Paris Was the Place

by Susan Conley

  “Oh no.”

  “Serious business.” Sophie crosses her arms over her large chest, and the silver bracelets clink on her wrist. “We each asked Gita about the baby—Sylvie, the nurse at the hospital, and Roselle, the government’s visiting nurse here. We had to know, of course. It’s part of our work to track the born and unborn.”

  “These girls are so young to be having babies.”

  “She’d done a bad job trying to abort.” Sophie takes a purple scarf off the back of her chair and ties her hair up with it. “They told me there was a lot of blood by the time she got to the hospital. We asked Gita, ‘Does the father know about the baby?’ The social worker asked first in English at the hospital. Then in French, Hindi, Urdu, and Farsi—all from a translation chart. I asked her all over again when they got her here. But Gita never answered. She was so slight. She slept the first week. Day and night, as if she hadn’t known sleep in months. Roselle offered her pills to calm her because she thought Gita was in a state of shock. She thought Gita would remain one of the speechless ones—one of the girls here who never speak.”

  “But she has so much to say, Sophie.”

  “This is not something you need to tell me, my friend.” She smiles. “Don’t ever forget that the girls teach us just as much as we teach them. Now go home, will you?”

  6

  Story: a tale, either true or not, that is designed to instruct or entertain the listener

  On Saturday morning I take Rue Lacépède until I reach Rue de l’Estrapade, then I walk south of the Pantheon past the tip of the Sorbonne, where the blue sky sits above the tallest buildings like a circus tent. I’m meeting Sara on the river. We do this on weekends. Talk and run and I feel intact again. Not the outsider who’s working, always working in my mind on my French. Boulevard St. Michel is filled with places to eat—food stands and small shops selling baguettes and cheese and crêpes. Everywhere crêpes. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of them. I stop at a crêperie at the corner of Boulevard St. Germain and Rue St. Jacques and order one with lemon and butter and sugar and eat it while I walk.

  Students have infiltrated most of the cafés and ethnic restaurants that dot the labyrinth of tiny streets in the fifth and sixth arrondissements. Passels of girls walk past me on the sidewalk wearing pompom hats and wool scarves and waxed parkas. Two young women in black leather bomber jackets sit at a brass table outside Café de Flore in the cold. The woman with hair to her waist pulls a package of Gauloises out of her coat. The box is shiny and red, like candy, with white lettering. She takes a metal lighter and flips it open with her thumb, then reaches for her friend’s cigarette. She lights her own afterward, and it’s as if they’re eating a meal. They lean back and inhale and enjoy the cigarettes so much that for a moment it looks like a real pleasure.

  Sometimes I find myself trying to list these pleasures in my mind here—maybe too often asking myself if I’m happy, and if I’ll find a way to make this city my home. A waft of their cigarette smoke waters my eyes. I walk down Boulevard St. Germain to Rue Dauphine and cross over the river at the Pont Neuf to Île de la Cité. The Palace of Justice sits several blocks from the tip of the island, gold and massive. Sara is on one of the granite benches to the left of the sidewalk, tying her sneaker. Seeing her pulls me out of my solitude, and I bend and kiss her on the cheek, so grateful that she lives here.

  A small group of teenagers lean against the stone railing nearby, listening to a bearded man sing in French. We make our way past them to the start of the bridge, where narrow stairs lead down to a cobblestone pathway. It’s so cold, I can see my breath. There’s a parade of boats moored to the stone embankment down here. The Seine hasn’t frozen completely, but the boats are beset in ice—heavy wooden sailboats tied to hydrant-like plugs embedded in the cement and white tour boats with flat hulls, and a series of small, brightly painted fishing skiffs. Sara’s hair is in a giant ponytail that sticks straight up. I still can’t believe she’s pregnant. Does she need to sit? “Is jogging good for the baby?” I ask. “Is it okay?”

  “I’m only five months pregnant, and the baby’s head is the size of a tiny Indian chapati. I am fine, for God’s sake.” So we bend and touch our toes on the cobblestones. No one is down here except a few men tinkering with the boats. We stretch each leg out to the side, one at a time, until I feel the pull in my hamstring. “How are all those beautiful girls in your class at the center?” she asks.

