Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  When the Kouachi brothers got to the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, they were met by several police on bicycles. The brothers both got out of the car and started firing. They shot Ahmed Merabet, a policeman who had just received a promotion to lieutenant, in the groin.

  “You want to kill us?” Chérif Kouachi asked him as he stood over the wounded policeman.

  “No, it’s OK, boss,” Merabet replied, raising his hand in a gesture of surrender. Chérif Kouachi then shot him in the head.

  “We have avenged the Prophet Mohammed!” they shouted as they walked back to their getaway car parked nearby. “We have killed Charlie Hebdo!”

  Oz wrote me back: Thank you, Kit, I know it was hard. I’m so sorry.

  SEVEN

  We buried Rousse at Père Lachaise cemetery on Friday morning. Everyone wore red. Little Ahmed wore a red pair of jeans I had bought him the day before. I wore my secondhand red Valentino coat and red lipstick to kiss her headstone. Oscar Wilde’s grave, a little further up the hill, was always covered in lipstick kisses. Rousse had taken me there one day, and we had contemplated the tender communion, lip to stone, that so many people had made.

  “I love that there is still so much love,” Rousse had said. “Maybe it is consolation for his alienation, his misery and fall. I think he knows that he is loved. We are lucky, those of us who can make marks on paper that people will see after we are dead. Love is everything, after all, and the only thing that endures, that can survive us.”

  It was cold and rainy. I gave Little Ahmed my gloves to wear because he had forgotten his. My hands were chilled, but I kept them out of my pockets, some private mark of contrition. The rain dripped down the back of my neck, but this too felt like solace. Discomfort, pain, heartbreak, seemed a pitifully small price to pay, reminding us that we were still alive and so many were not. Rousse’s mother had died of cancer the year before. Her father was in a wheelchair and Jean and Zorro carried him up the steps. Little Ahmed manhandled the heavy wheelchair behind them. I tried to help the old man, but he waved me off. He wanted to make his own gesture, and I was very proud of him for it. During the eulogies he dug the sharp point of a pencil into his palm and did not cry. Afterwards everyone went up and laid red roses against the polished granite gravestone. Between their stems, Little Ahmed tucked his own offering, a plain white envelope; what was in it, he wouldn’t tell me, it was just for her.

  Jean had arranged for a gathering at Bar 61 afterwards. There were four TV news trucks parked outside, and the crush inside was intense. All the formalities of condolence rang hollow to me. That annoying reporter from Le Monde (Rousse had once had an affair with him; we nicknamed him Didier the Dickhead) engaged me in a long lecture about how he knew it was a tragic event, but what can you expect when so many French Muslims are disenfranchised and ghettoized? The Kouachi brothers were still on the run, somewhere in northern France. There was a report they had robbed food from a service station.

  “They were orphans,” he said, as if he expected me to be sympathetic.

  Little Ahmed was agitating at my side, bored by the grown-ups. I felt angry and hot and exhausted. Dickhead’s mouth opened and closed, and the words that came out of it were subsumed by the din into nonsense. I whispered to Little Ahmed, “Do you want to get out of here? Shall we go and have a McDo?”

  Little Ahmed nodded and let me take his hand as we weaved our way through the crowd. We left the ritual cocktail party of mourning and went to eat quarter-pounders with cheese.

  In the McDonald’s on the nearby Avenue de Flandre, I gave Little Ahmed a twenty-euro bill and he went to order at the counter. I found a table in the window. Outside on the gray pavements beneath the gray sky, people were walking by, going somewhere. On the blank expanse of a dirty white wall, I spotted a silver and green mosaic space invader. Paris was dotted with these street art whimsies and Little Ahmed and I had made a game of collecting them when he was younger. Below was the stenciled gun graffito with the croissant trigger firing madeleine bullets. Take that, you soft Parisians! Let them eat cake! The sidewalks were full of Parisians in winter uniform: jeans, brown black gray jackets, drab and neutral colors that blended into a crowd. McDonald’s was all red trim. I looked down at my red fingernails and had one of those strange feelings of prescience. I knew I would remember every detail of this moment, the mop leaning against the wall, the old man sitting alone with a collapsed Maghrebi face and white bristle moustache, shoveling fries into his mouth at the table opposite. Something about the way he used three fingers of his right hand made me imagine the movement as a reiteration of a childhood memory of rice pilaf heaped on a platter.

