Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  “Thank you. It is better. Coca-Cola!”

  “I don’t know why it works,” I said, laughing. “It rots your teeth.”

  “It was American gas so maybe it needs American medicine.”

  “Create a problem and sell them the solution!”

  We grinned at each other. My eye caught the raw crack in the floor tile, the pool of vinegar, shards of glass and pickles. I took a dish cloth and bent down and cleaned it up. He watched me awkwardly.

  We could hear the helicopters vrooming overhead and the distant roaring of the crowd. Ahmed the intruder tried to call his brother-in-law, who he had lost in the melee, but the network was jammed. I said he should stay for a bit to catch his breath.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked this other Ahmed. He nodded. So I made him an omelet. He ate it sitting at the kitchen table.

  He was a big man and I remained wary, even as we became accustomed to each other. He politely asked me where he could wash his hands to pray and in which direction was Mecca. (I made an educated guess somewhere south and pointed towards the airport.) His movements were slow and deliberate, but he carried a grace that was expressed in long elegant fingers and a habit of pressing them together to make a steeple. He spoke English haltingly. He told me he lived up the coast in Tripoli, where he had a mobile phone shop; he had learned English to navigate the handset settings. His wife, he said proudly, was educated and spoke much better English than he; in fact she had taught him. He had two children, a boy and a girl.

  “Do you have children?” he asked me.

  “No.”

  “It is a shame. How old are you?”

  “I am twenty-eight.” Ahmed the intruder frowned. For some reason I told him the truth I had not yet told myself, let alone confessed to Ahmed. “I cannot have them.”

  “Ah,” he said, looking sad for me, fingering his teacup.

  “It is God’s will,” I said, playing my part.

  He looked discomfited by this.

  “I do not have children but my husband has a son by his first wife, who died.”

  How easily I repeated this lie! Then I realized that it was—strangely, wonderfully true.

  _____

  I turned the television on to watch the riot we could see from the balcony. The footage showed an angry melee, fists in the air, clots of protestors breaking into a run, lines of Lebanese riot police advancing. Black flags and green Saudi flags and burning red and white Danish flags. Ahmed the intruder asked if I had a charger that would fit his Nokia because his battery was low. I found one and he plugged it in and began to text, to his wife to tell him he was OK, to his brother-in-law to try and find him. I made another pot of tea and sat with my laptop on my knees, Googling news reports so I could file something quickly for Oz.

  File: SAINT-PLACIDE

  February 5, 2006

  A demonstration held in Beirut today to protest the publication of political cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, turned ugly. Several thousand protestors, Sunnis, many bused in from other towns, gathered in the center of the city. Towards the end of the morning, when a group began to march towards the Danish Embassy in the upscale Christian district of Ashrafiyeh, clashes occurred with Lebanese police.

  Tear gas was used and protestors say they were fired on with rubber bullets. A small section of the protestors, some armed with Molotov cocktails, some carrying sticks, managed to push through police lines and begin to break into the office block that houses the Danish Embassy on the sixth floor. Windows appeared to have been smashed, but the main door remains locked and protestors have not managed to get into the building. After a similar crowd burnt the Danish Embassy in Damascus yesterday, the diplomatic staff had been evacuated, and as it is a weekend, very few of the other offices were occupied. Frustrated, the protestors set fire to cars and attacked a Maronite church next door. Gunshots were heard as protestors ran through residential streets to avoid police. The mostly wealthy Christian residents of Ashrafiyeh were terrified to see Al-Qaeda flags and a religious mob in their neighborhood. Many of the protestors have expressed dismay at the violence.

  “We came to demonstrate our rights, and to ask for the respect to our Prophet. We did not mean to do any harm,” said Ahmed Khalil, 32 years old, a mobile phone shop owner from Tripoli. “Those who made violence are the police. Most people in the crowd were just trying to defend themselves.”

