Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  Jeroen and Emilie and Imma stood listening intently. Ahmed was very convincing. I had seen the same expressions on the faces of bespectacled Western government officials in conference rooms in Baghdad and London and Washington. Ahmed was the perfect Arab because he confirmed the opinions they were leery of voicing themselves. There is nothing more compelling than an argument you already agree with.

  “None of which means we should not uphold our values of accommodation,” I said. “It’s freedom of religion, not freedom from religion. It’s not right that the French don’t let women wear the burqa, it’s not right that the Swiss have banned minarets. Of course Muslims feel discriminated against.”

  “Do you feel discriminated against as a Muslim?” Ahmed teased me.

  “Only because I am married to an apostate atheist!”

  “Are we still married?” he whispered, turning me away from the group for a moment, husband to wife. He took my face in his hands so that the tip of his nose touched mine. I looked into his eyes wanting to be comforted by their caramel softness, but they looked back at me clouded and turbid as a Martian magnetic storm. I took his troubled look for concern about me, about us. All I wanted to do was reassure him.

  “I have a ring on my finger,” I replied.

  “I will explain everything,” he said very softly, kissing my forehead. “And if you are the woman I love, you will forgive me.”

  “Take me home. I’m sleepy,” I said. But he didn’t want to leave yet.

  “Go home, I’ll come later.”

  That night I wept tears that spread mascara blooms on my pillow and I waited but Ahmed did not come.

  THREE

  The weekend after the riots, Jean came to Beirut to report on the cartoon crisis. He took me to Johnny’s. “When Terry was released, this is where we all celebrated,” Jean said. “It was open every day. If the shelling was bad, he turned the music up. If there were Israelis around, he would lock the doors and there would be a special knock that would open sesame it.” Johnny beamed at Jean from behind the bar. The good old days.

  We sat in one of the corner booths, and Jean laughed that nothing had changed, not even the red velvet curtains that made the place look like a brothel. “I think it was a brothel during the war—Johnny’s brother used to run a backroom ‘poker game’ during the afternoon bombing hours.” He called over, “Whatever happened to Basil, Johnny?”

  “Went to Melbourne like the rest of them,” replied Johnny with a shrug.

  “We would come here and drink Negronis.”

  “My father too?”

  “Yes, sometimes.” Jean looked into his glass. “Johnny could get Campari even at the height of the blockade.” Johnny came over and put his hand on Jean’s shoulder and winked at me.

  “Did you know my father?” I asked Johnny.

  “Old war stories!” he said. “All bullshit! That Campari was only wine and cherry juice.”

  “Ah, the rose-tinted glamour of wartime when the war is over,” said Jean. “Kit, don’t be beguiled by the ‘I-was-here-and-the-tank-was-there’ war reporter stories. I know wartime is a crazy kind of happiness, but it’s also a sickness. You think you are at the center of the world when you are covering a big story. You are seduced by the excitement. You are standing right next to death and you are alive; it tingles. People say they get addicted to it. People get addicted to drugs—ouf—Zorro. I know, I know. How is Zorro? Where is Zorro? I saw his pictures from Somalia—The drugs take away the pain of life because life is shit and you know this and it is agony to live with this knowledge. And when you know you are an addict, you are ashamed and so you take more drugs. War is an avoidance too—I am sure, for Zorro it is like this. Because everything in a war zone seems more important than real life. When you are in the field, you have no responsibilities, no routine, there is only running and getting the story. You don’t have to go to dinner with your in-laws and take the kids to school and spend your Sunday afternoon working out your taxes. You are excused all of this. It is a kind of holiday. So when you go back, it all seems unbearably mundane and pointless and you want to leave again. So you leave again.”

  “Like my father.”

  “But eventually you are not happy because you realize that all of these everyday family things are actually more important than dead strangers. Some idiot with a gun is just another fighter and there are always thousands of these idiots and they are nothing special. But now you are stuck because this is what you do.”

