Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  “How are you doing, Kit? Did you manage to sleep a bit?” Jean asked. Kind, always so kind. “It’s a horrible week, it’s a horrible week for everyone.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “And Little Ahmed?”

  “Ahmed is fine,” I said. One corner of Jean’s thin lips contracted.

  “Kittredge,” Alexandre tried now, as delicately solicitous as if he were treading on the toes of an ayatollah. “I know it has brought it all back. Rousse . . .” he trailed off diplomatically.

  “It just reopens old wounds,” said Jean.

  “For all of us,” said Alexandre.

  “I am not wounded,” I said. “I am angry.”

  “It’s not good to be angry,” Jean said quietly. “Anger is the same as shooting.”

  “No it’s not.” I had not shot anyone.

  “I mean that the way we are in the world affects the world,” said Jean.

  “Yeah, yeah, and other platitudes and Margot psychological tidbits. It’s not my fault they are killing people,” I said. I swallowed another mouthful of champagne, honeycomb dissolving into a viscous, medicinal syrup in my mouth. “Before I was in the middle, trying to communicate one to the other, going back and forth from Paris to the Middle East all these years—reporting, listening, writing. But after Charlie, no. They made me choose a side. And now again—”

  The waiter hovered deferentially. Alexandre ordered the duck liver ravioli. Jean, snails with chestnut purée and caviar. I was not hungry, but I asked for the sweetbreads.

  “You are so like your father,” said Jean. “Collecting the anguish of everyone’s outrage, absorbing all the pain in the world, trying so hard to make it better and then punishing yourself for failing.”

  “That is what destroyed my father,” I said. “He should have stayed at home.”

  “He couldn’t stay at home,” said Jean. “He was drafted.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It was the early seventies. It was the time of the dreaded birthday lottery. Calling people up to fight in Vietnam. He did not want to fight in that war.”

  “But he went to war all the same.”

  “Yes,” sighed Alexandre. “He went to war all the same—”

  “We all did,” said Jean, the former second lieutenant.

  “It doesn’t make any difference,” I said. “War comes anyway, whether we choose it or not.”

  “We can choose how to fight it,” said Jean.

  “Are you going to tell me the pen is mightier than the sword, or some such rubbish?” I glanced at my imaginary friend in the corner. Ask Charlie if he thinks cartoons are any defense against Kalashnikovs. Writing, debating—that’s the very thing they wanted to destroy!

  “This anger,” said Jean, wearily, “will destroy us all.” He looked at me, but he was talking more broadly. “Our response has to be different. We can’t repeat Algeria. We need a new kind of humanism, a new enlightenment. It’s not enough just to reiterate our old values.”

  “But it is about our values!” I said. “After Charlie, after the Bataclan. Shooting people having a drink on the terrace, in bars, at a football match, at a concert. It’s exactly an attack on our values!”

  “We are all swept with raw emotions,” said Jean. “It’s been a difficult few days. Everything will be a bit calmer in a week or so.”

  “No,” I said. “You said the same last time and it will happen again.”

  The food arrived with funereal pomp. We ate in silence. I cut into my thymus and it bled a trickle of pink jus into the gutter of the plate. Our knives and forks made a hollow percussive conversation, metal scraped against china.

  “This is not why we asked you to lunch,” said Alexandre when they had cleared the plates away.

  “You mean you don’t want to lecture me about Little Ahmed and what this is doing to him, what I am doing to him, and what a bad mother I am.”

  “No.” Jean looked at me, his face was slack, his mouth had lost the straight line of articulation. He looked at me almost tenderly.

  “Just because we don’t agree with you,” said Jean, “doesn’t mean . . . Kit, we gave John our word that we would watch over you. So that’s what we try to do.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know I should talk to Little Ahmed, but he doesn’t want to talk to me. It feels as if I am constantly having to censor myself, as if everyone is against me, and all I’m trying to do is see through the layers of bullshit—which I am supposed to do. That’s my job, isn’t it? I am supposed to question and judge and figure out. But there’s just so much noise. It’s like we can’t hear the alarm that’s ringing louder and louder and louder—”

  “Kit—” Alexandre interrupted with a calm insistence. I looked up from the desert of white damask. He looked straight at me, swallowed a gulp of air, and said, “Your father died six days ago in Bhutan.”

