“They’ve probably never been allowed inside a school.” He spoons more rice onto his plate. “The waves of foreign girls in France keep growing. African girls and Chinese and Pakistani and Bangladeshi and Indian. Imagine you are ten years old, living on the streets in Lyon or Toulouse or here in Paris.” He points out the window.
“The girls in the center will love you.” Sara looks at me.
“Truly, Willie, you will be like a mother to them.” Luke takes a
sip of water. “Or with your long red hair and cowboy boots, you’ll be some scary apparition.”
“No one knows what to do with teenage girls who can’t go back to their home countries but don’t have French passports.” Rajiv throws his hands in the air and purses his lips. “The French government says that every child in France is redeemable, even the ones who come illegally. But then they lock them up.” He hits the table with his hand, and I blush.
“All for want of a French passport!” Sara says.
“What I still don’t understand,” I say, “is where are these girls’ parents?”
“Their families explode. Their only hope is asylum. They need teachers, Willie.” Rajiv pokes at the red tablecloth with his pointer finger.
“Please stop poking.” I smile.
“These enrichment programs are designed so the girls won’t go mad. There is only so long you can be locked up with no future before you go cracker.” Rajiv takes a bite of saag paneer. “The girls are not criminals. If you live in the ninth or tenth or eleventh or the thirteenth in Paris, then you know these girls.”
I once taught a freshman writing class at the state university in San Diego, and there were high school valedictorians in there and gang members. A boy named Sean wanted to give himself over to my class. I knew this because every morning he’d ask me to define a new word for him. The first time he did this, I stood frozen at my desk. I’d met a soul mate in the shape of a small-boned African-American boy with the beginnings of an Afro.
Words have always attached themselves to me. They get inside the machinery of my head. There was a time in middle school when words appeared regularly and I had to define them. Now they just help connect me to the world.
“ ‘Collusion,’ ” the boy named Sean had said before the rest of the class arrived. “Ms. Pears, can you please define ‘collusion’?”
“ ‘Collusion.’ ” I couldn’t stop smiling at him. “A secret agreement between two or more persons. A conspiracy.”
I eat my eggplant at Ganges, and can’t help think that Sara and Luke and Rajiv have colluded. They keep trying to find ways to get me out of my apartment more. “I can’t wait to continue with the girls. How could I not? I signed up for the semester. Sophie seems incredible, and so do the girls.”
Three years ago, I had the luck to publish a small book about a French poet named Anne-Marie Albiach. It was my grad school dissertation, and what landed me the job at the academy and the lease on my apartment. Today I got a small research grant: two weeks of expenses to travel this summer to a Tibetan outpost in northern India, near the Chinese border, to look for the original manuscripts of an Indian poet named Sarojini Naidu. I smile at Rajiv. “My tongue’s on fire. You’re trying to burn it with this spice. I got the grant from the academy, so will someone please order wine!”
Sara reaches for the bowl of crushed chilies. “The grant! You got the grant!” She waves her hand in the air for the waitress. “We need wine. We need toasts!” She drops a handful of the chilies into the chicken curry. “This is brilliant!”
“I got the grant!” I yell back. “My college has deemed its new American poetry teacher worth sending to the hinterlands of India to write a book about a poet no one in France has even heard of. But it’s a very small grant, Sara.” Now I’m embarrassed. “Tiny. Very, very small. Please don’t yell.”
She raises her glass of water. “To India in July! To Sarojini Naidu!”
“To Willie and the poets of the world!” Luke yells. The way his eyes widen is my mother. Her chiseled face erupting into laughter while she tries to save someone. Save me. Where is my mother? Because my need for her—just to see her face—is elemental now. I crave her. I crave the way she could help me unlock my thoughts.
“You are going to India.” Rajiv smiles. “You will not be sorry. Dharmsala is a place my mother often took me when I was a boy and the monsoons were on. Our mothers would flock to the mountains in droves, and the fathers would stay down in the sweltering heat of Delhi to work.”