  Ahmed Khalil, Ahmed-the-Intruder was, like all of us, an apologist for his own. His awkwardness at finding himself alone, unchaperoned, with a woman, a foreign blond woman without a headscarf, put him in the pigeonhole I used to label “Seriously Sunni.” His moustache was carefully shorn above his top lip, while his beard was left luxuriant below. His trousers were three-quarter length and showed a good three inches of white athletic sock before his Nike sneakers. When I got to know him a little better, I amended his moniker from Ahmed-the-Intruder to Ahmed-the-Wahhabi. He was very polite; he was very certain of his religious tenet.

  We talked a lot of Us and Them that afternoon, watching the riot in stereo, on TV and from the balcony. Islam and justice; might and right and human rights. For Ahmed-the-Wahhabi, Islam was a universal law so obvious and extant, God’s word enshrined in the Koran, that he simply could not understand that there was any other point of view or another way of looking at things.

  “We can agree to disagree,” I said. But he shook his head at this kind of compromise.

  “No, no, there is no disagreement between right and wrong.” Publishing an image of the Prophet Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him, was haram. Mocking the Prophet Mohammed, Peace Be Upon Him, was blasphemy. Blasphemy was a crime. He was not insulted by the cartoons because he had not seen them. He was simply outraged—but more than that, incredulous, hurt, genuinely pained—by the idea that Danish people would deliberately blaspheme and that their politicians would support such a heinous atrocity. He understood rights as respect and this was the opposite. One group of people, he argued, should not trample on the rights of another group of people and call it their right. I tried to explain it in a different way, in the way I knew, had been taught, inculcated.

  “I have the freedom of speech to say what I like, and you have the right to be upset and complain about it.” Ahmed-the-Wahhabi shook his head, sadly, disappointed.

  “I don’t understand your freedoms,” he told me quietly.

  Despite our inability to make each other understand, or perhaps because we were both earnestly trying to understand, we found a kind of friendship. We saw in each other someone to answer our questions about each other. It was the continuation of the conversations I had begun with Muntazzer and Oberon, but in Ahmed-the-Wahhabi I thought I had found a purer subject because the Americans hadn’t invaded his land and he was not reacting to geopolitics and sectarian muddles.

  I was oversimplifying. I was in Lebanon, for god’s sake, the greatest practitioner of geopolitics and sectarian muddles. Religion is always politics, sectarianism, nationalism, bollocks; jumble up the semiotics, same diff, as Zorro would say. But still, we had made a little island in the middle of the storm. He had needed sanctuary and I had given it to him. I was pleased because I had been rewarded for my liberal values and he was grateful with a sweetness that was humble and endearing.

  _____

  By the end of the afternoon, when the riot had burnt itself out and he had managed to contact his brother-in-law, we had agreed to meet again, to discuss these great matters further.

  I went out a few minutes after he left and walked up the hill to Ashrafiyeh to survey the damage. An elderly lady with a chic blond coiffure and a Chanel jacket with a mink collar was walking a small dog around a smoking overturned car. She looked not in the slightest deterred or dismayed as she carefully picked her elegant Ferragamo feet through the rubble. Picture-perfect Beirut ridiculousness.

  TWO

  That evening, I found Johnny, sitting in the corner of the bar in his habitual pose of patron. He had a te
lephone and a cup of coffee in front of him, a stack of old copies of Time magazine at his elbow. “The news never changes,” he liked to say. One of his favorite party games was to open one of the magazines at random, read out a headline and make people try and guess which war it was. He poured himself another glass of wine and cursed the Wahhabi marauders stirred up by idiot imams.

  “Sons of Mohammed’s dogs!” Johnny said. “Jesus H and his apostles, Kittredge, if they come into our side of the city again, I swear I will shoot these bastards myself.”

  I sat at the bar, typing my notes into my laptop. He had decided he would open the restaurant after all, because his chef had come in to work, diligently on time as always, despite the sirens and the mayhem.

  “Hussein is a Shia from the South. Ask him what he thinks about these turbans and beards. They want to dress like it’s the seventh century and brush their teeth with sticks because that’s what Mohammed did. But of course they watch television and drive cars and they all have mobile telephones and are very happy to get their hands on a Kalashnikov. Did Mohammed use these things too?”

  I folded myself into the concentrated effort of organizing facts into sentences. The waiter brought me a Negroni without my asking and I drank it.

  When I looked up, I saw a few journalists I knew coming in.

