Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  “What did you say?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Did you write Rousse’s obituary?”

  “No, I couldn’t face it. I wrote Charb’s. I left out the good bits, the raving Marxism, the women. I was worried that without these things the readers would miss his charm, his warmth—but, you know. Respect for the dead. We are already polishing the sarcophagus.”

  “What’s a sarcophagus?” Little Ahmed asked.

  “It’s a tomb,” I said. “A fancy tomb.”

  “Like Rousse has.”

  “No, it’s not exactly a coffin, it’s made of stone and carved. Usually for kings and Pharaohs.”

  I told Jean that Oz wanted a long piece about the day of the attack but I hadn’t been able to write anything yet.

  “You just have to do it,” said Little Ahmed. “Like homework.”

  “Not you as well,” I said. “Oz is harassing me.”

  “Kit-ma has one set of rules for her and another for me,” Little Ahmed appealed to Jean. “When she doesn’t want to do her work, she allows herself to believe the excuse she makes up. But she never believes my excuses.”

  “Yes, the tyranny of adults against kids,” said Jean, wagging his finger at him, joking, admonishing.

  “You all oppress me!”

  “Yeah, right,” I said, and then turned to Jean. “Last night he accused me of colonizing him.”

  “You two need to stick together,” said Jean, cuffing us both around the ears like recalcitrant children. Little Ahmed sucked all his Coke up the straw and slammed the glass down on the counter. “But she never believes me!” he said, and stomped off to a corner where there was a pile of old Tintin books to take him away from irritating adults.

  “He’s bound to be confused,” said Jean gently. “He’s suffered a great loss. He is in shock. It is a trauma.”

  “I know,” I said. “This is what Paris was supposed to keep him safe from. Not again. Not after his mother—”

  “Time heals.” Jean put his hand on my arm, the father I never had. Sometimes platitudes are all there is. “Don’t worry.”

  “I feel as if something has shifted,” I said after a pause. “Little Ahmed is angry. I am too.”

  “The violence isn’t somewhere else anymore.”

  “All this time I feel as if I have been earnestly trying to understand the Other, trying very hard to see the world as a universal humanity, to raise Little Ahmed to pay respect to his heritage—all that stuff that his father hates and wanted to get away from but ended up going right back to—but that all the time I was just pretending there wasn’t a difference, when there is.”

  I recalled a conversation with Ahmed-the-Wahhabi in Beirut, after the cartoon riots. I had said, “But we are all the same, no? We are all just people trying to do the best for ourselves and our families.” He looked at me very seriously, leaning forward, black-winged eyebrows coming together like ravens landing, and replied, “I can say this to you because you are also a Muslim: we do not want the same thing for our children as Americans, Europeans, the Christian people, do. We do not want them to think only of themselves and their pleasure and dishonor their religion and their family. You will know this better when you know your religion better.”

  Jean was tired and sad too. His eyes were hooded and the swags underneath made shadow circles. He had taught me that to be a reporter was to have no opinions, to make no judgments. Now this tenet seemed like a quaint adage from another era.

  “How are we supposed to be tolerant of people who are not tolerant of us? Why should we tolerate them?”

  “Them?”

  “It’s about me, you, this bottle of wine that we are sharing.” I raised my chin, defiant, and cupped my hands around my breasts to make my point. Liberty Leading the People, her breasts bared to the world. “I want to be able to drink, to think, to be a woman, to be me, to do what I want, to say what I want, to have different opinions, to change my mind. I want to live the way I want. I don’t want to be circumscribed, hobbled by political correctness. They killed Rousse and Charb. I don’t want to understand their point of view anymore or how their sensibilities have been upset. This has gone too far. It is us and them now.”

  “Does this mean you’re no longer a Muslim?” said Jean, mocking.

  Just then Little Ahmed came back to the table, declaring, “Captain Haddock is a racist.” The boring grown-ups were still talking. “Who’s a Muslim?” he asked.

  “We are,” I said, grumpy, weary.

  “I am, but you’re not. You only said you were to marry Aba.”

