by David Wright
Aïda told us that the doctors say Sidi is recovering well, but in the TV news reports that show him in his hospital room, he looks bad. Bandages and raw patches of skin and his eyes just empty. Every time, he’s staring into the camera and pleading for calm (Sidi, of all people), because things have gotten wild all over France. There are silent marches and sit-ins, but kids are also burning cars and attacking the police. All over. Towns big and small, north and south, east and west. One night it’s Clichy-sous-Bois, the suburb next to Villeneuve. The next night La Courneuve joins in. Last night the news reported cars burning in the projects in Toulouse, Lyon, Strasbourg and Marseilles. Nine hundred, a thousand cars torched before sunrise. The interior minister has declared a state of emergency in the “troubled areas,” but it just seems to fuel the anger.
The travel agent next to Free’s turns to me. “Monsieur Dumas, I checked like you asked earlier. Your return ticket is valid for another eight months.”
“Great, thanks,” I say.
The one taking care of Free types in his seat preferences, and he asks, “What’s up with that?”
“I need to stay a while,” I tell him, “to do Moose’s work.”
“Moose’s work?”
Monsieur Lebrun had suggested it after I told him I didn’t want to leave.
“I’m going to lead a workshop the mayor is organizing in the cités. He put me in charge of it.”
“For real?”
“Monsieur Lebrun asked me to keep working with the flag team and the juniors too, to get kids to bring their game to the field instead of the streets.”
“Dang, son. That’s dope!”
“Aïda and I have an appointment next week with the entire city council to talk about creating a fund in memory of Moose and Mobylette.”
He echoes me: “Moose and Mobylette. As it should be.”
Then he scrunches his brow.
“You and Aïda? Are you two serious then?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “She moves me.”
The agent hands Free his ticket, and we head out onto the boulevard.
“I was wondering why your moms came to town so sudden-like,” Free says. “This staying business—I’m guessing that didn’t go over so well?”
“Dad, he’s been great. He said he’d worry but that he was proud.”
“And your moms?”
“Well,” I say, “she still thinks it’s an ongoing negotiation.”
» » » »
Mom set the rendezvous at this restaurant called Les Fontaines, just up from the travel agency. She’s already there when we arrive. She just got off a plane four hours ago but looks as though she’s ready to begin a staff meeting. She wears a dark business suit and a Chanel scarf, her glasses perched on top of her head. But her face lights up when she sees me walk in.
“I don’t mean no disrespect,” Free whispers as we near the table, “but your moms is hot!”
“For Christ’s sake,” I whisper back, “she’s, like, fifty or something.”
I introduce Free. It’s clear from Mom’s face that she was expecting me to come alone, but I knew better. And she recovers quickly enough. They make small talk during the first course (paté for Mom and me, a frisée salad for Free). My mom starts in English, but Free insists on French. Where are you from? How have you liked Paris? Will you visit Montreal? That sort of thing.
Once the main courses arrive, he’s out of the conversation altogether. “Our agreement was that you would sign up for summer classes at Orford,” she says to me, “in exchange for missing the spring semester.”
“We went over this on the phone, Mom.” I’ve been rehearsing this speech in my head since yesterday, when I told her I planned on staying and she announced that she would be arriving this morning. “I love you, but I’m not you.”
Free cuts his steak, looking down like he doesn’t know us and just happens to be sitting at our table. I don’t blame him.
I continue, “You and Dad gave Manon, Marc and me great lives. Really, I couldn’t ask for more. But just because you and Manon and Marc went the corporate route doesn’t mean I want to or should have to. I know you and Dad don’t see eye to eye anymore, but I also know you respect him. I’m not saying I want to be a coach. I’m just saying that being a coach can be a noble pursuit too. Or a community activist or a teacher or a bus driver, for that matter.”
“So now you want to drive a bus,” she says.
“I’m just saying you have to trust that I’m doing what I think is right and best for me.”
“What you think is best for you? How can you know? You’re only a child.”
“I’m eighteen. Legally an adult.”
“Well,” Free says, “eighteen in a week.”
Neither Mom nor I think it’s funny. He returns his attention to his steak.
Mom removes her glasses, folds and unfolds them, worrying the blue plastic frame like a rosary.
“You and I are not so different, Mathieu. The good in you is what I loved, what I still love, about your father. And believe it or not, there’s also some of that in me too.”
“Then trust it, Mom. Trust me,” I tell her. “And if I screw up, if I make a mistake, trust that I’ll figure a way out of it.”
“Who am I to say, Madame Tremblay?” Free says. “What do I know? I’m even younger than Matt. But I would follow him anywhere.” He rests his knife and fork beside his plate. “What more can you want from somebody than honesty and the profound belief that he will always be the best that he can?”
