Paris, September 2021
The news traveled fast; news like that does.
I knew you had been caught up in it the moment the first reports came in from Paris. Almost six years ago now, on a Friday the thirteenth. A date like a bad joke.
All sorts of people checked in online as “safe.” Friends, a niece, a distant relative. People I’d studied with, my own former students. Exhibitors from the photo show, your fellow photographers. Others, vague acquaintances; I was surprised how many people I knew on the fringe of a world event. You were there too, Flo, and your profile stayed silent. Ominously silent, as they say.
That night and in the days that followed I studied the videos and news photos. I scrolled through dozens of shots of toppled chairs at sidewalk cafés, floors covered with shattered glass, people in space blankets being carried away on stretchers improvised from crush barriers. Pictures of ambulances and fire engines stranded at odd angles, clusters of police cars. The boulevards, avenues, and squares were packed with first responders, but everything was in short supply.
Was this the place and hour? Was that your hair? Were they your long limbs? Your boots? Would I recognize you after all these years, in this setting?
Were you still alive? That was what I should have asked myself first, of course.
—
“Looking and seeing aren’t the same thing,” you taught us long ago when we were still so young. Me, not even twenty; you, not yet thirty. The classroom wasn’t darkened like it usually was. You, our instructor, weren’t going to whip up our enthusiasm for a photographer’s body of work or the history of the first image, not going to take us on an expedition with a glass plate camera that was being lugged to a distant corner of the world to record the view for the first time in the history of the universe.
No, you were going to teach us what comes first, before the photograph. And you were going to do it close to home. The classroom we had been gathering in at a fixed time each week was, at best, a place we had looked at occasionally but probably never seen. It was now going to be our starting point. You asked us to let our eyes roam for fifteen minutes while mentally naming everything. Only after that quarter of an hour had elapsed were we allowed to take notes; as an exercise it was childishly simple.
We did as you asked, we did everything you asked. Back then, ten years’ seniority was the difference between duckling and swan. You sat in silence the whole time, staring out through the window, your sharp profile lit by the low autumn sun. With your boots on the table; it was the eighties.
We’d been coming here for months and only now did I notice how everything in the classroom—from the sagging venetian blinds with their grimy cords to the weary ceiling panels—hung listlessly. Dusty cobwebs were swaying in the air between the fluorescent lights. We saw and named it all silently, from the gleam on the old lino floor (mustard, dented) to the discolored cornices. Everything condensed and then etched itself into memory like the light on one of the daguerreotypes you had told us about a few classes earlier. To this day I can still list those neutral, completely unexceptional details, even the faded cards in the metal slots on the filing cabinet in the corner, sixteen drawers high—and I understood what you were trying to achieve. Someone who sees can tell. And someone who can tell records. We need language to
guide our eyes.
Only later did I realize that despite everything that happened, whatever reason you had for choosing me, whoever was guilty of what, it was still you who taught me how to be so observant.
—
At first, I waited. After the attacks, I waited. I soon heard that you had survived. Also how and what and where, messages came whooshing in. But I waited for more. For Kairos, who reveals the right moment. For courage. Or maybe I was waiting until I’d forgotten you again. So much time had already passed.
But then, in the fall of 2021, that night in Paris returned to screens everywhere. Again those streets, the flashing lights, the dull bangs. The stories. The men involved in the attacks had gone on trial and the French newspapers I read so I can discuss them in class with my students were filled day after day with the testimonies of bystanders and survivors. They even turned it into a Netflix series.
I didn’t see your face among the talking heads. Your story wasn’t told; you’ve always remained silent. Again, those images, but you will never see them.
—
I took some leave, came to Paris, and I’m still here.
Where else could I tell this story? I had you to thank for this city. And you me. Paris had inadvertently become the pivot we both turn on. Here I would find the words—for me and for you.
I rode one of those gray self-service bikes down familiar streets to all the addresses I knew by heart. I followed the Seine far beyond
the city limits; everything seemed to have shrunk.