  “So what makes you a Muslim?” I pushed back. “Maybe nobody should be allowed to be any religion until they are eighteen and old enough to decide for themselves.”

  “I am a Muslim because I am an Arab.”

  “But some Arabs are Christians.”

  “My father is Muslim, my mother is Muslim. So I was born Muslim.” Little Ahmed would confound even a Jesuit with the logic of facts.

  “Where is it written that you have to be what your parents are? Don’t you want to decide for yourself?”

  “Well, I am,” said Little Ahmed, angrily, kicking at the leg of the bar stool with his sneakers. “Everyone says I am, so I must be. Even you say I am.”

  I threw my hands up in the air in exasperated surrender. “We should get home.” Jean nodded, kissed me goodbye.

  “This will pass, Kitty. It’s natural to be angry now. We are all angry. But we have to temper it.”

  Now I felt like Ahmed-the-Wahhabi when he asked me how Christians could bear to turn the other cheek. “Forgive? How are we supposed to do that?”

  _____

  Over the following weeks I found I could not engage with the debate and the handwringing, the TV panels endlessly talking about Charlie Hebdo this and Charlie Hebdo that. Charlie was now defended as a Messiah. Free speech was an article of faith, born in the satirical pamphleting tradition of the Revolution, carried through the modern iteration of France, as the essence of liberté. After the attacks, hundreds of Muslims were arrested and charged with “apology for terrorism” offenses. When you asked the free speech group what they thought of people being prosecuted for speaking—for example, for yelling at a policeman who was stop-searching them, “I wish they’d killed more of you!”—they only shrugged. I asked one judge about this heavy-handedness at a dinner party at Alexandre’s and he was entirely unapologetic. “Well, it will discourage them from doing it again.”

  At the beginning of June, I had lunch with Jean at Les Editeurs. He said he was worried about the nuances of hypocrisy which crept into the debate. He was frustrated too that debate was all there was; dialogue had dropped out of the lexicon. I complained about the word Islamophobia that was being bandied about by the leftist apologists on political panel shows.

  “It’s a tar brush to smear anyone who raises a question about Islam or its overlap into a culture of violence. At this point it’s just a form of denial. There are six million Muslims in France. A tiny few are jihadis, a bigger few—still a minority—are fundamentalists. Overlap this with the larger number that believe that drawing pictures of the Prophet is unacceptable blasphemy and should be punished, and you find you have expanded into the larger gray zone of Muslims who are sympathetic to—I mean not to violence, I get that—but if you are a proper fundamentalist Muslim you want to live under Sharia, the Caliphate is an aspiration. But the French Republic, under its banner of laïcité, says no, there aren’t Muslims and Catholics and Calvinists, there are only Frenchmen. The French state denies the difference, and it’s a difference that fundamentalist Muslims themselves can’t bear to be denied. They wear different clothes, they trim their moustaches in a special way, the women curtain themselves off from the world. They want to show that they are different. They don’t want to be us.”

  Jean looked up from his steak tartare.

  “Have you finished, Kit?”

  We ate for a few moments in silence and then he a
sked how Little Ahmed was coping. I heard Margot in his query. Margot and I had not spoken for several weeks. She had tried to get me to go and see someone, a psychologist friend of hers. She said Little Ahmed was worried about me and that made her worried. She and Little Ahmed had been talking behind my back. She was basically telling me I wasn’t a good mother, that I was unhinged. What was I supposed to do? Carry on as normal, as if nothing had happened?

  I told Jean, “He’s fine.” I didn’t tell him that Little Ahmed had been sent home from school the week before for arguing with Mme Hérisson. When I had asked Little Ahmed about what had happened, he was entirely unrepentant.

  “She’s always getting at me. It’s like she’s the thought police for the French state.” He mimicked her pinched squeaky voice. “ ‘What are the first words of the Constitution? Monsieur Solemani?’ ” And just because I said, ‘whose constitution?’ she went into a giant tirade in front of the class about how we should all be so lucky to be educated in the French Republic of égalité, fraternité, blah-blah. So I said something sarcastic back and she just lost it and sent me home for the afternoon. Everyone thinks she’s mean and crazy. It’s no biggie.”

