Paris Was the Place (8 page)

We start off slowly. I keep thinking maybe it’ll snow. Is it really okay for her to be jogging? Her father moved the whole family to Nigeria in 1971, when Sara was eleven, to open one of the first clinics for Doctors Without Borders. Six months later, his appendix burst and he died of septic shock. Her mother was a nurse who stayed on in the village and still lives in Lagos, her mind fogged with dementia. When Sara was sixteen, she grabbed a spot at a boarding school in Delhi that her uncle arranged for her.

“Does anyone in there speak a single word of English?” she asks as we run shoulder to shoulder along the cobblestones.

“We sort of work through that. A few of the girls can translate.” My lips are numb and drool’s frozen on my chin. “But they’re shy sometimes. Especially at the start.”

“So bring some snacks.” She’s on call at the hospital, and her black beeper sits clipped to the waistband of her red sweatpants. “I always bring snacks. If I have a really sick kid, I’ll use them.”

“You mean you bribe them? And can you slow down, please? How is it that the pregnant woman is in better shape than the non-pregnant one?”

“Let’s say I need to care for a kid who’s on morphine because his leg is atrophying. The metal screws of his fixator stick out of his thighbone to hold it together. It’s a very painful surgery.” She catches her breath. “I clear it with his parents, and I bring him a lollipop. The boy will let me examine the wound while he licks the lollipop.”

She’s always been a rescuer. Has always gotten herself into jams with her quick tongue but found a way out. “Snacks.” I say the word
out loud. “I haven’t used snacks since freshman composition class in grad school, when I just wanted the kids to like me.”

“You really need these girls to like you now. Bring lots of food. Think of the girls as patients. Think of the class like a hospital. Their wounds don’t show, but you still have to go about bandaging them.”

“But therapy was my mother’s job.”

My mom left the city hospital when I was twelve and began her own practice. Dad was gone, and working at home allowed Mom more time with Luke and me. Money was a nagging problem. In 1972, everyone in Sausalito talked about healing—healing from the ongoing war, healing from Watergate. My mother started calling herself an intuitive. She said it was still psychology, but now she put her actual hands on people. She had cold hands—good hands for touching, she said. And she listened to the blood rush through her patients’ veins, and somehow this helped them.

We run under the arches of Paris’s most spectacular bridges—Pont Neuf, St. Michel and Petit Pont, Pont au Double, Pont de l’Archevêché. “You’re in there, asking them to tell you their stuff, for Christ’s sake,” Sara says. “Bring them mithai. Bring boondi and coconut burfi. My favorites. Bring them snacks and smile a lot and you’ll be fine.” We turn back at the Tournelle Bridge, which crosses over into the middle of Île St. Louis. Snacks. Why haven’t I thought of snacks?

I
BRING
boondi and burfi to the fourth class. The girls sit in the common room and consider the platter of sweets. Such patience. Will anyone break down and eat? Moona finally leans forward and carefully, carefully picks up a saffron-colored sugar ball and nibbles it. These are the boondi—so delicious. The coconut burfi is cut like brownies and has the consistency of fudge. Zeena chooses a piece. Soon all the girls sit back on the furniture and eat their sweets. Then they’re not shy at all, thank God, and talk openly with one another about how to trim the ends of their hair with nail clippers, and how to put on black kohl eyeliner by burning a match and letting it cool before applying it with one finger, and how to sleep at night in the asylum
center when they’re scared and don’t know where their mother is or if they’ll see their brothers and sisters again.

Mothering often feels like the first cousin of teaching. And I’ve learned to squelch most of the urges to mother my college students. But in the asylum center, the instinct is too strong. Do the girls have toothbrushes? Winter boots? Tights to wear under their saris? How will they stay warm in the Paris winter? How will they make it without their mothers?

