by Susan Conley
The girl in the chair next to Gita says, “Long after the British tore us in two, I lived part of my life in one half of India and part in the other half. I am Moona.” Her face is narrow, and she’s got much wavier hair that Gita’s, pulled back in a bun that puffs up at the front.
The girl next to Moona wears black Elvis Costello glasses and sequinned jeans held up by a belt with metal sprockets. “I am from Liberia. You can call me Precy.”
Then the small girl at the far end of the couch says, “I am Esther.” It’s almost a whisper. “I am from the Congo.”
The other two girls sit close together on the bench. One wears a blue tunic and pants and a red head scarf with glittery green and orange stripes. A black headpiece under the scarf completely covers her hair and neck. She stands up, embarrassed, and leans toward Moona and whispers. Then she looks at me. “Rateeka.”
“She cannot understand your English very well or the Hindi,” Moona says. “I learned Urdu in Kashmir. I will try to speak to them, but I only know a little.”
The other girl on the bench just says, “Zeena,” and waves. Her head scarf is bright purple, and she also has the black piece underneath so it looks like two head scarves, one on top of the other. “Zeena.”
I reach for my bag on the floor and pass out pencils and small spiral notebooks covered in blue flowers that look like snowflakes. The pages inside are lined. “I’d like to start by doing a drawing. I’d like you to draw a picture of your old house with this pencil if you can. Could you do that?”
They stare down at their laps again like they’re waiting for a secret sign to begin. “Could you try? I think it’ll be good if you can. We’ll use these houses for some practice talking in English. Why don’t we start the drawing? Then maybe Rateeka and Zeena will understand once they see what we’re doing.”
More of the painful silence. No one says a word. A leftover alphabet is stenciled in blue on the wall above the windows, and I stare up at it and try not to panic. How are we going to get through the next hour if no one will draw? Each of the girls looks slightly bored. Their thin arms and legs disappear into the mouths of the upholstered furniture. But I think fear can look disarmingly close to boredom.
Then Gita says, “It is time for the class to begin. We must do what the teacher is asking if we are going to get any help inside this place.” She smiles a perfect row of very small, square top teeth. Her bottom teeth are bigger and crowded to the front.
The class really only starts after Gita speaks, because they listen to her. We all listen to her. “You are asking us to draw our old houses on this paper? The houses we were living in before France?” She puts her hand over her mouth and smiles. “I do not know why you are asking us this when we are here in France. When we are trying to leave our old lives and our old families and our old countries behind.” She looks back down at her lap. Her brown eyes take up half her face, which is a tougher face than I realized. Her body is thin but strong underneath the sari. She has a pendant on a chain that she keeps fingering with her right hand.
“Yes, Gita.” I lean toward her and smile too quickly. “Yes, exactly.” I want to be some kind of recording device that the girls can speak things into. I just want them to talk. Moona says something fast to Gita—in Hindi? Then she sizes me up. “We can probably do that.” She’s more wary than Gita. “We can try what you are asking.”
They all draw in the spiral notebooks—rectangular shapes and thin, narrow buildings and short, round houses made with the outlines of brick. It’s quiet, nervous work. When it seems like everyone’s done, I hold up my drawing of three thin trees in front of a low, one-story house. I can’t draw to save my life, but I’ve shaded in the bay below the house and the small view of the houseboats. “If you can try to form one sentence in your mind about your house, it would be good. Just one thing you’d like us to know about it. Please try to speak in English if you can.”
Teaching can be a lightning-fast popularity contest with a very small population of voters. Your status rises and plummets in the course of one hour. It can also be like corralling students toward some unseen gate. Today I’m capable of more manipulation than usual. “This is my house in Sausalito, California, where I grew up. We were on the edge of the United States. My mother was a doctor. She worked at a hospital. My father was a mapmaker. He went into the desert to make maps that hung on the walls of my house. This is my family history. That’s what I want to talk about today. Family and history. Together these two words are a huge part of the story you’ll need to tell the judge at your hearing.”
