Paris Echo

by Sebastian Faulks

  I woke up as we were making our descent. I only had my backpack, which they’d let me bring on board, so I didn’t have to wait for luggage. The taxis weren’t parked outside the terminal building, but up the slope behind a fence. I opened the envelope of money Jamal had given me. I thought they’d want me to get a cab into town.

  The car, like most of them, was an old beige Mercedes. In the months I’d been away even more breeze-block buildings seemed to have been put up along the highway. Maybe some of them had plumbing, or fire sprinklers, but probably not. We drove in through the smarter suburbs, past the big cemetery and the road to the American School of Tangier and into the Ville Nouvelle. I hadn’t warned my father I was coming back, but Victor Hugo had told me the parable of the prodigal son from the Bible and I was hoping that if I surprised him the old man might go and find a fatted calf to kill.

  To prepare myself a bit, I got the taxi to drop me at the Café de Paris at a busy junction near our house. It was a middle-aged place I’d never wanted to visit, but I had money in my envelope and time to spare. I ordered an ice cream, with an avocado and almond juice to drink, and left a large tip when I’d finished. Then I walked down to the Grand Socco, the big square. Here was the covered market I’d missed – the bread hags at the entrance selling their dusty loaves and the cats prowling among the stalls. And just up the hill was the Rif cinema where I’d spent so many teenage hours and its café with the fresh cakes, and opposite that the white gate into the medina with the plumbers and painters squatting on the kerb with their pipes and brushes, hoping for work. It all seemed so dirty after Paris (the smart bits of Paris anyway) and the street kids, boys of no more than eight or nine, out of their heads on glue and kif. It might be running on a low charge, with most people having no work, but in its own way, I thought, it knew what it was doing.

  As I approached our house, I began to walk more quickly. I climbed the outside steps and found our first-floor doorway open, as it always was. The air was fresh and clear inside.

  My stepmother came out of the kitchen to see who was there. For a moment she didn’t seem to recognise me. Then she began to cry. We hugged awkwardly.

  ‘I’m going to ring your father. He’ll be so pleased. He’ll want to hear all about it.’

  Then she was on the landline. ‘Yes, he looks fine. A bit thin. He smelled of alcohol, I thought.’

  She came back into the hall. ‘I rang your father,’ she said. ‘He’ll be home for dinner.’

  ‘That’s good,’ I said. ‘I’m going to have a shower and lie down for a bit in my room.’

  ‘We’ll have dinner on the roof. The weather’s perfect.’

  Dinner on the roof? No one did that. ‘Thank you,’ I said, and kissed her on the cheek – though not in time to prevent her telling me again that the weather was looking just right.

  Everything in my room was as I’d left it. I picked up the economics texts, the notebook, the printout of the essay for Miss Aziz that I’d never finished, last year’s birthday card from Laila. There were some clean clothes in the drawers, and after I’d had a shower, I lay down on the bed in fresh boxers and tee shirt, wishing that the moucharabia, the wooden screen that gave on to the landing, had offered a bit more privacy.

  It was getting dark when I awoke and I could hear my father’s voice from the roof. I pulled on some jeans and went upstairs.

  ‘Tariq. My dear boy.’

  He opened his arms and I let him hug me. He looked older, his crinkled grey hair just a bit more grey, his new glasses thicker than the ones I remembered.

  We sat at the taifor, which had whisky on it, and Coca-Cola and cold beer, which I guessed was for my benefit. For once, my stepmother had taken down the shirts on the clothes line, so we could see across the water almost as far as Europe.

  ‘And did you find any old friends of your mother’s in Paris?’ My father’s voice was kind.

  ‘No … No, I didn’t. I met some other people. Interesting people.’

  ‘What nationality?’

  ‘French, American, English, Algerian. Some mixed.’

  ‘I saw your friend Laila the other day. She said you won’t have to repeat the year.’

  ‘If I pass the exam.’

  ‘You’ll pass. You’re your mother’s son, thank goodness, not an old fool like me. Have a drink.’

