by Mary Byrne
This is what the inhabitants hoped for: someone of the same generation to tell him. Better that than anyone from an older generation, someone he could, in his misery, accuse of being anti-Arab. For this is his reply to everything he sees, his sum and answer to the whole question of his daily interface with the world. ‘You’re afraid of Arabs,’ he said one day when eighty-seven-year-old Fernande negotiated around a parked car rather than step up on the high footpath beside him. ‘I didn’t even know you were Arab,’ she had replied, astonished. It hadn’t even occurred to her. For seconds, each had dragged the other back to the present: he had drawn her back into real life from a nightmare of aches and pains, dead friends, mourning her husband, administrative hassles. For an instant, Fernande had reminded him that not everyone thinks of things in terms of Arab and non-Arab, of ‘them’ and ‘us.’
Still, it seems to him the pain of the others is somehow less than his own. His need to listen to Marseilles rap music at full volume may be explained by this and more: by his desire to hear and understand the words, those words of minority hurt. He wants to hear their pain and have his own pain explained to him. But what he hears is only the tip of the iceberg. And then the seldom time he turns up the music, he gets into trouble with half the neighborhood.
Now, while everyone watches and waits, the policeman finally lowers his walkie-talkie and says suddenly, ‘Turn the volume down a bit.’ The Beur at the window nods silently, and turns inside to lower the music. No one will ever know whether it is the presence of the policeman or the insistence of his own generation that carried the most weight, or how his pain may be appeased.
Even the policeman, it turns out, has other pain in hand: as the music incident is closed and people withdraw from windows to retire, they hear him say into his walkie-talkie, ‘I’m at number seventeen, family row.’ He pauses to listen for a crackling reply. ‘Send me some help,’ he says briskly but coolly. And the watchers realize that the rap music incident was a mere drop in the ocean of the night voyage through the streets of Paris Est.
A Parallel Life
Writing is a difficulty Zorica approaches tongue out, armed with the accoutrements she adores: paper clips, see-through file dividers, pens. The result is a single word, her surname. Although the letters look as if they are ready to be joined to others—as in infant school—they stand shakily alone. This is more or less how Zorica sees herself in the world of French bureaucracy.
French administration is a dragon to Zorica, its huge mouth occasionally and often inexplicably showering hot air and flames in the shape of Orders to Pay and bailiff’s letters. Even a French electricity bill comes with the proviso that if it isn’t paid within a fortnight, it will be increased by ten percent. Zorica keeps careful and fearful watch for the dragon, signing her surname painstakingly on checks that others have written for her. In my absence the lady who works in the post office accepts two Euros for this job, for Zorica prefers her financial affairs to remain secret from our other neighbors. When I write a check for her, we sometimes have to scrap the whole operation while Zorica starts her signature again, tut-tutting loudly.
When you can only write one word, you want it to be perfect.
She is illiterate, she says, because of the war. World War II covered her school-going years, when Zorica’s reading and writing abilities must have seemed a minor priority in a devastated Mitteleuropa. Her neighbor and fellow countryman, Srboljub, on the other hand, cannot write, Zorica says, ‘because of his head.’ A brutish giant of little sensibility, he exercises his cunning on the French to great advantage, claiming unemployment benefit and rent allowance while working on the black, and thousands of francs from the insurance for regular leaks on his fly-specked ceiling. If an inspector turns up to check, he shrugs ignorance of any known language. Zorica says he murdered his father. ‘The tractor turning over wasn’t an accident,’ she said. ‘He wanted to get married again.’ Then she smiles: ‘If he’d been a Kossovar, he could’ve had as many wives as he wanted!’ Another version of the story is that the father died of shame at his son’s reproaches: it just wasn’t fair, Srboljub said, buying a new tractor for his sister, while he wore his butt out in Paris.
From a faded photograph, Zorica’s own father smiles down at us from underneath a huge white moustache, the sort of man easily imagined goading a mule from the bench seat of a cart sporting car tires, on a dusty road in flat country, somewhere east of Austria.
