Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  “Listen to what?” I said again.

  “My ingenious plan,” Ahmed winked at his son. “I’ve got it all figured out. One domino, two dominos, third domino falls and—just remember, Ahmed-son-of-Ahmed-son-of-Ahmed of the shining city of Samarra—I promise I will take you there one day, to the land between two rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris, the mighty Tigris that flows through Samarra, the land of the original civilization and the origin of the creation. Remember Gilgamesh! Nothing in that Louvre of yours would exist without the first mark of man that your ancestors made, the first writing, the first laws—”

  “The cradle of civilization, blah-blah,” said Little Ahmed.

  “And then the Arabs conquered Mesopotamia.” Ahmed had put on a boomy fake prophet voice and turned himself into a doomsday soothsayer of yore. I thought he was telling an elaborate joke. “The Arabs came and there was a battle. Karbala! Idiot Shia! Making a cult out of a defeat!” But he seemed to be serious. “A Caliphate was just good politics. Better the Umayyeds than those fanatics.”

  “But we’re Sunni, aren’t we, Aba?”

  “Yes we are. Because we are political realists. And no we’re not, because if you mix politics with religion, you get the same idiocy. The trick,” said Ahmed with a sharky grin, “is to get rid of religion. Shia, Sunni. Everyone’s natural enemy is their brother. Set them against each other. Let them bleed each other dry and their martyr blood will sink into the sand of the desert and be spent. Leave us people of the river to quench our dry and shriven lands with modern irrigation, and damn the Turks if they dam our water!” Ahmed was giddy, stirring hot sauce into the boiling currents of his broth, hauling up tangled strands of noodles, slurping, talking at the same time, eyes shining, chili oil drops glistened on the surface of the soup, fine beads of sweat shone, trapped in the crease along his forehead.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Think big! Think outside the box. Blue sky!” Now he sounded like a management consultant.

  “There’s no blue sky in Iraq,” I reminded him. “It’s white when it’s hot and yellow at night.”

  “Or red in a sandstorm,” added Little Ahmed.

  “Was there a sandstorm when you were there? You didn’t tell me—”

  “It was amazing! It was like rust and it was so thick that when I took a picture you couldn’t see anything. It looked like I took a picture of the inside of my eyelid!”

  I looked over at Ahmed. “The Good Iraqi,” I said sarcastically. “Are you going to arm the Sunni tribes again?”

  “It worked last time,” he said simply. “Trust me, Kit. What’s the best way to defeat an ideology?”

  “I don’t know, Ahmed, tell me, since you’re so clever and have the answer to all that ails us in these troubled times, what’s the best way to defeat an ideology?”

  “Give it enough rope to hang itself!”

  _____

  Paltoquet was looking at me, waiting.

  “What does Ahmed believe in? Whose side is he on?” he prompted. It occurred to me, fleetingly, for a moment, to recount this conversation. I did not know what Ahmed had been doing, but I had begun to connect a trail of breadcrumbs, coincidences, comments, asides. I could make my own guess—but did I want to tell Paltoquet? Screw him. Let him make his own inference. Why should I betray Ahmed to this dossier-apparatchik who was just another agent with an agenda?

  “What does Ahmed believe in? Himself,” I said, and then pushed back: “Why ask me about Ahmed? What has he got mixed up in?”

  “As you said, he makes connections. But my question to you, as someone who knows him well, is, to what end, for what purpose?”

  “He has notions,” I said haltingly, as if I was carefully considering his question, trying to answer it honestly. “He has ideas. But they change. He sometimes leaps on a theory and then shakes it for a while to see what use it can be.” This was true, but also vague, of little use.

  “Is he an observant Muslim?”

  “No, the opposite. He always says he is an atheist.” Paltoquet frowned at this.

  “He could have changed. Have you noticed any signs of radicalization?” Impatience had crept into his even-keel voice. “Has your son mentioned anything? In Baghdad or Jordan, did your husband take him to a mosque? Did he ever mention meeting an imam? Someone called Abu Mohammed—”

  “Abu Mohammed? Seriously? That’s half the male population of the Middle East.”

  “An imam, a sheikh, a commander. Someone he met perhaps with his father?”

