Paris Echo

by Sebastian Faulks

  And to be quite honest, there was also an e-mail I’d had from Laila. It was much longer than her usual I’m-having-too-much-fun-to-bother-writing type of message. It began, ‘Hi Tariq, How are you? You’ve been away for ages! When are you coming back? I MISS you.’

  I spent about five minutes enjoying that before I went on reading. ‘I ran into your father in the medina yesterday and he seemed very anxious about you. He asked if I would come and have tea with him and your stepmother and talk about you and what the matter was. He said you haven’t rung or answered his e-mails. Anyway, I went round to your house yesterday evening.

  ‘They’re worried. They want to know what you’re doing. I said so far as I knew you were looking for where your mother used to live. I know that wasn’t your real motive, you were just fed up with life here. But it was the best I could think of. Your father has spoken to the people in the college office and they say that if you sit your exam in August and you get a good grade you won’t have to drop a year. Please do that, Tariq, because I really don’t want you to be in the year below me! Think of my reputation with Wasia and girls like that. It wouldn’t be that much work and I could help you with the revision.

  ‘What’s new here? Najat has “broken up” with her twelve-year-old boyfriend and spends the evening in her room listening to gloomy music! Billy is getting good at tennis and beat me yesterday. Miss Aziz has been seeing something of a mysterious man who picks her up outside college in his Mercedes. He has aviator shades and a cream linen suit. I don’t think he’s from the Home Planet, but maybe Riyadh. Or Qatar. Ugh! But we can trust Miss A to play it cool, can’t we? She’s not going to spend the night with him in a hotel on the bay. Please!

  ‘I’ve thought about you a lot, Tariq. It bothers me that you’re in Paris with all those Christian women. City of Light and you a young man of good family. Frozen fireballs, count me OUT! I want you to come back. I think we’re a pair, you and me. We understand things.

  ‘Tangier needs us, frankly. There’s a lot of rough boys from Tétouan hanging round the Ville Nouvelle lately and some of those building projects, out towards the airport, they’re getting a bad reputation. This is so, SO real. So come back with your Paris accent and all the euros you’ll have saved up – you have made some money, haven’t you? And then come and see me for dinner and we’ll get Farida to make the lemonade you like and have a big barbecue in the garden and light some candles and play cards all night and have fun. Beer too. Don’t dare not to answer me. I miss you. Love Laila xxx’

  It was all I could do not to dance along the rue de Tolbiac, past the Lycée Claude Monet (I know. Don’t tell me. Revolutionary leader? Chemist?)

  At that moment I had a text message and was disappointed it was not a follow-up from Laila. ‘Tariq, it’s Julian Finch. We met at your birthday. Hannah gave me your number. Could I buy you a beer this evening? Something I wanted to ask you. J.’

  Free beer? Allez. We met at a bar near Filles du Calvaire. It was a run-down sort of place with a sticky floor and an old mirror advertising a liqueur called Fap’ Anis, ‘celui des connaisseurs’. Perhaps the whole thing reminded Julian of an English ‘pub’.

  He asked me about myself and what I’d been up to in Paris. I was able to make him laugh when I described the chicken bits and how we cooked them at PFP. I told him about Hasim and Jamal. He said he’d definitely try a Nuclear special next time he was up that way.

  ‘Do be careful, though,’ he said. ‘This money you’re passing over back in Tangier. Don’t get involved in anything, will you?’

  ‘Jamal’s a nice guy,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, but he might not have nice friends.’

  ‘He had a bad start in life. He was brought up in a kind of concentration camp. Near Lille. Because his dad had fought alongside the French in Algeria.’

  ‘We’ve tried to forget all that,’ said Julian.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Most of the Harkis were left behind in Algeria. They begged to be rescued, but de Gaulle told them they were the victims of history. The Algerian loyalist women paid to whip them. I’ve read they even cut bits off them while they were still alive and fed them to dogs. The few that made it over here were kept in camps, like your friend.’

  ‘It’s not surprising Jamal seems so against France,’ I said, trying to sound wise, though really I was just feeling pleased that I now knew who de Gaulle was.

