Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  Along with Abaaoud, a woman named Hasna Aït Boulahcen—according to some reports, Abaaoud’s cousin, according to others his girlfriend—and Chakib Akrouh, reportedly also a perpetrator of the Paris attacks, were killed. Five policemen were injured and a police dog called Diesel was killed. Eight people were arrested. One, Jawad Bendaoud, was the owner of the apartment in which the attackers were staying. As he was led away by police, he shouted to TV crews on the scene that he had lent the apartment to two Belgians as a favor to a friend.

  “I said there was no mattress. They told me, ‘It’s not a problem.’ They just wanted water and to pray.”

  I hit send. Oz was in New York, six hours behind; it was the middle of the night, but he never slept. Always hungry, always awake. Feed the beast, keep the news cycle turning, around and around like a hamster wheel.

  “Kit, you done? Let’s yallah.” Zorro had finished uploading his pictures.

  “Let’s go,” Jean concurred. “I’m going to go to the paper. Lunch later, Kit,” he reminded me. “With Alexandre at Le Grand Véfour.” My two godfathers had summoned me.

  “Yes sorry. I forgot.” I wanted to sleep. I wanted to forget everything.

  Jean gave Zorro a lift; I said I wanted to walk for a bit. The Stade de France métro, half a kilometer away, was open. One foot in front of another and maybe one day I’ll get somewhere. (Where did I pick up this endurance mantra? Tramping Moscow probably.) Or maybe I won’t because life is only a long walk to a dead end and the show will be over before I arrive.

  Here was Paris beyond the cordon of the Périphérique, low-rise bourgeois, plain, beige, walled. The idiom of the impenetrable French non was interrupted by a sudden cheery assertion.

  “Bonjour, Madame!” said a woman walking her son to school; I had accidentally caught her eye. She was my age, thin, delicate crows-feet at the corners of cornflower eyes. She wore skinny jeans and a tailored yellow leather biker’s jacket. Tap-tap-tap went the heels of her boots.

  Her son raced ahead on his push scooter, like Little Ahmed used to do. It always terrified me. I would run after him gasping, and he would laugh with delight as if it was a great game of escape, oblivious to the cars and trucks and buses that could kill him in the split second of an accident.

  The woman in the yellow jacket called out.

  “Pay attention! Be careful! Come back!”

  PART I

  * * *

  BAGHDAD

  ONE

  In the early, optimistic days of the occupation, Jean liked to tell the story of how he had been the one to discover Ahmed the golden wonder Iraqi, how he had met him in Baghdad, par hazard, on the evening the Americans were to begin their shock and awe. It was a good story; set in a bar, a classic Casablanca beginning. It was March 2003, the invasion was about to commence, and Jean was all alone in the Al-Rashid Hotel. The place was almost empty; the guests and the staff had all disappeared because the hotel was expected to be a target. Jean decided to avail himself of the unmanned bar and there, in the deserted cocktail lounge with its peeling black and gold Formica, was Ahmed, nonchalantly mixing himself a martini. Apparently his first words to Jean were: “Good evening. Do you know where I can find some olives?”

  Ahmed’s version of the story was that he had gone out that afternoon to see what was happening in the city, because he was curious. He had taken a taxi, but as evening fell and the streets emptied, the driver had become increasingly nervous and demanded more money. Ahmed refused to pay, there was an argument, and Ahmed slammed the door and got out of the taxi. He found himself on Haifa Street and decided to go to the Al-Rashid to call his mother, if the circuits were still working. And if he could get past the state security goons in the lobby.

  “You cannot imagine, Kitty Cat,” Ahmed recounted, some weeks later. “The place was absolutely deserted, it was like the hotel in The Shining. The storm was coming. I was excited. After all the years of hoping that this monster Saddam would die, that someone would assassinate him, that a SCUD missile would finally find him, I never imagined that the Americans would truly invade. It still seems fantastic to me that they are here, walking down our streets, going into all the ministries and throwing out the corrupt dinosaurs. The American invasion is the best thing that could ever have happened to the Iraqis! Most of them are just too stupid to understand. I am trying to get a conference of South Koreans and Japanese and Germans to come and tell them what a wonderful thing it is to be occupied by Americans!

