Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (51 page)

2. Valley of Angels

T
HE SOUND OF
the engines faded, and for a moment, they seemed to be safe. A steel gate that was supposed to close off a patch of wasteground had been left open. The three boys darted through it and into the undergrowth. Scraggy trees had grown up there like squatters in a condemned building. Their thin branches were tangled with creepers, and their roots clung on to old rubbish. It was a little remnant of forest in which three boys could hide from their pursuers.

There had been ten of them at the sports ground playing football, and not just playing: half the boys from Clichy-sous-Bois were technical wizards for the simple reason that there wasn’t much else to do in the holidays apart from wasting time on the PlayStation and hanging about at the
centre commercial
or the Muslim Burger King listening to zouk and American rap on pirated CDs. They knew how to curve the ball in from the corner to the head of a Zidane or a Thierry Henry who would knock it down through the goalkeeper’s fumbling feet. One of them–Bouna’s little brother–had been spotted by a scout and sent for a trial at Le Havre. They were agile and tricky, and these three in particular were fast and had an instinctive understanding of each other. Bouna was black and came from Mauritania; Muhittin was Turkish and a Kurd; Zyed was an Arab from Tunisia, and a kind of legend in the suburb: he was known as ‘Lance-pierre’ (‘Slingshot’) because he could throw a chestnut and hit a window on the sixteenth floor.

They had noticed the dimming of the light before they looked at the time. It was the last week of Ramadan, and none of them had eaten since morning. Their parents were very strict about the six o’clock rule. All ten of them had started to run when they heard the police sirens, but most of them had been caught, and now there were just the three boys, heading back to the monolithic forest of towers where the wind that never stopped blowing filled the entrances with litter.

Once, there had been marble in the foyers, and janitors who took out the rubbish and made sure the lifts were working. A generation later, the towers were like derelict buildings. Water ran down the walls and the corridors stank of urine. The planes coming in to land at Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle always missed them, but the towers were falling apart anyway. Children’s bikes and old furniture that had been pushed onto the balconies made the apartment blocks look ragged, as though they had been eviscerated by a bomb blast. Some of the families who lived there never went out, and since the names on the letterboxes downstairs had been torn away or defaced, it was as if they didn’t exist. Years before, they had fled from persecution by the FLN or the Khmer Rouge. Now, they were terrorized by teenagers: Clichy-sous-Bois had the youngest population in France, and one of the highest rates of unemployment.

The sirens swirled around on the gusty wind, rushing through gaps between buildings, bouncing off walls. A man who worked at the crematorium had seen the boys crossing the building site–wearing hoods and headphones, their Nikes flashing in the gloom–and had telephoned the police, because they might fall into a hole and hurt themselves, or because they must be thinking of stealing something.

As a precaution, none of them carried identity papers (it had taken their families years to get those papers), but a boy without papers was liable to be arrested, and Zyed had been told by his father that if he was picked up by the police for whatever reason, he would be sent back to Tunisia, which would be a fate worse than death.

A policeman or a bourgeois would have found their route irregular and suspicious. Knowing the lie of the land, they were heading for home in a logical straight line from the football pitch–across the building site and the ‘Pama’ (Parc de la Mairie) after Avenue de Sévigné, towards the towers of Le Chêne Pointu and La Vallée des Anges, where Zyed lived. The glare of security lamps darkened the twilight. They ran to the rhythm of the music in their ears. ‘
La FranSSe est une garce…comme une salope il faut la traiter, mec!…Moi je pisse sur Napoléon et leur Général de Gaulle…Putain de flics de fils de pute.
’

The sucking sound of the police sirens came through loud and clear. One of the other boys, crouching behind a burned-out car, had seen the policemen go by. Some of them were in plain clothes, which was not a good sign, and they were carrying flash-ball guns (marketed as ‘the less lethal weapon’–because the bullets were not supposed to penetrate a clothed body). Bouna, Zyed and Muhittin had run like wingers on a break in the closing seconds of the game to the other side of the park, hared across the road and dived into the wooded wasteground. This was, in police parlance, ‘an extremely hilly sector’, and since the policemen came from Livry-Gargan, where only French people lived, they might soon give up and go home.

