Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  “I am glad he is safe,” he said.

  “I know. I couldn’t believe it! It is him. He’s so big now, he’s seventeen? He told me he was eighteen.”

  “His mother was happy to hear from him. It has been such a long time—”

  “Fatima! How is Fatima? Please send her my warmest regards. Mohammed doesn’t have any papers, but don’t worry, the Greeks are letting everyone through.”

  “Kitt-e-redge.”

  “Isn’t it funny?”

  “Funny?”

  “I mean strange.”

  “Strange? Yes, very strange.”

  “I mean peculiar.”

  “Kitt-e-redge, I am sorry.”

  I took this to mean thank you. I kept talking. I asked, “So when did he leave Lebanon?”

  “Lebanon? A long time.”

  “Yes. I mean I know he is Syrian, through you, but really he is Lebanese—”

  “No, Syria.”

  “Yes, I mean it’s better if he’s Syrian.”

  “He was in Syria—”

  “Syria?”

  “Kitt-e-redge. A lot of things have changed and happened. What did he tell you?”

  “He said he was from Hama.”

  “Hama, no. Impossible.”

  “But you are from Hama, aren’t you? Originally.”

  “Hama is in the government’s hands.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Didn’t Ahmed tell you?” he asked.

  “Ahmed?”

  “Your husband.”

  “Oh. Yes. But we are divorced now.”

  “I am sorry. He didn’t tell me that.”

  The line cut. I called back and he picked up after a single ring, but the connection was crackly and it was hard to hear him.

  “Who didn’t—wait, are you in touch with Ahmed?” I asked.

  “Yes, we will be in touch.”

  “I mean have you been talking to Ahmed?”

  “When he comes to Lebanon. Through Syria.”

  “Through Syria?” I was confused. “Ahmed or Mohammed?”

  “His mother is very upset. She is very happy to hear his voice safe.” Some other words followed, but I couldn’t make them out.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  “I don’t know how to say—but Kitt-e-redge, please don’t tell Ahmed that you saw Mohammed.”

  “Why?”

  “It is not safe for him.”

  “For Ahmed?”

  “Kitt-e-redge, it’s not how you think.”

  “Not what? What do I think?”

  I saw Mohammed coming across the lobby towards me, and I felt as if I had been caught doing something I shouldn’t. Zorro was right behind him. A wasp landed on my finger and I twirled the phone around trying to shake it off. Flustered, I said, “I’ll call back. Bye!” and hung up.

  Zorro greeted Mohammed—“Welcome, how was your journey?”—as if he had come down for the weekend by train. Mohammed shook Zorro’s hand gravely. For a moment Zorro’s silver skulls interlaced with Mohammed’s carnelian set in a silver band.

  “Shall we go and eat?” I was annoyed at Mohammed. He had none of the warmth or twinkle of his father. Why hadn’t he told me he hadn’t seen his parents for a long time? And apparently Ahmed had kept in touch with Ahmed-the-Wahhabi through all these years. This was odd too.

  We went back to Costas for dinner. I assured Mohammed we would not order any pork. We ordered lamb souvlaki and rice and a Greek salad. He prodded it with his fork and said, “It is Lebanese food.” Costas, leaning over the table, hands clasped, waiting for a compliment, made a wry face.

  “Ottoman, Levant,” I said. “It is all the same food empire.” Mohammed looked blank.

  “But Syrian food is the best,” I said, fishing carefully. “I remember the cherry kebab. Kibbeh with quince, walnut baklava . . .” Mohammed did not respond. He remained taciturn. He resisted even Zorro’s easygoing friendliness. He knit his forehead when he saw four plump sunburnt women come in wearing spaghetti-strap sundresses, laughing, orange cleavages amply on display. Mohammed looked uncomfortably marooned. I recounted the story of our meeting on the dark beach to Zorro in an effort to draw him into the conversation. Zorro asked him about the Turkish side, about the smugglers, police, the price of boats.

  “They are all bad people,” was all Mohammed would say.

  He answered us in monosyllables. He said he had not seen his parents for a while.

  “More than a year?” Mohammed nodded vaguely.

