PSYCHOLOGY 

Sunday in Paris​​

by Alexandra Schwartz

NOVEMBER  22,  2015

 

An interdiction on marching was still in effect, but hordes of people had gathered to leave flowers and candles.

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A gentle spring Sunday in November. Soft air; the rarity of an unmarked sky dyed the same deep, Yves Klein blue as the doors of the Swiss Embassy on the Rue de Grenelle. On Saturday, the weather in Paris had been in sympathy with the city’s people: gray drizzle, the late fall damp that flows easily through the flesh to lodge deep in the bone. The mildness of Sunday felt like a reprieve, and the streets began to fill up again. Men and women in sweaters and thin jackets strolled along the placid streets of the Left Bank’s Seventh Arrondissement, a world apart from Friday’s violence, past the pink face of the South Korean Embassy, pausing briefly to peer through the barred windows of a mansion marked by a sign as a private villa, for sale. Anxiety welled up at the sight of a crowd in front of the Square Samuel Rousseau, but it was only the congregants of the Sainte-Clotilde basilica, milling about after Mass.

At the École des Beaux-Arts, on the Quai Malaquais, and again on the Pont des Arts, behind a shell-game hustler who was swiftly stripping a cluster of gamblers of twenty- and fifty-euro notes, someone armed with red artist tape had fixed a photocopied page to the wall. It was a text by Camus. The absurdity of “la tragédie que nous vivons,” said Camus, speaking from the stones, is that “we are pitifully gathered today, just a few of us, to ask only, without yet trying for anything more, that on one solitary dot on the globe a handful of innocent victims be spared.”
That task must be approached “decisively, in order to deserve, one day, to live as free men, which is to say, as men who refuse both to exercise and to submit to terror.” The photocopy gave the quotation the gloss of prophecy, but a later search revealed it to be a piece of Camus’s keynote speech at the “Call for a Civil Truce,” a 1956 conference in Algeria that aimed to put a stop to the violence mounting on all sides during the long war of independence from France. “I went to Algiers to plead for a civil truce in a lecture that was nearly drowned out by the shouts of ultracolonialists calling for my death,” Camus wrote the following year. When he died, in 1960, the war was still dragging on.

Over on the Right Bank, my friend Sabri Louatah, a French novelist of Algerian descent, was waiting for me at Blackburn Coffee, one of Paris’s new crop of Brooklyn-style cafés, in the Faubourg Saint-Martin. He had stayed home all day on Saturday watching the news, too distressed and frightened to go out. I found him bent over a sheet of unlined paper, writing in English; he has long been fluent in the spoken language, and is in the midst of a Nabokovian effort to leave French behind on the page, too. “It’s the least French place I know in Paris,” he told me, gesturing at his glass mug of American-style filtered coffee. Next to us, a waitress angled her phone at a burger-and-salad arrangement, taking pictures for Instagram.

Sabri’s wife works in Chicago, and he was homesick for that city. He couldn’t stand to be in Paris. It was a place of terror, he said, and more was sure to come. What about Chicago’s own terror, I asked, its hundreds of gun murders a year? They don’t happen in Wicker Park, Sabri said, and of course it was true. Terror attacks like the ones in Paris work by violating the principle of the radically unequal distribution of violence, the assumption that what happens on the South Side will stay on the South Side, the blight concentrated and all but invisible to anyone beyond the neighborhood’s boundaries. And terror attacks like the ones in Paris work, too, by depending on the principle of the radically unequal distribution of attention to violence. As the city was deluged over the weekend by interest and sympathy from all corners of the world, people began to ask, in newspapers, on blogs, on Twitter, why Beirut, where forty-three people were killed in a suicide bombing last Thursday night, had been almost entirely ignored.

It would be absurd to pretend that there’s no answer to the question. Everyone outside Beirut is used to ignoring terror in Beirut because we expect it there. The shock has gone out of it—or, rather, the shock waves are absorbed by the city alone, so that the rest of us don’t feel a thing. It would be equally absurd to pretend that that answer is just. Talking about it with Sabri, I thought of my colleague Dexter Filkins’s description in his book, “The Forever War,” of rushing to downtown Manhattan to witness the Twin Towers collapsing. “My countrymen were going to think this was the worst thing that ever happened, the end of civilization,” he wrote. “In the Third World, this sort of thing happened every day: earthquakes, famines, plagues.”

We walked to the Place de la République, the plaza at the center of the city. An interdiction on marching was still in effect, but hordes of people had gathered to leave flowers and candles by the base of the statue of the representation of the Republic at the plaza’s heart, a bronze maiden raising the olive branch of peace in her right hand, perched above personifications of Liberté, Egalité, and Fraternité. The monument was built in 1883—a decade after the Prussian siege, followed by the short-lived Commune revolt, filled the city with corpses. The mood was not without a certain festiveness. A spontaneous chorus of young people, two dozen or so strong, had arranged itself on a tier of shallow steps and was loudly singing “La Vie en Rose.” Strangers spoke to one another with the familiarity that follows a tragedy, not all of it welcome. A stout woman in her sixties who had begun to talk in a rich, phlegmy rattle to Sabri about marching in the demonstrations following the Charlie Hebdo attacks was interrupted by a red-faced man trailing a malted smell. He was Spanish, he said. The death had been terrible, but didn’t she agree that it was, really, France’s own fault for having nuclear weapons? She hissed him fiercely away. Nearby, the politician Noël Mamère, formerly associated with the Europe Écologie party, was chatting quietly with two friends, his thick brush mustache hiding his top lip.

