Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  The father returned to his sofa in the other room. I heard him make a call and speak in Arabic to someone. I stood in the kitchen next to a table that was covered with a plastic oil cloth printed with roses and Mickey Mouse. The mother turned towards the stove and away from me.

  “Where were they tonight?” I asked. “I thought they would be here. I did not think they would be out, on the street.” I was angry about this. “Were they walking Grégoire’s dogs?” The mother turned back to me with a box of tissues. Tea and a box of tissues; Iraqis were almost English in their useless niceties. When I didn’t take a tissue, she touched her face to indicate that I needed to wash mine. I took a tissue because I was obliged to. I crumpled it in one hand and repeated, “Where were they all night—? A night full of attacks?” She did not reply. I thought perhaps she did not speak French and had not understood me. Frustrated, I mimed, bang-bang-bang! with my hand as a gun and dredged up a couple of Arabic words, “Awlad wen?”—Where boys?

  The mother pointed to the chair for me to sit down. I did not want to sit down. That’s the first thing an Arab bureaucrat will tell you: Please take a seat, just one minute. If you sit down, you will wait all day.

  “He is safe,” she said finally, forcing the unfamiliar French words with an Arabic intonation. “They are with Grégoire’s older brother.”

  “His older brother who is called Ahmed.” I said, overwhelmed by Ahmeds. Where was mine?

  “But what were they doing all evening? Why are they still out?”

  “Ghaith does not have any dogs,” said the mother, as if I had said something ridiculous. “You live in the onzième, yes?” I nodded. “Near the attacks.” What could I say? I had thought to go home, to take Ahmed home, where it was safe, but who knew if this night was over yet? I sat down defeated. She put a glass of tea and a saucer of biscuits on the table. I dabbed at my face with the tissue. “We were also worried,” she said. “Alhamdulillah, Ghaith is a good boy, but the police can catch anyone at a time like this, so we were very worried—”

  “Very worried. The police!” echoed her husband, appearing in the doorway.

  “And the telephones were not working, so this was also very worrying.”

  “Finally, Ghaith answered and said that they had taken shelter in the mosque because it was not good to be on the street and the mosque was closer. And it was the time of the evening prayer, so Ghaith knew his brother would be there.” Grégoire’s mother spoke perfectly sincerely and I wanted to strangle her. She sat down next to me and took my hands in hers. This was unbearable.

  “Don’t—” I said.

  “He is safe, my sister, Um Ahmed,” she said. She closed her eyes and added, piously,

  “Alhamdulillah.” I withdrew my hands and stood up.

  “We could not find you,” said Grégoire’s father. “Ahmed was very worried,” he added. “He was sure you would go to the scene because you are a journalist.” He drew this last word out so that it sounded like an accusation. “He was worried and they were praying.”

  “To pray? To pray for who?” Now I was really furious. “Do you think prayers make any difference? These people are killing with God on their side! They are killing and they are the martyrs! Yes, let’s pray! I am sure that will help! Allah O Akbar and blow everything up!”

  “To pray for you,” said Grégoire’s mother softly.

  I turned to leave, but suddenly there was Little Ahmed, standing in the doorway between Grégoire and Grégoire’s brother Ahmed. His face was full of shock and his green eyes glowed like Kryptonite in the dim hallway.

  “Kit, stop it,” he said sharply; a rebuke, telling me off, like I was the child. Turning to Grégoire he added, “You see what I mean,” and I felt the cold iceberg tip of a larger, submerged complaint. Grégoire gave him a sideways glance, as if to say, not now, and put his hand out to shake mine and said politely, “Hello, Madame Solemani, I am sorry we were late.”

  Grégoire’s brother Ahmed was tall and thin and sallow-skinned. He wore a dishdasha with a leather jacket over it and a white knit prayer cap on his head. His face was smooth but for an incipient straggly beard. He was very calm. He put his hand on my Ahmed’s shoulder, as if he had authority over him.

  “You see, I was right,” he said to Little Ahmed. “You mother is safe, just as I said. Alhamdulillah.” He added a phrase in Arabic in the cadence of Koranic recitation. I could not stand this. I could not stand his certitude and sanctimony.

