Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  Alexandre came from Baghdad. Zorro came from London, Jean and Margot from Paris. Ahmed told me his mother had given us her blessing but that she was suffering with bronchitis and couldn’t travel. He said he had finally told her about our engagement just before we left Baghdad, but between all the election hoopla and organizing a leaving-Baghdad party and the logistics of arranging an armed escort to drive to the district where she lived, my hope to visit her had somehow been thwarted.

  We found a liberal imam who agreed to convert me and marry me on the same day. (A matter of legal expediency; interconfessional marriages were not recognized in certain Arab states.) The imam was also a dentist and we signed the contract in his surgery. Qabul, qabul, qabul, I said three times—I accept, I accept, I accept. Alexandre and Jean signed as witnesses. The dentist-imam gave us each a date to eat and wished us well and excused himself because he had a patient waiting for a root canal. We went out on the street to get a taxi. I had bought a floor-length ivory slub silk evening dress in Aïshti, the fancy department store in Downtown, and I wore new white sneakers I glued all over with pavée diamante. It had rained overnight and the streets were muddy, so Jean and Ahmed lifted me up and carried me to the car so I wouldn’t get them dirty in the gutter.

  We had rented the private room at the restaurant Casablanca overlooking the sea, and Alexandre made sure there was plenty of champagne. Zorro took the pictures. They are put away now, in an album in a box file in the closet at the back of the laundry room. Am I smiling in them? Was Ahmed smiling? Fizzed up, drunk on bubbles, in the swirl and center of attention, congratulated. I think I thought that everything would be alright, whatever stresses of organization, whatever nerves of commitment, the blowups over the previous fortnight—these were done, it had been settled, we were married, happily ever after.

  One moment, though, comes back: Zorro staggering against the wall of the spiral staircase down to the bathroom in the basement. He was doing a lot of white at that time, cocaine and alcohol, up and down.

  “Are you OK?”

  He looked through me with crystallized eyeballs and said, “Are you?”

  The next day a giant car bomb blew up Prime Minister Hariri’s motorcade, killing him and several others. Zorro, typically, was walking past. I, typically, missed it because Ahmed and I had left early to drive to Syria for our honeymoon.

  _____

  We found an apartment on the second floor of an old Levantine mansion abutting the rock cliff next to the Gemmayze steps. It was elegant and neglected, its high ceilings were marbled with water stains because rain leaked into the porous stone. The green-and-blue-tiled floors were patched with concrete; triple arched windows let in the winter drafts. It was light and bright and big and cold and dusty. Ahmed had rented it unfurnished—“It’s an orientalist dream, you’re going to love it!”—and we looked in the secondhand shops along the bullet-pocked old Green Line for tables and chairs and a sofa. I liked the idea of flea-market chic; Ahmed said the stuff was junk and the shopkeepers wanted too much money for it. He sulked until I agreed with him and we ended up at the ABC shopping center buying modern pine and cream chenille. I tried to tease Ahmed that his taste was nouveau riche footballer.

  “What about rush mats?” He thought I was mocking him.

  “Are we living on a riverbank? I didn’t leave Iraq so that I could end up living like my grandfather in the village.”

  The apartment was jerry-rigged with faulty wiring. The washing machine gave me a shock when I put my hands inside the drum. There were not enough electrical sockets, and we made a giant web of extension cords plugged into extension cords to get a router set up in the second bedroom that I used as a study. There was a third, smaller bedroom, and I found an old claw-foot tub in a builders yard and paid a plumber to connect it through the wall to the kitchen pipes.

  “Cat needs to be clean,” I’d said.

  “Yes, but cats don’t usually like water,” Ahmed had reminded me.

  “I need a bath. I can’t read in the shower. I can’t think in a shower.”

  There were a few months of pretend marital bliss. I was pretending, I don’t know what Ahmed was doing. I learned how to make kibbeh and outlined a novel. Ahmed went to work and came home late. The level of tension rose, drip-fed. Ahmed began to travel, at first just to Damascus, spending a night or two, then further, back to Baghdad, to Ankara, to Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, and longer gone. He said it was U.N. business, but his absences were often unexplained.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m with a cousin in the north.”