The wasteground was a no-man’s-land, somewhere on the edge of Clichy-sous-Bois, which itself was nowhere in particular.

N
OW THAT IT HAD
been swallowed by Greater Paris, the north-eastern
banlieue
was further than ever from the boulevards. Many of its inhabitants had never been to Paris and had never seen the Eiffel Tower. Clichy-sous-Bois had no railway station. Its transport links with the centre were tenuous and inconvenient. The area was ‘enclaved’. Clichy wasn’t even on the RER map: it lay somewhere in the out-of-scale empty space between Sevran-Livry and Le Raincy-Villemomble-Montfermeil, which looked like insignificant outposts, even though a quarter of a million people lived there. In
Les Misérables
, when Jean Valjean rescued Cosette from her foster parents at Montfermeil and brought her back to Paris by way of Livry and Bondy, he was able to take a direct service from the centre of the city: a bus for Bondy left from the Rue Sainte-Apolline near the Porte Saint-Martin. But in 2005, Bouna’s father, who was a dustman, like Zyed’s, spent an hour on the RER every morning on his way home from work and then had to wait for the 601 which wandered about for six miles before dropping him off near Notre-Dame-des-Anges.

In any case, a
renoi
or a
rebeu
(a Black or an Arab) from the suburbs was no more likely to tour the sights than a nineteenth-century inhabitant of the Faubourg Saint-Marceau would have gone for a stroll in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. For a boy from the
banlieue
, Paris was one of the big railway stations or the Forum des Halles, where French boys and girls spent thousands of euros on designer clothes and CDs, took drugs and kissed in public, as though they had no brothers to look out for them and didn’t know the meaning of respect.

Paris was also known to be extremely dangerous. On the day he received his first diploma, a Moroccan boy had gone to Paris to visit his aunt. He had been arrested at the Gare de Lyon and beaten up by four policemen in a cell, then released without charge. Everyone had similar tales to tell. The police would stop a boy in the street, force him to take off his jeans and insult his family or what they took to be his religion. Sometimes, they pretended they were going to kill him or grabbed him by the balls and said things that must have been written down somewhere in a police manual. ‘
T’aimes ça, petite pédale, qu’on te les tripote, hein? Allez, vas-y, lá, chiale un coup devant tes potes!
’ (‘You like having them tickled, don’t you, you little poof? Go on, show your mates what a cry-baby you are!’) It happened in the
banlieue
too, but at least in the
banlieue
there was a sense of community, and there were places where the police never went.

This is why they had taken to their heels when they heard the sirens, and why they began to panic when they heard another car pulling up on the other side of the wasteground.

The wasteground sloped down steeply to the south. There were soft mounds of earth where trees had fallen over as though they had been trying to get away. It had once been a plaster quarry, and then a municipal dump. Before that, it had belonged to the Abbey of Clichy. They were standing somewhere above the old abbey cellars, in the magical place that Mme de Sévigné had loved to visit. She had written from there to her daughter in 1672: ‘It is hard for me to see this garden, these alleys, the little bridge, the avenue, the meadow, the forest, the mill and the little view, without thinking of my darling child.’

They hurried through the trees and found the edge of the wasteground marked by a concrete wall. On the other side of the wall was an enclosed area full of metal structures and windowless buildings. Beyond that was the row of little houses with tidy front gardens and security gates along the Rue de l’Abbaye. The neighbourhood dogs were barking, excited by the sirens and the flashing lights. The boys could hear the crackle of the police radios just a few yards away. At least one other car had pulled up, and the wasteground seemed to be surrounded. The only place to go was over the wall. There were notices on the wall–as there were all over the
banlieue
: a skull-andcrossbones, some writing, and a raised black hand that looked like a stencilled graffito. Another sign showed a cartoon face with lightning bolts for hair. They climbed the wall, too scared to worry about the height, and dropped down on the other side.