  The distraction of violence. Jean was right, Jean was always right. He had seen it all before in another revolution, a previous war. But then again, Alexandre always said it was wrong to think that history repeated itself. History didn’t know what it was doing, any more than its protagonists who made it up as they went along.

  Jean tipped the rest of his wine down his throat.

  “How is Ahmed?” he asked kindly, a little worried. “The first year of marriage can be difficult.”

  “Ahmed is traveling a lot,” I said, noncommittal. “The ambassador sends him on trips and he can’t discuss them.”

  We ate the infamous boeuf bourguignon and ordered baba au rhum. Johnny put a bottle of Captain Morgan on the table and we kept pouring. We talked Shia and Sunni and civil war and Iranians and Alexandre taking up the ambassadorship in his beloved Damascus. I avoided talking about Ahmed because I didn’t know what was happening. He had gone to Baghdad and had not called. I suspended myself in limbo, waiting, wishful thinking in the future perfect. “Things to figure out,” as he had said when he left, would be figured out. I didn’t want to admit to his lie, I had absorbed it as my own secret too. Jean did not probe.

  Perhaps it was the rum, perhaps the comfort of old haunts and old friends who haunted them. Lulled, Jean became mellow and reflective. He smiled as he told me his regrets. He said he had made peace with them.

  “Or perhaps it is Margot that made peace with them,” I said. He nodded, acknowledging his debt to his wife’s forbearance.

  “Maybe it’s just time that sands down all the rough corners and resentments,” he replied. His children were grown now and at university. There was the house in Brittany, where the waves made navy blue taffeta ruffles in the winter. Pewter tones, duller grayer skies than Granbet’s Good Harbor Bay, but on a fine day, blue, good strong northern blue. Margot pottering in the garden; planting, pruning, composting, whispering to her dahlias, nourishing her plants as she nourished me with her gentle advice. Maybe I could grow straight and true too. I loved their house in Locquirec, vicarious home. All my father’s books were in the bookcase there.

  “What are you working on, Kitty?”

  “I don’t know. I was working on something about the reconstruction of downtown. How the hole in the middle of the city is being filled up by ersatz façades and luxury fashion brands. It’s a metaphor for the whole Lebanese post-civil-war denial and amnesia. But I met an interesting guy, an ordinary everyday Wahhabi. He took shelter in my apartment during the riot. I thought he might make an interesting profile, a case study—”

  Jean nodded encouragingly.

  “This is what we do,” I said to Jean. “We are reporters. A fine thing to be, no?”

  “Well,” he replied. “It is either this or the dark side. Become an editor.”

  _____

  I rang Ahmed-the-Wahhabi in Tripoli the next day, by chance, he was coming to Beirut soon to buy circuit boards and suggested we meet for coffee.

  A week later we sat in a café near the American University during the quiet midmorning, and he told me his life and times. As an experiment, I tried to write the story from his point of view, not inside his head, but in the third person. “To understand the other, walk in their shoes, stretch my mind to see the world from different perspectives,” as I wrote to Oz when I sent it to him.

  File: CONCORDE

  March 2006

  Ahmed Khalil was born in the city of Hama in Syria in 1977. His mother was his father’s second wife and much younger t
han him. His father’s first wife had died and left him a son, Ahmed’s brother Mohammed, who was twenty years older. When Ahmed was five, the Muslim Brotherhood rose up against President Hafez al-Assad and was brutally put down. His father and two of his uncles were killed in the massacre. His older brother Mohammed was in his last year of his studies in hydro engineering at the University of Damascus, and when he graduated he returned to Hama, took a junior position in the irrigation department, and supported his father’s second wife and son.

  Ahmed grew up believing his brother was his father because his mother and his brother were the same age and they shared a bed. After the uprising, Hama was a silent, cowed city, there were tens of thousands of missing fathers and brothers. Nothing was said because no one could speak. Rage was stifled, grief had been bulldozed into mass graves and paved with asphalt. Cry at night when no one can hear and do not forget, never forget. For several years, on the anniversary of the crackdown Ahmed’s mother left a white carnation at the edge of one of the empty parking lots. She was not the only widow who did this. One year a wreath was laid, and after this transgression soldiers were posted so that no one could leave flowers anymore.

