Radiant City

by Lauren B. Davis

  Through another door and they are in the brasserie. Having come through the lobby they are now at the main entrance of the restaurant, which is across from the bank of windows facing the street. The tables all have white cloths and the banquettes are black leather. Again, mirrors line the walls, in front of which hang brightly coloured posters in chrome frames. The carpet is red, the colour of ripened summer grapes, as are the leather cushions on the curved wooden chairs. The lights are large frosted globes.

  Matthew speaks to a tall girl in a black pantsuit, gives her his name and says they have a reservation. She tells them one of their party has already arrived and asks them to follow her. She leads them to a table in the corner, on a banquette, set for four.

  Anthony stands when he sees them, a huge smile on his face. He wears a red tie and white shirt under his leather jacket. “Hey,” he says, “happy birthday, Saida.”

  “Technically my birthday was a few days ago,” says Saida, but she smiles.

  “Listen, make it last as long as you can.”

  They settle themselves and a waiter arrives to take their drink order.

  “Oh, champagne, I think. Don’t you?” Matthew looks at her and she can only nod. “Good, champagne it is. And Joseph, what do you want?”

  “Coke?” he says.

  When the champagne comes, and colas for Joseph and Anthony, they toast Saida and wish her well.

  “Have you seen this menu?” says Anthony. “It says the guy who runs this restaurant is Philippe Renard. He studied at Troisgros in Rouen.”

  “Is that good?” Joseph asks.

  “Oh, yeah. He won the Prosper Montagné Prize and the Coq Saint-Honoré.” Anthony points to something on the menu. “I know what I’m having. Dorade with seasonal vegetables in pistou sauce. What about you?”

  “The chicken?” says Joseph.

  “A good choice. Garlic, thyme. Mashed potatoes. Why not try the snails and mushroom cassolette to start?”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  “I can’t imagine a North American sixteen-year-old eating snails.” Matthew shakes his head.

  “Why not?” Joseph watches Anthony unfold the napkin and put it on his lap, and then he does the same thing.

  “We are a squeamish lot. What are you going to have, Saida?”

  “It all looks very good. But perhaps the dorade, like Anthony? What do you call this in English?”

  “Sea bream,” says Anthony.

  “What about the figs with goat cheese to start?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “What about wine?” says Matthew.

  The waiter comes, recommends a wine and takes their order. Everything around Saida seems to shine and flutter. It is just a brasserie, nothing special, full of tourists in comfortable clothes and a few older Parisians. But to her eyes it sparkles and gleams. A small silver bowl is filled with tiny orange and yellow roses. The tablecloths, clean as bleached sails. Polished wood, chrome, silver. Silverware that is heavy and pleasing in the palm. Delicate wineglasses. The room is a still point from the storm of traffic outside breaking like waves against the curb, just on the other side of the window.

  When the figs come they are purple and plump and the colour of yellow cream inside, brown seeds a sprinkle of popping texture. The goat cheese is crumbly and dense. Fruit and cheese rest on a bed of bitter greens. Their taste, soft and sweet on Saida’s tongue, leans into expectancy and is not disappointed by the sharp smoke of the chèvre cheese. There is fig vinegar on the greens.

  “So?” says Anthony. “Taste this, too.” The cassolette with a pastry top has arrived in a small earthenware pot. He holds out a fat grey snail atop a mushroom that drips butter and cups his hand underneath so as not to spot the tablecloth. She closes her eyes and takes the meat between her teeth. A little butter dribbles down her chin. The snail is hot and rich and chewy and oozing garlic; the mushroom is a kiss of something almost sweet.

  She opens her eyes and grins at Anthony, Matthew and Joseph, who laugh at her. She gives Anthony and Joseph a piece of fig, a mouthful of cheese and they groan with pleasure.

  “You know, I think I might go back to New York one day and maybe open a restaurant of my own,” Anthony says. “Like this, you know? Something really classy, but not so classy you can’t just go and hang out with your family, right? Someplace that’s about the food, not the glitz, you know?”

  “I could be your sous-chef,” says Joseph. “New York. The Bronx, yes!”

