by Mary Byrne
Someone had remembered the Chinese, and the firemen began to hammer at the big steel door. No light could be seen over the heavily barred transom. Everyone knew about the ground-floor room, but Frank also knew that underneath it was a vaulted basement, for he once had to accompany the manager on a check of some kind. It was filled with rows of sewing machines.
This would be sport, Frank thought, for the Chinese never opened to anyone except another Chinese. You never saw them come or go, just the occasional suit with a briefcase, knocking and getting no reply. Even the roach-and-rat-killer didn’t get in. ‘Much use the rest of us paying for extermination,’ Bea had grumbled, ‘if there’s a center of production in the basement.’ This was an unusually mean comment, for Bea. It was a complex subject: the owner of the basement was one of the building co-owners, so they often found themselves at meetings with him, an equal of sorts. This irked Bea, who put him on the level of the other ‘sleep merchants’ of Belleville who rented crowded dormitories full of bunk beds. This one rented it through a Chinese agency, while renting all his other rat holes personally, getting what he called a ‘big Malabar’ from across the city limits in Aubervilliers to collect the rent. Frank had seen the ‘Malabar’: he was big and black and brooked no discussion. ‘They pay the rent or they get out,’ the owner told him.
It took nearly an hour for the firemen to break in the café door. When it finally flew open, black smoke billowed upwards and into all the open windows.
It could be a scene from Balzac, Frank thought, before Napoleon III instructed the Baron Haussmann to sanitize the city, demolishing left, right, and center and producing the Paris that everyone knew today.
Frank’s architect friend Crollo (from his proper name, C. Rollo) had found their apartment for them, and had first told Frank about Haussmann. He pronounced it ‘Ozman,’ like they all did, so that at first Frank thought he was talking about a Turk. Paris had been medieval until Haussmann sorted it out. The odd thing was that their quarter had gone up precisely at the same time that Haussmann was knocking down tenements and putting up elegant apartments elsewhere. Crollo reckoned their buildings were built with material from a giant Haussmannian demolition tip. Even the beams in their apartment were second-hand. ‘Just imagine what a quarter like this must have replaced,’ Bea said. Here, in the center of town, some well-meaning soul had put up these modest but correct buildings for poor workers. ‘So they could exploit them better,’ said Crollo. The still-operational but much-ignored rules stipulated when clothes could be hung out and carpets beaten. Curiously, parrots had been forbidden to nineteenth-century workers.
Blue and orange flames suddenly broke out in the café, and firemen were silhouetted struggling before them, through the smoke. Frank imagined Humphrey Bogart and Michèle Morgan curling in the heat.
Bea and some of the women were getting into a terrible state. There was nothing Frank could do. He found he wanted to say nothing either. He knew he was a bad painter—it had taken him two years to finish a portrait of Bea. Oddly, he remembered his trunk of adolescent scribblings—it was up there, and it had traveled with him everywhere. It was crap, but he wanted to drool over it one more time. He wanted to clean out his cupboards and drawers and burn it all or take it all to the dump and then write one last thing that would last.
Djilali dug him in the ribs and signaled that he should listen to the conversation behind them.
‘They do it for the insurance money,’ a voice was saying. ‘They can set the fire off at a distance.’
There were vague suggestions of how this could be done with modern technology. Frank recognized the speaker, an older man of some seventy years he often saw on the street. One day, pointing to a pool of urine on a footpath, the same man said viciously to Frank, ‘Macaques.’ Frank was so surprised he said, ‘What?’ ‘They’re like monkeys,’ the older man said, ‘straight out of the jungle.’ Frank had simply stared at him and walked on. He told himself he hadn’t argued because there was no point, no possibility of being heard. Afterwards he realized it was a failure of nerve. Seeing the man again in the same mode, he was sufficiently annoyed to want to atone.
He turned to speak.
But Djilali caught his arm. He smiled and shook his head. He seemed to be amused.
‘Half of them are illegal, too,’ the old man went on.
