You Deserve Nothing

by Alexander Maksik

  The music ended. I heard a faucet come on in the kitchen, the sound of water falling into the sink. Then it stopped. Footsteps. I breathed slow shallow breaths and watched the kitchen door. She walked out into the living room, her right cheek red and swollen, the beginning of a bruise rising below her eye. There was a spot of dried blood on her lip. Her hair was down around her shoulders. She wore jeans and her long gray turtleneck sweater. She crossed the room. I knew she’d replay the album. It was János Starker. She’d play it when I couldn’t sleep or when I woke from nightmares. “Magic music to slay monsters,” she’d say.

  When it began again—those slow, deep chords—she turned and saw me.

  “Gilad,” she said, raising a hand to her cheek. Her eyes were dull but she was lovely in spite of herself.

  “Hi,” I said. She came closer and seeing her like that—so small in her thick wool socks, sleeves pulled over her hands, her lip bloodied, her eyes dead, there was nothing of her left to hate.

  “Is he here?”

  She shook her head looking at me.

  “Where’d he go?” I whispered.

  “Left. He was leaving for Berlin tonight anyway. He’s gone.”

  I dropped my bag on the floor, stepped forward, and wrapped my arms around her. When she began to cry I held the back of her head with my hand.

  “You’re so cold,” she said. “You’re freezing cold.”

  I was quiet and she kept her cheek against my chest. I looked out toward Montmartre and Sacré Coeur white on the hill.

  After a while she said, “Are you hungry?”

  I followed her into the kitchen. There was a roasted chicken on a cutting board and a bowl of sautéed potatoes on the counter. She carried both to the table. I brought plates and silverware. She sat across from me and poured two glasses of red wine from an open bottle.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Gilad, you have nothing to—”

  “I do. I’m sorry I left you like that. I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything. That I didn’t do anything. That I haven’t ever.”

  “Gilad, it isn’t for you. It should be me, I’m the one. You’re just . . . ” She began to cry again.

  “I should. It is for me. I’m just like he is.”

  Her expression changed quickly. There was, in an instant, a return of color to her face. “You,” she said, her voice shaking, “are nothing like him. Nothing. Listen to me. It isn’t your fight, it isn’t your job to take care of your parents. Anyway, you can’t expect to find this courage you want so badly. It won’t just come all at once. You’ll discover how you’re going to be brave. Your father,” she shook her head, “he’s a bully, Gilad. You’ll never be that. Never. You may be afraid of him but that fear doesn’t make you a coward for Christ’s sake. It’s your father who’s a coward. Not you, do you understand me?”

  I looked up at her, her eyes narrowed. She was angry and it was a relief to see that she was still alive. She was trying so hard to pull herself up, doing her best to be my mother.

  “I don’t understand how you could have allowed that. Why you followed him, how someone like you, how you could . . . ”

  “End up like this?”

  I nodded.

  “Someone like me? Life sweeps you up, Gilad. Things happen fast, you forget to pay attention. Or you stop paying attention. You lose that thing.”

  “What thing?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know exactly. People used to tell me when I was young that I didn’t know what I was capable of, that my intelligence was limitless, that I could do anything. Which I’ve come to realize is true in both directions. I never imagined that I was capable of this life. It would have seemed impossible to me when I was younger, but God do we surprise ourselves. They never tell you that what we surprise ourselves with may be disappointment. No one ever told me that perhaps one day I’d find myself capable of disappointing my son. But here I am.” She took a sip of wine, looked up, and touched my cheek. “I know you think I was this wild-spirited artist, carefree and full of confidence, but I wasn’t. I was just a kid wandering around in Paris with no idea what to do. I was smart, O.K., fine, but I had no real strength, no real conviction. I was tired and out of money and I thought I’d have to return home and become, what? I don’t know, an art teacher? Christ, I’d have to return home to all those people I swore I’d never be, to lives I despised. Then I met your father and he offered me an easy way to live what seemed like a glamorous life. You can’t imagine the pleasure I felt telling my parents and my friends that I was moving to Africa. I felt cosmopolitan, so accomplished, as if I’d done something. I pretended that it had nothing to do with your father. That’s a very limited kind of courage, Gilad, following someone else’s life. Anyway, I didn’t plan to marry him. I was caught up in creating a story, and now, well, that’s what I’ve got, a good story. It’s just a good story.”

