Paris Was the Place (7 page)

Then he and my mother began doing what they called the big repairs on their marriage. He read the Bible every day and went to the church on Racino Drive—he knew someone there, a friend of a friend from the desert who was interested in space travel. He was calmer after this, too. But I’ve never been able to decide if the change in Dad was for the worse or the better. My mother forgave him. She told me it was because life is too short. “Life is fleeting, Willow.” This was the first night after he’d come home. I was lying in her bed watching her get undressed, waiting for the quiet thrill of seeing her small pale breasts and her high-waisted underwear. She had such thin legs, like a deer. Flanks. Perfectly shaped. I was from that. From her. She was still my person even though she’d left me for Greece. Even though the passage of time haunted her and drove her away from psychology and sometimes even from us.

Moona likes to smoke cheap American cigarettes—Pall Malls—and I don’t know where she gets them, but I let her do it, even though it makes me nauseous. It’s her nervous thing, and almost everyone else in France smokes, too. We can’t find the ashtray at the start of the third class—the one with the black sketch of the Eiffel Tower on it. All the girls look under the couch and in between the cushions of the chairs. Precy finally locates it on a stack of books on the round ottoman by the window. Then we all take our seats. Moona’s so grateful. She smiles and lights up right away and taps her foot on the floor while she smokes. She’s got on thick brown wool socks under her sari today.

She’s not the only one who seems stressed. It’s been a week since I was last here. Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Rateeka has this new, vacant look, as if the strain of staying in this place has become too much and she’s already left us. Or is she on some new anxiety medication? Zeena has small, red burn marks dotting her forearm. Has she branded herself with a cigarette? Has someone else done this? Have the scars always been there and I just haven’t noticed them until now? Precy can’t stop touching her chapped lips with her thumbs. Esther chews the tips of her hair and hums quietly. Gita fingers the Krishna medallion.

The girls need to be able to tell the story of how they came to France. The judge will ask them this at the appeal hearing. They also need to write it down in a document for the judge called a testimonial. “Heart-wrenching,” Sophie said to me today before class. “Make their stories so sad that there’s not a dry eye in the house and even God’s eyes are crying, yes.”

I stand. “It’s great to see you all again. So good to be back here with you. It’s getting warmer outside.” Then I regret saying this because no one in this class has left the center since I was last here. There’s no going back. I screwed up, but we still have three hours together. “Tonight I want to talk about what the judge will ask you at the hearing and how you will answer. A lot depends on this. So think of one or two sentences in your mind that are the real reason you’re here waiting on a hearing. Tell yourself this story. Then write it down or repeat it to yourself hundreds of times.”

I plug a black tape recorder into the wall above the bookshelf while the girls write in their notebooks. I want them to read their sentences into the machine. Moona stands and walks over to me. “I’m done. I’m ready to tell my story now.”

“Terrific.” I can’t wait for them to hear the sound of their own voices. I press Record. “Try to talk slowly and loudly.”

She leans down close to the tape recorder and doesn’t hesitate: “My uncle had a dark office near the bathroom stalls at his factory in Bombay. Every day he said, ‘You look like a peacock in your sari. Where are your feathers?’ I smiled at him because he was the boss but I was nervous because something was not right with the way he was talking to me. He told me to follow him into his office one night and close the door. It was loud in that place with the machinery and I could not be heard when I yelled out and he was unwrapping my sari and unbuttoning my choli and this is when the new troubles began.”

She finishes. “Oh Moona,” I say. “I’m so glad you’re safe in Paris. I’m so sorry. You said much more than two sentences. You said so much.”

“But I am not being safe here. What is this you are saying?” She pauses on her way back to the couch. “I am not safe here because they
will not let me stay. They will send me back, I am sure of it, because I had a dream in which this is true.”

Gita stands, puts her hand on Moona’s shoulder, and lowers her head. I have no idea what they say, but their lips almost touch while they whisper. When they’re done, Moona wipes the tears on her face and Gita joins me at the tape recorder.

The first thing she does is bend down and whisper, “My name is Gita Kapoor.”

“Gita, you don’t have to get quite so close to the machine. Can you step back and try to speak louder so the machine can hear you?”

