A Time of Miracles

by Anne-Laure Bondoux

  “I thought you had forgotten me!” I tell her.

  “Nonsense, Monsieur Blaise! You know very well that I would never forget you! You do know that, don’t you?”

  She gives me the box of cookies and explains that everything is settled. The truck driver agreed to take us to France. He’s waiting for us.

  “The problem is that there’s only one seat in the cab,” Gloria says.

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “Don’t worry, we’ll cheat a little. I’ll stay with the driver in front, and you’ll climb into the trailer without being seen.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yes. That’s the only way.”

  Gloria is shaking. I think she looks strange, but it’s not the time to dawdle. In agitated gestures she explains what I’m supposed to do.

  “Walk behind me, discreetly, up to the truck. The driver must not see you, do you understand?”

  “Understood.”

  “Then slip into the trailer and hide at the back. Don’t move from there until we reach France. Do you understand?”

  I nod, although the plan doesn’t make me happy.

  Gloria removes her Jeanne Fortune passport from the gear and orders me to hold on to the rest. If I get cold, I’m supposed to wrap myself in Dobromir’s blanket. If I get bored, I’m supposed to look at my atlas.

  Gloria puts my passport in my jacket pocket, the one that closes with a button, and she tells me to take good care of it because it’s the most precious thing that I own.

  “Do you know what to say if someone asks to see it?” Gloria says.

  I nod. “I tell the truth: my name is Blaise Fortune and I am a citizen of the French Republic,” I say.

  “Can you say it in French?”

  “Yes. And you?”

  “Me, I’ll be all right,” she says with a wink. “You know that I always manage!”

  Gloria holds me tight against her, and I can hear her heart drumming in my own body as if we were just one. She kisses my forehead and my cheeks with such urgency that it makes me dizzy.

  “Come on, Monsieur Blaise, let’s go! I told the driver that I needed to use the toilet before leaving. He must be wondering what I’m doing.”

  She trots to the door and I follow a few steps behind her.

  We cross the large parking lot, where lots of heavy trucks are parked. Without losing sight of Gloria, I slip in and out between all the wheels. Finally Gloria stops near a big, muddy truck that has a Spanish license plate. This is it.

  She is near the cab, where the driver is waiting. She turns back toward me and points to the rear of the truck. I answer by raising my hand, my fingers making the V sign for “victory.” Gloria does the same. I smile and tiptoe off.

  When I manage to lift the cargo door, a suffocating smell grabs my throat. I realize that the truck carries livestock, and I can’t help thinking that I couldn’t be unluckier. But now isn’t the time to be choosy.

  I go inside and shut the cargo door.

  It’s so dark that I can’t see the tip of my nose; impossible to know exactly what kind of animals I’m dealing with. I hear some scraping, some growling and breathing. I move forward, feeling my way, hurting myself against who knows what. The engine starts just as I knock my head against the back wall.

  I put the gear down and sit on the vibrating floor. This is it. We’re leaving! I wrap myself in the lambskin blanket, then open the box of cookies. I savor each bite. Because when you’re alone in the dark, and it stinks to high heaven, you have to gather strength from everything or you sink into despair.

  The sway of the truck rocks me, and I think that Gloria is right when she says that you have to be confident and that you have to follow your path the way the Gypsies do, without worrying about borders.

  I tell myself that in twenty-four hours we will be in France. Our ultimate refuge! The country of human rights. The country of the poet Charles Baudelaire.

  Yes, within twenty-four hours we will be at the end of our journey and the beginning of a better life. In twenty-four hours I will take Gloria through the peaceful streets of Montmartre. We will walk down the Champs-Elysées and stuff ourselves with butter croissants. And there, at last, we will be free and happy. Forever.

  chapter thirty-four

  BUT dreams are only dreams, and I did not go to Montmartre. I did not guide Gloria through the labyrinth of small streets. We did not walk down the Champs-Elysées, and no butter croissants were waiting for us on our arrival.

