Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  “Yes.”

  We ate our tartines standing up in the kitchen. It was a hot summer day, and through the window I could see the couples picnicking along the canal. “So is it weird,” I asked Little Ahmed, “to be a French boy with your cousin?”

  “No, not really,” he said thoughtfully, picking at a bunch of grapes on the counter.

  “Don’t eat those, I’m going to make grapes in cream and brown sugar brulée.” Ahmed made a face.

  “I’m not French when I’m with Aba, I am just an Arab like everyone else. I mean I just live in France, right, I’m not really French.”

  “No, I guess, really you’re British, according to your passport.”

  “No English person would think I was English,” Ahmed pointed out, bluntly practical. “Can I take my scooter to the top of Montmartre later? Can we go to Rousse’s?”

  _____

  All summer the news was the refugee exodus across the Aegean. Families crammed onto inflatable dinghies, set off at night from Turkish coves to cross the sea to a Greek shore, to Europe, to safety, to a future. Wet, salt-sprayed, mute and frightened children in their parents arms; blue sea, orange life vests littered on the beaches. Tents under pine trees, trash fires in the dark, tarpaulin flapping in the rain. Huddled masses. Hundreds, thousands, a million walked along highways, filled buses and crowded onto trains, moving north across the unbordered European Union towards Germany.

  The New York Times sent Zorro to Greece to cover it. His pictures were more intimate than his usual wide-angled scenes. He had become famous for the grand diorama scale of his photographs, but these portraits were so close up that they were details more than faces or individuals. Strands of hair caught in the hinge of a pair of spectacles, the curled eyelashes of a baby—sleeping or drowned?—razor rash at the edge of a moustache, a howling mouth, spittle-flecked lips, the edge of a shy smile as extraordinarily beautiful as the chipped face of a marble goddess, a little blond girl holding out a pink sparkly headband. Exhaustion, anguish, joy: arrival.

  Zorro should have been dead. He should have died a hundred times: Shrapnel in his head from a Baghdad car bomb, you could still feel the nubbin just above his hairline. Smashed-up pelvis from a car crash in the Panjshir. Recurrent malaria. He no longer had a belly button because he had been operated on for a hernia in Tbilisi and the surgeon had sewn him up without it. He was on and off coke and mostly on heroin, but he had a good doctor who kept him in clean white pills and so this was under control. Well, he was functional; he still took brilliant pictures. That’s what Jean and I said to each other and put our worrying to one side.

  We were so used to Zorro’s medical emergencies—impacted molars in Basra, an ear infection caused by a spider that crawled into his ear canal in Erbil—that we only laughed when he’d turned yellow after coming out of Congo. We thought it was jaundice because he was on some strange drug for giardia, but it turned out to be hepatitis C. The doctor said it had gone too long untreated. The doctor was very grave; he told us, “He has six months, maybe a year. You must understand his liver is very fragile.” I held Zorro’s hand, bruised purple from the catheter. Zorro took the doctor’s words to mean he could not tolerate wine and so he insisted on drinking nothing but vodka. The opiate tablets, of course, continued. The doctor told him that at this point his addiction was the least of his troubles.

  When Zorro was told he would die soon, it didn’t seem to trouble him very much because he had always thought he would die soon. He lived in war more than he lived in peace. He was more comfortable in the shellfire chaos, where adrenaline swam with the heroin and made him somehow happy. Home in Paris, he would sit restlessly in a café as people walked past, people in no particular danger talking of where they were going to go skiing over the Easter break or of how annoying it was that the sofa delivery man wouldn’t give an exact time. He would go to exhibition openings and trade photographers’ gossip about someone getting the World Press Photo prize who shouldn’t have, because everyone knew he was manipulating his shadows . . . But in this quotidian world, Zorro was bored and itchy. It was all so pointless. And then the New York Times would call and he would be back on a plane and up and gone to his beloved bang-bang.

  Six months after he was given six months to live, a specialist prescribed a new drug regime. Unbelievably, he got better. One day the specialist told him he was virus-free, that he was cured. The new and unfamiliar idea that he was not going to die tomorrow or the next day discombobulated him. Zorro had no idea how to plan. The future is always unknown, but to Zorro it had been unthinkable. He had always avoided life, and now that he had been given it back, he understood that it was precious and he should not take it for granted. But what on earth to do with it?