  Ahmed did not know any of this until he was eighteen and went to the municipality to register for his adult ID card. The official behind the desk told him to come back next week. The next week he told him to come back the next week, and the next, the week after. Ahmed had the sense that something was not quite right by the way the official continued to stamp, stamp, indigo stamp, moving forms from one pile to another, without meeting his eye. On the fourth week, the man referred him to a colonel in the Amn Security office in another part of the building, and with a fearful heart Ahmed found the right corridor and door number 43. The secretary told him to sit and wait and he sat there and waited for four hours without daring to go to the bathroom, without even asking for a drink of water. Finally the Amn Colonel handed him his blue laminated ID card with a line of XXXXX crossing out his father’s name, Mohammed, the same name as his brother’s name. When he asked why, the colonel said, “Your father was executed as a traitor.”

  Ahmed suffered the turmoil of deception, betrayal, anger, and youth. He vowed to himself that he would never serve his national obligation to the army that had killed his father. He refused to speak to his mother or his usurper brother or to live under the same roof. As a way out of the family crisis, one of his widowed aunts arranged for him to marry a cousin in Tripoli. And so he left Syria and went to live in Lebanon.

  His fiancée was called Fatima and was the same age. When he met her among her family, he was happy and relieved. She was plump and pretty and she smiled a little mischievously while trying not to look up at him. Her brother owned an electronics shop in Tripoli and Ahmed went to work for him. Another cousin rented them a small apartment with a catty-cornered view of the sea. Ahmed had never seen the sea before and he marveled at the bigness and blueness of it.

  When he came to live in Tripoli, it was only a few years after the end of the Lebanese civil war. The city was scarred by the fighting, but he could see signs of new building that gave him a sense of fresh beginning and optimism. Radios and TVs and personal stereos were very popular, he learned fast, and his brother-in-law was a good man. Soon Fatima was pregnant.

  When they married, Ahmed had agreed that Fatima could continue her studies to become a pharmacist. She was more modern than the girls he knew in Hama; she wore jeans and liked flowery silk blouses. When she became pregnant, she said she would continue working in a tone of voice that did not seem to invite any argument. But as she grew bigger, she stopped wearing trousers and began to wear a long gown for comfort. After Mohammed was born, she adopted it as her everyday dress. She had always worn a headscarf, but now she was very careful to make sure that not a single hair was showing and secured her scarf with pins. Ahmed was pleased at her modesty. It was better for his wife to be modest, closer to God, closer to the right way. He was a Muslim, this was his identity, but he did not consider himself especially pious.

  When Al-Qaeda flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001, Ahmed felt bad for the Americans who were killed. There was a Palestinian refugee camp in Tripoli and Ahmed heard that some of the Palestinians had rushed into the street victoriously waving Palestinian flags as if they had won a football match, but he did not like this reaction. People dying was not a cause for celebration. His brother-in-law did not believe that it was Arabs who had done this because the buildings had fallen down too neatly and too perfectly. His brother-in-law said he was sure that it was IsraelAmrika because everyone knew that they had told all the Jews in the building not to go to work that day. Ahmed did not agree, but did not like to contradict him in front of customers.

  He did not pay much attention to the war in Afghanistan; it was far away. But when the Americans threatened to invade Iraq, he began to feel a sense of grievance. Iraq was a sovereign Arab country. Iraq had nothing to do with September 11, and in any case what were weapons of mass destruction? Didn’t Israel have weapons of mass destruction that the Americans had given them? Some of his friends in the café said it was their duty to fight the American infidel and defend Iraq. Ahmed thought this was a stupid idea. They would not be able to do much against American smart bombs, and he couldn’t see that there was any reason to get yourself killed to defend a Baathie idiot like Saddam Hussein—even if he claimed to be the defender of all Arabs (they all said that anyway)—who was just the same kind of Baathie idiot as Hafez al-Assad, who had killed his father.

