Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  We found a place and sat down at a table and I asked for a cappuccino. Mohammed wanted tea. He did not put any sugar in it, which was abstemious for a Syrian. I took out my notebook.

  “Would you mind?”

  He did not answer, but he did not say no. He asked: “Can I please to borrow your phone? I want to call my family to tell them I crossed the sea safely.”

  “OK.” I gave him my phone. He got up from the table and walked a short distance to the esplanade to be private.

  I sat back with my coffee and took in the postcard view of the Mediterranean: sky blue sky, navy blue sea, sunshine sparkling on the waves.

  I watched Mohammed walking in small circles beside a fishing skiff advertising boat tours of the island. He was smiling and nodding—affirmation, survival, good news. He finished his call and came and sat down, handing me the phone. As I took it, I looked down at the screen and saw not just a number but a name in white letters on the shiny black. It was a long-lost name recalled from another life and another place; undeleted, the number must have been transferred through my contacts list through several phone upgrades over an intervening decade: Ahmed-the-Wahhabi.

  Sitting in my living room in Beirut bent over a mobile phone texting his wife to say he was OK. Laughing with Ahmed over lunch in Tripoli, throwing his little boy in the air and calling him his bear cub. I recalled his kindly face, his courteous and patient manner, as he had tried to explain to me, very gently and sincerely, his concern for my spiritual well-being. I looked over at Mohammed; I began to ask, “How?—” I saw that he was sitting back in his chair pressing his fingers together to make a steeple. It was the gesture of a vicar or a headmaster, a particular gesture, and I remembered more clearly now, Ahmed-the-Wahhabi, with his big black beard and his incongruous elegant fingertips and I felt a queasy sense of déjà vu, of time overlapping.

  “Mohammed?” I asked, tentatively amazed.

  Mohammed looked at me with narrowed eyes, suspicious. I was staring at him, grinning. “Mohammed, are you the son of Ahmed. From Tripoli?”

  “No, I’m not,” he said, reflexively defensive.

  Of course he wasn’t. That would be a ridiculous coincidence. “I’m sorry,” I said, “but I think I know the man you called. It came up on my phone. Look.” I showed him the name, Ahmed-the-Wahhabi.

  “It’s a nickname. I mean, a kind of joke—”

  Mohammed was wary. Perhaps he was confused because I seemed to be accusing him of being Lebanese when he had told me he was Syrian.

  “My father is Syrian,” he said, with a certain stubbornness.

  “Yes. From Hama!” I clapped my hands.

  “Yes, from Hama,” he repeated slowly.

  “And he moved to Tripoli and married Fatima. He has a mobile phone shop.”

  “What are you saying?” he asked me sharply.

  I told Mohammed how I had met his father (omitting the bathtub scene). I showed him the story that I had written about him on my laptop. I explained I was a journalist, that I had been living in Lebanon, that Ahmed, his father, and I had become friends.

  “Your father! The same Ahmed—it must be,” I said. “You just called him!” He still looked unconvinced, so I added that his father had helped me to understanding my religion better because I had just married my husband and was a recent convert to Islam. “My husband and I went to lunch at your home in Tripoli. We met! You were arguing with your sister. I think you must have been six or seven.”

  He nodded then, acknowledging, but still not smiling, “Yes, my father was always very hospitable with foreigners.”

  “How are your parents? Are they well?”

  “Alhamdulillah.”

  “Your father taught me a lot,” I said, hoping to break through his reticence. “I am very grateful to him. Let me repay his kindness. You need some clothes, I can see, and somewhere to stay.”

  He looked beyond me for a moment, towards the milling crowd around the harbor, as if he was looking for someone he couldn’t find. Then he looked back at me, having considered his situation, and seemed to relent.

  “You’re not a spy?”

  “No, I’m not a spy.”

  “And you knew my father in Lebanon?”

  “I know. It’s crazy, isn’t it?

  _____

  We walked to a beach shop to buy him new clothes and on the way we bought a couple of croissants. “Really, you came to my home?” he said, and shook his head. He said he could not remember the lunch in Tripoli at all.