  “The Bronx? No. Manhattan, my man. But sous-chef? Step back, now. I just don’t see you in that capacity.”

  “No?”

  Anthony punches him on the shoulder. “Naw, baby. You’re more an out-front kind of guy. You can be my partner. Handle all the money and such. I’m not so good at that. Yes, sir. I can see it now. ‘Joe and Tony’s Brasserie Français.’ I am dead serious about this. What do you think? Are you with me? Take you too, Mom. Naturally we’d need your expertise, since you are already an experienced restauranteur. Man, I could do it up right.” Anthony leans back and rests his arms along the back of the banquette. Without meaning to, he brushes the head of the woman at the next table, who wears her silvery hair in a rigid swoop of hairspray and bobby pins.

  “Oh! Alors!” she says and makes a sucking noise with her teeth. Her companion, a grey-skinned man with broken blood vessels along his cheeks, glares at their party. Rather, not at their party. He glares at Anthony. He glares at Joseph.

  “Sorry,” says Anthony, patting the lady on the shoulder. “Sorry.”

  “Zut!” she says and jerks her shoulder away.

  The man continues to glare.

  “Do I know you?” says Joseph, in French.

  “Joseph!” Saida puts her hand on her son’s arm.

  “No?” says Joseph to the man. “Then what are you staring at?”

  Saida’s grip tightens. The man blinks slowly and then leans in close to his female companion to say something Saida cannot catch. The woman nods and her lips purse, her eyebrow arches.

  “Aw, shit,” says Anthony.

  “Fucking racists!” says Joseph.

  “Joseph, please.” Saida looks from Joseph to Anthony to Matthew. She has never seen this expression on Anthony’s face. It frightens her. Such a lovely dinner.

  “BHLF,” says Matthew.

  “What?” says Joseph. His eyes flash beneath the frown.

  “Bald Headed Little Fart. The problem is, it’s gender-specific. Good for the guys only.”

  “Not necessarily,” says Joseph, and then he laughs, and Anthony, after a moment, laughs as well.

  “How about a little glass of wine for Joseph, even though it’s not his birthday? Mom, what do you say?”

  “I say, yes, fine.”

  When the main course comes, the couple next to them leave, and they all toast their parting. “To BHLF’s past,” says Anthony. A young German couple who smile and say “good evening” take their place.

  The fish is like salted honey in a savoury, milky sauce. The vegetables are jewels—emerald asparagus, beans and spinach and bright orange baby carrots. Saida and Joseph share bits of food. Perhaps it is the wine, but Joseph talks more than Saida has heard him speak in weeks. He talks about his friends who live in the banlieue, as though he does not remember telling her he had no friends who live there.

  “Rashid’s mother is a cleaning lady for these rich women in the 16th, and now she loses half her customers to Portuguese and Filipina cleaning ladies, and they don’t say so, but she knows it’s because they don’t want Arabs around them.”

  She tries not to interrupt him, not to make him stop speaking. She breaks crusty bread into small pieces and dips them in the sauce.

  “There are kids who live in this garage out there. They’re really screwed up. Glue and gasoline all day long. One looks about nine, but he’s almost my age. He won’t live long.”

  “No parents?” says Matthew.

  “Not that he wants to go home to.”

  He talks ab
out the police who won’t go in these neighbourhoods and when they do, maybe once, maybe twice a year, they find all kinds of assault weapons and sometimes even explosives. Saida meets Matthew’s eyes and he winks at her.

  “Just because a guy walks down the street without his papers, the flics should not have the right to hassle him, heh? What if he just forgot them? A guy should have the right to just forget sometimes without being called a criminal.” He points at Matthew with his fork. “I bet you do not get stopped, checked, do you?”

  “Nope, can’t say I do.”

  “That is what I mean. It is different for us.” Joseph tilts his head from side to side and cracks his neck. The sound makes Saida wince. “In my world, just because a guy’s got a record, it doesn’t make him a bad guy.”

  “It doesn’t make him a good guy either, you know?” says Anthony.

  “What?”