I also rode to the locations of the attacks, which I had marked on a map. A wobbly red line. And that was the route I followed yesterday afternoon on the warm asphalt of the empty Boulevard Voltaire; it was the car-free Sunday.
—
Comptoir Voltaire no longer exists. The red awnings have been replaced with blue ones. (Did you see that they were red? Did you name the color?) The brasserie is now called Les Ogres. Meat is still the specialty.
I stood on the sidewalk for a while trying to evoke that Friday, trying to find you in this place. That was still beyond me and I rode on. On the other side of the city, Parisians and visitors were thronged around the Arc de Triomphe, which was wrapped in shiny silver fabric, a posthumous art project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. It looked like an altar, surrounded by people taking selfies.
Maybe there was nothing under the material. There hadn’t been anything there in 1810 either, when the time came for Marie-Louise to ride under the arch and into the city; the construction work had come no further than the foundations. Napoleon had a trompe l’oeil of the Arc painted for her benefit, canvas on a wooden frame, a life-size illusion. She rode under an arch of air and flapping linen. If there’s anywhere history is being continuously reappraised, rewritten, and believed again, Flo, if only for a moment, this is it.
I’m sending you these messages from here in Paris. Our story was a pebble in my shoe I’d done my best to ignore, but once it made its presence felt, that was no longer possible. You’ll have to make time for it too.
Listen.
I
Philippe’s Story1986
I need a third person for our story because every story rests on three points. Otherwise, it falls over. The three points are you, me, and Philippe Lambert. A man I knew only briefly and you not at all, but without him this story can’t be told. I don’t need to explain to you, Flo, that it’s also less awkward for me to have someone else to talk about.
You and I get to spend the coming period outside ourselves, in neutral territory, with him. A character cobbled together from memories and recovered scraps of paper. Assumptions, reconstructions. Rumors, paintings, snippets from other people’s stories. Shirts to iron, unfinished sentences, coffee grounds in a cup, cigarette butts in a small ashtray on a staircase. And dates and coordinates. Those too, of course.
Philippe.
—
Every family has a child who’s “a bit different,” and with the Lamberts it was the youngest. The first three, two boys and a girl, all displayed the self-assured, determined traits of the paternal side from an early age. They were born in Rue Leclerc in the 14th arrondissement in 1948, 1949, and 1951 respectively.
Every morning at quarter past eight, the white tires of a Traction Avant glided up to the curb and the driver waited until father and director general Christian Lambert had emerged from the building, opened the rear door (making the driver get out to do it was too old-fashioned), and lowered himself into the back seat while taking the hat off his head in a single flowing movement. In 1952 he had been named chairman of the board at the Ministry of Telecommunication; the culmination of a steady march through the French civil service. Considered a dandy and a moderate modernist, he steered clear of politics. In the turbulent waters of the Fourth Republic, the period without General de Gaulle, it was essential for La Poste to plow on like a reliable steamboat—M. Lambert had a predilection for similes.
Essentially the pinnacle for a French civil servant, his new position called for a larger home in a better neighborhood. He settled on a spacious, horseshoe-shaped apartment with five bedrooms, a library, and a salon with tall windows, located in Rue Marbeau on the edge of the fashionable 16th arrondissement, with various embassies and the German consulate around the corner. The green haze of the Bois de Boulogne was visible at the west end of the street, on the other side
of the Périphérique.
This step also called for a fourth child.
—
Philippe’s arrival on a February morning in 1954 proceeded so swiftly that there was no time to make it to the hospital. His mother, Ghislaine Lambert, gave birth in the foyer on the new parquet floor; the doctor who had been alerted by telephone had just stepped through the door and still had his coat on.
The new baby was healthy but high-strung, he cried a lot and had a lazy eye. In his first months he suffered convulsions that made him jerk his arms and legs wide. The child outgrew this but seemed permanently on guard and easily upset. For the first five years it was impossible to leave him alone. He held on tight to the nannies’ aprons and his mother’s couture dresses. She was convinced Philippe’s birthplace was to blame. They should never have moved.
