The Radiant City (9 page)

It is four o’clock in the morning now, and the garbagemen yell to each other, banging the large green bins against the side of the truck to empty them. Their yellow swirling lights send strange patterns across the walls. In her restless sleep, Saida rolls over onto her back and the sheet tangles around her crossed ankles.

She does not understand it is only the bedclothes that have imprisoned her and three beads of sweat appear on the top of her lip. She tries to kick her feet, but she cannot move them. She tries to reach down and see why she cannot move her feet, but her hands will not move. She hears her heart in her ears, loud with blood. With enormous effort she opens her eyes and it is then that she sees him. A figure in grey overalls, smeared in gas station grease. Something on his head. A hood? In a rush like electricity through her limbs she knows who it is. It is Anatole Mariani. It is her husband. Her ex-husband.

But it cannot be him. He is in jail. But it is him.
How did he get in?!?
She opens her mouth to scream, but no sound comes out. Her panic increases. She feels as though she is flailing, but her arms will not move, her legs will not move. She does not know if he has tied her down, because she cannot turn her head to look. She thinks perhaps he has drugged her.

Anatole has something in his hand. Saida does not need for him to step into the light slanting through the blinds to know what it is. She knows hot oil, hot enough nearly to be burning, by the metallic smell. Knows the smell of scorched iron from the pot, knows the other smell, the sick smell of melting skin. She hears his whispers in her head.
Arab garbage. I thought I was marrying a good girl, not a useless bitch like you. You’re the reason I don’t get ahead. I’m tainted by you.
In her head she screams for her father, for her brother, for her son. Joseph
!
She screams silently, willing him to hear her even if she makes no sound, Joseph! Run! Run! Run!

How did he get past Joseph without waking him? What has he done to Joseph? Anatole steps closer, so slowly, he is torturing her. He smiles, his thin pale tongue rubbing against his top teeth, as though she is something he will enjoy eating, once she is properly cooked. He stands over her, lifts the pot, his face is blackness, shiny, empty. She hopes she will die this time, and quickly.

“
Maman! Maman!
Wake up. You’re dreaming! You’re dreaming again."

The sound coming from her throat is like that of an animal, bellowing with the lion at its throat. Strangled. Wordless. As though her throat had been cut. Joseph shakes her and then takes her in his arms and pushes her hair back from her sweaty forehead. Slowly she comes to herself and wraps her arms around her son.

“It’s okay,” she says, “I’m all right.”

“Wake up, wake up,” he murmurs. “Wake up.”

Their tears are impossible to separate. Rain from the same sky, making the flames of her terror sizzle and hiss and steam, until they are nothing but grey ash.

It
is Saturday and Matthew lies on his bed, staring up at the midday ceiling. The dull dishwater light shows up the cracks in the paint. Last night he dreamed about women. Ghost women with long fingers and pale, bruised legs. Friendly. He dreamed of Kate, and now he aches for her, knowing it is irrational. Something about holding each other. Forgiving each other. Tears. He presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and searches for an argument compelling enough to make him get out of bed. Here he is, come to the City of Light and what does he do? Skulks in the shadows of basement bars with ex-mercenaries, with broken down ex-cops, with hookers. Well, at least tonight he’ll be going to dinner at Anthony’s house. A change of scene from the Bok-Bok, right?
Only sort of
.

He moans. Sits up.
Enough. Get out of bed. He smells sour
. The bed smells sour.
Take a shower. Do a wash
. The idea of lugging his laundry to the launderette on rue de Clichy is enough to make him roll over and go back to sleep.
Agreed, then. No laundry
. But there must be something. There must be a reason to get out of bed.

You could write something
. He moans again, louder this time. Brent leaves messages every second day. He should write something. Why not write anything and send it to him? Shut him up at least?

