She goes down another flight of stairs, the station feeling empty except for herself, comes around another corner and sees a young man her age pressed up against the wall, she doesn’t understand why. He looks quickly left and right, doesn’t seem to see her. He’s loosened his filthy trousers, his filthy duffle bag is at his feet and as she approaches, she understands that he’s pissing against the wall. He doesn’t turn around, doesn’t look at her, but she can feel the shame radiating out from him, or is it her. She has to get home.
Laila
The streets are wide and almost empty. No crowds, no tourists. Not here. Just sun on the broad pavement. Quiet. Streets that are big and beautiful and clean. I’m done cleaning. Not at the office building now, Agnès got tired of me, I was late one time, she said she didn’t have any more work, not for me. Now it’s Mme Dupont I work for, here in this quiet part of Paris. Mme Dupont’s apartment is clean in the clean sunlight that comes through the clean windows. Because of me. My hands running a dust-rag over the polished wood, my hands wiping the counters down, drying them off so there are no streaks. Scrubbing down the sinks in both bathrooms, changing the towels, straightening them so they hang just so; the tap, the faucets polished so they shine. I do good work. Mme Dupont wants me back next week. Merci Madame. Mme Dupont hasn’t asked me what happened to my face, just told me I do good work. Merci Madame. But no pay in my pocket today, no white envelope. I have to come back for it next week. She says. She forgot to go to the bank. Last week it was M. Dupont who tucked the folded bills into my back jeans pocket with his nasty clean fingers. There you go, in my ear, in French, his fingers resting on my money, my pocket. No M. Dupont today. Will he be there next week? Maybe next week it will be Mme Dupont again. Mme Dupont will give me my francs, two days’ pay. My pay, in a fresh white envelope.
No pay, no money for the bus or the Métro. The street is so wide. No pay, so I’m walking across the empty city to get back to our room. You haven’t given me any of my francs back, Khalil, you need them to pay for the room. You say. No money so I have to walk. I’m so light. Wings a blur, that dizzy hum. If I try a little harder, I’ll float above the sidewalk. My head a balloon tied to my body by a string, the string thinned, ready to break. I ate yesterday, lunch, soup and bread. When I came into the big apartment this morning, Mme Dupont was drinking coffee, finishing a pain au chocolat. The smell of coffee in the room, the smell of butter, chocolate. I had to wipe my mouth. In her kitchen I washed everything, wiped down every shelf in her refrigerator. Moved the food from shelf to shelf to clean but didn’t taste. Just the smell.
I’m following the wide street, walking back to our room. Maybe an hour to get there, maybe more, and my head a balloon. You won’t be there. You’re working. You say. At your business. I’ll have to wait for you on the sidewalk, my head swollen. I don’t have a key. All this light, for me. I pass a café where people are drinking their coffee in small white cups and eating pretty bits of food. I pass a grocer’s where chickens are turning on a spit and I have to smell the smell of crisp brown skin. I pass a crêpe stand where I’m waylaid by a buttery, sugary, caramel smell. I stall and then move on, pass a bakery and it’s here that the smell of bread just baked comes into my mouth. The smell, but no bread. I don’t have the key.
The smell of bread in my mouth makes me dizzy. I have to sit for a minute on the curb of the sidewalk here. My head so light, it’s going to fly away. People sidestep me. A dirty little Arab, skinny little Arab they don’t want to touch. Even though my clothes smell of sweat, even though I know I smell of sweat from carrying the bucket and mop up the back stairs, I know that inside I’m clean. My hands are clean. The smell of soap on my hands from washing Madame’s delicate things. She doesn’t want them put in the washing machine, it has so many bright dials. She trusts me. With her delicate things. I like touching them, burgundy and lace, chocolate peau de soie. I like touching them. Nobody going by on this bright street wants to touch me.
I close my eyes, sitting on the curb, hold my head so it doesn’t float away. That dizzy hum. And then a man leans over me, what does he want, I open my eyes, an older man, he’s asking me something in French, his voice soft, am I sick, I think that’s what he’s asking me. I shake my head. He smells like cigarettes. He smells like my father. Creases around his eyes. His face is sad. Am I all right, he’s asking, and his hand is at my elbow, he’s helping me to a bench in the shade, sit here, I think he’s saying, and he’s gone and then he comes back with a bottle of water. It’s hot outside, he says in French. I must be tired, he says in French. Am I all right? I nod. He starts to go, then stops, very quietly reaches into his pocket and quietly puts some bills in my hand, francs. My hand, not my pocket. I want to say no, but he’s already gone, he doesn’t want to be thanked, doesn’t want anything from me. I must be tired, he said.
