Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  Ahmed told me to go inside, and I did because I trusted he knew better. I asked him, “Who was that?” But he only said, “I’ll tell you later,” and then never did.

  I fell in love with Ahmed that Baghdad scorching summer—throbbing temperatures, burning streets. I think he fell in love with me too. He said he did and I believed him.

  “I am a monkey,” Ahmed told me. “My father said I must be a monkey and a lion.”

  “You walk like a lion,” I told him, stroking the underside of his chin. “Padding gracefully, prowling.” Ahmed smiled at me and ran his hands through my hair.

  “It’s like gold,” he said, drawing it softly through his soft fingertips. “Our children will be lion cubs with golden manes.” I did not know yet that I was infertile. We drew the blinds against the beastly Baghdad sun and curled naked in each other’s arms. A boom sounded, faintly.

  “It’s only the elevator,” Ahmed reassured me. “When it hits the ground floor it makes a thud.”

  “Everything sounds like a bomb.”

  “Ah, my brave war reporter, frightened by the bombs.”

  “Aren’t bombs supposed to be frightening? After all, they can kill you.”

  “No one is going to hurt you, my perfect American dream.” He kissed the tip of my nose. “Let me count the spots.”

  “The freckles!”

  “Freckles! One hundred, two hundred, a thousand freckles like gold dust. There are too many to count! I love you like the sky is infinite. I love you like waves in the sea. I love you from your ski jump nose to the bottom of your American ass.”

  “Half-American ass.”

  “American it must be, to be so big and generous.”

  “Are you saying that my bum is fat?”

  “Soft and ripe like an apricot, Mish-mish.”

  He called me Mish-mish. Apricots and pomegranates and rosewater, the sweet scents of oriental courtship, pistachio baklava dripping in honeyed syrup from Abu Darwish’s shop in Karrada. We made love one afternoon on a boat hidden in the reeds of the Tigris. A stork stood by and watched us with great fascination and Ahmed kissed my belly and said, “See, she has come to deliver a present to us.” I felt the sun warm on my neck, heat pounding in my temples, pulsing hot blood, pumping lava through my veins, dizzy . . . heatstroke in May. But how magical to fall in love, to carry a child, to feel love growing into physical form inside me. Ahmed was very handsome.

  “But it’s not that!” I later protested to Alexandre, sipping Campari in the embassy garden. “He is clever and speaks four languages and studied at Georgetown. He says I have been lonely all my life and I will never be lonely again. He understands me! I have fallen in love, Alexandre! Don’t pout, be happy for me!”

  “He is a very clever fellow, there is no doubt,” said Alexandre, tinkling ice cubes into his highball glass. “But wartime romances are notoriously precarious.”

  “Like my mother and my father.”

  “Not a compatible couple,” Alexandre affirmed. He looked at me intently, as if considering adding something—but he did not. Alexandre, who spoke in silver streaming paragraphs, stumbled. “They should not have—” he began and then corrected himself. “Well, it’s an old story. There is no reason that history repeats itself—as I am always repeating myself! Bien. I am glad they did, bien sûr, because they made you.”

  _____

  Ahmed asked me to marry him, whirlwind. A sandstorm blew in from the desert. Wasn’t love supposed to be like this? We posed for our engagement portrait in the garden of the French Embassy. Zorro fiddled with the light meter and said it would come out badly, visibility was too low. In the photograph I am looking up adoringly at Ahmed, smiling despite the grit in my teeth, and holding an apricot in my hand.

  We came inside from the dust cloud and wind, Zorro polishing his lens with a chamois cloth, Jean pouring the champagne and laughing. He told Alexandre to stop being a naysaying old auntie, we were young and in love.

  “I met Margot in Beirut. I asked her to marry me the day the Israelis invaded. We got married in Cyprus and went on our honeymoon to the Turkish military zone because the beaches were empty. Kitty, don’t mind the old bachelor.”

  “Humpf,” replied Alexandre. Then he raised his glass and pointed a long elegant finger at Ahmed in warning. “You are welcome into the family. Such as we are—two godfathers and these two unruly adopted children.” Zorro grinned and ran his hand through his long hair; his jangling copper bracelets tinkled like a wind chime. “You must know that we two old dinosaurs are in loco parentis. It is us you will have to answer to if you make her unhappy.”