  I was wrong-footed by the non sequitur. How odd, I thought, how incongruous. For a moment I lost my bearings, the mirrors reflected in each other a floating world. I felt my fingertips rub against the red velvet of the banquette; corporeal, reality.

  “My father is dead?”

  “Yes, Kitty—I’m so sorry—” Alexandre’s eyes were blue and wet against his softly powdered face.

  “Yes. He died last week. In the monastery where he had been living, apparently.”

  “We didn’t know where he was,” said Jean. “I always thought he was in Burma somewhere, lost in the jungle or the mountains—and that’s why we never heard from him. I think he was in Burma for a while, but anyway, he died in Bhutan. The lawyer in Massachusetts called us both on Friday—we should have told you straightaway—but then everything blew up. The lawyer called us because he named Alexandre and me as his executors.”

  He bowed his head. I did not say anything. I felt curiously light. After all this time, there was an answer.

  “The house in Good Harbor Bay,” said Alexandre.

  “Granbet’s house?”

  “Yes. Yours now.”

  “Wasn’t it sold when she died? My mother said it was sold.”

  “No, rented. That’s what he lived on all these years. The rent from his mother’s house and opium.”

  “My mother always said he had gone away from us because he loved opium more.”

  “He loved you too.”

  “You cannot love someone and leave them.”

  “You can,” said Jean. “But it destroys a piece of yourself.”

  “I could never leave Little Ahmed.”

  “No,” said Jean, “you haven’t got your father’s fatal flaw. He was the kindest man you ever knew. He hurt the people he loved more than he could bear.”

  I barely heard what Jean was saying. I was thinking of the only clear memory I had of my father. He was holding me up to the sea wind, roses in my cheeks, hot and cold at the same time, and I was laughing and laughing because I was five years old and I felt only pure and unbridled happiness. My sneakers were wet from racing the incoming surf, but my father did not notice. (Granbet would have noticed immediately: “Toes are very important, let’s get you inside right away!”) Dad said, “Ice cream!” The most beautiful words in the world. I felt his voice burring against my neck. Ice cream! He took my hand and we walked over to the diner on the other side of the dune fence, where Granbet never went because of a long-running feud with That Mister Wade who ran it. We sat at the counter on the red vinyl stools and I was allowed to order whatever flavor I wanted. I asked for chocolate.

  “Good choice,” said That Mister Wade. I thanked him because even if he was a mean ole custard, you had to be polite—please, Louise, and thank you, Hank.

  “Chocolate is my favorite,” said my father.

  “Didn’t expect you’d be able to come back down around here,” said That Mister Wade.

  “Granbet doesn’t know I came,” I replied, and then added, carefully, slyly protective—of my Daddy, of me—“Don’t tell.”

  “Well, you didn’t see me,”
said my father.

  And I remember asking, “Are you invisible, Daddy?”

  I hailed the waiter and asked for chocolate ice cream. It was cold on my tongue and melted into velvet pools of Madagascar mud at the back of my throat. Alexandre handed me a linen handkerchief.

  “It’s OK, Kitty, don’t worry. We’re here.”

  _____

  I walked home carrying the solace of solution in my heart. I had the idea that the mystery had been resolved and now everything would right itself. It was raining softly, but I was dry under the colonnade of the Palais Royal. Rose bushes drooped heavy rose hips, fountains sprayed water arches. I felt free to be an orphan. I felt a stirring of new resolve. The house in Good Harbor Bay—

  I texted Little Ahmed to meet me at the Café Contra after school.

  Little Ahmed was surly at the summons. Six feet tall, thirteen years old, everything was awkward. He sat down lumpily with a crash of heavy textbooks.

  “Take the earphones out.” He made his I-hate-you face and complied.

  “What’s going on, Kit?” he asked. He sounded grown-up, my equal.

  “Something needs to change. We can’t continue to live in Paris as if nothing has changed. As if our lives are not threatened, as if our way of life is not threatened.”

