“My father smiled and threw a kiss and said his last words to me: ‘Turn around, Maria, turn your back and don’t look at us. You must not look. You must not look.’ I didn’t want to do it, but at the same time I didn’t want to see, you understand? I turned. I was crying, and I kept thinking, ‘I have now seen them for the last time! They are right there behind me, but I have seen them for the last time!’ I heard the line move off and I screamed with all my voice, but I did not look back, I did not turn around. Then suddenly I realized that I had not said good-by to them. I turned around, but the line was gone. I fell down on the ground, and all I could think was, ‘I did not even say good-by.’”
Simeon was silent. He held her tight, feeling more close to her than ever. Perhaps they could understand each other, after all. He watched the smoke of their cigarettes curl upward to the ceiling. Maria kissed his shoulder and said, “You understand, Simeon, I do not tell you this for pity. Millions of people lived the same. But this is part of me, you must understand it to understand me. For years, after the war, I dreamed of nothing except that camp, that line-up, the faces of my parents and the face of that commander. For years I dreamed how I could torture and kill that man. For years, I could not sleep unless there was a knife under my pillow. You understand? And now, I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about anything. For my sanity, I want to pretend it never happened. Only to you I tell this.”
II
1
SIMEON was stretched out in a chair, his long legs extended in front of him, having an after-dinner coffee on the terrace of La Chope with Lou, Clyde, and some of the Brazilians.
It was evening and Clyde had been drinking heavily as usual all day long. He looked at them with bloodshot eyes. “That goddamn Jinx. Wonder where she is. All I ever know about that bitch is that she’s in a bed someplace with somebody else.”
Simeon said, “Great love between you two. By the way, what do you do with your daughter?”
Clyde’s eyes opened wide. “Jinx takes her with her. That’s the honest-to-God truth. Has the kid wait downstairs in the lobby, or in a café next door! You ever heard of a mother like that?” He stared at his glass, his blond mustache twitching, lost in unsteady thought. He jerked his head up and looked at Simeon again, as though remembering something. “You’re a good boy, Simeon. A real buddy. I like you, know that? When we get back to the States, want you to come see me, meet my folks.”
“Yeah, I can just see myself ringing your doorbell down there in Georgia or wherever you come from, Clyde.”
“No, no, I’m sincere. Want you to visit us. Be pals, just like over here.”
The ancient buildings of the Place de la Contrescarpe sagged, as though about to collapse outward. An orange moon hung overhead, lighting the trees, the smelly pissoir and the lounging tramps. The air vibrated with the noise of motors, voices, pinball machines and the rock-’n-roll of a juke box.
Simeon stretched and glanced into the café, and an Algerian standing at the bar smiled and waved to him. The face seemed familiar, but Simeon could not place the young man. He stood up and went inside.
“You don’t recognize me?” the man asked in French. “I was in the bar when you had a fight with an Algerian, and I was sitting on the terrace the next day when Hossein called to you—the man who called you a white man. Remember?”
“Oh, I remember all right,” Simeon said with a nervous laugh. A faint echo of the shame returned. He remembered the man now—the only one of the Algerians on the terrace who had looked at him with a degree of sympathy.
“My name’s Ahmed. Do you have a minute? What will you drink? I was hoping I’d run into you again.”
They sat down. An old woman sitting at a nearby table sniffed in disapproval. An echo of America, Simeon thought, enraged at the woman’s contempt for Ahmed.
Ahmed looked somewhat like Simeon. He had the same thin face, deep brown eyes; he was tall, with long, nervous hands. But his skin was swarthy, not black, and his hair, though very curly, was not the hair of a Negro.
Simeon asked, “Why did you want to see me again?”
Ahmed said apologetically. “Hossein was too hard on you. You looked so sad and hurt. I wanted to tell you that everything is all right. After all, you could not know how things were with us.”
“I know now.”
“Yes. That’s good.”