The last item was true. In the café Frank often ran into young men who had slipped into the country and worked extremely hard to send money home, but who—without rental contracts and service bills—couldn’t prove residence or apply for papers. They could go neither forwards or backwards, couldn’t marry, couldn’t relax vigilance, couldn’t ever do anything like a normal resident. The café was the only place they could let go for a couple of hours. This was Frank’s idea of hell. He presumed they weren’t afraid to talk to him because he was a regular and on handshaking terms with the Algerian women and Djilali.
He caught Djilali’s twinkling eye, and they both began to laugh.
An axe was being applied to the Chinese steel door. A light went on inside, and voices were heard crying out. The firemen made no language concessions, merely repeating what they’d said to Frank earlier, in French, finishing with the polite but menacing ‘Monsieur’ or ‘Madame.’
The crowd stood back as firemen inside the cafe broke the reinforced plate glass windows and threw them into the street.
Bea began to cry, and was taken away by a neighbor for a change of clothes and hot tea. Frank nodded assent, but felt he couldn’t get involved, that he had to stay where he was.
Suddenly he understood the graffito that was scrawled inside their hall door and attributed to Nietzsche: The desert grows; woe to him who conceals deserts within himself. At least he thought that was what it meant. His German was rusty. He had always thought the quote was destined wryly at the general situation of the building, the street, the quarter. He still saw it all rather like he had from the start: Dante’s Inferno with the worst levels at the bottom of the hill, those tenements onto which the whole hill seemed to lean and drain, squeezing them into an agony of bulges and fissures, expansion and contraction, of buckling and dirt livened by the whispers of the army of parasites that lived off them all.
A long and winding street at the bottom, near the canal, was reputed to have once been part of Haussmann’s cloaca maxima, a brand new drainage system modeled on the original one in ancient Rome. Frank could just see it, paved and concave in the middle for the sludge. Crollo also said that termites had heard the news and were on their way. He had seen them in other quarters: ‘They go straight through concrete to get to a wooden beam on the other side.’ Bea was terrified they’d have to pay a fortune and pump chemicals into the walls as well.
Architects could be frightening, Frank supposed, but he found Crollo strangely comforting. He lived around the corner in a similar apartment to theirs, his clothes dried on a wooden contraption hoisted over the bath. Crollo wasn’t a bad architect, he was a practical one, and like some of the doctors and dentists on their side of town, he didn’t go for fancy offices and fancy jobs. ‘Everyone needs an architect like everyone needs a dentist,’ he said. ‘It’s not the style of the waiting room that counts.’ Crollo was a rare animal, a professional living in a real-time world of Paris populaire, shoveling shit and surprised at nothing.
Ten years ago as a fresh young architect Crollo had had trouble finding builders to work with him in the quarter. ‘This can’t be Paris!’ the first one had declared. ‘Whole thing should be bulldozed. Cracks and fissures I could stick my head in!’ A builder Frank had called recently for an estimate persisted in thinking they were all tenants. ‘City Hall own it?’ the man enquired confidently. When Frank said they were owners, he laughed dramatically.
There had been a more sinister incident, when Bea went to the police to report the theft of her bike. ‘You live where?’ the policewoman asked, when she heard the address. ‘You o
wn or rent?’ She looked genuinely shocked when Bea said they had bought. ‘Sell, madame! Get out before it’s too late!’ Bea had come back clearly shaken. Frank suspected the police of wanting the status quo to remain—Them versus Us, without confusion from incoming Bobo-Lilies, as the newer bohemian-liberal occupants were dubbed.
He and Bea continued to cling to the side of the hill like everyone else. The population was now three times the density of the richer west side of town. In mid-nineteenth century, when these houses were built, it had only been double. But Crollo was optimistic in the early days, and continued to be so now. He presided over an association that prevented the whole thing from being demolished, disappointing developers ready to make a killing. One had threatened to take him up a dark alley. Crollo just laughed: ‘People are tired of the ‘60s ghettos covered in white WC tiling. Militants are abroad. They have to move more cautiously. When he was Mayor of Paris, Chirac spent six hundred Euros a day on food. The mayor of another district got dead people out to vote.’
‘If I were you, I’d watch my back on a dark night all the same,’ Frank told him.
