Assorted Flavors

On a humid day in August at the beginning of the twenty-first century, an Arabic man kissed a Caucasian girl while standing on the platform at the train station in Lyon, France. The Moroccan’s name was Karim and that Midwestern girl was none other than myself, but I like to pretend that the Caucasian girl was someone else and that dear Karim was just another anonymous Arabic face.

It’s been two years since then and I haven’t spoken to Karim for at least six months, maybe more. I’ve already told this story too many times. Back in the States, my friends at Skidmore ate it up. They were the daughters of wealthy upstate New York democrats. Their fathers spent their summers betting on horses in the Saratoga races.

I had no intention of mentioning the way it tasted when Karim kissed me (thick and salty), or the way he smelled (like shisha and turmeric), or the weight of his hand on my waist (heavy like a basket of wet laundry). These details were irrelevant to the plot. I wanted to discuss more important subjects, like racial prejudices and the reasons why men fight wars (tea, taxes, cotton, communism, eugenic plots, and the right for an Arabic man to kiss a Caucasian woman in public). And I certainly didn’t want to talk about the way that I blushed when Karim kissed me (from shame, although I blamed my blood-flushed cheeks on the heat).

I used to begin the story by evoking that old Alfred Eisenstaedt photograph—you know, the one with the sailor kissing his lady on Times Square. He’s got her swooped down and wrapped up in his broad hairy arms and the whole crowd is watching them, their teeth unsheathed, mid-smile. I wanted so badly to believe that Karim and my relationship had been just as romantic as that one, infamous kiss. So when I told this story to my Skidmore classmates (in Poli Sci classes, during breaks in French Romanticism, in the lounge of the girls’ dorm while watching the presidential debates on TV), I pretended that the Caucasian girl’s back had arched elegantly in a deep swoon, just like the woman in that photograph. That was the only detail I ever invented.

The last time I had a layover in New York on my way back from Paris, I saw that damn Eisenstaedt photograph on a postcard stand in the airport gift shop. I had too much time and no loose change, so I just sat on my carry-on suitcase right there in the gift shop and looked at the picture of the sailor and his lady while waiting for my plane. She’s as elegant as moonlight in her white nurse’s dress and white square-heeled pumps, but I had never noticed before that her fist is clenched so tightly down by her side that you can see the bones in her slender hand. The sailor’s hairy arm is wrapped around her head and clasped over her ear like he’s protecting her from some vicious secret or a naughty joke (war, drugs, prostitution, race). And my god, everyone is watching them. The onlookers’ feet are caught mid-step as they close in on the couple kissing on the sidewalk. The spectators don’t have eyes, just shadows under their brows. All those blurry feet and teeth-bared smiles close in on that kiss.

If I saw the picture again on a postcard I’d still be tempted to buy it and send it to Karim. But I lost his address when I moved back to the States, and besides, I’m not entirely sure what I would write to him anymore.

The comparison’s negligible, anyhow. No one cheered in Lyon (or in Paris, for that matter) when France relinquished Morocco in ‘56, and when the Moroccan kissed the American in a steamy train station, everyone was watching but not a soul was smiling.

“You’re grimacing,” said Karim as he pulled back from the kiss.

I glanced aside. A beady-eyed woman wearing men’s galoshes was staring.

Karim and I communicated exclusively in French—a language that neither of us could claim as our native tongue—but it couldn’t have been our respective accents that drew attention. Our voices had been locked up behind our lips.

“The train is late,” I said.

My accent—American with a twinge of Canadian in my diphthongized wide vowels—always gave me away. I hauled it around like a reluctant child dragging his feet. It made me exotic and begged the question: Vous n’êtes pas d’ici?—No, I’m not from here. I’m just here working temporarily. For a doctor. I’m his nanny. Yes, yes, I like it very much here. The inevitable interlocutor would then pause before handing me my change, or pouring me a cup of coffee, or stamping my bus ticket, and contemplate the charming way I pronounced my guttural R’s instead of swallowing them like most Americans do.

“Come see me again next weekend,” Karim said.

Karim’s accent, on the contrary, would never be good enough, pure enough, smart enough, French enough. His voice unearthed the corpse of a colony that still reeked and attracted flies although negotiations for Moroccan independence had ended half a century ago. French Morocco was 52 years dead. Vous n’êtes pas d’ici. No question mark. Just a statement, a judgment, an ultimatum, a threat. You’re not from here.

“I can’t, Karim. I told you already. I have to take care of the little bastards all weekend while their parents visit friends in St. Tropez.”

Karim sighed, a deep, defeated oh.

“Find a babysitter,” he said.

“I am the babysitter.”

“Bring them with you.”

“All four of them? On the train?” I said. “To do what? Smoke kif and eat kebabs?”

“Amine will come over. He’ll make his special coconut chicken curry. The kids would love it,” Karim said, only half kidding.