  “Jean says that he found me pouring myself a martini; but this is not true; it was brandy. And you don’t put olives in brandy. I think he thought I was the bartender. He looked at the bottle and said, ‘Ah, Napoleon. Very apposite for an invasion.’ We began to talk and I explained that I was not the bartender. He said, ‘You speak very good French and I need an interpreter, because my guy has vanished with all the others. So Le Figaro would like to hire you. How does a hundred dollars sound?’ I was thrilled because I had been working for this air conditioner businessman who was paying me fifty dollars a month and five kilos of rice. I thought, That’s double what I am getting! Then he shook my hand and said, ‘A hundred dollars a day,’ and I tried hard not to look completely amazed. And then I was really worried in case the Americans didn’t bomb after all and Saddam somehow managed to wriggle out and survive as he had so many times in the past . . .”

  Typically, I missed the war. I was in Paris. My mother had died, and I was calling crematoria, furious with her timing, crying, confused, torn, watching the news and wanting to be in Baghdad, feeling guilty for feeling guilty.

  We burnt my mother on a cold Tuesday afternoon. It was a desultory ceremony, not many people, and few that I knew. When the doors opened at the back of the windowless room for the attendant to push her coffin trolley through, I could hear the roar of the furnace. Margot squeezed my hand.

  “Courage, ma petite. This is the first part, the trauma, shock.” I shook my hand free; I didn’t want to be consoled by her psychologist reasoning. Resentment was not one of the five stages of grief.

  I took my mother’s ashes to London on the Eurostar and scattered them in Hyde Park near the statue of Peter Pan, where we used to have rain picnics in the autumn. It was the day the Americans crossed into Iraq from Kuwait. I slept on the way back through the long tunnel under the Channel. In Paris there was a lot to do, and I was busy with the lawyers and the building residents committee. I packed her clothes in boxes for charity. I sent the curtains to the dry cleaners to get rid of the nicotine smell and threw away all her sheets. The British besieged Basra. I found the box of my possessions left over from Moscow that my mother had stored for me and I had never had time to open. The nostalgia was unbearable, as if episodes of my life had returned in a series of big heavy waves that swamped me. I found a packet of letters I had written to my father and never posted because there was never any address to send them to. I found the pink scarf I knitted for my mother when I was twelve and the mahogany tea caddy I had once hidden cigarettes in. I wrapped all her dusty trinkets from the Saigon years in newspaper and put them away in the cave in the building’s basement.

  In the evenings I drank her sweet Martini Rosso and watched the news. Tanks in the desert; ragged figures surrendering. I was missing everything! CNN was triumphant. Zorro was embedded with the Marines and his pictures were all over the New York Times. Jean sent emails:

  . . . I’m sorry for everything, your mother and the terrible timing. Margot says you were very dignified at the crematorium ceremony. I can’t imagine how bleak you must feel, but you know you can call on her if you need anything. I’m holed up in the hotel because of the bombing. Comical Ali press conferences have become our only entertainment. Phone lines in Baghdad are mostly dead. All my old contacts/sources have disappeared. The Ministry of Information extortionists are trying to charge the TV crews $100,000 a week (Sebastian, BBC, told me) for their “visa extensions.” They’ve arrested four foreign journalists from the Palestine hotel; a bunch of us
went to try and find out where they had been taken, but the toads wouldn’t say anything. Everyone is very worried about them. There is talk they will charge them for espionage . . .

  When are you coming? Come via Jordan, the border is completely open now, Fitz came through yesterday and said there were no guards, a couple of American soldiers just waving everyone through(!) The road is pretty clear, a few bandits, everything chaotic, but I’ll send you a good driver. Can you bring me money? I’ve run out, everything is expensive, war prices. Suzanne at the paper will give you an envelope. You’ll need a hundred a day for a translator, more for a driver. I’m staying at the old Sheraton now, it’s cheaper and they’ve got better internet than the Rashid, I’ll get you a room. The food is bad, chicken and rice every night, but at least the room cleaners have come back now—they all disappeared during the bombing. Come quickly, before it’s all over. You’ll kick yourself if you miss this one . . .