He drags himself to the bathroom, pisses loudly. Brushes his teeth and talks himself into taking a shower. The small shower is built into one of those fantastic French jokes, the sitz bath: a thigh-high square tub just large enough for one dainty Frenchmen to squat in, with a shelf for sitting, if one could figure out where to put one’s legs. For Matthew, at his height, it is impossible. From the ceiling hangs a chrome ring with a white plastic curtain around it and a jerry-rigged plastic hose attached to the faucet below. At least there’s lots of hot water. He strips off his underpants and steps in. The water pricks at his skin and the steam softens the air. He looks down at his hard-on. Soaps up his hand. He begins to believe there may yet be hope for the day.

Half an hour later, coffee in hand, he sits as his desk. He picks up a pen. Begin where today? Try Srebrenica. Try Herzegovina. But his mind is on women. Ghost women. And as he tries to write they haunt him . . .

There was a girl in Herzegovina. No more than sixteen or seventeen. She had a small wound on the side of her temple. So small it was astonishing to think it had killed her. By then I’d seen bodies ripped up so many times it felt as though that was the way death should be. But this small spot, so little blood, seemed impossible. Her mother or grandmother (ages were hard to guess) knelt beside her, doubled-over with arthritis, her thin grey strings of hair pulled up in an untidy knot, wearing a man’s jacket and several layers of skirts. The old woman touched the girl’s arm over and over again, as though trying to wake her. That girl was so beautiful. Death had made her beautiful. Pale and peaceful, completely lovely. Drained of all tension, all fear. So unspeakably frail and still and undefended. I wanted to touch her but when I put my hand out, the old woman grabbed me and bit the fleshy part beneath my thumb until she drew blood and I hit her on the back of her head, hard enough to make her let go. I walked away, nursing my hand, weeping for this girl, whom I had never seen alive, whom I loved and was dead. For days I dreamed of her and for weeks could not get her image out of my mind. I think she lives there still.

Later, when I came back to Kate from that time away, there was a moment when she lay sleeping on the couch. We had gone for a walk that afternoon, to see the cherry blossoms, pink and white, like a young girl’s skin, the colour of a nipple, of a lip, of an earlobe. A man bumped into Kate on the sidewalk, and I was instantly enraged, pushing the man, challenging him, stupefied by the look of astonishment on his face as he apologized and said it was an accident. Kate stepped in front of me and made me look at her, her hands on the sides of my face, smiling as though smiles were a charm against bullies. “I’m fine,” she said. “Look, no harm, no harm.” And I saw that this was true and held out my hand to the man to shake, to say I was sorry, but the man scuttled away, muttering. We went home, Kate and I, and made love and I lost myself for a moment in her butterscotch skin. Then she’d dozed off with a book on her stomach, and her head tilted toward the sun coming in the window. It made her face look pale, too pale, pale as a phantom in the afternoon light. It was sudden, the way I couldn’t stand to look at her and how I had to get out of the apartment right then, immediately, or I would choke. When I returned, drunk as Davy’s sow, in the wee smalls, Kate was mad as hell and how could I explain?

Sack of skulls.

Matthew sits back, his fingers cramped around the plastic shaft of the ballpoint pen
. Don’t read it back; don’t read it back.
He opens the drawer, grabs an envelope, scribbles a note to Brent and stuffs it, and the pages he’s just written, inside. Licks the seal. Flattens it with a pound of his fist.
Let’s see what you make of that
. Matthew laughs out loud, addresses the envelope, and then sticks a stamp on the letter and grabs his jacket. He will mail the damn thing. He will. Still laughing, he heads for the door.

After mailing his pages to Brent, Matthew strolls back to his apartment, but realizes he does not want to go in. He stands at the heavy wooden door with his hands in his pockets. He has nowhere else to go, at least not until tonight and dinner at Anthony’s. He wonders how this can be. How can a person live in Paris and have nowhere to go?