  ‘The Harkis and their children had a special case. But the other Algerians, the majority, just hate the French because of the way they behaved over there.’

  I mentioned the police massacre of 1961 and asked if there was any chance that there would ever be a list of victims’ names.

  Julian shook his head. ‘I don’t know much about it. But the files are usually closed for fifty years in these sort of cases. And they’ll never publish the names.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, for one thing I don’t suppose they have them. Do you think the corpses were identified? After they’d fished them out of the river I should think they simply burned them. And did the dead people have papers on them anyway?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I was trying not to picture it all too closely.

  ‘And there’s another reason,’ said Julian. ‘The urge to forget. The desire not to know. Have you ever noticed that if you confront a French person with something difficult, they don’t dispute it? They just look at you and wait till you’ve stopped saying what they don’t like.’

  ‘There was a guy in a bar. I mentioned about Zidane being sent off in the World Cup Final the other day. He didn’t say anything. He just stared at me.’

  Julian went over the sticky floor to get more beer.

  ‘It wasn’t just the Harkis,’ he said, as he sat down again. ‘Thousands of pieds noirs came back to France and they were hung out to dry. Teachers, clerks, engineers, people who’d faithfully served their country in difficult conditions. They had no welcome back and no financial help. They were told they were on the wrong side of the settlement. No one wanted to know them. The wrong side of history.’

  He drank some beer, then smiled.

  ‘Still. I didn’t come to talk about the darker parts of French colonialism,’ he said. ‘And I don’t believe they’re any worse than some murky bits of British history. I wanted to ask you a favour, Tariq. As you know, Hannah and I are good friends.’

  ‘Yes, you—’

  ‘I’m worried about her. She seems so fragile at the moment. It’s as though all this work has got on top of her.’

  I nodded, though I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  ‘Would you mind keeping an eye on her for me? I have to go to London for a while. In fact, I may stay there for good.’

  ‘You’re not coming back to Paris?’

  ‘I need time to finish my book. I did so much reading up on the Occupation and so on that I missed a deadline for my own work. My publishers have given me two weeks’ grace.’

  ‘So it’s a book thing. A deadline.’

  ‘Mostly. But other things haven’t quite worked out for me here. I can’t go on pushing at a closed door. I have to respect … the will of others. The integrity. I admire it.’

  Julian looked very sad. ‘Can you do that for me?’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a phone number. Call me if you think there’s a problem.’

  ‘What kind of problem?’ I said.

  He breathed in. ‘I think that in some odd way the strain of work and the nature of the things she’s been dealing with – women fighting lonely battles and so on … I think it’s opened some old wounds of hers. It’s as though her work and her private feelings have overlapped in a way she finds difficult to manage. I’m afraid she’s close to breaking point.’

  ‘Does she ever have boyfriends?’ I said.

  ‘She did once. Years ago. A Russian.’

  ‘Really? How on earth … A Russian? I mean, what was he like?’

  ‘A bad man.’ Julian finished his beer. ‘Perhaps that’s unfair. I only me
t him twice. But I didn’t like him. He seemed cruel.’

  To ease an awkward moment, we concentrated on practical details – when he was leaving (the next day), when I might be leaving (soon), and how to be in touch (for some reason he was ditching his French cell phone in Paris so gave me his sister’s landline number in England). We talked about what he might do in London – work, teach, write – where he’d live, what would happen to his flat in Paris.

  ‘So you’ll be here for maybe two more weeks?’ he said, as we stood up to leave.

  ‘About that,’ I said.

  ‘That’s better than nothing. It’ll be reassuring for me to know you’ve got an eye on her. Hannah likes you, by the way.’

  By now we were standing outside on the street.

  ‘Would you say goodbye to her for me?’ said Julian. ‘Tell her I was called away. A bit unexpectedly. Say de Musset needed me.’

  ‘Won’t you see her to say goodbye?’

  ‘No, I think it’s best not.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll tell her. De Musset.’

  ‘Do you want a taxi?’ Julian said.

  ‘No, I’ll take the Métro, thanks.’