Zorica lives in a world parallel to the one the rest of us inhabit, where everyone is a potential enemy intent on some devilry. She is convinced that the husband of another neighbor was killed by the doctor because he was from Serbia. The hospital asked first, she swears. ‘Are you a Serb or a Croat?’ they asked. ‘I’m a Yugoslav,’ replied the husband, who was close to being discharged. But they knew. He was taken away and given an injection. Next day he was dead, says Zorica.
Zorica maintains that a Croat doctor refused to treat her during the bombing of Yugoslavia, because she was from Serbia. The doctor had herself replaced. I said this was impossible, in France, and should be reported. ‘Non,’ Zorica said firmly, ‘I want no trouble about it.’
The world around Zorica is so nasty in intention that she sometimes resorts to visiting a lawyer who, like her doctor, is from the same region as herself and clearly takes advantage of the situation to pour oil on troubled waters for a minuscule fee, making her angrier than warranted by whatever administrative process is in hand.
When something does go wrong that must be righted, Zorica’s frustration is palpable, her angers volcanic, her voice raised to maximum, her precious little French deserting her. She shouts and shouts ‘Non, Non, Non!’ louder and louder against all arguments, until finally her interlocutor gives up in despair. In the administrative offices of the quarter you only have to pronounce her name and they sigh.
Even a map makes little sense to Zorica. As she peers over my arm, I suddenly see her as an ancient Greek, gazing at the map of a Pytheas or a Ptolemy, wondering at this thing that they call the ‘known world.’ Such maps bear no relation to Zorica’s Europe, furnished with the routes and contacts that she has memorized in order to get around. I am sure she could find her way home on foot, if she had to, across four countries. Paris is measured by her own gauge of offices, shops and people she knows or needs to know, travelling on the bus—for in the metro one travels not only underground but notionally, towards destinations that are mere words. Above ground, Zorica needs no such esoteric skills, and can even persuade bus drivers to let her out where she wants and not where they should stop. All of her sorties are connected with some mission or other, and she only notices Paris amusing itself when she accidentally comes upon it. One summer evening we stumble on an open-air concert in Parc de la Villette. The spectators loll on the grass, ‘Like seals on a beach in the Galapagos,’ says Zorica, who studies wildlife on afternoon TV.
She lives in a tiny room, with the use of a communal toilet on the stairs. When in a foul mood, she says, ‘I live like a tramp.’ Her TV is perched high up near the ceiling, on a shelf disguised with a lace veil that cunningly conceals the video beneath. Anything that can be interpreted as a shelf has a handmade lace curtain hanging from it. Shelves develop from shelves and cascade down the walls to just above the level of two industrial sewing machines that squat along one wall, their enormous cotton spools still in place, appropriately enough in red, white and blue: imperialist, French colors. Any empty areas are filled with plants that crawl up the walls, across the ceiling and out the window, where they run to meet lively geraniums in giant pots on the ledge below, contributing to the leaks and damp that plague the building. Beyond the flowers she has arranged a shaky set-up for drying clothes that often finish up on the street below. The unemployed young men hanging around the street bring them up and knock on the door. ‘They’re nice,’ she says, which is not what she said when some of them shouted ‘Yugoslav in a wig’ when NATO bombing of Yugoslavi
a was in full swing.
When she smiles, she looks younger, especially when the wig has been combed and put on properly, and not lopsidedly applied in response to a knock on the door. It has saved her a fortune in hairdressers’ fees after chemotherapy made her own hair fall out. On bad days the TV helps her pass the time. When she has a headache, she soaks a white turnip in home-made rakia, then applies a facecloth soaked in the solution to her forehead. ‘Doktures,’ she says, ‘what do doktures know?’ She makes liters and liters of lemon juice mixed with water and kilos of sugar, saying, ‘It’s good for what’s wrong with me.’
When alone, she lies on the bed watching Sunset Beach and Arabesque. Good-looking men are excusable for their sins: ‘Ah, Mikaël!’ she laughs indulgently about one of the doctors in Melrose Place. Her solitary existence is peopled with characters from American soaps and, if given any encouragement, she can recount episodes from years back, like ancient epics.