During the Exposition Universelle of 1889 this area had been home to a bullfighting arena financed by a consortium of Spanish bull breeders. La Gran Plaza de Toros, an enormous metal-roofed, brick construction, could seat twenty-two thousand spectators. Matadors were brought in from Madrid, the cheering from the arena rang out over the streets, and the ladies of the neighborhood suddenly began appearing with fans and mantillas and carrying signed photographs of El Gordito in their handbags. But after just four years, the Iberian fever had passed. Due to a lack of interest, the building was demolished and the block that came free was filled with Haussmannian apartment buildings.
According to his mother, that arena from more than half a century ago explained Philippe’s character. “On this ground,” Ghislaine said regularly, pointing at the polished parquet, “too much violence has been committed.
Blood has been spilled. A child feels that.” This annoyed his father, who said, “We live on the fourth floor, darling. And our first three children were practically born on the catacombs. It never bothered them.” In any case, is there an inch of Paris that hasn’t been drenched in blood?
It could only be coincidence that his youngest son was a little different. More sensitive, on a less steady keel. Nothing to worry about. He was sure to be smart enough, they all were, and if not, Director General Christian Lambert had the right contacts to ensure that Philippe too landed on his feet.
In the four paintings made of the family over the years, you don’t notice anything untoward at all. Philippe’s left eye, which continued to droop despite all the expensive treatment, was retouched. All in all, he became quite a handsome boy, with straight chestnut hair he would later pass on to his sons, a very slight stoop, and the angular Lambert jaw that lends itself so well to being captured in oils.
When Philippe was thirteen his grandmother was hit by a bus and killed while leaving Parc Monceau. Without warning, she had tried to cross Boulevard de Courcelles and the bus, which was coming from the left, had been unable to stop in time. She was a sparrow of a woman and the distraught driver picked her up and sat down on the side of the pavement with her on his lap, a pietà in uniform. Grandmother hadn’t suffered; she died instantly.
For days beforehand, Philippe had been restless, not wanting to go to school, hardly eating. He kept saying that Mamie was getting too old to live on the other side of the city, in fact she was getting too old to carry on living alone, couldn’t they let her move in with them? His brothers and sister had reached an age at which they found grandparents irritating. They avoided Sunday dinners, gushed about Serge Gainsbourg to annoy their parents, and smoked Afghani black in the deserted
servants’ rooms on the eighth floor. Their youngest brother was excluded from this pact and adored his grandmother. His parents thought he shouldn’t make such a fuss. That morning, he hadn’t wanted to leave the house, but his father had taken him with him in his official car and watched to make sure he went through the gates of his strict private school. A few hours later the family received the telephone call.
“Philippe had a premonition,” they whispered at the funeral. “He was very close to his grandmother. There’s a child like that in every family.”
—
Their greyhound’s sudden death from food poisoning in 1971; the zinc plate that crashed down onto the sidewalk just outside their front door after a heavy storm and came within a hair’s breadth of crushing the concierge; a fire in the Galeries Lafayette, where his mother was shopping at the time—in retrospect Philippe was quite often scared of things that ended up happening. But sometimes he also got wound up about events that never took place at all. Once, on the way to a weekend in their country home on the coast, already three quarters of an hour outside Paris, he begged his father to go back home, convinced that a pipe had burst in the building. The water was sure to be dripping through the floors. His panic in the car was so tangible that Ghislaine talked her husband into turning back. At home they found a peaceful apartment behind closed shutters. When they set out again for Saint-Valery-en-Caux an hour later, Philippe immediately fell asleep in the back seat, exhausted.
There were places in the city he gave a wide berth: bridges, stations, cemeteries. He could only sleep with the curtains open, ate his meals clockwise, and refused to let the housekeeper polish his shoes, insisting on doing
it himself. Words like compulsion, obsession, and anxiety were carefully avoided—the Lamberts did not suffer from things like that. A little sensitive, perhaps. Un peu nerveux.