  The coffee arrived.

  “I know you miss Rousse,” Jean said.

  He reached across the table, but he didn’t take my hand in his. I looked at his outstretched fingers, black hair on his knuckles, blue veins, manicured fingernails, perfectly oval and smooth. There was a certain vanity to Jean. He was known for the creases in his chinos, even in war zones.

  I did not miss Rousse. Missing Rousse was Rousse being away and looking forward to her return. This was only void and rage. Jean tried to convince me that her work and her talent, her pathos and wit, her sparky oddball asides, all the contradictions of depression and chutzpah, all that was her, spirit soul and friend, continued in us. “Love,” said Jean, “is irreducible, like carbon. Many different forms, but always extant. Passed on generation to generation, love does not die. In death it continues to nourish life—” I did not find any useful solace in this—what was it? Not exactly a belief—in this humanism. I felt only alone and cold and furious.

  “But you can’t let go of what is important,” Jean continued.

  “What is important? Are you going to lecture me about love of my fellow man again?” There were times I knew—Ahmed (both of them) would remind me—when my voice rose to a shrill and imperious treble. I saw an expression on Jean’s face I didn’t recognize—disapproval, disavowal, distaste? His mouth assumed a rigidness. I had never realized he had such a thin top lip. He didn’t reply. His silence made me want to retaliate.

  “Do you know where my father is?” I asked, accusatory.

  He signaled to the waiter to bring the check.

  “You can’t tell me because you don’t know, or you know and you won’t tell me?”

  “Kit,” he warned, “don’t let this anger engulf you. I understand you are in pain. But being angry about it won’t help. It’s selfish—you let it eat you from inside and it poisons people around you. After anger comes depression. Maybe it’s better, non, to be sad, to cry. Then you can accept. Because you must accept.”

  I went home and drew myself a hot bath and lay there for a long time. When the water grew cold, I turned the hot tap on my toes to replenish it. Dad was gone, Granbet was gone, Mama was gone, Ahmed had gone back to Baghdad, Rousse was gone, Zorro was away again, Alexandre was distant, Jean and Margot had condemned me. It was true, Little Ahmed probably hated me. The only warmth I could find, I would have to provide for myself.

  NINE

  In July, Little Ahmed went to see his father. They met in Amman and took a trip to Petra and went camping in Wadi Rum with his cousin Thayr. Left alone in Paris, I didn’t want to go out and see people. Empty summer Paris suited my mood. There was still a scrim of JE SUIS CHARLIE posters pasted over the base of the monument in the Place de la République, but the candles and the flowers had been cleared away and there were no more Charlie stories in the media. Everyone had gone back to normal, as though the shock had been absorbed. Ostrich fools. I knew it was only a matter of time before it happened again.

  When Little Ahmed came back, he dropped Arabic into his sentences and groaned when I couldn’t understand him. We had only a week together before I left for Greece. Little Ahmed would go and stay with Jean and Margot in Brittany.

  Little Ahmed shut himself in his room, hours concentrated in front of the computer. He is thirteen, I said to myself, of course he is confused and diffident. Poor kid with an absent father and an other-mother instead of a real mother. Minding the gap between worlds, from Wadi Rum to Locquirec, sand to surf.

  Thirteen is the dawn of the age of discovery, of self-assertion. When I was thirteen, I read Margaret Bourke-White’s Portrait of Myself. I found it in the bookcase in my mother’s bedroom. I don’t know why I was attracted to a plain volume of maroon broadcloth hardback. I read many books at that age (mostly Danielle Steele) but Bourke-White’s autobiography stuck. She had been in Moscow when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, a woman in a man’s world. It tuned my ambition.

  What book would Little Ahmed find? I hurried him out of his room, took him to Shakespeare and Company and pushed him through the stacks.