  I listened and ate my dinner.

  “The thing is you have to fight the whole time. You can’t stop. Otherwise you just end up somewhere, bobbing in the middle of a life you never wanted.”

  “So what? That’s it? You’ve given up? This is it for you? You’ll stay with a man who’s barely here? And when he is, he beats you?”

  She was crying.

  “I’m sorry.” I looked away for a moment. “Mom, I just don’t accept that this is it, that you’re going to spend the rest of your life alone in expensive apartments pretending to be happy.”

  We sat together in that kitchen for a long time. I told her about the protest, about Hezbollah, about the silent crowd and the metal bar. About Silver.

  “At least he said something,” she said.

  I shook my head angrily.

  “What do you want, Gilad? What do you expect of people?”

  I looked up at her bruised face, her bloodied lip. There were slight lines around her eyes I hadn’t noticed before. It was late. She was exhausted. She looked back at me as if she wanted, more than anything else, an answer to her question.

  * * *

  I’d promised myself I’d never do it again but on Monday I took the school bus with all the others. I didn’t have the energy for the cold walk from the métro and anyway, that morning I was short on principles. I had Silver first period. I thought about skipping it. About skipping school in general. But then I suppose I was expecting some sort of explanation. How he’d snuck around the back and broken the guy’s neck. Something.

  He began class with an uncharacteristic lecture:

  “In 1958 the Front de Libération Nationale, Algeria’s revolutionary party, attacked and killed four French policemen in Paris. Maurice Papon, then the chief of police in Paris, organized retaliatory raids against the Algerian community throughout the city. He rounded up thousands of Algerians and threw them in, among other places, the Vélodrome d’hiver and the Gymnase Japy, which by the way, is still there, just off boulevard Voltaire if anyone’s interested. Do you know why I mention these two places in particular?”

  He was cold that morning, humorless, acid, sarcastic, and unfamiliar. I remember Hala squinting at him, her face revealing a combination of confusion and concern. She wrote quickly in her notebook. Whatever play had been there on Friday, whatever lightness, had gone.

  “I mention them because they’d both been used in 1942, sixteen years earlier, during La Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv. Anyone have any idea what I’m talking about?” He looked around the room. He was fierce. “Abdul? Any idea? Ring any bells?”

  Abdul nodded.

  “Yes? Good. So tell us about it, tell us about La Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv.”

  He kept nodding but shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know.”

  “No?” Silver said, “No.”

  “I do.” This was Hala who ordinarily would have enjoyed seeing Abdul’s ignorance revealed, but she was upset, and glanced worriedly at Abdul as he went on nodding, tapping his fingers on his notebook. Silver leaned back against his desk. He crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows
at her.

  She looked at Silver angrily. “La Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv. The police arrested thousands of French Jews.”

  “Yes. Good.” He went on. “Of those twelve thousand Jews, more than four thousand were children. Pétain used both the Vel’d’Hiv and the Gymnase Japy as detention centers. The Jews were kept there until they were sent to Drancy. And from Drancy they were sent to Auschwitz where most of them died. So now we jump forward to 1958 when, instead of Jews, the French police begin rounding up Algerians, throwing them into the Seine, torturing them, and so on. This continues through 1961, when the FLN resumes its attacks on the French police, eleven of whom are killed in less than two months. As a result, anyone who even looked Algerian was fair game—people were attacked, arrested, drowned, and tortured. Men had their hands tied behind their backs and were thrown into the river for appearing Algerian. Maurice Papon called a curfew and made it illegal for Muslims, not only Algerians, Papon said ‘Muslims,’ to be out in the street between eight-thirty and five-thirty. The FLN called for a peaceful protest and in October of 1961 thirty thousand people marched against the curfew. Throughout the city, the police shot into crowds and flung people into the Seine. Most famously at Pont Saint-Michel, not far from where many of you spend your Saturday nights drinking. Two hundred people were killed. All of them Arab.

