Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  After a week we went to the shopping mall to buy him a bed. Little Ahmed was suspicious of this trip, which required a car, and refused to have the seat belt fastened. He squirmed.

  His father threw his hands in the air and said, “OK, tough boy refusnik. Sit in the back with no safety belt, and when we crash you will fly through the windshield and break your neck.” Little Ahmed glared at him. Ahmed put the car into drive with a long-suffering sigh that belied his single week of parenting.

  “Don’t yell at him,” I said.

  “You don’t need to teach him English, Kit. He perfectly understands.”

  We chose a wooden bed with a headboard painted with two sailboats.

  “It’s a sailing boat,” Ahmed said, pointing.

  “I no,” said Little Ahmed. His father misunderstood. He thought he was still refusing.

  “It is the most beautiful bed in the store,” he said, throwing up his arms at his son’s ingratitude.

  “I know,” repeated Little Ahmed.

  We took the bed home and Ahmed spent all afternoon assembling it. I made spaghetti for dinner, and Little Ahmed ate it with his fingers even though his father tried to insist that he use a fork and twirl it in the correct Italian manner. Little Ahmed tucked the snaky strands into his mouth messily slurping. Globs of tomato sauce spattered over the table. I laughed; eventually Ahmed laughed. Little Ahmed didn’t like being laughed at and threw the bowl on the floor in defiance. As I sponged it up, I saw that the tangled spaghetti had landed on the pickle jar crack.

  I hosed him down with the shower head in my bath. Taut little limbs, bowed back, funny pot-belly tummy. He smelled like chamomile. He would not let me hug him as I toweled him dry. I put him into his pajamas, tucked him into his new blue bed. He arranged himself carefully under the sheets and I sat respectfully on the edge of the mattress. I read him Where the Wild Things Are. By and by he fell asleep, eyelashes quivering, dreaming. We were his prison-guard parents now, the Wild Things were banished to the land of memory dreams.

  Ahmed said he thought it was a stupid book to read a four-year-old, it would only give him nightmares. He opened a bottle of wine and turned on the news. Hezbollah had kidnapped two Israeli soldiers on the border.

  “He already knows that bad things happen,” I said. “He’s an Iraqi.”

  “I don’t want him to be an Iraqi. I don’t want him to assume every fatalistic horror that country will impose on its people.”

  “He can be whatever he wants to be.”

  “Can he?” Ahmed looked at me, candidly, concerned and tender father, worried for the future. “Can any of us?”

  “You are,” I pointed out. Ahmed snorted, refilled his glass of wine. He fell silent for a moment.

  “Are you going to tell me how she died?” I asked.

  “I don’t know if Little Ahmed should know. I don’t know what to tell him. His grandmother told him that his mother went to paradise and it is a beautiful place. Now he thinks she is going to stay there forever because she loves paradise more than him. What can I tell him? That paradise doesn’t exist? I don’t want to tell him what death is. That his mother is buried in the earth and being eaten up by microorganisms.”

  “How did she die?”

  “You know he hasn’t cried once! Oh, he is a brave little Bedu!”

  “Did the Americans kill her, did my people kill her?”

  “No one knows,” said Ahmed shaking his head. His eyes clouded khaki. “Crossfire gun fight on the Qanat Road. No one knows if it was your people’s bullet that killed her or mine.”

  _____

  That night the booms woke us up at three in the morning. Little Ahmed came into the room and stood beside our bed and announced, matter-of-factly, in Arabic, “Bombs, Aba. We must go to the basement.”

  “You see?” Ahmed said to me, almost laughing at it, nothing to be done but open your arms wide to embrace your own complicity in the absurd; stop trying to run because you were only running in circles chasing round and round like the rainbow wheel on the desktop. “From one war zone to another. You can take the Iraqi out of Iraq . . .” Another shuddery, thundery window rattle. “The Israelis are bombing the Shia suburbs,” said Ahmed, as matter-of-fact as his son. “We’ll be alright here. Come in, little man,” he held up the corner of the duvet. “Crawl in and come in beside us.”