  He poured me whisky with Coke and ice. I’d never known him be like this before. He must have decided not to be angry.

  My stepmother was also having a drink, something she only did about once a year. It was a fiery thing called mahia, made from dates, I think, which she drank with limonada. So we all sat round the low table and I told them a bit about Paname Fried Poulet, but not too much about Jamal or Hamid and nothing about the money in my backpack.

  ‘I’ve made a special dinner, something I learned from my grandmother,’ said my stepmother. ‘She used to call it the food of princes.’

  ‘The woman was a peasant,’ said my father. ‘But a good cook,’ he added quickly when he saw my stepmother’s face.

  To start, we had an omelette made with different kinds of wild mushroom. Then my stepmother brought up a lamb tagine – a good one, with the best bits of lamb cooked for ages and slices of apricot and lots of juice to go into the couscous with chickpeas that she served alongside it. It wasn’t a fatted calf, but with a second whisky and Coke and the sun going down over the sea, it was pretty good, and I told her so.

  ‘Thank you, Tariq,’ she said. ‘My grandmother called it—’

  ‘The food of princes?’ I said. ‘Cheers.’

  The next day I had to fight off the urge to call Laila. I felt it would be better to sort out my other business first, so I rang the college and made an appointment to see Dr Ahmed, the head of department.

  When I got there, I was told by the secretary that Ahmed was not available but that I could have a talk instead with his deputy, Miss Aziz.

  Fine by me, I said. The truth is that, apart from handing in essays, or a quick excuse for not, I’d barely spoken to the woman face to face before. Even when I’d been in a ten-student seminar with her I’d managed to keep my mouth shut. It was strange, then, that I felt I knew her so well.

  Miss A was wearing trousers and a white shirt buttoned to the neck (the black skirt and the strip of escaping white lace had never made a second appearance, alas). She had a surprisingly high voice, girlish, almost piping. She seemed uneasy to be sitting in the head of department’s office and dealing with a disciplinary matter. She put on some reading glasses and lowered her chin, as though trying to make her voice sound graver. Before I went to Paris, I would have felt pretty awkward with her, but now I felt sympathetic. She was a girl, a woman, and as such would always have a hold on me, but she also had a job to do, a role to fulfil and was perhaps (I was only guessing here) as full of private fears and general weirdness as I was. Which is not to say I wasn’t aroused when she stood up, went over to a filing cabinet and squatted down to open the lower drawer, making the trousers cling to the outline of her thigh and her round backside. She had bare feet in leather sandals and her toenails were painted red. Her feet were like a little girl’s. I shifted a little on the chair and tried to concentrate. I wondered if she’d seen much more of the shady-sounding man in the aviator sunglasses. I didn’t want her to go off with him to Qatar or Riyadh or some burning Gulf shithole, I wanted her to go off with me. Perhaps I could be like the men in the old days and have several wives. I’d have Miss Aziz and Laila, Clémence of course, and maybe Farida from Laila’s house. Jasmine Mendel on a Tuesday. And Hannah to keep us all on the straight and narrow. And the girl from Stalingrad, naturally – Juliette Lemaire, if that’s who she was.

  ‘And you’ve missed two full semesters,’ Miss Aziz was saying, ‘so you’ll need time to revise and catch up. Suppose you sit the exam at the end of the month?’

  I remembered an important science test at school, when I’d scored four per cent in the practice exam. But the night before the real
thing a month later, I opened the course book and read it through. It was a revelation, and I managed to get the required mark with a couple of per cent to spare. Two weeks to catch up should be enough. And Laila would help me revise.

  ‘I’m glad you’ve come back, Tariq,’ said Miss Aziz. ‘If you pass, I’ll be teaching you again next year. Maybe you can give us a talk about Paris as part of the European history module.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Aziz. I’d like to do that.’

  I stood up and held out my hand. I think she may have blushed a little as she shook it, but perhaps I imagined that. Her skin was a lovely pale brown, perhaps incapable of changing colour any more than her violet-black hair.

  Back at home, unable to delay any longer, I called Laila and told her the plan. She sounded pleased to hear from me. We talked for ten minutes or so till I said, ‘Can I come round and do some revision at your house?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’d get distracted.’

