The school day finished at 5 p.m., but Little Ahmed often didn’t get back till after seven. I could no longer meet him at the school gates because this was not done. When I would ask him why he got home late, he would reply monosyllabically and stare at the carpet. Sometimes he would say, “Walking Grégoire’s dogs.” Grégoire was his best friend, friendly and doe-eyed with a blinking wide stare, a shy smile, and a tendency to giggle. He was half Little Ahmed’s size, still a soft-limbed boy.
Other times he said they went to the skate park. “Alright, yeah, like do you want to put a tracking device on me? Like the CIA?”
I rolled my eyes. “Don’t tell me I’m some unreasonable mother. You are twelve and I am worried about you!”
“You are like the Mukhabarat, you prefer interrogation.”
“Jesus, Ahmed—”
At least twice a week Grégoire would come over after school, and they would clump around the apartment interrupting my work time, eating all my good cheese out of the fridge, and playing World of Warcraft. Grégoire, apparently, was not allowed to play computer games at home.
Little Ahmed kept knocking things over with his elbows, which drove me crazy. “Watch where you are!” I knew this was unfair—he was still adapting to his place in the world. Grégoire and Ahmed never teased each other about their littleness and largeness. This must have required an enormous unspoken tact, and I was glad Little Ahmed had a best friend. I had a suspicion that neither of them was very popular at school. It didn’t make sense to me that his peers would shun my quietly intelligent, free-thinking boy, but Little Ahmed didn’t complain. Maybe these two were the brilliant outcasts who would invent wireless electricity and change the world. But this was unlikely, considering the dismal grade Little Ahmed had received on his last science report. His teacher told me he was falling asleep in class. According to his teacher, Mme Hérisson, he had an attitude “d’indolence.” She wanted to know what time he went to bed and what my regime of discipline in the evenings was. I did not tell her that he no longer had any bedtime.
“We must make a greater effort,” she told me. She wore glasses on the tip of her nose, and her hair was scraped into a bun fortified with a barricade of hair slides. I explained to Little Ahmed the word “harridan” and we laughed for about a week.
I didn’t want to bug him about his “devoirs,” which in French is the word for “homework” and “have to.” And sometimes he was sunny. When he wanted twenty euros.
“What for?”
“I’ve got expenses.” Shrug, obviously.
“What for?”
“OK, it’s for this special silicon paper that is easy to make cutouts with a scalpel.”
“Is this a Rousse project?”
“No, it’s my own project.”
_____
On my birthday Little Ahmed woke me up with a pot of tea and breakfast in bed. He went out and came back in with a package under one arm.
“I made this for you.”
“Really? For me? You like me, you really like me!”
“Just open it, Kit-ma.”
He sat on the bed next to me as I tore the brown paper off. It was a portrait of me, made in stencil, like a Banksy graffito. The detail was as fine as a Victorian miniature silhouette and he had not used black, but Prussian blue, the color of the waves in Locquirec when the sun went behind a cloud. The image was taken from a Rousse photograph. Three-quarter profile, I was sitting at my desk, bent towards my keyboard. On the laptop screen Little Ahmed had drawn a teardrop shape of elaborately entwined Arabic calligraphy.
He translated it for me: “Sorry I ate the last chocolate digestive biscuit.”
SIX
The first week of January 2015 was high cold blue skies. My morning was filled with new year errands. I had my coat on, Little Ahmed was lingering in the bathroom, and I wasn’t allowed to pester him.
My phone vibrated and I ignored it. Vibrated again. It was Jean and his voice was ragged.
“Don’t go out. There has been a shooting.” Jean repeated, “Don’t go out there has been a shooting. It’s still ongoing. There are gunmen at Charlie.”
I dropped my bag, took off my coat, and went back into the living room and turned on the TV news. The newsreader was talking excitedly. The breaking news banner read: SHOOTING AT CHARLIE HEBDO. 10 DEAD.
Little Ahmed came out of the bathroom, and seeing the TV was on, sat beside me on the sofa. “Kit-ma, what happened?” I hugged him close. He recoiled. He wouldn’t hold my hand on the street anymore.
“Rousse?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I was worried too. “Nobody knows anything.”