  Little Ahmed came back with a tray of food and unwrapped his Cheeseburger Royale and began to take giant bites out of it. I hadn’t let him watch Pulp Fiction yet, but we had rented Inglourious Basterds the week before. He had loved it. Revenge!

  “Well,” I’d said, watching him clap his hands delightedly at the exploding climax, “you can take the Arab out of Arabland—”

  “Kit, what are you talking about? They were Jews!”

  “Say Jewish people. In English, just Jew is a bit rude.”

  “Why?” I hadn’t known what to tell him.

  It began to rain again onto Paris’s gray cobbles. Spiky umbrellas went up, individual shelters, shields against the sideways-sleeting world, like turtle shells.

  “Why?” Little Ahmed said again, and I realized I hadn’t heard him.

  “Why did they kill them?” He was talking about Charlie.

  “Because they were angry at the way they made fun of Mohammed.”

  “Is it because the Koran says you can’t insult the Prophet?”

  “Is that in the Koran? You would know better than me.”

  “The Koran has strict rules about the death penalty,” said Little Ahmed.

  “Yes.”

  “You have to have four male witnesses. And these brothers were not judges or scholars, were they?”

  “No,” I said. “The Kouachi brothers had not studied the Koran, they were just petty gangsters having revenge.”

  “Do you think they thought they were doing the right thing?” Little Ahmed chewed his hamburger and looked over to the shabby Maghrebi man who was cupping his hands around a cardboard cup of coffee. Little Ahmed had learned from his lessons at the mosque that justice was not a universal or fixed system. In the Koran and the Hadith he read that thieves should have their hands cut off, that adulterers should be stoned or lashed, that the testimony and inheritance of a woman was worth half that of a man. The imam cautioned that Mohammed preferred mercy to be shown to those who were repentant for their crimes and that he always encouraged forgiveness over vengeance. I said that these were old desert customs from more than a thousand years ago and had no place in a modern society.

  For several weeks Little Ahmed pendulummed between our two authorities—probing each with the arguments of the other—before he seemed to resolve himself to the idea that bad things should be punished but that the punishment depended on whom he was talking to. Now he seemed to investigate the idea that justice could be in the eye of the beholder, that it could be weighted relative to the intention.

  “It doesn’t matter if they thought they were doing the right thing. It was not the right thing. It was murder.”

  “But who decides?”

  “Well, you can,” I told him. “Do you think it was the right thing?”

  “But I’m not the power,” he said. “I’m not the government or the police.”

  “Islam gives the power of punishment to the victim and the victim’s family. They can decide to let the murderer go free, ask for compensation, or have him put to death. In the West we give this power to the state: to judge and jury. ‘Which do you think is fairer?’ ”

  Little Ahmed seemed to consider this and to grapple, by extension, with the awkward implications of majority and minority opinions. He wiped the ketchup from his mouth with a napkin. “The final judgment lies with Allah,”
he decided, finally, lapsing into Arab fatalism. Where had he got that?

  “What does it matter what they thought they were doing? Is it alright to kill people like that?” The old man at the next table looked over at me. He made a hissing tcht, a clucking sound of censure. I had not realized I had raised my voice. I stopped myself—but stopped in my throat too were the old niceties and nuances of a decade of arguments and debates and conversations with bottles of beer and arak on the table and Iraqi-Syrian-Lebanese friends. The endless tug-of-war between cause and effect, provocation and reaction. What is a terrorist? One man’s equivocation, another man’s outrage.

  I had once believed in a universal morality. Now . . .