  Johnny opened his arms wide. “Ah yes, welcome, welcome to the thirsty vultures!”

  The Beiruti hack pack: Jeroen, Emilie, and Imma. A Dutchman, a Frenchwoman, and an Italian walk into a bar—Jeroen ran his hand over his shorn head. He had a cut over one eye, a yellow bruise along his brow.

  “Oh dear,” I said. “What happened to you?”

  “Hit on the head by a pirate with gold teeth and a scimitar in one hand,” he said equanimously. He showed us pictures on his camera. “I didn’t realize I was sheltering in the doorway of the building where the Danish Embassy is. There is only a tiny plaque next to the main door, no flag or anything.” I wrote the details of Jeroen’s observations into the story and hit send.

  Johnny held up a bottle of wine and the newcomers collected their glasses underneath it.

  “Saudi money. Saudi religion!” Johnny poured forth freely. “They are sending all their imams to tell our Sunnis that the rest of us are all heretical apostates! They broke the cross off the shrine next to the Armenian church, did you see it? They are fanaticals. God deliver us from the fanaticals! We must defend against them! If they come here again, I will fight them.”

  “Very good idea,” I said to Johnny, “look how well that worked last time.” I tossed the civil war back at him as if I knew what I was talking about. Johnny was sixty years old, he had brilliantined hair and he was having an affair with the new waitress. I took his reaction to be the hollow words of defiant machismo.

  “Ha!” said Johnny. “Look around. This is the last place in the Middle East where there are still Christians. If the Christians don’t fight, they will die. So I will fight.”

  “It’s always a minority of nutty,” I said, reasoned by an afternoon of Ahmed-the-Wahhabi’s sincerity. “They have the right to protest if they don’t like something.”

  Ping. Oz emailed me back: Thanks for this. We’ll run it on the website now.

  “Is this protesting?” Johnny pointed up at the TV on a bracket above the bar. The news footage was a repeating loop of police clashing with the menacing mob. A woman in a black abaya was screaming into the camera, her face frenzied and contorted. “They are crazy! Bulls in this china shop Lebanon!”

  Ahmed appeared. Jolt.

  “Are you listening to this old Phalangist?” He walked over to kiss me hello, I ducked his embrace. He was clean and shaved and smelled of a scent—honeysuckle treacle; something sickly sweet—I did not recognize.

  The revelations of the morning had been superseded by the events of the day. I had been too preoccupied to think about Ahmed, his wife and son and lover.

  “Where have you been?” I asked him.

  “At the U.N. Mission,” he said, addressing everyone. He began to retell gossip from the antechambers to power. His favorite kind of conversation, the kind in which he held court. (Ahmed was always at the center of his own stories; Alexandre once used the word diva.) I watched the semicircle of faces nod and drink it all in.

  Apparently the Lebanese prime minister had spent most of the morning reassuring the U.N. ambassador that everything was under control. Until Ahmed told his ambassador that he had just come through Ashrafiyeh and the demonstration was out of control and there was black smoke coming from the Danish Embassy building. His ambassador relayed this to the prime minister, who muttered, “The bastard Syrians,” and hung up and did not call back. Now they were saying that the interior minister was going to resign in the morning.

  “It’s your crazy coreligionists!” Johnny said to Ahmed. Ahmed spread his hands in a gesture of mock surrender.

  “Don’t blame me, I’m an atheist,” he said, laughing, deflecting. “It’s obviously a Zionist plot.”

  “Syrians,” added Johnny. “The prime minister is right. We are always at the mercy of our neighbors.”

  “Everyone is always trying to get their hands on little Lebanon because it has the most interesting parties.” Ahmed grinned at his own pun and poured himself a glass of wine. Charming, charming, charming; that was the word everyone used. Except Zorro, who had remained uncharmed, even the first time they met. “Photographers are hard to fool,” he said. “We listen with our eyes. Charming? Nah.” His word, dredged up from our London childhood, was “smarmy.”

  Ahmed put his arm around me. Warm palm snug in the empty small of my back. “How was your day, Mish-mish?” My face tucked into the familiar contour of his neck, underneath the syrup I could smell his smell, frankincense embers and leather. I knew I would forgive him. Not for the lie, which was unforgivable, but for his son.