I would have liked nothing better than to get those kids out of the house, to unplug them from their petty preoccupations, to throw the television in the pool and the video game console in along with it, to plop the kids down in the grass and spend a whole afternoon telling them Grimm fairy tales—the gruesome ones, just to scare them good. We were of the same flesh, the De Sévigné family and I, but we were not of the same mind. I came to visit Karim in Lyon each weekend with a week full of bourgeois misadventures to recount.

“Did I tell you about the incident with the freezer last week? A circuit breaker shorted and Sylvaine was horrified that everything would thaw and we would have ‘nothing to eat,’ so she had Cosette and me clean out the whole goddamn thing and transfer all of the food to the backup freezer in the bathhouse. And you know what? I found rabbit steaks in there. Four packs of them. And not the cheap Auchan brand either. There was filet mignon too. That shit was expired,” I said.

“Amine could make coconut rabbit curry,” said Karim, laughing. “He can make anything. Remember on my birthday when Amine showed up in my kitchen at one in the morning and cooked us a whole rosemary chicken?”

“But we were already a half bottle of Bacardi in and neither of us could remember how to speak French,” I said. I pulled him closer, burying my nose in the deep V of his polo, breathing him in. A thick smell. Like sweet curry with peanuts, or ginger and turmeric.

“Ana bahebak bezaf,” said Karim, and he kissed my forehead. The beady-eyed woman standing nearby scowled. Sale métèque, I thought I heard her murmur, but I could have just imagined it.

I blushed and pulled away. Thick air flooded in between us. The platform was filling up with steam. Clusters of passengers all waiting for the late train huddled together but never touched. Sweat evaporated in shimmering curtains from their bare arms and necks, leaving their skin gleaming. The train station was shaped like the enormous, inverted hull of a boat, and the spine of the ceiling arched at its highest point directly above the platform. Fifty feet of inaccessible space hovered heavily overhead while impatient passengers crowded below. An antique analogue clock ticked slowly and surprised puffs of dust clouded the clock’s face each time the minute hand moved.

Karim was fidgeting in my peripheral vision. He kicked at an apple core that had missed the trashcan and then itched the back of his ankle with the toe of his shoe.

Along the tracks, a scrappy looking man of indistinct Arabic decent was shuffling between the trash cans, poking through the rubbish with his index finger that seemed too long, looking for cigarettes with more than the butt left to smoke. Only one of his knees bent, so when he walked he buckled over at the waist, as though bowing deeply. The cane that he held in one hand dragged uselessly behind him as he doubled over with each step. The shoeless Romanians that had been huddling in the pigeon shit outside of the train station when we first came in had now made their way up to the platform. They were selling socialist newspapers that no one would buy. Three gendarmes followed them at a distance up the stairs.

“What if I came and visited you in Montfavet?” Karim said.

“You know I’m not allowed to have guests,” I said.

“But Nicole visited you,” he said in a childish, plaintive tone. He tugged at my hips like a toddler wanting to be held.

“She came over for dinner. Once. Besides, she’s French,” I said and regretted it immediately. I drew my breath in sharply and tried to suck my careless words in along with it. Karim took a step back but kept holding onto my hips like handles, harder now than before. I could feel his fingernails grabbing at the fabric of my dress.

The uneasy expectancy in the train station was heavy like a pregnant belly quaking over a belt buckle. Further down the tracks, thick violet shrubs vibrated with the shrill buzz of cicadas. Someone coughed. A little boy was kicking pebbles onto the metal tracks. A young mother caught him by the collar and gave his bottom a gentle but reproachful slap. The little boy was sulking now. Disappointed. Waiting.

“Have you told them about me yet?” Karim asked, his voice rising. I was tempted to put my finger over his lips. I didn’t want him to cause a scene, not here. The gendarmes had inherited their humiliating habits from the Vichy regime.

Karim kept the proof of his legality tucked near his thigh in a little pouch his ommy had made for him before he left Morocco nine years ago. No one could tell him that he didn’t have the right to stand on French soil. But if he were asked to show his papers, he would have to shove his hands down his trousers to pull them out, like some sicko masturbating in public. I blushed.

“Of course, Karim. This is silly.” I said.

“Do they know my name?” Karim said.

“I told them all about your internship,” I said.

Karim let go of my hips. He left two wrinkled patches where he had crumpled the fabric in his fists. Turning away, he pulled a pack of Winstons out of his back pocket. A faded rectangle in his pocket suggested too many packs of cigarettes and too few loads of laundry.

“You know the kids will smell that on me,” I said.

“You’re starting to like them, aren’t you,” he said, exhaling smoke slowly through a thin gap in his taut lips.

“You know, on Thursday night little Gauthier left his Mario action figure outside my bedroom door to protect me,” I said. “I’m allowed to be proud of my job, too, aren’t I?”

“Your monthly salary is still less than their weekly grocery bill.”

“Christ, Karim! They’re people, too!”

The woman in the galoshes was outright ogling by now, muttering to herself like Sylvaine did when she watched television.

