Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  A siren wailed a single note and fell silent. An ambulance crew went to work between the shadows of the flashing blue light, between awful illumination and dark matter. I stood there and watched. I am a camera. I did not take any pictures.

  The medics knelt at each body and felt for a pulse at the neck. They waved for stretchers. One sat a woman up and bent her arm close to her chest to staunch the bleeding. Another moved among the bodies, laying tablecloths over the dead as shrouds. Slowly the scene became animated and filled up the silence with sounds. Short gasping utterances, here, here, ici. The police appeared and pushed back those few, like me, who had been drawn to the scene.

  There was a young man next to me with a big hipster beard who was texting with great concentration. He looked up for a moment and said, “They are saying there has been a bomb explosion at the Stade de France, and at the Louvre.”

  “Go home!” a policeman shouted at us, agitated. “Everyone go home, get inside!” He wore black leather gloves, a riot helmet with a black protective flange that covered the back of his neck, and heavy plastic shin guards. He looked like an armored beetle.

  I thought: I can walk to the Louvre from here—it’s far, but not so far. I tried to call Little Ahmed, but the circuits were jammed. Call failed. I texted: Stay inside, don’t go out. I kept walking, long strides, down the canal, towards Bastille, in the direction of the Louvre. Police cars flashed past. There were still a few people on the street; hurried exchanges—They’re shooting at bars! Where? Where? I walked past a homeless man bundled inside a green sleeping bag and lying against a ventilation grille.

  I thought: Everything is gathered here tonight on the point of a spear. I felt a crystalized determination, a confidence. Was it vindication? I reached the point where the Canal Saint-Martin is paved over with a stripe of park and it flows underground to meet the Seine. Gunfire, close and loud.

  I crouched down next to a rose bush. A streetlight shone above me, like an orange sodium moon. I moved into the shadow; the rose pricked my cheek and snagged in my wet hair. There was an azalea bush nearby and I crawled underneath its branches. The glossy evergreen leaves made an umbrella. I was hidden. The gunfire continued. A lot of it, bang! bang! bang! Single shots, aim and squeeze. Then bursts, ratta-tatta-tatta, a cracked staccato rhythm I knew well. The single shots were more terrible. Crack! Very precise, very clear, very definite, each sound a death.

  I crawled through the flower bed, twigs and cigarette butts and soft mud clots between my fingers. I was hidden, no one could see me. I pressed my tummy into the soil, and it was an enormous comfort to know that half of me was protected by the permanent, solid earth beneath. I turned my phone off; I did not dare risk it ringing or the screen lighting up to give me away.

  I put my arms over my head and shuggled deeper to minimize my exposure. I conceived the idea that as long as no sliver of my white face was showing, I was invisible. I kissed the earth, felt my mouth against the clean alkaline tang of the earth. I wriggled myself into a little hollow. Bang! A metallic noise chipped like a pickaxe. Would it be better if they used swords, the technology available to the original armies of Mohammed? “Would you prefer to die by blade or bullet, Kitty Cat?” A typically Faustian question of Ahmed’s. I didn’t know. I only knew that I hated the sound, the insistent bang-bang-bang-bang, and I began to pray that it would stop.

  It did not stop.

  I felt the fear tingle in my fingertips the way it used to in Baghdad. I was not prone to panic or stasis. I was lucky. Jean said, “You get this from your father.” (Certainly, I did not get my nerves from my mother.) I felt fear as a fizzing in my fingertip nerves, not as a heart-clanging clamor. Hold me, hold me tight! I felt my thoughts bounce through slideshow memory scenes . . . Cut! Make it stop! I held my breath.

  It did not stop.

  I began to count the shots. Fifty, sixty-two, seventy, eighty-nine . . . bang-bang . . . a hundred. I stopped counting. I realized I felt cold. My left leg ached. I flexed the muscle in situ. I inched to one side to stop a stone digging into my kneecap. There was a smooth pebble next to my ear and I thought perhaps I could listen to its whisperings as the water talked to me. (It said nothing.) My wet hair made a cold hat on my head. I didn’t know if time had sped up or slowed down. Had I been lying there ten minutes or an hour?

