Paris Was the Place

by Susan Conley

  “There is another poet that I’m going to read to you. An Indian woman named Sarojini Naidu. She wrote in English, but gave her poetry to the women in India like your mother.”

  Gita raises her hand. “But my mother is not able to read. It is one of the reasons I am not going back to my country, where the women are working in the fields and cooking outside over fire and not going to school.”

  “But your mother may have heard of Sarojini, Gita. People read Sarojini’s poems out loud in India. Sarojini fought for women. She didn’t believe in discrimination. She wrote that the only thing to do when your rights are being violated is to ‘rise and say this shall cease.’ ” Gita looks at me like I’m crazy. Like she knows about struggle and that it’s a much more practical thing than writing poems or small speeches about resistance. But I read a short stanza of the poem out loud anyway:

  “Shall hope prevail where clamorous hate is rife,

  Shall sweet love prosper or high dreams have place

  Amid the tumult of reverberant strife.”

  The girls’ faces are blank. The words in the poem are big and antiquated. “I want you to think about this thing Sarojini calls your ‘high dreams.’ She means what’s important to you. The things that matter most. So if you can, please write about such a thing, in English or in your own language. Either would be fine. One thing that’s important to you.”

  “Something that matters to us?” Gita asks.

  “Yes, exactly.”

  Moona talks again in the language that must be Urdu, and it’s enough to get the two Pakistani girls nodding.

  “Gita,” I say, when everyone seems done, “will you go first, please? Will you tell us your sentence?”

  “I cannot.” She looks down and stares straight ahead at the wall, as if she’s coaxing herself to speak.

  “Maybe Moona could go? Could you do that, Moona? Then Gita will follow along after you. It’s hard, I know. It’s scary. But we don’t bite!” I look at each girl. “We are all here to learn with you.”

  Moona says, “My hair is important to me. My long, thick braid.”

  Gita goes next: “My necklace is important to me. Morone was giving it to me. My gold medallion of Krishna.”

  Moona translates for Rateeka and Zeena. Esther and Precy speak in English, and I write it all down. “Congratulations,” I say. “You are all poets now.” Gita and Moona look at each other and laugh. “We can call it the ‘What Is Important Poem.’ It goes like this:

  “My long, thick braid.

  My virginity.

  Having babies and bathing them in the Ganges.

  My mother.

  The boy who will marry me someday.

  My gold medallion of Krishna.”

  THE CLASS RUNS from five o’clock to eight, with breaks every hour. At seven we all stand, and Gita walks to the bathroom down the hall with the low toilets built for second graders. When she comes back, she stops at my chair and takes my wrist in her hand, the way you might reach for your mother when you want her attention in a crowd. It’s a signal.

  “We are glad you are back here with us tonight.” She laughs. “We had bets on whether you would be returning for the teaching.” Then she sits on the couch in her blue sari and fingers the pendant.

  Moona comes back from the hall. “Tonight I will tell the story of my village in Kashmir before the war began and everything changed.” I try to hide my surprise. I can’t believe she’s going to do this on her own. “At first it was being a green place to live outside Srinagar. We had water. We had food. But then the drought came and the gods were angry. There was a statue of Vishnu in a pagoda. Bad people in the village smashed the statue because of a rumor that gold was buried underneath. They were so desperate for food that they destroyed the only hope we had. Kashmiris lived on one side of the river and Indians on the other. Kashmir was where I grew up, on the wrong side of the river when the water was low. The soldiers walked across together at night with loaded guns. The village is still green in my mind. But that village is now gone.” She sits and the room goes silent.

  “Thank you.” I clap my hands. Then we all clap. It’s an incredible thing Moona’s done—trusting us with this story. “Gita,” I say. She’s fingering her necklace again. “Your necklace is lovely. Tell us about Krishna.”

  “Krishna.” She speaks loudly, as if she’s decided once and for all to no longer be the one who waits and watches. She holds the medallion and lowers her chin as far as she can to get a look at it. “My sister, Morone, gave me this when we got to Paris. One was for me and one was for my maa. They are from Manju’s jewelry shop. What Krishna is doing on this necklace is playing music that is keeping people like me safe.”