  We shook hands. As he was walking away, he turned round and called out, ‘Give her my love.’

  I watched as the car disappeared, feeling a bit lost myself. I had the scent of home in my nostrils, it was true, and I’d almost run out of money, so I wouldn’t be able to stay much longer. But before I left for good, there were a couple of things I needed to do. For a start, I wanted to see Clémence one more time.

  When I’d left her apartment there’d been no talk of meeting again. Rather the opposite. She gave me to understand that what had taken place between us was something that by definition can only happen once, like an introduction, or a death. Nor had we discussed such simple things as whether she actually lived in the flat, or merely had use of it from time to time. I had no phone number for her and I doubted that she had a cell phone anyhow. But the nature of what had passed between us made me feel indebted to her. My lie about having been to Drancy to see it for myself was beginning to trouble me.

  So after I’d watched Julian disappear, I decided I should put it right. I went to Châtelet–Les Halles to take the RER Line B. I disliked the RER almost as much as I loved the Métro. The underground building site that passed for a terminal, the announcements in English and the disappointing station names … They had nothing like Mairie des Lilas.

  When I eventually got to this historic place called Drancy, it was … It was disappointing. It was just a big, three-sided, low-rise housing block. It was pretty run-down, but I’ve seen worse. In front, on the open side, there was a few metres of rail and one of the cattle wagons they’d used to deport the Jews. There was an ugly curved memorial stone on which children were climbing. There was a plaque on the ground in a grey brick surround saying ‘Esplanade Charles de Gaulle’ (the guy seemed to be everywhere now). On it were some words I couldn’t make out and a date: 18 June 1990. ‘Souviens-toi’, it said, ‘Remember’. But they themselves had forgotten for almost fifty years. Can an apology that late really be effective?

  Anyway. I asked myself what would Clémence want to me to do – or feel? To concentrate. That’s what she’d have wanted. Yes. To imagine. So I pretended to be Hannah, going round with my teacher glasses on, knowing everything. I walked down the long colonnade with its thin metal pillars and apricot-coloured doors. There was a notice in one ground-floor window: ‘Protection Maternelle et Infantile’. A bit late now. At the foot of one staircase was a memorial to a poet called Max Jacob, who’d died on the spot before they could put him on a train to the east.

  The grass in the big area in the middle needed mowing and was full of dandelions. Three African men sat on metal benches in the sun, listening to the children’s voices, drinking Coca-Cola from the can, smoking cigarettes.

  I couldn’t get any sense of ‘history’ at all. There was just the idle present. A radio playing by an open window. Some birds singing. The men with nothing to do.

  Did it matter if once, more than sixty years ago, some terrible things had been done here? I would bet any money that none of the people living here now, mostly immigrants by the look of it, knew or cared about it. They had their own difficulties.

  These thoughts didn’t seem good enough. So I decided I should try one more time. Not to make an effort would be like making those people die twice over.

  Sitting on a metal bench, I shut my eyes. I pictured what Clémence had told me. It was night-time in my imagination and an old green Paris bus was arriving, packed with tired, bewildered people. The local gendarmes were pulling them off the bus. The open end of the three-sided rectangle was blocked off by wooden fences, with barbed wire and sentry posts. The gendarmes pushed them through the gates, where German soldiers got them into lines with the end of their guns. Rows of them, just where I was sitting on the bench. Maybe it was raining. They were given numbered staircases to go to and were kicked along by boots and rifle butts. Children were torn from their mothers. Perhaps each staircase had its chief, not a soldier but one of those interned, a Jew. Someone in the darkness who took them to a straw mattress on the floor. To sleep. Before they took a train to somewhere they were too tired to imagine.

  My eyes were squeezed shut with effort and I heard the sound of children’s footsteps going up the stairs. I was with them, just for a moment, right behind them, as they climbed, watching the calf muscles of their bare legs. And I hoped that maybe it would have meant something to them to know that many years later, someone, even just a nobody from Africa like me, would come to listen to their voices. I tried to believe it might have been a comfort for them to think – in the last hours of their lives – that in an act of remembering they were, for a moment at least, something more than footsteps in a concrete stairwell.