  “Have you been studying?”

  “Yes, studying.”

  “In Lebanon?”

  “No, not in Lebanon.”

  “Your father said you had been away.”

  “You talked to my father?”

  “I called him just before dinner. Were you in Syria?” I looked down at his hands to look for fighting scars. I noticed for the first time that he was missing the tip of the little finger on his right hand. “Were you in Hama? Your uncle was an imam there, I remember.”

  “What do you know about my uncle?” Mohammed’s tone flashed close to menacing. Zorro intervened with a compliment.

  “Your English is very good.”

  “My parents teached—taught—me.”

  “You want to go to Germany?”

  “Maybe Germany. Germany first.”

  “Sweden is also taking refugees,” said Zorro helpfully.

  “Not Sweden.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Study?”

  “Yes, study.”

  A large family of Iraqis arrived and sat at the adjacent table. Two brothers, their wives in flowing black robes and headscarves, and several children, two little girls in matching pink dresses with pink sparkly shoes. The men ordered beers and kebabs, and big plates of fries for the kids. They tossed a pack of cigarettes between them on the table. Three boys ran around until they were admonished by their mothers, hauled back up onto their chairs, and told to sit still and be quiet.

  “Children are a blessing,” Zorro said to them amicably, in Arabic (one of his friendly phrases that he had collected in several languages). The women smiled, the men offered him a cigarette. “Shaku Maku?” They were from Basra, they were going to Germany where they had relatives. No, they were fine, thank you, they were staying in a hotel. Their papers had been registered and they were going to Athens on the ferry tomorrow.

  “Why did you leave Basra?” I asked.

  One of the brothers pointed to his bottle of beer. “If you drink in Basra, they will kill you.” He drew his finger across his throat and laughed heartily. “And I like beer.” His brother pulled his chair over to our table and scrolled though pictures of his family on his mobile phone. Two sons and a daughter, sitting in a row on a new sofa still covered with the manufacturer’s protective clear plastic. Swipe. A family picture, twenty-five people crammed into the frame. Swipe. He pointed proudly to the screen. “Me and my brother.” They were standing arm in arm wearing camouflage military fatigues and carrying American M16 machine guns. “Soldiers!”

  I became aware of Mohammed standing beside my shoulder. He said something in Arabic in low composed tones to the Iraqi brothers from Basra. One of them looked at me, unsure. The other stood up, as if to reply.

  Mohammed nodded curtly to me and said, “I am tired. I will go now,” and left before I could remonstrate.

  “He is your friend?” asked one of the brothers from Basra, irritated, defensive.

  “He is the son of a friend,” I clarified.

  The brothers from Basra sat down again, but the moment of friendliness was broken.

  Zorro asked Costas to bring us the bottle of ouzo that we had been refusing out of deference to Mohammed.

  “I hate prickly Muslims,” I said.

  Zorro laughed.

  “You are a self-hating prickly Muslim.”

  “I know. It’s an advantage. I can say it without being Islamophobic. I am fed up.” I cont
inued. “I want to sit and have a nice meal and a conversation and drink a beer. For God’s sake. I don’t know what he said to the family from Basra.”

  “The Shia militia brothers,” Zorro commented. “Fleeing the prohibitions of their own ayatollah.”

  “You see, I am not the only Muslim fed up with Islam. Calumny heaped upon irony.”

  “What? You are making even less sense than usual, Kit.”

  The mayor arrived. Apparently the mayor ate at Costas most nights. He was tubby and care-worn. He had an upside-down smile; Costas’ was the right way up. The mayor and Zorro had struck up an unlikely friendship. All of Zorro’s friends were unlikely. One of his closest friends was footballer Thierry Henry. The greatest thing about Zorro, I once realized, was that he was entirely indiscriminate in his friendship—to all it was given equally. He could joke with a president and talk politics with a beggar. Once—long ago, before all the relapses; before answers got twisted around by questions—I had a theory about Zorro. I thought that his madnesses, his addictions, his heights and depths, were the consequence of an oversensitive soul. Like some people have more taste buds than other people, Zorro had more feelings. He could not watch movies because he could not understand how it was possible to watch suffering, violence, betrayal, and war—essentially any human drama, because drama is someone else’s pain—as entertainment. He was a dandelion; a puff of wind could blow his halo of seed into a sunlit grove or a mass grave. Maybe he was just more honest than most people. Maybe he saw the world for what it was and himself for what he was, a photographer, nothing more, nothing that could make any difference. Maybe this is what gave him such agony.