There used to be a playground in Sausalito near the houseboat flotilla in the harbor, and my mother and I drove there a lot when I was five and Luke went to all-day school. There were cedar steps up to a metal slide. One day I climbed a knotted rope that hung beside the slide and jumped into the sand. My mother, in jeans, stood with the other moms over to the side. I loved these mornings because I got my mother to myself. But they were always filled with anticipation—the sweet wait for Luke to be home. I found her and leaned against her and ran my hand over her thigh, claiming her. Then she and I knelt in the sand and shaped a moat and a castle, using my green pail. She was like all the other mothers that day, or better even. She loved the sand. We worked on the castle until it was time for Luke to come home from school. Then we got in the car. I said I wished Luke had been there, because it was the best castle we’d done. Sometimes things weren’t real until I shared them with him. It’s still the same today.

I look at the girls. “You are all learning to live in this really hard limbo.”

“Limbo?” Moona asks. “What is this limbo?”

“You are unsure if you will go home or if France is now your home. Limbo means things that are not certain.”

“I am not liking this limbo.” Gita crosses her legs and looks angry. “I am not thinking this limbo can last very much longer.”

I urge them to ask for more help at the center—Band-Aids and aspirin from Roselle, the nurse who comes on Wednesdays, help filling out the asylum forms from the lawyers on Thursdays, instructions from caseworkers on Tuesdays. I say their caseworker can tell them what to do about visiting hours, because sometimes a family member
shows up. Sophie told me this caused a problem last Friday. An uncle of Esther’s arrived. Esther saw him in the hall talking with Truffaut, and began sobbing. No one’s sure what this uncle means to her or why he was here.

“Gita,” I say. She looks straight at me from her seat on the couch. “Your limbo is guaranteed to last until sometime in June. That’s the month of your asylum hearing.”

“June,” she repeats.

“It would be great if you could practice your testimony every day.”

She starts laughing and has to put her hand over her mouth to contain herself. Her laughter is uncontrollable—almost like a fit—she’s got so much emotion inside her that she has to leave the room.

I ask the girls to write down the word “help.” Moona explains it to Rateeka and Zeena. I say, “I want you to get comfortable with this word. It’s a good one. Can you make sure you’re asking your caseworker for enough help? And your lawyer and me? Ask me for help.”

Gita comes back into the room. “Willow, I am sorry. I was laughing. Then I was crying and I couldn’t make it stop.”

She stays after class when the other girls leave for their rooms. “I understand help,” she tells me. “I can ask for help in French and in English and in Hindi. But I am not asking my maa for help because I do not want to ruin things for her or Morone. This is why they do not know where I am. None of them know.”

She flips the pages of her notebook until she finds the picture of her house in India she drew in our first class. “In Jaipur we were having the cow. Plus the long walk to school. But at night all the women in the village would come together in the yard where the fire was lit and we would pick the rice and I would be braiding Morone’s hair or she would be doing mine. There were six families. We were all cooking over the fire. Meat almost always came on Saturdays. I will never go back, but I wanted you to know that about my country because it is good for friends to understand where each comes from and I hope you are my friend.”

I
TAKE
the metro from St. Denis north to a stop called Barbès-Rochechouart, where I switch to the No. 2 line, which I take all the way to Victor Hugo. Luke and Gaird are giving a birthday dinner for their friend Andreas, a kind man who imports Scandinavian furniture to Paris and sings Broadway show tunes to himself. I get to their apartment at eight-thirty and let myself in with my key. I come here. A lot. My special place in Paris. Refuge. Gaird’s in the middle of the living room belting out a song in Norwegian. I’ve never heard him sing before. Luke flashes me a secret look of mock horror from the arm of the couch. Is Gaird drunk? He has a low, lovely baritone that vibrates when he holds the notes too long. He’s a tall man in a black suit with ruddy skin and one of the most coveted people in the French movie business. The apartment feels like a movie set, overflowing with settees and ottomans and pillows. There’s a purple velvet couch and ornate gold wallpaper and a large mural of hound dogs going after a fox, because Gaird is obsessed with anything French that references Versailles.