  “Everybody in the world’s got it hard one way or the other. Stay mad at the injustice, let go of the resentment. That stuff will give you cancer.”

  “You don’t understand,” says Joseph.

  Anthony laughs. “Yeah, the black man with the metal plate in his skull doesn’t have a clue. I want the plum tart for dessert, what about you?”

  The waiter, tipped off, she suspects, by Matthew, has put a candle in her tart.

  Later, when Saida and Joseph are at home, Joseph looks at her and says, “Do you think Anthony meant it, when he said he’d take me to New York one day?”

  Joseph lies on the couch, his arms behind his head. The blanket is pulled up to his waist and he is naked above. The hair under his arms is very thick and there is hair on his chest, a silky thatch over his muscles. His eyes are focused somewhere on the ceiling and he chews his lower lip, the fleshy, slightly misshapen bulge. Saida remembers the fig and thinks that one day very soon, if not already, there will be a girl nibbling on this fruit. It will not be long, she thinks, before he moves beyond his mother’s house forever. Oh, let him be safe!

  “I think Anthony says only things he means. But you mustn’t raise your hopes, Joseph. Sometimes we can’t make things happen no matter how much we want to.”

  “I think he means it, too,” says Joseph.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The phone rings at five o’clock in the afternoon.

  “Saida,” calls out Anthony, “it’s for you.”

  She is up to her elbows in minced lamb. “Can you take a message?” She never gets phone calls, unless it is her father or Ramzi, and they are both here. It can only be someone selling something she does not want.

  “They say they have to talk to you. Saida?” Something in his voice makes her look up. “I think you better take it.”

  She rinses her hands under the tap and wipes them with a paper towel as she crooks the phone up next to her ear. “Oui? Allo?”

  “Is this Madame Saida Ferhat?” A man’s voice. Deep. Official. Her heart skips.

  “Yes.”

  “This is Inspector Bertrand of the BDM. We have your son Joseph here.”

  The BDM. Brigade des Mineurs. The Police Youth Brigade.

  “What has happened? What is wrong? Is he all right?”

  Anthony reaches for her, and she holds up her hand to ward him off.

  “He’s fine. You need to come and get him. We’ll want to have a chat. We are on the quai de Gesvres. Perhaps you know where?”

  “Where are you?”

  His voice is impatient. “Quai de Gesvres, madame. At Hôtel de Ville Métro. You will be coming now, I assume.”

  “Yes,” and she wants to tell him she has never been there before, never to a jail to pick up her son, or for any reason, never to the Office of Public Assistance, but he has already hung up.

  “What is it?” says Ramzi, who has come up behind Anthony. She looks from one face to the other, to her father sitting at the table near the counter, his coffee cup halfway to his grey lips.

  “Joseph. He is at the police station—” Her voice cracks. “I have to go. Now.”

  “You want me to come with you?” says Anthony.

  “No, I will go with her,” says Ramzi.

  “No one will go with me,” she says and she grabs her coat and runs headlong into the street, where car horns and her brother’s voice calling after her barely register. She runs up the street, her heart racing, her fingers tingling, her breath short.

  In the metro there is a delay, a passenger is sick and Saida bites her knuckles to keep from screaming. There is no air in the metro and the woman in front of her smells of cigarettes and coffee. She stamps her foot and the man next to her takes a step away. She transfers at Concorde, cramming her way onto the car, pushing at rush-hour commuters who huff with disapproval.

  At Hôtel de Ville the square in front of the mayor’s office is oddly empty after the crush in the metro. The people crossing the square hurry with their heads down into a wind that has come up, its cold scent foretelling rain. The sky is a charcoal glower that nearly matches the dark rooftops of the ornate building. Statues of soldiers holding flags stand guard on the roof peak. Statues in every niche and along every ledge. A building guarded by heartless stones. The lamps are old, wrought iron, each post holding four glass chambers that flicker on when Saida half-jogs past, as though they are security lights searching for her.

  At the quai de Gesvres the traffic going across the bridge from the Île St. Louis is backed up into gridlock and the horns scream. The building she seeks is a new one and looks severe, harsh, impersonal. She puts her hand to her heart and says a quick prayer as she skitters up the steps. The door is heavy and she must use two hands to pull it open.

