by David Wright
“So what happens in the movie?” I asked.
“A man is murdered, and everything gets complicated,” she said.
Then she added, “Listen, I have to get back,” and it was only then that I noted the fading light. The sun was dropping toward the rooftops so fast you could almost see it moving.
I walked her toward Les Halles, where she would catch the RER. Foot traffic had picked up with the end of the workday. We passed beside the Saint-Eustache church, where skateboarders in baggy pants and knit caps back-sided and frontsided around the park benches. One did a railslide down a freestanding metal bannister, his board screeeeeeching. A little farther on was this boulder, at least ten feet high, sculpted to look like a huge head resting lightly in the palm of a stone hand. A couple lounged in the cupped hand, the woman whispering in the guy’s ear, the guy laughing.
I pointed to the church. “It’s a mixture of Gothic and Renaissance.” I’d read that in a guidebook, Le Guide du Routard. “Freeman says it’s ugly.”
“Really?” she said. “It’s my favorite.”
“Mine too. It looks like a giant ship, its sails catching the wind, bearing down on the Forum.”
I hadn’t read that. I was just winging it.
“That’s what I like about it too.” She pointed from the church to the metal-and-neon shopping mall. “Two worlds colliding.”
We took the long escalator down into the Forum, where the RER station was, me in front, her behind, so that people in a rush could get past. I could almost feel Aïda’s breath on the back of my neck. Midway she laid a hand on my shoulder. I stared down into the fluorescent-lit dark, then rested my hand over hers. We rode in silence like that, still as statues.
I heard a muffled drumbeat, Bob Marley’s “Revolution.”
“Funky ringtone,” I told her.
I’ve always loved Bob Marley. Before my parents split up, we would take family vacations in the Islands during the winter, and her ringtone reminded me of dancing to his music on the beach in Jamaica with a girl named Lora, whose older sister worked at the resort. I also remembered my mom on that particular trip sitting me down in the hotel for a talk. She warned me to be careful “playing tease with the locals,” and I told her she was being racist.
“Putain,” I heard Aïda say. She was reading the display on her phone. “I need to get back to Villeneuve. Now.” She dropped my hand and took off at a clip.
I struggled through the crowd, trying to keep up. She didn’t stop until she got to the ticket turnstile at the RER station.
“Wait,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“It was from Sidi. Monsieur Oussekine just found out about Moussa’s trouble at school.”
I had to jog my memory. “From three months ago? Him breaking back in?”
“Sidi says he’s going to ship Moussa off to Algeria.” Her expression was dead serious.
“Would he really?”
“On God’s head,” said Aïda. “To live with a great-uncle he’s never even met. Marc Lebrun and Yazid are going to talk to Monsieur Oussekine right now.”
We inserted our tickets into the machine, and I followed her through a crush of people to the platform.
“What kind of parents would send their kid off to another country?” I said.
Aïda looked at me the same way Moose had that night on the Champs-Élysées, when he called me “so white”—more disbelieving than disappointed but a little bit of both. As if my mouth spoke things on its own that the rest of me couldn’t possibly be thinking.
“Parents who work sixteen hours a day to put food on the table, that’s who. Fathers who are tired of seeing their sons screw up in school and who are afraid they’ll do the same with the rest of their lives. Mothers who want a better future for their daughters and who understand they’ll only attain it here if they learn the discipline of there.”
The RER train rolled into the station. Aïda pushed forward.
“My parents would do the same to me,” she said. “They’ve already threatened Sidi.”
The train was crowded, but we were able to get two seats next to a window. It was only six stops to Villeneuve. The buzzer signaled that the doors were closing, and I texted Moose, typing with both thumbs. Are you ok?
He answered instantly. Got any packing tips?
Aïda stared out the window. I did too. I looked at the forest of high-rises, trees in blossom in between, as we came out from underground and realized that spring was really under way. Ten minutes later we were in the streets of Villeneuve, headed toward the clubhouse. Our arms kind of rubbed as we walked, and as we rounded the corner by the Greek sandwich shop, I was like, Go on, wuss! and I slipped my hand into hers.