  “A commander?”

  “Do you think that it’s a coincidence that your husband and your son were in Amman at the same time as Mohammed’s uncle, the imam from Hama?” I rolled my eyes to pantomime dramatic irritation. Paltoquet was asking too many questions, everything mixed up, his composure was fraying. “Also known as Abu Mohammed.” I stuck my tongue out at him, exasperated. “This man!” Paltoquet jabbed his forefinger into the forehead of one of the headshot pictures. The one with a white knit prayer cap and a middle-aged indistinct face. “Abu Mohammed,” he repeated, “a known Jubat Al-Nusra commander. Picked up by the Jordanians in Amman in August. Detained. Released. Turns up here, in Europe.” Paltoquet was angry now, urgent. Shaking his forefinger at me. “Think, Catherine. Think. This is important.”

  “Where was this picture taken?”

  “Brussels. Four days ago.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Twenty-three phone calls have been logged between a cellphone number that was in the same café where this surveillance camera caught him, and the cellphone of your friend with the orange sneakers.” Paltoquet collapsed his distance. His candor seemed genuine, but maybe it was only a ploy. I was unsure how to talk him out of his narrative. He was plotting coordinates that were accidental, that were— “Can you explain these coincidences? Because I have to ask myself, are you involved? Is your ex-husband involved—well, we know he’s involved, but how? Who is he really working for? And who took the phone call from the German detention center on October thirty-first? Because if the caller was this man’s nephew, as we suspect, this younger nephew Mohammed who you met—by chance—in Kos.” Paltoquet was shouting now. “If you know his whereabouts and you are not telling us, for some reason, this is obstruction, this is an offense of accessory, this is a crime that we will not hesitate to prosecute you for!” He banged his fists on the table.

  The noise shattered the armor of my innocence. It didn’t matter what I told them or how earnestly I tried to explain. It didn’t matter that I had done nothing, that I was only me, a collection of imperfect sentences and unkind thoughts. They would make of this mess what they wanted to. He would make the facts fit their theory. People, places, dates, data, extrapolate, interpolate, random bits and bytes of information. They would arrange them into a picture and ignore the missing pixels. Because isn’t this what we all do? Make up our own versions of the world to suit ourselves.

  Paltoquet stared at me. The silence fell like a guillotine. What was the point in trying to convince him. I put my hands over my face and found my cheeks were wet with tears.

  “I don’t know,” I said, mumbling a sniveling show of defeat. Let him think what he wants. Something wretched retched in me. Paltoquet handed me a tissue. For a moment the white flag hovered over the Formica surface of the table between us.

  “You husband, Catherine,” he said more softly now. “No inkling? No prayer beads in a suitcase, whispers, someone who saw him at a mosque. Has he given his son any totem, anything religious, a Koran perhaps?”

  I wiped my nose and shook my head. What was in a wooden box with the minaret of Samarra inlaid in mother-of-pearl, anyway? It was easy to pretend to be pathetic when I felt pathetic.

  “I’ve never even seen him pray,” I said, keeping to my own script. “He drinks in Ramadan, he eats bacon.”

  “You are aware of the concept of taqiya?”

  “Yes, lying to deceive the enemy, religious dissembling. But religion, no,
that’s not like Ahmed.”

  “Are you sure? Wouldn’t he conceal it from you as he has concealed so many things?”

  Where better for a jihadi to hide than behind the mask of a debonair self-hating Arab? Ahmed, so urbane and international and plausible, the perfect foil.

  Splinter niggled under my fingernail. I knew there were as many things that I didn’t know as Paltoquet didn’t know. Had I been stupid and naïve? Don’t they always say you can’t see what’s under your own nose. How many times had I learned this lesson, seeing something and not really looking hard enough to understand.

  I thought of Little Ahmed’s reticence when he had come back from trips with his father—what was he hiding, protecting, not saying, not telling? Why did Ahmed go back to Baghdad? What was he doing there? Did he think he could save his country? What was all that talk of two rivers and throwing out the Arabs and making the desert bloom green again? What deals had he made with the bad guys? Would he have pulled his son in with him? Would he have risked Little Ahmed too?

