Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  “Would you like a coffee?”

  “Yeah.”

  He handed me a Starbucks cappuccino. Some kind of civilization had returned.

  “I can tell you now”—he seemed to suggest that it was with relief—“that Ahmed, your son, was questioned for two hours and then released into the custody of Alexandre Delacroix. He has been there for the past three days. Delacroix instructed a lawyer on your behalf, but unfortunately you refused legal representation on the first day and therefore he had no authority to visit you.”

  “You could have told me earlier. I did not refuse legal representation. I did not understand what the man was saying.”

  “In any case, you will be released shortly. Your period of garde-à-vue has expired and there is no evidence with which to detain you further.”

  “What was the charge?”

  “There is no charge.”

  “I mean what did you hope to charge me with?”

  “I did not hope to charge you. My job is simply to investigate.”

  “Yes, but to investigate what?”

  He did not answer. I noticed that Paltoquet was alone. No whippet. He sat back in his chair, as a gesture of informality.

  “Tell me, Catherine. What do you believe in?” His voice changed tone, the sounds were longer and more gentle.

  “I am not a real Muslim,” I said. “I told you this.”

  “You are a Christian.”

  “No.”

  “You have no religious affiliation.”

  “No, that’s not true. I have Christian affiliation. I am culturally Christian. But don’t ask me to believe in Christianity. Virgin births and resurrection and the mysterious Holy Spirit. It’s spooky and weird, this stuff. It’s absurd to believe in the supernatural.”

  “But of them all, Christianity is the one you prefer.”

  “Not really, it is only the one I grew up with, so—”

  “So?”

  “If you are really asking me, I have no preference. All of them have their holy fools and their murderers.”

  “When you arrived, you said that you were not like them. When I asked about your belief and your belief in Islam, you said: I am not like them. Your them was Muslims.”

  “My son is Muslim, I cannot disassociate myself from the son that I love. He is not them.”

  “So who is your us?”

  “It’s all of us,” I said.

  “All of us, in the context of laïcité?”

  “No, just us, just people. Who want to live the way we want to live without hurting anyone.”

  “Perhaps you believe in the rule of law? Something more secular?” Paltoquet suggested. This conversation was off the books. He had no dossiers in front of him.

  “Not laws,” I said. “The Americans make a cult of lawyers and argue every constitutional point with the same hermetic intensity as Islamic scholars debate the Koran. Every comma has its own interpretation. The British love their law and order, but for them it is a policeman with a truncheon. The policeman is the establishment, the establishment is the complicity of the majority. Step out of line and they won’t kill you but they will give you a bloody nose. This they believe is reasonable and decent, what they call “cricket.” But if you want to actually change something in Britain, you will find yourself an infidel apostate. In Britain you are allowed to be—and this is more insidious—an eccentric. If you think differently you are allowed to exist but you will never be taken seriously.”

  “So you are a revolutionary?”

  “No. Revolutions require ideology and I don’t like ideologies. All theories are bunk. Plus revolutions require violence and I don’t like violence, because I think it only breeds more violence.”

  “A kind of karma,” said Paltoquet.

  “I don’t know anything about Eastern spirituality.”

  “You would be a reformer.”

  “I would, if I could be bothered,” I said. “But I am too lazy to be an activist.”

  “You believe in everyone equal,” he said, more hopefully.

  “No, this would reduce everyone to the lowest common denominator. This is communism. People are different, not equal.”

  “You believe perhaps, that everyone should have the same opportunity—I am thinking of your son Ahmed now—who you decided to raise in France. That the state should provide the system, the umbrella for everyone to be treated as equal.”

  “I hate umbrellas, they poke people’s eyes out with their spokes.”

  “It’s a metaphor, Catherine. That everyone should be regarded as equal.”

  “Utopian idiocy.”

  “So you believe in nothing?”

