The car jolts forward and merges into traffic, swerves around a pothole. Zoli puts her hands against the dashboard to brace herself. The streets begin to branch and widen and clear. Out the window she watches the quick blip of traffic lights and the flash of billboards. I have arrived in Paris so many times, she thinks, and none of them ever like this. They speed through the yellow of a traffic light and down a long avenue shaded by half-grown trees. “We'll show you around later, Mamma,” says Francesca, “but let's go home first. We've a nice lunch ready, wait until you see how many cheeses!” It is a thing her daughter seems to have invented for her, that she is a lover of cheese, and she wants to say, That's your father, not me. Zoli puts her hand on Henri's forearm, asks him if he likes cheese, and he finds it funny, for whatever reason, she is not entirely sure, and he slaps the steering wheel as he turns a sharp corner.
They slow down, past kiosks and storefronts strange with foreign script. A number of Arab women in dark headscarves emerge from a shop, only their eyes apparent. Further up the street, a black man wheels a trolley of jackets across the road. Zoli turns to watch. “So many people,” she says. “I never expected it to be like this.” Her daughter unbuckles her backseat seat belt so she can whisper: “I'm so glad you're here, Mamma, I can hardly believe it.”
Henri taps the brakes and the car jolts. “Put your belt on, Francesca,” he says. A silence descends until Zoli hears the soft fall of her daughter's body against the rear seat and a long exaggerated sigh.
“Sorry, Franca,” he says, “but I'm the one driving here.”
How odd it is to hear the nickname of her daughter from
this young man. How extraordinary, in fact, to be here at all, in this small car, in these thrumming streets, on a sunny Thursday afternoon when back in the valley they will be cutting grass on the lower slopes.
They negotiate a few more winding side streets and pull in next to the curb under a row of low trees by a pale stone building studded with blocks of ancient red marble. They climb out of the car and walk through the front courtyard. Henri puts his shoulder to the giant ironwork door. It creaks and swings, revealing a black and white tiled floor. They walk towards an old elevator, but Zoli veers off to the stairs, explaining that tunnels and elevators are not for her, that they make her claustrophobic. Henri takes her elbow and guides her towards the elevator's intricate grillwork. “The stairs are so steep,” he says. Zoli reaches back for her daughter's hand. She is afraid now that she will dislike Henri, that he is one of those who is almost too happy, the sort who forces his opinions of happiness on others. A sharp look appears on his face, and he goes ahead, alone, in the elevator.
Mother and daughter stand wordless in front of each other. Francesca drops the bag on the first stair and takes Zoli's face in her hands, leans over and kisses her eyelids.
“I can't believe it,” says Francesca.
“You'll be glad to get rid of me in a day or two.”
“Want to bet?”
They laugh and climb the stairs, stopping on each landing for Zoli to get her breath back. She has the clammy thought that they will have arranged their home for her, that they will have laid out a bed and perhaps a night lamp and they will have cleaned and ordered things out of their usual places, perhaps even put up photographs for the occasion.
On the fourth floor, Francesca hurries ahead, opens the door, throws her keys onto a low glass table.
“Come in, Mamma, come in!”
Zoli pauses a moment on the threshold, then slips off her shoes, steps in. She is pleasantly surprised by the apartment, its high walls, the cornices, the crevices, the oak floorboards, the woodcut prints along the hallway. The living room is bright and open with high windows and a piece of artwork she immediately recognizes as Romani, vibrant clashing colors, odd shapes, a settlement of sorts. A photo of Enrico sits on an old wooden shelf made from a slice of railway sleeper. A dozen other photos accompany it. Zoli runs her fingers along the hard tar on the shelf, then turns and examines the rest of the room.
In the center of a glass coffee table sits the leaflet for the conference, in French, odd words shoved together. The leaflet is slick and professional and not at all what she expected. She should, she knows, pay attention to it, comment on it, compliment it, but Zoli wants nothing more than to ambush it with silence.
A row of books sit under the table and she lifts one, photographs of India, and deftly lays the leaflet underneath, its edge sticking out so it doesn't look hidden. Her daughter stands over her with a glass of water, and tenses slightly at the sight of the covered leaflet.
“You must be tired, Mamma?”