Ahmed’s eyes were wide and candid. He smiled constantly as he talked, gesturing in an apologetic way, while his eyes never left Simeon’s face. He leaned forward, attentive and concerned whenever Simeon spoke.
He said, “I am glad we met here. I have never talked to a black American before. I felt sympathetic to you when I saw you that first time. I told Hossein, ‘How can you talk to this man this way, he has a black skin.’ And Hossein replied, ‘He is a black American. This means he thinks like a white man.’”
Ahmed leaned forward, smiling shyly. “What I liked—perhaps it was because I felt we were similar in some way.”
“Perhaps. In what way?”
“Something gentle.” He watched Simeon’s face, as if afraid he might offend him. Reassured, he went on, “You looked sensitive. Someone repelled by hatred and violence.”
Simeon smiled. “Yes, we could be very much alike in that way.”
“You understand, I know some people who have acquired a taste for it, for the violence and the hate. The Foreign Legionnaires in Algeria, they are like this. Men from all countries, they enjoy to pillage and rape and torture and kill. Their eyes shine with joy. Some police here in France are like this, also. We are not like this.”
He studied Simeon’s face, to make certain he was being understood. Ahmed seemed to be talking about something that obsessed him. “You understand me, violence, brutality, they must be sometimes used when there is no other way. The way we are fighting this war is necessary—there is no escape. But one must not acquire the taste for it. This has bothered me; I do not like the terrorism, the killing and the planting of bombs. They are necessary, we act really in self-defense. You as a black man in America, you must have been angry many times, but I am sure you did not like to hate all the time. Hossein likes it, hating the French. But you and me, we are different from him. In our hatred of violence, we are alike.”
Ahmed sipped his coffee. Simeon remembered that Moslems rarely drank alcohol. Ahmed continued, “My brother does not like violence, but he uses it. He is in Algeria with an army unit of the FLN—the Algerian National Liberation Front. You have heard of it?”
“There’s nothing else in the newspapers.”
“Four years my brother has been in the mountains fighting! Wounded seven times, still he fights. Any day, I expect to receive news that he is dead. Two of my cousins are dead, the others and my father and uncles are dead or disappeared in the camps, we don’t know which. I should be there in the mountains, too. I tell myself that all the time, I should be there. Anyway, I am a student, and the FLN tells me I must get my education, they will need trained men when Algeria becomes free. I do some things here . . . little things. But it’s not enough.” He laughed suddenly, seeming very young when his face became animated. “I’m just a bourgeois intellectual! That’s what some of my friends tell me. It’s what Hossein thinks.”
“What do you study?”
“Medicine. And I write, I want to be a writer.” He frowned. “But that seems so useless when so many people are dying.”
They left the café together. Lou, Clyde and the Brazilians were no longer on the terrace. Ahmed said, “Which way do you go?”
“Toward the Luxembourg.”
“We can go part of the way together.”
They followed a narrow street. Simeon was relieved to have talked with Ahmed. Hossein’s words had stuck in his mind. Talking to Ahmed seemed to set things right again. He hummed to himself the spiritual:
I went to the rock to hid
e my face;
The rock cried out, “No hiding place,
No hiding place down here.”
They circled the Panthéon and passed in front of a police station. A policeman stood guard outside, standing behind a shoulder-high concrete shelter, a submachine gun in his hand. He stared at Ahmed and Simeon.
As they neared the corner, Ahmed said with a smile, “Every time I go by that police station at night, alone or with other Algerians, the guard points that gun at me and orders me inside. They check my papers and ask what I’m doing out so late at night. They have sweet words for me, like bicot or melon, then shove me on my way. Every time.”
“And why didn’t they do it tonight?” Simeon asked, suspecting the answer.
“Because I’m with you. With someone who looks ‘respectable.’” He laughed. “How does it feel, being respectable?”
“Odd.”
“And having so much power?”
“Odd. The oddest thing in the world.”
They halted at the corner before separating. Ahmed said, “How about having dinner with me tomorrow night? We could eat couscous in an Algerian restaurant.”