  Ahmed only laughed.

  TWO

  Dad was my American half, Mum was my English. They met in the AP bureau in Saigon in 1974. He was a correspondent; she was a telex operator. I have a photograph of them taken just before the Fall of Saigon at the bureau Christmas party. My mother is wearing a Pucci minidress and a loop of tinsel around her neck; my father is wearing a wide-lapelled safari jacket. She is staring up at him adoringly and holding up (for some reason) a mango. Dad is wearing aviator sunglasses. I have only one photograph of him where I can see his eyes. It was taken in Tehran in 1979 during the American hostage crisis; it’s black and white and it’s hard to tell what color they are. My mother burnt all her photograph albums after her second breakdown.

  They were happy together in foreign places. In Saigon, in Beirut—funny to think that they were happy there, where I was so unhappy thirty years later. Count back the months from my birth, I think I must have been conceived in Beirut because I was born in Boston in the summer of 1977. Dad had sent my mother to live with Granbet in the house in Good Harbor Bay when she was seven months pregnant. He stayed in Lebanon. “Abandoned me!” whined my mother through years of rambling complaint, mug of Martini Rosso on the coffee table next to an overflowing ashtray, TV on, droning melodrama. She loved EastEnders and wailed along with Angie because Den was a bastard rotter and he was going to run off and leave her. “Just like YOUR FATHER did!”

  I don’t know what happened between them. I know that he was not present for my birth. I know that my mother had postnatal depression. “They didn’t call it that back then,” Margot told me one Russian summer, pickling cucumbers at the dacha. Margot was a psychologist; her godmotherly sympathy carried the authority of professional reasoning. She gave me a way to see things from the other side: “repositioning perspective” was her clinical term for it.

  “They just called it baby blues in those days. Doctors didn’t do talking cures. I’m sure your poor mother was doped up with Valium.”

  I was born on July 2, 1977, forty-eight hours away from being independent—a metaphor I like to stretch to fit sometimes. When I was six months old, my mother left me in Good Harbor Bay with Granbet and went back to England. I think to a sanatorium there. Her mother would have still been alive then. After the sanatorium my mother must have moved in with her, because that’s the house where I went when Granbet died. Granbet died the day after my eleventh birthday.

  I lived in that narrow house in Paddington for seven years, in the guest room, my room, except my mother always called it the guest room. In bed, lights out, listening to the muttering television and my mother’s snoring on the sofa, tiptoeing downstairs to make sure she had stubbed out all her cigarettes properly. I didn’t like school, but I slunk out early every morning, better to have a few hours of lone freedom than suffer the grouchy breakfast routine. Zorro was my best friend because we were both bad at math and had the same blond bobbed haircut.

  My godfathers, Alexandre and Jean, were my father’s friends and not my mother’s. I knew there was antipathy between them, but I did not know why. They sent me birthday cards and Christmas presents, and a couple of times Jean asked if my mother would let me spend some time with him and Margot at their house in Brittany, but there was always some logistical obstacle that my mother delayed into never happening.

  When I turned eighteen, I finished school and th
e switch flipped to adulthood. I didn’t have to anymore. I didn’t want to go to university and sit in more classrooms and take more exams. My mother and I coexisted in the house by avoiding each other like repellent magnets. If she asked, I just said, “gap year.”

  “But where?” She became insistent. Eventually it erupted into a shouting match. I yelled back that I wanted to use my small inheritance from Granbet to buy a plane ticket to Thailand and go and find my father. Then the volcano really blew up, with all the rage and wrong and ingratitude and sacrifice and misery. Vitriol squeezed from her eyes and fizzed and turned to steam running over her red cheeks. In despair she called the godfathers, and Alexandre came over from Paris and took me to lunch at Le Gavroche to talk me out of it.

  Alexandre and Jean had circled my universe as distant planets, as mysterious as my father’s disappearance and somehow, gravitationally, connected to it. My mother always referred to them as “your godfathers” and in my childish imagination they appeared as a double act; in reality they were very different. Jean was practical and physical, vigorous—he surfed the Channel in the middle of the Brittany winter. Alexandre Delacroix was an effete diplomat.