  We could not sleep, and so we went out onto the balcony and looked for the planes that we couldn’t see because it was nighttime. I watched Little Ahmed’s fragile silhouette, tender stem, little rib cage puffing in and out counting the seconds between detonations.

  “That was a big one!”

  “No, Aba, it wasn’t as big as the one before!”

  I had missed Little Ahmed’s very beginning. But we had our own story, didn’t we? Once upon a time there was a boy without a mother and a woman who could not have children of her own. The light from the streetlamp turned the edges of his ears translucent pink, and I knew that I would do anything to take Little Ahmed away from war.

  PART THREE

  * * *

  PARIS

  ONE

  I grew up half-and-half, the American kid in the English school. Until I settled in Paris, I had copied my peripatetic father. Hopscotch: three years in Moscow interrupted by a year in New York; then I followed the War on Terror bandwagon from Afghanistan to Baghdad, lived in Beirut, detours to Syria, reporting trips to Cairo, Gaza, Dubai. Most of my friends were also journalists and similarly displaced. We seemed to form a new itinerant tribe: half Iranian, half German, Egyptian-American, born in Afghanistan and grew up in San Francisco, Congolese-Belgian but went to university in Edinburgh. Our lovers were Dutch or Russian or Lebanese; our children were trilingual.

  When Ahmed and I fell in love, we thought of ourselves in this way, blissfully removed from nationality and borders. When we moved to Paris after the July war between Hezbollah and Israel, it did not seem odd to us that neither of us was French. Ahmed spoke French fluently because his father had been stationed in the embassy in Paris when he was small. I spoke French pretty well from school. I had a British passport and therefore EU rights. Because we were married, Ahmed had French residency, and when I legally adopted Little Ahmed, he got a British passport. I had an American passport too, because I was born in Boston. But we both decided that there was nothing to be gained by applying for Little Ahmed to have American citizenship except a tax liability.

  Such were our identities; forms and applications, photocopied documents of attestation, notarized signatures. Little Ahmed spoke French at school, Arabic with his father, English with me. He had the brown hair and green eyes and amber skin of his father. He didn’t look different or out of place; Paris was a cosmopolitan city, and his classmates were all sorts of colors. France was a secular republic. No one was legally allowed to ask us what our religion was. Until his mother’s family insisted he take Koran lessons, I did not have to explain to Little Ahmed that we were, that he was, a Muslim. Certainly his father, who loved pretending he was Italian at hotel check-ins—spelling out his surname with an exaggerated accent. “S-o-l-e-m-a-n-i! Yes, almost a salami”—never bothered to mention it. We had come to Paris so that Little Ahmed could live in a society where no one would take any particular notice of his hybridness.

  I wanted him to grow up unbounded, a citizen of the world. Ahmed was keen to give him an upbringing that would be far from the tenets of obedience and honor that would have enmeshed him in Baghdad or in exile with his mother’s family in Amman.

  I don’t know if we were naïve or if the world just changed around us.

  “What am I?” Little Ahmed asked us, aged six, when we picked him up from his first day of Big Boy school. “Am I French? The teacher asked me where I was from.”

  _____

  My mother’s apartment, now ours, was on the fifth floor of a grand Haussmann block on the Quai de Jemmapes on the edge of the 10th arrondissement. It had a narrow slice of balcony that looked out over the Canal Sain
t-Martin. When we moved in, I painted clean white walls over all her wallpaper and installed a double-sized water heater so that I could always have hot water for my bath. It was a funny kind of neighborhood, on a transitional line between the commercial offices around République and shabbier streets on our side of the canal where rabbit-warren apartment houses were inhabited by Algerians, Vietnamese, and young Bobos, Bohemian bourgeois. When we first arrived, it was still a working-class quartier populaire, with old-time bars like Le Carillon, scuffed and easygoing, where Coco, the white-haired patriarch of the Algerian family that had run the place for forty years, set out plates of peanuts every evening at six o’clock to signal l’heure de l’apéro. Within a couple of years the hipsters opened up wine bars, and in the summer droves of pretty young things sat along the canal with bottles of rosé and baguette picnics. I liked our netherworld mix, but Ahmed complained the area was run-down and there was no supermarket nearby; he would have preferred the more haute international climes of the sixième.