  I did not reply. Did I see the edge of a smile on his pallid plain face interrupted with a brown spot? For a full minute Paltoquet looked at me closely and I looked back at him. He had a few white hairs at his temples I had not noticed before. He wore a wedding band on his left hand. The river delta of blue veins were visible on the inside of his wrist. He was nobody, a common type; almost anonymous. A cog in a machine. But a state is not a machine, it is a system, a polity, a community. And the mechanism is not operated by metal-toothed components but individuals, people. Bigger or smaller, powerful or not powerful, each of us is only ourself.

  SEVEN

  I was released from garde-à-vue after ninety-four hours in detention. My bag and our two computers and my telephones were returned to me, and I took a taxi home. The door was closed with a plastic cord taped over a legal notice. I turned my key in the lock and broke the cord and ripped off the official form. Inside was a mess of overturned boxes, papers dumped everywhere, and books toppled out of the bookcases onto the floor. The fridge door had been left open and was beeping. I closed it and plugged in my phone.

  I sat in the middle of my wrecked living room and thought, What now? I sat very still for a while waiting for an answer. None came. I got bored of waiting and so I stood up and began to tidy. Books in piles, reshelved, papers reordered, furniture righted. Put it back, make it home again.

  Alexandre brought Little Ahmed over that evening. I was nervous. I heard the clang of the antiquated lift stop at our floor. I wanted to fling open the door and rush out in a great excitement of homecoming reunion, but I wasn’t sure how Little Ahmed would react. I didn’t want to impose, to crowd him. So I waited until I heard him knock before I opened the door. Little Ahmed stood on the threshold, smiling at me despite himself.

  “So they finally let you out of prison, jailbird mother—” His voice was punchy, wisecracking. He was trying to be grown-up and cool. “They arrested me too, you know. At school, I swear, I have so much street cred now it's ridiculous.”

  “Are you OK, my Medio?” I reached out tentatively to touch his hair. Yes, he was here, he was really here.

  “Hey.” He hugged me. He smelled like teenage unwashed sweatshirt left out in the rain, sweetly sour, so very much of him. “So I’m really glad you’re out and everything, but it doesn’t mean I’m not still mad at you.”

  “I’m pretty mad at me too.”

  _____

  Margot suggested we stay with her in Brittany for a few weeks. Oz gave me time off. “We’ll call it book leave.” I was grateful not to have to organize my thoughts into sentences and paragraphs.

  It was hard to talk: I had used so many wrong words that now I mistrusted them. My moods were brittle and unsure of themselves. Little Ahmed was wary of me, as I was wary of him. I was frightened to say sorry out loud in case he did not forgive me. “Time, a little time,” repeated Margot soothingly. “It will come when you’re both ready.” She tended us carefully. She took Little Ahmed for coffee every morning, listened, let him talk. I was jealous, but she said that it was natural for him to want to talk to someone who was not me and that it was natural for me to resent this. I submitted myself to her explanations. I did not know better.

  Blue sea, blue sky. Little Ahmed went out in the waves every day with his surfboard with the other winter seals in wetsuits. I w
alked the beach and dug cockles at low tide, heavy wet sand under my fin gernails, scraping down to find a solid walnut lump, a fleeting nugget of joy. Time passed according to the rhythms of the tides, the swell of the surf, wind, rain, sun. I swam through the days—eventually giving in to Little Ahmed’s admonition and buying my own wetsuit—vanquishing the cold, embracing it, stretching broad strokes across the bay and floating back with the incoming tide, letting the sea wash me out and a hot shower warm me up again.

  “I’ll come swimming with you, Kit-ma,” Little Ahmed said one lulled afternoon. “The waves are too small to surf.” I looked at Margot and she smiled encouragingly.

  “Are you sure?” I said. “I’d love to have company.”

  I followed him down the sandy path between the dunes. Long lean man-cub, his hair had grown longer, more surf dude. I wanted to tell him that I liked it. I wanted to tell him a million things. He was striding ahead and I called out, “Ahmed!” but the wind blew the words away. I couldn’t bear the thought of going into the water with an ocean unsaid, so I ran up and caught his hand.

  “What?”

  “Everything!”

  “What do you mean?”

  But I couldn’t explain. “Thank you for coming swimming with me.”

  “It’s OK.”

  I bit my lip.

