Paris Metro

by Wendell Steavenson

  What would this Ahmed do when he got to Paris? Would he wind up sleeping on a grating outside the Gare du Nord or in a suite at the Bristol? Would he find friends and business partners or disillusionment or religion or get thrown into prison and be radicalized by a cellblock sheikh? Was he a hero or a villain? He could get a lowly job as a stockroom boy in a kosher supermarket and then save people during a terrorist attack by hiding them in the walk-in freezer. Or would he be the terrorist? Would he have a happy ending or blow himself up? (Maybe that would be a happy ending as far as he was concerned.) Was this kind of plotting corny or melodramatic, even if these things actually really happened? What if I made his story ironic so that he returned to Iraq? What would make a fictional Ahmed go back? What had made my real Ahmed go back . . .

  . . . And in and out of Lebanon. Through Syria. The thoughts dropped like drips from the shower. The shower dripped on my forehead. What lines of usefulness might connect Ahmed and Ahmed-the-Wahhabi? What did Ahmed do for the U.N. anyway? Protocol officer special assistant to the envoy of the undersecretary . . . traveling all the time, so many SIM cards that the numbers were all crossed out and cross-hatched in my diary. I thought back to the postcards of ruins he sent Little Ahmed. Leptis Magna in Libya—when was he in Libya? What for? The ziggurat minaret in Samarra. But Samarra had been under ISIS control for more than a year. The citadel in Aleppo—a city besieged, bombed, and divided. Which side would he have—?

  Cold, naked, wet, fumbling for a towel and thinking too much, I dressed and went downstairs to the lobby for coffee, stretching imagination, fictionalizing my life, replaying it with a melancholy cello score. Stories to steal. Little Ahmed had said it was not a real Kalashnikov, only a replica.

  _____

  I knocked on Mohammed’s door. I had a hundred questions. There was no answer. At reception they told me he had checked out.

  A thousand refugee migrants were packed into the plaza next to the police station. Some had formed a queue of sorts, and had sat down to wait their turn in the meager shade offered by squares of tarpaulin strung up from the pine trees. A pack of men pushed against the line of Greek policemen, shouting at them to let them through. The police banged their batons against the riot shields to warn them to move back. The banging made a drumbeat and the crowd began to chant at them: “Oh Greece, we sacrifice our blood and souls to you!” It was a chant Iraqis used to sing for Saddam. They were mocking the police. The press of people pushed me up a side alley. Faces crowded into mine. Someone trod on my foot and I howled and elbowed my way through the crush.

  Behind the police station there was a grove of pine trees in the lee of the wall that enclosed a field of Roman ruins. Pakistanis had set up little camps under the trees, sleeping on blankets spread on the soft pine-needle ground. I found Mohammed squatting on his heels, leaning against an ancient lintel. He was tapping the screen of a mobile phone and did not notice me until I was standing over him. He saw my shadow, looked up, and frowned.

  “You left,” I said, and frowned back at him.

  He stood up and put the phone in his pocket. He avoided looking at me—whether out of piety or obfuscation, it was hard to tell.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Fine,” he said. He made a sideways move to get past me. I blocked him.

  “Look, it’s obvious you were in Syria.” He did not answer. I knew he was trying to escape. I tried a last-ditch tabloid scam. “I can help—my newspaper can help, with asylum, with getting you to Germany. I could come along and report the story.” He stopped for a moment. Tall and glowering, he did not look like a refugee today. Perhaps the meekness of yesterday was only an act when he thought he needed me for something. Where had he got the phone?

  “What story?”

  “Your story.”

  “I don’t have any story,” he said.

  “No, I mean your life, Syria, war, fleeing, refugee.” A string of headline clichés came out of my mouth.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “You can tell me what the Americans need to understand.” Usually this worked—provide an outlet for Arabs to vent their outrage at Western hypocrisy and indifference. Mohammed narrowed his eyes at me.

  “The Americans are not stupid,” he said unexpectedly. “The Americans understand very well.” He put his hand on his heart, a formal gesture, enough, goodbye.