  I saw the old man looking at me with a gleam of disapproval—even, did I perceive, hostility? Should I feel reproach? Guilty that I was upset because my friend was dead? Why was I supposed to respect his sensibilities? Was he respecting mine? I felt the middle ground falling away from under my feet. No more liberal-livered justifications. They had killed people. They had killed Rousse. This was a simple and obvious fact and there was only one way to feel about it.

  Ahmed was still struggling with his own logic. Thinking, he absently began to lay his fries out in a row and then put other fries across them to make boxes. After a while he snatched up a handful of fries and stuffed them in his mouth.

  “They were angry about the cartoons of Mohammed,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “But Rousse didn’t draw cartoons of the Prophet.”

  “No,” I said. “This is what terrorism is: it kills innocent people.”

  “Like the Americans in Iraq.”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “The other Ahmed at school. His father is from Tunisia. He wanted to be friends with me because I was an Iraqi, but then he saw you picking me up one day and said I had a kaffir mother. But I told him you weren’t my mother and that in any case you were a Muslim. He said that the biggest terrorists were the Americans and the second biggest terrorists were the Jews.”

  “The Jewish people.”

  “Alright, the Jewish people.”

  “What do you think?” I asked him. “Do you think it was right for them to go to Charlie Hebdo and kill all those people?”

  “No,” said Little Ahmed. “But the other Ahmed refused to be quiet when we had the minute silence in assembly. He said we didn’t have a minute silence when Arab children were killed by Jews and Americans.”

  “Jewish—”

  “I’m quoting him. He, the other Ahmed, said that.”

  “OK.”

  “He shouted it out in front of the whole school and Mme Tuil took him out to stand in the corridor and told him off, but some of the other kids were cheering and the headmaster was angry because the whole minute silence thing was messed up and he made us do it again.”

  _____

  When we got home, I put on the television. We had left early in the morning and I had turned off my phone all day and I hadn’t seen the news. The Kouachi brothers had holed up in a printing company in a village near the airport and were surrounded by armed police. The live feed showed a helicopter overhead. At the same time, a gunman had stormed a kosher supermarket at Porte de Vincennes, just the other side of the Périphérique, and taken everyone inside hostage on the eve of Shabbat.

  Ahmed and I sat on the sofa and watched TV. All over the country I imagined other families were doing the same. As it got dark, I lit a couple of candles. I poured myself some calvados. Ahmed made popcorn because it was the only thing he knew how to make and we were full of McDonald’s and I didn’t want to cook. Since Wednesday I hadn’t even managed to buy a baguette.

  “Is it hard at school?”

  “You know, Kit-ma, most of the kids ignore me, unless they ask me about American TV shows or English rap lyrics. It’s the other Ahmed and his fat friend Mo-mo. They are in my face the whole time: Why don’t you pray, why are you eating saucisson, why are you eating in Ramadan? If I talk to a girl, they tell me I’m dishonoring her.”

  “Can you talk to Grégoire about it?”

  “Yeah, Grégoire’s the only one who understands. But it’s like Grégoire says, you can’t escape who you are, you have to be the best version of who you are, but—”

  “But you have to decide who to be.”

  “Yeah, like if I want to be the best Muslim, then according to Ahmed and Mo-mo I am probably supposed to blow myself up and take as many infidels with me as possible and then I’ll get to paradise.”

  It was raining outside. The branches of the big plane trees, which made such a pretty green canopy over the canal in the summer, were bare.

  “You can stay home for a few days if you want,” I said to Little Ahmed. “We can hang out and watch Tarantino movies and be Americanos. But we should call Mme Harridan and get Grégoire to bring you some work. I don’t think it’s a good idea if you fall too far behind.”

  “I’m OK. Jean says all the people who go on to do anything good were bad at school.”