  “Did your prayers help?” I asked him. “Did God save anyone tonight or did he kill them?” The pious Ahmed blinked and swallowed. Very carefully, with infinite patience, as if explaining clear evidence to a child, he replied, “Everything is written according to God’s will.”

  “Which is the same thing you say when you shoot people. Allah O Akbar!”

  “Kit—” my Ahmed stepped forward to intervene. “You’re crazy. You’re embarrassing me.”

  “It’s alright,” said Ahmed the preacher, maintaining his rectitude and composure. “She does not know the right way to believe. It is not her fault.”

  “I can’t listen to this merde,” I said. “Come on, Ahmed, we should leave.”

  I moved forward to push through to the door and tried to grab Little Ahmed’s hand, but he shook himself free. Grégoire’s brother Ahmed put his body in front of the door to stop me.

  “Madame Solemani,” he said. “We have been in the mosque, place of sanctuary, to pray for you because Ahmed was worried that you would rush to the Bataclan because you are a journalist. For three hours he tried to call you and your phone was off.” He spoke with eminent reasonableness, but he was not reasonable at all. “Do you think it is a good idea to take him home now to this area where there was shooting? Please consider the safety of the child.” He did not say “your child” I noticed. He had already claimed Little Ahmed for himself, apart from me; I was not a real Muslim. I spat his disdain back at him.

  “Do not claim to me that a mosque is a safe place,” I said to him, squarely, caustic. “It is a room full of narrow-minded people who will tell you there is no other way to be in the world but their way. You are so convinced of your own divine rectitude that anything you disagree with is denigrated. Your religion forces obedience and submission as if God was a dictator. I don’t want you ever to take my son to such a place again.”

  “It is the duty of all Muslims—” the brother began, taking a breath to absorb my outburst. I cut him off.

  “I am sorry.” (Why did I apologize? Some latent British gene probably.) “No more. Do you know what your religion is doing? It is killing people!”

  “I do not agree with the attacks,” said the brother.

  “Yeah yeah. But will you condemn them?”

  Little Ahmed stood without speaking. His eyes flashed from me to this other arguing Ahmed to Grégoire’s mother, who held her hands to her mouth, appalled, to Grégoire’s father, who shuffled forward in his slippers and tried to remonstrate by raising his hands up and down like bellows. I saw him mouth “désolé” to Grégoire.

  “Should I ask you to condemn what Christians do?” The pious brother countered. An old liberal equivalency argument.

  “What Christian suicide bombers?”

  “Israeli bombs that kill Palestinian children. American drones that kill brides on their wedding days. Is this not terrorism?”

  “Aha!” I had him now. “So because other people are doing it, it is OK for you to do it.”

  “But I am not doing it!”

  “No, you are going to pray in a mosque for the enlightenment of all unbelievers and the day when the Caliphate will return to rule the world. Because of course all good Muslims should want to live under Sharia law. What’s the difference between you and the terrorists? A degree of violence is the only difference; the aim is the same. In fact you are a hypocrite because you let others fight for what you believe in.”

  “You have insulted me and insulted my religion,” the brother said starkly, as if this was th
e most unforgivable thing in the world.

  “I can say what I like,” I said. “I don’t have to respect your beliefs.”

  “You are not a Muslim.” This was, I guessed, the worst thing he thought he could say to me, the greatest insult he knew. I shrugged.

  “Alhamdulillah and fuck you.”

  I barged through the narrow hallway and took Little Ahmed’s hand and pulled him hard. He snatched it away. Still, he came with me.

  We did not talk on the way home. I felt Little Ahmed’s fury as he walked long strides beside me. When we got home, he went into his room and shut the door. I sat down on the sofa and poured myself a glass of calvados and shook. Oz was in my inbox. He wanted me to write something. I wrote something something something something something across a whole page for half an hour and sent it to him as an attachment.

