the next time.
A couple of weeks ago M. Titouhk came home from the hospital in a taxi as usual, and collected Caramel from his usual lunchtime spot in one of my window boxes. He let the cat out onto his balcony, fetched his bicycle and set off down the Rue Bourbon. A hundred yards away from his own front door, M.Titoukh fell off, and died in the street. He was less than 50 years old.
To everyone's surprise, M. Titoukh turned out to have had a great many relatives - all of whom lived at La Coupure du Parc, less than a kilometre away from Richielieu. His father arrived that day to take Caramel away, and last weekend a lot of people turned up to take away the remains of M. Titoukh's life.
Where on earth were all those people - all those noisy, laughing, healthy relatives with their cars and their trucks and their trailers - when M. Titoukh was spending his summers and winters (and every Christmas!) alone in his flat, visited only by a professional carer, spoken to only by people who did not know him very well? Where were they when he was going to and from the hospital by himself - expensively! - in a taxi? Where were they when he felt that he had to put his cat - and Mr Titoukh certainly loved his cat - out in the street to fend for itself or rely on the good nature his neighbours?
Actually, it doesn't really matter - save that it might, one day (I hope!) matter a great deal to them. M. Titoukh's sudden absence has left a surprisingly large hole in the fabric of the life of the Rue Bourbon. We remember him - and will always remember him - with affection. We miss him - and he died amongst friends.
There are a great many M. Titoukh's in this world - and helping people (and having them help you to learn and grow and understand) isn't always quite as cut, dried, and straightforward as it's often made out to be. And perhaps you aren't as badly off as you think you are.
Emily - http://www.therapypartnership.com/
