The Wi-fi laboured for a moment, then … Whoah. I mean … Fuck.
I was really feeling sick now. My brain had turned to alcohol. I bent over the toilet. Frozen fireballs. Charles de fucking Gaulle.
Two days later, when I’d recovered, I went down to Mairie d’Issy early in the morning and teamed up again with Victor Hugo. I felt in need of some of his old-timer’s wisdom, whether it was reliable or not. He seemed happy to see me, but it didn’t work out like one of our usual mornings.
Victor was in a thoughtful mood and said he lacked the energy to do his puppet show. So we got off together at Assemblée Nationale (someone had blacked out the name on the platform and written ‘Palais Bourbon’ in its place) and walked along the riverbank. This was an area I hadn’t visited before. There were tourists with cameras and baseball caps, driven along by their guides, clutching water bottles, photographing themselves against the backdrop of the Seine.
As we walked, Victor Hugo talked to me about the Bible and told me the stories of Moses and Samson and Gideon and Joshua and Jonah and David and Bathsheba and Solomon and Saul and Elijah. I must say that even to someone who’d seen a lot of action movies these episodes of battle and sex and disembodied voices were pretty gripping.
‘But enough, Monsieur Zafar. What am I thinking, telling all this Jewish folklore to a Mussulman? Forgive me. I was intoxicated by the power of narrative and found myself unable to stop.’ He coughed. ‘Not for the first time, I must confess.’
We had arrived at a bridge that led to an island with a cathedral. Notre Dame, I presumed. Victor Hugo gazed over.
‘Of course my own country once hoped to be a Mussulman power.’ The phrase he used in French was ‘une puissance mussulmane’.
‘Really?’
‘The idea was to enlighten the Arab world, to bring it science, law, the rights of man, then form an alliance with them against our common enemy.’
‘Who’s that?’
‘The Americans.’
‘But that didn’t happen.’
‘No.’
‘What stopped it?’
‘World wars. Other European countries. The Germans and the English.’
‘Was that all?’
‘No. As a result of the wars, the countries of the Maghreb, the men of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia – people who had once loved us, or at least lived alongside us – came to distrust France as much as they despised the other Europeans. So they decided to remove us. And because they were so poor, so beaten and so spread out, the only flag under which they could come together was the flag of their vanished god. They brought a god into politics! And that was the end for France. After that, there was only massacre, torture and despair. The end of our oriental dream.’
He was starting to lose me here, but he sounded mournful. He took me by the elbow. ‘See here,’ he said. ‘This bridge. The Pont Saint-Michel. Look.’
I looked. I saw tourists.
‘An awful place for your people,’ said Victor, still holding my arm. ‘The last chance of friendship between our countries ended for ever on this spot. It was from this bridge that the police threw the bodies of the Mohammedans into the Seine. To conceal how they had beaten and killed them.’
‘When was this?’ I said.
‘Let me see … Forty or fifty years ago. Quite recently.’
I calculated, splitting the difference. Forty-five years ago would make it 1961, when my mother was a child in Paris. Perhaps her father had been one of those involved. But no, he was French or at the least French-Algerian – pied noir, black foot maybe, but white skin. But his wife, my Algerian grandmother … Suppose that was the trauma of my mother’s childhood. Her own mother (Algerian Granny) killed, then thrown by riot police into the river.
‘It was an infamous day,’ said Victor Hugo, releasing my arm and looking into the brown water of the Seine. ‘Hundreds of people were murdered by the police because of the way they looked. The police had been given a free hand by the man in charge, whose name was Papon. He said they could do whatever they liked and he would cover for them. During the war, twenty years before, this Monsieur Papon had been concerned with rounding up the Israelites in a bicycling arena further down the river to our left – whence they were dispatched to a place in Upper Silesia known for its manufacture of chemicals and there exterminated by gas poisoning. He was not a good citizen of the Republic, Monsieur Papon. He had not drunk deep from Pascal or Voltaire, from Racine or Montaigne or even from my own more modest work. He had turned his back on the clear stream of enlightenment and drunk from the puddles of the midden. Like a beast.’
