Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  “Their brains are still plastic at this age,” she explained to me the following summer in Brittany. Little Ahmed was learning how to surf, and Margot and I were sitting side by side on the beach, trying to see which of the seal-slick black neoprene figures poking out of the far waves was him. “They can absorb change as long as they have the constant of love and support—that’s you. And Ahmed hasn’t disappeared out of his life. He’s not your father, you don’t need to project your childhood onto his. It’s not the same.”

  “Ad-just, yes,” I said. “But he feels in-justice so keenly. He is very sensitive to inequity.” I told Margot how Little Ahmed had taken our assurances of shared parenting and reasoned that he should spend half his time in Iraq with his Dad and half his time in Paris with me. When I pointed out that he had to go to school, he said, “Well, OK, I can spend six months with you and then six months with Aba and go to school in Baghdad.” When I said that wouldn’t work because of school attendance requirements and exams, he came up with another solution: term time in Paris, holidays in Baghdad.

  “He is a stickler for fairness,” I said to Margot. “If I steal six fries from his Happy Meal, I owe him six fries back—and he remembers! The next time we go to McDonald’s he reclaims them from me.”

  “He is trying to create order in his world,” laughed Margot. “He is trying to find his balance. He’s at the age when he is beginning to question your rules and assert himself by making up some of his own.”

  “His mother’s family are trying to insist that he take Koran lessons,” I said. “His father is against it, but the grandmother wrote to me directly.”

  “I think it’s a good idea,” said Margot. “Don’t hide his heritage from him. He shouldn’t have to feel cut off from it.”

  “I know,” I said. “But.”

  “I know,” said Margot, simultaneously understanding and pushing my misgivings back at me, “but.”

  _____

  We surfed and swam and dug for cockles on summer weekends in Locquirec. In the winter I wrote about French political scandals, and Little Ahmed went to life drawing classes on Monday evenings and Koran school on Friday afternoons. Springtime was rain picnics, a thermos of Heinz tomato soup and a golf umbrella, homage to my mother. Rousse said the autumn was her favorite season, and she and Little Ahmed had a long-running competition for who could find the most beautiful fallen leaf.

  And we still went to the Louvre every month. One Sunday, Rousse showed us one of her favorite pictures on the top floor. We had gone to look at the gallery with David’s unfinished Napoleon and his portrait of Delacroix’s sister, and Rousse called us to come and look at something in the corridor outside. The picture was small and people walked by without noticing it. It was framed under glass so that the natural light puddled its surface with reflections, making it almost impossible to see.

  “It is The Barricade by Meissonier, a famous and expensive artist of his day, now forgotten,” Rousse explained. Meissonier, she told us, painted in the mid nineteenth century and made most of his money selling pictures of Renaissance scenes, musicians, dice players, and other gentle pursuits, for the bourgeoisie to hang on the walls of their drawing rooms. He was most celebrated, though, for his grand battle scenes.

  “Fifty years after the fact, he was painting giant historical canvases of Napoleonic victories for the flattering edification of Napoleon’s nephew, the third and unlucky-in-war Bonaparte.”

  Little Ahmed and I looked closely at the little painting. The Barricade was a watercolor, brush-washed, dashed, with faint color glaze in places, sketched with bare pencil lines in the foreground.

  “Meissonier was famous for his precise and figurative style,” continued Rousse in her best art lecturer style. “He spent an entire year sketching a horse’s fetlocks in order to realistically depict the cavalry group in his masterpiece, his painting of the Battle of Friedland. But La Barricade is scribbled with vigor and urgency. Look at the date.”

  “Eighteen forty-eight,” said Little Ahmed.

  “Meissonier painted it thirty years after Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa. Géricault came from the time of the created image, Meissonier worked at the beginning of the age of photography, the reproduced image. Meissonier had been a captain in the artillery in 1848 and witnessed the massacres of the revolution firsthand. This is the evolution from Géricault, this is the next step, do you see?” I leaned close and angled my head to see behind the silvery windows of reflection. “It is reportage! Isn’t it true and beautiful!” Meissonier had drawn a heap of corpses laid across the street. “Can you imagine how much better we would understand the world if we had to paint our horrors instead of taking snapshots of them. A snap takes less than a second. A reaction only, without considération. This barricade is so small and personal, the bodies have no glory, the violence is spent and gone and left lying there in a mess of piled-up rubble and sadness and loss. Do you know that Delacroix bought it?”