“I’m going to India.” It feels more real to hear Rajiv talk about his
childhood there. We pour the white wine and toast the grant. Then we toast the baby in Sara’s belly, and the new movie Luke’s working on. These people are my family. My mother’s dead (my beautiful, willful mother), and my father drives like a madman to the desert and lives for months in a tent, so it’s like he doesn’t exist. It’s late when we walk out to the sidewalk. I hug each of them good night and kiss their warm faces, feeling so grateful. Then I take Luke’s arm while he flags me a cab. When I’m with my brother, my mother is sometimes with us too, and tonight it keeps working. So often the world isn’t funny. It’s sad and I’m not sure I ever know how to show real empathy. But then there’s my brother. And the world becomes funny again. He loved my mother so much—more perfectly than me. When I long for her, like I do tonight, in a way that feels bottomless, Luke stops me from drowning. Because he’s wearing his beaver hat again and laughing.
I live on the fringe of the Latin Quarter, on a quiet, leafy street called Rue de la Clef peopled with Sorbonne students and young professionals and artists and would-be artists. The best way for me to get to the girls at the asylum center on Rue de Metz is to take the metro from Place Monge. It’s the start of February, and a huge fog from the warm rains has tamped down the city. I never remember to bring an umbrella, and I walk north on Rue de la Clef in the steady drizzle. Walking is how I try to become more attached to these streets.
There’s something unsettling about what’s underneath Paris—tombs and catacombs and resting places of the great artists and politicians. I’ve heard the dirt was too soft when they built the first metro lines. The engineers had to stage tunnels as close to the surface as possible. Part of my dread comes from a fear that the dead are trapped too close to us while we wait in our trains down below. That they can hear us but we can’t hear them, and they want to get out.
The numbering system of the neighborhoods goes from one to twenty on the map, following the snail’s spiral shell, with the first arrondissement the start. I’ve thought a lot about this map. It’s not like any other one I’ve studied. What a snail does is secrete its own shell, which hardens around it in deliberately ridged coils. This is what Paris seems to have done, spiraling out from the interior banks of the
Seine—the conical shrubbery of the Tuileries, with its immaculate gardens, leading to the Louvre on one side and the medieval Latin Quarter on the other, and onward and outward, winding and wending its way to the Bois de Boulogne and the farthest suburbs.
I think the twelfth arrondissement, in the southeast of the city, with Porte de Bercy on the surging Seine, would be the muscular foot of the snail. And the sixteenth, with its shining Arc de Triomphe and the bump at Parc des Princes near Porte de St. Cloud, would be the opening for the snail’s tentacles and head. My instinct is for the linear—I can’t undo what my father has taught me—and for the numbers of the neighborhoods to descend or ascend in order left to right or north to south. But this doesn’t happen in Paris. To get to Rue de Metz, in the tenth, today, for example, I’ll take a train that will pass me through the fourth arrondissement and finally into the first.
Each neighborhood has its own flavors—village within a village—but the more I walk, the more borders overlap and blur. Today it would take too long to get to the asylum center on foot. So I turn left on tiny Rue Dolomieu to Place Monge, where the metro station sits like an ancient crypt. The sign is Art Deco style, the word
METRO
painted in bright red letters on a piece of antique-looking glass. On either side of the sign, an arched doorway carved out of muzzy, moss-covered fieldstone leads to the underground.
It’s ten minutes on the No. 7 to Châtelet, where I switch to the No. 4 to Strasbourg–St. Denis. I’ve got poetry planned for the second class with the girls tonight—pieces of poems by the Indian poets Tagore and Naidu. When the train car empties, the crowd carries me toward the dank stairwell in the far corner. I’m late, but in the crush of people, I can’t get ahead—I move stride for stride behind a thin woman so close in front of me I could hold on to the nylon belt of her raincoat. Each time she places one of her high heels down it makes a pleasing, grinding sound on the concrete. How are the girls? What can I teach them that will help? How can I reach them? It’s been a week. Too long for any rhythm in the classroom.
Our herd is almost to the top when someone taps me on the shoulder.
Then a man’s voice says,
“Excusez-moi, madame.”
He touches me on the arm and I smile. He thinks I’m French, and I’m not immune to this kind of fantasy. He has a shiny, harmless face in wire-rimmed glasses under the fluorescent lights. But he’s unbuttoned his pants. I repeat this to myself. They hang low in front so I can see the small wiry crop of dark hair and the sharp surprise of his penis. He tries to rub himself against the side of my coat. It’s so disgusting. I push past the woman in heels out to the street. I’m furious at myself! Why couldn’t I think of one single word in French to yell? I run then, which people don’t ever seem to do in Paris, even if they’re late.