But people are a welcome distraction, and the high point of a good day is when she has someone in for iced tea and it’s time for the soaps as well. As she shows visitors out, reluctantly, after tea and homemade cakes, she apologizes, as if they were leaving because her room is too small: ‘Excusez-moi, mon appartement est trop petit.’
The single bed just shows under a rail of clothes that Zorica made herself. You can tell by the professional once-over she gives yours that she knows the qualities of good fabric, of work acceptable to top couturiers. After she got to know me well, she described being asked to take innocent photos at big fashion events, which turned out to be for immediate copying in illicit sweatshops. When she dresses up to go out, it is clear that her clothes are professionally made. In a hat and sunglasses she looks a million dollars, suddenly out of step with her small room. She spends any spare coins on cheap luxuries like ice-cream pots in plastic, each with its own matching spoon in imitation biscuit and lurid pink, or candle-holders from Turkey in which tiny boats rise and fall on a vivid green sea trapped forever between plastic walls. There are multi-colored balls that act as ice-cubes for the iced tea she keeps ready in a bottle with painted flowers. When in form, she trawls the shops for such treasures for herself, or friends at home who’ve seen and coveted them, sometimes regretting that a gewgaw spotted and ordered by a neighbor or friend can’t be repeated. Her bedside table, hand-made lace to the ground, is a cascade of informers’ scraps bearing scribbled names of shops where such objects may be found. She can remember exactly what each corresponds to, getting literate visitors to confirm. Administrative pieces of paper, however, behave like white mice, and in spite of her stationery fetish and careful stapling, clipping and filing, they very often finish up attached to other entirely irrelevant documents, upside-down or back to back, mislaid forever.
When Tito set her free, she came to Paris with her remaining small son, whom she describes as a ‘penalty goal in the final minute of play,’ born after her husband died. In her heyday she worked lengthy days, falling exhausted under the machine for the night, as many still do in the sweatshops roundabout. The rag trade is like that, she says, when an order has to be produced quickly you just stay at it till it’s done. Later the company gave her a room above the workshop, and the little boy played at her feet before finally going to a local school.
Since her arrival, Zorica has lived in a quarter where Serbs, Poles, Arabs and Jews work and drink together, hurling colorful insults at each other from the cafe on the corner. Pedestrians and cars stop and chat to sweatshop workers inside the bars of ground-floor windows. Only the Chinese seem to stick to themselves, getting drunk in their own bars, and working in their own sweatshops, which always smell of the rice-cooker in the corner.
Now that Zorica can no longer work, she can’t sell her machines for what she paid for them, and would like to take them to Yugoslavia, now that things are very expensive down there. She never initiates conversation about the Yugoslav war, but in reply to enquiries about the family, says, ‘They’re not as badly off as some, they’ve got the farm, they won’t go hungry.’ There is some talk of ‘dust’ after the ‘bombs’ which is making people sick and has done strange things to the fruit. Yet one evening when a TV program about depleted uranium is broadcasted, she watches a romantic comedy on another channel. She is in two minds whether it is wise to go home, now the country’s in such a state. Her basic French pension is some four hundred Euros, which the dragon might allow her to receive in Yugoslavia. The problem would be medical costs and care.
Once grownup, her literate and multi-lingual son went home to marry and run the farm. Now he has children too. His daughter recently married, and Zorica always shows new visitors the wedding videos, hours and hours of very serious-looking people, lean and handsome older men in hats, dancing hand in hand round a farmyard to the sound of great music—and Zorica likes it at maximum volume, bursting through the room and out the flower-drenched window. All the grandchildren are dark and good looking, one boy had just completed military service when war broke out. There is a suggestion that his military service was a nightmare of sleeping out in the damp and cold for weeks on end, but the family also paid 3,000 Euros to a colonel to keep him out of the war. They visited the colonel’s house some twenty-eight times, bearing money and requests: ‘It is a lot of money, but Antonije’s life is more important,’ she says.