  Customs officers who were controlling commercial trucks on the highway near Sarreguemines, in Moselle, discovered me on December 13, 1997, among a cargo of pigs.

  As far as I know, they were looking for drugs or smuggled goods. But I was the only contraband they found when they opened the cargo door of the trailer. I was sleeping, my head resting on the gear. I had managed to drift off despite the frightful smell of excrement.

  I had had nothing to drink since the service station. My throat was on fire, my lips were dry. The truck driver could not believe his eyes when he saw me and swore loudly in Spanish.

  The customs officers pulled me out of the trailer by the collar of my sweater. I wasn’t quite awake, so I didn’t have time to think and grab the gear.

  I landed on French soil and looked for Gloria.

  She was not there.

  I rushed toward the driver, begging him to tell me where she was, but he didn’t understand anything I said, and I smelled so bad that he kept walking away from me, holding his nose. Then the customs officers pushed him into a car.

  “Gloria! Gloria!” I shouted. There was no answer. Only the sounds of traffic on the highway and the wind.

  The customs officers dragged me to a van. I fought them as I kept shouting “Gloria,” so they handcuffed me. That’s how it is when you confront the authorities.

  They forced me to climb into the van, and I suddenly thought of the small weasel and of Hoop Earring’s warning, but it was too late. I had fallen into a trap set for humans. The door of the van closed on me, and we left the highway. Where was Gloria? Where could she be? I panicked. My head was empty and the steel of the handcuffs was cutting into my skin. I collapsed and cried, “Helpmehelpme!”

  Later, between two hiccups, I explained: “Mynameisblaisefortuneandiamacitizenofthefrenchrepublicitsthepureand

  simpletruth.”

  I repeated that twice, three times, like a prayer, like a song, but it was as useless as shouting in the desert. The officers sighed. They seemed upset.

  I put my head on my knees.

  Gloria had disappeared. Maybe she had fallen out of the truck? Maybe she was hiding? Maybe something horrible had happened while I slept with the pigs? I did not know what to think.

  I was almost twelve years old, the gear was in the smelly truck, and I was without Gloria in the country of human rights and the poet Charles Baudelaire.

  Never in my life had I been so scared.

  chapter thirty-five

  AT first I saw nothing of France except for walls, doors, gates, dormitories, and corridors.

  People talked to me. I didn’t understand a single word. They offered me food, but I wasn’t hungry. I was sad and I spent my time trying to hold back my tears.

  I was waiting for Gloria, you see. I hoped to see her appear at any second, behind each door, around each corner, but she never did.

  When your feet ache, you can always pretend that they’re somebody else’s feet. But when you’re filled with sorrow, it’s impossible to believe that your heart isn’t bursting in your chest. So I stayed in my corner, paralyzed, unable to fight the despair that was eating away at my soul.

  chapter thirty-six

  I was finally transferred from a holding zone to a shelter, where a man named Modeste Koulevitch came to see me.

  He was a white-haired man with a flabby chin that folded over the bow tie of his suit. He looked like an orchestra conductor. I wondered what he was doing there—had he escaped from the national opera like
Miss Talia?

  “Good morning, how are you?” he said to me in Russian. At last I had someone I could talk to!

  I felt so relieved that I burst into tears.

  “Well, well, now,” Modeste Koulevitch said as he patted me on the back as if I had swallowed something the wrong way.

  I wiped my eyes, and he explained that he was an interpreter. He was here to understand my story in order to translate it into French. Translation was his profession.

  “What is your name?” he asked.

  “My name is Blaise Fortune,” I said as I sniveled.

  “Yes, that much I know. But your real name in Russian, what is it?”

  “I don’t have a real Russian name. My name is Blaise Fortune, it’s the pure and simple truth.”

  “All right,” he said with a sigh. He took me to an office where there was a computer.

  We spent the whole day in front of the screen. I spoke to him in Russian, and he typed the translated words. I told him everything from A to Z like I had in Babik’s caravan. But Modeste wanted more details. In a way he, too, wanted to hear my soul.