  “Your mother kept you in the bedroom with Disney cartoons the whole time,” I reminded him. He frowned, but I was not sure if it was because he was trying to remember the scene or because he disapproved of Disney cartoons. I held up a T-shirt with a picture of a cartoon shark swallowing a swimmer under a sun-rayed KOS. Mohammed frowned. Frowning was his default expression. In repose his face had a drawn-down look; maybe it was just his thick black censor- bar eyebrows.

  “Are there sharks?” he asked.

  “Sorry, not funny,” I said. I picked up a pair of shorts. Mohammed shook his head and reached for a pair of khaki trousers. He tried them on in the cubicle and turned the hems up an inch or two above his ankles so that he was satisfied. We also bought a plain hooded sweatshirt, a packet of athletic socks, a pair of blue Adidas sneakers and, the most important part of the refugee kit, a nylon backpack.

  At the back of my mind was the idea that this was a really good story. The problem with refugee stories was that they were always impossible to check. The backstory was left behind in the rubble and all the compromising interesting details buried with it. Here I already had a beginning and an end. Now I just had to fill in ten years in between.

  “We can get more tomorrow,” I said. I carried one bag, Mohammed carried the other. He had worn the sneakers out of the shop. Less flat-footed now, a little bouncier. “Now let’s get you a room in the hotel, and then go and get you registered at the police station, and then you can sleep.” At this possibility, at last, Mohammed allowed a smile.

  TWO

  Zorro always knew the best place in town. In Kos he had made his regular spot a taverna behind the seafront called “Costas” after its owner, and we stopped in for coffee. Costas pulled up a chair, cuffed Zorro’s unshaven cheek, and said, “You just woke up.” Zorro did not deny it. His rhythms were anticircadian. Golden hours, dawn and dusk; the black and bright in between was no light and the worst light, so he was accustomed to sleeping through the middle of the night and the middle of the day. It was five in the afternoon. The terrace was empty. Zorro introduced me, and Costas clicked at someone to bring three glasses of coffee. Costas was big-bellied, friendly, and heavy-handed with the ouzo. His terrace was less than half full—his season had suffered with the influx of refugees—but his hospitality was undiminished. He had asked his Egyptian dishwasher to translate the menu into Arabic—and with lower prices.

  “Not Turkish coffee, Greek coffee!” He winked at me, then looked at Zorro. Old jokes already between summer friends.

  “In Armenia they call it Armenian coffee,” I said.

  “And it comes from Colombia!” Costas chimed.

  “All good things come from Colombia,” said Zorro.

  “No, no!” Costas wagged his finger. He had a walrus moustache and this wagged too. Zorro smiled his wide, chipped-tooth smile. Easygoing, take life as it is, turn it into a joke if you can. I resented his laid-back serenity; I was jealous of it. We had shared our marmite in war-zone hovels, we had our gray London childhoods in common and our escape. We had met again in the Panjshir Valley when the Northern Alliance were pushing into Kabul. He was the very model of the dashing war photographer. A brilliant diamond shining in his own black drama, laughing till we had drunk all the vodka I had brought from Moscow. “It’s easy for you,” I complained. “You get to look at the world and take a picture instead of trying to make sense of it in sentences. You can live in moments, in images. Click snap send. Front-page splash.” He told me that wa
sn’t true. “You can’t imagine what I see,” he said. “What I have to look at, how I look.” Later I came to understand the price he paid for not looking away. And then I envied him, because I had always recused myself.

  We left Costas, and I followed Zorro as he looped around the police station and shot pictures of the kids playing on the seafront. Knots of migrant refugees clustered around volunteers distributing food and clothing and bottles of water. Women searched through a plastic bag of scarves. A pair of Danish sisters with thick flaxen braids and tight red T-shirts with a discreet logo were besieged by young men begging for shoes: have you size 42, size 40? They held up the rubber soles to measure against their feet.