  “How is it going on Ellis Island?” Zorro asked the mayor. The mayor reached for the ouzo by way of answer. The numbers of migrants had been rising all summer and the number of tourists was falling. Every day was a new problem. Tomorrow, Athens was sending him a new police chief.

  “We need more Indians,” he said, “not more chiefs.”

  “Haven’t you got plenty of Indians?”

  The mayor made a not-funny face. “Plenty of Pakistanis; not so many Indians, in fact.”

  “How come the authorities are not making any distinction between refugees and migrants?” I asked. “What happened to the idea of processing people for asylum? Whether they have passports or no documents at all, they give their names—whatever names they want to give—they have their photographs taken, and they all get the same stamped document, take the ferry to Athens and onwards.” The mayor looked up at me blearily.

  “Can we be off the record, please,” he said, getting up and going to the bathroom to wash his hands. “I’m off duty now. I’m not the mayor for the next ten minutes.”

  “They can’t,” said Zorro. “They are overwhelmed. Greece is in the middle of an economic crisis, the mayor hasn’t been paid since April. He can’t even take his own money out of his own bank account. And there are too many people coming. Last week there were more than a hundred boats.”

  The mayor returned.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to him. “It’s all Merkel’s fault!” The mayor allowed a wan smile. I continued, “Merkel throws her arms open and says come! All those pictures of people welcoming them just encourages others to take the risk. Now more people will come. Did Cameron say ‘swarming’? The Hungarians know what’s coming, they were always the frontier land against the Ottomans. They are putting up the fences.”

  The mayor said, sadly, “We are the frontline now.”

  Costas sat down. “My grandmother was from Smyrna,” he said quietly.

  “Yes,” I said, “and so you know what happens when history tips over, when populations shift.”

  Zorro moved his chair back; it made an awful scraping noise against the terra-cotta. “What do you want to do, Kit? Let them drown? Send them back?”

  “I don’t know. All I’m saying is that nobody dares mention the fact that Muslims who were born and grew up in Europe are now violently rejecting its values, while at the same time their fellow Muslims are appealing to those values to let them in.” I threw up my hands. Was I a politician? Did I have to come up with the answers? Wasn’t it my job just to ask the questions?

  Zorro tried to ignore my shrill Cassandra. He lifted up his glass of milky ouzo and said, “I raise a glass. What if there were no borders at all? Imagine if everyone could go anywhere they wanted at any time. Come and work, come and rest, come and look around. Stay if you like, move on, go home. Nation-states are a nineteenth-century invention. Burn all their flags! Tear down the fences! Shoot all the border guards!”

  The mayor made a laugh-grunt. “And who pays?”

  “Pie in the sky,” I said.

  “A man can dream.”

  “Or hallucinate.”

  “Stop being nasty, Kit.” I felt the queasiness of humiliation. But I did not admit this. Instead I mustered affront.

  “I’m not nasty. I am being realistic. Pretend that we are all one happy family of humanity if you like. But you’ll see, they are different and they want to live differently and it won’t be an easy integration. It won’t be integration at all. It will be us and them.”

  Zorro turned on his singsong voice and recited:

  “Oh come on, Brian, or they’ll have stoned him before we get there . . . Would you like to buy a packet of gravel, madam?” And I laughed, like I always did. Zorro was the original Monty Python fan, he knew all the words. He fell back into his normal voice. “But seriously. But not seriously. What if we refused to be their enemy? What if we forgave them for hating us and said that we did not hate them and we were not afraid of them either? I’ve got a cunning plan:”

  “Let’s hear this plan of yours,” said Costas.