  Inside the air is overheated and dry. It smells of men, sweat and cigarettes. Police walk about as though nothing upsetting happens here. Three Eastern European—looking women sit on a bench against the wall. They seem old and tired, like potatoes that have sat too long in the bin. There is a glassed-in booth and a man presides behind it talking into a phone. She waits for him to finish.

  “Yes?” The man has a large nose and he puts his finger in the right nostril, flicking.

  “I am Saida Ferhat. I was called. My son is here.”

  “Name?”

  “Saida Ferhat.”

  “His name.”

  “Oh. Of course. Joseph Ferhat.”

  “Wait there.” He points to the bench where the three women sit.

  There is no room for her on the bench and so she stands next to it. The women talk to each other in a language that may be Russian and do not look at her.

  After a few minutes a small policeman comes out of a door with a file in his hand. He holds the door open and calls her name. She steps forward.

  “Come with me, please.”

  He does not say anything else, and Saida follows him down a hall. There is a large room to the left full of desks and computers. On the right are more doors. There are more police here and there are boys sitting on chairs. One is wearing handcuffs. Some are smoking. Some are Arab. Some are not. One is crying and one is trying not to. One lounges with his legs far out into the corridor. The policeman kicks his foot as he walks past and tells him to sit up. The boy does.

  They go into a small room where there is a metal table and four chairs. He indicates she should sit down. When she sits she holds onto her purse tightly so the shaking in her hands does not show.

  “Madame Ferhat. I am Inspector Bertrand. As I said on the phone, we have Joseph here.” He is a tidy man, this policeman, with hair in a crewcut, his scalp showing beneath. He has small hands and his nails are very clean. There are lines around his dark eyes, but not so much between his brows, which means he must smile a good deal, although he is not smiling now.

  “Yes.”

  “He was detained by the police on the Champs Élysées with two other boys.”

  “What was he arrested for?”

  “I didn’t say he was arrested. I said he was detained.” There is almost a smile.

  “What was he doin
g?”

  “Do you know what tagging is?”

  “No.” Was he cutting tags off things?

  “Tagging is when they spray paint something, graffiti if you like, on the walls. But it is not mindless graffiti. It has a meaning. A way of staking out territory. Rather like dogs. Each tagger has a special symbol. This is his ‘tag,’ you understand?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “Good. Is your son in a gang, madame?”

  Saida’s purse drops to the floor. “No! Joseph is a good boy. He is not a gang boy.”

  “We have all the tags, all these images, in a computer, madame. We know to whom they belong. This particular one is the tag of Rashid Charef. He is a known member of one of the Aubervilliers gangs,” he said, naming one of the more dangerous banlieue to the north of Paris.

  “But Joseph is not in the banlieue, there must be a mistake.”

  Inspector Bertrand taps his pencil on the tabletop, turning it in his short fingers so that first the eraser touches, and then the graphite point. He watches the pencil turn as though this movement is out of his control, something apart that he merely observes.

  “We do not believe there is a mistake, madame. Rashid Charef was with your son.”

  “God! This cannot be true!”

  The policeman shrugs. Then he walks around the desk and picks up her purse and, handing it to her, says, “Is Joseph’s father with the family?”

  Saida blushes and adjusts the collar of her coat over her scars. “No. I am with my brother and my father. There are good men in Joseph’s life.”

  “That’s good. Very good. Madame Ferhat, I’m going to be straight with you. Joseph had a can of spray paint in his pocket. We found it on him. But he wasn’t doing the actual tagging. At least not when they were seen. Rashid was, and another boy, who is also known to us. Your son has not been apprehended before. He has no record.” He sits on the edge of the table and leans forward with his arm across his chest so that their eyes are almost level. “Yet. This is a crucial day for your son, madame. And for you. This day I am letting him go home with only a warning. The next time we are not going to be so kind. And now his name is here, with us, you understand. We will know him the next time. You do not want us to know him. Do you understand?”