Zoli shakes her head, no, the day seems bright and open. She runs her fingers along Francesca's blouse: “Where's that cheese you promised me?”
They pass the lunch in idle chatter, the train trip, the weather, the new layout of Paoli's shop, and as the afternoon lengthens, a heaviness bears down. Her daughter brings her to the bed-
room, where the sheets on the double bed have been freshly changed, and a nightgown has been laid out with a shop tag still on it. Francesca snips the tag from the back of a nightdress and whispers that her boyfriend will be staying elsewhere for a few days, and that she will sleep on the couch, no protests allowed. She folds back the covers and fluffs the pillow and guides her mother to the bed.
Zoli feels briefly like a pebble that, having lain around for quite a while, is quickly tossed from hand to hand.
“Have a good nap, Mamma. And I'm not going to say anything about bedbugs.”
“I wouldn't even feel them.”
She wakes to darkness, disoriented a moment. A harsh whispering issues from the kitchen, the voices low and urgent. She lies and listens, hoping they will quieten, but Henri curses, and then she hears the slamming of a door, the slide of grooves in a kitchen cupboard, a rattling of cups. Zoli looks around the room, surrounded by the possessions of others, cosmetics on the table, photographs in frames, a row of men's shirts in the cupboard. In her mind she goes through the three rooms of her own millhouse, how the four doors creak, how the curtains jangle on the rings, how the stove leaks a little light, how the lantern nickers. Curious to have taken a train here and arrived so quickly, somewhere so unfamiliar, as if the journey has failed her by such ease. She lies back down on the bed. A surprising stillness to the room—no sounds of traffic, or children playing outside, or neighbors with their radios.
“You're awake?” says Francesca. She has put on some light makeup and she looks exquisite as she steps gracefully across the room. “Are you ready for dinner, Mamma? We ‘ve booked a little restaurant.”
“Oh,” says Zoli.
“Henri's gone to get the car. Do you like him, Mamma?”
Zoli wonders a moment what there might be to like, so quickly, so abruptly, but she says: “Yes, I like him very much.”
“I'm glad,” says Francesca with a chuckle. “I've been with worse, I suppose.”
They embrace again. Zoli swings her legs off the side of the bed, narrows her mind, forces it upon her arms and legs, stands. The nightdress comes up over her head. It takes an effort not to sway. Francesca turns her back and flicks on a small lamp on the nightstand as Zoli puts on her dress. Foolish not to have brought more clothes, but she wanted to impress that it would only be for a few days, no more, that she would not be part of the conference, that she would just sit and watch and listen, if even that.
Her daughter hitches the dress at the shoulders.
“Are you all right, Mamma?”
“I wouldn't know I had it if it didn't hurt,” says Zoli, and a smile loosens over her face.
At the door there is a series of three gold locks she had not noticed earlier. Three. And one hanging chain. It strikes Zoli that she has never lived in a place with locks on the door.
“We should take the elevator.”
“No, chonorroeja, we'll walk down.”
Outside, in the darkness, the engine of the car purrs. Henri waves them over with the sort of grin that already seems to throw out opinions and confidences. She will try hard to like him, she tells herself. He has, in any case, a fine name—so much like Enrico, though the sound is not as round or as full—and he is handsome in a measured way. She slides into the front seat and pats his arm.
“Onwards,” Henri says abruptly, and they drive off through a light rain.
By the time they reach the center of Paris, the rain has let up and the streets shine wet and black under lamplight. Elegant statues and houses, each angle planned, each tree thought out. Boats along the Seine dimple the water. Zoli opens the window to hear the rushing of the water, but receives only traffic.
At the restaurant there are engraved mirrors behind the bar. Wood and heavy glass. Waiters in long white aprons. She is given a menu and it strikes her with a start, how absurd, a menu in French, but her daughter says: “I'll help you, Mamma.” So many things to choose from, and nothing amongst them simple. She sits in a mild haze, listening to her daughter and Henri talk about their jobs, social work with immigrants, of how there is always a heartbreaking story, how it is hard to believe, in a civilized society, that these things still go on, day after day.
Zoli finds herself drifting, watching the movement of the waiters in the background, their intricate steps. She circles her fork around the edges of her wineglass, but snaps herself back when Francesca touches her hand: “Did you hear me, Mamma?”
