A Time of Miracles (12 page)

“Good morning, how are you?” he said to me in Russian. At last I had someone I could talk to!

I felt so relieved that I burst into tears.

“Well, well, now,” Modeste Koulevitch said as he patted me on the back as if I had swallowed something the wrong way.

I wiped my eyes, and he explained that he was an interpreter. He was here to understand my story in order to translate it into French. Translation was his profession.

“What is your name?” he asked.

“My name is Blaise Fortune,” I said as I sniveled.

“Yes, that much I know. But your real name in Russian, what is it?”

“I don’t have a real Russian name. My name is Blaise Fortune, it’s the pure and simple truth.”

“All right,” he said with a sigh. He took me to an office where there was a computer.

We spent the whole day in front of the screen. I spoke to him in Russian, and he typed the translated words. I told him everything from A to Z like I had in Babik’s caravan. But Modeste wanted more details. In a way he, too, wanted to hear my soul.

He stopped me often to wipe his forehead.

“Phew! It’s mighty hot in here, isn’t it?” he said, pulling on his bow tie. His chin shook like jelly.

Looking at him, I was reminded of what Gloria had told me in the peasant village: never to despair of human beings.

By the end of the day, most of my story was stored in the computer, in black and white. I asked Modeste if he knew where my gear with my precious things was. He didn’t. But he promised to inquire, and left.

Thanks to him, the authorities finally understood why Mr. Ha had fixed my passport. He had done a fine job, but it wasn’t good enough to fool the experts. That’s what brought me to their attention. I argued that it had to be my real passport, since my mother had given it to Gloria the day of the Terrible Accident.

“I agree,” said Modeste when he came back, “but the administrators need proof. Your story is so unusual.”

I didn’t see what was so extraordinary. It was easy to
understand, but the administrators obviously didn’t have much imagination. When I talked to them about Vassili’s orchard, instead of seeing apples, apricots, and magnificent pears, they wanted addresses, dates, and a lot of numbers.

“Scien-ti-fic proof,” Modeste said, striking the table like a hammer with the palm of his hand.

I looked at him blankly because I didn’t understand what he meant.

“According to you, this train accident happened in the Caucasus. Where exactly? The Caucasus is so large!”

I shrugged. Sure, the Caucasus was large! One more good reason to let it be and concentrate on easier problems—like finding Gloria and my mother.

“That’s just the same!” Modeste said, getting annoyed. “Jeanne Fortune, Gloria Bohème—all of it sounds too incredible to be true. Like a bunch of made-up names.”

My mouth dropped open.

Modeste sighed. “All right,” he said, seeming sorry.

Nevertheless, after a lot of research and fact-checking, the administrators finally found newspaper clippings and military reports that mentioned the derailment of an express train in the Caucasus.

“A terrorist strike that the nationalists claimed to be theirs, at the beginning of the war,” Modeste said to me with a large smile. “The dates don’t really match up, but—”

“Is it scientific proof?”

“Somewhat.”

“That means that you believe me, then?”

“It means that we’ll keep searching.”

“To find my real mother?”

“Yes.”

“And Gloria?”

Modeste Koulevitch wiped his forehead. He explained that the truck driver had been interrogated. He confirmed that he had taken a woman into his cab in the parking lot at the Romanian/Hungarian border.

“According to him, she was a prostitute,” Modeste said.

“He’s lying!” I shouted.

“Maybe. In any case, he didn’t know her name. He said that she left while he was making a pit stop in Germany.”

“He’s lying!” I said again.

“It’s possible,” said Modeste. “But we can’t be sure as long as we don’t have proof.”

I knew that the Spanish driver had lied, because Gloria was not a prostitute, and what’s more, she would never have abandoned me in a trailer loaded with pigs. So the mystery remained unsolved and there was nothing I could do but wait patiently in the shelter. But wait for what? I wondered.

“Well,” Modeste said, “wait until we know who you really are and whether France can keep you or not.”

According to the laws of the French Republic, I was considered an “unaccompanied foreign minor.” Modeste Koulevitch explained that France could not let everybody enter its borders under the pretext that it was a country that stood for human rights. Inquiries had to be made, otherwise it would be too easy for children in lots of war-torn countries everywhere to make the same request.

