Paris Was the Place (2 page)

He finally hands the passport back and points me down the hall to Sophie’s office. By now I’m one of those little children who used to come here every day for
école primaire
. Truffaut has shamed me. For what I don’t know, but it’s not surprising, this feeling of somehow not giving him what he wants. Of not performing correctly. The French enunciate the final syllable of the word “stupid” so it becomes
stupeeede
. This is how Truffaut makes me feel.

Jazz plays from a radio on Sophie’s desk. Reedy clarinets and the voice of one clear trumpet. She puts her hands on my shoulders and gently lowers me down to the wooden stool in her office and I’m grateful for that. For the simple connection. It brings me back to Rue de Metz and the girls. Where are the girls? I can’t wait to meet them. “These are girls. In dangerous positions. They’ve left families. They’ve seen wars. They’ve known bad men. God wish it was not true.” She’s a large woman with smooth, brown skin and brown eyes that look wet and shiny. Her lips are the color of dark plums covered in gloss, and the tiny diamond chip on the left side of her nose doesn’t move when she talks. Truffaut is scary. Hopefully Sophie’s the sane one. There’s always got to be at least one sane person. “I am Egyptian. Okay. So don’t ever think I know what’s going on with the French justice system. But I’ve been here three years, and I don’t mind repeating myself.” She speaks English with this high-pitched French-Egyptian accent, which makes her sound incredibly convincing. Then she does the French thing with her mouth where she makes a “poof” and shrugs like she’s really exasperated. I pretend to listen, but I’m thinking, Don’t let these girls down.

“A few girls already have English. But only French is allowed at
the hearings, and they’re never going to learn enough French by their court dates. So we teach English here. The international language. We get interpreters for the court. There is an organization called OFPRA. You must know about this, yes? The French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons. They run the asylum centers. There are about twelve girls here any given week. Many of them don’t know how old they are.”

“How could they not know?”

“They are girls. They are replaceable. Their parents didn’t mark their birthdays. The French court’s obsession is how the girls got into France in the first place. They want to catch the ones who came illegally. They want to trip them up in a lie or find them with fake papers long before the girls get to an actual hearing with a judge. The court never wants to listen to why the girls are really here. Are you following me okay?”

“But I didn’t think it would be like a jail.” I want to tell her that I might have screwed this up by coming—that I’m not good at incarceration. My heart is still racing. I’m embarrassed. It’s the locks getting to me again. I wish I were good. I wish I were stronger.

“Ha!” Sophie lets out a belly laugh. “We are low-security! You think this is bad. You should see the big detention centers. You only get to stay in here if you’ve come in legally—a tourist visa or a short-time work permit. All my girls are on appeal. Only cases that have good evidence get appeals. But anyone can apply for asylum. It’s a basic human right, okay? When they deport someone, they call it a ‘voluntary return to country of origin,’ but I’ve never seen a girl leave here voluntarily. Sedated, yes. Screaming, yes. But not voluntary. Sometimes the girls are here six months. Sometimes shorter. But 1989 is not a good time to be illegal in France. The far right is on the move. Our friend Le Pen is making it much harder for the girls. Maybe your new president, George Bush, can talk sense into him? Maybe not. But the economy is poor here, and this doesn’t help. Your dollar is too strong. There is resentment. Identity checks. House searches.”

S
IX TEENAGE GIRLS COME
to my class that night. They don’t have to. The classes aren’t mandatory. They walk into the common room with the dropped foam ceiling, and my stomach turns over. It’s been a long time since I haven’t known pretty much how a class will go, and tonight I’ve got no idea. The walls are white cinder block, with two narrow wooden windows at the end of the room that face the street. There’s a nubby olive couch that I pushed closer to the chairs and the bench, and a black-and-orange flowered rug, but it feels bare in here. The plywood shelves are stacked with paperbacks:
Conversational English in Ten Basic Steps
,
Street Maps of Paris
,
Bangladeshi Cooking for the Novice
.

Two of the girls wear saris—fire red and the other green like a fake Arizona lawn. There’s so much more fabric involved in a sari than I knew, and the moving around of the long piece that goes over their shoulders to get it right. Two girls wear stonewashed jeans, and the other two wear head scarves and embroidered tunics over pants. All of them seem quietly against me, which is partly a language deal and partly what always happens on the first day of any class, no matter how much the students want it to go well.

The girls sit very still on the furniture, so it’s hard to tell if some are breathing. They look fragile. Breakable. They don’t make eye contact except with one another. What I try to do is divorce them from their unspoken pact. “Hello,” I say slowly and smile. “Greetings on this cold night in Paris. Welcome to our first workshop. My name is Willow. But everyone calls me Willie. Now could you each please say your own name out loud?”

The girl on my left has a round face and dark pond eyes. She sits rod straight, which is how I can tell she’s paying attention. I’m getting more nervous. This doesn’t usually happen. Usually I start to talk and I’m relieved by the sound of my voice and climb back into my body. But have I said that I don’t have any literacy training? Or that I’m scattered tonight? “Yes. You. Could you start for us?” I turn to the girl on my left again with the big eyes and green sari.

Her hair’s pulled back in a loose braid. She looks at me. “My name? My name will be meaning very little to you, but I will share it
with you anyway in case it is useful. I am Gita Kapoor. I am asking you to help me so that I don’t have to go back home to India.”

I’m flooded by how quickly she’s pushed things forward between us. There’s an urgency now—a kind of chemical imbalance between what small things I can offer the girls and what they probably need. The battleship of a radiator clangs under the windows. Rajiv told me about the stream of caseworkers and lawyers who come in here to help. But I’m alone with the girls tonight. Maybe they have no use here for an American professor schooled in poetry.