  _____

  In the morning I woke up so late that Little Ahmed had already gone to school. My anger had not subsided. The apartment closed in and I went outside. The world was lighter by daylight, but still gray. Gray cobblestones, black tarmac, motorcycles and strollers cramming narrow sidewalks. I barked at a woman in front of me, walking so slowly that I could not get past. The tall elegant windows and curlicue wrought-iron balconies were impassive observers. Baguettes in the bakeries, métro grates rumbling, dog shit and bollards. A vitrine of chocolate bonbons tied with ribbons. This is what it looked like when France fell in 1940, I thought. The day after, but just the same.

  I walked up the steps of Montmartre and found myself standing in front of Rousse’s apartment block. I knew the codes by heart and I took the old metal cage lift up and let myself in with my key. I sat cross-legged on the wooden floorboards amid the stacked canvases, still wearing my coat because the heating had been turned off. I flipped through the most recent pile of pasteboards again. I found the picture of Little Ahmed with the gun. Little Ahmed had said, “It was nothing really. It was just an idea she had. It wasn’t a real Kalashnikov! Seriously, Kit, come on. It was a replica.”

  “So where is this replica now?” Little Ahmed had shrugged when I’d asked.

  “Dunno.”

  In Rousse’s portrait, Little Ahmed was still a child, with a narrow bare torso, delicate ribcage, the long slender bones of his arms were thinner than the rifle stock. He was looking back at me with an expression which I had thought was defiance or anger, but as I looked at it more closely now, staring hard enough to blur the image with my tears, I noticed a hint of amusement at the corners of his mouth. Had Rousse made him laugh just before she took the picture?

  I sat there for a while, raging. At Little Ahmed and Grégoire’s complicity. At Grégoire’s pious, righteous brother. The anger dug deeper with every thought.

  I got up from the floor and walked over to the kitchenette to make a cup of tea. A cup of tea. A nice cup of tea. My mad English mother who did nothing but drink cups of tea and watch EastEnders and Crimewatch and smoke and spout stupid platitudes when I was upset. But when she was upset, which was always, because she was depressed and neurotic and either going on or coming off lithium, she would rant and rave to her heart’s content. Nevermind, have a cup of tea. I picked up the teacup and hurled it against the wall. It smashed.

  I bent down to pick up the shards of china and noticed a plastic bag against the wall. Inside were three or four spray-paint cans and a stencil of a Kalashnikov with a croissant trigger and another with flying madeleines as bullets.

  TWO

  For the next three days, Little Ahmed endured me in silence. He went to school, he came home again and went into his room and closed the door against me.

  Oz sent harrying emails. I would not be allowed to recuse myself this time. Professionalism, or something. “Your contract is coming up—” I did not tell him that I had hidden in a flower bed outside the Bataclan the whole night. I did not tell anyone. It seemed so surreal that I did not trust my memory of it.

  There was some distraction in working, in running around to trace the route of the attack sites. Le Carillon was boarded up. Someone had stuck a rose through the jagged bullet hole in the window, and people politely took turns taking a picture of it. The Bataclan was cordoned off for several blocks. The strip of park where I had hidden was behind police tape. TV vans were parked up at the crossroads and stand-ups jabbered in the spotlights. I went into nearby cafés to talk to people for reaction quotes. One of them was the immigrant from Mali who had been working in the kosher supermarket during the Charlie attacks in January and saved people by hiding them in the basement cold room. It turned out he lived two blocks away from the Bataclan and had gone out that night when he heard the first gunshots and got stuck between police cordons, unable to go home.

  “It’s like having to go through it all over again,” he said.

  I wrote a story about a bartender opposite Le Carillon who had spent the night in lockdown, desperately trying to text his friends in the neighborhood to make sure they were OK. I wrote about the doctors in the emergency room at the Saint-Louis hospital who worked all night as the casualties came in. Oz pressed me to find witnesses, people who had been inside the Bataclan when the terrorists had burst in and opened fire. I pushed contacts for contacts, I cold-called. I’m sorry my sister cannot talk. We are only existing between the telephone and the hospital room. We don’t have anything else to say. I have not slept for three nights. I did not have the heart to convince them to talk. Too raw, too soon; I knew how it was when you can’t trust yourself to make sense, not to scream and cry and rail.

