You Deserve Nothing (18 page)

I nodded and stood up, pulling my backpack over my shoulder. He held the gate for me and smiled as I walked past. “
Bonne soirée
,” he said, sliding a key into the lock.

I went home. The apartment was warm and smelled of roasted chicken. I was hungry and the warmth of the place, the lit candles in the living room, the Bach cello suite playing on the stereo all made me grateful, in spite of myself, to be home. I’d imagined slipping into my room undetected. But now I listened to that doleful, keening cello, my cheeks warm with cold. The great strength I imagined I might possess upon my return home was lost.

The music ended. I heard a faucet come on in the kitchen, the sound of water falling into the sink. Then it stopped. Footsteps. I breathed slow shallow breaths and watched the kitchen door. She walked out into the living room, her right cheek red and swollen, the beginning of a bruise rising below her eye. There was a spot of dried blood on her lip. Her hair was down around her shoulders. She wore jeans and her long gray turtleneck sweater. She crossed the room. I knew she’d replay the album. It was János Starker. She’d play it when I couldn’t sleep or when I woke from nightmares. “Magic music to slay monsters,” she’d say.

When it began again—those slow, deep chords—she turned and saw me.

“Gilad,” she said, raising a hand to her cheek. Her eyes were dull but she was lovely in spite of herself.

“Hi,” I said. She came closer and seeing her like that—so small in her thick wool socks, sleeves pulled over her hands, her lip bloodied, her eyes dead, there was nothing of her left to hate.

“Is he here?”

She shook her head looking at me.

“Where’d he go?” I whispered.

“Left. He was leaving for Berlin tonight anyway. He’s gone.”

I dropped my bag on the floor, stepped forward, and wrapped my arms around her. When she began to cry I held the back of her head with my hand.

“You’re so cold,” she said. “You’re freezing cold.”

I was quiet and she kept her cheek against my chest. I looked out toward Montmartre and Sacré Coeur white on the hill.

After a while she said, “Are you hungry?”

I followed her into the kitchen. There was a roasted chicken on a cutting board and a bowl of sautéed potatoes on the counter. She carried both to the table. I brought plates and silverware. She sat across from me and poured two glasses of red wine from an open bottle.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Gilad, you have nothing to—”

“I do. I’m sorry I left you like that. I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything. That I didn’t do anything. That I haven’t ever.”

“Gilad, it isn’t for you. It should be me, I’m the one. You’re just . . . ” She began to cry again.

“I should. It
is
for me. I’m just like he is.”

Her expression changed quickly. There was, in an instant, a return of color to her face. “You,” she said, her voice shaking, “are nothing like him. Nothing. Listen to me. It isn’t your fight, it isn’t your job to take care of your parents. Anyway, you can’t expect to find this courage you want so badly. It won’t just
come
all at once. You’ll discover how you’re going to be brave. Your father,” she shook her head, “he’s a bully, Gilad. You’ll never be that. Never. You may be afraid of him but that fear doesn’t make you a
coward
for Christ’s sake. It’s your
father
who’s a coward. Not you, do you understand me?”

I looked up at her, her eyes narrowed. She was angry and it was a relief to see that she was still alive. She was trying so hard to pull herself up, doing her best to be my mother.

“I don’t understand how you could have allowed that. Why you followed him, how someone like you, how you could . . . ”

“End up like this?”

I nodded.

“Someone like me? Life sweeps you up, Gilad. Things happen fast, you forget to pay attention. Or you stop paying attention. You lose that thing.”

“What thing?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know exactly. People used to tell me when I was young that I didn’t know what I was capable of, that my intelligence was limitless, that I could do anything. Which I’ve come to realize is true in both directions. I never imagined that I was capable of this life. It would have seemed impossible to me when I was younger, but God do we surprise ourselves. They never tell you that what we surprise ourselves with may be disappointment. No one ever told me that perhaps one day I’d find myself capable of disappointing my son. But here I am.” She took a sip of wine, looked up, and touched my cheek. “I know you think I was this wild-spirited artist, carefree and full of confidence, but I wasn’t. I was just a kid wandering around in Paris with no idea what to do. I was smart, O.K., fine, but I had no real strength, no real conviction. I was tired and out of money and I thought I’d have to return home and become, what? I don’t know, an art teacher? Christ, I’d have to return home to all those people I swore I’d never be, to lives I despised. Then I met your father and he offered me an easy way to live what seemed like a glamorous life. You can’t imagine the pleasure I felt telling my parents and my friends that I was moving to Africa. I felt cosmopolitan, so accomplished, as if I’d
done
something. I pretended that it had nothing to do with your father. That’s a very limited kind of courage, Gilad, following someone else’s life. Anyway, I didn’t plan to marry him. I was caught up in creating a story, and now, well, that’s what I’ve got, a good story. It’s just a good story.”

I listened and ate my dinner.

“The thing is you have to fight the whole time. You can’t stop. Otherwise you just end up somewhere, bobbing in the middle of a life you never wanted.”

“So what? That’s it? You’ve given up? This is it for you? You’ll stay with a man who’s barely here? And when he is, he beats you?”

She was crying.

“I’m sorry.” I looked away for a moment. “Mom, I just don’t accept that this is it, that you’re going to spend the rest of your life alone in expensive apartments pretending to be happy.”

We sat together in that kitchen for a long time. I told her about the protest, about Hezbollah, about the silent crowd and the metal bar. About Silver.

“At least he said something,” she said.

I shook my head angrily.

“What do you want, Gilad? What do you
expect
of people?”