  He stopped me often to wipe his forehead.

  “Phew! It’s mighty hot in here, isn’t it?” he said, pulling on his bow tie. His chin shook like jelly.

  Looking at him, I was reminded of what Gloria had told me in the peasant village: never to despair of human beings.

  By the end of the day, most of my story was stored in the computer, in black and white. I asked Modeste if he knew where my gear with my precious things was. He didn’t. But he promised to inquire, and left.

  Thanks to him, the authorities finally understood why Mr. Ha had fixed my passport. He had done a fine job, but it wasn’t good enough to fool the experts. That’s what brought me to their attention. I argued that it had to be my real passport, since my mother had given it to Gloria the day of the Terrible Accident.

  “I agree,” said Modeste when he came back, “but the administrators need proof. Your story is so unusual.”

  I didn’t see what was so extraordinary. It was easy to understand, but the administrators obviously didn’t have much imagination. When I talked to them about Vassili’s orchard, instead of seeing apples, apricots, and magnificent pears, they wanted addresses, dates, and a lot of numbers.

  “Scien-ti-fic proof,” Modeste said, striking the table like a hammer with the palm of his hand.

  I looked at him blankly because I didn’t understand what he meant.

  “According to you, this train accident happened in the Caucasus. Where exactly? The Caucasus is so large!”

  I shrugged. Sure, the Caucasus was large! One more good reason to let it be and concentrate on easier problems—like finding Gloria and my mother.

  “That’s just the same!” Modeste said, getting annoyed. “Jeanne Fortune, Gloria Bohème—all of it sounds too incredible to be true. Like a bunch of made-up names.”

  My mouth dropped open.

  Modeste sighed. “All right,” he said, seeming sorry.

  Nevertheless, after a lot of research and fact-checking, the administrators finally found newspaper clippings and military reports that mentioned the derailment of an express train in the Caucasus.

  “A terrorist strike that the nationalists claimed to be theirs, at the beginning of the war,” Modeste said to me with a large smile. “The dates don’t really match up, but—”

  “Is it scientific proof?”

  “Somewhat.”

  “That means that you believe me, then?”

  “It means that we’ll keep searching.”

  “To find my real mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Gloria?”

  Modeste Koulevitch wiped his forehead. He explained that the truck driver had been interrogated. He confirmed that he had taken a woman into his cab in the parking lot at the Romanian/Hungarian border.

  “According to him, she was a prostitute,” Modeste said.

  “He’s lying!” I shouted.

  “Maybe. In any case, he didn’t know her name. He said that she left while he was making a pit stop in Germany.”

  “He’s lying!” I said again.

  “It’s possible,” said Modeste. “But we can’t be sure as long as we don’t have proof.”

  I knew that the Spanish driver had lied, because Gloria was not a prostitute, and what’s more, she would never have abandoned me in a trailer loaded with pigs. So the mystery remained unsolved and there was nothing I could do but wait patiently in the shelter. But wait for what? I wondered.

  “Well,” Modeste said, “wait until we know who you really are and whether France can keep you or not.”

  According to the laws of the French Republic, I was considered an “unaccompanied foreign minor.” Modeste Koulevitch explained that France could not let everybody enter its borders under the pretext that it was a country that stood for human rights. Inquiries had to be made, otherwise it would be too easy for children in lots of war-torn countries everywhere to make the same request.

  “You understand, don’t you?” Modeste asked.

  I did not understand but said “OK” to be left alone.

  * * *

  I had to tell my story many more times and give many more details and fill out millions of forms. Modeste perspired enormously. He said that I was going to drive him crazy if I kept repeating that I was a citizen of the French Republic and that it was the pure and simple truth.

  And I was waiting for Gloria.

  I stayed posted near a window in the shelter, my eyes on the horizon, even though the horizon stopped at the bottom of the opposite buildings.