  At Le Gavroche, Alexandre kissed me affectionately hello on both cheeks and handed his thick navy blue overcoat and his homburg hat to the maître d’. His pale gray hair swept off his high forehead like a helmet of very fine cashmere. He wore a blue tweed jacket, an ivory shirt with silver dice cufflinks, and an apple green cravat. When we sat down, he ordered an aperitif of crème de menthe with champagne.

  “And a Kir Royale for my dear companion.”

  Alexandre liked to say that he was a descendent of the artist Delacroix. When his audience smiled, he would continue, “And did you know that Delacroix was, in fact, the illegitimate son of Napoleon’s chief diplomat, the great double-crossing Talleyrand?” (There was a certain plausibility to the rumors; Eugène Delacroix’s father, Charles Delacroix, was minister of foreign affairs under the Directorate and had undergone testicular surgery in the year before his son’s birth; Talleyrand was a close family friend.) Alexandre would clap his hands together with delight, a particular gesture of his, the looting joy of luxury that he did not have to pay for, he was a very model roué left over, like much of France, from La Belle Époque.

  Alexandre was a perennial bachelor. Everyone knew, but he preferred to allude than to admit. Discretion, above all. I was never aware of any lover, although he must have had them. He had joined the French diplomatic corps in the days when homosexuals were not sent on foreign postings because they were vulnerable to blackmail. Outwardly he cultivated graciousness, politesse, but there was something of the costume in it, a professional garment. In the private residence of the French Embassy in Baghdad, his cadence was languid and indulgent, “but of course,” “yes, I have often said so,” “how marvelous!” If he wanted to chide, he would say, “come, come now” as if his interlocutor—whether belligerent Russian first secretary, ornery tribal sheikh, unblinking zealot—only needed a nudge to bring him round.

  With eighteen-year-old me, that day at Le Gavroche, Alexandre was kind and concerned. He listened to my complaint attentively. He did not try to interrupt or intercede until we had finished our vol-au-vent aux champignons and the waiter had bought a bottle of Pommard.

  “Explore, yes, this is your age and your nature; I wouldn’t expect anything less of John’s daughter. But don’t go to look for your father. He has lost himself. He is lost to us.” I felt my lower lip tremble. This was not how I had rehearsed Alexandre’s part. He was connected to my father, he would help me find my father. Alexandre reached his hand across the damask, my hands remained frozen on my lap, and I regarded his five manicured fingernails and his gesture as if from a great height or from a great depth.

  “It is very sad. We are all very sad, but the truth is your father doesn’t exist anymore, not in any form that you can find him.” The waiters put two plates in front of us and, with a nod, lifted the silver cloches at precisely the same moment to reveal a tiny nest of pigeon breast. My mouth tasted of zinc; I was biting the inside of my lip, trying not to move, trying not to cry. When I chewed the pigeon, it was as soft and dense as wadded tissue and tasted of betrayal.

  “There, there,” Alexandre said. “I’ve talked to your other godfather Jean. He is now bureau chief in Moscow. He says you can go and stay with him and Margot there—much more adventurous than Thailand, which is full of Eurotrash backpackers. Margot is a wonderful and wise soul, you can talk to her. You can learn Russian and how to drink vodka, take the train to St. Petersburg, white nights, Siberian tundra. You want to write?” I nodded, a single lead shot rolling under my tongue. “Very good. You will be in the land of writers and the new frontier of journalism. Stay for a few months and see how you feel. You can always go to university later.”

  _____

  “When did you first meet my father?” I asked Alexandre one evening in the dappled shade of the bougainvillea on his terrace in Baghdad.

  “In Sinai,” he said, but I could not see the expression in his eyes behind the emerald glass.

  “Yom Kippur War?”

  “Or the Ramadan War. Or the Six-Day War. Depending on which side you were on. That’s where it all began,” he said, and started to say something else—but gunfire sounded, ratta-tatta, quite close, and we went inside to be safe. The thread of his reminiscence was broken.

  After dinner I asked Alexandre straight out why no one would tell me what had happened to my father. I had only a few photographs of him that had escaped my mother’s wrath, and the thrilling memory of a rough pair of hands jerking me up on his shoulders.

  Alexandre looked at me squarely and said he knew it was difficult to understand, but the truth was not being hidden from me. It was just that no one knew what it was.

