Paris Was the Place (12 page)

“Sometimes there is famine.” I don’t know this to be a fact. “There is a man in India who’s raped her and will hunt her down if she goes back.”

“The one who brought her to Paris? But he is on this continent,
and France is planning to send her back to the continent she came from.”

“I am talking about a different man. Manju’s brother. An arranged marriage has been planned.”

“How do I convince the judge not to send her back? This is my question every day. There is an Air France flight to India that leaves Charles de Gaulle at four-fifteen.” He begins putting his things back in his saddlebag—the file on Gita, two pens, a small pad of notepaper with a bright orange cover and doodles on it that look like they’ve been done by a small child.

“The brother-in-law is the reason she’s here at the center.” Maybe if I keep talking, he will stay. “Yes, he lives here. In Paris. But he has arranged for his own brother in Jaipur to marry Gita.”

“That won’t be sufficient grounds for asylum. I’m sorry.” He isn’t interested in making me feel good, and I respect and resent it. “Here is what I have.” He reaches for his tea and seems to relax again and relish his work. “A girl who by all accounts is remarkably bright. With a broken family that is probably all in Paris illegally now—tourist visas that have each expired, except for the brother-in-law, who’s on a work visa and comes and goes as he pleases with the jewelry. There is a grandmother we think might still be in India, but we are not sure if she is alive. This will be a sticking point. There is also a nasty arranged marriage waiting for her in Jaipur. Lastly, I want to point out a small passage in the French Asylum Long Brochure—”

“I know this clause. I’ve read this part!” My voice rises. I can’t help it. “I’ve read the brochures! They say defendants can be protected by asylum from their own family members when those members mean to hurt them.” I’m so sure this is the statute that will save Gita, because it clearly states that you can be awarded asylum if your family is a threat to you.

Macon raises his eyebrows at me. “You are shrewd to have already located the statute. But it won’t work for Gita because the person who wants to hurt her is Manju, the brother-in-law, and he is with her in France. She is asking for asylum from India. She is arguing to stay
here, in the country where the brother-in-law actually lives, and to not go back to her home country. It’s contradictory.”

“Yes, it’s complicated.” I lower my voice. “But there’s danger in India for her.”

“But can we prove it?” He smiles—a wry, tough smile. “What she needs is a court guardian who can vouch for her in court. This is a new tactic we are just trying. Some courtrooms are open to it. The child lives in foster care with a French family, but the court guardian helps manage the child’s well-being through the hearing and is the court liaison through the foster care. That is the only way they may release her in France. I have been thinking about you.”

I fear I turn completely red. He has no idea how much I’ve been thinking about him. Then he says, “I am wondering if you might consider being Gita’s guardian. There’s a lot of pro forma you’d have to do with the court.”

Guardian? I’m stumbling my way through being her teacher. “Why do you think I’d have any chance of being appointed?”

“You are a great teacher, by all accounts. You aren’t French, and this will be a problem, but you’ve got a work contract, so there might be some room here. You know the girl. I think she trusts you.” He begins packing up again. “What do you think?”

“I think I could try.” What am I doing? “What’s the first step? Maybe I can try it and we’ll see if this is the right fit?”

He smiles again. “Wonderful. Fantastic. This is great news. The first step is the written document Gita needs for court. She will hand it to the judge and she will be asked to read some of it out loud. We’re never sure how it will go. But it’s essential that she know her story well. I will help her with this. It’s part of my job. But if you can do it too, then we might win. She will get about five minutes to speak. Put small things in that you’ve learned about Gita. Things she might not tell me. Please try to stay away from actual interpretations of the law and away from speculation. That’s my job. I will do that. We can meet next week. If you are willing to see me again?” He looks me straight in the eyes.

I’m not imagining things, am I? “I am willing.” My heart beats so hard I can hear it in my ears.

He stands and moves toward the door. “Thank you for meeting me, Willow. Thank you for working so hard on Gita’s behalf.” He smiles, then he’s gone.

I finish my tea alone. Is he choosing me? Am I choosing him? What’s happening? I feel like life’s asking me to be more open in Paris than I’ve ever been before. And when I think I’ve opened enough, it’s asking me to open even more. I hear Esther and Precy talking back and forth in their bedrooms down the hall. Precy’s louder. I can hardly make out Esther because she’s so quiet. “Who has my brush? Did anyone see my hairbrush?” Precy asks. “I need to brush my hair. I have been waiting to brush my hair.”