On previous visits to Paris over the years he had always been contemptuous of a certain type of expatriate and how the city supported their illusions. All the beachcombers, and soon-to-be novelists, painters, dancers, jazz musicians. They teach English or work as babysitters or moving men or at some other bad-paying job, or else they live off their trust funds or savings or, yes, disability checks, and don’t actually do any writing, painting, dancing, whatever. They sit in cafés and smoke Gitanes and they bolster up each other’s lies and they tell each other they are all Hemingways, or Josephine Bakers, or Picassos. Back in some place like New York, say, they would have to make it quick or be chewed up and spat out in record time and back to a bus to Minnesota and the Mama’s
lutefisk.
But not here. Here they slink along café to café. Now, he fears he is becoming one of them.

“Mr. Matthew!” The teenager from Chez Elias, stands in the doorway of the café. He is dressed like any American teenager: baggy black track pants slung low on his hips, oversized jean jacket hanging almost to his knees. Trainers. He fills up the doorway. Matthew considers that if it were not for the ear-to-ear grin he would be a pretty intimidating kid, the kind old French ladies move away from in the metro, clutching their pocketbooks. That lower lip is strange. When Matthew first met Joseph he thought someone had given him a swollen lip, but it is clearly some sort of birth defect, as though someone has pulled down that side of flesh, turning it slightly inside out.

“Hello! My uncle says hello,” he calls.

“Hello. It’s Joseph, right?”

“Yes. Joseph. You busy?”

“Nope.”

“Then you come. Have coffee.”

Another café, another coffee
. Matthew shrugs. “Sure,” he says.

Ramzi greets him warmly and pulls out a chair at a table where the old man already sits.

“Sit with us. Joseph, you get the coffee.”

Saida is behind the counter. She looks tired, with hollows under her eyes. Smiling at Matthew, she adjusts the scarf around her neck, and Matthew senses that this hiding of her scars is an automatic gesture. He has noticed that when she is not using her right hand, which is also badly scarred, she keeps it behind her back. When Saida smiles, the brightness of her teeth makes her skin look darker and the smudges under her eyes more pronounced. She says something to Joseph and the boy comes back with a tray of tiny cups, a pot of Turkish coffee, a plate of dates, oranges and baklava.

Joseph sits and pours the coffee. Matthew looks at these three generations of men and can’t help but wonder what it would be like to sit like this, with men of his own blood, of his own stories. To be known in that way. Where you come from. Who your people are. I know my people, he thinks, and I am not proud.

They ask him how he is and he says he is fine. They talk about the weather and about the
sans-papiers
and the recent strike by public employees, which brought the country to a near-halt for one day, closing schools and grounding flights. Saida does not enter the conversation, but watches them and serves the occasional customer, wrapping preserved lemons in jars, packages of haloumi cheese, olives and pita. Matthew sips the coffee, rich and smoky, alive on his tongue after the sweetness of the date, the sparkle of the orange.

Joseph asks him questions about being a reporter, and at first he answers in monosyllables, not wanting to bring the dark memories into this place. Then he looks at the boy, who runs his hand self-consciously over his shaved head, his heavy eyebrows raised in eagerness, a smile of encouragement on that bruised-looking mouth—and Matthew sees himself as he never was, but would like to think he might have been: hopeful for the world, for tales of adventure, for someone to open a hand and show him a treasure from a far-off place. He sees how Joseph tries to be tough, dressing like that, with the swagger and the pout, but how he is, after all, just a boy champing at the bit and restless in this, the world of his family. Matthew finds he does not want to disappoint him and so he tells a tale or two—harmless stories of exotic places—the Khyber Pass, Bejing, New Guinea, Borneo. He tells of eating slugs with the Australian Aborigines, and snake meat in China. He tells of entering the bowl of a Hawaiian volcano with a film crew from
National Geographic
and of travelling with storm-chasers across the dust bowl of America on the trail of tornadoes big as mountains, moving at the speed of freight trains.

Matthew discovers he likes telling tales to Joseph, and when he looks at his watch he is surprised to find three hours have passed.