  Afterwards we walked back to the onzième, stopping for ice cream on the way. Little Ahmed and Rousse had a long conversation about illustration and imagination, about the representation of fact and whether it was OK to make collages out of photographs and still call it reportage. What made an image true?

  Indian summer sunshine. Rousse and Little Ahmed filled their pockets with yellow ginkgo leaves. What makes a family after all? Just us and a balmy afternoon.

  I loved our neighborhood, on the edge of the canal, on the edge of populaire and immigrant, old cafés with stubbly men standing up at dented zinc bars all day buying lotto cards, the same three drunks on the corner behind the school for a decade. My mother used to call them the Marx brothers, wrapped up in sleeping bags whether rain or summer sunshine, surrounded by a little fence of empty wine bottles that acted as a tinkling alarm in case their stupor was disturbed by do-gooding authorities. There was a good fromagerie next to the kindergarten where we had put Little Ahmed when he was very little. The proprietor liked to terrify the kids with whiffs of Époisses. Pablo the greengrocer pretended he was Spanish, but according to Carillon gossip, he was actually part of the Moroccan fruit and vegetable mafia of the onzième; have you seen the price of his endive?

  I didn’t mind when the new bistronomies moved in and the upholsterers and the watch repairman were replaced by young designers selling thumbprint pottery and bamboo cutlery and fabric bags printed with Victorian moustaches. I liked the new Italian coffee place run by an Australian. But increasingly, when I walked down the street, I realized that I was mentally categorizing people. Before I had just thought of everyone as mixed-up locals, we of the onzième. Now I saw separate tribes who went to different cafés: international hipsters, bourgeois young mothers, bland professionals with blue suits and pointy shoes, older worn-down first-generation Maghrebis, hermetically un-Francophone Chinese. As the quartier had become trendy, lots of kids came day-tripping into le vrai Paris from the banlieue—skinny, chippy kids with ripped jeans and gel-spiked hair who stole glasses of beer from people’s outside tables and ran off laughing. They swaggered and smoked their spliffs openly along the canal side. I warned Little Ahmed not to react if they hassled him on the way back from school. Better just to walk on the other side of the street, ignore them. He said I was being overprotective.

  “They’re alright,” he said in a way that suggested he already knew them.

  _____

  Ahmed would come to Paris and take his son for a few days, on the train, to Strasbourg or Dijon or Marseilles. The gaps between his visits were long. In the meantime he would call from Baghdad or Beirut or Tripoli or wherever. He sent Little Ahmed postcards of ruins. Leptis Magna, Palmyra, Baalbek, once even the Minaret of Samarra—it was some kind of a private joke between them. From time to time Little Ahmed would asked me, “Can I go and stay with my father for a while?” I was not sure if this was a rejection of me or a childish longing for something else. I did not want to ask him why he wanted to go for fear of opening up the old argument that began, �
�You’re not my mother . . .” But eventually he stopped using this as a weapon. We had grown together, the childish recriminations were rescinded.

  “I love you, Little Ahmed. Even if I’m an ogre, we have to stick together, we’re the only ones each other’s got in this town.”

  Once or twice he even conceded, “Yeah, I love you too, Kit-ma.”

  FIVE

  When Little Ahmed turned twelve, Ahmed asked me if he could visit him in Baghdad. Since Little Ahmed was now old enough to fly as an unaccompanied minor, I agreed he could go over the Easter break. He had not seen his father in almost a year.

  Rousse gave Little Ahmed a new iPhone before he left for Iraq. That winter she had a retrospective at the Jeu de Paume; her painting of an aerial photograph of the refugees packed into an open boat crossing the Mediterranean had sold to a Lebanese collector for 35,000 euros. We ate well. “Have the lobster, Kit!” She rolled her eyes at Charb and his liaisons and told me all the office gossip. Charlie was running out of money again, sales were slipping. A couple of the older well-established cartoonists put their own money in to keep it going. I don’t know if Rousse did or not. But she was happy. I was happy for her.