  “Do you think Krishna is always benign?” I ask.

  “What is ‘benign’?” Moona asks.

  “Harmless.”

  “But Krishna can also be fierce.” Gita’s voice rises. “His fierceness is forcing evil spirits away.”

  Moona leans forward. “I myself am loving Krishna. I would be marrying Krishna if I could. If I was ever going to be marrying, I would like to marry Krishna.”

  The girls seem relaxed. There’s a softening again. “Krishna is kind.” Gita sits up on the couch. “It started when Vishnu came down to earth as baby Krishna to save us. He was playing tricks! He climbed a tree with the milkmaids’ clothes! He married a milkmaid. He put a blanket over his mother because he didn’t want her to know he was a god.”

  “He just wanted a normal maa.” Moona speaks slowly. “Who loved him and cooked dinner.”

  “He plays the flute, and all the animals come to listen,” Gita says. “Humans, too. Everyone enjoys it. Especially the cows.”

  It’s close to eight, and the girls look sleepy. Moona yawns. I stand up. “We’re done for tonight. Great work. Go to sleep.”

  They file out of the room and I walk down the hall and run into Gita’s lawyer again—the funny man with the hiking boots. My stomach does a flip. “Well, hello,” he says, in French this time. “Gita has spoken highly to me about your class.”

  “She’s a wonderful girl. How strong is her case? Do you think she’ll get asylum?” Adrenaline courses through my legs and arms. Where did it come from?

  He looks quickly at his watch and shrugs. Have I thrown him? Am I asking too many questions? “Merde,” he says to no one. “Merde.”

  “It’s that bad? She’s going to be denied?” I can’t stop myself.

  “No, no. I am late for a meeting with one of the girls in a very unusual case.” His voice sounds scratchy, as if he used to smoke heavily but has given it up. “You are Ms. Pears, yes?”

  “Please call me Willie.” I blush. “No one calls me Ms. Pears.”

  “Okay, it’s Willie then. What kinds of parents give a girl the name Willie?”

  “A slew of parents in the United States named their children after seasons and bodies of water and trees in the 1960s. My brother changed my name from Willow to Willie. Can you tell me if you think Gita isn’t going to make it?” I’ve never been good at flirting. “And how does a French boy in Paris end up with the name Macon?”

  “By way of a French mother and an Estonian father who live in Canada and travel to a small town in Georgia and begin a love affair with the American South.” He smiles. I can’t stop staring at his lips while he talks. They’re full and smooth, like a small, masculine flower. “We have a lot of work to build her case. I will press the judge and the representative from the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. I will push them, but it’s a challenging time.”

  “Because there’s no clear reason she couldn’t just be deported back to India?”

  Another long silence. “I reserve comment.” Where’s his sense of impending crisis? His urgency? “Willie. Please do not misunderstand me. But I do not deal in speculation. I let the facts lead us to the court, and I let the facts tell their own stories to the judge. What I need from you are more of these facts. Building blocks. More specifically
, I need you to help her write testimony. She needs a story that you believe is one hundred percent accurate that details her rape here in France. That explains why she can’t go back to her family in Paris but also why she can’t return to India, because there is no one there to care for her—a dead father, an arranged marriage with her rapist’s brother, a man who also molested her. Her hearing is scheduled for June. France has a policy of not expelling unaccompanied minors. It is our law. But the only way she can stay in France is if I can find her foster care. The government will insist on family reunification. It is their goal with minors. They will try to reinstate her with her mother, or they will fly her to India if they can trace the grandmother.”

  “You need facts,” I say in my best French. Gita’s road sounds daunting. “I can help her with facts.”

  “Do that and I will look forward to reading it.” His smile is big and infectious. I grin back. When? I want to say. When will you read it? When will I see you again? And even if you wanted to find me in this city, how would you do that? You don’t know where I live.