  After this excursion, I didn’t feel up to much, so for a few days I stayed in the flat. In the end, I got the necessary energy to go up to Saint-Denis and make a call on Paname Fried Poulet.

  Hasim was away, but I let myself in by the kitchen door and found Jamal up to his elbows in flour and spices.

  ‘Thought you weren’t coming, you little cocksucker.’

  ‘I had other things to do.’

  ‘Got your plane ticket?’

  ‘Yes. I leave on Wednesday.’

  Jamal pulled his hands out of the mixing bowl and ran them under a tap, then he turned to me. ‘You do hate this country, don’t you?’

  ‘France?’

  ‘Yes, boy. France. They tortured us and killed us. And your country the same.’

  ‘No. They gave us independence.’

  ‘They let you go because they couldn’t fight two wars at once and Morocco was less useful to them. And what they did to my father and mother. That camp. He escaped by stealing a passport one night. He got a job as a labourer, building tower blocks for new immigrants outside Lyon.’

  I remembered Maurice the paedo lorry driver: ‘Too many Algerians in Lyon, that’s the trouble. Always have been.’

  ‘My mother died in that camp,’ said Jamal. ‘My father and my sisters and me, we then lived in a shanty town.’ Bidonville was the word Jamal used – a town made of empty cans.

  ‘I know it was bad for you, Jamal. But … None of these things happened to me.’

  ‘But you still hate France, don’t you?’

  ‘No, I don’t. I like France. Of course I know there were bad things done. But it’s the same with any European country, isn’t it? England’s just as bad.’ I thought of Miss Aziz’s puzzled history lesson. ‘Or Germany. They were far worse. And I like it here in Paris. I’ve learned so much.’

  Jamal banged a tray of chicken pieces into the oven. ‘All right, kid,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’ve met a girl. A woman.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Don’t let them ruin your life. Women.’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  Jamal went to one of the store cupboards and took out an
old chicken sack. He pulled out a thick envelope, which he handed to me. ‘This is the money. There’s a phone number inside.’

  As I was leaving, he gave me a small plastic bag of kif. ‘And this is for you. Use it before you go to the airport, then throw it away if you haven’t finished.’

  We shook hands. Jamal smiled at me. ‘Na’al abouk la France,’ he said. Fuck France.

  I smiled back. ‘Thanks for the weed, Jamal.’

  For the last time, I crossed the medina that is Saint-Denis market square – the black slate roofs and the halal meat, the buried Christian kings of France and the exiles of the Maghreb, the black burkas and the limp tricolore on the town hall. Frozen fucking fireballs.

  I was leaving just in time from a cash point of view as I’d spent what was left of my savings on a silver bracelet for Laila that I’d seen in a shop in the Marais. I was down to my last forty euros, and even with cunning use of the ‘Flunch’ fill-your-plate scheme and Hannah’s fruit bowl I was always feeling hungry.

  But I still had eight Métro tickets left, and using one of them I took myself to Bir-Hakeim. Down the steps and onto the Quai de Grenelle, past the Franprix with the elevated track on my right, past the Gitane with its red awnings and blackboard outside (dish of the day, as ever, was entrecôte or dos de cabillaud) and on down to rue Humblot … Apart from the cobbles and the Royal Rajasthan Indian restaurant (on which the metal shutters were drawn down to the pavement), it was a very unremarkable street. From the maroon street door a woman in a hat was emerging and I ran towards her, calling out, ‘Clémence! Wait!’

  She turned to look at me and I saw in a moment that it was someone else. The old-fashioned clothes were similar, she was the same age and height, but it was another woman’s face. She smiled at me as she put her key into her bag and began to walk. Even her smile had something of Clémence in it – a look that said, It’s all right, I know you and I understand.

  Waiting till she’d reached the end of the street, I set out to follow her. Almost at once we were in a square, the Place Dupleix, which was loud with the noise of children playing in the dust. They pushed and screamed, with a sound like seagulls. Behind them was a church with a pointed spire. Clémence, or her sister, walked on quickly, looking at her watch, past a glass-roofed bandstand inside the park.