  I wiped my eyes and drew myself up. I thought that it was curious how comfortable plastic chairs can be after concrete, how malleable.

  “Do you know how long you have been here?” Paltoquet asked. I couldn’t tell what sentences were my thoughts and what I had spoken out loud.

  “I have been scratching each day on the cell wall.” Paltoquet did not smile at this.

  “Three days,” he told me. “Most people cry within the first twenty-four hours.” Was this a compliment? “You are becoming confused, we will stop for some time while I verify what you have told me.” He went out, and the whippet clicked the recorder off and sat looking at me and not saying anything. The female guard came to take me back to the cell. She put her hand under my arm pit to guide me, her fingers dug into me in the same place where the insurgent had gripped me when he pushed me into a room in Samarra years ago.

  SIX

  I sat on the floor of my cell in the corner and talked to myself in Q and A. My interrogations were stuck in this format and now my cell musings copied it too. I knew I was not quite mad; because it would not be madness to know that you had gone a little mad. Who wouldn’t? Three days in jail, dragged up a spiral staircase to be questioned over and over again. At the same time, I confessed to myself (not to Paltoquet! I would never give him any satisfaction of confession!) that I reveled a little in the madness. Now I appreciated Zorro’s addiction: the escape, the half delirium, the crazy thoughts that come in riffs of clouds and draw back a sucking blur as waves on a shore—there is a delicious liberty in madness, of impotence. For the moment I did not have to answer my interrogator-oppressor’s questions.

  But just to think.

  The lights were kept on at all times. I closed my eyes and stared at the interior angry red of my eyelids. When I blinked them open, the world turned blue again, bright and inconsolable. I thought: This is what is to be a Palestinian at a checkpoint, an Iraqi in an immigration booth, a Syrian crossing a border, a son of an Algerian immigrant frisked at a French train station, an asylum seeker stopped and searched in a London high street. This is a prison cell. I am subject to the state. Unfair, indignity, wrong. Every innocent’s nightmare. Walk in another man’s shoes. (I have no shoes; they had been taken away three days ago and replaced with a pair of plastic flip-flops.) It is very unhappy to be unfree.

  I would not let go of my self. I would not concede defeat. I hugged my knees to my chest. The state was only interested in the facts it could type on a sheet of paper and file in a dossier, but these facts don’t tell you the truth. They are not the important things—they say nothing about the elements of soul or feeling. I will not concede (not to Oz, not to the insipid inspector either) that truth is in any way connected to facts.

  I was comforted by this epiphany. After all, it is a prisoner’s prerogative to pretend that the imaginary realm of self can triumph over the corporeal; the only thing you can claim as your own is your belief in your superiority to your captor.

  I held fast to my innocence. I had not hurt anyone. I knew that Little Ahmed had not either. This I knew for certain; a mother’s instinct, although Margot would have said it was only wish fulfillment masquerading as intuition. Of his father’s innocence, I was less sure. I would not believe, I could not, that he had turned into some kind of terrorist mastermind jihadi. This was ridiculous. But Paltoquet had asked questions to which I did not have answers.

  I ate a plastic bowl of claggy rice with three fingers of my right hand, pressing the rice together carefully, not to lose a single grain, as Ahmed’s mother had once taught me.

  There is another part to the privacy of one’s thoughts. After the loud protestations of innocence, there is a reckoning. What have I done? What have I not done?

  There was no chicken on the plastic food tray and I was hungry; each mouthful of rice represented a significant treasure of consideration. Ant came to say hello and navigated the rust stream from the pissoir hole followed by a friend. I placed a grain of rice in their path and felt myself as munificent and wise as Zeus.

  Follow the trail of thought, each footfall as delicately tensile as the thin black line of an ant leg. What if I am not right? What if I am wrong?

  I rewound the argument with Grégoire’s prayer-cap brother, and analyzed my antipathy to him and his parents. I felt guilty, but why? Hadn’t I only been frightened for my son? I righted my righteousness and smiled. It kept me company in that lone cell. Yes, Grégoire’s family had been unfriendly. Why keep me out in the hall, why were they so hostile? And the arrogance of the brother, his smugness, his assumption of his own superiority, this was simple provocation. All reasonable justifications—

  —Or only mitigations. Some other voice inside me, the interior self-god-conscience that used to answer me when I was a little girl, growing colder in my bath, whispered, “But who was unfriendly first, Kitty?” They had opened their door to a wild thing with mud on her shoes and twigs in her hair; I was dirty, my French was foreign, they did not know me. I had said rude things.

