Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  They made me stand there like that for an hour while they searched the apartment. They pulled all the drawers out and dumped papers on the table and sifted through them, they pushed books off the shelves to see if there was something hidden behind them.

  Eventually they put me in the back of a van. I was not allowed to take my wallet or a coat or any book or notebook with me. The van had no windows.

  I was thirsty, my eyes were dry, eyelashes still stuck with sleepy dust, my hair hung straight down my cheeks because I could not brush it off my face, my shoulders hurt from the wrench, and my wrists hurt like sharp bruises where the handcuffs bit into them. My nerves cross-wired all their electrical signals in screeching rills of itchiness and aching.

  I didn’t see the façade of the police station because one of the policeman pushed my head down to face the pavement when we arrived. Scuffed parquet, lintel trip, tiled corridor. White tiles like a bathroom, fluorescent lighting bouncing green shadows.

  The same policewoman who had searched me in my bedroom led me to a cubicle to search me again. She took off my handcuffs and told me to take off my clothes. I complied. She took each article of clothing as I took it off and turned it over in her hands, examining every seam. She put her hands into each pocket of my jeans and brought out a wad of dryer fluff, three copper coins and a lighter. She tested the lighter and it made a tall yellow flame. My socks, my shoes were examined in the same way. She took my watch.

  I was chilled; gooseflesh stood up on my arms. The curtain did not pull all the way across the cubicle’s entrance. The walls, once white, were dirty and starkly grim under the glare of a fluorescent bulb. My bare feet were cold on the tiled floor.

  I was down to my underpants and bra. She pointed at me. “Yes, everything.” I took off my underpants and my bra and stood naked because I was told to do so. I did not speak or reply. My only defense was a silent humiliated rage which was of no interest to her. She went away and I was alone.

  There was no chair or bench. I examined the walls. I thought of all my kidnapped friends. I thought of all the times I had imagined my father kidnapped. I had read the memoirs of his Beirut colleagues who had spent eight years as hostages. In Baghdad I had interviewed people who had been locked up in Saddam’s prisons. I had often thought about being kidnapped myself. For a while whenever I went to the toilet I would lock the door and imagine the door being locked from the outside and consider the stall space I must inhabit now—could I lie down? Was there a window, a sink with running water?

  Someone had squashed a piece of chewing gun into a corner of the cubicle, a hardened knob of flesh-colored putty. I made an impression of a smiley face with my fingernail. It’s important to keep your mind to yourself because it’s the only thing they cannot take from you. Thinking makes us so. I looked at my companion smiley face and smiled back. I was cold and naked and frightened. They had taken my son from me. I thought: This is very interesting. This is what fascism is.

  At some length the policewoman gave me my clothes back. But not my watch. She took me down the corridor into another room, where I was told to stand inside a full-body scanner. Then I was taken up one floor to an interrogation room and told to sit on a chair on the other side of the table. The room was as bland as the cubicle. There was no window. I sat there for a long time, but I didn’t know how long because they had not given me my watch back.

  _____

  “I am Frédéric Durand, your lawyer. I have been appointed by the Republic.” He looked as ordinary as the official in the suit in my apartment. But it was not the same man. This one did not look at me. “I should inform you that you are not required to talk to the police but that you are advised to do so. Sign this.”

  “No.”

  “It is in your interest,” he replied evenly, still not looking at me, but rifling through several pages to find the form for me to sign.

  “Why?”

  He spoke a paragraph of rapid boilerplate legalese. I said I did not understand.

  He shrugged and collected his dossiers and left the room.

  Presently another man came in with the same sallow impassive face, brown hair, and long Gallic nose. His only distinguishing feature was a mole in the middle of his cheek.

  “My name is François Paltoquet. I am the juge d’instruction for this case.” He put out his hand for me to shake it. I shook it. Firm and dry. “You have refused a lawyer.”

  “I did not understand him.”