  The shots stopped.

  I exhaled. I had not realized I had stopped breathing. Then the shots began again, a hundred and thirty, two hundred and thirty, three, four, five, six . . . Then another pause.

  I inched forward on my elbows. I was cold, but there was no use in thinking about being cold because there was nothing I could do about it. It was not cold enough to freeze or to get hypothermia. Granbet appeared in my head and told me, in her practical and reassuring way, “There are three things in your favor, listen and pay attention: Little Ahmed is with Grégoire; they are safe, so do not worry in this direction. You are hiding in a bush and no one can see you. And this will end and you will be home again soon, you will come in from the cold and be warm. Nothing lasts forever.”

  “Except death, Granbet.”

  I wriggled forward, deeper into the azalea bush, which entangled itself with a thicket of incongruous bamboo. I raised my head so that I could see the street on the other side of the canal park, tiger stripes of orange light through the stalks of bamboo. I could see that I was opposite the façade of the Bataclan theater. There were groups of people in a side alley, crouching, hiding, hunched together, clinging in twos and threes.

  The façade of the building was decorated as an ornate theatrical curtain, looped with swag and announcing in big billboard lettering THE EAGLES OF DEATH METAL. But there were no eagles, only pigeons cooing. A pigeon hopped along a railing on pink deformed legs, bright- eyed, head cocked to one side. Then he flew off and I followed his flapping wings up along the Quai Voltaire. He landed on a striped awning above a shuttered café. On the sidewalk there was a body lying in a pool of light, one long arm outstretched, waving slowly goodbye. The groups of people escaping down the alley began to break cover between the starburst fusillades, running away.

  A big red fire engine arrived in a blaze of sirens and blue light. Two policemen appeared from behind it and advanced towards the front door with their handguns drawn. I thought to call out a warning to them, but there was no time before a volley came from an entrance and they went backwards, firing, then forward firing, en garde, fencing with the gunfire.

  The gunman who had been firing from the entrance retreated inside and barred the door. The street filled with police vans, ambulances, and hundreds of uniforms, helmets, and automatic weapons. The police led away survivors who had been sheltering in the surrounding streets. A young man with a stripe of blue hair, shivering in a T-shirt, bent over his girlfriend. She had blood running down the side of her face. He held her so tenderly. The police were rougher, grabbing to rescue her. She stumbled barefoot. She looked up from the ground to try and make sense of where she was and she seemed to look straight at me, but her gaze was unfocused and indistinct. She was not dead, but it was as if she hadn’t yet realized that she was alive.

  I saw a policeman with an officer’s hat stride forward and point at everyone in a muscular way to move back. But when he got back into his car, no one did anything he said. The gunshots all but ceased from the interior of the Bataclan and a strange atmosphere descended on the scene. The wounded were taken away, the police vans arranged themselves as an articulated metal vehicle screen. Police tape was stretched across the intersections. I spotted Zorro coming up the road from the direction of Bastille with his camera waving like a surrender flag. “Let me through!” A policeman in a motorcycle helmet pushed him back brusquely. I thought of texting him, but I did not dare risk the ping of a reply.

  I lay there, listening to people die. After fear, anger; after anger, fear again. In this new incarnation it did not tingle with excited shock but felt as heavy as a frozen blanket, leaching cold into my hunched shoulders, cold
to the bone, to the marrow of me. I could no longer see the façade of the Bataclan because there were so many police vans parked in front of it. My toes were cold. My hair had dried into stiff strands. I turned my head to one side and nestled it in the crook of my arm and let my thoughts wander where they would—as random as a pigeon. Where was my pigeon who had gone to roost above the dying man? Flown away.

  I could see a small group of people, Zorro among them, a hundred meters away across the road. One man was sitting on a doorstep cradling his phone in his lap, another stood leaning against a wall with his hands in his pockets just watching the scene, like me. He had a knit cap pulled down over his forehead and wore orange sneakers. I watched him for a while watching. Did he have a friend inside? Someone he loved? I couldn’t see his face well. He talked into a phone. He looked behind him down the alley. He scratched his temple. He shifted his weight from one leg to another and held his hand over his face for a few moments, in a gesture of tension or absolution. I wished him well, I hoped it would be OK for him, that his friend would be alive.