  Yes, I thought, this is all true. There were two sides to this contretemps. I should at least acknowledge the existence of the other one. Perhaps this acknowledgment was enough to exonerate me. I considered this, but my guilt still niggled. Would remorse do? No, not really.

  Ant and his friend were trying to carry the big lump of rice back to their home. The problem with generosity is that it is difficult for the recipient to carry. Should I have cut the rice in half? Is the God of magically appearing rice grains expected to do everything for her subjects? Isn’t it enough that I am not crushing them with my thumb out of sheer boredom. I thought about doing this, but I did not because I didn’t want to feel bad about it. I clung to my mercifulness as evidence of my goodness.

  So you are superior because this time you decided, in your great magnamity, not to kill the ant? said the voice. I said. To me. Inside a thought, a perception of my own devising. I lay down on the concrete bench, cold balm against the lump of regret lodged in my intestine. I had insulted the prayer-cap brother. There was no denying this. I despised him and I told him so. But he had insulted me first . . . hadn’t he? I was not sure . . . On closer examination, perhaps his rudeness had been unintentional, perhaps it was only my interpretation. I had retaliated. What use was my compounding insult? Shouldn’t I apply the same argument of moral equivalency—condemn American killing but not jihadi killing—that I had thrown back at him, to myself? Do unto others—

  The cold leached into my bones. It felt cleansing in some way, a penitence. I let go of my insult and fury; I think I was too exhausted to hang on to it. Still, I resisted resolution. Self-pity moved into the space left by anger. Poor me. I was alone in the world, without parents. This was sad, I was sad, I had the responsibility of Little Ahmed and no one to help me. How many times had I gone to sleep, to not sleep, fretting that I should not go on a reporting trip, that he needed to learn piano or how to ski or ride and that his father had not sent mone
y for two months. The voice interrupted, “And Little Ahmed? What about his fear and worries and you shouting, crying, drinking, railing, stuck in your own hermetic ranting grief, your stupid, blinded “It’s a war; us and them.” Then I remembered Little Ahmed’s face that night at Grégoire’s apartment, his mouth an open O: shock, humiliation, disgust. A wave of shame crashed through me as a sudden heaving nausea. I buckled over the yellow hole in the floor and tried not to drown the ant in vomit.

  “Poor me!” the voice mocked, merciless and sarcastic. And what about Ahmed? Motherless son with only-me-for-an-unmother, a terrible mother, selfish, stupid, hurtful—

  Wracked; spasms shook me until I was emptied.

  And becalmed. Poor Little Ahmed. For that matter, poor Ahmed in Baghdad with a killed father, a querulous aging mother, a country ripped apart and his son so far away, left behind for his own good. I had not thought of Ahmed leaving Little Ahmed in terms of sacrifice before; I had only thought about it as an abandonment. As I had been. I had so long blamed my father for leaving me, waited for him to come back and ask my forgiveness, that I had never wondered what shame and damage might keep an intelligent man from the daughter that he loved.

  I felt sorry then, for myself first, for my misunderstanding, and then for Dad, because it takes two to make a misunderstanding. And then for Ahmed who was only trying to give his son what his father had tried to give him. My thoughts unwound, untangled. As I was falling asleep, a sort of peacefulness entered my heart, something unknotted. It was not a debated sequence of thoughts, there was no remonstration, but a feeling, an emotional wash, hot water warming up a tepid bath. I thought about Grégoire’s brother Ahmed too, who was probably just trying to live a good life like the rest of us, and a deranged woman had come and yelled at him because she was angry with a bunch of killers who had nothing to do with him. Poor all the Ahmeds. Because we are all Ahmeds really.

  _____

  I slept the whole night, dead and dreamless. When I was taken upstairs in the morning, Paltoquet smiled and indicated the chair opposite him, suddenly solicitous as if I was joining him at a table in a café.