  “There are too many false leads down jungle trails. He got lost. There were drugs.” He shook his head. “There were a lot of drugs.” He sighed with the sadness of a great loss. “Your father was an extraordinary man. He was as sensitive as a grape skin, but he would carry a man across the desert under gunfire. Even a man he did not know. Jean. Did you know that? He found Jean in an Israeli trench in Sinai, after an Egyptian plane had just bombed. Jean’s eardrums were blown and he was in shock. Your father carried him on his back out of the killing zone. He would save anyone except himself.”

  “That’s how you all met.”

  “It’s long ago, history doesn’t care anymore. None of us were supposed to be there, I remember, that was the funny thing. I was working for French radio and managed to cross into the military zone with Israeli radio people as an extra sound engineer. Jean was a second lieutenant in the French Army, liaison to the Israelis, but officially unofficial. Your father, God rest his idiocy, was wandering about pretending to be a lost hippie. And then the Egyptians made their surprise attack. We were stuck in a medical base for three days under Egyptian bombardment until the Israelis scrambled a counterattack. We didn’t think we were going to get out of it. Afterwards, we were friends, connected by horror and death, for life. War people understand these moments. We promised we would never tell what we had seen.

  “Jean and I—we are not protecting your father, we are protecting you. It takes a few decades of experience—especially in this game, this hall of mirrors—and don’t fall for Jean’s sagacity, Je suis le grand rapporteur! In Sinai, I understood for the first time that we can never know, that there is no truth to be discovered by diligent investigation. It’s why I changed sides, or rather I went from ‘outside’ to ‘inside,’ as Jean calls it. Just as he switched sides the other way. He thinks it is more honest to stand on the street with his nose pressed against the glass. But really it’s only another perspective, a different angle, and one obscured by the reflections in the window.”

  THREE

  Ahmed worked for Jean as a fixer in the early months of the occupation. At the end of 2003, he secured a job in the Green Zone, as a translator for the Develo
pment Fund for Iraq. His mother was against it; she worried about his safety.

  “People are spitting on those who work for the Americans,” she told him, “soon they will start killing them.” She was right. But Ahmed, annoyed, told her to stop fussing as if he were a child.

  “Your father would not like you working for the Americans,” she said, falling back on good old emotional blackmail.

  “If my father had worked for the Americans instead of being loyal, he’d probably still be alive,” Ahmed replied glibly.

  I liked Um Ahmed, but she was skeptical of me. Ahmed told me she was conservative and would disapprove if I was his girlfriend, so it was better that I was presented as just a friend, a colleague, one of the journalists he had met through Jean. I don’t think she was fooled, but she kept up her end of the pretense, a convenient complicity.

  Um Ahmed had lived in Caracas and Washington as a diplomat’s wife, but she never lost the tenets of propriety and obedience that the second daughter of a sheikh of Samarra was brought up to observe. Ahmed told me she would sit at dinner tables and make conversation when her husband commanded her to, but she never accompanied him to cocktail parties. She would not drink alcohol nor take off her headscarf in mixed company. She made friends with wives from Muslim countries, but she was always suspicious of the loose ways of the European women who drank and flirted. She prayed at home and would not have thought of going by herself to a mosque. But after Saddam fell and it was possible for Iraqis to travel again, she applied for the haj lottery and was accepted with a group of other widows. When she came back, she said that it had been very fulfilling, but that the crowds had been overwhelming and uncomfortable.

  “There were too many Arabs” was how she put it. Which I thought was hilarious.

  I knew that Ahmed had been married before. Early on, when we were still discovering each other, I had gone to use his mother’s bathroom, and caught sight of a photograph of Ahmed, younger, with a moustache and a formal black suit and a carnation in his buttonhole, standing awkwardly next to a bride. His mother was in the kitchen preparing lunch and I asked him straight out, hands-on-hips, what’s going on here? He had hung his head and sighed. They had married in 1998, he said, when his father was missing. He told me she was a nice girl from a good family, a suitable match arranged before his father’s arrest. The wedding was very small because of the cloud hanging over his father’s fate. A few months later, he said, she had an ectopic pregnancy and died in the hospital because a surgeon could not be found to operate on the relative of a traitor.