Chapter 6
HANDS AND FEET
On my hobnailed shoes, I have crossed
The world and its misery . . .
—FÉLIX LECLERC, “MOI, MES SOULIERS”
I HAVE BEEN WATCHING an old woman who lives near the apartment I rent on the edge of Le Chambon. She is in her seventies, and is wiry and strong like a bird, and she works outside much of the day. In her leggings and knit cap, I see her dragging fallen tree limbs, or wrestling with a clothesline, or fishing something out of a small tractor. She has a face that is as fresh as the outdoor air, and big bobbly plastic glasses and long gray hair pulled back in a bun. She gives kisses hello, holding your face up close to hers so that you can feel the soft fuzz of her cheek.
I’ve heard that this woman might have some stories to tell me about her family during war. Up to this point, I have spoken with only a small group of storytellers here, practiced in recounting tales of adoptive baby sisters, and next-door German soldiers, and running around the forest as fighters—stories sure to enchant busloads of schoolchildren or tourists. Here and there I’ve been attempting to find others who might be willing to share something new. But true to the Plateau’s reputation for general silence on these matters, my efforts have gone mostly nowhere.
A local historian agreed to talk with me after an innkeeper I knew assured him that my research was really quite different from the usual fare. In the dim light of his stone home, deep in a forest not far from Le Chambon, he told me about the region’s history of farming and industrialization, its habits of interdependence and secrecy, the varieties of resistance during the war: nonviolent, violent; religious, a-religious. Eventually, I found the courage to ask him if there were any stories in his own family about sheltering strangers.
“Yes, there were,” he said, and then added, after a pause: “In this very house.” I looked toward the stone hearth beyond the kitchen, the cozy fire giving its glow into the dark. Then he said, “But these were my grandmother’s stories, and she isn’t here to tell them.” I waited a little in the quiet that followed to see if he’d say more, but he didn’t.
There are a few names that are very common here, and I’d seen them in books about the Plateau, in the graveyards, on the walls of the Righteous at the Holocaust Museum. But each time I’ve encountered a person who bears such a name, they’ve deflected, or denied any connection to themselves or their parents or grandparents. Not my stories. Not us. Not ours.
I know I have to earn their trust. I know these things take time. Still, I keep wishing for the vivid pictures—the spontaneous ones, the palpable ones, the ones it seems you might be able to reach out and touch. So when I heard that the old woman who lives near me might have stories, I girded myself, walked over to her house, and knocked.
She opened her door with a big bright smile. But when she heard why I had come, her face fell.
“During the war,” she said, after a pause, “when I was a girl, people showed up at our door at night, covered with blood. I was very afraid, and my father was very brave. And that is all I will say. No more.”
I left her threshold, mortified. Ashamed. I couldn’t bear the way her beautiful face fell, because of me. I went to see her again a few hours later, and apologized. She was so kind. She patted my hand and said not to worry; I did the right thing not to press her.
Over the years, in Russia, faces have fallen so many times, in front of my face. . . . Over the dead father, the dead love, the beaten mother, the raped girl, the botched abortion, the child ravaged by war or drink or prison or anything else. The faces have fallen over the hideous war in Chechnya, the murders, the arrests, the bribes, the lostness, the wishes for speedy, merciful death. So many tears.
And so now I realize, I just cannot bear to make any old woman’s face fall because of my questions, ever again. If people want to tell me their stories, they can; but I won’t ask. I can’t. If the past wants me, it is going to have to come and find me itself.
So, here on the Plateau, silence has won again. But it has given me a parting gift: the image of a dark night, a brave man, a door, several bloody migrant strangers. And a child—her fingers folded around a wall—looking on. A decision to be made.
I will watch my neighbor, as her eyes meet the winds of the Plateau. I will see what she and her kindred spirits say, without words.
It will never again be late 1942 in the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon. Daniel Trocmé won’t be climbing up and down and up and down and up the road to Les Grillons, making shoes from old tires at night. The Little Crickets won’t be exploring the forest, debating whether a girl should follow her beloved to Tonkin. My neighbor will never again be a little girl, standing behind her brave father at their threshold at night. That door called 1942 is closed forever.
But then I learn that there are asylum seekers living on the Plateau today.
This might not seem like such a striking thing out in the regular world. After all, there are signs of migrating people in need everywhere these days. But when I tell my social science friends back home about it, their jaws all drop. Yes, strangers have been sheltered on the Plateau periodically for hundreds of years. Data point, data point, data point, data point. Because of that, I can already understand something about how those practices have persisted over time. But this shiny new data point means that the dimensions of the knowable explode open. It’s all up close now, all vivid in time and space. I don’t have to imagine, or suppose, or draw causal lines like castles in the air. I can watch and see. I can accept or refute things, thus. It makes all the difference.