She jerked free, like my hand had shot her with a jolt of electricity.
“Not here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I stared at the high-rises, at the faces passing by. I felt kind of embarrassed.
But I also didn’t know what to make of her reaction. I mean, she was the one who had made the first move, on the escalator in the Forum.
We crossed the big cement courtyard. A group of players, six or seven of them, were gathered in front of the clubhouse. Yasmina and Sidi spotted us and headed our way. “Marc and Yazid just left with Moose,” Yasmina said.
“To meet with his father,” Sidi added. He looked at us kind of suspiciously.
Aïda shot back, “Why aren’t you with them?”
“They didn’t want me there,” Sidi said, looking suddenly sheepish, and I could see in his face the little boy he still was behind all the bravado and the spleefs.
“Yaz said Sidi had already contributed more than enough toward Moose’s cause,” Yasmina said, and I laughed.
Aïda didn’t.
Neither did Sidi. “I’m sick of being tagged as the screwup!”
“You know I love you,” Yasmina said, “but come on. You do have a knack for making messes.”
“And no demonstrated ability for cleaning them up,” said Aïda.
“So anyway,” I said, trying to help Sidi out, “what do we do now?”
We all looked at one another.
“Wait,” Aïda said.
We went into the clubhouse and sat around the conference table, talking and playing backgammon. Aïda mostly ignored me. She leaned in toward Yasmina and whispered stuff, all conspiratorial.
I stepped outside and dialed Moose’s number. I got his voice mail after the first ring and left a message: “Your phone must be off. Call me when you get this.”
I texted Free: Moose getting sent to Algeria.
He called right away. “For real? He’s out for the final?”
“He’s out for the rest of his life,” I said. Then I explained everything.
“So what do we do?” Free said.
“What can we do?”
I wanted to ask his advice about this stuff with Aïda, but I didn’t. I told him I’d call later, after I knew more about Moose.
When I got back inside, Sidi was on the phone, talking to his mom or dad. He hung up and told Aïda, “We have to get back for supper.”
“Me too,” Yasmina said, gathering her things. “I should be going.”
Out in front of the building, Aïda turned to her brother. “Go on,” she said. “Tell Father I’ll be there soon.”
Sidi looked from her to me and back again. “How long will you be? I can wait for you.”
“You think I need you to watch over me?” she snapped.
He dropped his eyes and shuffled away.
We took the same route to the train station, only in reverse. I made sure we weren’t touching at all.
“So what’s up?” I asked.
“Nothing is up. Can’t I walk you to the train station without something being up?”
We covered the last blocks in silence, passed the turnstile and followed the Trains to Paris sign to the platform. The electric board indicated that the next one would arrive in two minutes.
“Better st
art talking,” I said, tapping my watch.
The station was empty. Aïda went to the far end of the platform. I followed.
“I just wanted to apologize,” she said.
“For what?”
“For shaking your hand off earlier. I didn’t mean to be rude, it’s just that…”
She looked toward the ground.
I said, “What?”
“You know.” She was standing square in front of me now. “I don’t want your being with me to be about some rich kid slumming.”
“Look at who my friends are, Aïda.” The board said I had one minute. “Don’t you know me well enough to know I’m not like that?”
“But Matt, I live here and you don’t. Your mother runs a company, and my father sweeps the street. When you go back to Montreal, I’ll still be here.”
I heard the train coming. Our faces were only inches apart.
“I have to be able to trust that you have my back,” she said.
Have her back? I thought I did. I was certainly trying to. Hers. Moose’s. Sidi’s. But I began to wonder if I even knew what this meant.