  “You have been detained under the Anti-Terrorist Legislation Act of 2014. We can hold you for ninety-six hours without applying to a judge for an extension. I cannot predict how long it will take to find an English-speaking lawyer. If you wish, we can begin your questioning without the formal consultation of lawyer. In any case you will not have a lawyer present during questioning.” He took my silence for acquiescence and continued. “You are Catherine Madison Kittredge, born July 2, 1977, Boston General Hospital, USA. Father John Adams Kittredge, American, Mother Christine Dorothea Hardwick, British citizen, died resident of France in February 2003.”

  “Yes.”

  “Please verify these details.” He handed me a form in which my address, email addresses, and mobile phone numbers were written down.

  “You are employed by an American newspaper, as a correspondent. Since 2003.”

  “Yes.”

  “Married Ahmed Ahmed Solemani, citizen of Iraq, in Beirut, 2005. Divorced, finalized France, April 2010.”

  “Yes.”

  “Adopted Ahmed Ahmed Solemani, son of this man, registered, France, July 2008.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are aware that Ahmed Solemani was never legally divorced from his first wife. And that you were married before her death in”—he checked the date against his typed sheet—“February 2006.”

  “He told me that he divorced her through an imam in Baghdad.”

  “The divorce was not legally registered.”

  “It may have been around the time of the American invasion,” I said. “There may have been no formal authority with whom to register the divorce. Iraq did not regain it’s sovereignty—”

  Paltoquet cut me off; he was not interested in explanations. He had a fact printed in black and white on a piece of paper and this was all the truth he was interested in.

  “Pursuant to this fraud, your marriage in Beirut in”—his eyes returned to the résumé of my life printed on one sheet of paper—“February 2005, is not valid. The petition for your adoption of his son, however, was uncontested by his father.”

  “Correct.”

  He paused. He put away the typed form in a leatherette folder secured with a piece of elastic and leaned his elbows on the desk.

  “Did you convert to Islam at the time of your wedding to Ahmed Solemani?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah. Good. Yes.” This seemed to confirm something for him. He left the room.

  After another long while, which could have been ten minutes or fifty, the policewoman returned and brought me downstairs again to the white-tiled corridor which led into a white-tiled abattoir hallway lined on one side with cells. The cells were not solid door bang-ups like in British TV police dramas, but built with walls of metal-framed windowpanes so that the guards could see the prisoners at all times.

  My cell had a cement floor, a cement sleeping ledge, and a foul pissoir hole in the corner. The hole did not flush and there was no running water.

  “I am thirsty.”

  The door shut and I was alone, but not alone. There was no privacy behind the glass wall.

  “Achacha!” shouted the man in the next-door cell. No one answered him either. I lay down with my hands behind my head as a pillow and examined the infinite ceiling of my inside sky. It cracked into continents; rivers ran to water-stain seas.

  _____

  I was not in Syria. There was no torture to be frightened of. But there were other things to be frightened of. Rat scratching, trapped in its own brain. Is prison only an echo cha
mber for the human condition? I tried to think what the hell had happened. I rewound the last few months, half answers, defensive mumblings, slammed doors. Mounting anger. Mine or his? What had I missed, misunderstood; teenage disaffection, my fault, or something larger, worse—Little Ahmed, habibe, what have you done? What has Grégoire-Ghaith’s brother encouraged you to do? What lies did he fill your impressionable, inquisitive thirteen-year-old head with, what false trails of God-Allah and logic and identity has he mapped in your unfolding folds of cerebral coruscations? What were you really doing all those afternoons after school?

  A month earlier Little Ahmed had come back late, past eight o’clock dinner time, congealed carbonara on the stove. I had been the very model of a nagging mother.

  “Didn’t you think I would be worried?”

  He said his phone had, uh, run out of battery. “I am only like, late, like an hour. It’s not some crime!” He had an orange plastic bag with him and I asked him what was in it and he wouldn’t tell me. “Stuff a friend gave me.” What friend? What stuff?