It is Caroline who first tells me about the asylum seekers. Caroline grew up in Montfaucon, on the far edge of the Plateau, and has taught English at the Cévenol School for many years. She has a mane of long brown hair and wears hoop earrings and has a cackle of an infectious laugh; she is the kind of person who breaks into song for the slightest reason; who kisses you on the cheeks, squeakily; who can’t take more than two paces in a grocery store before another person wants to talk with her. At a family dinner at her home in nearby Les Tavas, she tells me about the local branch of the national organization called Centre d’Accueil pour Demandeurs d’Asile, or CADA. Welcome center for asylum seekers. The asylum seekers who come to CADA are from all over the world. They live in a residence compound not far from the center of Le Chambon, about fifty to a hundred people in all, at any given time. The parents in the asylum-seeking families spend months filling out their paperwork, waiting to learn if they will be given refugee status or sent back to their home country. And, in the meantime, their children go to local schools, including—for the strongest students—the Cévenol School itself. In fact, Caroline says that Sandrine is facilitating some kind of volunteer program between Cévenol students and CADA children. They do art projects and schoolwork together. For this program, Sandrine is working with a woman named Amélie, one of the CADA staff.
You should probably get to know Amélie, Caroline says to me, as our evening winds down.
And now, this is what I say:
The Second World War is over. I know that most everyone who remembers the war on the Plateau is gone from this world. And so, they are silent. And the few living who remember it are silent, too.
But knowledge of the asylum seekers living in the Plateau today lets me draw a brand-new circle in my head, and I can—and I do—ask the question: Who does what with whom? And with that question I can now prepare myself—with new faces and new stories and new conditions, and new doors, and new countries and new children—to see how strangers are taken in here.
I am a blind person bumping up against the world in the dark. And the world answers.
CENTRES D’ACCUEIL POUR DEMANDEURS D’ASILE were first created in France in 1973 to house the waves of refugees who arrived from Chile after Pinochet’s coup d’état. Soon, the CADAs were also serving the so-called boat people of Vietnam and elsewhere. In the 1990s and 2000s, new streams of asylum seekers began arriving to France from sub-Saharan Africa, from Eastern Europe, some Middle Eastern countries, and from the territory of the former Soviet Union. Today there are more than three hundred CADAs in France—spread among the many départements—serving seekers of asylum from all over the world. Their key function is to make the rather arduous application for asylum more rational and more humane. There are tens of thousands of applicants per year in France, after all. If people find their way to a CADA, they are roughly twice as likely to be granted asylum, and to be allowed to stay in France, away from the risk of death back home.
There has been a CADA right here on the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon since the year 2000. Monsieur M—, the director of the local CADA since its founding, had been working at a similar center down in Saint-Étienne, one with a thousand beds and barracks-style living with shared kitchens and no real privacy. Here on the Plateau, he aimed to create something smaller and more dignified, far from the chaos of the city. Monsieur M— now works with a staff of around ten: with social workers, like Amélie, and educators, and legal and administrative assistants. And it has been going pretty well, all in all. In many places, you’d see foreigners treated with fear and suspicion. Here, it’s different; there are lots of local volunteers who teach French or offer music programs or art programs. There are even a couple of independent organizations that support the families if they are refused refugee status.
Sixty-three residents from thirteen families now live at the CADA. They come from Congo, Rwanda, Angola, Guinea, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Chechnya. Many had long and perilous journeys to get here, having been crammed into cars or trucks, having spent weeks or months sleeping on the streets or in dirty hotels. Most arrived utterly traumatized, some without speaking a single word of French. At this CADA, each family gets its own apartment, with a door and a lock, and a key, since Monsieur M— made a point of creating a place of privacy for the families. Asylum seekers are permitted to live here for the months and sometimes years it takes to put together their legal case for asylum. They also get monthly allowances for food, since they’re not allowed to work. But you never know who will be awarded asylum and who won’t. It can be a new kind of torture, the waiting.
Now, after talking with Monsieur M— on a couple of different occasions about the mission of the CADA, after meeting his staff, and explaining my own work to the group of them, I have been invited to go with Amélie to the CADA residence to meet a family of asylum seekers. This family comes from Armenia. I have never been to Armenia, but I’ve lived on the northern side of the Caucasus mountain range that Armenia is wedged to the south of. And I know something about the bloody—and some would say senseless—war that has been waged between Armenia and its neighbor, Azerbaijan, since before the collapse of the Soviet Union. As for the details, however, I know only that Amélie has been helping the family with paperwork for many months now, an especially complex process for people whose first language is not French. She hopes my knowledge of Russian will prove useful.
I’VE BROUGHT A BOX of cookies along, as an offering to the family.
“Is that weird?” I ask Amélie, before anyone answers the door.
Amélie has dark, smart eyes and short golden hair, parted into a flop on one side. She is wearing a leather jacket and a big scarf.
She gives me a wry smile. “I think you’ll find there will be plenty to eat,” she says.
On the second ring, a middle-aged man with brownish skin and grayish stubble opens the door. Standing just behind him is a woman in her forties or so, with big, expressive eyes and long, luxurious dyed-black hair.
At the sight of Amélie, their faces open up.
AMÉLIE! Amélie, Amélie!
At the secondary sight of me there is a little one-two, up-and-down glance. Then back to Amélie.
Come in, come in! No, no, no!! Keep your shoes on! Keep them on!
She is Lalik, and he is Arat.