  “It’s ridiculous, Kit,” Zorro said down the phone from Kos. “It’s refugees on the beach in the morning, beers on the beach in the afternoon. It’s a good story for you.”

  Oz agreed but I hemmed. Since the Charlie attack I had been pulled back into political and news stories. I wanted to go back to Euroculture, visit the Venice Biennale, write about New Nordic cuisine. Oz wanted banlieue imams, deradicalization programs, Molenbeek, burkinis-on-the-beach, the rise of the Front National. Muslims Muslims Muslims. I was tired of listening to their indignation. I didn’t note the tremor and reedy tone of their voices as I once would have done. I didn’t hear their fear; my own had canceled out empathy.

  I went to meet a family in Grigny for a story about immigrants in the outskirts of Paris. The husband had been run over by an ambulance the year before, and he could no longer work as a plumber. I asked if his wife went to work; he shook his head. She had tried to find a job, but around here—he waved his hand towards the small square window which looked out onto a square housing block. Gray brick blocks, gray sky. No métro, no shops. Three connecting buses took an hour and a half to get into Paris. His teenage son was on remand for a shoplifting charge in prison—in Fleury-Mérogis, a notorious jihadi breeding ground that was located only a kilometer away—and he was worried about him. “He was with the wrong people at the wrong time; he didn’t steal anything, the police just arrested everyone. He’s a good boy, he studies for the bac in his cell. Maybe he can still go to technical school.” Dislocation, isolation, bad luck, poverty. He apologized for not having any biscuits to give me with the tea. His nine-year-old daughter came into the kitchen and sat on his lap. “Maybe we should have stayed in Mali,” he told me. “But I wanted something better for her.”

  I left grim Grigny too late to beat the rush hour and got caught in traffic on the Périphérique. I pounded my hands on the steering wheel, stuck, irritated that I could not make a story out of this kind of mush. Maybe Zorro was right, maybe a change of scene would be good.

  _____

  Rousse’s apartment was due to be officially vacated, but neither Jean nor I had managed to find the time or heart to go and clear her things, and the supervising agent at the Bureau des Artistes had kindly said we could have until the end of September.

  She’d lived on the back of the butte, in the attic space of a grand beaux arts apartment house on the Rue de Clignancourt. It was an enormous atelier with bare wood floors, and half the roof was a skylight streaked with pigeon droppings like paint drips. As an artist, she’d been entitled to this subsidized space, granted by the Mairie de Paris.

  The gallery had removed her larger canvases and a few of her more polished and later notebooks. But most of her work, the backlog files and folders, giant portfolios tied up with string and piles of paste board that she used for her collages, were still there. Ahmed rested his scooter against the doorjamb, and I rooted around in the kitchenette for some coffee and put the cafetière on the stove.

  “Ahmed, you should take some things of hers. The rest will just end up in storage or sold—choose things that you would like to have to remember her.”

  Little Ahmed hated my mother voice.

  “As if I’m going to fucking forget,” he said, hands clenched by hi
s side.

  He crouched down in the corner where Rousse had stacked her most recent work. She had been taking portraits of refugees and migrants making the Mediterranean crossing from Libya. She had spent a lot of time in Catania, where the boats came ashore in Sicily, setting up an outdoor studio in the camps. She asked each person to bring a possession to hold up for the camera. After a while she’d had to say “no more mobile phones,” too prosaic, even though for most people it was the only possession they owned. Many of them had been rescued at sea, half naked, wet, and salt-rimmed and had nothing with them at all. But some had small fetishes, ferried and guarded all the way from grandfather to father to son, from village in South Sudan across the Sahara through camp and detention, beatings, robbings, sitting in a foot of water off the Libyan coast when the motor stalled and they had drifted for three days. A crumpled leather pouch, two swirling blue glass marbles, a carved wooden figure. One man, with a heavy brow and a blunt nose, held up a single cardinal feather.