  ‘Go on. Please.’

  ‘In fact, I don’t think we should meet until you’ve done the exam.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t want you to be in the year below me. I want to sit next to you. Once you’ve taken it and passed it, you can come to dinner the same day. I’ll get Farida to make everything you like.’

  ‘Laila, you’re being a tease.’

  ‘I’m not. I really think it’s for the best.’

  ‘Have you found another boyfriend?’

  ‘Certainly not! It’s only you, Tariq. I promise. I think about you all the time.’

  ‘And if I do as you ask, will you make it worth my while?’

  There was a pause and I wondered if I’d gone too far.

  ‘I might.’

  There were no words I could find to answer that.

  Before the exam, I needed to deliver the money. I opened the Koran, thinking I could do what I’d done with the science book and at least be able to say something sensible if asked about it by Jamal’s friends. My memories of the holy book from when I was young were pretty positive because the handful of classes I’d gone to at the mosque were designed for children. They made you feel lucky that the Prophet had come and that we were among his followers, and the things you had to do – like being kind to widows and orphans and not drinking alcohol – all sounded fine.

  But I hadn’t looked at it since I was ten, because my mother had been a Christian (I think) and my father believed in nothing. I’d thought very little about religion myself, though obviously I knew about the new fundamentalists, the jihadis, and what they’d done. Then in Paris I’d got an idea of Christianity from Victor Hugo. He told me that the Jewish religion was based on the best-ever myths and stories and the Christian religion on the most revolutionary teaching, and he gave me some examples of that (love your enemy and so on).

  What this Koran offered was simple enough. The truth. The other guys got it wrong, we got it right. Moses and Jesus were good men, but the Prophet was the real thing. And if you don’t believe that now it’s been explained to you, then you’ll burn in hell for all time. I took on board the importance of this warning, but, then, after a hundred pages or so, I began to wonder when the book was going to show its hand. When would it reveal the facts or teachings that made ‘my’ religion the boss over the others? The lack reminded me a bit of the comments I used to get on my mathematics exams: ‘You need to show your workings’. But it began to look as though the special authority was in the assertion alone.

  Soon, I switched to economics revision. Laila had mailed me her lecture notes and I had the course books. I found my concentration was better than it had been before I went to Paris. Knowing now a tiny bit about European, or at least French history, made it more alive. It was no longer all Botzaris to me, and I began to feel confident about the exam.

  Next day I went back to the Koran and tried to bring the same enthusiasm, but the repetitions were beginning to get to me. I knew that if I didn’t believe in God I would be condemned to the fire for all eternity because I had been told that on the page before. I made myself persevere – though it was a bit like being locked in a room with my stepmother. When I felt I’d read enough, I rang the number in Jamal’s envelope. I thought the man who answered would be suspicious and would demand false names and heaven knows what, but he sounded all right. We made a rendezvous in an area of new buildings on the way to the airport. He said he’d meet me by the side of the main road.

  Near the open vegetable market above the Grand Socco there’s usually a line of taxis and by chance I found the same beat-up Mercedes and friendly driver who’d brought me from the airport. As we sped out of town, I began to think about what this money was for. Jamal was a bitter man, and in his place who wouldn’t be – given what had happened to his Harki parents? He was a funny old dog in many ways, Jamal, but he was also a friend and a top supplier of weed at knock-down prices. I imagined the money was going to help people in his extended family, here or in Algeria. In turn these people would be outsiders, like him, men who hated France and what it had done. The money would buy them some comforts and ease their lives. I hadn’t thought much further than that. The people I was going to meet were just friends of friends of a friend, a deep-fryer of chicken bits in a nowhere street in Saint-Denis.

  When we reached the half-finished buildings by the highway that the man on the phone had described, just before a big hoarding on the left that advertised ferry crossings to Spain, I told the driver to stop. I gave him the fare shown on the meter, plus a big tip.

  ‘If you wait here, I should be back in a few minutes. Then I’ll give you more money.’