“You understand, don’t you?” Modeste asked.

I did not understand but said “OK” to be left alone.

*   *   *

I had to tell my story many more times and give many more details and fill out millions of forms. Modeste perspired enormously. He said that I was going to drive him crazy if I kept repeating that I was a citizen of the French Republic and that it was the pure and simple truth.

And I was waiting for Gloria.

I stayed posted near a window in the shelter, my eyes on the horizon, even though the horizon stopped at the bottom of the opposite buildings.

I looked up at the sky. I tried to keep calm. I told myself that wherever I was on this earth, the sky was always the same. It was a constant, like the stars, the sun, and the planets. And I imagined Gloria watching the same sky, a thought that gave me comfort.

Then one day Modeste Koulevitch read Article 20 of the convention to me, concerning the rights of children: it meant that I had obtained the protection of the state.

“As long as we can’t find someone who knows you, and we don’t know where you come from exactly, we’re stuck,” he added.

I was sent to another shelter, near the town of Poitiers, and there I was enrolled in school. That was the law also. I thought this was a good idea because otherwise I would have kept waiting for Gloria, and despair would have killed me.

IN
France school isn’t anything like the university for the poor, or like Fatima’s school, where everyone prayed to Allah on a rug. In France no one would ever teach you about the different cuts of beef, or the list of martyred saints, or the rules of poker. Never. First you have to learn the language. And this time it wasn’t like the phonetic sentences of Mr. Ha.

In my class we were eleven “unaccompanied foreign minors.” Most of the others came from Morocco or Tunisia; others were black like Abdelmalik. They had left their families at page 90 of my green atlas; that is, in Africa. Others were born in different parts of the world, like Colombia or the Philippines. I learned that there are many dangerous places for children on our planet.

We didn’t need to talk to understand one another; each of us had gone through the hazards of life—hunger, border crossings in the middle of the night, the fear of patrols, the
noise of Kalashnikovs—and had known distress that rips your guts out when you’re alone in the world. Our memories and our feelings acted like cement: we were as united as the bricks of a wall. This was very important because no one can live without human warmth.

The picture that I’ve kept from that time shows all of us together: Malik, Anissa, Fatou, Samy, John-Aristide, Sabado, Wema, Jamal, Leandro, and Prudence. Behind us is our teacher, Mrs. Georges, who smiles with beaming pride. Thanks to her, within a few months we became adept at conjugating verbs.

Time went by.

I turned thirteen and still lived in the Poitiers shelter, under the protection of child social services.

My gear was never found. It was definitely lost, so I couldn’t show the official document concerning Mont-Saint-Michel and my mother. I thought that maybe the pigs—those omnivorous animals—had eaten the pages of my atlas and my catalog. But I would never know.

I was finally able to recite the poems of Charles Baudelaire with barely an accent: “Free man, you will always cherish the sea!” I was able to construct complex sentences and use adjectives, and the list of France’s kings held no more secrets. But I wasn’t officially French, and Jeanne Fortune was nowhere to be found. When Modeste Koulevitch visited me from time to time, he said things were status quo.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means that there’s nothing new, that nothing has changed, Blaise. You’re not French or anything else.”

“OK.”

This was nothing new to me; I was used to being a ghost. A draft.

As for Gloria, her disappearance remained a mystery and my heart was broken. I feared that she might be dead because of the dog in her chest, or that she might be caught in a trap for humans somewhere in Europe. The laws of this world are stricter for adults, for the very reason that they are not minors, and Mrs. Georges always looked gloomy when I spoke of Gloria.

“Maybe she was deported,” she said.

“That means sent back to the Caucasus?”

“Yes.”

“Even if she was sick?”

“Yes.”

I thought that was unfair, and I was terrified at the idea of never seeing Gloria again. Many times I had dreamed of the peaceful life we would have; I had imagined the wonderful reunion with Emil, Stambek, Fatima, and all the others, and I was despondent.

At night I bit my pillow so that no one would hear me cry.