  “Here’s a novel about Tom Paine,” I said. “Or what about Edward Said’s memoir? Or Homage to Catalonia, To Kill a Mockingbird—” But my exemplars would not do. He did not want my heroes. What sense could I make to him when he was still struggling to make sense of himself? When his every sentence that summer week in Paris together began with a determined I.

  “Life is like a mirror, Kitty,” Granbet said long ago. “You get from a relationship what you put into it.”

  “Give him the tools for intellectual enquiry,” Alexandre advised.

  “Give him your love,” Father Angelo had told me.

  “It is your example,” Jean warned, “that will form his worldview.”

  “Just keep him out of the mosque,” Ahmed had once implored. “Whatever you do.”

  “You’ll screw his head up no matter what you do,” Rousse’s voice came back to me. “All parents do. Don’t worry about it.”

  As usual, he wouldn’t let me see his pictures from Jordan.

  “I’m editing. Rousse understood.”

  “Did you take pictures of shapes? How was the desert? Did you like camping?”

  “It was good.”

  “Tell me about your cousins.”

  “They were OK.”

  “Thayr and Zaid and Leyla, isn’t it?”

  “Only Thayr came with Aba and me. My uncle said Zaid was too little and Leyla is older but she’s a girl.”

  “You like Thayr?”

  “He’s OK. He’s a year older than me, but he doesn’t know anything about music, he’s never even heard of Booba or Tupac or Kanye. I let him listen to some Furious and it totally blew his mind. Afterwards there was a big fuss because he downloaded some of my songs, and my uncle said it was a degenerative influence of Western drug music or something and made him wipe them all.”

  “Is your uncle strict?”

  “Yeah. Like, not about religion so much; Thayr goes to the mosque on Friday with him, but he doesn’t have to pray every day. But it’s more like the classic Iraqi father, all about obedience. Aba’s not like that, and it really surprised Thayr, like when he would ask us whether we thought this is a good place to camp, instead of just telling us. We talked about lots of things in the desert in the nights and Thayr said he would never talk to his father the way I talked to Aba. He got quite upset about it. And then we would argue and he didn’t know how to argue because if he didn’t like something we said he would just keep repeating his point over and over. He said he knew, because his father said so, that everything wrong in the Middle East was the fault of the Americans. Iraq, Syria, was all because of the Americans. And I said: How does your father know? Like give me proof of the argument, like the supporting points, and he just said, you’r
e wrong, you’re just wrong! Like just being convinced of something is enough to make it right. One time he got really upset because I said that it wasn’t true that in France they didn’t let Muslims pray. And then we got into the whole issue about girls wearing the veil. I said I live in France and I know, and it’s only at school that girls can’t wear the veil, but they can in other places. He just said it’s the same thing. He was really mad about it. Afterwards, Aba said I had to apologize just to make him feel better even though there wasn’t anything really to apologize for. I had just said the truth.”

  “Do you want peanut butter on toast? I’m making some for me.”

  “Haven’t we got any Nutella?”

  “I forgot to buy some.”

  “Kus Umak,” he muttered under his breath. It was one of the few Arabic phrases I knew.

  “Seriously? Ahmed, that’s nasty! Don’t say that to me.” He managed to look a little guilty. “Is that how Thayr talks?” Ahmed nodded. “Do you know what it means?”

  “Camel’s woman thing.” He could not bring himself to say cunt. Bless him. I relented, laughed, and said, “Actually it’s your mother’s—blank.”

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “It’s alright. For years I thought it was sac à bordel.”

  Ahmed grinned. “Instead of sacré bordel?”

  “Yes. I mean, a bag of brothels is a better description of a fucked-up situation than sacred brothel.”

  “Kit, you said fucked up.”

  “Sorry.”

  “That means I get to say it once within the next week.”

  “Yes, OK.” According to our swear word agreement, he was right.

  “Kit?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s a brotherly?”

  “A brothel?”

  “Yes. What’s a brothel?”

  “Ah. Well.”

  “Don’t say, When you’re older . . .”

  “A brothel is where men go to have sex with prostitutes.”

  “Like in Pigalle.”