  “Ten years ago we discover Papon collaborated with the Nazis. He was convicted of ‘complicity in crimes against humanity’ and sentenced to ten years in prison. But that’s another story. Why am I telling you this?”

  He looked around the room, daring one of us to respond.

  “Why? Because Sartre, living in the midst of all of this, having once been a prisoner of war, spoke out in support of the FLN and an independent Algeria.”

  He hesitated for a moment and shook his head. “Never mind his failures during the occupation.”

  He went on. Fierce.

  “Sartre wrote angry articles against the mistreatment of Algerians and the racism endemic throughout France. He was called a traitor and anti-French. Accused of treason, he received death threats and yet he did what he’d been doing for nearly all of his adult life, he continued to write. Sartre’s apartment was bombed. He kept writing. And then again it was bombed, this time entirely destroyed. But he kept writing anyway.”

  No one spoke.

  “What’s the point, right? You tell me. What’s the point? Abdul? What’s the point?”

  Abdul ran his fingers back and forth across his page. Silver looked around the room.

  “Anyone?”

  “I suppose, sir,” Colin said looking blankly at the backs of his hands, “the point would be that we should do the same. We should fight against things like that. Corruption and oppression and the like. Despite fear. Do the thing anyway. Would that be right, sir? That if we don’t, sir, it’s all just writing, it’s just theory like you told us, just, like you said, ‘words on a page.’”

  He spoke without emotion. Silver looked at him steadily and nodded.

  “The thing is, sir, about all this fighting back and standing up, we’d need to have courage, right? We’d need to be able to find the courage to do the fighting. And if we can’t, well, we’re just stuck here watching the world go by, like you told us, watching the world go by, like everyone else, like you said, ‘cowards.’”

  “That’s true,” Silver said nodding, his eyes narrowing.

  “Would that be like you, sir?” Colin asked finally looking up and meeting Silver’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Someone like you. A fighter. Someone who, like you said, has the courage,” Colin flipped through his notebook until he found the page and read, “‘To travel the distance between desire and action’ is what you said. That’s what you told us about courage, sir. That’s what separates the brave among us, ‘the ability to travel the distance between desire and action.’ I’ve got it right here. October 27.”

  Colin raised his notebook from the desk and held it open for Silver who nodded and said, “Yes, Colin. I think that’s right. But what’s your point here?”

  “My point, sir? I was answering your question. It was your point we were discussing. The point you were making about Sartre and the Algerians and the Jews and all that.”

  “Yes, Colin,” Silver said, cold, “but what does it have to do with me?”

  Ariel had been watching Colin with renewed interest.

  “I guess I’m just wondering if all this courage you want us to have, I just wonder, sir, if it’s the kind of courage you have yourself. I mean if I can ask that, without being rude.”

  Silver glanced away from Colin and out to the field where a light fog had filled the space between the bare poplar trees and the low buildings of the school. He seemed to contemplate the question and then, turning back, he said, “I’ve never pretended to be an example, or to have more courage than anyone else. I’ve never claimed to be braver or stronger or more capable of action than anyone else. But then, that doesn’t really answer your question does it? Do I have the kind of courage Sartre had? That’s the question, right?”

  Silver said this quietly. He seemed deflated, melancholy. The anger and icy cadence gone.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “No, I don’t think I do. Why, Colin? Why the question?”

  After a long pause he shook his head. “Nothing, sir. I was just wondering.”

  “How can you say that?” Hala asked, staring at Silver incredulous.

  “What? Say what, Hala?”

  “How can you claim you’re not an example?”