  “I wouldn’t call it a class, Sara. It’s a jail. People die in these places.” She, more than almost anyone else, understands an asylum center. Sara’s been inside more refugee camps in more remote places on earth than I can count. Before med school, she’d helped Rajiv do camp assessments for Oxfam. She’s pregnant, and I’m deeply happy for her, and I cannot wait to be the auntie. But maybe I need to become an expert in something, too? Maybe an overnight expert in refugee girls? “They’ve locked up teenage girls in there.” I speak with a little too much intensity. “Girls who have faces I sometimes can’t read.”

  Sara’s kind enough to remain unfazed by my little outburst. She reaches both her arms up in the air and jumps in place. “I’m so sorry for those girls. So sorry that detention centers even exist.” She stretches her arms above her head, then bends back toward the ground and reaches up again. “But you’re good in there, I just know it. You are a walking dictionary, and you can talk straight with the girls about what they need. Now, are you ready to jog?”

  We start off slowly. I keep thinking maybe it’ll snow. Is it really okay for her to be jogging? Her father moved the whole family to Nigeria in 1971, when Sara was eleven, to open one of the first clinics for Doctors Without Borders. Six months later, his appendix burst and he died of septic shock. Her mother was a nurse who stayed on in the village and still lives in Lagos, her mind fogged with dementia. When Sara was sixteen, she grabbed a spot at a boarding school in Delhi that her uncle arranged for her.

  “Does anyone in there speak a single word of English?” she asks as we run shoulder to shoulder along the cobblestones.

  “We sort of work through that. A few of the girls can translate.” My lips are numb and drool’s frozen on my chin. “But they’re shy sometimes. Especially at the start.”

  “So bring some snacks.” She’s on call at the hospital, and her black beeper sits clipped to the waistband of her red sweatpants. “I always bring snacks. If I have a really sick kid, I’ll use them.”

  “You mean you bribe them? And can you slow down, please? How is it that the pregnant woman is in better shape than the non-pregnant one?”

  “Let’s say I need to care for a kid who’s on morphine because his leg is atrophying. The metal screws of his fixator stick out of his thighbone to hold it together. It’s a very painful surgery.” She catches her breath. “I clear it with his parents, and I bring him a lollipop. The boy will let me examine the wound while he licks the lollipop.”

  She’s always been a rescuer. Has always gotten herself into jams with her quick tongue but found a way out. “Snacks.” I say the word out loud. “I haven’t used snacks since freshman composition class in grad school, when I just wanted the kids to like me.”

  “You really need these girls to like you now. Bring lots of food. Think of the girls as patients. Think of the class like a hospital. Their wounds don’t show, but you still have to go about bandaging them.”

  “But therapy was my mother’s job.”

  My mom left the city hospital when I was twelve and began her own practice. Dad was gone, and working at home allowed Mom more time with Luke and me. Money was a nagging problem. In 1972, everyone in Sausalito talked about healing—healing from the ongoing war, healing from Watergate. My mother started calling herself an intuitive. She said it was still psychology, but now she put her actual hands on people. She had cold hands—good hands for touching, she said. And she listened to the blood rush through her patients’ veins, and somehow this helped them.

  We run under the arches of Paris’s
most spectacular bridges—Pont Neuf, St. Michel and Petit Pont, Pont au Double, Pont de l’Archevêché. “You’re in there, asking them to tell you their stuff, for Christ’s sake,” Sara says. “Bring them mithai. Bring boondi and coconut burfi. My favorites. Bring them snacks and smile a lot and you’ll be fine.” We turn back at the Tournelle Bridge, which crosses over into the middle of Île St. Louis. Snacks. Why haven’t I thought of snacks?

  I BRING boondi and burfi to the fourth class. The girls sit in the common room and consider the platter of sweets. Such patience. Will anyone break down and eat? Moona finally leans forward and carefully, carefully picks up a saffron-colored sugar ball and nibbles it. These are the boondi—so delicious. The coconut burfi is cut like brownies and has the consistency of fudge. Zeena chooses a piece. Soon all the girls sit back on the furniture and eat their sweets. Then they’re not shy at all, thank God, and talk openly with one another about how to trim the ends of their hair with nail clippers, and how to put on black kohl eyeliner by burning a match and letting it cool before applying it with one finger, and how to sleep at night in the asylum center when they’re scared and don’t know where their mother is or if they’ll see their brothers and sisters again.