  When the Americans reached the banks of the Tigris, I left the keys to the apartment with a rental agency and flew to Amman.

  The driver Jean recommended met me at the airport and we drove through the night across the desert border.

  Dawn drew a flat horizon. The road spooled a gray ribbon through a scratched-up landscape, dun and featureless. Nothing to see for miles, no other cars on the road. I was too scared to sleep, hundred-dollar bills stashed in my underpants. The driver was a big fat guy who chewed sunflower seeds to stay awake, splitting them methodically with his teeth and spitting the husks into a paper cup. When we got to the outskirts of Baghdad, we saw the first American tanks, great beasts sleeping in the shade under Saddam’s triumphal arches. I held up my American passport and they waved us through. The driver dropped me at the Sheraton and there was Jean in the lobby with Zorro. Sitting next to them was Ahmed.

  “You’re late to the party,” said Zorro. “You missed the fireworks.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You got across the desert alright?” Jean asked.

  “No, I was kidnapped. I am in a basement in Fallujah right now.”

  “Not you, the money!”

  “Yes, I brought the cash. And whiskey and an extra flak jacket and four new notebooks.” Jean kissed me. “And two salami.”

  Jean and Zorro clapped.

  “I am Ahmed Solemani,” said Ahmed, standing up and extending his hand to introduce himself. He was golden, his skin shone, burnished. His eyelashes beat black angel wings. “Italian or French?”

  I was confused, I thought he was trying to explain his background. “You are Italian and French?”

  “Not me—the saucisson!”

  _____

  Ahmed, my Aladdin. He smiled like a prince in a fairy tale, shining white teeth to the rescue. I think back to the beginning, to those early helter-skelter days when everything was new and exciting and the springtime sun was warm before the oven heat of summer, and I can hardly believe I was so naïve.

  Ahmed was an educated, Westernized Iraqi. All the correspondents and diplomats were impressed by his erudition and his sophistication. He wore Diesel jeans and desert boots he said he bartered for a Saddam statue head with an American major. He was cool, he was fluent, he was one of us. He was an Iraqi anomaly. He could analyze Tony Blair’s cabinet with a BBC producer, talk reconstruction with the neocons, roll his eyes with the French at the “coalition of the willing.” They asked him where he’d learned such good English, such good French. Where had he read the novels of Romain Gary? How had he managed to watch Sex in the City under sanctions? Ahmed inveigled their condescension.

  “Well,” he would say, drawing his eager audience in, “if you must ask—”

  Ahmed would explain that he was the only son of an Iraqi diplomat. He had learned his French and English from international schools in Paris and Caracas. In the early nineties his father was a senior political officer at the Iraqi Embassy in Washington and they lived in D.C. for six years. At the beginning of 1998 his father was recalled to Iraq. According to Ahmed, this meant he had to leave Georgetown when he was in his senior year, only a semester from graduation. Shortly after the family returned to Baghdad, his father was arrested. For several months they had no word of him. Ahmed called his father’s friends in high places, but they all professed to know nothing and told him, insincerely, not to worry.

  In the summer, at the beginning of Eid—Ahmed remembered because it was a holiday and everything was difficult to arrange—his mother received a telephone call telling her to collect her husband’s body from the prison at Abu Ghraib. Ahmed went with her. The officials insulted them and made them pay for a coffin and would not help them carry it. Ahmed told me how he and his mother had wrestled with the dead weight of his executed father, levering, pushing, pulling the coffin onto the car roof while the guards watched and smoked and spat on the ground.

  “At one point it fell and the lid came off and I had to go to a garage up the road and borrow a hammer to nail it back on. I understand why you don’t want to look at death, Kit. His face was so familiar, and it was looking at me. They had not even closed his eyes. I wanted to close his eyes, but I couldn’t bring myself to touch his body. Even now, I remember his face looking at me. I did not have the courage to close his eyes so that his soul could sleep.”

  He told me this sitting in a café on Mutanabbi Street. Dominoes clacked on the marble tables. There were many things he told me back then that turned out not to be true, but when he recounted collecting his father’s body, he looked down, not to let me see his tears. This scene I believe.