I looked up at her bruised face, her bloodied lip. There were slight lines around her eyes I hadn’t noticed before. It was late. She was exhausted. She looked back at me as if she wanted, more than anything else, an answer to her question.

* * *

I’d promised myself I’d never do it again but on Monday I took the school bus with all the others. I didn’t have the energy for the cold walk from the
métro
and anyway, that morning I was short on principles. I had Silver first period. I thought about skipping it. About skipping school in general. But then I suppose I was expecting some sort of explanation. How he’d snuck around the back and broken the guy’s neck. Something.

He began class with an uncharacteristic lecture:

“In 1958 the
Front de Libération Nationale
, Algeria’s revolutionary party, attacked and killed four French policemen in Paris. Maurice Papon, then the chief of police in Paris, organized retaliatory raids against the Algerian community throughout the city. He rounded up thousands of Algerians and threw them in, among other places, the Vélodrome d’hiver and the Gymnase Japy, which by the way, is still there, just off boulevard Voltaire if anyone’s interested. Do you know why I mention these two places in particular?”

He was cold that morning, humorless, acid, sarcastic, and unfamiliar. I remember Hala squinting at him, her face revealing a combination of confusion and concern. She wrote quickly in her notebook. Whatever play had been there on Friday, whatever lightness, had gone.

“I mention them because they’d both been used in 1942, sixteen years earlier, during
La Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv
. Anyone have any idea what I’m talking about?” He looked around the room. He was fierce. “Abdul? Any idea? Ring any bells?”

Abdul nodded.

“Yes? Good. So tell us about it, tell us about
La Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv
.”

He kept nodding but shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know.”

“No?” Silver said, “No.”

“I do.” This was Hala who ordinarily would have enjoyed seeing Abdul’s ignorance revealed, but she was upset, and glanced worriedly at Abdul as he went on nodding, tapping his fingers on his notebook. Silver leaned back against his desk. He crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows at her.

She looked at Silver angrily. “
La Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv
. The police arrested thousands of French Jews.”

“Yes. Good.” He went on. “Of those twelve thousand Jews, more than four thousand were children. Pétain used both the Vel’d’Hiv and the Gymnase Japy as detention centers. The Jews were kept there until they were sent to Drancy. And from Drancy they were sent to Auschwitz where most of them died. So now we jump forward to 1958 when, instead of Jews, the French police begin rounding up Algerians, throwing them into the Seine, torturing them, and so on. This continues through 1961, when the FLN resumes its attacks on the French police, eleven of whom are killed in less than two months. As a result, anyone who even looked Algerian was fair game—people were attacked, arrested, drowned, and tortured. Men had their hands tied behind their backs and were thrown into the river for appearing Algerian. Maurice Papon called a curfew and made it illegal for Muslims, not only Algerians, Papon said ‘Muslims,’ to be out in the street between eight-thirty and five-thirty. The FLN called for a peaceful protest and in October of 1961 thirty thousand people marched against the curfew. Throughout the city, the police shot into crowds and flung people into the Seine. Most famously at Pont Saint-Michel, not far from where many of you spend your Saturday nights drinking. Two hundred people were killed. All of them Arab.

“Ten years ago we discover Papon collaborated with the Nazis. He was convicted of ‘complicity in crimes against humanity’ and sentenced to ten years in prison. But that’s another story. Why am I telling you this?”

He looked around the room, daring one of us to respond.

“Why? Because Sartre, living in the midst of all of this, having once been a prisoner of war, spoke out in support of the FLN and an independent Algeria.”

He hesitated for a moment and shook his head. “Never mind his failures during the occupation.”

He went on. Fierce.

“Sartre wrote angry articles against the mistreatment of Algerians and the racism endemic throughout France. He was called a traitor and anti-French. Accused of treason, he received death threats and yet he did what he’d been doing for nearly all of his adult life, he continued to write. Sartre’s apartment was bombed. He kept writing. And then again it was bombed, this time entirely destroyed. But he kept writing anyway.”

No one spoke.

“What’s the point, right? You tell me. What’s the point? Abdul? What’s the point?”

Abdul ran his fingers back and forth across his page. Silver looked around the room.

“Anyone?”

“I suppose, sir,” Colin said looking blankly at the backs of his hands, “the point would be that we should do the same. We should fight against things like that. Corruption and oppression and the like. Despite fear. Do the thing anyway. Would that be right, sir? That if we don’t, sir, it’s all just writing, it’s just theory like you told us, just, like you said, ‘words on a page.’”

He spoke without emotion. Silver looked at him steadily and nodded.

“The thing is, sir, about all this fighting back and standing up, we’d need to have courage, right? We’d need to be able to find the courage to do the fighting. And if we can’t, well, we’re just stuck here watching the world go by, like you told us, watching the world go by, like everyone else, like you said, ‘cowards.’”

“That’s true,” Silver said nodding, his eyes narrowing.

“Would that be like you, sir?” Colin asked finally looking up and meeting Silver’s eyes.

“I’m sorry?”

“Someone like you. A fighter. Someone who, like you said, has the courage,” Colin flipped through his notebook until he found the page and read, “‘To travel the distance between desire and action’ is what you said. That’s what you told us about courage, sir. That’s what separates the brave among us, ‘the ability to travel the distance between desire and action.’ I’ve got it right here. October 27.”

Colin raised his notebook from the desk and held it open for Silver who nodded and said, “Yes, Colin. I think that’s right. But what’s your point here?”

“
My
point, sir? I was answering your question. It was
your
point we were discussing. The point you were making about Sartre and the Algerians and the Jews and all that.”