It made me think about Jamaica, those family trips to the Islands, what my mom had accused me of—playing tease with the locals. We’d stay a week and I’d run around with the Jamaican kids, listening to reggae, swimming or messing around on the beach, and I remember thinking of myself as Jamaican. But I’d never really stopped to think how insulting that was. The real Jamaicans didn’t look anything like me. No matter how much I hung out with them, no matter what we did together, I’d never be like them. I was one of the others, who came from elsewhere, with dollars in their pockets, for the sun and the ocean, living in a hotel with a pool and a private beach and security guards and loving it. Pathetic.
“I get it,” I told her. “You have to believe me that I do.”
“Because I don’t want to be the silly Arab girl who fell for the rich Canadian who was just visiting.”
Up the tracks, the train rounded the corner, closing in.
“You’re leaving in, what?” she said. “One week? Two?”
“Classes don’t start until September.”
“September,” she said. “And your mom will let you stay until then?” But she didn’t wait for an answer. She took my face between her hands and kissed me. Right there, right on the platform.
The taste of her. Her scent. The faint smell of shampoo. Strawberry.
The train barreled into the station and slid to a stop. She slowly backed away. Then she laughed.
“This,” she said, pointing back and forth between us, “won’t be a walk in the park. I can be difficult.”
“So I’ve learned.”
People got off the train, and I leaped on. I sat next to the window beside where she stood on the platform. I laid my hand against the window. When she did the same, we both burst into laughter. I couldn’t hear her through the glass, but I read her lips: “Corny,” she said as the train started to roll.
I watched her grow smaller and then completely disappear.
I texted Moose before I lost reception underground. How did meeting go?
My phone rang the second we resurfaced, five stops later, at Port-Royal. “Yaz and Marc convinced my father to not send me back to the bled,” Moose told me.
“That’s awesome!”
“Under one condition,” he continued. “I have to quit the team.”
FREE
Me and Matt met at Les Halles the next afternoon. He was sitting on the lip of the Fontaine des Innocents as I walked up.
“You sure this is a good idea?” I asked.
“It can’t hurt.”
“If Monsieur Lebrun and Yaz didn’t get anywhere, what can you and me accomplish?”
“You underestimate my charm and powers of persuasion.”
We had our big bags with our gear so we could go straight to practice after, but I was dressed fly, in black slacks and a white shirt.
Matt busted on me. “Did you get a side job as a waiter?”
“Oh snap,” I said, and I gave him the hand.
He pointed to a florist’s shop. “For Moose’s mom.”
A little old lady sold us the Délice du Printemps, which meant “spring delight.” It was a bouquet of yellow tea roses, white lilies, pink gerberas and blue lisianthus. (She had to explain this to us; I don’t know yellow tea roses from Guns N’ Roses.) On the train, we sat silent, me holding the bouquet. I didn’t tell Matt this, but I hadn’t ever been in a Muslim’s home before. Ever. I didn’t know what to expect, and I was kind of nervous behind it, especially as we were trekking up there to tell a grown man how to raise his son.
It was seven floors up, and the elevator was broken. The cement stairwell reeked of piss. With our huge bags, me and Matt were in a sweat and working for breath by the time we reached their door. In the hallway outside was a line of shoes and sandals. Matt slipped out of his, and when I didn’t, he nudged me. When my shoes were off, he rang the bell.
A little girl, ten, maybe eleven years old, in a long embroidered shirt and a blue-and-yellow headscarf, opened the door. She yelled back into the apartment, “Moussa, les américains des Diables!” Then back to us, beaming: “Salut, les champions.”
An older lady appeared—Madame Oussekine?—in a high-necked robe that reached the floor and a dark headscarf. “Please, please.” She waved us in. Then, kind of scolding: “You should have called to let us know you were coming.”
I extended the flowers.
“How lovely! Let me find a vase.”
Their living room was long and narrow, with green walls. The ceiling was kind of low, the room kind of tight, with stuff everywhere. There was an oak cabinet with glass doors, filled with old books, colored candles and framed pictures. One was a black-and-white—super old—of a man in an army uniform.