  A public funeral was not permitted. They took the coffin to the cemetery; they had to bribe the caretaker to say a prayer over his grave.

  Afterwards came the sanctions years. As the son of a traitor, Ahmed was not allowed to apply for university, and government jobs were closed to him. His father’s pension was stopped. They sold the family car, two gold-plated handguns Saddam had presented to his father, and the VHS player they had brought back from the States. His mother sold her jewelry until there was nothing left and she was reduced to begging from her sisters. After two years, a friend of the family helped Ahmed get a job with a businessman from Samarra who had some bogus concession that allowed him to sell Turkish air-conditioning units. They were difficult to come by under sanctions.

  I long ago decided not to try to reconcile the misaligned details and ellipses in Ahmed’s stories. But it was true that Ahmed’s father was executed by Saddam for being a traitor. (There was an American-backed plot to oust Saddam in ’98, cooked up by the CIA and Ahmed Chalabi; it was a complete disaster. But Ahmed always said he didn’t believe his father was mixed up in it. “He was a patriot; he hated Saddam for what he did to our country, but he never would have joined a group of Baathie putschists.”) But the part about Georgetown, for example, was not. After Ahmed and I finally split up, Alexandre made discreet enquires and told me that there was no record of Ahmed’s matriculation.

  The hard times, the misery years of sanctions? Yes, Ahmed was thin when I first met him (in Paris he would inflate to a satisfied tubby), and his mother’s villa was large and empty of furniture. But the chronicles of Ahmed were inconsistent. Dates didn’t add up, characters got swapped from one story to another. He had sold Turkish air conditioners, he had sold his father’s books at the book market on Mutanabbi Street, he helped a cousin steal oil from a pipeline and sell it to a Kurdish middleman. He had tried to escape to Kurdistan, but the smugglers took his money and never showed up for the rendezvous. He was recruited into the Republican Guard, but when he reported for duty, the colonel realized he was the son of a traitor and sent him away. He lived for five years as a deserter (an offense that carried the penalty of having an ear cut off), he had three different fake ID cards, and once he was arrested for taking a picture of Saddam’s son Uday’s power boat moored on the Tigris.

  He told these stories lightly, as comic illustrations of the mad Saddam years. Maybe there was some kernel of truth in them, but in his telling the
episodes always had the quality of anecdote. From time to time in Baghdad we would run into someone he knew and he would be reticent to introduce me. I could not speak Arabic—at least not enough to understand low tones, dissembling, nuances. “Who was that?” I’d ask. “Oh, an old school friend,” Ahmed would answer blithely.

  One time, Ahmed and Jean and I had gone to Samarra—it must have been the end of that first summer—to investigate a report of two boys being pushed off a bridge by American soldiers; one had drowned. It was a long drive out of Baghdad—white skies strung with swags of telegraph wire. We interviewed the family of the drowned boy, and then Jean wanted to see the big Shia shrine in the middle of the Sunni town. I remember he was working on a long article about the Shia at the time. Ahmed didn’t want to go to the shrine and was grumbling. He had wanted to go along the river to where he said there was the best kebab restaurant in the country.

  “It’s only because your father’s family is from Samarra that you think that Samarra has the best kebab in Iraq. Every town thinks it has the best kebab in Iraq.” Ahmed didn’t smile at this; he didn’t understand teasing yet.

  A small crowd milled about the gate to the shrine, the popcorn seller, the beggar, a prostitute, an old man selling postcards. A man approached us under the colonnade. Brown trousers, white shirt, gold ring set with a turquoise stone on his pinkie. He was clean-shaven, angular, sharp face, knife blade nose. I saw Ahmed try to turn away, but the man reached out and held his wrist fast and I heard him say, in English, as if this was a language that would not be understood by passers-by, “Ah, I thought it was you. We haven’t seen you for a long time, you have forgotten your cousins!” The man looked me up and down. I instinctively smoothed my hair under my headscarf, better to meet his approval. “You are friends with the Americans, I see. Yes, good. Very helpful.”