My only hope was Nouka’s prediction. Gypsies are very good at divining things, and I clung to the idea that Gloria could not die as long as I needed her. I preferred to believe that she had found Zemzem again, or that she had taken shelter in the cottage in Vassili’s orchard. I imagined her happy, boiling water in a brand-new samovar. I saw her climbing a tree or driving a truck, laughing with her
brothers, who had all come back alive from the war. I made up stories to make reality more bearable, just as Gloria had taught me.

In 1999, as I turned fourteen, the computer in our class was linked to the Internet. According to Mrs. Georges, it was a very important event, and she was happy to initiate us into new technologies that would become our passport to the new millennium.

“With this tool,” she said, “you’ll know everything about anything!”

Our eyes shined because we were all searching for something or someone in this vast world of ours. Jamal asked if it was possible to learn about people who had been lost in the Mediterranean. His brother had drowned during their trip to Europe.

Mrs. Georges looked sad. “With this tool you’ll know
nearly
everything about anything,” she corrected herself.

She explained how to use the Internet, and I decided to make my own inquiry to get out of the status quo.

The first word I entered in the search engine was “Gloria.”

    Results:

concentrated milk trademark

American actress, dead a long, long time ago

Latin words of a Christian prayer

lots of restaurants and hotels

    Not a trace of
my
Gloria, even when I added “Bohème,” which sent me to a European region and to a song and to a poem by Arthur Rimbaud.

As sad as ever, I entered a second request: “Jeanne Fortune.” This was even worse because no one seemed to have that name, either at Mont-Saint-Michel or anywhere else in France.

Finally I entered “Zemzem Dabaiev.” At last something popped up—newspaper clippings in Russian saying that Zemzem was a warlord, a terrorist, a bloodthirsty monster who was armed to the teeth and who had killed many innocent people. I was sure they were mistaken, that they weren’t talking about the same person, because Gloria’s Zemzem wasn’t a monster. Gloria’s Zemzem had saved people; he had run to get the tanker truck. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Upset, I abandoned the computer. I went to see Mrs. Georges and shouted that I was disappointed with the new technology. What good was it to be modern if the millennium didn’t offer me a little bit of hope? I demanded.

“Lies, that’s all there is in there! Lies!” I cried.

I slammed the classroom door and stormed out, a ball of rage forming in my stomach.

I sat on a low dividing wall at the back of the courtyard that surrounded the shelter, near the athletic field. I was fed up with everything, with my friends, even with Modeste Koulevitch and Mrs. Georges and her kindness. What I wanted was Gloria. She was the only one who knew the truth! She was the only one who could help me find my mother, the only one who could bring the scientific proof
that I was French. Even more important, she was the only one who could soothe my distress by taking me in her arms.

I cried a long time, hitting my heels against the wall, then, unexpectedly, I felt a presence behind me. When I turned, Prudence was looking at me.

“What do you want?” I snapped. “My picture?”

I was in a foul mood.

Prudence smiled. She came near me.

“If I sit here, you’re not going to bite me, are you?” she asked.

I shrugged and she sat down.

I was surprised because Prudence was the quietest and shyest girl in the class. I didn’t know much about her except that she came from Liberia, a country that borders the Gulf of Guinea. I remembered that it was on page 91 of my green atlas.

She remained silent for a long while. Suddenly she asked me if I wanted to play a game.

“A game? What game?” I asked.

“A contest.”

“What kind of contest?”

“A contest of misfortunes.”

I stared at her inquisitively.

“It’s simple. We each mention something unhappy that happened in our lives,” she explained. “The winner is the one who has had the most misfortunes.”

I thought this was funny. “OK,” I said.

And we played.

Misfortune for misfortune.

For a long time we stayed sitting side by side on the wall in front of the athletic field.

We revealed everything about ourselves, starting with our oldest memories. And the pure and simple truth is that Prudence won by far. What had happened in only thirteen years of her life was unbelievable! A list to make the hair on your head stand on end—massacres, fleeing through a hostile jungle, venomous stings, beheadings, and scars on her arms to prove torture. By the end of the game, my mouth was agape. She made the victory sign with her fingers, and tears ran down my cheeks because I was reminded of the last time I had seen Gloria in the parking lot.