But Crollo was right, change was on the way. More and more young trendies were buying in. Young second-generation Arabs in the street spread rumors that these Bobo-Lilies used crack and cocaine and worked in TV. ‘This place’ll be as fashionable as the Marais soon,’ they said, taking another drag on a joint. ‘Who do you think we sell our dope to?’
Djilali’s mobile rang. ‘Gigondas or Chirouble?’ he pretended to reflect. ‘Bring both,’ he grinned.
‘Ex-wife,’ he explained. ‘Has her own restaurant, just got rid of last customer. I’ve dinner ready for her. Likes to eat out in the early hours occasionally. Way to your ex-wife is through her stomach.’
Decidedly, Frank thought, Belleville was a very complicated place. He wondered if Djilali lived off his ex-wife.
Suddenly the large Chinese double steel doors were flung open. The scene inside resembled a theatre set. Top lit, the walls were lined with single beds with colorful bedclothes. On these, up to a dozen Chinese sat or lay in various positions, drugged from smoke and trying to wake up. The firemen didn’t waste any time and soon these pale actors were helped off the stage, past the crowd. Without as much as a word or glance they headed off barefoot as for a definite destination. Frank hoped no one was sleeping in the cellar workshop.
‘Beats the smell of durian, I suppose,’ said a new voice. Crollo had arrived, at last, in a warm hooded jacket. He handed another to Frank.
‘Enjoy the show,’ said Frank bravely. He thought he might cry.
‘They’ll get it under control,’ said Crollo. ‘There’s a lot worse than this.’ He handed Frank a quart bottle of whiskey. They both took a swig then gave one to Djilali, who then headed off to meet his ex.
Bea had already had a run-in with the local youths. It had destabilized her. They had taken on many of the newcomers, especially those their own age. Especially the women. On hearing voices raised in the street Bea had shot down the stairs, arriving to find three young men harassing a middle-aged female blow-in about Bush and the war in Iraq. They had blocked her path and were showing her a photo from a website. ‘What do you think of that, madame?’ they were asking threateningly. Bea rode in to the rescue; there were words, and a good-looking young Arab in a white tracksuit came out of the café and threw a cup of coffee in Bea’s face. She didn’t back down, but continued giving them a piece of her mind, knowing that all this was a question of power and bluff and who could put on the most pressure. The young man continued shouting, but suddenly seemed to have invested all his ire in the coffee. Eventually it was he who backed down, especially when Djilali and others arrived.
After that Bea stopped taking part in local activities. She no longer supported Crollo’s association. She became negative about what they might or might not do to improve anything. She wanted to create in peace, she said. This was no area to keep a boutique or open a restaurant, she said, although many were doing it. Whenever footsteps were heard running in the street, her ears pricked up and she waited to hear the inevitable cry of ‘Stop, thief!’ from a restaurant or an unsuspecting tourist.
Around four a.m. many people had decided to call it a day or found a place to sleep for a few hours. Frank and Crollo had finished the whiskey.
Suddenly there was a ripple among the spectators as they moved back to make way. Frank strained to observe a silent line of djellabah-clad men emerging in single file from the main door of the building. Eyes down, they quickly made their way through the crowd and melted into the night.
Crollo raised an eyebrow. ‘Second floor,’ Frank said. ‘Has to be. It’s the only apartment we didn’t open up. Someone’s raking rent in on the black.’
It was six a.m. before the firemen finished. Once they’d extinguished the fire, they tore out anything capable of smoldering on. Floors, ceilings, furniture sat in a glistening pile under the rain as the few people with work in the quarter made their way past.
Within days, the radio was reporting other fires in the poorer quarters of one of the richest cities in the world, fires in which people died and children suffocated in smoke before they ever had a chance to wake up.
Some insurance people came and interviewed everyone in the building about what they might have seen, who frequented whom, and who lived where. No one had anything much to say, although Bea made it her job to tell them anything she knew before the van came to move her stuff.