It is, she knows, a story about an Algerian man and a hospital and flowers by someone's bed, but she can't quite locate the center of the story, and has to catch up. She surmises that the man sends the flowers to himself, and it seems to her not so much a sadness as a triumph, sending flowers to his own bedside, but she doesn't say so, she is caught up in the caughtness of her daughter who has a tear at the edge of her eye, which she brushes away.
A waiter arrives bearing three large plates. The dinner unfolds and Henri seems to sweep in behind Francesca, as if he has started driving the table, taken the front seat, lowered the
pedal. He rattles on, in a high voice, about the plight of the Islamic women and how nobody takes them seriously at all, how their lives are denned by the narrowness that others bring to it, how they have been poisoned by stereotype, that it's time for people to open up and listen. He is, thinks Zoli, the sort of man who knows in advance all that, for him, is worth knowing.
Dessert arrives and the taste of coffee fills her with sadness.
She wakes in the backseat of the car, startled a moment as Henri points out the Arc de Triomphe. “Yes, yes,” she says, “it's beautiful,” though the car is sandwiched in traffic and she can hardly see it at all. They swing past a tower and then zoom along the quays. Henri clicks on the radio and begins to hum. Soon they merge onto a highway and it seems like only moments later when Zoli is being brought up in the elevator. She panics briefly and reaches for the buttons but her daughter catches her arm and strokes her hand. “It's all right, Mamma, we'll be there in a flash.” A strange word, it seems, and the light actually flashes across her mind as if invited. She feels her daughter support her indoors. Zoli flops to the bed with a little laugh: “I think I drank too much wine.”
In the morning she rises early and kneels down by the couch and combs her sleeping daughter's hair, the same way she used to comb it when Francesca was a child. Francesca stirs, smiles. Zoli kisses her cheek, rises, and searches in the kitchen for breakfast items, finds a card on the fridge with a magnet attached. She runs the magnet over her own hair and suddenly Francesca is there behind her with a phone to her ear: “What are you doing, Mamma?”
“Oh, nothing, Franca,” she says, and it's a name so close to Conka that it still manages, at times, to hollow out Zoli's chest.
“What's the magnet for?”
“Oh, I don't know,” says Zoli. “No reason really.”
Her daughter begins chatting rapid-fire into the phone. There is, it seems, a seating issue at the conference and some rooms have been overbooked. Francesca clicks down the phone and sighs. In the kitchen she opens a can of coffee beans, grinds them, fills a contraption with water. So much white machinery, thinks Zoli. She can feel a slight tension between her and her daughter, this is not what she wants, she will not embrace it, conference or not, and she asks Francesca how she slept and she says, “Oh fine,” and then Zoli asks her in Romani. It is the first time they have used the language, it seems to stun the air between them, and Francesca leans forward and says: “Mamma, I really wish that you would speak for us, I really wish you would.”
“What is there for me to speak of?”
“You could read a poem. Times have changed.”
“Not for me, chonorroeja.”
“It would be good for so many people.”
“They said that fifty years ago.”
“Sometimes it takes fifty years. There's going to be people from all over Europe, even some Americans.”
“And what do I care for Americans? ”
“I'm just saying it's the biggest conference in years.”
“This thing makes good coffee?”
“Please, Mamma.”
“I cannot do it, my heart's love.”
“We've put so much money in. It's huge, people from all over the world, it's a mosaic. They're all coming.”
“In the end, it won't matter.”
“Oh, you don't believe that,” says her daughter. “You've never believed that, come on, Mamma!”
“Have you told anyone about the poems?”
No.
“Promise? ”
Mamma, I promise. Please.”
I can t do it, says Zoh. I m sorry. I just can t.
She places her hands on the table, emphatically, as if the argument itself has been tamped beneath her fingers, and they sit in silence at a small round kitchen table with a rough-hewn surface. She can tell her daughter has paid a lot of money for the table, beautifully crafted, yet factory-made all the same. Perhaps it is a fashion. Things come around again and again. A memory nicks her. Enrico used to spread his hands out on the kitchen table and playfully stab a knife between his fingers, over and over, until the wood at the head of the table was coarse and pitted.