Gita walks into the room first and takes my hand. “You are back. I never know if you will really be coming back.”

“Gita. I’ve signed an agreement to teach classes here at the center on Thursdays through June. It’s only late February. I so greatly enjoy teaching here with you. I keep my word.”

She sits down on the couch and starts talking without any warning: “My maa and I were sharing a bed in our home in Paris. I cannot tell you where. I cannot have you go there. So I tell my mind to forget. Promise me. Do not make me go back there. I want to live in France. But not with Manju. My pitaa waited for us in India. My maa and I only came to France for a visit. We were not meant to be living here. Maa came because Morone and I talked her into it. I am guilty she is here in France. I am guilty Pitaa is dead. I love all of my family. My mother doesn’t speak French or English. The first day she was here, she packed up the beans and rice and mutton and left the apartment to find a way to climb up to the roof to cook. Morone and I stopped her in the hall. We said, in Paris we use the kitchen stove.”

“We are trying to fix things so you can stay in this country, Gita. I just had a meeting with your lawyer.” Is she starting to lose her mind in here? She can’t slow down. This is what I fear the most for the girls. That the locking up and the faceless days will cause them to vacate their minds. And then they will slowly come apart. It’s what would
happen to me quickly. But I’m weak like that. To lock me up would be how to unravel me. I’d crave the world outside.

“He is a good man, Mr. Ventri. I can feel this. But he is very busy with many cases. What I wonder about every day is if Manju slept in that hall of our apartment. Because I am still not sure how he was finding me there every day. I screamed in my head each time. I saw a hammer in my mind while he pulled me on top of him, and I hit him on the shoulder and there was blood. But in the real life I did nothing, because of my sister and my maa and my little brother, Pradeep. The gem shop is the only way for them. Manju and the gem shop.”

“Oh, Gita. They wouldn’t turn on you.”

“They would not believe me, and so they would turn me out. My father is dead, Willow. I cannot go back to India because there is nothing waiting for me there but Manju’s brother, who will be my husband. So I am keeping the blue papers and the pink papers I get from the law people. I am meeting with the lawyer and the caseworker. I am working on the story. I am practicing. I am not going back. Please don’t make me go back.”

“We are working so hard on it. There will be an end.”

She brings out a photo from her notebook and hands it to me. She and Morone and their mother and a younger boy who must be their brother, Pradeep, and then Manju. He’s a short, thick man with a blunt strip of bangs across a broad forehead. Gita points to her mother’s lined face and rests her finger there and stares. The only photo Gita has of her mother also has her perpetrator in it. Then Moona and Rateeka come in and Gita takes the photo and slides it back in the notebook.

The common room fills with girls. “Let’s start right away.” I jump up. “What if the judge in the courtroom asks you to go back in your memory?”

“Chapati and potatoes,” Moona says. “That is my memory of the food in Bombay. The same thing every day.”

“The judge may ask you to tell the courtroom exactly how you left your country—on a train or in a car or in an airplane or on foot. This is when you will be glad you’ve memorized your story.”

Gita says, “In my memory Manju came to our house in Jaipur and sat for the coulis and masala and said that he was moving Morone to France to work at the gem shop. Then he announced he was taking my maa and me with him to France. We were scared but also feeling the excitement.”

“Is Pradeep still here in Paris?” I ask.

“He is in Paris, yes. My baby brother. The boy who I love so much. But I won’t see him. None of them know where I am.”

“That has to be so hard,” I say.

“Yeah. Hard.” Precy stares at Gita. “I don’t know where my mother is, but you know where yours is. How do you not go back to her? I would go back.”

“Precy,” I say. “You’ve made your decision and Gita’s made hers and both for different reasons. It’s better to stick to your story and not worry about Gita’s.”

Gita’s got her hand over her mouth, scowling. I need to be their teacher. They already have caseworkers. Sophie is Gita and Moona’s. A nurse from Bangladesh named Mrs. Kader is the caseworker for Rateeka and Zeena. I haven’t met Precy or Esther’s caseworker yet, but I’ve heard she is a retired public schoolteacher. “We should do some writing now. Can you open to a blank page in your notebooks? Do you have pencils? Who needs a pencil?”