  Mothering often feels like the first cousin of teaching. And I’ve learned to squelch most of the urges to mother my college students. But in the asylum center, the instinct is too strong. Do the girls have toothbrushes? Winter boots? Tights to wear under their saris? How will they stay warm in the Paris winter? How will they make it without their mothers?

  There used to be a playground in Sausalito near the houseboat flotilla in the harbor, and my mother and I drove there a lot when I was five and Luke went to all-day school. There were cedar steps up to a metal slide. One day I climbed a knotted rope that hung beside the slide and jumped into the sand. My mother, in jeans, stood with the other moms over to the side. I loved these mornings because I got my mother to myself. But they were always filled with anticipation—the sweet wait for Luke to be home. I found her and leaned against her and ran my hand over her thigh, claiming her. Then she and I knelt in the sand and shaped a moat and a castle, using my green pail. She was like all the other mothers that day, or better even. She loved the sand. We worked on the castle until it was time for Luke to come home from school. Then we got in the car. I said I wished Luke had been there, because it was the best castle we’d done. Sometimes things weren’t real until I shared them with him. It’s still the same today.

  I look at the girls. “You are all learning to live in this really hard limbo.”

  “Limbo?” Moona asks. “What is this limbo?”

  “You are unsure if you will go home or if France is now your home. Limbo means things that are not certain.”

  “I am not liking this limbo.” Gita crosses her legs and looks angry. “I am not thinking this limbo can last very much longer.”

  I urge them to ask for more help at the center—Band-Aids and aspirin from Roselle, the nurse who comes on Wednesdays, help filling out the asylum forms from the lawyers on Thursdays, instructions from caseworkers on Tuesdays. I say their caseworker can tell them what to do about visiting hours, because sometimes a family member shows up. Sophie told me this caused a problem last Friday. An uncle of Esther’s arrived. Esther saw him in the hall talking with Truffaut, and began sobbing. No one’s sure what this uncle means to her or why he was here.

  “Gita,” I say. She looks straight at me from her seat on the couch. “Your limbo is guaranteed to last until sometime in June. That’s the month of your asylum hearing.”

  “June,” she repeats.

  “It would be great if you could practice your testimony every day.”

  She starts laughing and has to put her hand over her mouth to contain herself. Her laughter is uncontrollable—almost like a fit—she’s got so much emotion inside her that she has to leave the room.

  I ask the girls to write down the word “help.” Moona explains it to Rateeka and Zeena. I say, “I want you to get comfortable with this word. It’s a good one. Can you make sure you’re asking your caseworker for enough help? And your lawyer and me? Ask me for help.”

  Gita comes back into the room. “Willow, I am sorry. I was laughing. Then I was crying and I couldn’t make it stop.”

  She stays after class when the other girls leave for their rooms. “I understand help,” she tells me. “I can ask for help in French and in English and in Hindi. But I am not asking my maa for help because I do not want to ruin things for her or Morone. This is why they do not know where I am. None of them know.”

  She flips the pages of her notebook until she finds the picture of her house in India she drew in our first class. “In Jaipur we were having the cow. Plus the long walk to school. But at night all the women in the village would come together in the yard where the fire was lit and we would pick the rice and I would be braiding Morone’s hair or she would be doing mine. There were six families. We were all cooking over the fire. Meat almost always came on Saturdays. I will never go back, but I wanted you to know that about my country because it is good for friends to understand where each comes from and I hope you are my friend.”