  ‘I can wait.’ He showed a gold tooth when he smiled.

  We were a few minutes early, so I stood in the open where I could be seen. As so often in my country, I had the feeling I was being watched anyway, so there was no need to do anything. They’d come when they were ready. After four or five minutes, a boy of about thirteen appeared from one of the unfinished apartment blocks and signalled me to follow him. He looked a bit like Laila’s brother, Billy, though poorer, in ragged shorts and plastic sandals. We went down a dirt road for about a hundred metres, then into an area of uninhabited building works. I followed him inside what would one day be the reception hall of some flats, then down the service stairs. He knocked at a basement door and we went in.

  There were two people inside, an unshaven man with a red baseball cap and a woman in jeans with a white blouse and a black headscarf. They were both a little older than me – about twenty-five, I thought. For some reason I was thrown by the fact one of them was female – though also a little relieved.

  Red Cap, who sounded like the man I’d spoken to on the phone, did the talking at first. He asked me questions about Paris, how long I’d lived there, where I’d stayed, who I knew. I suppose he wanted to make sure I hadn’t been followed or that I wasn’t some kind of informer. Meanwhile, the woman looked impatient and muttered to Red Cap in a dialect I couldn’t follow. I began to feel uneasy. I had an urge to be back in the steamy kitchen at PFP.

  But no. It’s all right, I told myself. Jamal’s a good man. His life has been tough, he has some weird ideas, but he’s my friend. He’s my homely uncle, my kif pal. He wouldn’t land me in danger. Have faith.

  The woman asked if I’d like to help them by running some messages. To Brussels, maybe.

  ‘No, thank you. I’ve brought the money. That’s what I agreed to do.’

  ‘Who gave you the money?’

  ‘A man in Paris.’ I didn’t like to say Jamal’s name. ‘He said he was a friend of some people you know.’

  Red Cap was impatient. ‘We don’t know this man. He’s just a go-between. But you have the money.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Then the woman asked if I’d go along to a meeting in Beni Makada and stay to listen to some speaker there.

  ‘No. I have an exam to do. I’m going to finish my studies
. I may get married.’ I was saying anything now – but I knew Beni Makada was a bad part of town. ‘Here’s the money.’

  I handed the envelope to Red Cap, anxious that he might ask where the missing notes were. But he didn’t check it.

  The unplastered room was lit by a bulb that hung from a wire held in a corrugated plastic tube. They hadn’t finished installing the electricity and it was dusty in there.

  We all looked at each other in silence. I began to edge towards the door. It occurred to me that these two were quite low down in whatever organisation they worked for – that they were making things up as they went along. There were no rules in this game, so I needed them to think my agreed role in it was over.

  ‘I guess I’ll be on my way.’ I kept it light.

  ‘Wait,’ said the woman. ‘What was the name of the Prophet’s mother?’

  ‘What?’

  She took my wrist. ‘The name of the Prophet’s mother,’ she said.

  ‘Er …’ I cast my mind back to childhood. ‘Aminah.’

  ‘What are the first words of the holy book?’

  For this, I had only to think back to the day before and Jamal’s battered French edition. ‘“In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful …” Er … “All praise to Allah, the lord of, of …”’

  ‘The universe,’ she said.

  ‘That’ll do,’ said Red Cap, now standing very close to me. ‘This meeting never happened.’

  The woman, equally close on the other side, said, ‘Never.’

  I confirmed. ‘Never.’

  ‘Allahu akbar,’ said Red Cap. God is great.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  Then I went swiftly outside and followed the boy down the dirt road to where the old Mercedes was waiting.

  I never heard from them again. No incidents since then have made me think the money went to a bad end, and I like to think they used it for welfare – food, medicines, a few luxuries for the hard-pressed. Even plane tickets to go to Europe. Because however much men like Hasim and Jamal despised the place they lived, it gave them more opportunities than where they’d come from. I’d run an errand for a friend – a good friend, as it turned out – and that was all. And after a few days I did what I’ve always been able to do with troublesome thoughts – put the whole thing out of my mind.