  “But—”

  “Ask your husband about Syria,” he said, irritated. “Your husband is the Iraqi-American, isn’t he? My father told me.” He shook the phone to show he had talked to his parents.

  “Just Iraqi, not American—”

  “My father told you not to tell him that you saw me. But you will tell him.”

  “Why shouldn’t I tell him?”

  He didn’t answer. I took my business card out of my wallet and gave it to him. “If you need anything, get in touch.”

  “I go.”

  I did not put out my hand to shake his. I knew he would not touch it. Mohammed walked away and I was left standing there feeling wrong-footed. I had done something wrong but didn’t know what.

  _____

  Oz said, “It sounds interesting, Kit. I like the backstory. Can you follow him on the road to Germany?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s disappeared on me.”

  “What about the parents in Lebanon. What do they say?”

  “His father is Syrian,” I said, trying to tune the story to his fork. “His uncle an imam in Hama.”

  “And Hama is—remind me.”

  “In the middle of Syria.”

  “But under who? Under ISIS?” Oz’s tone was hopeful.

  “No, under government control.”

  “Can we get to the uncle somehow?”

  _____

  I rang Ahmed-the-Wahhabi in Lebanon. I told him that Mohammed had checked out of the hotel and I didn’t understand why.

  “My son follows his own path.” Was there sadness in his voice? “We pray for him.”

  “Where was he in Syria?”

  I heard a muffled voice in the background, admonishing tones.

  “We don’t know anything about his life now.” There was a woman’s voice in the background, high-pitched and talking rapidly.

  “Is that Fatima?”

  “Yes, she is here.”

  “Please give her my love.”

  “She is very worried.”

  “He made it across the sea, that is the most dangerous part.”

  “We have not heard from him in long months and now he is in Greece—” Perhaps Ahmed-the-Wahhabi was trying to make sense of it all too.

  I asked about his brother the imam in Hama, but he said he did not know anything about him. He said it in such a way that I did not quite believe him. He did not seem to want to say much. Then he asked, “Your husband is in Damascus now?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to him in a couple of weeks. He lives in Baghdad.”

  “In Baghdad? . . . wallah Baghda . . .” I heard Ahmed-the-Wahhabi repeat what I had said to Fatima in the background. The line faltered as I walked back to the hotel. I couldn’t hear what he said next.

  “He was just in Amman with his son,” I added.

  “Amman? . . . wallah Amman.” This news seemed to cause some consternation in the apartment in Tripoli. There was a pause while Ahmed-the-Wahhabi remonstrated with Fatima. Then his voice returned with a finality in the tone. “Kitt-e-redge. We will pray for you. And for the son of Ahmed.”

  “Pray for all of us,” I said.

  “Inshallah,” he said. And hung up.

  I did not find Mohammed again. I looked for him in the plaza next to the police station, in the pine grove, among the tents pitched along the seafront. There were many young men who looked like him—amber-skinned, a sharp edge between cheek and eye socket, oil pool eyes—but they were not him.

  _____

  I called Ahmed-the-Wahhabi in Lebanon two or three times over the next couple of days, but the phone just rang
. I called my Ahmed on his Baghdad cell number, but it went straight to voicemail. I emailed Urgent! need to talk—where are you? A day and a half later I got a single line back: Internet terrible here. Will be in touch when I get back to civilization. Lines stretched and doubled back, grew slack, entangled, frayed. The refugee migrants waiting at the police station sat on the dirty cobbles under umbrellas against the sun. They queued to board the ferry, white paper documents flapping in the harbor breeze. The line formed again in Athens and moved towards the Macedonian border in buses, in trains, in Albanian taxis. It snaked along railway tracks through Serbia. It pooled against the shiny new razor wire along the Hungarian border, tautened, and turned left towards Croatia. Thousands of people moving en masse through summer fields, tramping along motorways. Mohammed was somewhere among them.

  I stayed a few more days on Kos. I went to the beach again and watched the boats come in at dawn, but the people were wary. They put their hands in front of their faces to stop Zorro taking their picture. They did not want to talk and said (in English) that they did not speak English. Zorro was withdrawn, opiated, mad at me or just tired. Like the time he came back from the front at Tora Bora and collapsed into the camp bed in the corner of the refugee tent and slept for twenty-two hours straight.