  “You let Turkey into the EU,” said Zorro with a touch of both the triumphal and the absurd in his voice. “If Turkey joins the EU, you take away the whole argument of we-are-we and you-are-you. Take away the border between Europe and Asia, East and West, Christian and Islam. Erase it. Heal it. Anyone can go where they want, under the umbrella of Brussels and Strasbourg and human rights courts and anticorruption conferences and subsidies for minorities. International. Community.”

  “Don’t talk to the Greeks about the community of the European Union,” said the mayor bitterly. “It used to be called Community. Now it’s just a German Zollverein.”

  “No, listen to the crazy man,” said Costas, whose grandparents had been forced to flee Smyrna when the Turks burnt the Christian quarters of the city. “If Turkey is in the EU, they will have to allow us to go back there! Freedom of movement!”

  “You see!” Zorro poured more ouzo all around. If Zorro ruled the world, it would be the best party ever. “Turkey wants to be part of Europe. Give them this and they become us and stop being them. Think further: Turkey’s natural sphere of influence is Syria. Turkey installs a client in Syria to oversee reconstruction. Then after a generation Syria becomes part of the EU—which is then given a different name—”

  “Rome,” I suggested.

  “Meditteraneo! Who next? You might as well let the Lebanese in, and they will be only too happy to remember they are really Phoenicians and trade with everyone. And then what happens? Now who wants to be in the club?”

  “Israel!” Costas clapped his hands.

  “Voilà!” concluded Zorro with a big grin. “And you have solved Israel-Palestine too.” He sat down with a flourish.

  The mayor laughed heartily. Costas clicked his fingers for another bottle of ouzo.

  “Give him another bottle and he will tell us how to persuade the lion not to hunt the gazelle.”

  For a few moments we basked in the reflected silly brilliance of Zorro’s fantasy. But the sun had set and the zephyr breeze began to gust colder and I had drunk ouzo, which made my brain clear and my mouth warm.

  “Just one tiny detail,” I said. “The Roman Empire needed Roman legions to enforce it. Only a monopoly of violence can ensure peace. Alexandre always says this. You need a
European Army. Otherwise everything is civil war.”

  “All wars are civil wars,” said Zorro. “And all wars are uncivil.”

  “And we are in the process of importing one. How are you going to enforce the peace in Zorroland? All these people desperately clamoring to come and live in our nice functional societies. Aren’t they the same people who fucked up their own?”

  “The people who are risking their lives to come here, they are the victims—” said Costas. “These people are fleeing! They are the ones who are trying to get away from—”

  “Don’t be naïve,” I said. Insulted, Costas got up and went to check on something in the kitchen.

  Zorro said, “Kit—” but I kept talking.

  “They are coming and there are millions of them and many of them are nice and friendly and desperate and many of them are suspicious opportunists and some of them want to kill us and some of them will kill us.”

  Zorro shook his head. The mayor made his excuses and said good night. Costas did not come back and sit down with us. We paid the bill and walked home past the slumbering tents and pitiful trash fires surrounded by glowing faces.

  “Fucking hell, Kittredge,” Zorro said.

  THREE

  The next morning I woke up early, first light at six. I made a cup of tea with the minikettle and the Lipton yellow tea bags in my room. I sat at the narrow table by the window and began to write my short story about Ahmed the atypical Arab.

  I could not decide whether to make my fictional Ahmed into a spy or a con man. Agent, double agent, terrorist, bigamist, entrepreneur, fixer, fraudster, thief. Which of these was the real Ahmed? Which of these was my original Ahmed? What was he doing going in and out of Lebanon? From Syria?

  File: LES GOBELINS

  Ahmed was handsome and he was cleverer than everyone else and these two things were going to be his passport because he didn’t have one . . .

  I wrote for two hours before I ran out of track. My fictional Ahmed began his odyssey in Baghdad and hopscotched on fraudulent papers to Beirut, to Istanbul, to Athens, to Paris. He had many escapades along the way. He had several identities and encountered many different characters—a priest, a prostitute, a plumber, and a politician. He stole and was robbed. He deceived and was lied to. When he earned money, he spent it. His journey took him up mountain paths and lapsed in squats.