Gita and Moona are already on the couch when I make it, breathless, to the center. They smile at me shyly while I take off my coat, wet with rain, heavy like a blanket. “Girls! You’re more on time than I am. It’s so good to see you!” They just open their notebooks and stare at the blank pages. Then the others walk in and find seats. It’s so quiet in here it’s like we’ve never met. I can hear the buzz saw of motorbike engines and Vespas outside. The ceiling lights can’t cut through the gray of the afternoon rain. It will take time to find our rhythm again.
I stand up from the bench and read the Tagore: “ ‘When the heart is hard and parched up, come upon me with a shower of mercy. When grace is lost from life, come with a burst of song.’ ” Then I asked, “How are your hearts today?”
Moona laughs. “Can you read it again? I think my heart is like his heart. Hard.”
“ ‘When the heart is hard and parched up,’ ” I repeat, “ ‘come upon me.’ ”
“Time away from your family does this to your heart,” Moona says. “It has been three years since I saw my maa.”
“It is not natural,” Gita says. “To live apart like this. At India we slept together. My sister and me.”
Precy nods. “I keep thinking,” she says. “That if I can get legal, then I can go back and get my brothers and sisters. My mother and father. It’s what I think about every day. I can bring them here. But first I have to get legal.”
“Let’s write. It’s good to get ideas down on paper. Do you have the pencils? Let’s write to the person you most want to talk to in your family. What would you say?”
Moona laughs again. “There is so much. I could start with winter. I could tell my father that it is too cold in France for his goats and honey mangoes.” Then she speaks in fast Urdu for Rateeka and Zeena, who nod but don’t write. I’m beginning to think that they can’t write. Esther looks dazed. Precy chews on her pencil eraser.
“Let’s go for five minutes. Say what’s in your heart. Say the things you most want to say.” Then I start writing too, because it helps when everyone’s taking a small risk together. What kind of deranged creep pulls his pants down in the metro station? I write a list of English curses and French expletives that I wish I’d yelled at him. Then I feel better.
“Do we have to read these?” Esther asks.
I smile because I’m so glad she’s speaking. “Even just your opening line would be good. It’s great for you to hear your voice out loud before the hearing. We’ve got to get you comfortable with your story. I’ll go first and make this easier. Because you’ll see that I’m no poet.”
“You didn’t ask us to write poetry, did you?” Precy looks worried. “You said it was a letter.”
“A letter. You’re right. We’ve written letters tonight. Which sometimes sound like poems and sometimes don’t. Here is mine: ‘Dear Mom, I’m in France, teaching six girls how to tell the story of their lives. I’m so lucky to meet them. I wish you could know them, too.’ ” When I finish, my hand shakes. I’m not able to acknowledge it—this sadness for my mother that’s so big sometimes it scares me.
“You wrote that for us, to make us feel better.” Gita smiles. “Where is your mother? Why haven’t you seen her?”
“My mother died last year. And it’s okay. I’m okay. She was a funny woman. Go ahead, Gita. You read next.”
“We are sorry.” Gita looks at the other girls, who are all staring at me with wide eyes. “We are all so sorry for your loss, and you have to know that the gods wanted it this way. Vishnu will make peace for your mother.”
“Thank you, Gita.” I’ve messed things up. On the top of the list of what not to do when you’re the teacher of emotionally vulnerable teenage girls locked in an asylum center in France is to talk about your dead mother. Why can’t I just be quiet? I’ve surprised myself by offering up my mother. Sometimes I can wait. Days. Weeks. Months. Before I leverage something personal. But I want them to trust me completely. For that to happen I have to surrender something that matters to me.
“Really, it’s okay.” I try not to sound forced. “You go. We’re listening.”
Gita stands and adjusts the skirt of her sari. “Dear Pradeep. He is my brother. Dear Pradeep, I am still in France but you cannot know where. It is better for you with me gone. But you must go to school for me.”
Precy says, “In my town we speak Bandi. I wrote to my father. I said thank you for also teaching me queen’s English. It is why I have gotten this far.”