She raises her voice, and I can’t ever tell if Truffaut’s watching us on the surveillance cameras in his office or not, but if he is then he should be ashamed. “In my story Manju is taking us to the department store. The big one. I needed a coat because the winter is coming. We all are purchasing the coats. Maa, Pradeep, Morone, and me. Mamie and me practice in the long mirror of the store, tucking the sari up under the coat, but we stop because that is not working. That is the week Manju presses into me where the coats hang in the back hall of the apartment and says that he will tell his wife—my sister, Morone—if I yell. Every morning he unties his pajamas and says the part about telling Morone. So I am not yelling. He is making red dots on my neck where he presses with his fingers and thumbs. He is almost strangling me sometimes. Then he turns back down the hall and I put on my coat that hangs behind me and I go down the stairs to my job at Shalimar in Brady Passage opening the restaurant.”

Gita closes her eyes and pauses. Then she opens them and says, “I am not going back.” This time I know she doesn’t just mean India, but also her family’s apartment in Paris. In a way she’s asking for asylum from both homes—the one she’d grown up in and the one she’d left India for. I’m afraid what she wants is impossible. “I am not going back to Maa or to India,” Gita continues. “If I go back to India, Manju has arranged for me to marry his younger brother Daaruk. He owns many acres of land near Jodhpur. It is all prepared, Willow. Daaruk already had me in the back of Manju’s shop in Jaipur. I don’t want this to happen again.”

“Willie. You can call me Willie. I’m so incredibly sorry for what you’ve been through.”

“But why would I call you the name of a boy,” Gita asks, “when the name your maa gave you is being much more beautiful?” She smiles that big, open smile. “Willow is sounding better.”

A
FTER THE GIRLS
have gone to their bedrooms, I find Sophie in her office writing notes on a pad of white paper as fast as she can, the black phone receiver propped in the folds of her neck. I stare at the corkboard of photographs above her desk—Polaroids of every girl who’s ever come to the center, no matter how short or long a stay. A record of who was here. She swallows a big sip of tea, and it burns her mouth. She rolls her eyes at me and waves her hand in front of her face. Then she says,
“Oui, oui, oui. Merci. Merci beaucoup!”
And hangs up. “Ow. Ow. So hot! So darn hot! More girls coming tonight. Two from Algeria.” She puts her fingers on her lips. “Ow.” Then she looks at me. “How are things, my dear girl?”

“Moona? She tells me she’s been raped by her uncle in a shoe factory in Bombay.”

Sophie shakes her head from side to side. “Many of the girls here have been raped. You have no idea the number caught in human trafficking rings. You have no idea the number of children. It is the most appalling thing of all.” She says Moona’s father had been an Indian soldier in Kashmir for ten years. He later became a clothing importer, buying kurtas and saris directly from wholesalers there. When tensions began rising in 1987, he was stuck on the Pakistani side of the border. There was no work for him there, so he spent most of his time hiding in the house of a distant cousin.

I play Sophie Moona’s tape recording. She closes her eyes and puts her hands together under her chin like she’s praying. Then I play Gita’s recording. Sophie doesn’t seem surprised by this story, either. “A baby was lost. God’s will. Amen.”

“What do you mean, ‘lost’?”

“Gita got pregnant, God save her.” Sophie stacks papers on her
desk. “For a Hindu girl like Gita, having an illegitimate child is grounds to be thrown out of the family. Disgrace. If Manju convinced Morone that Gita seduced him, Gita might have been killed. So God granted Gita safety here. It is a sad thing to be locked in so your own family can’t get you.”

“Oh no.”

“Serious business.” Sophie crosses her arms over her large chest, and the silver bracelets clink on her wrist. “We each asked Gita about the baby—Sylvie, the nurse at the hospital, and Roselle, the government’s visiting nurse here. We had to know, of course. It’s part of our work to track the born and unborn.”

“These girls are so young to be having babies.”

“She’d done a bad job trying to abort.” Sophie takes a purple scarf off the back of her chair and ties her hair up with it. “They told me there was a lot of blood by the time she got to the hospital. We asked Gita, ‘Does the father know about the baby?’ The social worker asked first in English at the hospital. Then in French, Hindi, Urdu, and Farsi—all from a translation chart. I asked her all over again when they got her here. But Gita never answered. She was so slight. She slept the first week. Day and night, as if she hadn’t known sleep in months. Roselle offered her pills to calm her because she thought Gita was in a state of shock. She thought Gita would remain one of the speechless ones—one of the girls here who never speak.”