  Truffaut buzzes me out and the lawyer still doesn’t come. It’s dark out tonight. No stars. I turn at the end of Rue de Metz and pass the Restaurant de Chengdu with its black Chinese characters on the sign above the doorway. Macon Ventri. What kind of name is it? There’s a dark green news kiosk on the corner with curved metal sides, not unlike the drawing Precy made of her house in Monrovia. From this distance the kiosk looks ornate—a street temple. Enchanted, even. A black placard on the back reads PRESSE. I climb down into the metro station and attach myself to the outer circle of a group of older African women until the No. 4 comes.

  The foyer of my apartment building is lined with pieces of white-veined marble. There’s a narrow elevator I don’t trust, with collapsible brass doors and a wall of mirrors. To the left of the elevator are two rows of dark brass mailboxes. I’m No. 3. I hardly get mail in France, but I check it anyway. The carpet is thick and dark red with fading, light-colored roses. I follow the roses up to the third floor and find my keys in my bag.

  Then I dial Luke from the kitchen and pour a glass of white wine. I hang up after the first ring. He lives in the grown-up part of Paris: gorgeous single-family stone town houses in the sixteenth where no one’s on the sidewalks but older women in pencil skirts walking miniature poodles. We have a system, because he hates the phone. I dial again, and he answers right away. I can’t help smiling. He’s the reminder of the best part of our family. He’s me and not me. Better than me, because he sees me from afar and still loves me in a way that I can’t always love myself. And who can do that? Stop judging themselves? I felt my mother’s judgment. She couldn’t help it—the way she got mad at people at the hospital when they treated her patients unfairly. Roughly. Negligently. And then she’d get mad at me. At Dad. Hardly ever at Luke. I talk while, in bed, he watches a French game show involving plastic balls and trivia. He has a weakness for really bad TV. There wasn’t any television when he lived in China, and he’s making up for lost time.

  “The girls talked about Vishnu and Krishna in class. None of them had heard about the poet Sarojini. But they have so many stories to tell. Gita got going about how Krishna came down to earth to save it. Moona wants to marry Krishna. She said Krishna changes back and forth from god to a human.”

  “And who is Vishnu?”

  “Just the creator of the universe.” The phone’s quiet. “What are you doing? You’re smoking, aren’t you?” I hate it when he smokes.

  “I’m relaxing. Before I begin my night job.” During the day he helps Gaird design movies by scouring the Paris flea markets and building sets. But at night he works for his Water Trust, mostly trying to raise foreign money. He’s the president of a small, active board that he’s pulled together. My dad’s on the board and two of his old colleagues from his time at U.C. Irvine. There’s also a Chinese businessman who works in steel and a Taiwanese woman who runs foster care programs for orphans throughout northern China. Luke hasn’t met anyone in China or France or anywhere else, for that matter, who thinks that getting clean drinking water to Chinese villagers is a bad idea. But he needs a great deal of money to make it happen. He’s hired a full-time CEO—a Chinese foreign policy expert he met in Beijing when he taught the man English. But Luke raises most of the actual capital. He calls it flushing ducks. It involves a series of orchestrated dinners in Paris and Beijing and San Francisco, and lots of time on the dreaded phone.

  “My book will be about how poetry and religion are woven together in India.” I close my eyes. “I’m starting to run out of time.”

  “You got the grant. Don’t worry.”

  “You’re right. I got the grant.” I’m not going to tell him about Macon Ventri. There’s nothing to tell. And he will only make a joke, and whatever it is between Macon and me is too early. Too tender in my mind for Luke’s jokes.

  “I think you should book a plane ticket to Delhi.”

  I take a sip of wine. “Rajiv said I would be an English teacher at the asylum center. But it’s more complicated than that. Why did I agree to teach there?”

  “Because you are weak and Rajiv took advantage of you.”

  “I feel a little like a giant from outer space in that center.”

  “Normally you’re graceful, and you are very, very short. You always pull the classroom stuff off. You’re good at it. It’s what you do. You certainly shouldn’t have said no to Rajiv.”