Andreas is also on the couch with his partner, Tommy, smiling. There’s a woman across from him, whom I’ve never met, wearing incredibly high wedge heels. The song sounds like a Pete Seeger melody. Andreas claps. He’s also Norwegian. He must know what he’s doing. Then we all clap. Gaird sings: “Oh, I know of a land far away in the north, with a shimmering strand …” Then he bows. “Happy birthday, Andreas!”

His scotch is on the top of the grand piano, and when he reaches for it, he sees me in the hall. “I am still having a love affair with my home country, Willie.” He takes my hand and kisses it. “We have been waiting for you.” He speaks English in a singsong accent that ends on a high note and leads me into the dining room. He and Luke have done a seating chart for dinner—they always do. Tonight they’ve placed me between Andreas and Tommy. I put out my hand and say hello to the woman in heels before I sit. Her name is Clarisse. She says she’s a painter at the Sorbonne. I’m relieved not to have to talk to her during the meal and offer myself up to her explicitly.

Tonight I just want to listen. I talk all day in the classrooms.
Andreas has curly black hair like a mop on his head. He wears clear plastic glasses. One of his eyes is green and the other is pale blue. I try not to watch his eyes while he talks, because then I think too much about whether they’ll ever turn the same color. And they never do. He asks me about the asylum center. For him I’ll answer anything. He’s one of those generous listeners who makes me feel like I’m sharing instead of burdening him. He’s calm and self-composed and absorbs everything I say about Rajiv’s connection to the center and the backlog at the immigration courts.

Luke pours red wine and Gaird brings out a white platter from the kitchen with something he calls
dyresteg
on it. “In English, please, Gaird?” I smile.

“Venison.” Andreas pats my hand. “Roast venison with a goat cheese sauce.”

“It is straight out of my mother’s recipe book” Gaird says. His parents owned a commercial dock in Drammen Harbor in Norway. He left after high school and rarely went back. In 1986, he parachuted over the Torne River into Finland. Last December he invited Luke to sit in the plane’s cockpit and watch him drop out over Lemvig and pass over the Danish fjords. Luke called me when he’d made it safely back to Paris. “I live with a man who likes to open the plane door at ten thousand feet and jump out. People who fly are crazy. Stay away from them.” Then Luke got the flu.

The woman named Clarisse has a sweet, knowing smile and perfect jaw-length black hair. She says, “Thank God for meat. We used to eat venison growing up in Switzerland. Sometimes it was all we had on the farm to get us through winter.”

“This reminds me,” Luke says, “of the food in Innsbruck, where Gaird was foolish enough to try to ski on the full moon.”

“First he had us cross entire glaciers in our sneakers,” Andreas laughs.

“We’d taken a tram halfway up.” Gaird waves his hand in the air dismissively. “Then we began the push through the new snow toward the hut.”

“At one point I was hanging off a small precipice by my right
hand,” Luke says. “Nothing but glacier below me all the way down to my funeral in Innsbruck.”

“I got complacent—that is the word, yes? I took a trail alone through the woods. We were skiing without a guide at night, which was wrong in the first place. The snow was heavier under the trees, and I found myself in a dead man’s gulley. Jesus, I was dumb.” Gaird laughs out loud at himself. It’s not everyone who can stop taking himself so seriously.

“We thought,” Luke says, looking at Andreas and Tommy, “that he was gone, didn’t we? We sat at the big stone fireplace in the hut waiting for him, and I began to have this sick feeling that crept through every bone in my body. I would lose him, and I could never bear that.”

“We had no way to trace him because the new snow kept covering up his tracks,” Tommy says. He’s a tall Malaysian yoga teacher with a gorgeous face. “We were sick with worry. I had the hut manager call for more guides, and all three of them went out an hour later with lanterns.”

“They found me in my boots, snow up to my knees. Only three hundred yards from the hut, but I couldn’t see in the snow. There was no way for me to tell how close I was.” Gaird shakes his head.