  I ended up writing a story for Oz about the Danish volunteer sisters who distributed donated clothing to the refugees. Freya and Sophie were very nice and earnest and deluded. They reminded me of Soviet peasant girls on revolution posters.

  File: OLYMPIADES

  August 22, 2015

  Father and son, Ahmed and Mohammed, set off from Aleppo at the end of June, walking to the Turkish border. They spent three nights sleeping rough to avoid ISIS checkpoints. In Turkey they took a bus to Bodrum and paid smugglers there $1,200 each for a place on a boat. They were crammed with 40 other Syrian refugees in a small inflatable dinghy. At some point during the night the engine stopped. After drifting for several hours they were picked up by the Greek coast guard. Now they are stuck on the island of Kos, waiting for a registration document that will allow them to continue their journey to Athens and then, they hope, to Düsseldorf, where they already have relatives.

  They know that it is a long walk ahead. Ahmed is 65 years old, hale, and confident, but he has diabetes and suffers drowsy low-sugar episodes. His son Mohammed worries about him. Mohammed has only a pair of flip-flops on his feet. Every evening they come to the seafront in the town of Kos where different charity organizations congregate with donations of clothes and supplies and medical help. The two Danish sisters, Sophie and Freya, promised to bring Mohammed a pair of sneakers sized 45 if they could. Bigger sizes were always in demand. Their mother was bringing in another container of donations in a couple of days. Mohammed held up a plastic shopping bag containing his few possessions and asked if they had any backpacks. Freya shook her head regretfully.

  “They are fleeing war,” she told me, “we have an obligation as fellow human beings to help them.”

  I did not write about the scrum that surrounded the two blond sisters whenever they appeared. I did not write that the sisters were careful to limit their presence to half an hour. Freya had admitted to me that a couple of times they had stayed too long after dark and the crowd had become threatening. Men pushed aggressively, grabbing at them and at the bags. One had squeezed her breast so hard that she had a three-finger pinch bruise for a week. Another time a band of irate Greeks, bristly locals, probably drunk, had confronted them with sticks and told them they should stop encouraging people to come and ruin their island and their businesses. After a couple of beers and a shared cigarette, Freya, wheaten hair falling over her tanned shoulders, admitted that she was scared to be alone with the refugees. She remained determined, but she had developed the jaded ambivalence I recognized from do-gooders in Iraq. Freya’s full quote was: “They are fleeing war. I know we have an obligation as fellow human beings to help them, but sometimes it’s frightening and I don’t want to.”

  _____

  I left Kos dispirited. I had to change planes in Athens. I had an hour transit time, but there was a huge queue at security. Eight cordoned lanes snaked back and forth. Hundreds of people, babes in arms, patient pensioners, a headphoned Zen guy. We shuffled along, waited, shuffled along. The security officer manning one of the X-ray machines had a beard and a trimmed moustache. He barked at me in Greek. He barked again in English. “Put your bag here, no there, computer out! What is in your pockets?” I struggled to heft my bag onto the belt. Worried about missing the connection, I looked at my watch.

  “Take your watch off!”

  “My watch is plastic.”

  “Take your watch off.”

  “Why?”

  “Security. Security,” he repeated. Security. Meaningless. The X-ray idiots stared at green and orange jumbled outline of shapes all day long and saw nothing. The body scanner operators laughed at our bodies, just as I had once laughed at an Iraqi woman in a village who swore to me that the American soldiers had special binoculars that could see through women’s clothes.

  The security idiot said “security” again.

  “Security is an abstract noun,” I retorted. “If you are looking for a bomb, say you are looking for a bomb. Do I look like I have a bomb?” By now I was shouting. The word “bomb” detonated among the tourists. Everyone went quiet. “Why are you strip-searching all of us and letting in hundreds and thousands of God know who—anybody—and not stopping anyone. Not stopping them, rescuing them!”