In an open stretch of the plaza, people formed a ring, snowball-dance style, around two men and a woman, who were holding up signs offering free hugs. The shorter of the two men turned toward us, a smiling beatifically. People approached and wrapped their arms around the huggers, leaning their heads on the shoulders of strangers. A young man wept wildly, his thin body convulsing. His name was Alexandre Henrard; he was twenty-three years old, a journalism student. He had come alone. “I didn’t know anyone who died,” he said, almost before being asked. “Why did I come? No idea. I just had the feeling that I needed to be here.”

We left, passing a row of shiny black cars that had transported international camera crews to the scene, the drivers waiting patiently with windows open to take them away again. The pilgrimage route among the attack sites near the Canal Saint-Martin surged with walkers; where only tens of people had been the day before, there was now barely room to move. The Franprix market by La Bonne Bière was doing a brisk business in flowers, arranged outdoors. The unstable, nervous atmosphere of the day before was still there, but tempered, somehow, by the sheer fact of the crowd, which swelled further still on the streets leading to Le Petit Cambodge and Le Carillon, a restaurant and a bar that were sites of shooting attacks.

Sabri and I walked slowly. We were talking about “Les Sauvages,” his literary thriller, in four volumes, about the fallout of an assassination attempt made on a fictional French president of Algerian descent. The shooting happens at the end of the first volume; the second opens with a description of candles floating down the Canal Saint-Martin in tribute to the wounded president, put there so that his daughter, whose apartment building overlooks the water, can see them go by. Both volumes were published in early 2012. At the time, Sabri had struggled to imagine a realistic French response to national tragedy. “I asked my editor if he thought it was too cheery, and he said no,” he told me. All around us was the uncanny proof.

In Sabri’s novel, the architect of the attack is Nazir, a young Kabyle (a member of an ethnic group native to Northern Algeria) born and raised in the French industrial city of Saint-Étienne, Sabri’s home town. “He’s a nihilist,” Sabri said—seemingly motivated by extremist ideology, but actually driven by something purer, the will to destroy. Nazir does, however, work for ideologues, a rogue faction of France’s ultra right wing, which wants to eliminate the country’s Muslim President while scapegoating Muslims in the act. “The end of the world—we’ve been anticipating it in France,” Sabri said. “There’s been talk about apocalypse, about the end of France, about the loss of our identity. It comes from the right wing.”

In the fourth and final volume of “Les Sauvages,” due to be published in January, a suicide bomb set off in a mosque in Saint-Étienne kills more than thirty people. Sabri wrote two drafts of the novel over the course of a year and had scrapped them both. He couldn’t figure out how the book should end. “I didn’t want to finish on an apocalyptical note,” he told me. Then the attacks at Charlie Hebdohappened, and the enormous marches, the displays of proud, defiant solidarity. “They showed me the way out of my book,” he said, of the marchers. Before Charlie Hebdo, “I hadn’t even imagined it,” he said. “And that’s sad for me, because as a writer, I want to be better than reality. Fiction should be better.”

He meant that fiction should do its best to tell the truth. And now the truth was coming true, in the worst way possible, and Sabri, like everyone else, was stunned. “I’m just puzzled. Flabbergasted. What’s the strongest word for ‘amazed?’ ” he asked me that night, over the phone. News had just come that the French government had begun a bombing campaign to target ISIS strongholds in Syria. After we parted ways, a rumor spread—false, it turned out—that there had been another shooting on the Boulevard Voltaire. Sabri had been sitting outside at a bar on the Boulevard Ménilmontant, on the edge of the Belleville neighborhood—not even close by, but a wave of people had flooded the street and everyone began to run in panic. “I’ve never run faster in my life,” he said. He had sprinted around the corner, and, with a few others, dashed through an open door and into a room where rows of men were sitting calmly on their knees, pressing their foreheads to the ground. It was a mosque; the men at prayer greeted the incomers and asked what was going on.
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At home, he had received a message from a reader of his on Facebook, telling him that he had been depressingly visionary. “That’s totally wrong. I just took an interest in the subject. Who are terrorists in real life? They generally have the same social and ethnic background as me. They come from the same exact place. I know exactly who they are,” Sabri told me that evening. He had wanted to do what fiction writers do: imagine his way into someone else’s mind in an attempt to understand and illuminate some shard of the world. “And so I feel guilty that I was very often trying to imagine the worst that could happen when I was writing it, because that’s classic storytelling: What’s the suspense?” His novel, long as it is, is full of many different personalities, of humor as well as darkness; Nazir is at a far extreme. “I was trying to find the light,” he told me. “A bit of comedy.” He paused. “But there’s nothing comic here. It’s just pure tragedy.”

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