  What have you done, Little Ahmed? My precious Medio. (Rousse would have trusted you; but look what happened to Rousse. From a prison cell even trust can be cause for suspicion.) Where is the gun? What did you do? Courrier, carrier pigeon, WhatsApp intermediary, hashtag jihadi, skyping Syria . . . Did you link your uncle in Amman to a recruiter who lives on rue Stephenson? My eye caught on a tangle of dust strings high up in the corner of the cell, and I recalled the curly hairs dangling from the smooth insouciant chin of Grégoire’s brother. A violent surge of impotent rage swept through me.

  After an hour or two, the policewoman came and escorted me back to the interrogation room.

  Paltoquet gave me a can of Coke. I pulled the ring pull with a sparking fizz. Drank. It was cold. It was bliss. Spangling bubbles over my shag pile tongue, caramel up my nose, sugar rushed into my veins. Yes, I am American, I confess, I admit everything. I want a large Coke and a quarter-pounder with cheese, please. I want to go back to the diner in Good Harbor Bay with the red vinyl stool and eat three scoops of chocolate ice cream.

  Paltoquet watched me empty the can of Coke in continual gulps. A second man, young, junior, whippet thin, came in and put a thick pile of sheets of paper on the table.

  “This is a list of web pages accessed by your IP address over the past year,” stated Paltoquet. “Please look through these and tick,”—he handed me a pencil—“those pages which you remember visiting. If you are not sure, please make a question mark next to it. If you are very sure you have not visited this page, please draw a cross.”

  Paltoquet left the room. His whippet boy remained. This list was more than fifty pages long. I bent to my task.

  After two hours I was taken back to my cell. I hoped for rest. In Darkness at Noon, Rubashov had waited up so many nights expecting the NKVD to arrest him that when they did, he curled up in his prison cot and fell, finally, sound asleep. But there was no mattress for me to lie down on and no blanket. The concrete floor and glass wall exaggerated the chill.

  After an hour I was taken back to the interrogation room.

  “Thank you,” said Paltoquet. He scanned the list of web pages. “Now your travel.”

  I was asked to list every place I had visited in the previous decade, stating whether Little Ahmed had been with me or not. Separately, I was to write down a list of all the places Little Ahmed had visited, and whether he had traveled with his father or independently of me. I said such a list would be incomplete, that I could not remember every weekend in Brittany, side trips to London, which week I was in New York that autumn.

  I made my concern sound earnest. I kept my fear in check. I decided to tell him as much as possible, to give him all the information that I could, to show that I had nothing to hide, which, I reminded myself, clear-headed and business-like under those flickery fluorescent lights, I didn’t. (I didn’t, but what about Little Ahmed? He was undoubtedly being questioned in tandem. What might he have to hide that was hidden from me? What might I say that would prove or disprove his version or another version . . . ?)

  “I understand,” said Paltoquet. He gave the impression of running through these details as if they were merely a formality. He had the mien of a reception manager at the Four Seasons in Damascus: obsequious, anodyne, corporate, Mukhabarat. He affected a certain apology without offering any explanation. This was nothing personal; this was simply what procedure required. His manner—cordial, aloof, officious—was expressly designed to encourage my compliance. Even though I knew this, I complied. Oh Stanley Milgram! You are right. Authority is irresistible. Paltoquet had given me a test and I wanted to do well on it. Even though I hated him, I wanted his approval.

  I began to write down my travel. I had to list every town I had been to in Lebanon and Iraq. Where had I visited in Syria outside of Damascus? How had I traveled, on what dates, to what towns? Deir Mar Mikhael. “Yes. When was the last time you talked to Father Angelo?” When was the last time you went to Damascus? Why did you go? Why did you take your son with you? Did your husband ask you to bring him? How far in advance was the trip planned? How did you obtain your visa? Did your husband arrange it for you? Did your son travel on his British or his Iraqi passport?

  _____

  I answered as best I could. My recollections sounded like an inaccurate retracing, lines that I could not bring into complete circles, things I had forgotten, chronologies got tangled, snagged. Why had I taken Little Ahmed to Syria that spring? Was it my idea or his father’s?

