I'll Be Right Here

Me, Myself, Gazala

Rue Caplat, Paris

1930

It is the first thing I remember.

I am lying on my side, on the woven straw mat, pulling at the red stitching. The mat is scratchy and thin under me, and at the edge of my feet the packed dirt of the courtyard is hard. Samir rolls a bead necklace toward me, to play with. Two dogs piss against the wall, the short yellow streams running down the darkened wall. I sit up in a wide bar of light, and the rest of the courtyard is cool, green in the corners at the edge of the brown brick. The cement sticks out like thick dirty cream. My father says that the workmen were no good, they were en désordre, and he added an Algerian word I don’t know. When I run my thumb over the cement, over the tiny sharp peaks, it sticks me and I cry out. My brother drags me by the foot back to the mat. I crawl as far as the brick and the irresistible white dirtiness, and Samir lures me back with blue and green glass beads sliding and clicking on a leather string. He hides them under the mat, in his pockets, under his feet. The beads are in my mouth or dangling above me, sparkling in the light. The light comes and goes all day.

I climb into my brother’s lap, and he pulls the mat over me. It gets a little colder, and Samir lays me on top of his legs to warm us both, and then, then as the light fails, our father comes home.

The makroud from our father’s pockets are a little stale and a little dusty, but there are two for each of us and he is too tired to care if we eat sweets before dinner or not. Sometimes he brings home cinnamon montecaos, seeping oil into the twist of paper. We lick the paper. We eat the green beans, when there are green beans, and our father puts shreds of lamb, folded in bread, into my hand. I eat from my father’s hand until I’m bigger and then from my own hand when I’m four, when he’s sure that I won’t drop the plate. We have six plates. We have four cups. We have four glasses. We have one beautiful thing, which is my mother’s tin teapot, a berrad, with leaves and flowers etched on the tin.

We have two beds, one for our father and one for us, and when I am seven and Samir is eleven, our father finds an actual mattress for himself and Samir, wide enough for the two of them, and we switch. My father doubles my bedding in the other corner and adds another blanket because I won’t have Samir to keep me warm.

On Sunday my father pulls out the newspaper, a copy left behind by a morning customer. He rattles it open. He clears his throat. Sometimes, to make the suspense more delicious, more delightful, like being tickled, but only just enough, by someone who truly loves you, he pauses and says: Let’s have some tea. He makes a cup for himself and for Samir, and he lets me take sips from his cup.

Where was I?, he says.

Ah, yes. I see here in the paper . . . He rattles the paper again and lifts it to cover his face so that all I can see is the French newspaper down to his blue corduroy trousers and his worn Algerian slippers. He does have French slippers too, cracked brown leather.

I see here in the paper, my father says, that one of the most beautiful lions from the Zoo de Ben Aknoun—I’m sure you remember that, Samir . . . And Samir nods, although he was only a month old when his mother died and my parents became his parents. All he knows of Algeria is what I know, is what we’ve heard from the old man who has a small room on the other side of the courtyard and who speaks a little Darija to our father and seems to have been dying since I was born.

Samir knows the names of the cookies and the flattened dates we eat at the end of the day. He sometimes rubs our mother’s teapot against his shirt, to brighten it, and he tells me, when he’s angry, that he remembers everything about my mother, the woman who became his mother, too. Her curly brown hair, he says. Not black like yours, but brown like dark honey. Her hands were like white butterflies, he says, and then he shakes his head. You don’t remember anything, he says—

Our father rattles the newspaper. It says here that one of the most beautiful lions, as beautiful as the great bronze lions that guard the great mosque of Oran . . .

We nod.

I say: A Barbary lion, from the royal palace. I get a nod and a cookie from behind the newspaper.

Indeed, he says. A Barbary lion. The greatest lions of Algeria. As I say, I see here that the lion had been roaming the streets of Oran with a man—a Berber, is what I understand. Maybe his name was Samir, he says, and he winks at Samir. Maybe, he says, who knows, the newspaper doesn’t give a name, maybe it was a girl dressed as a man. A skinny girl, she put on rags and a great black beard, and maybe it was she who walked the streets of Oran with a lion. Our father makes a face at me.