  Two pots of tea arrived, two different colored tea-bag tags hung out of the lids, green mint for Ahmed, gray Earl Gray for me. Ahmed looked at me straight on. He regarded me coolly, like an inmate under duress, but he was getting older, he would be free soon.

  “They are trying to kill us.” I continued. In my head my thoughts were clear, but Little Ahmed was looking at me as if I was raving nonsense. “I mean, they are trying to stop us living. Stop us going to see a movie, walking down the street and having a beer afterwards.”

  Little Ahmed shook his head. “Kit, what are you talking about?”

  How could I explain better? “You’ll understand when—”

  “Don’t tell me I’ll understand when I’m older.”

  “You will. You’re the child now and I’m the adult and I’m telling you—”

  “Telling me? That’s a joke, telling me! You’re always telling me, telling me. Not listening to me.”

  “Is that Margot talking?”

  “Don’t try and blame her.”

  “Is that why you were always going to see Rousse all by yourself. Is that what you were doing with her, playing with a Kalashnikov? Do you think that’s funny? Do you think that’s clever? Subvert the stereotype of an Arab boy with a gun by making an image of the stereotype.”

  “You’re the stereotype, Kit,” said my son, simply. “You’re the ranting right-wing nutcase.” Then he said something really mean. “You sound just like Aba: Islam is stupid and ridiculous! Turn it against itself. Eradicate it!”

  What had I meant to do? Extract the Arab gene, inoculate him against it? Take him away and live in a place where there was only us. An hour before, it had seemed obvious, simple. The house in Good Harbor Bay, mine now! Cleansing cold blue ocean, wholesome American summertime, lobster rolls and clam bakes and homey folksy can-do. My green-eyed boy with dark hair, handsome square-cut photo in his high school yearbook.

  If only I could get us to some other place where we didn’t have to be in the middle anymore—if only he could understand that I was just trying to protect him, take him away from—

  He stood up and delivered the ringing blow. Oh, but he was magnificent.

  “You are upset about Rousse and so you take all this upset and label it Muslims. But it’s not Muslims’ fault. It’s not my fault. Blame an entire religion and everyone who believes in it. Even me. Blame and blame. That’s your solution?”

  “We need to get away—we need to go—”

  “Where?”

  “Home,” I said very quietly. He did not understand me. I had not told him that my father was dead. I had never talked to him, really, about Granbet and Good Harbor Bay. My America was something abstract for him.

  “There’s nowhere to go, Kit. Because I will have to go with you and you’ll just have to look at me: a Muslim. Every day.”

  “It’s not you.”

  “Yes it is. You keep saying it’s a war, it’s war and they and them and we have to be on a side. But what does this mean? I mean what are you going to do about this Muslim disease? Isolate it? Put us in a ghetto. Disinfect with bleach—what do they call it, deradicalization—it’s bullshit anyway. Expel us? Kill us? What do you want to do to solve this problem. Do you want to kill me?”

  “Ahmed—”

  “You think you know you’re right. But you’re really just saying that I should change and not be a Muslim. If you want me to be someone else, then you are not my mother.”

  He stormed out of the café. The cold air came in when he banged the door, and it bounced in its bracket and hung open.

  “Teenagers,” said the café man, sympa. I could not bring myself to smile at this. I put the coins on the counter and left.

  He hated me. He was on their side. Everyone was sleepwalking into a nightmare and everything was fragile. Didn’t they know how easily concrete turns into rubble?

  _____

  Little Ahmed did not come home until after midnight. I knew he had been with Grégoire. I heard him brush his teeth and go into his room and close the door. For several minutes I tried to ignore the presence of him. I continued to transcribe notes into files named for Republican heroes whose deeds were forgotten. Who was JAURES? Or CARDINAL LEMOINE? or PHILLIPE AUGUSTE? But I couldn’t concentrate.

  I knocked on Ahmed’s door, carefully, conciliatory, waited for a response.

  “Yeah.” He was arranging pictures on the desktop of his computer screen. I stood behind him; a pool of yellow lamplight made soft shadows.

  “My father is dead,” I told him.