I was now thinking too much about my grandmother to concentrate on the history lesson. I wondered if there might be a way of finding out if she had been one of the victims of this man Papon’s massacre. Or perhaps my French grandfather. Had he been tanned enough by the Algerian sun to pass for brown in the eyes of a crazed riot policeman?
‘For weeks afterwards,’ Victor Hugo was saying, ‘the bodies of Algerians and Moroccans were washed up on the banks of the river, like the jetsam from an oriental merchantman that had been scuttled in the night.’
Was there perhaps an official casualty list, I wondered? And what name would I search for, what in fact was the family name of my grandparents? Although I knew my father’s parents, I’d never met my mother’s – French Grandpa and Algerian Granny. They’d never been mentioned at home so there was no need to add a surname to distinguish them from the Zafar grandparents.
‘For many years,’ Victor Hugo was saying, ‘we were fascinated by what we called the Orient, though North Africa is not really very far to the east. But at the end of the nineteenth century Paris was in love with the Tuareg and the Berber, with their kilims and their arches and their metalwork. We had grand exhibitions on the Champ de Mars with pavilions of the Orient. Our poets smoked hashish and our artists painted odalisques. It was a fashion, it was a game we played with the people of the Maghreb as our toys. Until we lost interest. And for that, and for the massacres, your people have never forgiven us.’
A few minutes later, Victor said he had to be on his way. He had a rendezvous with someone – his wife, I guessed, or perhaps his mistress. He didn’t say, but he looked pleased at the prospect.
‘I do hope we’ll meet again, Monsieur Zafar,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘I have enjoyed our promenades.’
‘Yes, I hope so, Monsieur Hugo.’
After I’d watched the old boy shuffle off towards the Boulevard Saint-Michel, I went down some steps to the edge of the river itself. I sat on the embankment, my legs hanging loose, and gazed into the water. I wished I’d been like Hannah Kohler, who knew everything about her family and the history of the countries from which they’d long ago emigrated to America. She understood herself, her ancestors and her obligations to them. Her earnest work, it struck me, was a thank-you letter to the generations who had enabled her to know her place.
For people like me – or Hasim and especially Jamal – there was no such luck. I would never meet my grandmother or her French-born husband, though I had a feeling I would have liked them both. He was an adventurer in Algerian exile, and must have been a free spirit to have married a local girl. And she too must have been bold – to have left home and gone to live in Paris, this wonderful, difficult place.
It was not their ghostly absence that I felt, as I sat by the river, staring into the silent water. What haunted me was the sense that their secrets had left a permanent void in my life.
Eighteen
Barbès–Rochechouart
It was good to see Jasmine again and to spend time with her after Tariq’s birthday. I was especially grateful for her company after my earlier promise to Julian to ‘come clean on tea alone’ had led me into difficulty.
I had begun with a description of my first visit to his apartment. He lived off the rue de la Goutte d’Or – near the department store with windows full of wedding gowns and its name, TATI, written up in the colourways of the st
riped laundry bag that was everywhere at the time. It was like being in Kampala (as I imagined it, anyway, not yet having visited) as I came down the steps from the Métro and turned off the boulevard, past the hawkers selling faux-designer suitcases, into a narrow street of butchers’ shops. Pigs’ trotters, split longways, were lined up in neat rows; in one place, above raw joints of chicken, a sheep’s head was oozing on a spit. The smell of meat was so overpowering that it was a relief to come to a fruit counter, where the bananas were laid out by colour, from bright green through yellow to black, catering to tribal custom. Beyond the food shops there was a djellaba store and a kiosk that sent money orders home. On almost every face I saw a longing for Africa.
After the next turning, a street door opened on a different world. I crossed a courtyard and walked up a wide stone staircase to the first floor, where I knocked. Once inside, I was out of Africa, back in France, back with my Russian; and from this point on, as I talked to Julian, I began to edit my account of what had happened.