  “Plenty of people who do badly at school then go on to do nothing,” I said. Little Ahmed scowled. My tone of voice, I realized, had relapsed into maternal hector lecturer. “I mean,” I tried to laugh, to lighten the mood, “I’m not worried. You are brilliant in a million ways. Your photographs are fantastic. You won the school portrait prize last year. You can draw like a natural. But school is not nothing. It’s the preparation for university, where the rest of your life begins—and if you want to choose—well I want you to be able to choose what you want—to have lots of options, not be stuck in a second-rate place.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I want to go to art school.”

  “Art will always be there. Art is the easy thing for you. But artists—”

  “I know, I know. Artists don’t make any money and so I have to be a lawyer in the daytime.”

  “Pretty much.” Ahmed made a face, but I could see he had taken on board the point. Rousse had told him last weekend—how could it only be five precious days of lifetime ago—“Of course you will be an artist, but just make sure you have a real métier too. A profession. Then you will be a better artist because you won’t be starving.”

  He leaned into me on the sofa and I stroked his hair, shaved close at the back of his neck, thick and glossy as an otter’s pelt. He did not mind.

  We watched as the police stormed the printing house and the kosher supermarket and killed the terrorists and freed the hostages and I wondered where the hell this was going to end.

  EIGHT

  On the Sunday after Rousse’s funeral, Jean and I took Little Ahmed to the memorial demonstration in the Place de la République. Charb’s sister had said we were welcome to join the friends and family at the head of the march, but Jean had thanked her and said we didn’t want to impose.

  They said on the news there were four million people in the streets that day. It’s notoriously difficult to accurately count crowds. This crowd was dense; it would have been frightening if everyone had not been so polite; excusez-moi, pardon, pardon. Polite and well heeled, cashmere scarves, stylish winter boots. We shuffled forward, en masse. The police stood to one side beside their vans, they did not interfere or try to corral or funnel people. I mentioned to Jean that this was a first for a manif. From time to time a wave of applause broke out, like a wind-carried ripple. People sang the Marseillaise, not with the vigor of triumphant nationalism, but quietly, reverently, as a hymn.

  The crowd held up homemade signs and placards. Je suis Yohan, for the hostage at the kosher supermarket who tried to grab a gun the gunman had discarded, only to discover it was jammed, and was shot and killed. Je suis juif, Je suis musulman, Je suis athée et tolérant, I am an atheist and tolerant. I even saw a Je suis Ahmed, for the policeman they had shot in cold blood as he lay wounded in the street. I nudged Little Ahmed to point it out, “Look, everyone is Ahmed!” Ahmed made his whatever face. I squeezed his hand and pointed out more signs: JE SUIS FLIC, and the more polite JE S
UIS POLICIER. JE SUIS FRANÇAIS.

  We inched towards the monument on the Place de la République. The crowd was so crammed in, it was almost impossible to move. A group of banlieue kids, skinny toughs in ripped jeans, had climbed up onto Marianne’s giant feet and were waving Palestinian and Egyptian and Tunisian flags among the tricolors. Jean and I were taken aback by the incongruity.

  “It’s a freedom-of-speech march!” I said. “What are the Middle East flags doing?”

  The kids had black hair gelled into oily quiffs. One of them was trying to rally the crowd as if it were a football match. He called “Charlie!” and pointed at the crowd to respond. The crowd shuffled uneasily. “Charlie,” they called back, some of them, not many, quietly, awkwardly.

  I imagined Charlie, ascended, a ghost sitting upon a cloud, looking down on the massing ants holding pencils aloft in solidarity and proclaiming Je suis Charlie!

  “But I am Charlie! Up here! I am Charlie!”

  It had fallen to Luz to channel the spirit of Charlie and draw the next cover. He drew Mohammed with a big fluffy turban and tears in his eyes, holding up a sign that said ALL IS FORGIVEN.

  Charlie stood on his tip toes on his cloud and shouted as loudly as he silently could.

  “Forgiven? Are you fucking kidding?”

  _____

  After the march we went to Bar 61. Jean and I drank wine; Little Ahmed had a coke. Jean had been writing commentary all week.

  “I hate writing editorials,” he said. “They made me write them. It’s as if any journalist over sixty is pensioned off as a pundit.”