In the video background lies the family house, with garlanded gates and a man-made pond that Zorica calls the piscine. Old cartwheels and planks have been used to make a garden seat painted red and white. ‘Before, we had only horses and carts,’ Zorica begins, then her eyes glaze over as she talks of her mother smoking hams and putting walnut leaves among the laundry, in beds and under carpets, against insects. ‘Once,’ she says, ‘the Seine between Yugoslavia and Romania froze over—kilometers wide—and my grandparents went to Romania by sleigh.’ All big rivers are the Seine to Zorica. I decide she is talking about the Danube. ‘When it’s cold like that, no one gets sick,’ her grandfather told her.
Sometimes she improvises strange tales that reveal a primitive instinct sufficient to make the hairs stand on the back of my neck— ‘Sasha was walking down the road one day when he met a strange woman with a horse’s head…’ she goes, or: ‘Natasha looked into the cave. There was a bad, animal smell….’ She watches me carefully for reactions. On the street, everyone is good for an invented story. She indicates a middle-aged man hovering, and says, ‘Poor thing, she’s stood him up.’
Sometimes if I use a farming metaphor or turn of phrase from my own past, I can pass completely through the barrier of language and find myself on the same side as a giggling Zorica who repeats her own word for winkers or spancels, amazed that such communication is possible at all, and vaguely embarrassed to find that it is, in the heart of Paris.
‘Big wedding,’ I nod toward the noisy video. ‘Four hundred,’ Zorica shouts above the music. Different outfits had to be made and worn for each day, she says proudly, enumerating just how many lambs and calves and chickens and geese had to be slaughtered to feed the crowds. ‘Lot of money,’ I say, rubbing thumb and forefinger together in the meaningful continental way, thinking of the expense of a wedding these days. ‘No,’ Zorica says firmly, ‘the wedding meal is held at home, and since all the food is home-produced—you only have to buy Orangina.’ Many of the band are family members, playing a mixture of Serbian, Gypsy and Romanian melodies.
Some people, of course, might just sit whining because they didn’t have the money for a big wedding. That, Zorica seems to say, is one of the differences between Serbs and Albanians. But the biggest difference is that Albanian women don’t work. ‘Serb women work.’ In fact, she says, ‘Serbs in general work all the time.They come home from the day job and then they drive the tractor and feed the pigs: men, women, children.’ The farm is—as farms once were in France—mixed, with all kinds of livestock and cereals, and require all hands to keep it going. Antonije called her only yesterday evening and sai
d, ‘I’m off out to do a bit of ploughing now, Grandma.’ That’s why Serbs are able to live on little, she says, because they work hard, and grow everything they eat.
‘There’s land in Albania,’ says Zorica firmly, ‘but they do nothing with it.’
They’re not the only ones, she adds: Croatian women don’t work either, they just wear a lot of make-up and spend their husband’s money shopping, when they’re not having babies.
Eventually, in the early 1980s, the firm that provided Zorica’s job and lodgings closed down. By then she’d saved up enough to purchase her small room with its tiny kitchen alcove. She did most of the restoration work herself, showing no fear of plumbing or plastering. The little kitchen window, whose rotten frame prevents its shutting properly, overlooks a nineteenth-century yard in black and white and grey, straight out of Zola.
After years of contributing to the economy—even if it was only adding the label ‘Made in France’ so that a garment could be described as such and re-exported—Zorica fell far short of some French standard of perfection, hobbling through the last few years of illness on the newly-invented ‘minimum wage’ which, as she says, ‘Wouldn’t keep a healthy appetite in spaghetti.’ This was backed up by the Town Hall for bills and other occasionals. They explained that if necessary they could give her extra money on the basis that when she died, her room would go to the Town Hall. She noted the name of her Town Hall interlocutor: Souad. ‘No Muesli Man will tell me what to do,’ Zorica replied. And with a keen sense of value, and property (‘five thousand Euros to repatriate the body,’ she once informed me) Zorica told the Town Hall she would prefer her family to inherit her room. So she shops carefully, and often eats spaghetti.