Somewhere between thirty and forty thousand years ago, human beings began stenciling outlines of their hands onto cave walls in Europe, East Asia, and Indonesia. Using pigments of red, or rust-orange, or violet, they created permanent shadows of hands of different sizes: of both men and women; some with fingers splayed; some missing a digit. Some of the hands were clustered together in compositions, perhaps, of an entire family or residential group, or clan.
I am here, says the hand.
We are here, say the hands.
We are here, many of us—all our fingers pointed up, like flowers toward a hidden sun—says the group of hands.
One of the earliest examples of hand stencils is found in the Chauvet Cave, just two hours of snaky roads south of the Plateau Vivarais-Lignon, deep into the Rhône Valley of the Ardèche. The hands in the Chauvet Cave, discovered some twenty years ago, are special for many reasons—not least because they were found together with a few of the most astonishing and earliest examples of cave art the world has ever seen. By the dappled light of fire or lamp, spectacular images of horses, deer, and bears leap off the walls. But there are also cave lions among the vivid beasts, and panthers, and rhinoceroses. It’s Africa on the Rhône, deep in the darkest recesses of the Chauvet Cave.
Thirty thousand years is a long time; it stretches into our evolutionary history. Right when those cavemen in the Ardèche were marking their existence in silhouettes of violet and red and rust, Neanderthals—another branch of our genus, Homo—were also living in France. In a different cave of the Ardèche, called Moula-Guercy, there is evidence of how Neanderthals—with their big brains and heavy brows and brawny frames—once ate both deer and each other. And now we know that all those thousands of years ago, the Neanderthals of Europe fraternized with Homo sapiens. The two species made children with each other—a commingling that left permanent traces on human DNA.
We are here, say the hands.
Thirty thousand years ago, there were hands, uplifted, right . . . here. Those hands hunted and gathered and scraped meat off bones in front of fires in a cave. They practiced some kind of worship; even their Neanderthal cousins might have thrown flowers over the bodies of their dead. On and off, these human beings—the owners of the hands—would come out, to live in the light. Here in the Ardèche, the wind would blow fierce in winter; the river would run cold in the spring. Tens and hundreds of years went by, and then thousands, and tens of thousands; humans learned how to cultivate plants—chickpea, emmer wheat, barley—and they learned how to fire metals; and they learned to make more tools and travel more broadly over land and down rivers; following the seasons, they moved; following the stars, in set patterns in the sky.
They moved, those humans. They moved to find what they needed, to flee from the cold, or from disease, or from an enemy. They moved, and on the way they met each other and mixed with each other and traded and married and, we presume, loved.
It took a long stretch of history to create the modern nation-state, and the idea that something called a country, with a past and some documents and a set territory, somehow springs from the natural order of things. It took a long time to create something called the République Française, with its borders and armed border guards, and papers and black-and-white photographs that say—snap—this one belongs here, and this one does not.
It took a very long time and lots of hard work to imagine that somehow, the gorgeous barbaric yawp of the handprints in the cave were made by French hands. That those hands and that gorgeous yawp didn’t, in fact, belong to the world.
MODERN NATION-STATES ARE far more—and far less—than we now imagine. They are far more because of the broad, specter-like reach of their colonial empires. We forget where riches come from. Despite our narratives about hard work and gumption and the spirit of innovation, the United States grew rich on the institution of slavery. In Europe—despite its own narratives about blood and soil and God and kings—countries grew rich on colonialism and colonial extraction. So in France, it’s easy to forget that the country is made not just of Parisians lolling at a dîner en blanc, with their lovely flopping hats and long gloves. It’s easy to forget that France isn’t the republican spirit, either, with fists raised—en grève!—in some industrial town. France is made of shadows of its broad colonial past—in the Americas, the West Indies, the Middle East, South Asia, the Far East, the Pacific, and, so importantly, in Africa. France is much more than we think.
But it’s also much less than we think. Why? Because those very narratives about the national past effectively cause us to suppose that countries have been there forever. Always an England. Always a France. Always a Germany or Italy or Poland or Bulgaria. But of course, those countries weren’t there forever. Sure, there were kings and wars and alliances. Sure, one by one, each of those countries had a shot at dominating its own region of the world. But most of the countries of Europe didn’t exist in anything like their modern shape until the late nineteenth or even early twentieth century. And because of the peculiar, stupefying ideology of modern nationalism, we beg to differ, even when faced with the fact that Prussia wasn’t Germany; Rome wasn’t Naples; Poland was for a time part of Russia; Bulgaria, say, together with a huge swath of southeastern Europe, was a single arm of a massive Ottoman Empire.
It doesn’t take a long dive into literatures on the advent of modern nationalism to date the peculiar way of seeing countries—as having defined territories and senses of belonging—to somewhere around the end of the eighteenth century. Before that, yes, there were lords and kings and royal families, and battles over territories. (That’s our river! No, ours!) But the equation was different before modernity. The lord was a proxy for the king, and the king was a proxy for God, and the closer you got to the lord, then to the king, the closer you got to God Himself. It was a topography of proximity, getting good, better, best as you approached your liege.
