The Fugitivities, стр. 39
Why was it always like this? A nameless starving African. And people going to work averting their eyes, the message assimilated, quietly disposed of. How much had really changed? The agency behind the poster had probably hired a marketing team to produce their campaign. They had offices in London, Geneva, Paris, and New York, and employed wealthy and upper-middle-class whites who could afford to live in the great cities and chose to take up more attractive volunteer work. The life behind the starving face had no substance or will. A fly crawling over the mind of Europe.
Nathaniel felt a swelling rage. There was such a vast canvas of injustice, bigger than he had ever previously imagined, worse the more he learned. All the knowledge he had acquired since he had moved abroad was coiling together, glowing hot as his own sense of futility increased. It was like the time when he stood in that awesome hallway in the Louvre, nearly deafened by the massive paintings on all sides, furious at the hollering mobs of tourists knocking into him with flagrant fouls. He was surrounded on all sides by pinkish angels and Madonnas and bearded saints with their marks of holiness, their place in history. But nowhere, in the entire palace, could he find a celebration of the goodness, the power, the intelligence, the glory of anyone who looked like him. Not one instance in all the sacred imagery of the Occident of a black man crowned with power and holiness.
And yet he felt especially peculiar, perhaps more alien than ever, when he passed the groups of young black teenagers huddled together in the gray wastelands in the city center at Les Halles. Boys who looked so familiar to him, and yet who regarded him with a wary curiosity. And he couldn’t deny that this was, at least in part, because they (like whoever had built the hideous shopping-mall complex where they copped their cheap Euroburgers and chased skirt) seemed astonishingly indifferent to the flying buttresses of Saint-Eustache. A building whose old stone arches and spires filled him with awe.
At the top of the rue du Transvaal, there was an esplanade from which one could see the whole city spread out below. It was lovelier than the Bronx. It had art and aspiration. But did it have soul? Did it have a place for his arts? Would the mind of Europe ever be able to incorporate him? Just then, as if to banish any further thoughts, an overwhelming need to urinate came over him and he marched furtively down into the sketchy park below. There, he found a suitable tree and released a torrent which, in an alternate universe, he would have made gargantuan enough to drown every embassy, every sleek arms-dealing bureau, every petroleum office tower, every pompous government office building in the city of light.
The questions nagged at him. Could he love the woman and not her city? Could she ever love him across the vast gulf of experience that separated two people like them? What was it in her that he couldn’t reach? What filled her with the sadness that he had detected from the very start, but that she wouldn’t reveal or hadn’t yet? He had seen the traces of that sadness. They could show themselves in anything or nothing at all. In the way she said, “Toss me a cigarette, I think there’s one in my raincoat.” Or those odd moments, he noticed, when she stared absently at her own hands. Sometimes when they fucked, he would catch a glimpse of her mouth biting at the air, uttering words that he couldn’t understand, that he supposed were Armenian, or maybe not even words at all but a lost or alternative alphabet accessed only in those fleeting moments when sex makes language strange again, keeping a part of the world secret, sacred, free from the will of men.
—
One night as they left a café in the Latin Quarter, Laura pulled on Nathaniel’s arm, and said she wanted to talk. They moved off the boulevards and took the narrower, older streets. They came to the fountain square at Saint-Sulpice. One of the bell towers of the church was covered in scaffolding, the clasped fingers of planks and girders covering its massive, ghostly presence in a loose skin that rippled and ballooned gently in the wind.
Laura said she was thinking a lot about her brother, Mehdi. Nathaniel felt as if a jab had caught him in the ribs. “I didn’t know you had a brother,” he interrupted, stopping in his tracks for emphasis. She had never mentioned him before.
Laura stared at the pavement as she fished through her bag. “I’m sorry, I thought you would be overwhelmed because Mehdi adds a layer of complication to my life. He’s really only my half brother, and he’s Muslim. He stayed in Lebanon with an uncle. I haven’t seen him since we left Beirut. We were very close before my parents took us away. I get letters from him sometimes, very beautiful letters in Arabic. He’s a great writer. So good.” She paused to light a cigarette. “My parents won’t talk to him. My father never got over his decision to stay in Beirut or his disdain of science. Mehdi embraced religion and totally rejected Paris and the studies that my father wanted him to pursue. He said he didn’t need the French to understand his place in the world or the universe that Allah set in motion. Sometimes I think he was right to want to stay. When I read his