“Somebody hit you.”
Another shrug. “It is a dangerous profession.”
An old lady pulling a shopping cart passes between them and gives Suzi a dirty look before entering the building.
“The neighbours talk too much.” Her eyes are jittery and she rubs her finger under her nose. “What do you want? I am in a hurry.”
He had not expected her to be angry with him, and does not know how to respond. “I guess this was a bad idea. Sorry. Just wanted to make sure you were all right.”
She says nothing, but stands looking down the street to the right and then to the left and behind her. Anywhere but at him.
“Okay. Well. You’re all right, then. Sorry.” He turns to leave.
“Matthew.” She reaches out. “C’est moi. A very bad mood is all. Don’t pay attention to me. I suppose you better come in.”
The apartment opens directly into a kitchen, painted white. There is a sink, cupboards and workspace with a hotplate on it, along the right wall. A few photos and a child’s drawing are taped to the front of the refrigerator. Above the sink is a window, boarded over. At the back, a door leads to a paved courtyard. There is a table in the middle of the room, with two chairs, and a colourful braided rug on the floor. In the corner a spiral staircase leads down into what Matthew assumes is a below-ground bedroom. A box filled with worn stuffed animals stands in a corner. The walls are bare.
As they enter, Matthew can’t help but ask, “Who’s M. Roussel?”
“The last tenant, I suppose. I’ve only been here a few weeks.”
“Oh, I thought for a minute … well, that it might be your name.”
Suzi laughs. “You think Suzi is my real name? Men are such fools. You never see that movie, about the Chinese prostitute, The World of Suzi Wong? It is a name that works well for me at your bar.”
“So, what is your name?”
She looks at him and frowns slightly. “Suzi, you call me Suzi, okay?” Leaving her coat on, she says she will be back in a minute and disappears down the spiral staircase.
Matthew sits at the table and a fat Himalayan cat pads up from the basement and jumps onto his lap. It purrs loudly and looks at him with proprietary eyes. After a few minutes, he hears a toilet flush and Suzi reappears. She looks much less jittery. She takes the cat from his lap and sits across from him. She has taken off her coat and shoes. She wears a short black skirt, black wool stockings that come just over her knee, and a red sweater, very low cut. She has not attempted to hide the damage. She curls one foot under the other, so her legs part slightly.
“Why are you here?” Her lids are heavy now and her mouth more relaxed.
“Did Jack do this?”
“What does it matter?”
“It matters to me.”
“Why? What are you going to do? Beat him up for me?” She laughs.
“Maybe.”
“He would kill you. You are too skinny.”
“That’s probably true.”
Suzi arches an eyebrow. “What is a little violence between lovers, eh?”
“So Jack did hit you?”
“And so? I hit him back. I threw a drink in his face. I am not so fragile.” She pulls down her sweater to reveal another storm-coloured bruise on her breast. “You Americans know nothing of passion.”
Matthew opens his mouth to speak, but closes it again, for he can find nothing sensible to say. This is not what he had expected. Where were the tears? The anger? The fear? He watches her fingers caress the cat, gently tickling the fur, and then kneading, massaging. “That’s ridiculous,” he says at last. “Like something out of a bad French farce, all that slapped-face and slammed-door nonsense.”
He stands and starts to leave but she pulls at his sleeve and he sits down again.
“No. It is not ridiculous. What is ridiculous is you coming here, acting the noble hero, when it is not nobility you want at all.” She stands up, dropping the cat on the floor, and stands very close to Matthew, puts her hands on either side of his head. She straddles his thigh.
“Hey! Hey!” He stands up and steps back from her. “You’ve got the wrong idea.”
In one quick motion, she pulls the sweater over her head. She is not wearing a bra and her nipples are brown and small. The bruises stand out like too-fresh tattoos. There are other bruises on her arms. She puts her hands over her breasts, and begins to caress herself. “I’m never wrong about such things.”
Arousal flows through Matthew like a shot of whisky. He glances at the refrigerator with the child’s drawing on it.