  I couldn’t see his face well beneath the knit cap. He was busy with his phone. He looked down at the phone and then glanced sideways, squinting at the corner of the Bataclan where the police were concentrated. He raised his head and looked up and around him. I looked up with him and saw the silhouettes of police snipers moving on the rooftops. A soft wind blew the trees.

  When the police began their final assault, the sound of gunfire was interminable. I covered my head with my hands, dug myself deeper into the earth. I thought it would go on forever. When I looked back at the corner again, the man with the orange sneakers had gone.

  Finally, the police began to come out of the building shepherding survivors. Their faces were blank and immobile. Some stumbled barefoot. The gunfire had stopped. There was a gap in the police vehicles, and I saw a still life framed between the white metal of the police van and the horizontals made by the foreshortened perspective of the curb and sidewalk, a motorcycle boot studded with pink gemstones and an empty green beer bottle that glowed like alien blood under the flashing blue light.

  _____

  I got up from the dirt and walked away without looking back. The noises dissipated into clangs and thuds, like distant construction. Or maybe this was just my brain muffling the impact. I walked across the narrow park to the other side of the road. Now that it was over I felt an overwhelming physical need to see Little Ahmed, to hold him safe and tight. I turned on my phone. It vibrated violently. One hundred three missed calls. Little Ahmed, Little Ahmed, Little Ahmed. I scrolled through his texts:

  Don’t go out there is shooting

  Again

  Please

  Kit

  Don’t go out!

  Call me

  Where are you?

  You’re phone is off. The circuits are busy. I can’t whats app.

  If you get this try whats app

  If you have gone to journalist Ill never speak to you again

  I will speak to you

  Sorry

  But Ill be very angry

  I mean Im not angry

  Dont worry

  Just call

  Dont not think I dont love you

  I mean I love you you know

  I love you

  I held this precious rectangle in my cold hands and it rang.

  “Ahmed.”

  “Where have you been where have you been are you OK are you in hospital are you shot?”

  “I’m OK,” I said. “Where were you? I called and you didn’t answer!”

  “YOU DIDNT ANSWER, YOU WERE NOT at home! I called Clothilde next door, I made her walk across the hall and knock on our door and she said no one was there. I called the man downstairs who woke up Batshit the concierge and he came up with the key and opened the door. And YOU WERENT THERE.”

  “I’m OK, baby, I’m OK. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I had to turn my phone off. Are you at Grégoire’s now?”

  “No, nearby.”

  “Text me the address, I’m coming now.”

  “No, Kit—”

  “Just text me the address.”

  42 rue Stephenson Code 23A45 2e étage a gauche

  I walked to the métro at Jacques Bonsergent. The streets were quiet but not empty. People were walking, talking into their phones. I looked at my watch. It was one-fifteen in the morning—the witching hour of the métro. Luckily it was still open. A young guy ran from behind me and jumped the barrier, barging, and my fear, held at bay, nearly home nearly to Ahmed, burst into a raw flower again.

  The train rattled through the tunnel, a string of yellow lit carriages. Tunnels felt safe, which was nonsensical. I sat opposite a couple who were holding each other’s hands. I studied their fingers, intertwined, a complex tangle of knuckled wrinkles, creases, interloops, shades of brown and pink.

  The metro jerked in the tunnel. The world shuddered. Jean had called Charlie a fulcrum moment, when history tips into a new chapter, weighed by an incident that hardly seems more incremental than the last headline, but which somehow suddenly changes everything. Like Gavrilo Princip, he said, or all those forgotten telegrams and ultimatums of the nineteenth century. Something whispered, something misunderstood, a loud bang—and then a start, the reaction.

  Is this what happened to me? When something traumatic happens, you are changed by it and nothing is the same again. Violence hits you like a billiard ball hitting another billiard ball and life goes off on a completely different angle. I saw it happen so many times to other people. Did I imagine that I was immune? Yes, I think I did.