“I’m outnumbered,” she says with a laugh. “I know, I know. And I do trust you, Mathieu.” She wipes her eyes with the end of her scarf. “I didn’t come here to fight. I came to see my son, whom I haven’t seen in three months and, from all appearances, won’t see again for several more.”
“You’ll see me, Mom. I’ll come home when I can. And you can come visit, come to Villeneuve and see the work I’m doing.”
She puts her glasses back on, sits up straight. “So,” she says, clearing the tears from her voice, “what’s her name?”
“Her name?”
“The girl behind all this.”
“This isn’t about a girl!”
“Right,” she says. “Do I at least get to meet her?”
Free laughs. “She’s great, Madame Tremblay. You’ll love her.”
FREE
Matt’s moms gets a cab to her hotel after lunch. Me and Matt, we saunter down the crowded Boulevard Saint-Michel.
“So how long you plan on staying gone then?” I ask.
“You’ll be the starting cornerback at Iowa State before I return home.”
“Then you’ll be back in Montreal before the end of the summer.”
He says he’s going to stay with Juliette until he can get it all sorted out and find a place on his own. He says he’s built a lot of capital with Juliette since the madness in Villeneuve, that she all but tucks him in at night, but that he needs to be independent.
There are people everywhere all up and down the boulevard, both tourists and everyday folks. Lots of cops too, eyeing the kids hanging at the Saint-Michel fountain, the ones who look like they come from the suburbs. That’s when I notice her.
“How did it go?” Aïda says, hugging and kissing Matt when we walk up. “Salut, Freeman,” she says to me.
“Mom’s good with it,” Matt says. “Well, she’s accepting my decision anyway.”
We cross the Seine over onto the Île de la Cité and pass in front of Notre-Dame. We work our way through all the tourists milling around out front. Matt and Aïda hold hands.
“Free is leaving in two days,” he tells her.
“Really?” she says. “So soon?”
“Yep,” I say in English—curt-like, to set the tone, because I ain’t studying no tearful goodbyes. “I got things got to be done.”
We walk on with no real destination, and it’s just as easy with Aïda here as it was with just Matt and me alone. I see what it is Ma
tt sees in her. She’s cool like that: the kind of girl you imagine as your girlfriend when you imagine yourself in a movie. And I’m thinking, Here we are in Paris, Matt’s new home.
Home.
For four months, this has been my home too. Georges and Françoise’s apartment. The cobbled streets, where me and Matt wandered, discovering new corners of the city. The Cinq Mille projects. The Beach. In San Antonio, home was the house Pops bought and that him and Mama and me and Tookie and Tina lived in. Heritage Park Huskies football was a second home—my boys, Coach Calley. It was for me what the Diables Rouges were to Moose.
Am I even going to feel that in Iowa, at State? Should I expect to? Mama, Tookie and Tina look to be in New Orleans for a while, maybe from now on. It’s kind of like there ain’t a home really for me to go back to.
Well, there’s Mama. And Tookie and Tina. In New Orleans, sure, but there for me still and all.
As much as what Matt’s doing sounds tempting, I couldn’t ever. I wouldn’t, not again. Mama, Tookie and Tina, they are my home. I need to go on and get my degree so I can make our home better. That’s how Pops would see it too.
“This quick departure,” I tell Matt. “I really am sorry to miss your birthday.”
“Well, maybe we should celebrate it early then,” he says.
“Oh, sure. Why not?” says Aïda. “We can go to the Champs-Élysées, to your Pizza Pie Factory, play a game of foosball against your bouncer friends.”
Matt laughs. “Yeah, yeah, yeah…”
He takes Aïda’s hand. “At home with Mom and Dad, when there’s anything worth celebrating, it’s always with Champagne.” He pronounces it in French—shawm-PINE. He pulls out his wallet and flashes the credit card his father gave him for emergencies. “And I still have this.”
“You ain’t eighteen yet,” I remind him. The drinking age here.
“Pretty close. What with you leaving, my birthday upcoming—I bet if I show them my passport and your plane ticket, I can convince them to let me buy a bottle.”
For real.
“I don’t doubt it,” I tell him. “I don’t doubt it one bit.”
AUTHORS’ NOTE
On October 27, 2005, in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, three boys were electrocuted after climbing into an Éléctricité de France substation, running away from the police. They had been guilty of nothing more than growing up in a poor, racially mixed and crime-ridden neighborhood, one feared and marginalized by the rest of French society.
Just minutes before, the boys had been playing a pick-up game of soccer on a pitch near their high-rise projects. It was the end of Ramadan—the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, a time of daytime fasting—and with the sunset, the group of boys, many of whom were Muslim, were walking home for supper. After passing a padlocked construction site, the boys found themselves suddenly surrounded by police cars. A neighbor had called in to report (mistakenly, it turns out) that the boys were vandalizing the property. The police, armed with Flash-Balls—guns that fire rubber bullets—rushed up on them, ordering them to stop and produce their ID documents.