  Which cousin? Which north? The phone line cracked and my heart cracked. Sometimes I could hear gunfire in the background as the winter rain seeped through the roof and spread clouds of green-black-edged mold across the ceilings like thunderheads.

  I didn’t have many friends in Beirut, I was lonely. After Hariri was killed, the streets were full of protests, but I walked through the forests of cedar tree flags and could not engage. I wrote daily pieces for the website, counterposing vox pops, but every time I tried to expand the roiling Lebanese politics into a feature, I got tangled in subclauses of shifting alliances. Oz asked, “OK, so who should we be focusing on? The March 8 alliance or the March 14 alliance?” And I would just say, “I don’t know.” It didn’t feel like my story.

  When Ahmed came back from a trip, I scratched at him with whittled splinter resentments. I nagged. I wanted the version of Ahmed I loved in my imagination, my golden dream boy, warm and burnished and caressing me. But he was distant, distracted, and when I polished up my mood into happy wife and made plans, all I got was, “I can’t. I’ve got an early flight tomorrow.”

  I tried to construct a different narrative in the unreal conditional tense. On weekends, we would walk along the Corniche to Rawda and have lunch, eat grilled sardines and French fries with garlic labneh, and drink beer. Ahmed would make me laugh with absurd U.N. acronyms and stories of diplo-gaffes. We would talk and walk through the city, postprandial peregrinations through someone else’s half-forgotten war. We would mend our two halves. We would make a bridge between East and West as we walked from West to East through the half-rebuilt downtown, dodging cars crossing highway lanes, tramping acres of parking lots asphalted over bulldozed bomb sites. We would make clever political commentary out of the lack of pedestrian crossings.

  I put on this hope like a veil each morning. I did not realize that I had made love into a kind of costume. For a long time I blamed my self-deceiving artifice for provoking Ahmed’s diffidence and recalcitrance. But it was not my fault that I didn’t know what he hid from me. He had put on his own disguise and it was stretched taut and wearing thin.

  _____

  One Saturday morning I woke up late. The sky was so impossibly high and blue and perfectly clear that I almost expected something terrible to happen. I think I actually said to Ahmed, leaning over him in bed to kiss his earlobe, “It is a beautiful day. Nothing could possibly go wrong.”

  I sounded lighthearted, but it was an effort. I thought by being so I could make us so. Love is delusion. God, how long it takes, how painful to let go of it.

  Ahmed was still asleep. I wrapped myself in a warm robe and felt the February chill of the tiled floors against the soles of my feet. I went into the kitchen and turned on the kettle. When it boiled, I steeped dried hibiscus flowers in the teapot and tried to read a book about the civil war, each complicated chapter dissolving as soon as I had completed it. I thought: When Ahmed wakes up, I will make him an omelet and he will smile at me. We will not fight. We will go and have coffee and then we will walk along the sea and it will be sunny and he will kiss me.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” I said, leaning over, kissing him in my realizing fantasy, awake, hello there, I am here and I love you, love me back please, like you used to. Ahmed turned away from me, sleepily, heavily, grumpily. I touched the back of his neck—

  He turned around sharply.

  “Kit—”

  “
What?” I sat up like a good Kitty Cat, waiting to be fed. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and got up. He seemed to have gone from sleepiness to wide awake at sixty miles an hour, as if my kiss had been a bucket of cold water. I followed him meekly through the living room into the kitchen. He kept his back to me. He stood in front of the refrigerator as if deciding what he wanted.

  “Do you want an omelet?”

  “No.”

  “I can go and get us coffee.”

  “No.”

  I struggled for words. “You can’t just, you should be more . . . You should . . .”

  Ahmed turned around and I saw that he was angry. I was confused, his anger was out of nowhere, out of a nightmare he hadn’t shaken off on waking. He took a step towards me and for a moment I thought he was going to hit me. Instead he picked up a jar of pickles on the counter, swung his arm up and smashed it against the tiled floor. The noise startled him away from fury. He looked down at the mess he had made, sharp glass shards, green cucumbers splayed out like limbs. There was a crack in the terracotta tile.