  I got out at Barbès. The pirate cigarette sellers who Zorro said were all police informers were gone. The corner that was always such a Maghrebi African market bustle of rustling paper kebab wrappers and the smell of popcorn was now weirdly quiet. I looked up at the windows that should have been dark and asleep at this hour, but they were all glowing with blue television light. I walked along the boulevard, past the encampment of migrant tents underneath a section of elevated métro line.

  No. 42 Rue Stephenson was a modern block that backed up against the rail cutting that led into the Gare du Nord. The windows were small and square, the façade paved with pale blue tiles like a municipal swimming pool. Satellite dishes were bolted at intervals like ear-shaped fungi. I tapped the code and the door buzzed open. The elevator needed a key so I walked up the stairs. The lights were on an automatic timer that clicked on only when I had passed, so that the light was behind me as I walked up into the dark.

  I knocked on the door. Voices inside the apartment halted, a chair scraped. I heard a man say something in sharp undertones. I couldn’t catch the words, but they sounded irritated and wary. The chain tinkled and scratched and the door opened a fraction. A man stood there wearing a brown dishdasha with red slippers on his feet. He was short and tubby and had a bristle moustache and a spade-shaped beard. There was a deep furrow at the bridge of his nose and a dark disc of welted prayer callus on his forehead. I told him I was Ahmed’s mother, that he’d said he was with Grégoire, and I’d come to pick him up. He did not answer but looked behind him where a bulky woman wearing a long house gown was hurriedly wrapping a black scarf around her head.

  “I am Um Ahmed,” she said. Her voice was thickly accented and reticent.

  “I am Ahmed’s mother,” I repeated. I thought she was confused. “I am Mrs. Solemani.” I never used this name, but I wanted to explain my formal connection to Ahmed.

  “Our other son is also called Ahmed,” said the father, realizing the mistake.

  “Grégoire’s brother?” I said. “I did not know he had a brother.”

  I realized I did not know very much about Grégoire. When he had first come over to the apartment a year or so earlier, I asked him if he wanted to call his mother and let her know where he was. But he said no thanks, that she wasn’t expecting him until later, that it was OK. I wondered if it had been OK. Hadn’t Grégoire told them where he went when he came ov
er those afternoons after school? His parents seemed to have no inkling of me. I could see their discomfiture. They hesitated to ask me in.

  “His name is not Grégoire,” said the father, “it is Ghaith—”

  “Ghr?”

  “Ghaith—it is Grégoire’s real name. But it is difficult for the French to pronounce it. So he uses Grégoire.” He sighed as he said it, as if it was the beginning of a long list of disappointments.

  Behind them on the wall of the narrow hall was a calendar with a picture of the black meteorite cube Kaaba surrounded by concentric ranks of white-robed faithful.

  “Where is Ahmed? My Ahmed? I came to take him home.” I took a step forward.

  “They are not here,” said the mother.

  “He told me to meet him here—I want him to come home. The attacks—”

  “He is safe,” said the father.

  “Where are they?”

  “They are at the mosque with Ghaith’s brother Ahmed.”

  “At the mosque?” There followed a small pause, neither of them replied. What were they doing at the mosque? “Look. Can I come in and wait for him?” Neither of them moved. “He said he would meet me here.” The father opened his palms, as if to say it was out of his hands.

  The mother pulled on the loose fabric of her husband’s dishdasha as a signal for him to relent. She took a step backwards and moved her hand to indicate that I could enter. She ushered me into the kitchen. On the right I could see the reception room through an open door, a slice of beige sofa with orange-and-gold cushions, beige carpet with a prayer mat laid on top. On the coffee table there was a half-eaten plate of food and a tulip glass of tea with an inch of sugar in the bottom. The TV was on, the news in Arabic on Al Jazeera. I realized they were Iraqis. The details of tulip glass, the wooden prayer beads wrapped around the father’s wrist like a chain around a fist. I could smell lamb fat and cinnamon-cumin. I looked down at my feet. I had tracked mud all over the carpet. I reached up to touch my face and a fine sprinkle of dried soil flaked off.