“But she has so much to say, Sophie.”

“This is not something you need to tell me, my friend.” She smiles. “Don’t ever forget that the girls teach us just as much as we teach them. Now go home, will you?”

On Saturday morning I take Rue Lacépède until I reach Rue de l’Estrapade, then I walk south of the Pantheon past the tip of the Sorbonne, where the blue sky sits above the tallest buildings like a circus tent. I’m meeting Sara on the river. We do this on weekends. Talk and run and I feel intact again. Not the outsider who’s working, always working in my mind on my French. Boulevard St. Michel is filled with places to eat—food stands and small shops selling baguettes and cheese and crêpes. Everywhere crêpes. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of them. I stop at a
crêperie
at the corner of Boulevard St. Germain and Rue St. Jacques and order one with lemon and butter and sugar and eat it while I walk.

Students have infiltrated most of the cafés and ethnic restaurants that dot the labyrinth of tiny streets in the fifth and sixth arrondissements. Passels of girls walk past me on the sidewalk wearing pompom hats and wool scarves and waxed parkas. Two young women in black leather bomber jackets sit at a brass table outside Café de Flore in the cold. The woman with hair to her waist pulls a package of Gauloises out of her coat. The box is shiny and red, like candy, with white lettering. She takes a metal lighter and flips it open with her thumb, then reaches for her friend’s cigarette. She lights her own afterward, and it’s as if they’re eating a meal. They lean back and
inhale and enjoy the cigarettes so much that for a moment it looks like a real pleasure.

Sometimes I find myself trying to list these pleasures in my mind here—maybe too often asking myself if I’m happy, and if I’ll find a way to make this city my home. A waft of their cigarette smoke waters my eyes. I walk down Boulevard St. Germain to Rue Dauphine and cross over the river at the Pont Neuf to Île de la Cité. The Palace of Justice sits several blocks from the tip of the island, gold and massive. Sara is on one of the granite benches to the left of the sidewalk, tying her sneaker. Seeing her pulls me out of my solitude, and I bend and kiss her on the cheek, so grateful that she lives here.

A small group of teenagers lean against the stone railing nearby, listening to a bearded man sing in French. We make our way past them to the start of the bridge, where narrow stairs lead down to a cobblestone pathway. It’s so cold, I can see my breath. There’s a parade of boats moored to the stone embankment down here. The Seine hasn’t frozen completely, but the boats are beset in ice—heavy wooden sailboats tied to hydrant-like plugs embedded in the cement and white tour boats with flat hulls, and a series of small, brightly painted fishing skiffs. Sara’s hair is in a giant ponytail that sticks straight up. I still can’t believe she’s pregnant. Does she need to sit? “Is jogging good for the baby?” I ask. “Is it okay?”

“I’m only five months pregnant, and the baby’s head is the size of a tiny Indian chapati. I am fine, for God’s sake.” So we bend and touch our toes on the cobblestones. No one is down here except a few men tinkering with the boats. We stretch each leg out to the side, one at a time, until I feel the pull in my hamstring. “How are all those beautiful girls in your class at the center?” she asks.

“I wouldn’t call it a class, Sara. It’s a jail. People die in these places.” She, more than almost anyone else, understands an asylum center. Sara’s been inside more refugee camps in more remote places on earth than I can count. Before med school, she’d helped Rajiv do camp assessments for Oxfam. She’s pregnant, and I’m deeply happy for her, and I cannot wait to be the auntie. But maybe I need to become an expert in something, too? Maybe an overnight expert in refugee girls?
“They’ve locked up teenage girls in there.” I speak with a little too much intensity. “Girls who have faces I sometimes can’t read.”

Sara’s kind enough to remain unfazed by my little outburst. She reaches both her arms up in the air and jumps in place. “I’m so sorry for those girls. So sorry that detention centers even exist.” She stretches her arms above her head, then bends back toward the ground and reaches up again. “But you’re good in there, I just know it. You are a walking dictionary, and you can talk straight with the girls about what they need. Now, are you ready to jog?”