Tensions had been running high in Paris’s poor suburbs like Clichy-sous-Bois. Populated largely by immigrants, many from France’s former colonies in North and sub-Saharan Africa, the townships had become a toxic combination of all the country’s social ills: a decaying urban landscape, pockmarked with overpopulated and poorly maintained high-rise projects; widespread under- and unemployment; inferior education; juvenile delinquency; and crime. In a speech the week before, Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s interior minister (who would be elected president a few years later), had made sweeping and disparaging statements about the projects, describing its hip-hop-identified young residents as “racaille.” Commonly translated as “scum,” the word can also mean “vermin.” Sarkozy vowed to “nettoyer la cité au Kärcher”—to clean out the high-rise projects with a power hose, the language evoking the work done by an exterminator.
Relations between neighborhood residents and the police quickly deteriorated. Sarkozy assigned the CRS—the riot squads, which have a reputation for viciousness—to police these neighborhoods. Frequent and repeated checks of identity documents became commonplace. Residents perceived the CRS presence as being intended to intimidate, not to protect.
When the police cars sped up on the group of boys in Clichy-sous-Bois, three of them—Muhittin Altun, seventeen, Zyed Benna, seventeen, and Bouna Traoré, fifteen—panicked. Fearing the aggressive police as much as the eventual wrath of their parents for getting arrested, they ran. Muhittin, Zyed and Bouna sprinted past the graffiti-covered wall of a cemetery, the police chasing after them. Ignoring the skulls and crossbones, the Danger–High Voltage signs, the boys climbed the concrete wall of the electric substation in an attempt to hide.
The pursuing officers saw them enter the site. One commented, “If they enter the EDF compound, they’re as good as dead.” Still, despite recognizing the danger, the police left the scene without attempting to go to the aid of the boys—a violation of French law. They later reported not having pursued them at all.
Not long after, the entire neighborhood went suddenly dark. One of the boys must have misstepped. A blue charge—twenty thousand volts of current—engulfed the three youths. Zyed and Bouna died instantly. Muhittin, his clothes burned into his skin, managed to climb out and stagger back to his high-rise.
News of the deaths sparked violent riots, first in Clichy-sous-Bois and neighboring suburbs, then throughout the entire country. Over the course of the following month, dozens of public buildings were vandalized and burned, and thousands of cars were set ablaze. Five people died. Though three thousand rioters were arrested, no police officers were found guilty of any wrongdoing, not even those who saw the boys enter the substation and fled the scene.
Zyed, Bouna and Muhittin’s tragic story inspired us to write Away Running. Though our novel is not those boys’ story, their story has allowed us to explore the promise and the failures of multiculturalism and the accountability we all bear for one another.
Please visit www.awayrunning.com for more information and go to our Study Guide for Teachers for strategies and exercises that can help you incorporate the themes of our book into your lesson plans.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Paul Rodeen of Rodeen Literary Management, an old friend who had the vision to imagine this as a work of fiction when we were struggling to write it as nonfiction, and to Sarah Harvey, our editor at Orca, whose sharp eye helped make the narrative work. Thanks also to our former teammates from the Flash de la Courneuve—notably François Leroy, Jacques Tillet, Fabrice Delcourt and François Rouat—and to Frédéric Martin, for giving us access to people who had been involved in the rioting as well as to police officers assigned to those neighborhoods.
The English Department at the University of Illinois provided generous support from the start, and residencies from the Blue Mountain Center, the MacDowell Colony, the Texas Institute of Letters and the Yaddo Foundation gave us the time to get the work done. Profound thanks.
Portions of chapters seven, eight and thirteen appeared previously in different form in the literary journal Callaloo (vol. 34 no. 4, November 2011), under the title “Going Places.” The essay that inspired the novel also appeared in Callaloo (vol. 32 no. 1, February 2009), under the title “Away, Running: A Look at a Different Paris.”
DAVID WRIGHT and LUC BOUCHARD met as teammates playing American football for the Flash of La Courneuve in suburban Paris. David, a writer and teacher of writing, has since returned to Champaign, Illinois, a home base from where he sets out abroad, most recently to Bahia, Brazil, and Benin, West Africa. Luc now lives in Montreal with his partner and his two daughters. Along with Away Running, last year he also finished Bras de Fer, on the infiltration of organized crime into Quebec's largest construction union. For more information about David, visit www.davidwrightbooks.com, and for Luc, visit www.bouchardluc.com.
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David Wright, Away Running