But now, in modernity, the king was diminishing in his grandeur and would soon be almost entirely gone. Now—O science! O dissolution of the master narrative!—the map would flatten out, and each country would get some nice smooth color, becoming, in the aggregate, a nice, even pastel puzzle. Italy, red; France, blue; Germany, pink; and on it went. But what that map had lost of its rich, kingly glow, it had gained in the seeming solidity and permanence of its borders. The national anthem replaced the hymn. A country, not God, was forever. Now you died for your nation, not your lord. And you killed for your nation, not your lord. And maybe, just maybe, if nationalists could get it just right, you wouldn’t even notice the difference.
The ideology of nationalism works. It makes us believe some things are large and forever, when they aren’t. A pretty flimsy sleight of hand, if you think about it. But France—like Germany, and Russia, and Italy, and on and on—is less of a country than even what remains after that abracadabra. It’s less on the inside.
What if it was the eighteenth century and you lived, say, in a village up on a high plateau towering over the Rhône Valley, with a religion unlike that of your neighbors and a patois they couldn’t understand? Let’s say there were still no rail lines connecting you to big cities, and you were wholly unaccustomed to strangers, and the king—say, the weak, womanizing Louis XV—was so far away, he barely had any glow at all in your mind? Were you living in . . . France?
In The Discovery of France, the historian Graham Robb tells the story of an eighteenth-century geometer who traveled into La Haute-Loire, a part of France still virtually unknown by the king. The geometer arrived in the village of Les Estables—just fifteen short kilometers from the edge of the Plateau—loaded with equipment. The locals took one look at him, with his strange instruments, and assumed he was a sorcerer and therefore a great and immediate threat to the health of the human and natural worlds. They butchered him on the spot.
Were those locals, so far from Paris—with their concerns so vivid and urgent and complete in their own terms—were they, in any meaningful way, French? Could France, at that time, honestly claim their bodies, or their minds or their hearts or souls?
The world is huge and ancient. And there was never a time when people weren’t, in effect, coming out of the caves, following the rivers, fleeing from the wind, looking toward the rain, hoping for bounty. These countries we live in, they are mere artifacts of a long history of walking and stopping, and walking and stopping again. Our maps are just snapshots of that walking and stopping, and then mixing and trading and fighting sometimes, and then hoping for the best. No country is made of a pure kind of human; no border—however high or however intimidating the barbed wire wrapped around it—surrounds a real thing. It’s a fairy tale to think that it does.
AND YET, there is today a country called France. And in that France—and its territories in South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Polynesia—live around sixty-seven million people. So who are they?
For centuries, people here mixed with their neighbors, creating a lively Celtic-Italic-Germanic mix, with Moors and Vikings to boot. And then there are Jews—both Ashkenazim and Sephardim—who have been living in French territory since the Middle Ages: protected, then persecuted, then protected again. As France built up its colonial empire in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, it also built and strengthened ties to what would become powerful migration routes in the future, particularly from North Africa and Asia. The Second World War brought in people from all over Europe and beyond. Today’s France is rich with migrants—a lucky counter to the demographic crisis facing most of Europe, where too few babies are born to replace the generation dying off.
It is illegal in France to collect statistics about the racial or ethnic composition of the country. But rough, recent data suggest that all of those colonial traces—and the brutal, attendant decolonization wars that followed—have produced robust pathways into the country. In the year 2010, more than 27 percent of babies born in France had at least one foreign-born parent. Among the ethnic communities, the largest trace their origins to the Arab and Berber lands of the Maghreb—Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia. In cities mostly, there are also significant numbers of people of sub-Saharan origin. There are those who trace their roots to Vietnam, Turkey, and Madagascar as well. In the past twenty years, these enriching waves of migrants have grown rapidly. The fall of the iron curtain in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, the enlargement of the EU, the after-effects of 9/11 in the form of refugees—all brought wave after wave of people into Europe, with France considered a first-rate final destination.
But all this demographic richness has come with its burdens and dangers. Recent economic crises have added a dimension of new pressure in Europe, making it harder for people to feel at ease sharing their country’s wealth; making the whole enterprise of taking in newcomers feel like a zero-sum game—if I win, you lose—and making the fiction of the clean, pure nation, where everyone looks the same and talks the same and worships the same, seem newly attractive. France’s right wing is on the rise; likewise its anti-Semitic outbursts. In a brand-new strain of anti-Muslim violence, pig feet, pig heads, swastikas, and the words Sieg Heil have desecrated graves and mosques. Muslim practices like women wearing headscarves and covering their faces have been banned by republican French law. Women who cover themselves, in accordance with their own or their family’s interpretation of holy writ, have been beaten by strangers.
So on it goes, the movement. On it goes! Out of the cave, into the light, down the stream, and into the chill of the wind. On it goes, toward the rain, away from the war, toward some hope for safety, toward some hope for thriving.
And, one more time, on it goes, now, into a train station, onto a bus—coins jingling in a metal plate as you pay your fare—up a creaking hill, the air growing colder, the trees growing higher; falcons overhead, magpies in the grass, swallows darting from branch to branch. On it goes, up into the land of stone houses and blue eyes and quiet stories.
On it goes, for new travelers—from which of the round earth’s imagined corners?