I drink all the water. Nobody is looking at me here in the shade where it’s cooler. I close my eyes again, open them. There’s a little grocery store across the street, a cooler with soft drinks on the sidewalk in front of it, fruit set out on a stand, grapes, melons, bananas. I go into the store, open my hand, show them the bills. My other hand resting on the counter, holding me up. May I have some bread, I ask in French, and the man looks up from his paper, which tells him Beirut is on fire. He looks up at me. A young man. His face also is sad. He puts his hands on the counter too, as if his hands were thinking. Then he turns away, his face sad, his back my brother’s back, blue cotton of his shirt, blue sky above my house. He takes a loaf of bread in a plastic bag, a chocolate bar, a bag of peanuts. Assalamu alaikum. Peace be with you, he says, in Arabic. Peace be with you. Softly he folds my fingers into a fist. The money is still in my hand.
~
history
the dream comes back. The night after drinks at the Ritz with Laura and Marie-Claire. Again she’s awake but not awake, eyes open but not able to move. Glass breaking, boots coming up the stairs, people shouting, pounding on the door, shouting orders. Outside the room the sound of motors and trucks, the awful barking of dogs. Why is she remembering something that didn’t happen to her? The thing pressing on her chest. Somehow she knows Michael is breathing beside her. The dream won’t stop. Finally she must have called out, because he rolls over beside her, wraps his arm around her, almost asleep, muttering, you okay? No. But his arm around her moves her out from the nightmare. Michael, she says, and he stirs, pulls her towards him. Michael, she doesn’t say, save me from the dream.
~
The next morning, the dream a hum at the back of her mind, she’s heading down to the public library in the Centre Pompidou at Place Beaubourg, ten minutes’ walk from their apartment, to study history. Histoire. The history, the story, of Paris. What is the story of Paris? It may be that for her, Paris is a puzzle, or a test. La rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv. The Holocaust history course taught Sarah so much but it didn’t teach her this story and now she needs to know.
In the story of Paris, the Centre Pompidou, like the Eiffel Tower and Sacré Coeur, like the Eastern European Jews who took refuge here, is another unwelcome recent arrival, a newfangled building opened five years ago to general public displeasure. Covered in gaudy tubes, with a weird exoskeleton of mechanical parts like a squid or octopus with its guts on the outside, the building certainly makes Sarah grumpy. The stepped plastic tube that holds the escalator looks like something that belongs on a hamster cage. Such a show-off of a building, a building that looks forwards, never back, that has no regrets. Maybe it belongs to a brave new world, a world in which la rafle du Vél’ d’Hiv never happened. Or happened and can be ignored.
Sarah’s been meaning to come to the public library here ever since Charles gave her the list of gardens; she wants to look things up, learn about the history of the parks he’s suggested she visit, see some scale drawings, some old engravings that show the various stages of development. She’s more and more interested in public spaces, what can happen in them. What can happen in public spaces – what was i
t that happened in the Vélodrome d’Hiver? That’s why she’s here, this is the story she needs to learn about today, not the Palais-Royal, not the Bois de Boulogne or the Tuileries.
It’s clear what can’t happen in the public space of this enormous square in front of the Centre Pompidou – it isn’t made for sitting. No benches, nowhere at all to be comfortable, though people Sarah’s age or young families are picnicking on the cobblestones, or perching on the concrete stumps of columns that help control traffic. Laura says the slang word for the stumps is bîtes, which is also slang for penis, something like putz or schmuck. Is the square meant only as a space to move through? It must be perfect for big demonstrations or for shepherding giant tour groups, but what if you’re tired, what if you need to rest?