“Great.”
They arranged to meet at the Tournon at seven.
2
Orpheus descending into Harlem, Simeon thought. At the bus stop the next day, Joey the Drunk staggered toward them, staring at Ahmed with curiosity. Joey was a gray-haired American Negro with bloodshot eyes who had been in Paris since the end of the war and worked as a waiter in a Pigalle night club. He scowled at Simeon.
“Hey, man, need five hundred. You got it?”
Babe had said that nobody in Paris could ever remember having seen Joey sober. Nor had anyone ever seen him smile.
“Yeah.” Simeon gave Joey a five-hundred-franc bill.
Joey took the money angrily. He reeked of alcohol. “This don’t mean I’m poor,” he said aggressively. “I just don’t have no money on me.”
“Sure, sure.”
“I’ll pay you back when I run across you next time.”
“Okay,” Simeon said, kissing the bill good-by.
The bus moved northward from the student quarter. They passed the Palace of Justice, the crowded street in front of the Sarah Bernhardt Theater, the gray office buildings of the Bourse area, Les Grands Boulevards. Ghosts of the great cafés where painters and journalists had argued passionately; now a popular neighborhood for Sunday strollers, complete with shooting galleries and sidewalk booths.
Northward toward the Harlem. The further north the bus moved, the more drab became the buildings, the streets and the people. Cheap stores selling clothes, furniture, kitchen utensils: “Easy terms, ten months to pay!” Cafés became dimmer, the streets narrower and noisier, more and more children filled the sidewalks. Men out of work, with nothing to do and no place to go, stood in sullen, futile groups on street corners. Arab music blared from the dark cafés or from the open windows of bleak hotels. Then suddenly, police were everywhere, stalking the streets, eyes moving insolently from face to face, submachine guns strung from their shoulders.
It was like Harlem, Simeon thought, except that there were fewer cops in Harlem, but maybe that too would come one day. Like Harlem and like all the ghettos of the world. The men he saw through the window of the bus had whiter skins and less frizzly hair, but they were in other ways like the Negroes in the United States. They adopted the same poses: “stashing” on corners, ready for and scared of the ever-possible “trouble,” eyes sullen and distrusting, dressed in pegged pants, flashy shirts and narrow pointed shoes. He could almost hear them saying: “Whatchu puttin down, man?” “Jus’ playin it cool, jus’ playin it cool, man, tryin to keep ole Charlie off my back.” Ole Charlie paced the street, waving his submachine gun. Simeon watched everything, remembering how it was on South Street and Lombard Street, feeling the old unbearable frustration and anger, the fear and defiance. Who knew anything about all this? What did Them Folks know about this or that or about anything? Who was alive except us down here, us here down under, feeling the heat and weight of what life was in the all-too-real present, watching ghostly clowns play frivolous games there above? Street vendors shouted their wares in Arabic: fruit, clothes, vegetables. He remembered the pushcarts in his childhood on Tenth Street, the sweating men plugging holes in watermelons so you could taste them, opening fish and cleaning them and scaling them for you, shouting in the mornings, “Any old rags, any papers, any iron?” The odors of rotting food and of cooking mingled in the air, and he remembered how they had smelled to him—the fried chicken or the greens, the uncollected garbage in the alleys and gutters. Arab music assailed them from all sides. The Blues. Where was the Blues Singer now? In the dismal cafés, men played pinball or football machines, or stood at counters staring at nothing, empty coffee cups in front of them. There were no women. The police paced the streets, their faces hard.
Simeon was aware that Ahmed was staring at him, boyish and intent, searching for his reactions, just as he had that day when Hossein had called to Simeon.
“Where are you?” Ahmed asked.
“Home.”