Lalik and Arat are from Russia, but came to Russia from Armenia. They speak French only slightly, haltingly. Amélie, it is clear, speaks brilliantly with her hands. As we stand in the entryway to their apartment, she tells the couple, pointing to me, that this is Maggie. That Maggie is here, for a time, to learn about how foreigners experience life in the Plateau. Eyes up; eyes down. And that I used to live in Russia, so I speak Russian.
Really?
At their threshold, I bend down to unlace my boots. “Don’t you DARE take off your shoes! Don’t you dare!” Lalik hollers, in response. Interesting. Though I don’t know every region of the former Soviet Union equally well, I certainly know the ubiquitous dance-of-the-shoes. Here’s how it goes: You are never supposed to leave your shoes on when you enter a home, at least not in any place I’ve ever lived or traveled in the region of the former Soviet Union—north, south, east, or west; city or countryside; Christian or Muslim; apartment or log cabin. Street shoes are pretty much considered filthy everywhere—not befitting the clean inside space of a home. But still, as you enter a home, people will, at times, tell you not to take your shoes off. Why? Herein lies the dance: People do this as a sign of deference to you, their guest. But you, the guest, are supposed to take your shoes off anyway, as a sign of deference back to them. Once the dance is all done, everything becomes nice and cozy and kosher, as it were, with everyone satisfyingly receiving a proper dollop of respect, right there at the door. But the whole ritual can get rather dramatic—not to say baroque—in certain circumstances, like when relationships and hierarchies are unclear. Like now.
So, after several rounds of don’t-you-dares, I swallow hard and, like Amélie—innocent of the shoe dance—obey Lalik.
And so we both enter fully into this new territory, shoes on.
Inside the apartment, we are sent straight to the small bright kitchen, at a little table wedged into a corner, and Lalik opens up my package of cookies (Why did you bring them? she asks. Za chem, what for?) and starts cutting up all kinds of fruits.
Amélie and Lalik are speaking in French, and in hands. There is much to discuss. Arat has been trying to reach their lawyer, but the lawyer doesn’t answer. Amélie mimes a huge pile of letters that this lawyer—a very good and popular one—is already dealing with. Then, Lalik and Arat strain to explain that they found something on the Internet about how, if you join the French Foreign Legion, you can get automatic status in the country. Should their son try for that? Amélie, her face kind but alarmed, mimes the dangers of joining a mercenary army; mimes the love their son has for them, embracing herself, “J’aime Papa! J’aime Maman!”; mimes the fact that their son might do anything to please them. She says something under her breath.
Oy. If we could just get our papers, Lalik says. And she says it again.
As Lalik cuts the fruit, she gives us a lesson straight from a first-year medical anthropology class, telling Amélie about foods that can be used for healing purposes: for coughs, diarrhea, fever. I know many of these formulas from Russia—honey or raspberry jam for colds, mustard plasters for fever, fire cupping, with those dreaded, medieval banki that only ever made me scream. But here are new ones: drying pomegranate peel and then breathing it in, for infected teeth. Pear seeds in a tea for a cough. Cocoa butter for fever.
How many of these conversations did I hear in Russia, over the years? How urgently did people wish to tell others—even in the first moments of acquaintance—how to cure what ails them? How to fix things that were broken in the body or the soul? The sorcerer I lived with in the village was no expert in this kind of healing; but his small, soft-spoken wife knew more than he did—as was often the case with women. When people arrived, sick, at the door of the cabin, she always had ideas of her own—besides the magic potions of her husband—about how to make visitors well with plants, steam, honey. Hers was a soothing art.
Amélie sips her coffee. They’ve offered her every kind of food, but Amélie warned me beforehand that she just can’t eat every meal offered to her. The residents—that’s what they call the asylum seekers here—all want to be generous with her. But she just can’t eat every time. She has daughters at home, who need real meals. No matter; Arat and Lalik clearly adore her, even though she doesn’t take what is offered.
But I’m hungry, so I do.
Now, Lalik begins to glance over at me. She and Arat have some questions; they’re testing out this business of the foreigner-who-speaks-Russian. I tell them what I learned about the Plateau during the war—how people from many countries were sheltered here, when it was very dangerous. And now, I understand people are living here again from all over the world.
The response is a blink and a change of subject.
Soon, though, Lalik, and then Arat, are speaking a little Russian to me. Though it’s a second language for them—and Arat has an especially strong accent—they are quite fluent. Before long, they are speaking only in Russian, and very loudly and very quickly, and I do my best to translate for Amélie. What about the bumazhki, the papers? they ask, now in Russian. The bumazhki bumazhki? And to me, Where do you live? Where is your husband? Where are your children? And, oh yes, Yerevan is beautiful, a great cosmopolitan city, nothing like this backwoods here! Why in the world would you live in a Russian village? Or any village? Yes, the air is clean—so clean we could hardly breathe when we first arrived. But can you believe how people dress here? They look like bomzhi: bums!
The food is piling up on the table. Lalik flips her long black hair. She sets down some sunflower seeds. Eat!!! Eat the fruit! Eat the fruit, it’s good for you! And it all is starting to feel rather familiar, being stuffed around a table, being ordered around, being yelled at with the formulas for secret elixirs. . . .