  “My mother is dead,” he said.

  “Mine too.”

  “And Rousse. And all of these people. Look at my pictures. Me and Grégoire went out to see all the shrines all around the cafés and the Bataclan,” he said. “People have left messages, hundreds of them. Handwritten notes. It rained and splotched the ink.”

  “Show me,” I said, and he clicked through his slideshow.

  He had taken close-up pictures of the notes that people had left. Blue biro on yellow legal pad, greetings cards, block-lettered on Xerox paper, ink-blotched with tears and rain.

  THREE

  Banging woke me up, but before I knew what it was, there were three men wearing balaclavas in my bedroom pointing guns and shouting at me. I got out of bed very fast and pulled on a pair of jeans.

  “Quick, quick,” barked a man who pointed at a police badge on his chest.

  “Where is my son?”

  An official pushed through the police. He was wearing a dark suit, dark tie, his face that of an ordinary accountant. He held a piece of printed paper and read from it:

  “Pursuant to the Counter Terrorism Act of 2014, Section 3—”

  “Where is my son Ahmed?”

  “We are placing you under garde-à-vue, pursuant to our inquiries according to the Counterterrorism Act of 2014.” I did not know if this was arrest. Garde-à-vue is detention, but I was not sure if it was arrest. France’s judicial system is different from the Anglo-Saxon versions I knew from TV detective dramas. It depends on the investigating magistrate. There’s no jury trial. Just the investigating magistrate.

  “I want a lawyer.”

  “It’s not Law & Order, Madame L’Américaine,” said one of the policemen. I asked him to turn around so that I could put on my bra. He refused. “It’s Engrenages, it’s a spiral.” He twirled his finger round and round, “Heh-heh-heh.”

  I shouted for Ahmed, and he shouted back, “The police are taking me.”

  “It will be OK!” I called to him.

  “Stop talking!” said the policeman roughly.

  “He’s thirteen-years-old,” I told him, “you can’t arrest him.”

  “You th
ink thirteen-year-olds can’t commit crimes?”

  The official in the suit said, “He is being escorted by an appropriate adult.”

  “Who?”

  “An appropriate adult.”

  I saw Little Ahmed pushed out of the apartment. He had obviously pulled on his clothes in a hurry, because he was wearing his least favorite green Nike sweatshirt. His face was ashen and knotted and defiant. This cut into me. I felt helpless, awful. One of the female policemen told me to stand up straight with my arms out. She searched me carefully, around my waistband, running her hands around my bra strap, and the underwires. I stared at the ceiling, seething, powerless, violated. She did not look at me.

  The man in the suit asked me for my passport, my residency papers, my marriage certificate, and Little Ahmed’s birth certificate. I kept these documents in a drawer in my desk at the end of the living room but the policemen barred my way.

  “Tell me where they are and I will get them.”

  He took my laptop and Little Ahmed’s laptop. I said I was a journalist. This was not relevant. He asked me how many mobile phones I had. I said, “One.” It was plugged in to charge on the desk. He took it. One of the policemen found a bag of old electronic stuff in the hall cupboard and held up two old mobile phones as refutation. I explained they were old phones I did not use any more. They put each one in a separate plastic bag. They found my box of sim cards and these were put in another plastic bag.

  “Where is the boy’s mobile phone?” I said I did not know.

  They searched the drawer in the desk but could not find Little Ahmed’s birth certificate, only the certificate of adoption. I said if it wasn’t there, I didn’t know where it was.

  “Where are you taking Ahmed? What is going on? I need a lawyer.” My questions were met only with more demands. I gave up trying to be helpful.

  “Where is your French Press card?”

  “I don’t know. I never use it.”

  “We need the access code to your laptop and to your son’s laptop.”

  “No.”

  The man in the suit shrugged, as if noncompliance was to be expected. He told me to put my hands behind my back to be handcuffed. Again I said “no.” A policeman behind me pulled my arms behind and pinched my wrists together. He ratcheted the cold metal bracelets closed tight so that they rubbed against my wrist bones. My nose began to itch. This was the worst moment, when I could not touch my own face, when my own body was separated from itself.