  Ahmed flicked through these, and then I heard him stop. He pulled out one of her pasteboard squares, and held it out in front of him in both hands. I walked over to see what he had found. It was a portrait of him. The picture had been taken last year, his twelve-year-old self, before his recent growth spurt and the black fur appeared on his top lip. Three-quarter-length portrait. He was bare-chested and in his hands he was holding a Kalashnikov.

  PART FOUR

  * * *

  KOS

  ONE

  I flew to Kos the day after Little Ahmed went to Brittany. The town of Kos was pretty, blue and white and light; a ruined castle overlooked fishing boats in the harbor. In the cobblestone old town two minarets poked up over red-tiled roofs, vestiges of an Ottoman past. Zorro took me for an ouzo on the seafront the afternoon I arrived. He told me that dozens of boats were coming in every day, mostly at night. The Greeks made the refugee-migrants register at the police station before they could continue their journey to Athens.

  “They all say they are from Syria,” Zorro told me. “Half of them are from Pakistan. The others are Iraqis and Afghans. The Africans have the disadvantage because they can’t say they are Syrian. Anyway the Greeks don’t seem to care, they process them all just the same.” The authorities were overwhelmed and slow; the process usually took about a week. In the meantime the wealthier ones rented hotel rooms, the poorer ones slept in abandoned houses or in tents along the seafront.

  I watched the tourists walk by, French and English mainly. Vikings and Celts from the cold north with yellow hair. The women wore skimpy clothes and the soft pink rolls of their shoulders and plump bare upper arms were covered with tattoos. They strolled about with a slow aimless gait, unconcerned, dawdling, on holiday. The refugees, thin and harried, weaved among the slow-milling tourists. I wondered what it would have been like if I had brought Little Ahmed here on holiday and we were walking on the esplanade right now, among this strange mingled crowd. Would people think he was a tourist or a refugee? Which group would he identify with?

  I set my alarm for midnight, but Zorro refused to wake up, so I walked down the hill to the beach by myself. The beach was a long curve of shingle. There were stars in the sky, but the moon hung too low and wan to offer any light. Below the hotel there was a line of beach recliners and I sat on one and waited.

  Across the sea, the ancient Aegean, full of rotting civilizations that nourished and lapped its shores, was Turkey. It was only three or five miles away. I could see the orange necklace of lights along its coastal road. I could not see the people massing on the shoreline; I could not see the smoke from the bomb blasts or the elongated shadows of gunmen standing beside braziers or the hovels in which eight or ten people were sleeping side by side, or the hungry mother with a scrawny baby, sickly and fussing. These things I imagined, turning them over in my mind as the waves lapped over all the centuries of wars and oppressions. I laughed to myself at the banality of these thoughts and the metaphors that come along in facile trills, with nothing but the stars and the repeating rhythms of the sea to keep time and company.

  I stared out to sea. Lights twinkled and blinked, elusive. I kept my eye on one, an intermittent blueish pinprick that seemed to be coming closer. Would an illegal boat have a light? I thought I could hear the faint throbbing drone of an outboard motor, but then the sound merged with the waves and was lost. It was very dark. I couldn’t see anything. Further along the beach, where the line of recliners and the streetlights stopped and the shore clumped with dunes, a shore light flashed on and off. It seemed as if it would be a logical beacon to steer for.

  I watched a car drive slowly along the esplanade and stop close by. A man got out and I went towards him to preempt my fear of the unknown, waving my hand in greeting. The man smiled back.

  “Hello, I am a security guard, my name is Giorgios.” He said he had seen two boats land earlier, both full of Pakistanis. “Sometimes you can see them when they turn on their mobile phones and the screens light up. Look there!”

  A bright light was moving jerkily about, a flashlight of some kind.

  “It’s a boat! Get in the car!”

  We drove a few hundred meters and I rushed down onto the beach, and there, caught in Giorgios’s headlamps, were the outlines of figures coming up towards us. It was the very moment of landfall, of arrival. I could hear high-pitched voices, full of exclamations, urgent, triumphant, relieved.

  “Hello, hello,” I said, bumping among them. I reached out and found myself embracing a woman, plump and damp from sea spray. She clasped my two hands together in her two hands, a little dazed and amazed.