  “People are being manipulated,” said Ahmed. He had put on his serious diplo-expert face, ready to analyze events.

  “People are upset,” I said. Ahmed-the-Wahhabi had been very upset. He had wept over the Danish insults to the Prophet.

  “They are upset because someone tells them they are upset.”

  “But all over the world—Pakistan, Indonesia, London—everywhere.”

  “Don’t be fooled by crowds. Crowds are easy to buy,” said Ahmed, the son of the Baathie traitor.

  “Don’t underestimate people, popular sentiment.”

  “So do you agree with them?” Ahmed turned to me. We were back in our marital to-and-fro, discussing. The world to rights again.

  “I have sympathy for their outrage,” I said, measuring my thoughts. “Just because we don’t think it’s insulting doesn’t mean it isn’t insulting. They are clearly insulted. But on the other hand, insulting someone shouldn’t be a crime. But it is something we try and avoid doing.”

  “The trouble is,” said Ahmed, “insult is in the eye of the insulted.”

  “But we all have our red lines. Like France and Germany, where Holocaust denial is illegal.”

  “Free speech is an absolute,” said Ahmed. “On this point I am a fundamentalist!”

  “Maybe that’s OK in theory,” Jeroen came over, shaking his bloodied head. “But in practice these things have consequences.”

  “If you give them an inch, is the beginning of the problem,” said Johnny. A crescent of light shone across his shiny hair. “You say, OK we agree not to be offensive, and then they decide that everything is offensive so that by the end you are not even allowed to eat salami.”

  “It’s important to think with your stomach,” mocked Ahmed.

  “Yes it is,” replied Johnny, who ignored the reproach. “If everyone’s stomach is happy, then many other problems would be less well fed.”

  “Yes!” said Ahmed, agreeing with Johnny. “I always say it’s the economy, stupid. Free markets and good financial infrastructure. This is the answer to the Middle East.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said. “A chicken i
n every pot, a refrigerator in every kitchen. But they have plasma TVs in Saudi Arabia, and all they watch on them are religious shows.”

  “It is deeper than the superficials of white goods,” said Ahmed. “It is the difference of mentality. It is the divide between Islam and the West.” Then I regretted challenging him because now he went into full pontification mode. He was wearing a blue button-down shirt, khaki trousers, and suede loafers. He looked almost presidential, and then I remembered his talent for dissimulation and thought, maybe not quite presidential; Ahmed was more praetorian aide.

  “If not these cartoons, then it would be something else,” he continued. “They will find any issue to wave about like a flag. A headscarf is a flag. A flag is just a banner with a stick. Why are we Arabs poor and oppressed? We Arabs, who once ruled as far as Andalusia and invented arithmetic! What happened to our empire? They say we are brought low because we are not godly enough. If we return to the piety of the good old days, we will be delivered from these humiliations. But they never question the source of our poverty and our rotten societies. It does not occur to them that religion is the problem. Submission, obedience. No, no! You cannot question the Koran!”

  I had often heard Ahmed rail against the shibboleths and superstitions of Islam. For Ahmed, the West was successful because it had done away with religion as a political authority. The American Constitution separated church and state, Henry VIII had divorced England from Rome, the French Revolution had destroyed the power of the bishops and established laïcité as a fundamental principle of the Republic. I used to argue back that by opposing all Islam, he was only playing into the hands of the Islamists who said that the West wanted to destroy it. Jihad needed an enemy in order to exist; why give them what they wanted?

  I felt the red wine curdling in my stomach. Ahmed continued his stump speech.

  “Arabs will beg and lie to get a visa to live in the West. But when they get there, they want to live according to the same values of the society that they left. Where women are less than men and everyone has to suffer all the tropes of family and honor and obedience because they are written in this surah or that hadith. The Koran is the word of God. So they are stuck in a tautology, don’t you see? They are stuck because they won’t allow their belief to be questioned even as they demand that their beliefs be respected. But how can you respect something that can’t be questioned? They complain that their rights are not respected; but they’re in Denmark! Try and have your rights respected in Damascus!”