If the girls turn on me now—because of my old age or white skin, or the way I wear my red hair down past my shoulders with bangs that hide my eyes, or how I mispronounce their names—then the class is finished. How will I explain that to Rajiv?
There aren’t any people in my drawing, but I know where my mother would stand, next to the biggest eucalyptus, if she were alive. My beautiful mother. There’s an empty space in the drawing where she should be, and I miss her terribly in a way that’s still mostly buried.
I look over at Gita and wait. I bet she isn’t shy but has learned to bide her time. “Gita, could you do me a favor and go next?” She glances up and back down at her lap. There’s this tension between her wanting to talk and a learned instinct to hold back and see. Then she raises her picture above her head defiantly, with both hands. “This is my house, near Jaipur in India. Two floors. One for the rice and hay. One for sleeping. Every day I was milking the cow and walking to school. I am not going back.”
Tell me more, I want to say. Tell me everything. I’m hard to deny in the classroom. I have an eager face. I nod my head. I care about the details, so give them to me please. What I’d like is an invisible thread to connect me to each of them. It’s not transparency I’m working toward. I can never fully know any of them. But as much as it’s possible for a student to connect with a teacher—well, I want that inside here.
Moona goes next. She has a long, pointed nose and a small gold stud in each ear. Her picture is of a tall apartment building. “We were living in a slum outside Srinagar in Kashmir and I knew the Top Ten U.K. chart by heart.” She walks in a small circle in front of the couch and points to the drawing in her hand. “But then the troubles were starting and we left because we are Hindu. We got two rooms on the sixth floor on a wide street in the south of Bombay. My father had to stay in Kashmir. This was before I began working at my uncle’s shoe factory.”
Moona is able to translate Rateeka and Zeena’s descriptions of their small mud houses in a village outside Lahore. How have these two girls gotten from Pakistan to Paris alone? “They are Pashtun,” Moona says. “The Punjabi army drove their families out. They have been living on the street in Paris for almost a year. I cannot believe they are still in one piece.”
Then Precy says, “Hmmmmm. Hmmmm. Hmmm,” and looks up at the ceiling. Her hair is in dozens of small braids. “We were very poor. Understand. I have six brothers and sisters in Monrovia.” She looks down at her pencil scrawl, and I see tears on her face. Have we gotten ahead of ourselves tonight? This is another unspoken rule of teaching: I’ll ask you to go further than you’ve ever gone with your story, but I won’t abandon you in front of the class.
She smiles me away. There is a quiet fierceness to her. “The house was a plastic tarp with pieces of cardboard on the sides. Then my father got a job driving a bus. So we moved to a two-room apartment and I went to school. I was thirteen. There was a big rainstorm, and an orange van stopped on the road with the doors cut out. The war hadn’t started, but my father talked of signing up with President Samuel Doe. It was raining hard. I found a place to stand inside the van, and I held on to the roof with one hand and we went to the river. That was my mistake. There were bad men in there, and it was the last day I saw my family.” Precy’s face clouds over.
She sits down and glares at me. “Why are you doing this? No, really, why are you helping us? What is in this for you?”
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p; Part of me saw this question coming. But maybe not on the first night. “Being able to tell your story could be a way to save your life.” I pause, because even though I believe what I said is true, the girls might think I’m crazy. Precy’s about to be deported. She wants legal documents. Not stories. My face turns red. “There’s nothing in this for me, Precy, but the chance to teach you. I’m a teacher. That’s what I do.” I’m not sure if she buys it.
I smile at Esther, and she looks away. Her hair is long and scraggly, her jeans baggier than Precy’s. She’s a little bird inside a black hoodie that has the words THE WHO in squiggly white capitals across the chest. The small bones in her arms move when she waves her hands. “We lived in the Congo, but I was very young when the men came and pushed us into Kenya. There was never electricity and bad things happened in the dark, but I cannot remember this to you. When we left that camp, we flew to a country called Sweden and we didn’t have my mother anymore.”