The truth was that from the start there was a scary kind of candour. I thought it was a sign of Aleksandr’s passion for me that he should be so honest; he seemed to have no time for caution. His directness was born of experience, I guessed, and when we spoke French (which was most of the time, my French being better than his English), I was able to respond without feeling as vulnerable as I might have felt in my own language. I told him everything – what I dreamed and longed for, even how to touch me. I was young and I was small, and he was a man of forty-five, solid and heavy on my frame. Sex was the gateway to intimacy and sex intensified that closeness all the time; but the intimacy itself had something else – a joyous feeling of having squared a circle, of having somehow cheated death.
I understood that with my boyfriends at college I’d been only going through the motions. In Aleksandr I had found what the poets wrote about, and it was different in kind. Body and soul, no holding back, and the more I offered, the more I believed in what I found. It was as though he’d revealed to me that being his lover was my purpose in being alive, and always had been. It was not so much that I’d previously imagined I had a different function, it was more that I hadn’t known till then that I had a raison d’être at all.
In the version of all this I offered Julian, I tried to play down the sex and dwell on the elevated conversations in which we’d discussed … The problem was that I could barely remember what on earth we had discussed. Surely when I had come back to bed in a tee shirt, carrying tea or wine, we must have touched on Pushkin and Tolstoy and the failures of Communism; we must at least have talked about his childhood and how his grandparents had weathered the Revolution. Or something. Yes, there was the time that he’d said I should write a book, though I couldn’t say what sort of book he’d had in mind. A play, was it? I could recall in some detail his admiring commentary on Paris when we were out on the streets and in the bars, his admiration for the men of the Enlightenment and for France’s continuing battle to be both revolutionary and democratic. But what I remembered best of what Aleksandr had whispered to me in the rue de la Goutte d’Or was more personal and much less elevated.
‘Interesting area,’ said Julian, when I finally paused for breath. ‘Zola country.’
I guessed he was trying to change the subject in order to spare my embarrassment, so I doubled my efforts to make what had happened ten years ago sound more like a meeting of minds. The truth didn’t sound grand enough.
‘He was a wonderful companion in the city where I’d been so lonely. But it wasn’t just the relief of having company, you understand. It was much more than that. We were identical in the way we …’
‘… in his novel L’Assommoir,’ said Julian, just carrying on. ‘It’s been translated as “The Boozer” or “The Knock-Out Shop”. Lots of people think it’s his very best, though in my view it’s not as good as Germinal …’
‘… though I did know, of course, that he was married,’ I said, ‘but they were separated. And anyway we had so much in common that …’
‘… and Gervaise the poor laundress lies dead for days at the bottom of her sordid building in the rue de la Goutte d’Or before anyone finds her …’
I wasn’t going to give in to Julian’s delicate attempts to spare me. ‘Though I’m not defined by one affair that ended badly,’ I was saying firmly. ‘I’m not a victim. All love affairs end badly, unless they just fizzle out, which is itself a bad ending anyway.’
‘… and Gervaise is living in a cardboard box beneath the stairs. The place was built around a courtyard. Perhaps the very same one that your Russian lived in.’
I looked down. I had nothing left to say on this subject and I knew if I kept talking I would start to cry.
It was only when Aleksandr left me one day, without warning, to go back to St Petersburg that I began to see that his candour and his urgency were not the mark of his commitment but a sign that he was short of time; he’d never looked into changing the return date on his ticket. It turned out he was ‘separated’ from his wife only in the sense of living in a different country. The intimacy of his pillow talk, which I’d taken as a measure of how deeply he was wrapped up in me, was his way of not engaging in anything more serious – on topics where, I later suspected, he was frightened of being bored by my opinions.
Of course I didn’t tell Julian how many weeks I’d sobbed and torn at the bedclothes, loathing my gullibility as much as I had hated Aleksandr. I didn’t say how many years the feeling tortured me. Even to myself I could never admit how much – for all I felt humiliated and abused – I had continued loving him. I couldn’t admit it because I couldn’t tolerate the idea that I was that deeply flawed.