  The police station faced the harbor beneath the walls of the old fortress. In front of it was a small plaza bordered by a broken wall on one side, a police cordon on another, a line of four portacabins, and the sea. Gutter filth; garbage mulch tramped into the cracks. The late-afternoon air was trapped by the pine trees, and the atmosphere was thick with the stench of urine, rotting figs, and the sweetish undertone of excrement. The refugee migrants milled about while the Greek police stood guard in their black Kevlar leg armor and surgical face masks.

  A line of men sat on a low stone wall, eating their donated supper out of foil takeout containers. They passed the time and snippets of information: a room to sleep, the price of a tent, bus timetables, the name of a driver that would put their family in the back of a truck and take them from Belgrade to Salzburg, a photograph of a Macedonian policeman beating back migrant refugees at a train station, news from the Hungarian border. “They are putting up a razor wire fence, did you hear? At midnight anyone illegally crossing it will be put in jail for three years.” “My cousin was detained in Denmark.” “You can still go to Sweden, but how can you go to Sweden without going through Denmark?” “Can you buy a train ticket to Austria in Budapest now?” “I have relatives in the Netherlands, they told me—” “No, that’s not true anymore. Did you hear? The Germans blocked the border!”

  I sat down on the edge of the group and began a conversation with a Syrian Kurd who told me he was an English teacher. His teeth were covered in gray patches where the enamel had worn off. He told me he was traveling alone and hoped to get to a European country and then apply for his family to join him. “Ah, Paris. I dreamed to go Paris and see the Eiffel Tower.” He had never seen the sea before, he admitted, “I was too frightened of it so I paid three thousand euros to go across the sea in a good boat.”

  “Three thousand euros!” I said. “Usually people pay twelve hundred.”

  “I know,” said the English teacher, a little abashed, and now almost entirely out of money. “It was a yacht.”

  “You had the VIP voyage,” I teased him.

  “Yes, a Very Important Person.” He managed a half smile and then he asked politely, “I have a question, if you don’t mind?” I nodded. “Is it permissible, I mean, for example, in Europe, if there is a girl, a daughter, is it possible that when she is eighteen she can go out of her family’s house?”

  “Yes,” I told him. “At the age of eighteen, a girl or a boy is legally an adult and can leave home or do what they want.”

  “And if she has a boyfriend? How can I put this”—the man paused—“if she is not a virgin?”

  “This is her decision,” I told him. “Nobody can make choices for her, not her father or brother or even a husband.”

  “Do girls in Europe have more than one boyfriend?” he asked hestitantly.

  I was not sure if he meant more than one boyfriend at the same time, or sequentially, so I answered, “Yes, sometimes.”

  “And then if there is a boy who wants to marry her? Will he still want to marry her?”

  “Yes, it is quite normal for a girl to have boyfriends and then get married.”

  He thought about this for a moment. His mouth pursed in distaste. “We have the matter of honor,” he said.

  “I know,” I said, raising an eyebrow in rebuke. “But in Europe, we do not have the concept of honor, we have the concept of individual rights.”

  I knew Oz would want a perfect, nicely desperate middle-class Syrian family with a disabled child and a mother who did not wear the headscarf who had fled ISIS. There were a few families in the tents around the park at the base of the old fortress who might fit these criteria. I copied their details into my notebook and sat in a nearby café writing paragraphs in my laptop, to be topped and tailed later on.

  File: FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT

  August 10, 2015

  I met several Syrians from Hasakah who were living in the tents around the corner, by the ramparts of the Castle. When I asked them about the situation in Hasakah, they shook their heads. The government was holding the provincial capital, but they said that Daesh, the name most Syrians use for the forces of the Islamic State, had captured many of the villages. When I asked them about life under the Islamic State, they shook their heads. When I asked them about the government of Bashar al-Assad, they also shook their heads, pointed at the sky and made helicopters with their arms and mimed houses falling down. “Barrel bombs,” they said. One young man told me he had left because he didn’t want to be called into Assad’s army. Another pointed to shrapnel scars on his legs. His friends hoisted him up like a trophy to tell his story. “He was buried, dead. He was dead and now alive!” They said it had been a miracle and they proudly showed me photographs on a phone: a rectangle of gray ash rubble and in one corner, a shape of a comma, the curve of his neck and a shoulder, barely visible in the blasted scrim. The miracle was embarrassed, but his friends made him pull up his T-shirt to show me a long surgical scar on his narrow torso.

