by Mary Byrne
Ahmed, passionate about words and their origins, draws from his jacket a notebook where he jots the links between Spanish and Arabic. He helps the local children with their lessons. He says the ‘Bosc’ in the village name is from Germanic and Latin roots and means ‘wood.’
Ahmed and Angel study words together. Angel has learnt the Arabic origins of some everyday words, place names and institutions: he has learnt that Gibraltar comes from Jbel Tarik, the mountain of Tarik, the Berber who once invaded Spain, that Europe’s oldest still- activemedical school in Montpellier, based its beginnings on writings of the Arab masters.
‘But we have more than all that in common,’ Ahmed says.
Angel slowly lifts his head from the coffee. ‘We are the lowest forms of life in the village.’
Ahmed points upwards, one hand on his heart, ‘And Allah watches out—’
‘So that neither of us will resort to a big nail on a beam.’ Angel laughs.
They drink good, strong coffee.
Listening to Ahmed and looking out at the vineyards in the blinding sunlight, Angel doesn’t marvel at the confusion and lack of purpose—other than eating and sleeping—of one small life. He repeats for his friend the proverb of the wise king, given him by his old schoolmaster as his only baggage before leaving home forever: Old wood best to burn, old books to read, old wine to drink and old friends to trust.
Nikodje’s Lap of Honor
The psychologist Georg Groddeck once said that even breaking your leg was no accident. I’m going to tell you a story about my father, and you can decide for yourselves.
My father was utterly transformed, the day he brought home his Mercedes Benz. He always called it by its full name, even long before it ever seemed possible that he’d actually own one. It stood there that first day, dazzling on the cobblestones, in shocking contrast to the shaky masonry and loose drainpipes of the buildings surrounding our yard.
Up to then, I’d always seen him as an apologetic man, slightly bent over—he even appeared to have a slight hump, although there was no deformity of any kind—as if he was constantly expecting a blow from somewhere. He was the sort of man who went around objects and avoided confrontation. One of those very large objects was my mother. She ran the show.
My mother is the sort of woman who takes up a lot of space. I am an only boy, with no sisters to compare myself with but I sometimes imagine that I must resemble my father and that this displeases her. Yet my father and I always complied with her wishes, one of which was that I do my damnedest to try for a prestigious Grand Ecole. This looked extremely unlikely in those early days, given the quarter, the local schools teeming with immigrants like ourselves, the lack of French people and language. Yet it was an admirable goal too, and she followed, supervised and helped—in her supreme unknowingness—every step of the slog-hard way till I passed those very competitive entrance exams. I’m in. This autumn is my first year, and I’m enjoying it thoroughly, even if I miss my father. How he would have enjoyed all of it. He’d have been so proud of everything—from the kind of work we students do, to sailing weekends on the coast with friends. The fact that I was more or less off their hands, with a good grant as well, was one of the reasons he was able to afford the new car. I comfort myself by thinking that he went out in a blaze of glory.
My mother’s apparent domination of him, and all those around her, is partly due to her job. It was she who found the job in France as concierge in the first place, probably she who pushed the plans forward and got them out of that infernal hole—‘down home,’ as they still call it. She put us on the map, you might say. She took over the job from a Portuguese couple who were heading home to realize their dream and live on a mountain up near Galicia, in a house they’d built themselves. Apart from my father’s dream of one day owning a Mercedes, I don’t know what other goals my parents had, back then.
It is unusual to have a Yugoslav guardian, most are Portuguese. Even though everyone now calls them gardiennes, the old enamel plaque on the wall, blue on white, still announces ‘Concierge’ proudly, an echo of a past when this position was something to be proud of, before those old Parisian busybodies drove it into disrepute by snooping and spying on all and sundry. There is the occasional one like that left, but they get short shrift these days. They have to behave themselves or their Christmas box gets reduced—and it’s not negligible, a tenth of a month’s rent. Not that a name-change was necessary in our quarter of northeast Paris: there is little enough prejudice against us, the inhabitants are poorer than we are, and in any case my mother meets all derision head-on. I doubt there’s anyone in the whole cube of buildings who would dare take her on.
Not that she didn’t have plenty of natural curiosity. I often saw her peer around people into the apartment when she delivered the mail, and she had a way of asking the simplest of questions. One day I realized that all she really sought was someone to tell her story to. She wasn’t sneaky either: she told people about all the apartments she and Father had bought and done up. The house in Brittany really impressed people, although you could see it was almost too much—farting higher than your arse, as the French say. Whenever someone called to our caretaker’s lodge near the old carriage doors, I was reminded of the contrast between the smallness and darkness of this, their lifelong abode, and the various other ones they owned and rented.
Everyone was coming to France when my parents made their way here, back in the 1970s. France needed workers, Tito let them go. I must have been the product of those early years of euphoria, and they obviously weren’t tempted twice. My mother ran the show, maintained a steady salary, delivered the mail to each door, kept residents in order and squalor to a minimum, cleaning stairs and sluicing out smelly communal toilets once a week, wheeling out heavy green bins at night. During all this, my father brought up the slack behind a sewing machine in whatever sweatshop had work going, sometimes all night if an order had to be produced quickly. He sewed sleeves for fancy suits for famous designer X, ribbons onto fur bobbles for famous designer Y, came home with his clothes covered in and coughing up the fluff of whatever fabric he’d been working on, kept a machine at home too, on which he did jobs for neighbors and friends and made scarves for children and zippered bags for sale in the markets from bags of offcuts.