I am seized, in a moment, with how I miss Russia: the small, warm table when it’s cold outside; the potatoes and onions crackling on a skillet; the intimate questions coming fast—yes husband; no children—and hearts heading right out onto sleeves. I miss the poems, recited out of nowhere with the nod of a knowing rhyme, full of grace. And the cures themselves—from fruit tree and honeycomb—because there will always be pain, and something must be done to repair it.
Now, as I sip my tea and eat what has been offered at this table, I realize I feel oddly at ease here in this home, among the strangers—or rather I, the stranger, among them. Which is it? I find myself exhaling, sinking into the moment, taking in the known contours of this food and this talk: the bossiness, the benevolence, the warmth.
Finally, I allow myself to look around. The apartment is modest and neat. There are couches and chairs. The television is blaring, in Armenian, I assume. I notice there are lots of teddy bears, all over the apartment. In fact, the longer I look, the more teddy bears I see. They come in all kinds of colors—blue teddy bears, pink teddy bears, orange teddy bears. Most are faded, like they’ve been through the wash, or caught out in the snow or rain. They are large and small. Some are propped onto chairs, others are perched onto shelves or hung on the walls, in patterns. In the bedroom, off the living room, there is a large circle of bears on the wall. One has a head that has been re-stitched with black thread.
I look, I listen; they talk. Lalik begins to just talk and talk. Amélie lets the Russian float past her for a time, sipping her coffee, nibbling at a cookie.
And now, a story begins to unfold.
A girl, Lalik, is born in Azerbaijan, one republic in the Soviet South Caucasus, right on the Caspian Sea. When she is still small, her family moves to Armenia, another republic in the Soviet South Caucasus. She grows up there. Her father, an Azeri, was once a Soviet officer, beloved of many.
At some point, the girl goes from being a cherub, the apple of someone’s eye—a girl with a big bow perched on top of her head—to being, as far as her Armenian neighbors were concerned, simply an Azeri. Not a girl, not a cherub. Just an Azeri. An Azeri to be feared, hated, distrusted. Now a young woman, with long, plush black hair—she works in a sewing factory. She meets Arat. “He cut, and I sewed!”
Soon, Lalik and Arat are married and living in Yerevan, a city surrounded by beautiful mountains. Then one day there is some political shift in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union—a mountainous piece of Azerbaijan called Nagorno-Karabakh is claimed by Armenia, and everyone gets murderously upset about it. Poof, the couple is in grave danger. Because Lalik is Azeri, Arat is getting beaten, again and again, sometimes to a pulp.
The couple eventually flees Armenia, selling everything. Only when he is forced to sell every one of his two thousand books, each of which he had read, does Arat finally break down and weep. They find themselves in Moscow. At first things are okay. But soon, their status changes. They become stateless people, living underground, bereft of citizenship and without documents. They are now vulnerable to every sort of corrupt practice imaginable at the hands of the Russian mafiosi—with their track suits and their empty eyes—and the Russian police, and the Armenian diaspora, too, that never gave up hating this couple because he was Armenian and she was Azeri. By now, in Moscow, they can never go to the doctor, so they have to use things like pomegranate tea and pear seeds when their teeth are infected, aching through the night.
I now see that Lalik is missing several teeth on the side of her mouth.
In Moscow, there are everyday cruelties, large and small. Arat is beaten in the stomach with a hot metal rod. They have two children, a boy and a girl. Their boy, Avedis, is now almost seventeen. That’s him, Lalik says, pointing at a figure that comes in and out of the shadows of the apartment, blushing and pale. I can’t exactly see him in the French Foreign Legion.
That is their boy. But their girl is gone.
The Armenian music on the television is blaring. The teddy bears look on.
Their girl is dead. They killed her. Arat was in the car with her, when they hunted him down, those Armenians, and crashed his car. After the crash, he was in a coma. When he woke up, the girl was already buried.
Gathering together thousands of euros, the couple found a driver, a passeur, who could smuggle them into Europe. They had no idea where they would be going. When they arrived in France, they went straight to the prefecture’s office and gave themselves up, and officially requested asylum.
Their boy was still in a state of terror when they first arrived in Le Chambon. Would scream like a girl when he saw a spider. He is still afraid to speak, says Lalik. Yes and no, that’s all you can get from him now.
But their girl. She’s dead. Gone.
Lalik tells me how she plucked all her eyebrows out with her own fingers, one by one. Tells me how she was once slim, but is now fat. Look at me! She covers half of her mouth to hide the missing teeth. Akh, you can’t even buy proper clothes here. Akh, this place . . .
Amélie is taking all this in. I’ve been trying my best to translate. I can translate words, but how do I translate this: That you can love a place that might someday break your very heart?
The evening is winding down. And I begin to assess—within the storm of words—what I can really know:
Lalik and Arat lived in secret for years, and now they are momentarily safe. Lalik and Arat lost a daughter. She is gone forever. And now they are waiting, waiting, waiting for papers. Would that they had their papers! They say this and repeat it again and again. Lish’ by byli bumazhki. Bumazhki. Bumazhki. The papers. There is no respite from the wish for papers now. No real peace until they know about what will come of these bumazhki.