Arabe beur crapule fripouille khoroto. I knew the words, too. They tumbled in the back of my mouth like loose teeth knocked out by a fistfight but I refused to spit them out. Métèque plèbe racaille raton vaurien.

“You should go,” I said to Karim. “You don’t need to wait. I don’t want you to be late getting back to work.”

“I can stay.”

“Your lunch break will be over soon,” I said.

“You want me to go,” he said.

“You’ll be late.”

He threw his half-smoked cigarette onto the tracks. He hesitated. He lit another.

The Arabic man was approaching us now. He was elderly, scrapped-up but harmless. His faded hair had fallen out in intermittent patches. One deep black eye was looking at me. His other eye was blue and looked awry. A sheath of colorless of puss clouded his blind eye. He grasped a half-smoked cigarette in one hand and pointed its ashy end at me like a threat.

“T’as du feu?” he said as he approached Karim and me slowly, bowing at the waist with every step as his stiff leg dragged along. Karim reached into his pocket for his lighter and held it out to the man.

His voice wasn’t smoky and guttural like I had expected it to be. Instead, it was unsettlingly childish and crisp, like he had swallowed a cicada and was coughing up the insect’s shrill song. I noticed his military-style boots, laced tightly and meticulously over a pair of billowing, khaki breeches. Oversized ears whose pointed tips had been rubbed raw poked out of his garrison cap. The cap was faded but he still wore it with panache.

I had seen his type before. One day when I drove the De Sévigné children into town for ice cream, a camp of sage-green tents, all A-frame style, blocked off the whole square in front of the Opéra. Former French legionnaires were striking for veteran’s benefits. One among them—a one-legged man of Arabic decent, perhaps Algerian—was sitting on a street post and shouting Vive Bir Hakeim! over and over again. He must have been eighty-five, ninety years old. His face had disappeared into folds of flesh bleached after too many years in the sun. When he opened his mouth to chant (Vive Bir Hakeim!), the skin stretched out around his mouth, revealing deep, dark crevices where his melanin hadn’t yet faded away.

The one-eyed man stopped in front of me, too close, still doubled over. His forehead was at my torso and I could see the minefield of his patchy scalp. He looked up at me through his eyebrows with his one good eye and reached out to take Karim’s lighter without turning his head.

The one-eyed man straightened his back and groaned. I was surprised to find him tall. He swung out his stiff leg and shuffled closer. He said something to Karim in Arabic as he handed him back the lighter, but Karim did not respond, just squeezed my hand. The one-eyed man reached out his cane and flicked each of one of my breasts in turn. Tap tap. Like he was picking out ripe oranges from a basket. I want this one and that one.

Karim shook off his French like a wet blanket and began to bellow in Arabic. I didn’t understand a word. My thoughts were swimming upstream, from right to left. The one-eyed man just threw back his head so far that you could see the grooves in the roof of his rotting mouth and laughed and laughed and laughed. Then he turned and shuffled slowly away, as though nothing had happened, dragging his leg after him. Karim stood motionless. He had no right to violence here. The gendarmes guarding the platform watched from their roost at the top of the stairs.

Vaurien raton racaille plèbe métèque khoroto fripouille crapule beur arabe.

Mixed. Mongrel. Métis. Mestizo.

No one alerted the police.

Nothing more, nothing less. That’s all my friends at Skidmore needed to know.

They didn’t need to know that as the one-eyed man slowly retreated, I wrenched my hand from Karim’s and sunk to the platform. I felt a stranger to my own skin. I wanted to molt. I crouched with my head between my knees and spat on the platform.

I was hardly the heroine of this story. I was full of just as much hatred as the rest.

Karim was standing as straight and still as a dog keeping diligent watch over a raccoon slinking away in the night.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Karim said, turning back towards me. He put one great big hand that smelled like shisha and hashish on the nape of my neck, and I bristled at his touch.

Fucking raton.

I could feel the ground rumbling beneath the balls of my feet as the train swept into the station. Karim picked me up by my armpits and set me upright. No one was watching us anymore. The spectators of our petty platform drama had seen what they needed to see.

Karim helped me lift my bag onto the luggage rack on the second level of the train and then waited outside on the platform and held my shoulders in his hands until the last whistle blew.

“Please, let me come visit you,” he said.

“I’m not allowed to have guests,” I said.

“You won’t tell the family about this, will you?” Karim said.

“Of course not. They’d worry. They care about me. They treat me like I’m one of their own daughters, you know,” I said, and the door closed between our noses.

Karim remained diligently on the platform and waited for my face to appear in the window next to my seat. I ducked down to pick up the tiny tennis shoe that the little boy sitting opposite me had kicked off as soon as he sat down. His mother took the shoe and smiled dubiously and thanked me. She continued looking in her bag for a box of crayons for her fidgety son.

I didn't look out of the window as the train huffed and puffed and prepared to pull away. I couldn't see him, but I knew Karim was still standing there, immobile, his hands hanging limp by his side and his feet spread hip-width apart, as though he was firmly planting himself into the platform for stability, afraid to be blown away or swallowed in steam.