The butt end of the rag trade has been changing recently. The ground floor workshops used to lie open onto the street, radio going full blast while foreign conversation, laughter and tears batted about. Nowadays machines hummed behind closed doors, and things are often run by the latest arrivals, the Chinese, whose workshops smell of rice and who never open doors, especially to anyone carrying a briefcase. Inscrutability and language incomprehension. At the post office, clerks spend half their time cashing refugee checks and helping the same people fill out postal orders for the folks back home. Just before the changeover to the Euro, the same post office was swamped by adolescents coming in relays to launder dirty money. There are rumors about the Triads, and trafficking in children. Who knows?
My mother at least learned to speak French, with an accent, while Father never took to either the people or the language, and hardly spoke a word of it at his death, twenty years later. His free time was spent in the Yugoslav cafes and restaurants round the quarter, places that stand out in their cleanliness and tidiness, and where the food and the television are focused on a greater Serbia, and where every shot of the wars in Bosnia and Kossovo was studiously followed, discussed, analyzed. It can’t have been easy for him to hang around with other second-class citizens like himself, but then it can’t have been easy for my mother either. She comes from proud peasant stock, people who always owned their own land and beasts, controlled their sources of income, people who kept themselves to themselves. My father was a townie. But whatever drew them together was stronger than what divided them, and they arrived in France together and never went back home once, in all the twenty years.
Until my fathe
r decided to drive his new Mercedes down there this summer.
It was early summer when he drove it into the yard. The sun glinted hotly off its dark sheen, and most of us circled it several times to get used to the feel of being near its greatness, before we examined the details or dreamed of sitting in it.
Father was in a frenzy of activity. He made his way time after time, over and back to the house for cushions, gewgaws to hang on the mirror, a bead thing for sitting on. Each time he made the journey he moved like a man in his own world, oblivious of us all, giving my mother a wide berth. She hung back, watching him with an amused smile on her face, pleased for him, but not really involved. In all the years they had bought, restored and rented apartments she had never seen him so satisfied. The real estate investments had been her pleasure. He’d gone along with it, humped bags of rubble up and down stairs, tiled and plastered and hammered in his spare time. They’d kept me away from all that, sure that I would never need to get my hands dirty. And throughout it all my father had talked and dreamed of one thing only: the day he would own a Mercedes Benz.
It smelt factory-new. Most of the hangers-on in the quarter had a sit in it before my mother and I were finally invited to hit the road for a jaunt. It struck me how youthful my mother looked when she was happy. She wears big skirts and has kept her hair long, and when the invitation finally came, I was surprised to notice her hesitantly finger her apron strings like a girl, unsure of herself. For the first time in my life I saw her confidence thrown, yet I think even this pleased her. I had the impression that my father got as much of a kick out of people’s reactions to it as he would from actually driving the car, until I saw him behind the wheel.
Behind the wheel he began to unfold, like a morning flower. His shoulders straightened, he held his chin higher. The humpback disappeared. His hands on the controls were those of a confident multi-millionaire, someone who had this in his blood. From time to time he looked at us, smiling, as if to ask, ‘What do you think?’ or ‘Not bad, eh?’
But he didn’t utter a word. Words might have choked him. He slipped in and out of the traffic like a man who did it every day. Years of driving the old van around workshops and handyman stores helped, but nothing had prepared us for this style, this panache.
I had a new father, and Mother had a new man.
It wasn’t long before he announced that he intended to drive down home, to their home place near the border with Kossovo. They had a month’s holidays every summer, during which they usually faithfully headed off for Brittany, in imitation of the French. I could take or leave Brittany with its sunburnt tourists and its changeable weather, but I never dared complain given all they were doing everything for me. If I were to fail, I sometimes reminded myself, they would probably consider their lives to have been in vain.
It was then that I realized why they had never gone home, in all that time. Of course they were curious now to see how things really were, ‘down home,’ after all the bombing. There had been increasing talk of depleted uranium and how much of it had been spread about. But the real reason they had never ventured back, I realized now, was that they never felt themselves quite rich or presentable enough. By not getting involved with ‘down home,’ they had also avoided the cargo-ing back and forth of big plastic bags full of the produce needed down there or missed up here. They had escaped the shared concerns of sending money home, getting a lift home, finding a new and cheap way of phoning home (a phone booth on rue de Belleville functions without money, its location a precious well-known secret). Most of the immigrants, when the farm down home was completely equipped, went on to finance the restoration of the old house, then the new house. Since their own lives were sacrificed anyway, the emigrants were even beginning to finance a whole new generation coming along at home, in a variety of jobs from bakeries to more sweatshops.
