Paris Was the Place

I try taking Boulevard de Strasbourg away from the crowds at the St. Denis metro stop to find the girls. This isn’t one of those gilded Paris streets heralding the end of a war or the launch of a new haute couture line. The sky’s already turned gray again, but it’s flanged lilac in places. The early dusk settles around the Beauty for You hair salon and a small pyramid of green-and-white shampoo bottles in the
pharmacie
window. I’m almost lost but not entirely, searching for an asylum center full of girls on Rue de Metz. Two mothers in saris pick over veggies while their toddlers jump in place on the sidewalk holding hands. A
tabac
sign yells
LOTTERY FRANCE!

The sequencing of the neighborhoods here baffles me—arranged like the curvature of some terrestrial snail. I’m in the tenth arrondissement, anchored by two of Paris’s great train stations, where the alleyways weave into mapless places. I’m not embarrassed to carry my
Michelin
. But it’s colder here at four o’clock in January than I ever thought it could be, and three of my fingers have gone numb.

My lunatic father has spent his whole professional life drawing maps. He’s older now. Where, I don’t know exactly. But I feel him with me today while I walk. A high white cement wall runs along the start of Rue de Metz—a one-way alley off Boulevard de Strasbourg.
Four blue suns have been painted on the wall and the bodice of a woman’s lime green dress. The end of the wall is a deeper cerulean, and the graffiti here looks done with chalk—spaceships and loopy sea creatures and messy stars.

Number 5 is a low, two-story brick interruption after the wall with an airport orange wooden door and a bronze plaque the size of an Etch A Sketch that reads
ÉCOLE PRIMAIRE
. Primary school. But this can’t be a school anymore, can it? Unless I’ve been sent to the wrong place? Two bow windows sit on either side of the door like eyes on a face, and the door itself is like a mouth that might try and eat you.

A woman pulls it open, and the electric locks zing. She’s got enormous black frizzed hair up in a scarf. “By the grace of God, you’ve come. We never know who will actually arrive. And this is not a tea party we are hosting here, you know? So we like it when people come who say they will come.”

It’s so good and unexpected to have someone waiting for me in this city. She says her name is Sophie. That she’s here by way of Cairo. Her smile is a force field that pulls her to me. She takes me down the narrow hall, and her black tunic flutters behind her like a sail. Small pieces of kilims and Persians cover the walls of her windowless office. She says, “The girls here are desperate to get out, and they are oh so lonely for their mothers you cannot even know. But nothing is going to touch them while they are in here with me.”

Then a man—early forties, gray crew cut, blank scrunched-up face—peeks his head inside and stares until I look away. He’s in dark blue—shirt and trousers—with a gun in a black holster on his right hip. “You are new,” he says in rapid-fire French. “New people sign in before they do anything else.” What his gun does is take away my ability to use French. I follow him to an office at the start of the hall, where a small black-and-white television sits on a desk, playing a loop from surveillance cameras. There’s the sidewalk outside and the bare poplar tree and the knees and shins of Parisians walking by.

“Visa number? Full name and place of residence?” He’s got a green poster of the Paris metro system taped on his wall. I’ve taught classes in one language or another for almost a decade, but I’m jangly
today. It has something to do with the locks and the surprise of that. But it’s not the physical quality of being trapped, exactly. Or the lack of sunlight. It’s that the locks are making me feel lonelier than I ever remember. People are living out their days inside here. So I call this man Truffaut in my mind, after the French movie director who made the new-wave film
The 400 Blows
. It helps to think I have a secret on him.

“Location of employment?”

I’ve studied French for years. Sometimes I’m lucky and dream in it. But I have to wait for my French to come back to me. My heart is beating fast—leaving in quick ascending scales and then coming back. Who is this man? It’s the locks on the door again—the idea that no one in here can get out, and I always like to get out. To know the exits. All I manage is “The Academy of France. I’m a poetry professor there.” These vowels are warm in my mouth and pleasing.

Truffaut laughs.
“La poésie.”
He licks his lips and scratches under his nose. “How does poetry have anything to do with this place?” Everything, I want to say. My plan, though uncooked, is to teach the girls poetry. I know this sounds a little ridiculous. We’re in a locked asylum center in the middle of Paris, and what the girls probably need most is a really good lawyer. But poetry is concise. It can hold enormous amounts of emotion. My friend Rajiv is the one who asked me to come here. He’s an adviser to the center, and married to my best friend, Sara. Rajiv told me the girls’ hearings would rest on wildly compelling, condensed versions of how each girl ended up in France and why they can’t go back to their home countries. So they need poetry.

But I don’t say a word of this to Truffaut. I’ve been in Paris almost five months, long enough to learn the part of the American
jeune fille
, even if, at thirty, I’m a little old for it. I smile and he takes my passport and job contract and holds the
U.S.A
. stamp close to his face. “Willow Pears. Poetry professor at the Academy of France. I suppose we should be lucky to have you here.”

There’s no good way to answer this. I’m not going to admit anything about the poetry. I’m afraid he’ll make me leave if he finds out
I’m not trained in literacy or something else more helpful. I followed my older brother, Luke, to France. I would follow him anywhere. He is my lifeline. Applied for every single teaching job I could find in Paris and was so damn lucky to get the one at the academy. Truffaut slaps my passport down on the desk—which is steel, three drawers to a side, with black plastic pull handles. The sound is the thwap of a fly-swatter. It’s been nine minutes on the industrial clock above Truffaut’s door, but time crawls.