Emily Wolfteich

Let me introduce you to some of the people in my life right now.

This man is named Hector. The “man” is really a boy, he’s 17 although you would never know it because his hands are twice my size and he speaks more slowly than most teenagers I know. He wears a red shirt with patterned English words that don’t make sense. At first when he told us his story I thought that I was hearing wrong, that my French wasn’t as good as I had thought, that pirogue must mean something different. But no, no I was correct — this boy younger than me, younger than my little brother even, got to France from Cote d’Ivoire via canoe. Cote d’Ivoire to Spain to France to this hospital bed in this hospital that smells like antibacterial soap and the nurse’s pungent perfume. Hector has no family in France and doesn’t know where his canoe-mates are now. When we put the barquette of thiep down by his bed, he touched it like he was afraid it might dissolve under his fingertips.

I call Madame de Turckheim my grandmere d’acceuil, and I rent my tiny room from her and we eat together three days a week and last Friday I spent an hour under her desk trying to figure out why her internet wasn’t working. She pinches my cheek and is of course horrified that I don’t wear a warm enough jacket out. Ever since I told her that it’s hard making French friends, she’s brought new suggestions up at every dinner, where we have three course meals with the flavor of France’s classical music station overlaying everything. She is sure that I don’t eat enough and yet, in the French way, agrees with me when I bemoan how fat I’m getting here. You should never, ever interrupt her during the news. I think she is marvelous.

So many people (this may have been an ambitious post). Fadoua is our social assistant at work, and she is a gifted cook and feeds me all the time and says she will be sad to see me go. Olivier is the crepe man next door, who enjoys warning me about the aspartame in the coca lite I always get, and knows by now that I never get anything but tartiflette, and told me he was sorry to hear about Boston. I don’t know her name but there is a woman who is homeless who always sits on the stairs at my stop, hand out, and sometimes I give her my change if I can, but always a smile that I hope helps even a bit. There have been the French boys who have introduced me to Leffe and the now-infamous “French drop,” and there have been the Moroccan guitarists that I sang with at 3 am in front of Notre Dame, and there is the cashier at Monoprix who I once tried to flirt with and now specifically pick out his line just so I can annoy him by making him change my 50 euro bills.

There are the men on the street of Goutte d’Or who yell after or at me, or worse the ones that step in front of me to block my way. There are the men who think they are owed a conversation, or a glance. Ah men of the Metro, I want to be kind to you, but I feel like I’m risking my safety by talking to you. I want to treat you like people, but you are not treating me as one. I hate generalizing, but I have learned to keep my mouth hard and my eyes narrowed and to look past you as if you don’t exist, because if I were to soften even a little bit, someone would see weakness and pounce. I am not weak. But it is exhausting to be in armor all the time.

Lastly there is Jean Joseph, who had a last name once but on his papers they couldn’t spell it so now his name is just Jean Joseph.  He has a voice tuned for the radio, velvety and with low chords. The first time we walked into his corner room we were in blue plastic scrubs from head to toe, and couldn’t stay long, and our voices were muted by masks. He talked about mundane things desperately, because he had no one else to talk to, telling them in story cadence even though they were not stories. The second time we came in we had skin again, scrubs unnecessary, but this tall man with silvering hair and wide eyes was shivering under two covers, teeth chattering. Naoual left to find him another blanket, and as the door closed behind her and I tried to think of something to say, Jean Joseph cried, deeply and quietly, and the only thing that I could do was to hold his hand while his fears came unwillingly bubbling out of his mouth. This will be my end, I will never leave this place. How could this happen to me? How can I die so far from home? I stuttered out things I couldn’t promise him, assurances, prayers, consolation, empty words from someone who has never known such deep anguish. Except for my hand, small and scarred and freckled, gripped in his shaking one, I was utterly, painfully useless.

He slowed crying, let me go, and went back to shivering. Naoual came back and noticed nothing, bearing another blanket. He spoke of the weather and what the doctors had said, and then we left. I said nothing to Naoual, but I cried that night, and a few nights after.

The people here are frightening and frightened, just like everywhere else in the world. Everyone I meet, as much as it is temptingly easy to flatten them to one facet of their personality, is human with aching sorrows and hard lives and secret pleasures, the same as me and mine. But who do you give a chance to? How can I hold the hand of a man in the hospital who is afraid, and then assume that the one loitering on the steps sucking in his teeth as I walk by is not equally full of fear and things that haunt him? How can I blame the French for being cold when I know that feeling too, of not wanting to share too much of yourself because when you did it before, it cost you? And when do I learn who to trust?

I hope I learn soon, but I have a feeling that there’s no answer to that.