There’s a softening. It started when the girls said their names out loud, and it ripples each time we drop down deeper into one of their stories. Who doesn’t want to be seen or listened to? The girls’ pasts feel so close they could get on and ride them back to their childhoods. They’re better timekeepers than me, because when the white clock above the door says eight, they stand on cue and gather their notebooks and pencils, smile weakly, and leave.
Then Sophie pops her head in. She’s almost ecstatic. “Gita was laughing for the first time she’s been here! I could hear her in the hall, and this has got to be an act of God because nobody laughs much in here!” She helps me shove the couch against the wall with her hip.
“I asked the girls to draw houses, and they really tried. It’s a great sign. Why do some of them have English?” I lean down to pick my bag up off the floor. I’ve got to go now. I’ve got to find my brother at our favorite Indian place for dinner.
“School is the magical potion that separates the girls from the girls.” She clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth and smiles. “Some of them got school and some of them didn’t. Lord, it is good to have your new blood inside this place.”
“How long has Gita been here?”
“Two weeks.”
“Moona?”
“For Moona it’s been close to two months.”
“Moona has had bad luck.”
Sophie stops me in the hall and puts her hand on my face. “You don’t know good luck staring you in the face. You haven’t been to the real detention centers in France. Five, ten, fifteen to a room and all waiting for a plane back to what? This here, my girl, is decent food and a bed and a chance in front of a judge.” She steps into her office and waves me down the hall.
Will Truffaut let me out? Could he be on a coffee break? Then what? My heart beats faster again. How do you physically leave this building?
Then the door zings and a man with dark wet hair jumps in and moves to the side to make room. “Raining like a son of a bitch,” he says in French and stomps his hiking boots so water that’s pooled in the collar of his black raincoat slides down his pants and onto the floor. I pull up the hood on my own coat—the wool one with wooden toggle buttons. The man is sinewy in a navy suit, and has the start of a beard. His eyes are mapped with small creases that make them look kind, the blue porous, with small flecks of gray.
“I see that they’ve tricked one more sane person into teaching for us. I can tell by how scared you look. Shit,” he says. “Shit, Shit.” He paws through the saddlebag slung over his left shoulder, which is filled with manila files that have names written on them.
“You’re a lawyer?” I say in French.
“So many girls here. Macon Ventri, pleased to meet you.” He puts his hand out, and when I take it there’s something gentle about the way he gives it to me. Then it’s done, and he’s on his way to Sophie’s office. “You must wait here like a robot while the guard in the surveillance office decides whether to release the maddening locks and let you out or not. Gita Kapoor,” he says, turning back. His eyes lock on mine. The fact that he doesn’t know his eyes are sexy makes it so much better. “She is one of the girls who I’ll see tonight.”
Truffaut must be watching on his TV screen because the locks zing again, and I pull the heavy knob. It’s a cold rain outside. “She is my student. Gita.”
“Don’t be fooled by her shyness. She will have her appeal hearing this summer. I’ll know the actual date as we get closer,” he adds in English. I hate when this happens—when Parisians switch languages on me as if I can’t manage French verbs. He waves at me and turns back down the hall.
The door slams, and I jog in the rain down Rue de Metz, past the Saint Pierre Cosmétique shop with its poster of an African woman with straightened hair. The metro station is more menacing and smellier at night, so I stand close to the commuters on the platform—older women in saris and parkas and middle-aged African men in blazers and knit hats. I step onto the No. 4 and stare out the window into the dark. Our class meets for just three hours a week—such a short amount of time for the work in front of us.
2
Collusion: a secret agreement between two or more persons; a conspiracy
I get off at the Gare du Nord—loud cavern of steel and glass—and climb the stairs to Rue du Faubourg St. Denis, which runs along the east side of the station. I’m late for dinner with Luke. The sidewalks are even more crowded with shoppers. We’re still in the tenth but farther north. The train station shadows long banks of dove-gray apartment buildings with wrought-iron balconies and cafés with scalloped awnings. The rain’s stopped but not before it froze on the icy sidewalks, and the wind has only picked up. Dark limbs of chestnut trees rock back and forth up near the highest apartments. And this is a different Paris than even this afternoon. The city changes faces.