That autumn, trouble broke out all over the Paris suburbs. The media reported burnt cars in Clichy-sous-Bois and Montfermeil. Fires and destruction spread all over France and into Belgium and Germany. Each morning the media gave the growing numbers of cars burnt. Everywhere young men, like animals with stricken limbs, seemed to want to destroy part of themselves: their neighbors’ cars, their own crèches, gymnasiums, schools, local associations. In Greece, young men set fire to car showrooms. By then Bea was good and gone, her brightly-fronted workshop all boarded up.
Yet the young men in Frank’s quarter didn’t react. Cars burned as close as the 3rd and 17th arrondissement, but there was still no movement from their own hooded youths. Frank wondered if they’d perhaps smoked too much of their own product. He had no one to talk to at home, now that Bea had taken her homely and home-making affairs and what turned out to be most of the furniture. He found himself taking over her role in Crollo’s association, attending interminable meetings with sociologists and politicians, and taking a certain pleasure in organizing a local festival.
He wondered if Bea would have to keep moving from arrondissement to arrondissement and from suburb to suburb to escape the hooded youths. Perhaps she would eventually stop and go home. Or perhaps she would encounter an elderly rich man who would supply her with all her worldly needs and a heavily-secured apartment on the Place des Vosges.
Frank decided to stay. He still wasn’t sure if this was simply due to laziness and an inability to act, or the realization that this was his future, the motley crew that included himself, Djilali, Crollo, the two Algerian ladies, the Tunisians and the French, but also all the now-French kids of North African descent and their tired parents. It seemed to him the only way to deal with this was to stand. And talk.
For someone who had always favored silence, this was new.
* * *
It is summer’s end. As evening changes to night this Saturday, Frank sits at his window and observes the street. The latest young man back from prison swings down the street in a white tracksuit to hang out with his friends. They greet each other North-African fashion, hand on heart. The ex-prisoner is missing several front teeth. Frank has seen young men like him before, more alive on their return than when they left, expert in the ways of the police, and very bitter.
The young men stand and watch half a dozen adolescents finish burning out a state-of-the-art scooter they have stolen, revving it noisily and scorching smok
ily up and down the street. Frank realizes that the young man in the white tracksuit is the one who threw coffee in Bea’s face.
An elderly man with a beard hobbles by from a Saturday afternoon demonstration that finished locally. Many of the left-wing demos tend to finish on the north-east side of town, to avoid upsetting the bourgeois in the west. The man is carrying, upside-down, a poster that reads ‘I hunger, therefore I exist!’
A girl tiptoes over a drainage grid in those extra-long pointy-toed shoes with needle-thin heels. Her trousers are over-wide. Her hair is dyed red. She is probably headed for a place where she can meet friends, many from the suburbs. At Bastille or Chatelet they will eat a deep-fried string that passes for calamari, served by young people like themselves. It will cost a fortune but they will consider it a good evening.
Frank thinks that is the best—perhaps the only—approach.
A Day on Rue du Faubourg
Morning
A Berber from Kabylia lays out chairs on the terrace of La Mandoline. The black man arranges papers and magazines at the front of his kiosk, climbs in through the back door, and waits. At the Hôpital St Antoine, Monsieur Tunc awaits Madame Nunquam, doing crosswords, never looking up. A North African, strongly resembling Kadafi, piles vegetables and fruit neatly on the stand before his small shop. The bar next door reads ‘Closed.’
Afternoon
High in the hospital Monsieur Tunc does crosswords, never looking up. His wife embroiders quickly. No one speaks. Monsieur Tunc’s drip drips regularly and, like him, is silent. The gipsy in the next bed sleeps, surrounded by his family, his children large-eyed and impressed. Their mother tells them God is good. Kadafi’s lookalike dozes at the entrance to his shop. The small bar remains closed.
Dusk
On the hospital’s fifth floor the gypsy’s wife dozes in a chair beside his bed. Soon his colleagues will arrive to discuss business and she will leave. This big brown man leans on one elbow and stares into the night, reflecting on what the doctor has told him. By his side a green machine injects something, slowly, into his bloodstream. Kadafi serves his final customers wine and cigarettes from under the counter. Next door, the bar opens, puts out chairs and tables, turns up the volume, dims the lights.