  “Hello, my name is Kit.”

  “I am Mohammed!” said a young man’s voice in English. “The children are all wet! And look, this woman has no shoes!”

  I could see them only in glimpses between the dark and the wobbly beam of their flashlights. Perhaps a dozen people, among them two women with dyed blond hair, two or three small children, and four or five men. Their moment of joy was hustled and brief. They threw down their life preservers, took their mobile phones out of the Ziploc bags they had put them in during the crossing, gathered up the children, and began walking, at a brisk pace, towards the lights of the town. The women and the children were barefoot.

  I walked with them, distributing cigarettes, which was all I had to give them. One produced a lighter and gallantly lit my cigarette for me. Mohammed was the only one who spoke English. He was young and handsome, with even white teeth and a quiff of wavy black hair that fell over one eye. “I was the driver of the boat! We were chased by the Turkish patrol. They shot at us! I swear it. They were shouting through a megaphone. Finally they said, ‘OK we allow you to go!’ Allow us? They could not catch us!”

  “Where are you from?”

  “From Syria.”

  “Where in Syria?”

  Mohammed hesitated. I offered him a cigarette. He declined, pressing his hand against his chest in a gesture of pious refusal.

  “Hama.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “Things are very bad in Hama.”

  “Very bad.”

  “Is this your family?” I asked, pointing to the group trailing behind us.

  “These people?” Mohammed’s eyebrows drew together to make a thick black line. “These people? No. They needed a driver for the boat and so I went with them without paying. I don’t like them.”

  “You met them in Turkey?”

  “Yesterday only. The women are very rude and the men don’t pray. They are bad people. They don’t respect people and they don’t pray. Except in the middle of the sea when the waves were coming higher and the Turkish coast guard light was shining at us and then they all started praying too much.”

  “How old are you?”

  “I am eighteen.” It could have been true, but he looked younger. Dawn lit his face soft rose; his cheeks were smooth, his eyes glittered black, his left eyebrow was striped with a scar.

  “Did you bring your passport?” H
e made a derisory face. “Any ID at all?”

  “I burnt it in Turkey,” said Mohammed. “Where is the police station? Is it far?”

  “No, it’s not far, but it’s early yet. You can begin the registration process when it opens in the morning. There will be a line. A lot of people.”

  “How long does it take?”

  “Five days or a week.” He frowned.

  “They said it was better on Kos than Lesbos.”

  Mohammed was wearing a pair of jeans and a black polo shirt. He had no shoes. I asked him if he had any money with him. He pulled out his pockets to show me that he had nothing at all. How would Rousse have photographed him? Upturned empty palms, supplication of prayer, cupping nothing.

  “There are some volunteer organizations around the port,” I told him. “They can get you some clothes, some shoes, perhaps a tent.”

  As we came into the main town of Kos, the sun was coming up. We walked along the sea front where the Afghan refugee migrants had pitched their tents. A few women were up early and washing clothes in the sea. Mohammed took in the sight of the makeshift camp strung out along the road. A tangled family was sleeping on a foraged mattress under a canopy of bougainvillea; a row of men lay like a row of sardines on flattened cardboard boxes under a pillared portico. He looked out over the harbor where a giant white ferry was moored, as large and rectangular as an apartment building. He didn’t say anything.

  “Can I buy you a coffee?” I asked. He nodded. We left the others in the small plaza next to the white-washed police station and went to find a café on the harbor front that was open early.

  I was thinking: scene, describe, early-morning boat landing, horizon, details, reportage, Hama, Syria . . . I was thinking about the beginnings of a story and the questions I needed to ask Mohammed.

  I never liked refugee stories. They are all very sad and desperate, but they are always the same. War, home destroyed, flee . . . Report, write, repeat. The relationship between journalist and refugee is awkward, transactional, collusive. The journalist must tell the great suffering; the refugees must present themselves as greatly suffering; they are reduced to selling their package of abject despair, advertising it with tears and torn clothing and desperate quotes. “Our house was bombed!”—“They killed my husband-father-mother-sister-son!”—“We don’t even have milk for the babies!”—“Look! The children are wet and this woman has no shoes!”