They got out of the bus and wove their way slowly through the crowded, narrow streets to a big café-restaurant. Simeon felt immediately conspicuous in his well-pressed American suit and starched white collar. Men in shabby pants and worn tennis shoes stared at him, their gazes not hostile but questioning. You never knew in a jungle world. One of the Algerians was almost as brown as Simeon, but you could tell by the eyes and the hair that the man was not Negro. Harlem! Harlem! Simeon felt disappointed, as if he had really expected all of the Algerians to break into smiles and rush to embrace him shouting: “Brother!” They kept their distance, considering him with caution, as they would a Frenchman—or an American.
They sat down and Ahmed ordered the couscous. The waiter brought a huge platter of steaming semoula and mutton, over which he poured a red sauce filled with vegetables and hot pepper. Simeon had never tasted the Arab dish before. It stung his tongue, like hot barbecue on South Street or Lenox Avenue. He looked around the café. Nobody was paying any attention to him now. He felt more at ease.
Ahmed said, “Is it like this . . . the black neighborhoods in America?”
“Yeah.” He thought a moment. “There is more laughter among the Negroes, though.”
“They’re not at war. Not the shooting kind.”
“No.”
Ahmed did not look like the other Algerians. He was better dressed and gayer, more expansive than the other Algerians in the restaurant.
“Your family’s well off?” Simeon asked.
Ahmed flushed. “Yes. They’re traders in Kabylia. I’m lucky, they send me money for school.” He looked around the room. “Half of these men are out of jobs. The lucky ones who work are laborers; they dig ditches and do other things the French don’t want to do. Cheap labor, about thirty thousand francs a month. What’s that in dollars?”
“About sixty-five.”
“And still, it’s a lot more than they could make in Algeria. About a fifth of the Algerians at home live on the money these men send home.”
Where was Maria? Simeon did not know why he thought of her suddenly or why he had not thought of her before. Probably at Enghein, with her “Paris mother,” gambling at the casino. Another world.
“It must be hard, without women,” Simeon said.
Ahmed nodded. “The women stay home. They’d be an expense here. You probably wonder what the men do for women?”
“Yes.”
“Most of the time, they do without. Sometimes, on pay-day, they go to a prostitute, if she’ll have them. Most Frenchwomen won’t go out with Algerians. A few with strong characters will, but they are the minority.”
Simeon remembered that he had never seen an Algerian with a Frenchwoman. You could not walk down a street on the Left Bank without runni
ng across mixed couples, black and white, but the black people here, Africans or West Indians or Americans, were not laborers and were rarely poor. They were students, artists, professional people. They were “respectable.”
Simeon felt uneasy; life had become too soft for him in Paris. That afternoon he had finished the last of a series of six absurd articles on the love lives of the Impressionists and mailed them off to He-Man magazine. But although the articles were ridiculous Simeon had had a feeling of accomplishment simply because he had done something. The plague of the foreign colony was idleness. A check would be mailed off to him in a week or so. He could pay for his apartment, lounge in cafés, go to the theater or to good restaurants when he wanted to. He looked around him, and thought of Hossein, the Algerian who had called him “white man.”
He said, “I’d like to see Hossein again.”
Ahmed smiled. “I told him we might drop by. He lives near here.”
“And the man I had the fight with?” He felt embarrassed again, mentioning it.
“He’s disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“You sound surprised. It happens every day. More often in Algeria than here, but here in France also. He was probably picked up in a raid and sent to a concentration camp.”
Simeon was stunned by the idea, and by the casualness with which Ahmed had said it. “You’re not serious. There are concentration camps in France?”
Ahmed looked surprised now. “You didn’t know? Even the newspapers talk about them. They’re called ‘internment camps,’ but the difference lies mainly in the word. There are two right near Paris, and the others are in the Midwest and South. I thought everybody knew. Algerians disappear every day, and later you learn they’re in such-and-such a camp. They’re not so agreeable, these camps. No gas chambers, of course, but the guards and officials are not gentle. It’s worse in Algeria. There torture has been developed into a high art. Shall we finish the coffee and go to Hossein’s room?”
3
The Stone Face Page 9