Blue lights flashed over the ceiling, sirens screamed. Ahmed went to the window and looked out over the canal. The water was green and calm.
“I can’t see anything,” he said.
“Charlie is near Richard-Lenoir, the other side of République.”
“Will Rousse be there?”
10 DEAD.
“I don’t know.” Little Ahmed sat on the sofa with his corduroy knees hugged to his chest. His eyelashes were as long as his father’s, but his cheekbones were getting sharper. Soon there would be no vestige of the boy anymore, his face would grow and change and harden.
My phone buzzed. Oz was awake already in New York. There was an email: You on this?
I was about to call him back, but as I scrolled through recent calls on my phone, I stopped. The screen glowed with the name ROUSSE. I had called her yesterday about lunch on the weekend. I texted her. It did not go through.
For thirty minutes the TV newscaster repeated ten dead, but no other news outlet would confirm this. All we knew was: gunmen at Charlie Hebdo. Even after Charlie Hebdo was firebombed—when was that? four or five years ago?—Rousse and I had never talked about the risk except to roll our eyes at Charb’s police bodyguard. I looked at my watch. It was Wednesday morning, the time of the weekly editorial meeting.
When Ahmed used to travel back to Iraq during the height of the civil war, when bodies were dumped by the side of the road with drill holes in their heads and every checkpoint was a death trap, I practiced denial as a coping mechanism. There were times when I couldn’t get hold of him, and when he would finally call me back, he would always say, “Don’t worry, Kitty Cat. No news is good news.”
I tried to reassure myself with this mantra. It didn’t work. No news was only a terrible limbo, no news was watching the news not telling me anything. The earnest young woman on the television sat behind a desk and repeated the fact of something terrible. There were camera shots of the ambulances whose sirens I could hear outside my window.
Little Ahmed was scrolling Twitter, but it was all the same there too. Gunshots heard. Police on the scene.
“Je suis Charlie,” he said, looking up from his phone screen.
“What? Who is Charlie?”
“I am. I mean everyone is, suddenly. It’s trending everywhere.”
There was a lot of confusion. It was not clear who was killed and who was wounded and who had survived. The gunmen had shot a policeman and made a getaway, crashing into a traffic bollard and then carjacking a man, and driven out of Paris, north. The police lost them somewhere near Pantin. President Hollande went immediately to the scene of the shooting.
Little Ahmed and I stayed in front of the TV. We watched the mobile phone footage of the gunman standing over the policeman and shooting him in the head. The newsreader identified the dead policeman as Ahmed Merabet. Another dead Ahmed. A phrase from a different city—not here, not home, not Paris. I wondered what Rousse would have done with the image.
“He shot another Muslim just like that, for nothing,” Little Ahmed said. “The flic was on the ground, wounded, he didn’t even have a gun. Le connard just shot him.”
“Why are you so upset about the fact he killed a Muslim when Rousse is dead for all we know?” Little Ahmed got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen to be away from me. “Don’t just walk away!”
“Understand what?”
Little Ahmed hovered in the doorway, looking back at me, a scowl masking the sadness and hurt in his face.
“For a jihadi,” he said, explaining, “it should make a difference. You’re not supposed to kill brother Muslims.”
“So you’re seeing it from the jihadi point of view—”
“No I’m not!”
“They’re just killing! They don’t care who they kill!”
He shut the door behind him. I heard the gas whoosh on the stove; he was making coffee, Arabic coffee, in the little brass jug he had brought back from Baghdad.
I had said the wrong thing. I was upset, he was upset, I would apologize—but then the land line rang and I answered it. It was Jean again. He said, “Rousse is gone. I’m sorry. She’s gone.”
There was only a hollow ringing shock. Like my ears hadn’t popped yet after the plane had landed. Like the noise after the cymbals have clashed. Vacuum. Thought suspended, there was not even disbelief. Clarion clanging resounding nothing.
I said, stupidly, “Jean, what do you mean?”
“She’s dead, Kitty. Dead at the scene.” But I still didn’t understand. The word didn’t make sense, as if it was in a language I didn’t know.
“Kitty, I’m sorry—” I heard a sob catch between “Kitty” and “I’m.” Then I got it. Hit by a train, like in the clichés. And then the pain came.