  But when he watched the bright explosions light up the Baghdad night and saw American tanks driving over cars and laughing, when he saw the frightened faces of the children watching firefights from doorways and their tiny limbs torn and bloodied, when he held his sleeping son or carried his baby daughter in his arms, when he saw the pictures of Iraqi men blindfolded, naked, humiliated, he began to feel differently. The anger he had buried in the bosom of his family began to resurface.

  It was about this time that his mother wrote a letter to him asking that he bring his family to visit in Syria. Hafez al-Assad had died, his son Bashar was president now, and the Amn Security were no longer questioning or detaining Syrians with Lebanese residency permits.

  Fatima convinced him they should go to Hama for a visit. Even, she reasoned, if only out of curiosity. It had been several years now, it was time for forgiveness. So he bought bus tickets and a baby sling for traveling and a new suitcase with wheels and they made the journey back to the home that he had once vowed he would never set eyes on again.

  His mother and his brother received Ahmed as a prodigal son. The women of his family gathered and cooked all the dishes he loved from his childhood, the quince kibbeh and makkdous and mohammara with Aleppo pepper. And the lamb! He had forgotten the taste of the fat-tailed lamb! Layered with yogurt and pinenuts and raisins, there was nothing to compare with the fat of the lamb from the land of Hama.

  His brother had married his mother and they had a daughter who was the same age as little Mohammed. His brother was more confident and more friendly than Ahmed remembered him. The city seemed to have changed in this way too. His brother was now a manager in the Department of Irrigation, but at home he changed into a dishdasha and wore a white prayer cap. He had become an unofficial imam, preaching in the apartment of a neighbor, because he did not want to be registered with the Ministry of Religious Affairs and affiliated with a mosque. “All the imams are only mouthpieces for the government,” he said.

  His brother’s new piety had conferred on him a certain authority. His brother explained to Ahmed that everything that had happened was according to God’s plan and said it had been necessary to protect him from the truth in the years when the agents of the government were watching the families of the slain Brotherhood. He talked a lot about politics, and he spoke with a fervor and outrage that was new to Ahmed, who was used to the mild dronings of the imams in the mosque which he attended in Tripoli.

&
nbsp; At that time there were many Iraqi refugees coming over the border into Syria. The men brought their families to safety and then went back to Iraq to fight the Americans. It was their duty, his brother said, to help them as the Ummah should, and listening to him, Ahmed felt proud that there were Syrians who would sacrifice themselves to defend their Arab brothers.

  After he returned to Tripoli, Ahmed began to attend a new mosque where a young Saudi imam preached. This imam was a friend of his brother’s and his message was the same. He spoke of a battle between infidel and believers, between the godly and the apostate, between the Crusaders and the righteous. The cartoons in Denmark were only the latest insult. Should we stand by as our Prophet, Peace Be Upon Him, was insulted?

  In Beirut, I concluded my story about Ahmed-the-Wahhabi with a description of the cartoon riots, from his point of view, how he had been blinded by tear gas and lost his brother-in-law in the stampede and stumbled into an apartment for safety. I left out the incident in my bathroom and folded our debate about Islam into the narrative. I sent it to Oz.

  He did not run it.

  _____

  Ahmed was away in Baghdad for two weeks. He was never good at answering his cellphone and the reception at his mother’s house was conveniently patchy. In his emails he wrote that he loved me. He wrote that he had been separated from his wife when we had met. He had wanted to get a divorce, but his wife’s family refused so he had paid an imam to pronounce the divorce. His wife’s family had not accepted this as legal. At this time the baby, Little Ahmed, was only a year old. According to Iraqi family law, based on Sharia, a father was granted custody of a son at the age of two (girls stayed with their mothers until the age of seven). His wife’s family wanted to keep the child beyond that age and they refused to let Ahmed see him.