Teenagers sort through tape cassettes in the shops, and women stop at the clothing store windows: New Madras. Saja Pathni. Then, chatting, they move on, plastic bags of vegetables hanging off their wrists. I take the mental notes of a foreigner: the strong smell of cooking oil in the air and the way the women lean their heads together while they walk. For years I’ve been wanting to go to India. I read the work of Tagore and Roy in grad school until the voices in those poems were like kind, good people talking in my head.
Tiny white lights have been strung above the wooden door to Ganges, a hopping Indian restaurant halfway down the block. They blink on and off, and I can just make out the thin frame of Luke walking toward me. The greatness of living in the same city with him hasn’t worn off yet. He’s got on a Russian hat made of beaver—the kind for hunting in Siberia with bow and arrow, and side flaps that button above his ears. I want to laugh at him except he looks so earnest in the hat. He kisses me on both cheeks and holds my hands. “Sister-love. Can we please talk about your cowboy boots?”
He’s a tall, long-haired thirty-two-year-old with a pale V over his right brow from the fall he took off our refrigerator when he was five. Wanderer. Collector. He raised me. He studied engineering in college for one year but left in 1976 and reinvented himself in China. He lived in Beijing for seven years, teaching English in a state-sponsored jobtraining program and taking crash courses in Mandarin. But he’s an engineer at heart, like our father, and wanted to get drinking water to the Chinese villages he’d fallen in love with. This became his passion, so he formed a collective of expats and local Chinese called the Water Trust that builds pipe systems into the villages.
“It’s hard to do cowboy boots with a toggle coat, and I wish you’d called me first.” He grins and opens the door to Ganges and moves us through the crowd waiting for tables. “I can take you shopping for real shoes tomorrow.” By 1984, when I visited him in China, he was known at the Chaoyang flea market in Beijing as the crazy laowai who bought propaganda posters and silver cigarette cases with engravings of Mao—anything with a whiff of the Chinese Revolution. A movie designer approached him there one day about sourcing props—a Norwegian named Gaird, working on a W
u Tianming film called Old Well. When the filming was done, Gaird and Luke left China together and moved to Paris.
“But I don’t want real shoes. I like my boots.”
Even in Paris in 1989 it’s the reign of Madonna—black lace shirts and shoulder pads and leggings. Levi’s are also on the streets, but they hem them higher here, so you can see the equestrian boots the French women are wearing. No one seems to own cowboy boots. “You could wear more black at least. You could wear spandex. Everyone in Paris does when they’re walking their dogs.”
“But I don’t have a dog.”
The ceiling at Ganges is low and slanted, the walls painted with bright orange suns that yell out SAAG PANEER! and LAMB MASALA! Rajiv and Sara sit in a corner booth, their heads close together, talking. Rajiv stands and hugs me, and Sara jumps up. I’ve known her since our first day of college. Our school president said statistics showed that we might end up marrying the person next to us. The girl to my right seemed bored. She pulled a pair of aviator sunglasses down from her nest of crazy hair and said, “Sorry. I’m just not that attracted to you.” Then she laughed out loud and grabbed my hand. “Sara’s my name. We need to evacuate and go find some good marijuana.”
Many years and several countries later, Sara and I hug in Ganges in Paris. “You smell so good, Sara, like verbena.” I have to yell over the din of the sitar music and the voices of so many people eating food they love.
“I don’t know my way from verbena to violets.” She uses her whole broad face when she talks and crinkles the space between her eyebrows. She’s four months pregnant, in a bright orange Marimekko tunic belted over a very small bump of a baby. “It’s free sample cream I found inside a magazine.” Tonight she’s somewhere near the midpoint in the obstacle course that becoming a doctor in France entails, and the dark rings under her eyes prove it. “Now tell us! Tell us! Tell us about the center, Willie! How was your first night?”