  “Hala, I didn’t say that, I didn’t say that I wasn’t an example. I just never argued that I was. Or should be.”

  “Mr. Silver,” Jane said exasperated, her cheeks red. “As a teacher, I mean, as a teacher you are an example. I mean, even if you never said it, even if you never explicitly said it.”

  “That’s the point, in your role, you have an a priori responsibility, a priori as Sartre says.” Hala went on, nodding at her allusion. “You may not claim to be an example, but you are nonetheless. You are anyway. You don’t get to decide how people see you. And you know, right? That you are an example to a lot of the students at this school, Mr. Silver? I’m sorry, and I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but you don’t get to choose.”

  Silver took a deep, slow breath. “Well, Hala, I don’t know. I don’t know how many people really see me as an example. But that’s for another discussion. I do play a role in how I’m perceived. The clothes I wear, the things I say, the way I say them. I, as we all do, cultivate an image. I’m no more pure than anyone else. What is far more important is that all of these people who supposedly consider me an example, they also make a choice don’t they? They decide to see me one way or another, right?”

  I watched Silver carefully as he spoke. As I studied his eyes and watched his mouth move, the way he picked at the dead skin on his thumb, my heart beat faster and harder. I felt something rising in me and when he came to the end of his question, I let out an exasperated breath.

  He turned to me, his eyes sad. He seemed so tired.

  “Gilad? Something you want to say?”

  I glanced at Colin. He was looking at me.

  “Mr. Silver, I just, I wonder if you believe all of that.” I felt nauseated and my face was hot. I wiped my hands on my jeans. He narrowed his eyes. He seemed surprised by my question.

  “What do you mean, Gilad? Believe what?”

  “I mean, do you actually expect that a tenth grader, someone fifteen or sixteen, you expect that they make this decision? That they’re capable of deciding how to see you? Of really, fairly judging you, judging your, I don’t know, your authenticity? They make a decision to see you one way or another? That you, I don’t know, share the responsibility of the thing? You and the student? That it’s equal?”

  We all looked at him and waited for an answer. We barely moved, all of us unified in our anticipation. Silver looked at me, and this time I held his gaze. He tur
ned to Colin. The tension was terrible.

  Abdul coughed. Silver turned to him. “What do you think, Abdul?”

  Then I was angry, I felt a surge of rage. How dare he rely on Abdul.

  Abdul rocked back and forth, his nervous nod taking over his whole body. “I don’t know. I’m not really sure.”

  “About what, Abdul?”

  “I don’t know. Yeah, you’re a teacher. So you’re responsible, yeah. You have this job. It’s your job.”

  Silver nodded impatiently, his slight gesture bordering on the ironic. “Anyone else?” he asked.

  I raised my hand now. It was a formality I’d long ago abandoned. My own ironic gesture. Silver turned to me. He’d walked to the window and opened it and was leaning with his elbow resting on the frame, looking away from us. I felt the cold air chill the sweat on my neck. I was grateful for the cold, thankful that he’d opened the window and again, I felt sympathy for him, warmth, and I wondered briefly if perhaps he’d opened the window for me, seen my face flushed, the sweat on my forehead. I wished for it. And again I felt as if I were betraying him.

  But I kept my hand raised.

  “You don’t have to,” he began still looking away from us. Then he turned back to the room, shook his head and said, “Yes, Gilad,” in the same tone he might have used with Ariel.

  I was holding my notebook open. “Can I read you something? It’s Sartre.”

  He nodded and I read, “‘What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterward.’”

  Again, there was nothing. No response. No noise. No shuffling of papers, or the sound of pen pushing across paper, no whispering. I looked at Silver, who raised his eyes at me and said nothing.

  “‘Encounters himself.’ You said that to encounter yourself, it’s the point when you suddenly understand, when you begin, when you no longer can pretend that life is otherwise, when you realize the truth of the world. That’s more or less what you said, I think. That’s how I have it.” Again, I spoke with the faintest edge of irony and in false deference.