  Late—it was dark outside, I think, it was hard to tell through the drawn blinds along the corridors as I was taken back to my cell. A meal was brought. A heap of rice, desiccated chicken, two slices of bread, a pot of pink yogurt, a cup of tea. I ate it all. With relish. Like Solzhenitsyn’s starving gulag zeks who found a prehistoric salamander frozen in a timeless Siberian lens of ice and ripped it out and ate it all up, with relish.

  The Russians are very good at writing about prisons. I recalled all the Ivan Denisovich Siberias I had ever read. Exile, boredom, malcontent, cold feet, griminess, fatigue. I envied them their camaraderie, their bunk beds and their wood stoves. Alone in my cell, my brain raced, what had Little Ahmed done wittingly, unwittingly, accomplice, patsy . . . who was Grégoire’s brother? What were they doing when they were walking Grégoire’s imaginary dogs? What had happened last summer with his cousins in Amman?

  FOUR

  “Amman,” announced Paltoquet, back in the interrogation room, a new topic for questioning.

  “I told you. Ahmed went to Amman to see his father. Because it was safer than Baghdad and he has cousins there. ISIS had just captured Mosul. They went on a camping trip in Wadi Rum and to see Petra.”

  “And the names of these cousins.”

  “Thayr,” I said. “I don’t know the name of his uncle.”

  Paltoquet raised an eyebrow and looked over a sheet of paper at me. “You do not know the family name of your son’s mother?”

  “My husband never told me. He did not like to talk about his first wife in front of me.”

  “What is your ex-husband’s job and who is his employer?”

  “He is a protocol officer for the United Nations.” Paltoquet nodded.

  “What is the name of his immediate superior.”

  “I don’t know. We communicate almost exclusively about our son.”

  “When he was resident in France, he undertook several trips to Syria.”

  “In the spring of 2011 he was in Damascus a lot. Maybe that’s partly why I went and took Little Ahmed. I honestly don’t remember who initiated the idea. Ahmed was there because there was still a window for political negotiation. He went to Hama, I think, I remember he was talking to opposition groups about a conference—” Paltoquet cut me off.

  “This was, according to his passport records, not his only trip to Syria that year.”

  “He moved back to Baghdad at the end of that summer. After that I don’t have much idea whe
re he went.”

  “He has visited France regularly since 2011.”

  “To see his son.”

  “Please write down on this piece of paper, who he sees, that you are aware of, when he comes to France. Please include professional acquaintances as well as social friends.”

  “What has Ahmed got to do with this?” I asked. “Why are you asking me questions about him?”

  I wrote down half a dozen names. When I was finished, Paltoquet pushed a buzzer under the table that signaled a guard to take me back to my cell.

  _____

  Aching, interminable, alone. I had no book to read or write in. I thought of the warden of the Peter and Paul Fortress in Tolstoy’s Resurrection. What was his name? He allowed the prisoners a slate and a piece of chalk in order to write, as a pastime. This detail of obtuse cruelty was the only thing I could remember from the whole novel. What would I write if I only had a slate and a chalk? Would I write the same thing over and over to inscribe it to memory? Could I bear to wipe away every morning what I had written the day before? What was writing except remembering?

  Time fractured into segments of cell and interrogation. Facts fractured between memory, imagination, and wondering. Ahmed, Little Ahmed, all the other Ahmeds. Loops of film on a cutting room floor, jump-cut scenes, jumbled up in my head. I was not frightened for myself; I hung onto the logic of my innocence. But for Little Ahmed I felt a vertiginous terror; precipice, abyss. In my dreams his face kaleidoscoped, smiling at me, laughing at me, mocking me. When I woke, I did not know where I was, and then it came back, hard as concrete, and the fear flushed icily through me again: Where was he? Was he OK?

  There was no yogurt for dessert, only a tiny box of raisins. They tasted of sweet cardboard and made me think of a mulberry tree in Aleppo and how the fruit had fallen onto the concrete paving stones and made purple juice stains like a massacre. My concrete cell floor was scuffed in places, but otherwise as dun as the desert outside of Ramadi. But there, lo! An ant!