Arat soothes his wife. She cooks. She cuts more fruit. She starts insisting again that Amélie eat. She blinks. She eats the sunflower seeds that have been placed on the table. She eats and talks and eats some more: fingers, mouth, bowl; fingers, mouth, bowl.
Her mouth, an O. A poor crooked O. Her eyes look down, then up, then out.
The days go by; the weeks go by. Things have changed for me here on the Plateau. The doors have opened.
I go to CADA now, and I meet people. I knock on doors. Bring my cookies and chocolate bars, hope for the best. Word has gotten out that I’m okay, I guess. That I speak Russian—which is useful to all the families who come from the former Soviet Union—and can translate. And though I’m far from perfect at it, I don’t cost anyone anything, so Amélie, who is always greeted with the same happy chant—“Amélie! Amélie! Amélie!”—has been putting me in her agenda for meetings about the bumazhki. Or next week’s visit from the electrician. Or for setting up a doctor’s appointment.
I meet a family of hardscrabble Albanians with kids who always look like they’ve been crying all night long, and a single woman from Rwanda who walks erect and frowning, her little son in tow. I meet a glamorous young couple from Armenia with three children. Their eldest daughter volunteers to help the little CADA children with art projects together with kids from the Cévenol School. One of that family’s few keepsakes, rescued from home, is a photograph of their son, with a bird slipping from his hands, in front of Mount Ararat.
Worlds open up.
Rather often, I visit a Congolese family, composed of seven exceptionally beautiful people—a wife, a husband, and five children. The wife, Rosine, has creamy skin and smooth long hair and a low, scratchy voice. Years ago, her husband was arrested for handing out flyers; he was gone so long she was sure he was dead, but then it turned out he wasn’t. The wife was later arrested, too; she was tortured in prison, and raped. Finally, a church group got them all out of the country and into France. “Oh, when the children saw snow for the first time! They couldn’t believe their eyes!” says Rosine. “The snow came out of the sky and they reached out to grab it, to eat it, to pour it over themselves, as if it were the sands of Africa!”
Her husband’s eyes bear yellow scars, I see now. Before his arrest he would travel for his work, walking from Congo to Angola to Namibia and back, through the countryside, through the jungles, along rivers, the back ways, borders blurred, trips measured by where the sun would be when you arrive in a certain hamlet along the way. What is a border, anyway? He tells me that when you travel like that, by foot, the chief of the village comes out to join you, and everyone comes out to welcome you, and you have the right to all the fruits of the village, brought out to you in brimming baskets by the armful.
I look at his hands; they are textured, also scarred. With all they have carried, and all they have begged, and all they have borne, his hands are finally here.
And so now, when I lay me down to sleep in the quiet of the night, there are images I see not only from Nazi Germany or Occupied Poland, or the concentration camps where parents were left behind. Not only of Daniel’s solitary waiting by the dimming embers at night in Les Grillons, safe for a moment, in late 1942. Or of Magda Trocmé’s doorway—from which, they say, no one was ever sent away.
Now there are snapshots of a city—Yerevan!—surrounded by mountains, as beautiful as my mind can conjure; and of a boy releasing a dove in front of Mount Ararat, where Noah once crashed ashore, with all the beasts of the earth spilling out to start anew; and now, too, a snapshot of a river, winding through West Africa toward the ocean, women washing their clothes there, on the edge of Kinshasa.
CURIOUSLY, as soon as I begin spending time with the asylum seekers and learning their stories, the stories I’d originally sought in the Plateau begin to arrive as well. People start telling me things, without ceremony or hesitation. At CADA, the guy who helps with the legal papers tells me how his wife’s family sheltered Jews. A graduate student from the area mentions that a relative of his was blamed for trading with the Germans during the war. A friend’s mother was evacuated here from Saint-Étienne; another friend’s grandmother lived just past Le Mazet, at Panelier. A beautiful old woman with bright white hair and berry-black eyes tells me of her girlhood in wartime, and sings me a song her mother—a washerwoman—taught her at the fountain in the town square.
The stories are everywhere, just below the surface, and it seems pretty much everyone has them. Oh yes, well, maybe my grandmother said something about some refugees during the war. I don’t know. I’ll ask my uncle. I think I heard they fed some people in the barn? They’d sneak food out. They’d hide them in the wall cabinets—here, these cabinets here—all those police would come but they didn’t give them up. They’d hide them up in the church bell-tower, across the street from the butcher. I don’t know if they were Jewish or not. No one ever said.
The stories come now, without hunting, without digging, without any faces falling. They are fractured, spontaneous, sparkling with tiny aspects of life, flowing like water. They aren’t the kind of stories you would offer a busload of tourists, but intimate, real, tied to moments of life’s own urgency.
This is a favorite so far: Sandrine and I are walking with her towheaded little boy one day in a field at her uncle’s farm. The boy is chasing frogs and looking for mushrooms—at seven he’s already got a masterful eye. Sandrine tells me that she’d heard how, during the war, some Jewish children had been taken in by one of her relatives. “And these children wanted to please the family. They knew how much we like eating frogs’ legs here. So the children went out into the woods, hunting for frogs. But they were from the city, and after they were out for a few hours, they came back with bunches of toads. Not frogs, toads!”