Moose came out from the back, not looking too pleased. “What are you doing here?” he whispered.
“Saving your ass,” Matt whispered back.
Before Moose could say anything more, a man appeared at the end of the hallway, tall and lean, in a long white robe and skullcap. Monsieur Oussekine was straight up a replica of Moose, fast-forward forty years, and with a full beard.
“Welcome to my home,” he said in a booming voice. It seemed to echo over every other noise in the apartment. But he didn’t smile. Kind of the opposite: his face was as quiet as a closed door.
Moose was sort of…submissive in front of his pops. Not like nothing I’d ever seen of him. “Father, meet Mathieu Dumas. His family hosted me in Montreal last summer.”
Monsieur Oussekine’s face loosened some at that, but not much.
“And this is Freeman Behanzin. He comes from Texas.”
He took me in with a glance and waved for us to sit down. Matt and me sat side by side on this old leather sofa, and he took the large chair beside the window. Moose stayed off in the corner, near the hallway. The air was stuffy with the smell of food frying in the kitchen.
“Let me guess,” Monsieur Oussekine said. “You’re here to try to convince me to let my son stay on the team.”
It wasn’t a question.
“Yes, sir,” Matt said, and then he started in, and it sounded kind of rehearsed. “Like all fathers, I’m sure you know what the—”
Monsieur Oussekine cut him off. “How old are you, son?”
“Eighteen, sir. Well, almost.”
“And you propose to lecture me on what’s best for my children?”
Matt stared at his shoes.
The girl who’d opened the door carried in this fancy sculpted tray with a copper teapot on it like the one in Aladdin. It saved our asses. Monsieur Oussekine took his focus off us and turned it onto the tray. There were these fresh but ridiculously small glasses in a bunch, and he served us mint tea by holding the pot up high, lowering it to the lip of a glass and then moving on to the next one, splashing tea all over the table. I didn’t know if we were supposed to raise the cups in a toast or throw
them back like movie cowboys do a shot of whiskey. Matt sipped at his, his eyes still fixed on his feet, so I followed his lead—or tried to. The glass was scalding. I put it back down and blew air on my burning fingertips. And we just sat there, looking at one another.
I said, “Moose—I mean, Moussa. He told us you work as an urban technician. For the city of Paris. That must be interesting?”
“Interesting? No. But essential. I’m what the municipality calls a technicien responsable de la propreté urbaine.”
“Pardon?” I asked.
“I’m a garbage collector.”
There was a long silence. Then Monsieur Oussekine broke it with this high-pitched, songlike laugh. It didn’t match his voice.
“But Father studied to be a mechanical engineer,” Moose jumped in, kind of defensive, “when he still lived in Algiers.”
“Yes, yes, that’s true,” his father said. “In the gas and oil industry. That hasn’t meant much here though, and it was a long time ago.”
I didn’t realize I was staring at a framed medal, over in the oak cabinet beside the picture of the soldier, but Monsieur Oussekine went and got it and laid it on the coffee table. It was a bronze cross with a red-and-white ribbon. “This catches your eye?” he said. “It was the ticket my father, Moussa’s grandfather, paid so that we could come here.”
“Pardon, Monsieur?” Matt said, looking as baffled as I felt.
“During the war of independence, in our home, in Algeria, my father”—Monsieur Oussekine pointed to the man in the picture—“was a Harki.”
A Harki? But I didn’t have to ask because he just went on and explained.
“My father fought for France against the insurgents who would eventually take over Algeria. Harki is what these native troops were called.” He refilled Matt’s glass, with the same up-and-down stroke. “He died in combat.”
“The French government,” Moose said, his voice rising, “after getting beaten, refused to even admit that a war had been fought. They called it a ‘police action,’ as though my grandfather had died for nothing.”
“No, no, my son,” Monsieur Oussekine said. “French citizenship—that’s what he got in exchange.” He turned to Matt and me. “His sacrifice was our ticket to France.”