  He did not look up at me, but he said in a resigned, honest, small, tired voice: “It’s not true that my wife died. But now she is dead. She was killed yesterday morning and I have to go back to Baghdad to collect my son.”

  Stone cat, very cold. Carved out of marble. Ahmed walked out of the room. I heard him turn on the taps in the bathroom and begin to brush his teeth. I had no blood or thought in me at all, so it seemed very odd that my ears were singing.

  I went into my bathroom, ran the bath and undressed. I was cool, lightheaded. I imagined a faint, faked nonchalance even as my denial crumbled like a sand castle. I lowered myself into the aquatint water and watched my body disassociate from its surroundings, pale, submerged. I didn’t need to talk to him, I didn’t need clarification. He had only said what I had known, but had refused to know, had lied to myself as much as he lied to me.

  His wife was not dead not dead not dead.

  The cast-iron bath drew the heat out of the water, so I had to sit up and turn on the hot tap to recharge the temperature. My brain remained icy. I lay flat against the floor of the tub, legs hooked over the tap end. I shimmied down into the pale blue, water swallowed me without a ripple, so that I was drowned and blind, save for the island tip of my nose.

  Ahmed must have finished brushing his teeth because I could hear him on the other side of the wall. The shared pipes banged and I heard a metallic echo in the carcass of the old tub as he turned off the tap. I heard him lean against the metal sink and clink his wedding ring—my wedding ring—against the rim.

  I continued to listen carefully in my peculiar position of underwater snorkel spy. Beep-beep-beep. Ahmed tapping numbers on his phone. I heard him talking in Arabic and I instinctively put my head out of the water to hear better. But in the clear still air—steam coming off the surface of the water like a lake in a frozen dawn—I couldn’t hear anything. So I went under again and heard him talking, now in English, in a tone of familiar intimacy.

  “I told her, she knows. Wait for me at the café, I’m coming now . . .”

  I held my breath. I could not imagine what aural trick of plumbing and wall cavity had produced this strange eavesdrop phenomenon. How did sound travel? Could it bounce like shock waves? Like when a bomb hit and a house three streets away would have all its windows smashed because the blast had bounced in a tangential coincidence of angles.

  “. . . no, he’s with her relatives. I don’t know . . . He is very young. He won’t remember.”

  The talking stopped. I heard him pull on his boots, scraping them against the floor, and bang his heels into them with his habitual double tap. I heard the door open and his footfalls going down the stone steps.

  I stayed very still. Bloodless, sterile. The bathwater provided an amniotic suspension. I could not think or I did not dare to. For some moments everything was quiet and blank. Then I began to recall his individual words. They fell like the cuts of a chisel against my nerveless statue self. “It’s not true that my wife died. But now she is dead. Killed.” I tried to unravel the sequence. At first her death appeared to be more terrifying than if she were alive. But then, at the same time as the obvious and astounding deception presented itself, its own solution appeared in the mirror, almost as if I had wished it. The wave of dread knowledge washed into relief, even gratitude, that his wife was dead. Then the relief cooled. His words continued to chip at me. I knew, I knew, I knew. Wife not dead, now dead, and the woman—for it must have been a woman, a lover, on the other end of the phone—a second jagged betrayal. Chip chip chip. To draw, in slow comprehension, finally, the full shape of Ahmed’s revelation. Not just a wife. A son. A son! Not mine, but had fallen to me, Icarus spark, phoenix egg.

  I opened my eyes and they filled with water, the washed watercolor blue of a New England dawn from my childhood. From underneath, the surface of the bathwater reflected a memory of a silver sky. Northern limpid light. I recalled the weathered gray clapboard of Granbet’s house, sea foam between my toes, stealing lobsters from the fisherman’s pots for supper. Lost world, a world where I could come in from the cold. The sea was freezing, even in the sunshine of a sparkling July day, and Granbet would hold my hand so that I couldn’t chicken out and we would run into the sea together.