  I TAKE the metro from St. Denis north to a stop called Barbès-Rochechouart, where I switch to the No. 2 line, which I take all the way to Victor Hugo. Luke and Gaird are giving a birthday dinner for their friend Andreas, a kind man who imports Scandinavian furniture to Paris and sings Broadway show tunes to himself. I get to their apartment at eight-thirty and let myself in with my key. I come here. A lot. My special place in Paris. Refuge. Gaird’s in the middle of the living room belting out a song in Norwegian. I’ve never heard him sing before. Luke flashes me a secret look of mock horror from the arm of the couch. Is Gaird drunk? He has a low, lovely baritone that vibrates when he holds the notes too long. He’s a tall man in a black suit with ruddy skin and one of the most coveted people in the French movie business. The apartment feels like a movie set, overflowing with settees and ottomans and pillows. There’s a purple velvet couch and ornate gold wallpaper and a large mural of hound dogs going after a fox, because Gaird is obsessed with anything French that references Versailles.

  Andreas is also on the couch with his partner, Tommy, smiling. There’s a woman across from him, whom I’ve never met, wearing incredibly high wedge heels. The song sounds like a Pete Seeger melody. Andreas claps. He’s also Norwegian. He must know what he’s doing. Then we all clap. Gaird sings: “Oh, I know of a land far away in the north, with a shimmering strand …” Then he bows. “Happy birthday, Andreas!”

  His scotch is on the top of the grand piano, and when he reaches for it, he sees me in the hall. “I am still having a love affair with my home country, Willie.” He takes my hand and kisses it. “We have been waiting for you.” He speaks English in a singsong accent that ends on a high note and leads me into the dining room. He and Luke have done a seating chart for dinner—they always do. Tonight they’ve placed me between Andreas and Tommy. I put out my hand and say hello to the woman in heels before I sit. Her name is Clarisse. She says she’s a painter at the Sorbonne. I’m relieved not to have to talk to her during the meal and offer myself up to her explicitly.

  Tonight I just want to listen. I talk all day in the classrooms. Andreas has curly black hair like a mop on his head. He wears clear plastic glasses. One of his eyes is green and the other is pale blue. I try not to watch his eyes while he talks, because then I think too much about whether they’ll ever turn the same color. And they never do. He asks me about the asylum center. For him I’ll answer anything. He’s one of those generous listeners who makes me feel like I’m sharing instead of burdening him. He’s calm and self-composed and absorbs everything I say about Rajiv’s connection to the center and the backlog at the immigration courts.

  Luke pours red wine and Gaird brings out a white platter from the kitchen with something he calls dyresteg on it. “In English, please, Gaird?” I smile.

  “Venison.” Andreas pats my
hand. “Roast venison with a goat cheese sauce.”

  “It is straight out of my mother’s recipe book” Gaird says. His parents owned a commercial dock in Drammen Harbor in Norway. He left after high school and rarely went back. In 1986, he parachuted over the Torne River into Finland. Last December he invited Luke to sit in the plane’s cockpit and watch him drop out over Lemvig and pass over the Danish fjords. Luke called me when he’d made it safely back to Paris. “I live with a man who likes to open the plane door at ten thousand feet and jump out. People who fly are crazy. Stay away from them.” Then Luke got the flu.

  The woman named Clarisse has a sweet, knowing smile and perfect jaw-length black hair. She says, “Thank God for meat. We used to eat venison growing up in Switzerland. Sometimes it was all we had on the farm to get us through winter.”

  “This reminds me,” Luke says, “of the food in Innsbruck, where Gaird was foolish enough to try to ski on the full moon.”

  “First he had us cross entire glaciers in our sneakers,” Andreas laughs.

  “We’d taken a tram halfway up.” Gaird waves his hand in the air dismissively. “Then we began the push through the new snow toward the hut.”

  “At one point I was hanging off a small precipice by my right hand,” Luke says. “Nothing but glacier below me all the way down to my funeral in Innsbruck.”

  “I got complacent—that is the word, yes? I took a trail alone through the woods. We were skiing without a guide at night, which was wrong in the first place. The snow was heavier under the trees, and I found myself in a dead man’s gulley. Jesus, I was dumb.” Gaird laughs out loud at himself. It’s not everyone who can stop taking himself so seriously.

  “We thought,” Luke says, looking at Andreas and Tommy, “that he was gone, didn’t we? We sat at the big stone fireplace in the hut waiting for him, and I began to have this sick feeling that crept through every bone in my body. I would lose him, and I could never bear that.”