  I wrote expat stories for Oz about the Paris that Americans wanted to visit on their vacations. I found the city was largely unchanged since Hemingway had shot himself. It was easy enough to paint a glaze of faded glamour nostalgia over the city’s deliquescent slide, because the Parisians did. It all looked the same as it did when the Lost Generation had camped there, but now the bistros were staffed by Sudanese reheating magret de canard and poulet chasseur in the microwave, and the accordion players were Romanian beggars. Aspic, petrified, stuck. Nevermind said Oz, Paris is the eternal city of rose-tinted foreign spectacles; send me Audrey Hepburn, Edith Piaf, and lilac blooms. Paris was almost a parody of itself: chocolatiers and bonbon vitrines, wrought-iron café tables under the horse chestnut trees, red-and-white-checked tablecloths and a carafe of rotgut Brouilly. All the young people had given up and moved to London. I derided my version of “twee Paree” to Jean one postprandial afternoon.

  “Ah yes, the popular Anglo-Saxon pastime of French bashing. Have another Café-Calva, my dear, and then I’ll take you to the Rodin Museum.”

  Ahmed worked for the U.N. Political Mission. He was away a lot. For Little Ahmed, his father’s returns were great occasions. He would paint big WELCOME HOME ABA! banners and I’d help him pin them up in the hall. He would hug his father and hang on to his legs and help him unpack by carefully folding up his socks and arranging them, in rainbow color coordination, in the sock drawer. His father was like the moon to him, a bright being that waxed and waned, full spotlight attention or diminishing slivers of phone calls. Of me, the everyday sun that rose in the morning to wake him up and fell into a glass of wine at dusk, he was less enamored. I watched him follow his father from room to room, not to spill a moment of precious Aba-at-home time, careful to be quiet if Ahmed was working, to be still if he was watching TV, and to remember to ask politely if he could sit on his lap.

  At first I tried to persuade Ahmed to apply for a post that would keep him in Paris. I said we were a family, Little Ahmed needed his father. Ahmed came up with various obstacles, U.N. internal politics, the contractual complexities of local hires over international staff. But something about Paris never quite knit into home for him. Because of his traveling, he remained a visitor always caught out by the city’s particular rhythms: shops that were closed on Mondays or Tuesdays or alternate Thursdays, restaurants that didn’t open on weekends. He would come home in the evening irritated, irritable, thwarted. A shuttered shop, a rude waiter, an abrasive encounter with an official, a shove on the métro, muttered tutting in undertones.

  “We should have gone to America,” he said. But he didn’t apply for a post in New York either.

  “Why did you call your son Ahmed?” I asked him during one of our difficult conversations. His packed rolling suitcase waited like a tombstone in the front hall. Ahmed had his coat on and was rifling through the pockets for his ticket. “Didn’t you call him after yourself because you are his father? Don’t you want to be his father? Where are you? Here, there, nowhere.”

  “I am late,” Ahmed replied and left again.

  His absence became normal and I devolved into indifference. We did not grow apart, we simply were apart. I stopped asking him about particulars; there was always some glib excuse. He wasn’t in Istanbul that weekend when he said he was going to be because of a last-minute change of ambassadors, the conference had been delayed, the flights to Erbil had all been grounded because of fog, the hotel switchboard got the wrong Solemani in another room and the woman who answered his phone was just a secretary with the Geneva mission.