Sandrine, with her eyes like water, laughs. Toads! Ha-ha. They did their best, the poor ones!
So now I know how to spend my days. I go up to doors, bearing cookies, and listen. There is so much to hear.
But something else is happening. It’s as though some new logic—with a strange new shape—is forming in my peripheral vision. It goes like this:
I didn’t understand the Law of Silence on the Plateau, but one day, I obeyed it anyway, and was silent. And then people began to speak.
And like this:
I stopped going to violent Russia because I needed to study peace, but then Russia returned to me anyway, here in the land of peace. The map of my world bursts open, down new rivers, up new mountains, into new countries, and new continents, with new wars, new conciliations under jungle leaves, new hands stretched upward in supplication and hope: We are here!
And like this:
The past was closed to me, and the present now comes rushing toward me, in a torrent. And then the past arrives in its wake.
What physics is this? What conservation of matter? What fluid dynamics? That when you close one door, another, greater one opens? That when you reach for the cloak, you are given the coat as well; and hoping for one mile of companionship, you are given two.
I’m so grateful for all of this, and a little dumbfounded. It’s hard not to blur Magic and Law when you see this: That when you finally melt into your purpose, your purpose melts, right back, into you.
One day, not long after our first visit, Lalik and Arat invite me back to their home. Lalik has been to the Resto du Coeur, the food bank the CADA residents have access to a couple of times a month, and Arat tells me he wants to make shashlik for me—shish kebab. He wants me to taste the real thing. The visit is calmer, easier this time. Lalik wants to tell me about her life back home. She had several fur coats back then, and Arat always liked to dress sharply—“You don’t have to be the boss to look like the boss!” Yes, this village life in France is calm, it’s true, but so slow for her, so tedious. No, she doesn’t like walking around the village, or into the woods. You should have seen me before, she says. I was slender.
Here, nobody cares how they put themselves together, she insists. The Frenchwomen, they don’t care; they go out with their hair still wet. They never wear heels. She has another friend from Russia in the area. That woman once got dressed up and went out to an event in makeup and proper heels and a pretty dress, and people were looking at her as though she were some kind of prostitute.
Arat lets me help with the shashlik—I put the raw onions on the skewer next to the chicken. Lalik is still in a good mood from her trip. The food wasn’t the best this week, she says, but it was okay. She got fish and canned ravioli and chili; boxes of “American” milk; frozen fish fillets; some sardines; some fruits and vegetables. A CADA woman from Africa who was waiting behind her in line had started touching her hair! Lalik didn’t like that; she wriggled and told her to stop. The other woman didn’t have much hair of her own—probably because the Africans braid their hair so tightly, she says, that’ll make your hair fall out. Well. I wondered about the other things that could cause an African woman’s hair to fall out. But I didn’t say.
The shashlik is delicious. Arat and Lalik take pictures of it and of me. The glamorous young Armenian family comes by for a visit.
At the end of the evening, I tell Lalik and Arat not to worry about walking me back to my apartment at the other end of Le Chambon. It’s nearly a half hour to get there, uphill for part of the walk, and they’d have to go both ways. But they insist. Lalik puts on a bulky sweater she says she wouldn’t have been caught dead in back home.
The moon is out, fat and white behind thin clouds. It follows us as we walk, first down the street where the CADA residence is, flanked by tall pines. We pass large houses, all closed up. You’d think no one at all lived here, Lalik says. You see not a flash of light coming out of any of the houses. But people are there, inside. Here’s the big house, dark almost, where a woman lives alone. Not even a dog lives there with her. If we get papers, maybe we can buy this house.
Then, there is another big, dark place behind some trees.
And here’s where that man hanged himself, Lalik says. No one lives there now. Back in Armenia, when someone dies, we lay them out in their house. Here, they send the bodies right to the church, but we don’t think it’s respectful to take the body away from the home.
We’re getting closer to the train tracks.
Here is the place where the father of the music person lives, she says.
Down the hill, now, in the center.
It looks so different here in the summer, she says. People come out, dancing. People bowl in the square.
Here’s where I go to the doctor. That’s my doctor. Here’s where you can buy clothes.
Here—she is pointing at a small public square where there is a plaque dedicated to the Righteous of the Plateau—is where there was some summer festival. I don’t remember what. Something about flowers. She looks at the Protestant church coming up on our right. I haven’t been inside any of the churches yet, she says.
We round the bend toward the river. A bright star has appeared. It seems to blast light on the three of us as we leave the center of town, pass over the bridge and along a quiet highway, surrounded by fields and trees. We walk, and walk.
Lalik narrates her tale of the large, dark houses, the quiet here, the suicide, the church, the women with their flat shoes and unkempt hair: This is what she sees, as she walks. This is her Plateau. She knows nothing of any righteous past here. But why should she?
The one moon follows us as we walk, down finally, toward my own door, and my own little light that shines above it at night.
Lalik has her eyes; I have mine.