“We are alone,” she says.
“Jack’s my friend.”
“This has nothing to do with that.” She steps out of her skirt and stands before him, with only those black stockings on, and tiny white panties. There are more bruises on her thighs. “I can give you what you want, Matthew. What you came here for.”
Her breasts rise out of her thin rib cage, all the bones visible. The bruises are vivid against her skin. The tale of violence they tell is pornographic, the images of brutal hands on her body. And then she puts her hand on the front of his pants and her tongue in his mouth. Her bones are tiny beneath his hands; her eyes, with their pinpoint pupils, are like those of something wicked.
He takes her up on the tabletop. She is very good at what she does and makes him believe her cries are real.
When he is finished, she goes downstairs and comes back wearing a Japanese kimono. “I’m sorry, Matthew, normally I arrange the price before.” She names her price and he pays it, his face burning. “You are very silly,” she says, kissing him on the cheek.
“I didn’t come here for this, you know,” he says, because he must say it, must say something.
“Of course you didn’t. But still, it is a good idea, non?”
“I don’t think we should tell Jack, do you?”
She throws back her tousled head and laughs. “Matthew. I am like a doctor. No, like a priest. Absolument confidentiel!” She puts her finger up to her damaged lip. “Shush,” she says, and giggles.
He leaves her apartment, gets on the metro. A bunch of loud teenagers push and shove as they enter the car and he wants them to push him so he can feel someone’s bones crack beneath his knuckles. Disappointingly, they keep their distance.
When he gets back to his apartment, he takes three times the recommended dosage of sleeping pills and still has to wait half an hour before unconsciousness overtakes him. He dreams of girls and soldiers and an old woman biting his hand.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Saturday mornings Saida shops at the open-air market on rue Dejean. She walks up rue de Faubourg Poissonnière toward the Barbès Métro and her thoughts are of Joseph. He had said little this morning, merely hunched over his bowl of café au lait. She suspects he was hung over, although he denied it. She tried to smell him, to discover the telltale sweetish sweat-reek of alcohol seeping through the skin, but he dove into the shower the moment she vacated the bathroom.
“Where are you going?” she had said as he put on his jacket. “I want you to take your grandfather to the restaurant.”
“Can’t. Soccer game.”
“This morning? But we need you at the restaurant.”
“I can’t. I promised I’d be there.”
“Where? Who with?”
He scooped change off the tabletop and stuffed it in his pocket, and then stooped to kiss her on the cheek. “Just some guys in Square Léon.”
“I don’t want you spending all your time up there. I want you at the restaurant this afternoon.”
“Okay, okay,” he said as he opened the door. His shoelaces dragged, untied, from his running shoes.
“Tie your shoes,” she called after him.
Now, as she walks toward the market, pulling her cart behind her and with a basket on her arm, she decides to go by the square where the boys play soccer. Across the boulevard de Chapelle the streets become twice as congested, with both cars and pedestrian traffic. Outside t
he Tati department store, the sidewalks are nearly impassable because of the vendors hawking everything from pots and pans to hats to hams. She crosses Barbès and walks onto rue de la Goutte d’Or, entering the heart of the tiny, mostly Arab immigrant neighbourhood. At Le Case@Café, which is advertised as a cyber-café, the men inside are clearly more interested in the off-track betting that goes on than anything having to do with computers. The smoke drifts out of the grey-and-beige-tiled cubbyhole in a blue cloud. She stops and looks in the windows of the textile shops, with gloriously luxurious cloth from Algeria, from Tunisia, from Morocco, deep blue and rose and white and bright yellow, twinkling with gold thread and sequins. At Toualbi, she passes the Muslim butcher on the corner of rue de Chartres—sides of goat and lamb and waffled strips of tripe hang in the window. The lamb looks good, but she knows she can get it cheaper in the market.