T
WO RINGS OF CABLES
surround the City of Light–one at a distance of twenty-four kilometres, the other at sixteen kilometres from the centre. Though no one would ever go to see them, these two enormous rings are as important in the history of Paris as the walls and ramparts that mark the stages of the city’s expansion. The outer ring carries 400,000 volts. The inner ring, which reached Clichy-sous-Bois in 1936, carries 225,000 volts. In France, this dual configuration is unique to Paris. If one substation is affected, some of the power can be made up by the next substation along, and in this way, the Paris region, which consumes one-fifth of the electricity used in France, is protected from major power cuts.

The three boys had taken refuge in the Clichy substation, which reduces the incoming voltage to 20,000 volts and feeds it into the distribution network. First, they tried a door in the main building, but the door was locked. Then they climbed a gate into a compound within the enclosed area, and went to stand as far from the gate as possible: if the policemen tried to get in, they could still try to hide behind one of the transformers.

Bouna and Zyed stood on one side of the compound, Muhittin on the other. There was no longer any hope of getting home by six o’clock. The best thing was to wait for the police to go away. Ten minutes passed, then another ten minutes. The policemen sat in their cars, their blue lights flailing across the trees. They were talking to the operator at Livry-Gargan: ‘
Yeah, Livry, we’ve located the two individuals; they’re climbing into the EDF
^*
site…
’ ‘
Repeat end of message
…’ ‘
Yeah, I think they’re going into the EDF site. Better get some back-up so we can surround the area.
’ ‘
OK, got that.
’ At one point, one of the policemen was heard to say, ‘
S’ils rentrent sur le site EDF, je ne donne pas cher de leur peau
’: ‘I don’t fancy their chances (literally: ‘I wouldn’t give much for their skin’) if they go into the EDF site.’

Four cars and eleven policemen had taken up position around the compound. No one called the electricity company or the fire brigade. The boys had entered the substation at about half-past five. At twelve minutes past six, one of the boys–Bouna or Zyed–raised his arms in a gesture of desperation or impatience, hoping for a miracle or trying to work off some nervous energy. It is likely that, by then, the police had left the scene, since no one reported the brilliant flash of light that danced above the walls and disappeared.

3. Immigrant

T
WENTY HOURS BEFORE
, the Minister of the Interior had visited the north-western suburb of Argenteuil after dark. It was a deliberately provocative visit. Some stones were thrown by local youths and bounced off the security guards’ hastily opened umbrellas. A woman called down to the minister from the balcony of a tower block and asked if he was going to do something about the
racaille
(‘scum’). The television camera showed the minister looking up at the balcony. For a moment, he was eclipsed by the shaven head of a boy who was jumping about, trying to get his grinning face on TV. Then the minister jabbed his finger aggressively over his shoulder, and said to the woman on the balcony, ‘You want someone to get rid of those gangs of scum, don’t you?…We’ll get rid of them for you.’

A short man dwarfed by his security officers, he nonetheless looked like a man who was not to be trifled with. He had removed his tie, and he wore an expression that was something between a scowl and a leer–the face of the cowboy vigilante who knows that the bad guy is out of bullets. There was a lunge and swagger about his gestures that made it easy to edit the videos and make him look like a rapper–‘
When I hear de word
banlieue,
I get muh flash-ball out!
’ (The joke was that the minister had ordered the prosecution of a rapper for defamation of the French police.)

These walkabouts in the
banlieue
were important opportunities. The minister’s popularity rating always soared after a visit to the
banlieue
, and he played his role to perfection. He was the decent man who has finally had enough, who stands up to the hooligans and tells them who’s in charge. In June, he had gone to the suburb of La Courneuve, where a child had been shot, and promised that the area would be ‘cleaned up with a
Kärcher
’, which is a high-pressure hose used to blast the filth off paving stones. He made ‘no apology’ for using inflammatory words. ‘The French language is rich. I see no reason why I shouldn’t use its full range.’