  I went to the supermarket. Another brightly lit banality. Red plastic basket, Nutella, lardons, orange juice, speculoos biscuits, Weetabix, more calvados.

  On the way home I saw three men standing next to a garage. Jeans, hoodies, puffer jackets, dark beards. One of them had a submachine gun hanging around his neck.

  “Are you police?” I asked. They had no identification.

  “Yes, we are police.”

  “But how can I tell?

  _____

  My hands hovered over the keyboard, fingers cramped like claws. Sentences blurred before my eyes and swam together. The red numerals on the digital clock blinked 23:24. It was too late for Little Ahmed to still be out, but I didn’t want to call him and face another argument. Presently, I heard his footsteps in the corridor. Crumpfing heavy Timberlands on tiptoes; he was trying to be quiet. I heard the clunky double click of the door latch unlocking and then closing. I should have called out to him, Hi, Heya—something, but I didn’t trust the tone of my voice. He went into his room and shut the door. I stared at the screen, but I couldn’t see the words through my tears. Tomorrow, I thought, tomorrow, I’ll take him to McDonald’s and I’ll say I’m sorry.

  I kept working for another couple of hours and fell into bed exhausted. It was still dark when Zorro woke me up to tell me that the police had surrounded the suspected terrorists in a house in Saint-Denis.

  _____

  Drumbeats, but the rhythm was discordant. Gunshots, heartbeats, footsteps. The métro roared through the tunnels on my way home. The crowd and the sirens of the police raid receded, but left, in their wake, white noise screaming in my head.

  I dressed for lunch with Alexandre and Jean at Le Grand Véfour in my severe black Dior funeral suit and wore red-for-Rousse sneakers in case I needed to run. I was nervous and scratchy. Little Ahmed had probably called Margot and told her I was going mad. I braced myself for an intervention.

  I arrived a little early. I came in from the battleship gray streets, from the cold, into the surreality of warmth and light, twinkling chandeliers and shimmering mirrors.

  “Madame,” said the maître d’, showing me to a red velvet banquette. “L’Ambassadeur Monsieur Delacroix always likes to reserve the emperor’s table.”

  I sank into the soft cushion and looked about me. Cherubs smiled from the gilded plasterwork and peeped out from beneath the imperial swags and acanthus of Napoleon’s First Empire. Roman goddesses and nymphs held platte
rs of pomegranates above their heads; the ceiling was painted with wreaths of roses and borders of laurel leaves. The light sparkled in rubies and diamonds on the edges of silverware and the rims of wineglasses and gleamed in the antique mirrors that bloomed with silver-speckled galaxies. I saw myself reflected, refracted into three aspects; one pinkish under an incandescent sconce, one a hard-edged profile, and the last a view of myself I had never seen. A congruence of looking-glass angles had caught me almost from behind, a jowl of mottled cheek cut with a garish stripe of lipstick which some further optical trick of light and shadow had turned black.

  I was a clown monster. I hated myself, but I could not help it. Drop an unseen tear, watch it spread a circle stain on the white tablecloth. When I looked up, my eyes were underwater.

  Sitting alone at Balzac’s corner table, almost hiding behind an urn filled with white lilies, was a strange little man wearing John Lennon glasses with yellow lenses and a rumpled corduroy jacket. It’s Charlie! I whispered to myself. He looked sad. He picked up a red china pencil and began sketching on the snowy damask tablecloth. He drew a man with long floppy arms tipping a glass of champagne down his throat and the champagne pouring out of all the holes in his body where he had been shot through like a colander.

  Alexandre and Jean arrived together. There was always a certain superciliousness to Alexandre. When he arrived, I saw that in retirement, this tendency had been indulged. He divested himself of his periwinkle cashmere coat. His face looked taut, as if he had his eyes done. He kissed me bonjour on each cheek and ordered a bottle of champagne and a glass of crème de menthe.

  “Margot sends her love,” Jean said. “She says, please call her.” Rapprochement or committal?

  A highball of crème de menthe appeared. The waiter poured my champagne; it hissed delicately.