  “Take pictures of everything you see,” Rousse told Little Ahmed. He beamed his special only-for-you-Rousse smile at her. “Anything you think is interesting. Even the things you think are boring. Imagine you are making a visual diary.”

  Little Ahmed was gone for two weeks. When he came home, he was quiet.

  I asked him: “How was it, tell me about Baghdad, did Aba take you to Mutanabbi Street? What were your impressions? Did your grandmother make you her terrible doormat kibbeh?” I said, “Please tell me, because it’s been years since I was there.”

  “It was good, Kit,” he said. “I had a good time.”

  It was Rousse who he talked to. When she came round for Sunday brunch before we went to the Louvre, he took her into his room and showed her all his pictures. Apparently he swore her to secrecy because when I asked her about them later that afternoon, she shook her head.

  “He’s not ready to show them yet,” she laughed. “He’s still editing.”

  “Oh for God’s sake.”

  I did not see the photos until some weeks later. Little Ahmed printed them into a booklet, much like the travel journals that Rousse used to make. I had expected snaps of Ahmed and his mother, I had expected to feel a pang of revisited nostalgia. But he hadn’t taken pictures of people. Instead he had focused on shapes. He was interested in crescent curves that delineated one color from another. Minarets against a blue sky, the bend of a river reed, the edge of an engraved copper platter. He had found this form repeated in many different places. Palm tree sway, donkey neck, bicycle tire left as garbage, the headlight rim of an Iraqi Army Humvee, a slice of melon.

  There was only one picture of another person. It was a boy about his own age, sitting in front of a dusty computer terminal in an internet café.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Ahmed,” he said, inevitably. And we both laughed because, well, it was ridiculous, this Ahmed thing. “Actually, I’m joking,” Ahmed said. “His name is Thayr, he’s my cousin. He was visiting from Amman and he taught me how to play Gulf War: Operation Desert Hammer. It was super funny because his handle was SaddamT and he killed loads of Iraqis. I told him that he should be on the Iraqi side and not the American side, but he said there wasn’t any choice, everyone had to be an American, there was no function on the game to be Iraqi. He didn’t seem to mind though; he said it doesn’t matter, it’s only a game. He was really good at it. He had one of the highest scores in the whole café. The only one who was better than him was called SaddamA. They all called themselves Saddam. Aba let me go by myself, because it was just on the corner.”

  Over the following months, Little Ahmed let slip the odd comment about his time in Baghdad. When we went to the Louvre, he wanted to see all the Babylonian stuff. He asked me about Hammurabi and about Gilgamesh. He wanted to know if an Assyrian was the same as a Syrian and what was a Syrian? Weren’t we all Arabs? I talked him through the patchwork polyglot of his antecedents. The land between the two rivers, Jews and Chaldean Christians, who were there long before the Arab tribes arrived. Alexander and the Mongols, the disputed origins of the Marsh Arabs, Salahuddin the Kurd. His questions came out one at a time, almost slyly, as if he were gathering the answers as individual bricks and building a wall out of them. I wasn’t sure of the architecture of his thoughts. Even as I explained the cross-hatched ethnicities of his country, I knew that I was describing an Iraq that was already past. My stories seemed to have the quality of a fairy tale: A long time ago there was a land where everyone lived in harmony . . .

  “We are Sunni,” said Little Ahmed decisively one day when I was trying to tell him about the Feyli Kurds. “They are Shia.” These were the poles that he had brought back from a Baghdad where you were one or the other and you better know which.

  “Well—your Dad is not exactly religious.”

  “I know, Beeby was always telling him he should go to the mosque. She took me to the mosque, but she had to go and sit behind the partition. Have you ever been to a mosque, Kit?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but not to pray. I’m not religious either.”