  I met an older man, also from Hasakah, who was limping. “Daesh is in my town,” he told me. “I cannot go back. They will kill me for leaving. They took over my house, my car, everything they take for themselves when someone leaves. Very difficult here”—he swept his hand over the camp to take in the washing draped over the bougainvillea bushes, a man filling a water bottle from a hose connected to a main water pipe, and a woman sitting against a palm tree slumped over her sleeping baby. “I have three children. I cannot stand for a long time—my legs,” and I looked down and saw that his trouser legs flapped at awkward angles. “I had polio when I was a boy, they didn’t have vaccines then.”

  I stopped typing. Too flowery, too much first person. Oz had warned me on the phone the night before I left, “Don’t let your fiction ambitions color your reporting, Kit.” I had rebutted, “There’s a difference between fact and truth, you know,” and he had sighed his writers-are-so-troublesome sigh.

  I sat for a while, nursing a melting glass of gin and tonic, watching Zorro photograph boys playing in the surf. My eyes lit on a man leaning on a rail, staring out to sea, to Turkey, back beyond. He had broad shoulders and a scar on the edge of his cheek where it glowed against the setting sun. What resolve was set in his jaw?

  I had the idea that I should write a short story about an Arab who would defy the sentimental image of the poor, desperate, homeless, war-torn refugee that the happy-clappy nice and liberal Europeans were so gratified to rescue. A man who made his own luck. I imagined him as a chameleon charmer—a version of the Ahmed I had been seduced by. An antihero who would subvert the mass media narrative of victim. Not dependent, not supplicant; savvy, resourceful. Good with his fists if he needed to be, computer-clever, able to hack into banks. Carrying a secret, sent on a mission, searching for something or someone, he would have many adventures along the way . . . An Odysseus. If Odysseus had been a Trojan.

  Zorro clunked his camera down on the table and fished into his pocket for his silver pill box.

  “Refugees, refugees,” he said happily. He chewed a little white tablet and washed it down with a sip from my drink. “It’s a story that will never stop giving.”

  _____

  Mohammed had spent the afternoon sleeping, and when I knocked on his door a little after eight in the evening, he opened i
t only a crack. I could see that he had showered and dressed in his new trousers with the hems neatly rolled up.

  “Excuse me,” he said, not quite frowning, but serious. “I will come later. I must pray now.”

  “Oh. OK. We’ll wait for you in the lobby.”

  “Who are you with?”

  “With a photographer friend of mine.”

  “I don’t want my photograph taken.” Mohammed shut the door. I stood for a moment facing the bare wood and then walked down the stairs slowly. I had thought that we could call his father together and surprise him with our reunion. But suddenly I didn’t want to share it with Mohammed. I reached the lobby and found a sofa in the corner and tapped Ahmed-the-Wahhabi’s name onto my phone.

  He answered warmly, expecting to hear his son’s voice, calling back. When he heard instead a foreign woman, he said, brusquely, “Wrong number” and I had to talk fast to stop him from hanging up. “Ahmed? Fatima Mohammed Ahmed. Um Ahmed.” I repeated all the names I could think of and then mine.

  “Kitt-e-redge?” he said at last, in the three syllable, spelling-out way I remembered. I told him about meeting Mohammed on the beach. “It has been a very long time.”

  “Can you believe it?”

  “It is unbelievable.” A sigh, or was it the phone line? His voice was familiar, but there was an echo of reserve—time, distance, reticence—I couldn’t tell through the static.

  “So now I have rescued the father and the son,” I said. I was excited by the luck of the cosmos colliding for my benefit. Ahmed-the-Wahhabi did not say anything. I repeated my little joke.