Little Ahmed heard me shriek, and he came back into the living room, long arms hanging down, empty-handed, anger gone. He looked to me to tell him.
“That was Jean,” I told him. “Rousse.” I couldn’t say it out loud so I just shook my head.
There was nothing to do, there was nothing that could be done. Ahmed put his arms around me and hugged close. I hadn’t had such a long hug from him in a long time. I could feel his heart beating steadily against mine, out of sync, but together.
Little Ahmed brought me a ceramic cup of Arabic coffee and we sat and watched the news all afternoon. The treble urgency of the newcast bounced against our numbness. We didn’t talk much, it was too awful for any words. From time to time Ahmed handed me a tissue. He put his head on my knee like a puppy and wedged his feet into the seam of the sofa like he used to do when he was small, falling asleep in front of cartoons. Tears were caught in his long eyelashes.
“How can I ever draw again?” he asked me. “I always draw for Rousse.”
“You can still draw for Rousse,” I told him. “You will always draw for Rousse.”
I didn’t write anything that day. Oz said he understood, but I could hear his irritated sigh in the email. Late that night, when I was almost asleep with three glasses of calvados numbly burning in the back of my head, as Little Ahmed slept grumpily in his blue room, humfing through his dreams, popping his cheeks . . . in . . . out . . . the familiar metronome of my nights, the phone jangled and it was Oz. If I couldn’t bear to write analysis, he said, pretending to be solicitous, what about a personal essay?
I put down the phone and I tried, but my fingers cramped. I couldn’t write anything at all for several days. And when I did come to write an anatomy-of piece, I had to keep Googling news reports because I couldn’t remember the order in which everything had happened.
_____
It was more than a week later when I forced myself to walk over to Charlie’s building. I needed to make sense of the geography so that I could organize the different perspectives of the witnesses who had appeared on TV and given interviews to the newspapers. There was still police tape girdling the entrances; flowers and candles overflowed the curbs. Grim reaper of the details, still and forever mistress of the aftermath. I sat down at my laptop and, painfully, fitfully, over several long nights into the early hours, I wrote.
File: GAÎTÉ
January 15, 2015
On the morning of January 7, Saïd Kouachi woke up early in Reims, kissed his wife and baby son good morning and goodbye, packed his kit in a black hold-all, and took a shared taxi to Paris. He took the métro to his brother Chérif’s apartment in Gennevilliers. There they loaded the car, a small black Citroën hatchback, with the two Kalashnikovs, a pump action shotgun, a rocket launcher, ammo. They dressed in black combat trousers and black combat webbing vests and said goodbye to Chérif’s wife and son.
They drove their black car and parked it in the Allée Verte next to the building where Charlie Hebdo had its office.
The office building was a modern white rectangle that took up a block on the Rue Nicolas-Appert, a small street in a nest of small streets between the Boulevard du Temple and the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir. The building housed about twenty different businesses. There were three entrances. The Kouachi brothers approached the one at No. 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert. A sign read: FOR ENTRANCE AND ENQUIRIES, PLEASE GO TO THE GARDIEN’S OFFICE AT NO. 6. A post office woman was delivering letters. They pushed past her. They went up the wide concrete staircase to the second floor, barged into the offices of an audiovisual company, and pointed their guns at the man behind the desk.
“Where is Charlie Hebdo?” they asked, and shot a bullet through the glass door of the office for emphasis. He did not answer them.
Charlie Hebdo had their offices on the second floor in a suite at the back of the building. It had windows on only one side that overlooked a courtyard between buildings. They had no window that overlooked any of the three streets that bordered the building. It was a kind of cul-de-sac.
Charlie Hebdo held its weekly editorial meeting on Wednesday morning. It was the only time that everyone came together. Editors and cartoonists and columnists sat around the big oval table in the backroom. Charb, as editor, led the conference. All the old guard—Cabu, Wolinsky, Honoré—sat in a row on one side, the gathered sum of more than two hundred years of satire and caricature.
The editorial meeting began at 10:30. They talked, as always, of jokes and news. Charb had drawn a cartoon that morning of a jihadi with a speech bubble: “Still no attacks in France. Ah well, we have until the end of January to make our resolutions.”
