Paris Metro
Page 33
Back at the house, Alexandre popped the champagne and we opened our presents. Books and socks and scarves piled up amid drifts of wrapping paper.
“The best gifts,” said Jean, “keep us warm and feed our minds.”
He gave Little Ahmed a catalogue of an Ellsworth Kelly show, because he knew Little Ahmed loved the bright colors and the abstraction. Alexandre gave him a special membership card to the Louvre. Margot gave him a lithograph by a local artist of a whale with a Jonah figure crouching, gestate, inside its belly. Zorro had brought him a Congolese mask made of teak and carved with concentric grooves rubbed with red earth. The face was half monkey, half man, and had an expression of curiosity and mischief. “Somehow it reminded me of you,” he told Little Ahmed, and Little Ahmed grinned and held it up to his face and we all said, Absolutely! The spitting image!
I gave Little Ahmed a large leather portfolio case filled with different kinds of paper, pressed linen, cotton rag, hemp, parchment, papyrus, watercolor card, and every weight of cartridge I could find. “Blank canvases,” I said as Little Ahmed ran his fingers over their planes with a quiet reverence. “Each a new beginning, each a different medium—”
“It’s like I have to figure out what the paper wants,” said Little Ahmed. “Water or oil or charcoal or pencil or pastel.” He felt the sharp edges of the acid-free cartridge paper and the soft frayed hem of a hand-rolled Indian silk-slub cotton mix. “And to figure out what to draw too—because some are rough and some are really slippery, supersmooth. Some say jagged, because you can’t draw a clean arc, it would snag on the texture. Some are so shiny it’s like they are just telling me: try to draw a perfect oval egg.” He came over and hugged me and kissed my forehead. Benediction. “Cool, Kit-ma, thanks.” Maybe it would be alright wherever we were, two mongrel outcasts brought together by fate, by love, by absent Ahmeds.
Then Little Ahmed opened the brown paper parcel his father had sent him. Inside was a lump of bubble wrap. He gently unrolled it to reveal a small cylinder of green agate. It was an ancient cuneiform seal. Little Ahmed held it up to the fairy lights on the Christmas tree and examined the carving.
“It’s a lion!”
Alexandre peered over his demilune tortoiseshell glasses. “In fact it’s a winged lion. An Assyrian winged lion. It must be three thousand years old. Extraordinary.”
I held the seal in my palm, felt its delicate heft, and saw how the light shone against it and through it, luminous and opaque. I was amazed at this tiny thing that had survived civilization and its ruin, the fall of empires, invasion and conquest and bandits, buried, lost, found, probably looted, to be safely delivered to a son of the land between the two great rivers.
ALSO BY WENDELL STEAVENSON
Stories I Stole
The Weight of a Mustard Seed: The Intimate Story of an Iraqi General and His Family During Thirty Years of Tyranny
Circling the Square: Stories from the Egyptian Revolution
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2018 by Wendell Steavenson
All rights reserved
First Edition
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Steavenson, Wendell, 1970– author.
Title: Paris metro : a novel / Wendell Steavenson.
Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017052636 | ISBN 9780393609783 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Women journalists—Fiction. | Americans—France—Fiction. | Mothers and sons—Fiction. | Terrorism—Psychological aspects—Fiction. | Domestic fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3619.T43 P37 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017052636
ISBN 978-0-393-60979-0 (e-book)
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