What does get to happen here? There are the usual little kids feeding the usual pigeons, and the usual pamphleteers, some of them touting shops, some political causes. No doubt the usual pickpockets. Sarah pulls her purse closer, Laura’s slightly tipsy words of wisdom still in her head. Despite the few lonely-looking lindens, that amenable tree – littleleaf, by the look of them – at the western edge of the square, this is not a park, certainly not a garden. The space feels harsh, controlled, despite the fun the picnickers are clearly having, especially on a day like today, all sunshine.
There are buskers here as well, musicians playing jazz, a guy dressed up as a mime, wearing a beret and striped sailor t-shirt, tight trousers. He’s got a mask over the top half of his face, an exaggerated clown face of some sort, that’s vaguely frightening in its distortion. And he’s very clever, walking up to people who are self-absorbed, mimicking them for the brief moment before they notice him, and startle, or shriek, and then mostly laugh, others laughing at their bemusement or fear. There’s something about him Sarah doesn’t like, the way he pushes into other people’s spaces. So clever. She doesn’t want him to come up to her, so she hustles into the building. The inside is the inverse of the square outside, a lidded, rather than a lidless, giant box. It feels slightly less unfriendly than the square, but there’s still no place to sit: you must never be tired at the Centre Pompidou. She lets herself be taken up the short escalator ride to the library and she’s soon absorbed in the quiet, the public privacy of its reading rooms.
It takes a while, but eventually she finds a few references. The librarian helps her find more articles, points out other possibilities. Sarah starts reading painstakingly through the French sources. It’s hard to find much, just as Laura predicted, though Sarah does learn that the round-up at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, which happened on July 16 and 17, 1942, was part of one of the largest operations against Jews by the Vichy government, and it was mostly hushed up. Marie-Claire was wrong: the Gestapo weren’t directly involved. The operation was led by the French police and by officials who were working with the Parti Populaire Français, a French fascist organization, to round up thousands of Jewish civilians, mostly women and children, many of them living in the neighbourhood around the Pletzl. The neighbourhood she now wants to visit, to be able to imagine how this story unwound. Because something real happened there. People, civilians were taken away, held in the Vélodrome and then deported to Auschwitz. The sources note the Vichy government’s ‘enthusiasm.’
To ensure compliance, the government officials recommended that only foreign nationals be included in the round-up. So Marie-Claire was right about that. But Laura was also right: many of the ‘foreign nationals’ had in fact lived in France for decades, but hadn’t been able to become citizens. The decision was made to round up children as well, to avoid ‘unpleasant scenes’ when they were separated from their parents. There were Parisians who applauded as their neighbours were herded into busses. There were concierges who looted empty Jewish apartments. Collaboration. It’s the same in French and English. A word the French don’t like. Would Marie-Claire have been one of the ones applauding as those people were taken away? There were Parisians who did help: church leaders, journalists, even some of the police officers involved in the round-up. Prof. Koenig would want Sarah to determine the numbers, objective evidence, and she finds them: 4,115 children, 2,916 women, 1,129 men. They were held for up to seven days, they were given next to no food, no water, next to no access to the restrooms. She finds no record of an apology, no claim of responsibility by the French government after the war. Rien de rien.
What she does find is a photograph of a family: the father in his dark suit and tie, his face under the fedora obscured in shadow, a yellow star stitched to his jacket pocket; two little girls who remind Sarah of photos of her mother when she was a girl, one in a neat plaid skirt cut fashionably on the bias, her hairband tidy. It’s hard to see in the print, but it looks like the mother is bent over beside the bleacher, probably reaching for some food she packed. Yes, it’s the mother, there’s a patch of light caught on the back of her hair, one hand. The dark cloth of her coat. One strand of light. Their little brother is in his suit jacket with his yellow star stitched to the left breast pocket, bedrolls on the bench beside them, one, two, three, four, five, one each. A wooden horse on the bench as well, just within reach. He looks to be about five or six. It’s probably his favourite toy, the one he decided to take with him.
Who took the picture? And how did it get into the book? There’s nothing in the caption that gives the names of the family. She wishes she knew their names. That would help. It wouldn’t help them but it would help her.
She closes her books, puts them on a trolley to be shelved.
When she comes out of the Centre Pompidou she notices for the first time the graceful, welcoming slope of the plaza. This space built so many years after those thousands of people, women, children, men, were taken away to the Vél’ d’Hiv so they could be forgotten. Such a big space, where only certain things can happen, where no one can rest. Another Paris.