My parents avoided all that, the endless yelling phone calls, the bitching, the whining, the discussions about how much it cost to repatriate the body. They never went home for holidays, never talked about home, and had gone for French nationality as soon as they were able. They seemed to take pleasure in the restoration work they did, and nothing pleased Mother more than showing people the work they had learned to do from scratch, pointing out details of tiling and wallpapering. You could see it wasn’t everyone’s taste, but it was neat and clean. They just grafted ahead with another apartment purchase, another renovation, all their money and energy tied up in that, and in me. When they started they couldn’t stop, for they had never decided what the limits were to be.
The Mercedes, however, suddenly seemed to do the trick. I could see them becoming more and more enthusiastic about the idea of going home. They got out the maps and planned the journey and phoned people and arranged an itinerary. They would go via Austria and drop in on family there. Very soon the Mercedes was choc-a-block with stuff going to this one and that, including a dismantled sewing machine for a niece in Austria who was about to be set up on the path of the sewing life.
What had possibly set the Mercedes purchase in motion was a relatively harmless incident which had annoyed Father severely. One day he was sent across town to deliver a microscopic skirt to one of the big name designers. The van broke down, so he took the metro. Most people would have been glad of the excuse to take it easy for an hour or two. Not my father. He liked to work, at all times. One of his biggest criticisms of Albanians is that they just don’t work: he called them Sheptar, a nasty down-home word for them that I knew he heard used often in the cafes roundabout. Mother disapproved of it, and every time he used it she would glance at me quickly and hiss ‘Nikodje!’ at him reprovingly, in a shocked voice.
What made the designer skirt episode worse was the insult when he arrived at the designer’s place on the other side—the rich side—of town. His boss had forgotten to give him the pattern that went with it. They were furious, probably suspecting his workshop of making a hasty copy. And maybe they had, although my father and mother severely disapproved of anything dishonest. It probably goes on all the time. Whatever the case, he then had to turn around and come back across town again, pick up the minuscule pattern and humbly make his way back with it. His boss refused to pay for a taxi, and for some reason my father never dreamed of rising up and paying for one with his own money. It was a dull wet Parisian day. The metro was sluggish. He just shunted over and back across town seething inwardly at the way he’d been treated: the implication of dishonesty, the lack of reliable transport, the role of go-between.
Or it could have been the incident with the Chinaman at the dentist’s, early that same morning. Mother had a tendency to underline the nationality of the people she talked about. Father simply grunted: ‘Même pas français’ (They aren’t even French) was a frequent refrain of his. Sometimes it seemed the only phrase in French that he knew.
Earlier that morning, a Chinese man—or a man Father assumed to be Chinese and who could in fact have been from anywhere between Mongolia and Japan and was most likely Vietnamese—had closed the door in his face, the door into the dentist’s building. ‘Can’t let you in,’ the man had said, ‘ring the bell of the apartment you want.’ Father had to ring the bell again and wait till the dentist’s secretary pressed the button to release the catch. By that time Father was furious. It wasn’t so much the door, as the fact that it had been a ‘foreigner’ that had refused him entry. ‘Même pas français,’ Father said dejectedly at dinner that evening. I didn’t point out that many Vietnamese had probably been ‘French’ long before Father.
He must have ordered the new car straight away, because it arrived a month later. After the initial preparations and a couple of shorter jaunts, they were ready to try the Périphérique, the Paris ring-road, and head for home. My mother arranged for a neighboring concierge to take over her chores, and they dressed up and set off, complete with maps and picnic, abstemious to the last. They had refused extra passengers, so as not to make enemies.
> It was a fine July morning. I didn’t anticipate trouble. Rejoicing at having the place to myself for the first time ever and doing all the things normally forbidden, I was spreading myself around the kitchen. I hadn’t washed the breakfast dishes. I was reading at table.
Suddenly the phone rang.
Mother sounded a bit shaky, but unhurt. She was calling from the main halls of a hospital.
Father had had a major coronary at the wheel, and had hit the side barrier going fairly fast.
Mother had been saved by airbags and comfort, but Father was gone. The car was a twisted write-off.
‘Your father had his lap of honor, Christian,’ she kept saying, ‘Nikodje had his lap of honor. He died happy. We did a tour of the Périphérique before his heart exploded.’
Then she cried.
I told her to wait for me in the lobby of the hospital, and grabbed my coat.
Musical Interlude
It is eleven at night, a short walk from the centre of Paris. Suddenly, very loud rap music blasts from the open windows of the second floor of number 22, rue Saint Louis. Most people are already in bed; many of them get up and leave before dawn to head for sweatshops and building sites. Some heads appear in the few lighted windows, and wait.
After a while six young men appear on the street. They are known as Beurs, a name adopted for themselves by young people of North African families. Beur represents Arab, in Verlan or backwards slang. The young men whistle up at the noisy window, but of course they can’t be heard over the music. As if by magic, a policeman appears in the doorway opposite. He watches and listens to the crackle of his walkie-talkie. It is only when the boys whistle and roar in concert that the head of another Beur like them finally emerges from the window with the noise. ‘Are ye deaf or what?’ the boys inquire. He looks down at them uncomprehendingly. They smile. ‘Ye eejit,’ says one of them, ‘turn the goddamn music down!’