Before he started economics at university, his parents sent him to a psychologist who recommended relaxation therapy, a fairly new phenomenon at the time. He learned to breathe with his stomach and discovered that he could rationalize away fears, ignoring them, sometimes even laughing them off. And also that nobody wanted to hear his warnings. In his circles, self-confidence was the norm. Adversity, failure, fate—they were all for other people. Even the war hadn’t changed the family’s fortunes, although the details of that were something they didn’t talk about. “Always remember, Philippe,” his father said, “people like us help the country to advance. We direct the flow of money. We head factories and laboratories. We’re responsible for the development of the Concorde and the first European space launch. These things don’t happen by themselves: all those trains that run, all those hospitals…Think of the hundreds of thousands of people who get onto their bicycles and climb into their yellow vans in the name of La Poste to ensure that all that information ends up where it’s supposed to be”—the image of an army of anonymous functionaries moved Philippe’s father deeply, he used it every year in his New Year’s speech at head office—“these are great processes, wheels that keep society turning, and yes, yes, people like us are behind them. We bring forth leaders, managing directors, what am I saying—presidents. There is no room for doubt. Be a man.”
Philippe slid a lock of hair in front of his left eye and did what was asked of him. Apparently, that was possible. Apparently, you could stuff your fears into a mental box and screw down the lid. They were still there, but you grew around them. That also made them invisible to others, who weren’t interested in them anyway. He’d learned that.
He completed his studies, obtained a management position with Renault, and, on one of his first business trips to Germany, met Laurence, a meticulously coiffured Air France stewardess. She could spot a passenger with
flight anxiety in seconds; it was quite common in first class. A little personal attention could make the trip so much more comfortable. She remained standing in the aisle with the coffeepot in one hand and conversed with Philippe until they commenced descent. There was something appealing about the clammy face turned up toward her and she decided to breach company protocol by asking for his card.
Thanks to their slight figures, straight dark brown hair, and somewhat reticent gait, they could already have been mistaken for family. Laurence brushed over her frugal childhood in Compiègne; Philippe didn’t mention his fears—they both longed for a regulated existence. Philippe Lambert and Laurence Duclos married a year later and moved into an apartment in Rue Dorian near Place de la Nation, where tall linden trees filtered the sunlight that shone in through the windows. In June 1983 Nicolas was born.
It would not have come as a surprise if the birth of his child had stoked the smoldering mountain of fear inside Philippe. Every district nurse knows that young parents suffer from an aftershock of anxiety and responsibility a few days after the umbilical cord has been cut. Even those without a nervous disposition. There, in the cot or on the breast or lying between them, is their Achilles’ heel. Nobody warned them about this sudden vulnerability and if someone did mention it, they weren’t listening.
But while Laurence wondered out loud how she could carry on living if anything ever happened to this tiny human being, Philippe became the picture of serenity. He changed diapers, fed the baby (breastfeeding was not a success and they soon switched to formula), and was deeply content to break with French custom by exhausting his supply of free days to spend the first weeks fathering his son. “Nothing will ever happen to him,” he told Laurence. “He will always stay healthy, grow very old, and never break so much as a finger. Believe me.”
fade. Every evening around ten, Philippe let his exhausted wife fall asleep on the couch, took his son in his arms, and carried him all the way around Place de la Nation, following the sidewalk of the outermost ring, where the child’s howls invariably calmed. Back in the apartment, he stroked the baby’s gently pulsing head, laid him over his shoulder, and continued to walk to and fro in the kitchen until the tense little body relaxed against the side of his neck. Fear had never been further away.