  “The shock is the best part,” said Granbet. “If you can make friends with the shock of it, we will be swimming buddies.” I wanted to be her swimming buddy, so I held my breath not to scream or yelp or give way to any kind of childish reaction. “Jump in. Never hesitate. You can talk yourself out of something you want to do a hundred times in the guise of anticipating doing it. You might as well do it. There’s very little efficacy, I have found, in waiting. There is even less in worrying.”

  The curious thing was that after the first moments of needling, freezing shock the water felt delicious, like an ice cube was licking you. The best bit was when you got out and your whole body felt on fire. A miracle that turned cold to hot.

  Come in from the cold, from the sea, from the snow, come into the kitchen and sit by the fire and drink hot milk, rugs underfoot, layers of ancient fleece blankets to snuggle into. This was the assumption of my childhood; cold was not to be feared because Granbet would make me warm again. This was the color I was always trying to get back to, the transparence of an Atlantic wave. Fluid, fleeting, I would catch it in the tint of bottle glass, in a window shadow, reflected in a spring rain puddle, but I could never find it in paint or Pantone; it was unprintable.

  The color of Ahmed was the color of Iraq, yellow. My opposite. Take all the reserve and spite of my childhood, take all of the longing, the gaps and silences and unsaid things that a child cannot yet even articulate as missing. Take all of that and imagine how much I loved Ahmed at the beginning when the summer burnt yellow and it seemed as if I could never be cold again.

  Ahmed was the sun. A son!

  I don’t know how long I lay in the bath. The water cooled, but I did not notice. I lay there, incubating, inert and still, careful not to move, not to make any splash that might ripple against the warmth of the rising—

  The door hinge squeaked.

  This was strange. Ahmed had gone—

  In the instant the man walked into my bathroom I realized I had not heard Ahmed lock the door behind him on his way out.

  I got out of the bath very fast and dragged a towel around my wet naked body. The man was wearing a leather jacket, a wool ski hat and he had a bushy reddish beard. He saw me, hopped. Stopped.

  “Who are you?” Crystalline adrenaline poured through me. I shouted again, “Who are you?” I thought Ahmed might hear and come and rescue me. But Ahmed had gone. The man seemed to be startled; his hands juggled a nervous panic and he quickly removed himself to the other side of the door, saying, “I am sorry, very sorry, sorry.”

  I pulled on my jeans and a sweater and wrapped the towel around my wet hair. I looked at the screen of my phone. There was a text message from
Ahmed: don’t go out stay at home, lock the door. I put the phone in my pocket. I thought about putting on my shoes so that I could escape but they weren’t in the bathroom. I could try to get out of the window and run in bare feet. But the window was two stories above the alley. All of this I thought through very fast. Possible, not possible; fight or flight?

  The intruder stood on the other side of the door repeating, politely, in accented English, “Sorry, sorry.” For the moment he did not seem threatening. I went out into the living room.

  “Who are you?” I looked around for a weapon. There was nothing, of course, but books.

  “My name is Ahmed,” the man said. I almost laughed. He looked embarrassed. My phone vibrated again: riot going on. Gunfire. I had been going to run out of the door onto the street, but now I hesitated.

  “Are you Denmarkan?” asked the man.

  I said no, I was not Danish. I was English. (Which was better than being American; an identity I had learned to disown in the Middle East). I told him I was married to an Iraqi. Everyone, after all, was afraid of Iraqis. I held up my platinum wedding ring. He took it for silver, the choice of a modest believer.

  “You are a Muslim?” he asked tentatively.

  “I am,” I answered tentatively. I was. Technically. “But my husband has not taught me very much.”

  The intruder Ahmed apologized for stumbling into my house, he said he had run away from the tear gas and found my alley by accident, climbed the steps to avoid the police who were looking for people to hit with their sticks, and noticed the door was open. His eyes were red and streaming. He rubbed them with his fists.

  “No, don’t do that.” I reached out and touched his hand. He complied, crying, childlike. “It will only make it worse,” I explained. “Come, I’ve got some Coca-Cola, that works the best.” He followed me into the kitchen, blinking meekly, and let me hold up a cloth to catch the drips while he flushed the bubbly black Coke over his eyes. When he was finished, he tipped his head forward and blinked.