  “I don’t actually hate you, you know,” he said.

  “Oh thank god.”

  “You’re my mother after all,” he made a mock smile. “I have to love you.”

  _____

  Margot was right. Over the seaside weeks the space between us lessened. We began to talk to each other. At first, about waves and barnacles and what fish to buy for supper; then watching old episodes of Law & Order, about lawyers and law, about prison and questioning and questions, about answers too. I said “I’m sorry” a hundred times, and every time—in one way or another, an eye roll, a kiss on my cheek, a hug, sometimes even in clear direct words, Ahmed said, it’s OK, I get it, I understand.

  At Christmas everyone gathered in Locquirec. Alexandre brought smoked salmon and caviar. Zorro flew in from Kinshasa with a tan. He took pictures of us, mother and son, standing apart, sitting next to each other on a big flat beach rock, coming out of the sea and struggling to peel off our wetsuits. In one, my favorite picture, I am staring off at some distant storm cloud and Little Ahmed is grinning behind my back, about to put a crab down my neck. On Christmas Eve, Margot cooked a whole turbot for dinner and we all sat around and ate it with our fingers the way Iraqis eat mazgouf.

  “I don’t want the New Year to come,” I admitted to Margot, washing up in the kitchen afterwards. “I don’t want to go home, it feels like going back is going backwards.”

  “I understand, these weeks here by the sea are like a holiday from your life. But it’s inevitable, you have to face it again. Work and school, all the usual pressures. You and Little Ahmed will be alone together and you are finding a new language, a different way of communicating. Both of you, I can see it happening already. I know it’s not easy, but don’t worry too much. Of course you will argue, there will be misunderstandings, there will be slammed doors; it doesn’t matter. It matters what you do afterwards, how you handle these moments. Little Ahmed looks up to you.”

  “Little Ahmed despises me,” I said. Margot passed me a tea towel to dry the wineglasses. “Careful,” she cautioned, “they were Jean’s mother’s.”

  I gently rubbed the thin tulip bowl of one of the glasses. The linen damply absorbed the water drops, the linen would dry, and the water would evaporate and fall again as rain, or tears. “I feel like the more I apologize, the more he just says “Yeah, it’s OK,” as if its rote and he feels like he has to say that, but he doesn’t really forgive me.”

  “That’s just his grumpy thirteen-year-old defenses, the prickly pear exterior. See how he brings you his drawings to look at. He’s looking for your approval.”

  “But he always asks, ‘What do you think Rousse would say?’ ”

  “But he wants you to tell him. To be his bridge to her. He wants your opinion too.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe we shouldn’t stay in Paris. But then where should we go? Could we move to Good Harbor Bay? To London? Should I try and find someplace where he can see his father more often—even though, God, right now I don’t want to see Ahmed ever again.”

  “Home is not a place,” said Margot. “It’s not a location. It’s a feeling you carry inside, in your heart, in your imagination. You take it with you.”

  _____

  We lit the fire in the library and banked the logs. Zorro taught Little Ahmed how to blow the bellows and make the orange flame dance. Circle of radiant heat. Jean poured an old jigsaw puzzle of a nighttime seascape out onto the coffee table.

  “Fifty shades of blue,” complained Little Ahmed.

  “I’m sure there are pieces missing,” said Margot. “I think I remember from the last time we tried to do it.”

  “We’ve never completed it,” admitted Jean. “I think we just said there were pieces missing as an excuse.”

  We found the corners first, the easy bits. Little Ahmed had answered my phone on October 31 and forgot to tell me. Fitted together the edges, made a frame. When he was arrested, Little Ahmed had put up his hands straightaway and admitted that he had been stenciling the Kalashnikov firing madeleines all over the city. A charge of dégradation d’espace publique was pending, but since Little Ahmed was a minor, Jean was sure the lawyer could get the matter dropped. Zorro told him he should be proud. Especially as he had maintained that he had acted alone and kept Grégoire’s name out of it.

  The moon shone on the patches of sea and made a white path that we managed to put together. Little Ahmed said there were no secret meetings in Amman, no imams or commanders or passed notes, no code in the postcards. Aba was ever Aba, always his father, anyway.