—
That someone would come to look after the child was a given. Philippe and his brothers and sister had grown up with these temporary, caring, shadowy figures around the house. Young women whose names and builds changed, but whose hands and voices melted together in the children’s memories to a single movement, a single feeling. Hands that dressed you, made meals, packed bags, pushed baby carriages, retrieved balls from flower beds, tidied and picked things up, checked the temperature of the bathwater, and combed wet hair. Silhouettes that appeared in the morning, waved goodbye, stood waiting at the school gates, never sitting down but always sliding between the salon and the playroom, the kitchen and the bathroom. Disappearing at a certain moment to their chambre de bonne on the top floor by slipping out the back door, through which they made their equally silent entrance again the next day. Until the end of Philippe’s collège, their presence was self-evident. He couldn’t imagine it being any different for his children; Laurence soon came round. Nicolas was an easy child, Philippe seemed more balanced than ever in the time she had known him, she missed work, and her parents-in-law were willing not only to search for a girl for them but also pay and house her; the maid’s room on the eighth floor at Rue Marbeau was empty, after all. Times had changed: An international au pair seemed a good, modern variant of the classic nanny.
“I’ll look in the northern countries,” Ghislaine said. “I don’t want my grandson adopting an African accent or starting to use Arabic words. What’s more, girls from the north are clean and quick to learn the language. We’ll look for a new one each year, that’s how it’s done these days.” After having worried most about her youngest son, she was happy to be able to contribute to his perfect, mail-order family.
“Let me take care of it. That’s best for everyone.”
Later, when Philippe thinks back on these years, the first three with Nicolas, they seem a bright, timeless intermezzo. The days thread together in calm happiness. He goes to work and occupies himself with pleasant, abstract activities: He’s responsible for cost minimization. Planning a new production line, relocating jobs, mainly to Asia—these are all major developments involving thousands of employees, packaged as numbers and pastel-colored histograms on overheads he explains at weekly meetings.
In the evening, he returns to a neat, fresh-smelling apartment, where his son has been bathed and fed. Philippe says, “See you tomorrow,” to the au pair who lives on the other side of town in a maid’s room above his parental home, pleasantly out of sight. He waits for Laurence, they warm up something from Picard Surgelés in the microwave, drink a glass of wine. He makes love to his wife at least twice a week. She has recovered her shy prenatal enthusiasm and likes to walk around the house naked, which excites him. Sometimes they smoke a joint—buying Dutch weed from the cook at the brasserie around the corner and airing the bedroom afterward.
Within a few months of becoming a parent, Philippe no longer remembers what he was like before. He forgets the constant tension
in his neck, the headaches, the nights he only skimmed the surface of sleep, he forgets the calamitous visions that beset him through his entire childhood and adolescence, flaring up at any moment. Visions he has never mentioned to anyone, that not even Laurence knows about: dead animals on the side of the road, torn-off limbs, a body floating in the river, water washing away houses, a child choking on candy, an unending stream of cockroaches from under the baseboards, toppling bookcases crushing toddlers, chain collisions, diseases that make your tongue turn black. He forgets that those images were always there. He forgets what fear feels like. This phase of his life is so bright, almost bleached, a sun-drenched impression. For the first time in his thirty years of being alive he approaches the future trustingly, without reservations, and slowly that starts to feel normal. Philippe starts to believe that it will continue like this forever.
—
This isn’t necessarily strange. Fears can grow, but they can also shrink, disappearing as inexplicably as they appeared. But around Philippe, outside the brightly lit cage of his happiness, the city is moving in the opposite direction.
In mid-July 1983 a bomb explodes at the Turkish Airlines check-in desk at Orly Airport. Eight dead, fifty wounded; the atrocity is claimed by the Syrian branch of the Armenian liberation army ASALA—almost no one understands how these things could possibly be linked. “Paris in Fear,” declares the cover of Time magazine. Air traffic comes to a brief standstill (not for too long, it’s the summer holidays, the middle of the exodus of Parisians fleeing the hot city) and more police appear in the Metro corridors. But it is remarkable how quickly the attack is rationalized away. This is an attack on Turkey, not France. On French territory, true, but…This hatred is directed elsewhere. Laurence too, still at home on maternity leave when it happens, simply heads off to the airport to start work again at the end of the summer. Philippe looks at his son, confident that they are invulnerable behind his shield of foolish bliss. ...
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