Laila
I’m not going anywhere. I’m going nowhere, one step at a time, down the grubby concrete steps, to breathe the unbreathable air. A dirt-coloured floor, a floor that could be made of dirt. The Métro platform empty except for me, empty with me, alone with its dirt, its ugly plastic seats. Mme Dupont’s money is in my pocket, two days’ work. I came into her apartment and his face was on the television, the Prime Minister of Israel, Begin. A photo of him, a man with the mouth of a frog, the eyes of a frog. And a map of Israel and Lebanon – no Palestine, for them there is no Palestine – with cut-out soldiers, Israeli soldiers, cardboard heroes. Then footage of the battle, first the sound of missiles, a sound like the rush of wind around the wadi by my house. And then machine-gun fire, dit-dit-dat, dit-dit-dat-dat, rat-a-tat-tat, a cartoon noise. Mme Dupont got up, turned the television off. She had things to do. She wants me to come back next week again. I do a good job, she says, I’m a good girl. Because I’m a good girl and do a good job, she has a friend, Mme LeBlanc, who wants me to work for her too, tomorrow. Mme LeBlanc, an older lady who needs help, who might need me to work for her every week. More work is what I need, Mme Dupont says.
I need you, Khalil. You’re gone, I don’t know where. I don’t have a key to the room. I ask M. Laval, the man who rents us the room, to let me in, he says why don’t I have my own key, why didn’t you leave me a key, where did you go? He can’t let me in if you haven’t given me the key, it’s you he’s renting the room to, you’re the one who pays the rent. I give you money for the rent, I tell him, I give you almost all my money. Why don’t I have a key then, he asks me. He shuts the door in my face, shouts at me to go away, leave him alone, who do I think I am, disturbing him like this, while he’s eating his dinner? The smell of beef stew coming through the door, the sound of his voice.
Only you can let me in. I don’t count.
I count Mme Dupont’s money in my pocket, enough for food but not for a place to sleep. Where can I sleep? I think about the pillars covered with posters for movies on the kiosks with their onion-dome turrets. I could take some of my francs and pay for a ticket, sleep in the movie thea
tre, sleep somewhere clean. But if I slept there, who would find me, what would they do when they found me?
When we first came to Paris you told me that there were places in the Métro to hide, blind spots, dead spots. You told me that was where you took your business. That was where you took your duffle bag, sorted through what was left to sell, no one could see what you had, take what you had. Blind spots, dead spots, that’s where you’d catch a quick nap, take a piss, no one could see. Though sometimes someone would catch you, by mistake. But there were places, you said. Maybe today there’s a place for me, a place to sleep.
I don’t know where you are.
Everything you do is by mistake.
I sit on one of the ugly chairs but there’s no place to lie down, no place in Paris where I can sleep. I have to go to work tomorrow for Mme LeBlanc, the white lady, but there’s no place for me to sleep. I want to do good, I want to do a good job, earn my keep. But how can I work if I don’t get any sleep? Thick steel beams above my head, the machinery of the Métro on display. I have to find a blind spot, a dead spot, down a tunnel, up a set of stairs, but there aren’t any signs to tell me where to go because I’m going nowhere, going the wrong way down one-way halls.
And then I find my little nowhere, a hidden corner down an empty hallway and I must fall asleep for a while because I have the dream again, the one I dream too often. You aren’t there. I go for water, I have the plastic jugs with me. My brother’s friend comes up as I’m going home beside the wadi, the jugs are heavy with water. He says hello, polite, my brother’s friend, and he walks beside me, can he carry the water jugs, can he help? Yes, I say, thank you. The jugs are heavy. He wants to help. When we’ve walked to a place that is empty, a place where no one else is, he changes. Pulling my arm. Let go, I say, no, but he doesn’t let go. No, I say, no. Pulling me behind an empty building. And when I start to scream, I won’t let him do this to me, I’ll scream and someone will come, he takes the knife out of his coat pocket. A kitchen knife, ordinary, the kind my mother uses to slice sweet circles from oranges. He holds the knife against my throat and then I’m quiet. He hits and hits me and then he’s inside me and it hurts. He says words to me that I don’t want to remember, they’re that sharp.
Rue des Rosiers Page 20