  I looked up at the sky. I tried to keep calm. I told myself that wherever I was on this earth, the sky was always the same. It was a constant, like the stars, the sun, and the planets. And I imagined Gloria watching the same sky, a thought that gave me comfort.

  Then one day Modeste Koulevitch read Article 20 of the convention to me, concerning the rights of children: it meant that I had obtained the protection of the state.

  “As long as we can’t find someone who knows you, and we don’t know where you come from exactly, we’re stuck,” he added.

  I was sent to another shelter, near the town of Poitiers, and there I was enrolled in school. That was the law also. I thought this was a good idea because otherwise I would have kept waiting for Gloria, and despair would have killed me.

  chapter thirty-seven

  IN France school isn’t anything like the university for the poor, or like Fatima’s school, where everyone prayed to Allah on a rug. In France no one would ever teach you about the different cuts of beef, or the list of martyred saints, or the rules of poker. Never. First you have to learn the language. And this time it wasn’t like the phonetic sentences of Mr. Ha.

  In my class we were eleven “unaccompanied foreign minors.” Most of the others came from Morocco or Tunisia; others were black like Abdelmalik. They had left their families at page 90 of my green atlas; that is, in Africa. Others were born in different parts of the world, like Colombia or the Philippines. I learned that there are many dangerous places for children on our planet.

  We didn’t need to talk to understand one another; each of us had gone through the hazards of life—hunger, border crossings in the middle of the night, the fear of patrols, the noise of Kalashnikovs—and had known distress that rips your guts out when you’re alone in the world. Our memories and our feelings acted like cement: we were as united as the bricks of a wall. This was very important because no one can live without human warmth.

  The picture that I’ve kept from that time shows all of us together: Malik, Anissa, Fatou, Samy, John-Aristide, Sabado, Wema, Jamal, Leandro, and Prudence. Behind us is our teacher, Mrs. Georges, who smiles with beaming pride. Thanks to her, within a few months we became adept at conjugating verbs.

  Time went by.

  I turned thirteen and still lived in the Poitiers shelter, under the protection of child social services.

 
; My gear was never found. It was definitely lost, so I couldn’t show the official document concerning Mont-Saint-Michel and my mother. I thought that maybe the pigs—those omnivorous animals—had eaten the pages of my atlas and my catalog. But I would never know.

  I was finally able to recite the poems of Charles Baudelaire with barely an accent: “Free man, you will always cherish the sea!” I was able to construct complex sentences and use adjectives, and the list of France’s kings held no more secrets. But I wasn’t officially French, and Jeanne Fortune was nowhere to be found. When Modeste Koulevitch visited me from time to time, he said things were status quo.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “It means that there’s nothing new, that nothing has changed, Blaise. You’re not French or anything else.”

  “OK.”

  This was nothing new to me; I was used to being a ghost. A draft.

  As for Gloria, her disappearance remained a mystery and my heart was broken. I feared that she might be dead because of the dog in her chest, or that she might be caught in a trap for humans somewhere in Europe. The laws of this world are stricter for adults, for the very reason that they are not minors, and Mrs. Georges always looked gloomy when I spoke of Gloria.

  “Maybe she was deported,” she said.

  “That means sent back to the Caucasus?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even if she was sick?”

  “Yes.”

  I thought that was unfair, and I was terrified at the idea of never seeing Gloria again. Many times I had dreamed of the peaceful life we would have; I had imagined the wonderful reunion with Emil, Stambek, Fatima, and all the others, and I was despondent.

  At night I bit my pillow so that no one would hear me cry.

  My only hope was Nouka’s prediction. Gypsies are very good at divining things, and I clung to the idea that Gloria could not die as long as I needed her. I preferred to believe that she had found Zemzem again, or that she had taken shelter in the cottage in Vassili’s orchard. I imagined her happy, boiling water in a brand-new samovar. I saw her climbing a tree or driving a truck, laughing with her brothers, who had all come back alive from the war. I made up stories to make reality more bearable, just as Gloria had taught me.