  “How do you know anything you’re talking about?”

  “I don’t.”

  “You’ve never seen me in the classroom.”

  “You’re right, I haven’t.” Luke laughs. It’s a low laugh. More throaty. Like my father’s. When I think of my dad I’m filled with missing and white-hot anger. The longer I hold this anger the longer I hold my mother. Anger and love. Twins maybe.

  “So, really, everything you’ve just said is guessing?”

  “Exactly.”

  “There are no mothers and fathers. Can you believe that? They have no parents to help them in there.”

  “You’re going to be good at this, Willie. Give it time. If they don’t have mothers, then what an amazing thing that they’ll have you as a short stand-in with flaming red hair that needs a trim. You must not quit, sweetness. You’re not allowed to quit. Mom wouldn’t want you to ever quit.”

  4

  Fondue: a dish similar to a soufflé usually made with cheese and bread crumbs

  Our mother’s name was Kate. She had long, dark hair parted in the middle, which she pinned up with two tortoiseshell combs. When I was five, I used to sit on her lap in the rocking chair in the kitchen and run my hands through that hair. I wanted to swim in it. It smelled elemental—like vanilla and her skin. Sweet and earthy. She spent the first ten years of her life in southern Thailand near the coast, where her Dutch father harvested rubber trees for export with a French lumber company. When she moved to Montana, my mother said, she was already an outsider.

  When I was growing up in the sixties, she wore Thai sarongs like skirts over pants. She wasn’t like other hippie mothers. She was sterner and more serious. She drank glass thimbles of espresso at lunch in our kitchen and swore out loud, and she was one of the first women psychologists in San Francisco. Her specialty was cognitive therapy, a type of psychotherapy developed by a doctor named Aaron Beck, who’d been my mother’s teacher. For years she thought this brand of therapy would save even her most troubled patients. She believed it could change dysfunctional thinking and alter emotional reactions and transform entire belief systems.

  Her standards for people were so extremely high. In her mind, personal change always lived just around the corner. So she was on alert for it. She’d stare at me when I stepped off the school bus and into our driveway, as if I was going to say something brilliant. Sometimes I was paralyzed by her, and I said banal things or, worse, I whined and knew I’d let her down. She was so intense. She held the world accountable. She believed that everyone she m
et was as devoted to their passion as she was. But she’d put her arms around me in the driveway and hold me. Sometimes she’d even cry standing there because, she said, she loved me so much.

  She gave wild parties and took them almost as seriously as psychology. In 1970 she had a Halloween fondue party and asked everyone to come wearing a hat. Our house was a single-story redwood with skylights in the kitchen that Dad had put in himself. I got to greet people at the door. Luke took their coat in the hall if they had one. When the party was half full, Mr. Stevens, our neighbor, rang the bell. He was a neuroscientist at San Francisco State, and the only thing he had on was a blue beret. His genitals looked loose and ropy and scary, and I screamed for Mom. When she saw him, she laughed so hard she cried. Then she went upstairs to get him her kimono.

  At the dinner table, everyone had to stab cornichons and little pieces of beef with skewers and dunk them in the bubbling cheese. My mother stood up in her felt cloche and said, “You can’t drink the water tonight.” I leaned against the dining room door and stared. Who was this woman in the exotic hat? Where was my mother? It was hot for October in Marin. The dimmer on the pewter chandelier was turned low, so the room took on the glow of Sterno cans under the fondue pots. “You can only drink white wine!” She raised her glass and took a sip to demonstrate. “Water will harden the cheese in your stomach like stone.”

  She played Joan Baez during the meal and smiled at her neighbors and friends, who slowly and systematically got lit. My dad liked it once my mother started things for him—the talking, the people, and the food. But he didn’t seek people out the way she did. He didn’t need people. He had his math and his desert and he had her. “The Weight” by The Band came on, and everyone jumped up from the table and ran to the sunken living room and sang “Take a load off Fanny.” My mom had just painted the walls salmon the day before, and my father had hung his Indian weavings from Arizona.