  “Where are the dolphin tails?” said Little Ahmed. “They’re gray, we should be able to see them.”

  Ahmed had been in Washington while I was in prison. I hadn’t spoken to him—I didn’t want to speak with him yet. But it was all a complicated misunderstanding, he had assured us remotely. A Defense Department official called an opposite number in the DGSE, France’s external intelligence agency, an understanding was understood. Ahmed was privately told not to travel to France for the foreseeable future. He told Little Ahmed he would be moving to Istanbul soon and they could meet there. Little Ahmed was not sure he wanted to go by himself. “Yes, Aba, OK. No, she’s gone out,” he covered for me, “she can’t talk now.”

  Alexandre and Jean swapped theories. Margot said they should let it go, the truth will out in its own time, but the coruscations of plot were too beguiling. Ahmed was arming Syrian jihadis for the Americans, he was coopting lesser ISIS affiliates, he was playing a long game, helping the Sunni against the Shia. “That would have the effect of dovetailing with American and Saudi strategic interests,” Alexandre dissected, “and preventing a Shia landmass bloc from forming between Tehran and Hezbollah . . .”

  “But at what cost?” Jean was always suspicious of theoretical diplomatics. He thought governments tended to react, like people, emotionally, knee jerk, revenge, swipe, slight, and pride. “Long-term strategic interests—I think these are the dreams of retired ambassadors.”

  “Maybe.” Alexandre conceded. “At least for democracies. Elections make all planning subject to short-term expediency.”

  “But to arm the jihadis?” said Jean.

  “He was already talking about it in 2011,” Alexandre said. “At the monastery in Syria. He wanted to know how far in France would go, how far in I thought the British would go. If Russia was bluster or not. The point for Ahmed, I think, was always to oppose Iran. He inherited a very Baathie hatred of Iran.”

  “All Arabs distrust Persians,” said Jean.

  “But still,” mused Alexandre, “to arm jihadists, to deal with ISIS . . .”

  “Think about it,” said Jea
n, “to him ISIS were not so scary. He probably knew those guys, they were Iraqis, a lot of them, from Samarra, Tikrit, they were old Saddam era officers, leftover Awakening commanders . . . Muntazzer’s sons . . . they were his childhood friends.”

  I kept working on the foreground, putting puzzle pieces together, fitting black tab into black socket.

  “He thought the Shia had to be defeated, pushed back, contained, yes,” I said. Alexandre and Jean turned towards me. “But he thought that the answer to the violence, the jihad, the endless cycle of the tortured turning into torturer, was to discredit the ideology. What did he say? ‘Give it enough rope to hang itself.’ By inoculation. Let them have their caliphate and then everyone can see what a brutal absurdity Sharia is.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Little Ahmed. “Look! I found a piece of the dolphin tail!” He held up a puzzle shape triumphantly. “It doesn’t matter what my father thought he was doing or what he did. I don’t really care. It’s the same as my grandfather. Is he the perpetrator because he was in the Baath Party, or is he the victim because Saddam killed him? He’s still my grandfather. I wish I had known him. I wish I could go to see the banks of the Tigris with my father and my grandfather and eat the famous kebabs. Maybe one day I will go with my dad. Maybe one day he will be able to come here and we can walk on the beach together. Or we can meet in America, in my other grandparent place in Good Harbor Bay. I don’t care where we meet. I only wish that my mother wasn’t dead and that Rousse wasn’t dead, that lots of people who were killed didn’t die. It would be better for everyone. The rest of us left over just have to get on with it. It doesn’t make any difference what the reasons are or whose fault it all is. That’s all I’m saying. Look, it goes there. The dolphin tail is making a splash—where’s the white droplet piece, I saw it here a moment ago . . .”

  _____

  On Christmas morning we walked along the beach, and Little Ahmed and Zorro drew holly leaves in the wet sand with sticks. Curves, concave and convex, met in a sharp point. I pondered the uselessness of metaphors and added fat round berries to their leaves.