As usual, the conference began late. That morning they were discussing a possible cover for the first issue of the year. The writer Michel Houellebecq had just published a new novel entitled Submission that imagined a Muslim electoral victory in France. On the oval table was a cartoon of Houellebecq with lank greasy hair and ragged rabbity teeth, captioned: “New Year predictions of the Magi Houellebecq: in 2015 I will lose my teeth, in 2022 do Ramadan.”
At 11:28 a.m. the Charlie Hebdo Twitter account tweeted a drawing by Honoré of Al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS, with the tagline, “Happy New Year: And above all to your health!”
The Kouachi brothers went back down the staircase of No. 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert, not realizing they could have simply walked along the second-floor corridor to the offices of Charlie Hebdo. They went back out into the street and tried No. 6. There they were confronted by two maintenance men at the booth by the entrance.
“Where is Charlie Hebdo?”
Chérif Kouachi then shot one of them, Frédéric Boisseau, 42, in the chest. His colleague, Jérémy Ganz, hardly had time to realize what was happening. As Boisseau collapsed, he was still conscious. Ganz pulled him back into the booth and tried to close the door. He held Boisseau in his arms, but he was bleeding heavily. The gunmen pushed past into the foyer of the building.
Inside, the Kouachi brothers found Coco, one of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. She had just picked up her small daughter from day care and was coming into work with her.
“Where is Charlie Hebdo?” Coco, terrified for her daughter, reluctantly took them to the second floor. She punched in the door code to the steel door with the barrel of a Kalashnikov pointing into her back.
Inside the offices of Charlie Hebdo, the Kouachi brothers pushed Coco aside and called out for the editor, Stéphane Charbonnier, Charb, by name. They turned left into a small corridor that ran past the kitchenette. At the end was
the conference room. They burst in shouting “Allah O Akbar!” They kept shouting for Charb. They shot him first. Charb’s bodyguard, a police officer called Franck Brinsolaro, drew his weapon and was gunned down. The brothers said, “Now you are going to pay because you have insulted the Prophet!” They recited the names of other cartoonists and shot them one by one, in turn.
A female journalist, Sigolène Vinson, tried to crawl away under a desk, and one of the brothers addressed her. “We won’t kill you because we don’t kill women, but you must read the Koran.” Despite this pronouncement, they shot Elsa Cayat, a psychiatrist who had a column called “Charlie on the Couch,” who once wrote, “I want to talk about the difficulty humans encounter in opening up to others and their differences.” They shot Rousse, a painter and photographer who revolutionized the comic strip as reportage and who had recently represented France in the Venice Biennale.
They killed the grand triumvirate of French cartoonists, Cabu and Tignous and Wolinsky, artists who had woven themselves into the fabric of the French cultural tapestry. Wolinsky was eighty years old and rich and successful but came faithfully every week to Charlie Hebdo. They killed Bernard Maris, who was an economist at the Bank of France who wrote a column on finance and was known as Oncle Bernard for his sagacity. They killed Mustapha Ourrad the copy editor who had got his French citizenship just one month before. They killed Michel Renaud who was almost seventy, and just happened to be in the office that day, because he had created a festival in his hometown of Clermont-Ferrand called “Rendezvous of Travel Notebooks,” and Cabu had lent him some drawings for it and he had come up to Paris to return them.
They shot Philippe Lançon in the lower jaw. Philippe was an investigative reporter. They shot Fabrice Nicolino in the leg. Riss, who would take over from Charb as editor, was wounded in the shoulder. For several days he didn’t know if he was going to be able to draw again.
Luz arrived late, it was his birthday and his wife had made him breakfast in bed. The gunmen had just left the building shouting, “We have avenged the Prophet!” A neighbor in an apartment opposite filmed them on his mobile phone as they got back into their car, apparently unhurried, moving purposefully, “like trained soldiers,” said another witness. The brothers spotted a policeman coming into the alley on a bicycle and they shot at him. Then they tried to drive away, but a police car was driving towards them blocking their way. One of the brothers got out and fired at the police car so that it was forced to reverse at speed. Then they drove towards the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir.
Paris Metro Page 19