So, he says. A wanderer.

We shrug. We are city people, is what my father gives us to understand. We are not and were not nomads. We are descended from exceptional people, superior Muslims and Christians both, and a rabbi, he said. You see how close the words are: the name Rabee, your great-uncle was Rabee, and the word rabbi—all tributes to the mutafawiq river of education and understanding that flows in our very veins. So, this Berber—I don’t see a name, my father says—has been pulling that old stunt, getting the simple folk to pay him so that his lion doesn’t eat them. You know that one, he says to Samir, who nods like he has been fleecing simple folk and laughing up his sleeve since he could walk.

Well, it was unusual, my father says. The lion was obviously very clever. He was trained to roar and frighten the village folk, and then the Berber collected food, maybe a little money, from the people, fed the lion a lamb, and if not they split a tagine jelbana, is what I think, my father says, and then they moved on. Not a bad trick. But I see here that after a couple of months of village folk and lamb dinners, the lion ate the Berber.

We gasp.

Poor man. Worse and worse, my father says. The lion reveals himself to be not the docile companion of a Berber charlatan, not a servant content with bits of lamb and a pat on the head, but a proud—and hungry—killer. Our father reads silently for a few seconds.

Aha. Ahh. I see.

If we sit still, he will continue. We know he will but it is agonizing to hold ourselves tightly, not to give him a tap on the knee.

More tea, Baba?, I say. My father says nothing. He clears his throat.

Extraordinary. It says here that the lion leapt through El Hamri onto a freighter just leaving the Harbor of Oran. Our beautiful harbor, he says. It hugs the city and then sweeps out to the Mediterranean, blue like nothing here in France, never.

We press our feet up against each other’s. We clasp hands.

Onto a freighter. Remarkable. What a creature this lion must be. A mane like the blazing sun, paws bigger than melons, teeth, can you imagine, teeth like giant knives. It says here that the International Crime Police were notified. The International Crime Police! They seem to have tracked the lion to . . . Well, it says here that they tracked him to Europe. The lion disembarked in France, my father says. I’m a little puzzled by this, he says, but it seems to say that the lion came into Paris, into the tenth arrondissement, that he came down rue La Fayette.

But this cannot be, my father says.

The lion’s picking up speed.

It says that the lion came down rue La Fayette and turned left onto rue de la Charbonnière to rue Caplat, traveled another little bit and turned into a courtyard, and it says here that the lion went down the street, turned right through a brick archway, and aywah, aywah, aywah, AND . . . HERE . . . HE . . . IS!

He drops the newspaper to the floor and roars. We beat our feet on the floor and scream with pleasure.

Barbary Lion Escapes was our favorite game.

Our father, Mounir Benamar, is the sous-chef pâtissier, assistant to the pastry chef, of the good but not grand bakery Lefond et Fils. (The owner is the fils. The père died twenty years before, and the fils has no sons.) Lefond sells to people in the neighborhood, they sell day-old bread to the elderly and they sell to the small bistro next door. No one travels across Paris for Lefond’s almond croissants like they do for Pâtisserie Stohrer. (Samir says that Stohrer’s croissants make Lefond’s look like dogshit.)

Lefond makes regular, affordable baked things that regular French people like, and I like them too. They bake baguettes and brioches. They bake two-layer wedding cakes with white fondant flowers (which taste like sugar and wax and I am happy with every discolored rose petal and crumpled stem I get). My father says that they make entirely adequate Paris-Brest and Opéra cakes and macarons, éclairs and mille-feuilles. When our father arrived at Lefond, he offered to make some Algerian desserts, and they said: By all means, bake away, but there’s no need to call them Algerian. People who knew knew, and they sold his ghriba cookies and his walnut baklawa right next to the éclairs. I live on broken éclairs and crushed macarons.