She turns up rue des Gardes to the square and goes up the stairs past the metal gates, ignoring the four men drinking out of paper bags by the children’s Jungle Gym to the right. The children of the area, being street smart, shun them as well, and high-pitched voices come from the other play area where there is a sandbox and teeter-totter. The older boys play soccer on two fenced-in, asphalt squares, one on a level lower. The intermittent shouts and soft thuds of footfalls make her smile. It will be nice to watch Joseph at play. When she looks over the waist-high concrete wall, however, she sees only black faces. All North Africans. No sign of Joseph. Perhaps on the upper square. She strains to see but cannot, and so climbs up to the next level. These are all Arabs. She scans them. No Joseph, and in truth she thinks these boys—ten, eleven, twelve at the most—are too young for her son. Three boys lean against the chain-link with their backs to her.
“Excuse me,” she says.
The boys turn to her and stare blankly.
“I’m looking for my son. His name is Joseph Ferhat. Do you know him?”
“No, we don’t know him,” the boy nearest her says. He has a scar slicing through his left eyebrow, making it look as though he has one regular-sized and two smaller brows.
One of the other boys clears his throat, spits and smears the spittle on the ground with his shoe. It is clear that even if they do know Joseph, they will not tell her.
Saida has not really expected to find him here. She has hoped, of course, but did not really believe it. He lies to her. When had that begun? What was the first lie? Why doesn’t he know it is wrong? Has he learned from his stepfather that this is the way a man is? She blames herself, for she waited too long to leave him, afraid of the shame her father would feel. Ashamed herself at the bad choice she’d made, the ridiculous belief they had all had, that marrying a Frenchman would make her, and by extension them, less strange here. She fears now that Joseph will pay the price for her stupidity. And how to stop it?
She goes into the church, Saint-Bernard de la Chapelle, to be quiet for a moment, to light a candle and ask Mary for intercession. As she walks up the aisle, toward the great statue of Mary behind the altar, the Holy Mother standing on a clouded crescent moon, she sees a jumble of rags on the steps. When she gets closer she realizes it is a person, a man, not old, sleeping but not sleeping, his shoes off, his feet on the warm-air grate. His head nods, he tilts incrementally, until he almost falls and then snaps up again. Nods, sways and begins the tilting journey once more. The caretaker, an Algerian, tries to move him, but the man is too much under the influence of whatever narcotic he has taken to be roused. Saida sees his face; he is younger than she thought. Not much older than Joseph.
She quickly lights a candle, murmurs a prayer and goes out the side door. It looks like rain. People have draped torn plastic garbage bags over laundry that hangs from racks out of second-storey windows. She passes the Hotel Myrha, advertising rooms with hot water and heat that rent for the month or for the day. Market shops sell dried fava beans, green tea in many varieties, pine nuts, pistachios, fermented milk in used Evian water bottles, rice, mangoes and dates. She passes the little shop that sells live chickens, its air powdery with feathers, and she sneezes.
A sharp voice calls out in Arabic and she hears the sound of palms slapping together. A group of young men spill onto the sidewalk. They do not move for people passing and so everyone, old ladies and women with baby strollers, must move around them out into the street. Farther along, the crowd parts for a large man, head and shoulders above the crowd. She sees the figure only from the back but it is familiar. Jack Saddler. There is no mistaking the bestial lumber of his walk. She strains her eyes after him, but he turns a corner and is gone.
The youths speak loudly and one of them, a big boy wearing a bright yellow jacket and a heavy gold medallion, flips a lit cigarette into the street. It narrowly misses a man carrying bags of groceries. Saida frowns, considers crossing the street, and then she spots him.
“Joseph! Joseph!”
He sees her; she knows he does, for he glances in her direction and then quickly turns away, a cigarette cupped in his palm.
“Joseph! Come here!”
“Oh, look, your maman’s here!” The boys laugh and nudge each other, brave and sneering in the safety of their numbers, of their size, of their youth.
“Merde.” He says this, and perhaps he thinks he speaks too low for her to hear, but she does hear it. He drops the cigarette, as though she will not see it. He slouches toward her, one shoulder down, moving as if he is limping, or dragging something, his hand on his crotch.
“What’s wrong with you?” she says.