Winter unlocks its hold on the city. Days grow warmer in March. The daffodils get an early start in the Luxembourg Gardens, where I start taking my lunch at school. Buds on the cherry trees swell and bloom into pink gauze, and everywhere there’s the yellow surprise of forsythia. “I’m not a saint, you know,” Gaird says into the phone on a Friday. Sometimes I only detect his Norwegian accent at the end of his sentences, because they finish on high notes and confuse me with cheeriness. He pauses to inhale his cigarette. “How much longer do I have to wait?”

“What do you mean, ‘wait’?” It’s hard to take off my skirt and change into my sweatpants while I talk. I’ve just gotten home from office hours at the academy, and I’m trying to go for a run. Gaird never calls me. Why can’t he say that he’s worried about Luke? Then at least we’d have that connection. Because Luke still doesn’t feel completely better two weeks out of the hospital.

“I wait for Luke to go back to the way he was before the hospital. I wait for him to get out of the bed on Saturdays and to cook his own eggs.”

Is this how Gaird’s mind works? I make careful use of pronouns, trying to bring him inside the conversation. “This is not the easy part.
But it will get better. We’ll figure this out.” Luke is improving. All Gaird needs to do is make sure Luke doesn’t work too much.

“It is a complete disaster.” The brushback. “At home and now also at work. Because he cannot work for very long.” Gaird inhales again. “He comes here to the offices, but then he lies down on my sets. My God. I think, What in the name of my maker is happening? I have deadlines. I have a headache.”

On Saturday morning I walk the two blocks to Place Monge and take the No. 7 pink line, which goes underneath the river to Châtelet—Les Halles, where I switch to the A line. The train is crowded with families going to the Bois de Boulogne or farther west into the suburbs for the weekend. French boys with cropped hair seeing how long they can stand in the aisle of the train without holding on to anything. I plan what I’ll say to Gaird if he’s there at the apartment. I set out at Charles de Gaulle—Étoile and the fluorescent lights give everyone’s skin a greenish tone. The staircase straight ahead leads to the Arc de Triomphe. It’s always a surprise—this huge arch in the middle of the working city. Almost two hundred feet high, it comes from another lifetime of war and generals who marched entire armies around it.

I walk farther through the trippy tunnel and come up on Rue de Presbourg, which forms a semicircle around the far side of the arch. A series of streets fan out from here. Victor Hugo is a busy coiffured avenue of upscale clothing stores, Guy Laroche and Céline farther down the street, and cafés and smaller boutiques and jewelry stores. The stone is paler here, and the sky is piercing blue today. A flock of pigeons swoop between the buildings, blotting out the sun. I cross the street named for Paul Valéry—champion of Rimbaud long after the poet’s death. The pigeons’ bellies hang below their little bald heads. They all land together in a patch of sun outside Café Le Victor Hugo near a tall horse chestnut tree whose buds begin to poke from its limbs.

Luke lives at the corner of Rue Georges-Ville. I want to do something to help him get better—something concrete. The string bags of oranges for sale at the corner market seem like a start, so I buy one and carry it in both arms like a toddler the rest of the way to his apartment.

“The juice lady
est arrivée
!” I yell, turning my key in Luke’s door.

“I’m having a quiet moment!” he calls from his bedroom.

“Have many quiet moments. I’m making juice!” I stand in his white kitchen and slice a dozen oranges and pull a metal juice press out of the cupboard next to the stove.

“Take off your coat first!” Luke yells after I’m into the oranges. “Come and sit and talk!”

“
Attends! Attends
. First I make the juice.”

I take a full glass into his bedroom—a long, narrow room with a king-sized canopy bed and three blue prints of Napoleon in oval frames along the street-side wall. His bureau sits low to the ground, a straw basket on top filled with clippings of good furniture and loose francs and cuff links. “The lead today,” he says, “the boy who thinks he’ll be the next Depardieu, stormed off the set because he couldn’t get his lines right.” Then he takes the juice and drinks it like he hasn’t seen water in days. “God, that is tasty.”