  I let go nagging, reminding, justifying, self-recriminating. I got used to being alone, took solace in my own routines and small discoveries, my friends, in Little Ahmed’s little hand in mine. I took him to McDonald’s on Friday afternoons as a treat, and he liked to make an artist’s palette out of blobs of ketchup and mustard and mayonnaise and then swoosh his fries through them to mix them into a happy mess. His father always said that when McDonald’s opened in Baghdad, it would mean the wars were really over.

  “See Kit-ma, the mustard is English and the ketchup is American and the mayonnaise is French.”

  “All we need is some labneh and you would be the perfect poster child for multiculturalism.”

  Every Christmas, I marked Little Ahmed’s height on the back of the bathroom door. I took him to school in the mornings and picked him up at three-thirty in the afternoon. He hated football and loved drawing and demanded great quantities of paper. Always, the cry went up, “More paper! Another pencil! Not that kind, I want a red one!” He was implacable, he would not bend for my convenience, yelling and begging and bribing made no difference. He could be convinced only by the logic of his own benefit.

  “If you eat all your green beans now, you won’t have to eat them cold again tomorrow.” Silence as he considered this before he began to eat them, one by one, glaring at me.

  How they grow so fast! And other banalities of motherhood. Washing machine, dishwasher, make the beds, pick up, tidy up. I did not mind. I learned to nod in acquiescence at the school gates with les autres mamans. Except I was not Little Ahmed’s real mother, as Little Ahmed reminded me when we argued.

  “You’re not my mother!”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I’m trying.”

  “I want my father!”

  “He’s away.”

  _____

  Rousse was my first Paris friend. Jean introduced us. Margot said she thought we wouldn’t get on because we were too alike, but for once she was wrong—well perhaps not completely wrong, because there was always an element of competition between us, or at least that I felt when I scratched my ego against Rousse’s success. I don’t know what similarities Margot discerned—maybe of ambition, of trying to stretch reportage into something more artistic. But Rousse was an artist, this was never in doubt. I was just a journalist and whenever I tried to color outside the lines Oz sent it back for a rewrite.

  Rousse had grown up in Strasbourg. Her father was pied noir, her mother was an Algerian Jew who went to church at Christmas, so she was a mongrel like me. We both felt as if we didn’t fit somehow. Like Little Ahmed, I always hated it when someone asked me, “Where are you from?” and so did Rousse. “It’s not important where you are from, it only matters where you are going!” she declared one day. (Little Ahmed had nodded at her and then asked, “Yes, but where are we going? If we go to the zoo, does it mean I can be a tiger?”) But while I secretly wanted to belong—but belong where? to whom?—Rousse reveled in her unbelonging.

  “I never want to join,” she declared. “We must remain independent!”

  Once, feeling lonely because Ahmed was away again, I said, “Independent together!” Rousse physically pushed me away to make her point.

  “Non! You are independent and I am independent. Separately. It’s what I said to Charb. He said, ‘Ah, but you cannot make love separately.’ But of course you can, it’s what telephones are for.”

  “How is Char
b?”

  “I don’t know. I have refused to answer his calls for a week.”

  Rousse was an eclectic eccentric, drama and ice, the moth and the flame. She was always late, always dashing, alternately a stray cat hanging around my kitchen mewling she was hungry (“where is the pasta? can I open this bottle?”) and aloof, working for weeks alone in her studio without calling.

  Rousse had gone to art college in Strasbourg. Her graduation show had been a series of paintings of famous reportage photographs. When she graduated, she was twenty-two, she didn’t know what she was interested in, but she wanted to paint real stuff, not conceptual stuff. She was mesmerized by the violence of Old Master paintings—rapes of the Sabine, massacres of the innocents—and she was frustrated by the banality of the photojournalism of the day, the repetition of Kalashnikovs as props in every shot of fighters no matter if they were Taliban or Congo rebels. She told Zorro once that she had really wanted to be a famous war photographer like Lee Miller but that she knew she wasn’t brave enough, so she hid behind paint. When Zorro repeated this conversation to me, he added, “You see, Rousse wants to be you and you want to be Rousse.”