All I could do was wonder what had happened in my life up to that point to make me so vulnerable. I looked back at my childhood, searching for a clue; but in the middling household with the confident brother and the slightly baffled parents (‘But she’s so wordy …’), in the functional high school where I had friends enough, and in the town with steel mills replaced by IT start-ups there seemed nothing unusual – no trauma, no denied reason for being so defenceless. So maybe it was just the way I was.
For ten years I’d tried not to revisit, let alone revive the earlier person I had been, that Dido full of angry yearning. It might have been my real or truest self, but I preferred another version – one that worked, had colleagues and friends and went about her business eagerly. And as I gave Julian an idea of the years that followed, he grew less embarrassed. He seemed happy to ask about my time in Africa and my return to college as a postdoc, intrigued by my failed dates with other men, amused by the sound of the all-powerful Professor Putnam.
By the time I’d finished the account of what Julian had called ‘your Russian poet’ and its aftermath, I felt tired, though no longer ill at ease. We sat in silence for a time, each picturing, I suppose, the fragments of the fallout – the bits and pieces of what I’d once been. I knew my story sounded in some way unconvincing because I’d failed to convey the depth of the emotion. I didn’t have the words. But the odd thing was that I no longer minded. I was under no obligation to convince anyone, even Julian; my task was to survive: to heal, somehow, and move onward.
‘It’s nearly eight o’clock,’ said Julian at last.
‘Does that mean the pubs are open now?’
‘It certainly does. And the restaurants. And for once you’re going to let me pay. You won’t be abandoning a principle or betraying your sisters. It’s what friends do sometimes. Give each other presents.’
I stood up. I felt relieved. I felt more than that, in fact. I felt reborn.
We went to a noisy café-restaurant in a backstreet near Oberkampf. Outside, beneath an awning, people sat smoking efficiently, like dogs in a laboratory. Indoors, the ceiling was decorated with scenes from a circus and I thought it best not to say that I’d always been afraid of clowns.
Julian was thrilled to be allowed to pay at last, to be the host, and spent a long time consu
lting with the waitress about the wine.
‘The trouble with organic is that it often tastes of beetroot,’ he said when she’d gone. ‘Or worse. I was trying to find if they had something that tastes like wine.’
In the course of dinner, I found myself being gently probed about Aleksandr. Julian kept his language simple. ‘It must have knocked you back a bit’ was one of his British openings; but I found it much easier to respond to this kind of thing than to the pseudo-scientific terms of Dr Pavin, the Beacon Hill therapist.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘it sure put me off men.’
‘But you’re naturally affectionate. And optimistic. So you must have felt an urge to … to try again at some point.’
‘I did feel that, yes. But I was able to control the urge. I couldn’t risk a repeat.’
‘So you consciously shut down the better part of yourself.’
‘I made some hard choices. But I wouldn’t say it was the “better” part. It was a different part, that’s all. Perhaps the “better” bit was the intellectual part, the worker.’
‘Don’t you think that the urge to affection, towards trust and the giving of yourself – for all the risk involved – is a noble urge? To love. It’s life-giving, life-affirming, whatever you want to call it. And in that sense “better” than self-protection, however logical that may be?’
‘No, I think it’s just a different way of living. Love is danger. I made a choice, no more than that.’
The food had arrived, and with it some red wine that tasted, to Julian’s relief, of wine. I found myself thinking about the men who’d asked me out over the years and how I’d developed strategies to stop them. It was difficult at the time to be honest. I’d told Jasmine that I had difficulties with the act of sex, though in fact I’d enjoyed it with Aleksandr to an extent that seemed almost indecent. To some of the men I hinted that my interests lay more with my own sex; to others, I mentioned entanglements, obligations … With one, I simply broke down and cried, sobbing till (I saw through parted fingers) he left.
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