  I hurled my coat onto the conveyor belt and tried to march through the metal detector, but the beard blocked my way. He pointed to a sign that said aggression against security staff will not be tolerated and will be dealt with by all legal means necessary. “Am I being aggressive? Am I attacking anyone?” I swept my hands over the vast mass behind me, “Are we all terrorists? We are forced through airports like cattle! This is not security, it is fascism!”

  As if on cue, two policemen appeared. They were wearing black Gore Tex uniforms and carrying submachine guns. One of them took a step towards me. I thought I was about to be arrested. I shut up. I put my hands in the air as if in surrender.

  “OK, OK, OK,” I said, and kept walking. (Jean’s checkpoint policy: raise your hands in the air, flash a big smile, walk slowly, pretend you don’t understand the instructions to stop and, most important of all, keep walking.) I walked through the metal detector and mercifully it did not beep. I collected my bags from the other side of the X-ray machine without looking up. Encumbered, I stuck the boarding pass in my teeth. Keep walking. I didn’t look back. Departure flight screens, gate numbers, long strides down the corridors. My Air France flight was already boarding. I was so angry, I sat in the narrow rigid metal chair all the way back to Paris and fumed. No, I don’t want coffee, I don’t want tea, I don’t want your plastic wrapped slimy sandwich. When the man in front of me leaned his chair back, I kicked it sharply.

  PART FIVE

  * * *

  PARIS

  ONE

  I heard the shots underwater in the bath. The enamel made a faint percussive ting against my inner ear, a drumbeat. When I raised my head to hear better, I heard another sharp crack, felt the weight of it, a solid sound, and then another. Ripples echoed on the surface of the water.

  I leapt out of the bath and dressed fast. Checked my bag for pencil, notebook, phone, keys, passport. I put on sneakers in case I needed to run, tied the laces tight. It was Friday night, I was alone, Little Ahmed was staying with Grégoire for a sleepover. I put on my anorak and went down to the street with my hair still wet. It was early November, not cold, not winter yet. The streets were slick because it had rained earlier and the leaves were piled up in damp drifts.

  Along the canal it looked as if nothing had happened: pools of yellow streetlamp light, couples sitting on the low concrete wall with a bottle of wine between them. A jaunty young man with slicked-back hair and a ready-for-it grin walked past, bouncing on the balls o
f his feet. The shots had stopped and I stopped for a moment to think, to reorient myself. Which direction had they come from? Across the slice of dark water, I saw the young crowd outside Le Verre Volé hurriedly scattering. One man ran and his girlfriend called after him, urgent and frightened, “Wait!” He ran past me, slammed against my shoulder, and kept going.

  People were running or walking quickly in the opposite direction. A man in skinny jeans bent like a pipe cleaner over his phone, a girl raggedly pulled along by a large man. “Yallah!” he shouted to her in Arabic. A motorcycle roared past. A taxi crawled behind, looking for someone to pick up.

  Metal shutters rattled and a face popped out beneath one and cried out to me, “Come in! Come inside!” Pale oval face, arched eyebrows, rose pink lips. I was not afraid. I kept walking. Not fast, not slow, looking all around me, behind me, up too—people had come to their windows and were leaning out to try and see what was going on.

  “What’s happening?” someone called down.

  I turned left, away from the canal, down the Rue Albert. A man limped past me, dragging one foot. He had no jacket and there was blood on his T-shirt. He looked at me and I looked at him. I did not say anything and neither did he.

  I looked at my feet and saw my navy blue sneakers against the dark tarmac street glistening with mica stars. I saw a blue pebble of shattered windscreen glass. This was all very familiar. It was inevitable. It was almost—how to explain this strange feeling of disassociation. Journalism? It was almost a relief. I had the clear sense that I was exactly where I should be.

  The blue circular chips of scattered glass glittered like diamonds. How oddly beautiful! I was at the crossroads by Le Carillon. Café tables and chairs were overturned, and among them bodies had fallen in dark triangular shapes. Nobody tells you about the awkwardness of limbs when they are violently dead, bent wrong, jutting unnatural angles. Not even Géricault could render this. The worst thing of all was that some of these terrible shapes were still moving. The blood on the streets was black at night, not red as I was used to in Baghdad, but black and shiny, like oil.