“Nothing. What do you want?”
“What do I want? What do you think, Joseph? What do you think?” Anger, and the cringing little worm of fear in her stomach, makes her repeat herself.
“I’m busy here. I said I would be by the restaurant later. You come looking for me?”
“I wanted to see you play soccer.”
“The game got cancelled.”
There is much laughter from the group at this. The indignation flickering like flames up her face makes Saida braver and she stands her ground.
“So this is what you do? Who was that I saw up the street? Was that Jack Saddler I saw just now?”
“No.”
“It was.”
“No.”
“I want you to stay away from that man.”
“I told you. It was not him. Look, I have to go now.”
“You are going to go all right, you’re going to come with me. Help me do the shopping. If you do not have a game you have no excuse, and besides, a game, what excuse is that? I let you get away with murder. Enough. It is over. You come with me.”
“Imma, please. Not now. I’ll come later.” He says this under his breath almost, and she knows he does not want his friends to hear.
“Don’t Imma me. Now. You can help Anthony.”
Joseph stares at her, his handsome face becoming the impassive mask she hates so much. She scrambles, trying to find a way to get him out of there, and she knows if she is not careful now she will push him too far, he will baulk, flex his muscles, and she will lose him. “Listen, he told me he has a new CD he’s made for you, blues musicians from America. He said you wanted it.”
Joseph’s face twitches as he struggles with his pride, and it is all Saida can do not to reach out and stroke his cheek. “He made it for me?”
“Yes. He told me he would bring it today for you, but he wanted to talk to you about someone named Robert Johnson and a pact he made”—she grins—”with the devil at a crossroads.”
“Oh, yeah, that one!” He smiles now and her heart, which had been clinging like a bird to the side of her rib cage, flutters and relaxes. “Okay, I’ll come. Wait a minute.”
Joseph goes over to his friends and tells them a black American friend from New York wants to see him, has some blues music for him, he will get it and share it with them.
“You know a lot of Americans, hein?” says the boy with the yellow jacket.
Saida and Joseph walk together without speakin
g. They walk past the téléboutique, where customers who do not have phones can make cheap calls to Turkey, Romania, Poland, Algeria, Iran, Egypt, Cameroon, Senegal and more. They move into the Haitian and French-Caribbean sections of the neighbourhood. People lay out their wares on the tops of parked cars. Brightly coloured African cloth, carvings, jeans and cosmetics especially designed for African skin. Here the shops sell wigs and hair gel, manioc, plantains, taro, igname, gumbo and sweet potatoes. Green-and-grey metal construction barricades lay tipped over and flat on the torn-up street and people walk over them because it is impossible not to, there are so many people. As they pass the Paris Refugee Bar, Joseph waves back to a man with a thick black moustache and a cigar who calls his name from the doorway. Saida says nothing.
The market is crowded, as always, and smells of fish, meat and the faint rot of discarded greens. Stalls are set up, with plastic roofs on them, to sell every sort of vegetable and fruit, sweaters and boots, watches and linens. She gives Joseph some money and sends him off with a list. They will meet in twenty minutes.
“I’ll take you for pizza after, if you want,” she says, by way of reconciliation.
As he ambles through the market, she wonders if he will disappear into the crowd. While she shops, haggling with vendors over cracked wheat, rice, vine leaves, parsley and mint, she turns her head this way and that, trying to keep sight of him. When they meet at last at the far end of the market, she hugs him and kisses his cheek.
“You’re a good boy,” she says.
“Imma, please!”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Matthew does not leave his apartment for five days. He sleeps and writes, but sleeps more than he writes. All he sees is Suzi’s rib cage, the points of her hips, the bruises on the inside of her thighs. On the fifth day, he watches Ramzi and Elias argue in the window of the café. Their arms wave, their faces redden. Finally, Ramzi flicks his hand skyward in a gesture of dismissal and turns away. The old man looks out the window. He rubs his hands over his face. Matthew wonders how long it will be before Ramzi takes his maps and hits the road.
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