  “You’re a convert. I know.” Something about the way he said this, emphasizing the weight of the hard consonant syllables con vert, a cadence of accusation, seemed to suggest the iceberg tip of a conversation between his father and his grandmother Beeby about me. I knew that Ahmed’s mother wanted him to bring his son home to live in Iraq where he belonged.

  “Did you pray with all the men?”

  “Yes, they were nice to me. One complimented me on my prayer positions, he said I must be very pious if I was so graceful.” Little Ahmed still went to Koran lessons twice a month. He loved mastering the swoops of Arabic calligraphy. “I told him I had memorized the surah of the Dawn and he said that was an easy one because it was so short.”

  We continued our history lessons. I tried to balance the certainty of God’s revealed word with the Enlightenment, enquiry, and the Socratic method. I looked for books about the early Islamic period, but the only thing I found for boys his age were adventure stories of the Crusades. We watched Monty Python and the Search for the Holy Grail and then The Name of the Rose. He was very impressed with the burning of the witches.

  “When was the last time they burnt people at the stake?”

  “Not for a long time,” I reassured him. “Not in Europe.”

  Recent Iraqi history was more of a challenge. I tried to put the British Empire into the context of the receding, sclerotic Ottoman Empire. I told him about the day his father and I had driven to Kut and walked the rows of British graves. Colonial misadventure.

  “So the Turks and the British were fighting over Iraq?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because of the oil?”

  “No, the oil hadn’t been discovered then.”

  “Why?”

  I made a face. Why was the world the way it was? A twelve-year-old’s consternation can tip you over the edge.

  “What were the Iraqis doing?”

  “There weren’t any Iraqis because Iraq hadn’t been invented.”

  “Huh?”

  “The British and the French drew the lines on the map. Before, Iraq was a mix of peoples and tribes and the capital Baghdad.”

  “Hitler was the only Western power to offer the Arabs their independence,” Ahmed replied, knitting his brow. I guessed he was repeating something he had heard from his grandmother; Ahmed’s mother was old enough to have absorbed the fascist nationalism of the forties in her childhood. So through the summer, in between bicycling green country lanes and watching him ride the waves, I told him the story of the Third Reich. Hitler, the racial laws and Lebensraum, the invasion of France, the invasion of Russia, the Holocaust.

  “Yeah, I know about the Jews,” said Little Ahmed airily, “we had to learn about them in c
ivic history.”

  Little Ahmed knew about the Holocaust, but not about the Fall of France or the Occupation or Vichy. The Second World War, which formed the backdrop of my own historical and cultural context, was for Little Ahmed something distant and German. Little Ahmed’s generation had no such general knowledge; for them it was not a touchstone. He listened to me bang on as I went through the Pacific Theater, Hiroshima, the Eastern Front, the Siege of Leningrad, and D-Day, and he kicked at pebbles on the beach as we walked.

  “So in this war,” he said, grappling with the idea of horror in a continent where everyone now lived in unbordered union, “the Americans and the English were the good guys?”

  _____

  When I measured him against the bathroom door that Christmas, Little Ahmed had grown taller than me. He squirmed and ducked under my hand as I marked his annual progress with a green marker pen.

  “Can we stop this ritual now? We are running out of door.”

  He had shot up to six feet tall and his feet were growing so fast that I had to buy him new sneakers every month. He was withdrawn, he mumbled, he shut his door behind him, and stared for hours at the computer screen with his headphones on. I didn’t dare check his browsing history because it was bound to be nothing but porn. I told him that porn was corrosive and corruptive, and I knew he understood this, but at the same time, Margot had warned me, the physical and the cognitive were at odds in his adolescent mind. Almost as if they were fighting against each other under his own skin. Inflamed spots burst on his forehead, and I caught him trying to shave his armpits in the shower with my razor. He was so furious at being embarrassed that he would not meet my eyes for two days.

  Little Ahmed’s school was a big, rambunctious, diverse place in the 19th arrondissement, next to Oscar Niemeyer’s spaceship Communist Party headquarters. He was in the middle of the awkward year of the sixième, when the boys were twelve going on puberty, and half the class were choirboys and the other had grown into hairy rugby players. He was having a difficult time.