The girl in the chair next to Gita says, “Long after the British tore us in two, I lived part of my life in one half of India and part in the other half. I am Moona.” Her face is narrow, and she’s got much wavier hair that Gita’s, pulled back in a bun that puffs up at the front.

The girl next to Moona wears black Elvis Costello glasses and sequinned jeans held up by a belt with metal sprockets. “I am from Liberia. You can call me Precy.”

Then the small girl at the far end of the couch says, “I am Esther.” It’s almost a whisper. “I am from the Congo.”

The other two girls sit close together on the bench. One wears a blue tunic and pants and a red head scarf with glittery green and orange stripes. A black headpiece under the scarf completely covers her hair and neck. She stands up, embarrassed, and leans toward Moona and whispers. Then she looks at me. “Rateeka.”

“She cannot understand your English very well or the Hindi,” Moona says. “I learned Urdu in Kashmir. I will try to speak to them, but I only know a little.”

The other girl on the bench just says, “Zeena,” and waves. Her head scarf is bright purple, and she also has the black piece underneath so it looks like two head scarves, one on top of the other. “Zeena.”

I reach for my bag on the floor and pass out pencils and small spiral notebooks covered in blue flowers that look like snowflakes. The pages inside are lined. “I’d like to start by doing a drawing. I’d like you to draw a picture of your old house with this pencil if you can. Could you do that?”

They stare down at their laps again like they’re waiting for a secret
sign to begin. “Could you try? I think it’ll be good if you can. We’ll use these houses for some practice talking in English. Why don’t we start the drawing? Then maybe Rateeka and Zeena will understand once they see what we’re doing.”

More of the painful silence. No one says a word. A leftover alphabet is stenciled in blue on the wall above the windows, and I stare up at it and try not to panic. How are we going to get through the next hour if no one will draw? Each of the girls looks slightly bored. Their thin arms and legs disappear into the mouths of the upholstered furniture. But I think fear can look disarmingly close to boredom.

Then Gita says, “It is time for the class to begin. We must do what the teacher is asking if we are going to get any help inside this place.” She smiles a perfect row of very small, square top teeth. Her bottom teeth are bigger and crowded to the front.

The class really only starts after Gita speaks, because they listen to her. We all listen to her. “You are asking us to draw our old houses on this paper? The houses we were living in before France?” She puts her hand over her mouth and smiles. “I do not know why you are asking us this when we are here in France. When we are trying to leave our old lives and our old families and our old countries behind.” She looks back down at her lap. Her brown eyes take up half her face, which is a tougher face than I realized. Her body is thin but strong underneath the sari. She has a pendant on a chain that she keeps fingering with her right hand.

“Yes, Gita.” I lean toward her and smile too quickly. “Yes, exactly.” I want to be some kind of recording device that the girls can speak things into. I just want them to talk. Moona says something fast to Gita—in Hindi? Then she sizes me up. “We can probably do that.” She’s more wary than Gita. “We can try what you are asking.”

They all draw in the spiral notebooks—rectangular shapes and thin, narrow buildings and short, round houses made with the outlines of brick. It’s quiet, nervous work. When it seems like everyone’s done, I hold up my drawing of three thin trees in front of a low, one-story house. I can’t draw to save my life, but I’ve shaded in the bay below the house and the small view of the houseboats. “If you can
try to form one sentence in your mind about your house, it would be good. Just one thing you’d like us to know about it. Please try to speak in English if you can.”

Teaching can be a lightning-fast popularity contest with a very small population of voters. Your status rises and plummets in the course of one hour. It can also be like corralling students toward some unseen gate. Today I’m capable of more manipulation than usual. “This is my house in Sausalito, California, where I grew up. We were on the edge of the United States. My mother was a doctor. She worked at a hospital. My father was a mapmaker. He went into the desert to make maps that hung on the walls of my house. This is my family history. That’s what I want to talk about today. Family and history. Together these two words are a huge part of the story you’ll need to tell the judge at your hearing.”

If the girls turn on me now—because of my old age or white skin, or the way I wear my red hair down past my shoulders with bangs that hide my eyes, or how I mispronounce their names—then the class is finished. How will I explain that to Rajiv?

There aren’t any people in my drawing, but I know where my mother would stand, next to the biggest eucalyptus, if she were alive. My beautiful mother. There’s an empty space in the drawing where she should be, and I miss her terribly in a way that’s still mostly buried.

I look over at Gita and wait. I bet she isn’t shy but has learned to bide her time. “Gita, could you do me a favor and go next?” She glances up and back down at her lap. There’s this tension between her wanting to talk and a learned instinct to hold back and see. Then she raises her picture above her head defiantly, with both hands. “This is my house, near Jaipur in India. Two floors. One for the rice and hay. One for sleeping. Every day I was milking the cow and walking to school. I am not going back.”

Tell me more, I want to say. Tell me everything. I’m hard to deny in the classroom. I have an eager face. I nod my head. I care about the details, so give them to me please. What I’d like is an invisible thread to connect me to each of them. It’s not transparency I’m working toward. I can never fully know any of them. But as much as it’s
possible for a student to connect with a teacher—well, I want that inside here.

Moona goes next. She has a long, pointed nose and a small gold stud in each ear. Her picture is of a tall apartment building. “We were living in a slum outside Srinagar in Kashmir and I knew the Top Ten U.K. chart by heart.” She walks in a small circle in front of the couch and points to the drawing in her hand. “But then the troubles were starting and we left because we are Hindu. We got two rooms on the sixth floor on a wide street in the south of Bombay. My father had to stay in Kashmir. This was before I began working at my uncle’s shoe factory.”