The Fugitivities, стр. 37

Nathaniel knew what living in what they called the banlieue meant. It was basically the hood. But he wanted to be around skinfolk at least some of the time he was abroad, and that was where they were at. It would also mean spending a tiny fraction of what he was spending on hotel luxuriance and room service. It was time to see what the Other Paris was about.

Claude was renting an apartment with two other West African friends on the eighth floor of a housing block. Their unit was in the bottom half of an L on the far side of six identical buildings that made up the Cité Lamartine. The buildings were joined by a barren concrete esplanade, along which several rows of scooters were always parked, and where there had once been a low-rise frontage for shops (most boarded up and closed down) and a kind of gravel extension where kids played soccer. In fact, there was only one business still open—Faisal’s, a kind of café or tea shop run by Ahmed, an Egyptian, that served as the informal meeting room for the men of Cité Lamartine.

It was at Faisal’s over Moroccan tea that the new roommates all met for the first time. Claude introduced Nathaniel as his American friend, which drew large smiles. He was introduced to Ghislain, a young man from Cameroon who worked as a cook in a Senegalese restaurant in the Marais. Then to Apollinaire, a slightly older Senegalese man, nearer to Nate in age, who had arrived in Paris almost ten years before, and who had a job working as a sanitation worker for the city. And Claude explained finally that he was French, born in Sarcelles, but that his parents were from the French island of Martinique. They toasted to a new beginning.

The apartment was small but functional. Nate had his own room, as did Claude, while Apollinaire and Ghislain agreed to share a room and pay less for their share of the rent. Nate had a window that faced out onto the scrubby outskirts of Maisons-Alfort, which consisted mostly of a car-and-motorcycle dealership, more apartment complexes, and a low, flat, boxy building, which turned out to be their local Leader Price grocery store. Claude’s window faced the inside esplanade of the Cité, and in front of it, he had set up his decks, his mixer, and a synthesizer he had hooked up to a PC. His bed was often covered in clothes that he would mix and match, crisp outfits that he kept meticulously ordered in his mirrored closet. The rest of the room was devoted to his records and to the neat rainbow rows of a nice sneaker collection.

With his new friends and warmer living arrangement, things were falling into place. At the university, Nathaniel’s heart always jumped when he spotted Laura entering the amphitheater. She would come over to him and meet his cheek with a warmly perfumed bise. They often paused to chat before class in one of the grand stairwells, a flirtatious islet in the hubbub of students streaming in and out of the lecture halls.

He continued to struggle with his coursework. His French was still pretty bad, as she had pointed out, although he found he could understand a good deal more than he could speak. But the professors certainly didn’t make it easy. They had a way of talking about an idea or an event without ever really saying what they thought about it, or what had happened.

The history of Iceland, one professor seemed to argue, was crucial to understanding the origins of the French Revolution. Nathaniel had never thought about Iceland in his life, nor the people that lived there, and it occurred to him that had he not taken this particular course he most likely would have gone to his grave without ever even once having considered them. The professor said that one of the great human tragedies of the modern era took place on this tiny North Atlantic island. A period known as the Mist Hardships, which followed the eruption of the volcano Laki on June 8, 1783. This massive eruption, the professor explained, produced the closest thing to nuclear winter that anyone had ever experienced until Hiroshima. In Iceland, anyone living at that time would have believed it was the end of the world. Clouds of poisonous sulfur and ash blotted out the sun. Rivers of fire and falling molten rock set fire to the villages. The clouds of death spread to Europe. In London the fog of noxious gases made navigation of the Thames impossible. Laki’s pall of doom generated extreme weather that spread chaotic and toxic conditions around the globe. In the winter of 1784, as far away as North America, the Mississippi froze at New Orleans, with icebergs spotted by bewildered slave and sugar traders in the Gulf of Mexico. The extreme weather lasted until 1788, when disastrous hailstorms put the final nail in the coffin of Europe’s peasant underclass, causing widespread famine, notably in France, where passions stoked by the Jacobin intelligentsia set the house of Europe on fire, igniting a revolution that forever changed the course of history. Geography. Meteorology. The seasons of the Earth are as much an actor in History as any other force, the professor claimed. Even the origins of the French Revolution could be traced and explained, at least in part, by a spell of bad weather. A change of climate issuing from a dismal and humiliated island in the North Atlantic that no one cared about. History, the professor concluded, is a deep ditch of diabolical misfortune, out of which Man has always struggled to climb by filling the cavity with the bodies of other men somehow unlike him and using them as a ladder, only to discover that the bodies and the ditch are one and the same thing, and that nothing is more like oneself than one’s enemy.

Nathaniel had recounted his story with Laura