Bastille Day, page 14
I lifted my mic in my left hand and turned toward Ahmed. Nadia held my right hand, tightly, out of shot.
I took a deep breath.
And I stood tall.
“This is Calvin Jones, reporting from the tower of the American Cathedral in Paris,” I said. A firework boomed behind me, and I tried not to flinch. Nadia squeezed my hand. “Behind me, as you can see, the July 14 fireworks display is being fired off the Eiffel Tower.” And I actually turned my head, got a look at greens and reds and sparkling silver fireworks arcing through the air.
It was beautiful.
“Today, the people of France celebrate what some call Bastille Day,” I went on, feeling Nadia’s hand in mine, feeling like I could do this forever if I had to, “and what the French call La Fête Nationale. This isn’t a French Fourth of July, as some people think, but it does mark the beginnings of the French movement toward independence, the storming of the Bastille Prison on July 14, 1789. Every year it is commemorated by parades, parties, and fireworks across France, as you can see. And this is one of the best views in all of Paris. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do.”
Ahmed turned, focused on the glittering lights for a moment, then counted down from three with his fingers, and we were back in.
“This is Cal Jones for News Europe, wishing you un joyeux Quatorze Juillet and a very good evening.”
And we were out.
I handed Ahmed my mic.
I turned quickly and pressed my back firmly against the tower wall. “Let us out,” I begged Rob, and he scurried to clear the alcove and set us free.
How we got down the stairs, how we walked out into the streets, the fireworks still going off across the river—none of that matters much.
What mattered was that Nadia never once let go of my hand.
We walked down onto the crowded pier, past the spot where I had pulled her out of the water, walked along the Seine well down past the Tower, the moonlight flickering on the water, walked until the fireworks had stopped and the crowds began to disperse, walked all the way down to the Pont de Grenelle and began to cross the bridge there.
We could not at first stop laughing, which I guess makes sense, considering both of us felt we had somehow narrowly escaped extinction, but at last, we began to calm a bit, and to look down at our hands, still connected, and that sobered us.
My phone had begun to buzz in my pocket shortly after the fireworks stopped.
“Should you get that?” she asked me, now swinging our hands a little like sixteen-year-olds on a date.
I shook my head. “It’s Rob,” I said. “I’m sure he wants to chew me out, or to congratulate me, or to apologize, or something. I don’t need to hear any of those things at this particular moment.”
“What do you need to hear?” she asked.
“Well,” I said. “Maybe why you climbed up that tower even though I was kind of an ass to you. Oh my God,” I remembered, patting my pants pocket with my free hand. Yes. The iceberg was still there.
She smiled. “I saw how frightened you were,” she said. “And I thought, ‘He has already been punished enough.’”
“But you didn’t have to come after me.” And I stopped us there in the middle of the Pont de Grenelle bridge, where we could get a good look at the faux Statue of Liberty at the western end of the Île aux Cygnes, the Island of Swans, a long, narrow manmade isle in the middle of the Seine. It was just beneath us. “Seriously. Why did you?”
She shrugged. “I thought you might need me.”
I let go her hand. “I do need you,” I said.
And then I leaned in and kissed her.
It was not a monumental kiss, just a short one on the lips. The fireworks were finished. No tour boats blasted their horns in celebration. I pulled back to make sure I hadn’t just done a bad thing, but she was smiling.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll take you home.”
“I don’t want to go back to the hotel,” she said, and she took my hand again and pulled me back to her. “Just so you know: I don’t want to sleep with you. I am confused enough without involving my body. But I do want to know: why does an American boy jump off a bridge to save a drowning woman?”
“You don’t want to go home?” I asked.
“I want to go to your home,” she said. And she leaned in and planted one on me.
I believe there were actual fireworks with that second kiss.
And the next thing I knew, I was lying in bed, looking down at a sleeping Nadia with something dangerously like love in my heart.
Rob used to tell me about the early days in Baghdad, after Saddam fell and we had nothing to put in his place. How soldiers in Bradleys and Humvees would sit, still, their hands on their weapons, safeties on, as looters cleared out ministry after ministry, hauled off everything that had any potential value. He told me about how they sat outside the ministry of the interior or some such place watching people load air conditioners and filing cabinets and desk lamps into trucks. And then they stole the trucks.
“Shouldn’t we stop this?” one soldier asked his LT.
“How?” he asked. “This is their damn country. If they want to tear it all to shit, what can we do?”
These were our lives, to tear to shit if we chose.
Or maybe to rebuild something from the ruins.
So, anyway, I was lying partly awake, mulling that over in my head for some reason, my hand on Nadia’s hip, her head on my shoulder, when the doorbell started ringing. I remembered that scene in The Sun Also Rises, where Jake is already in bed and Brett talks his disapproving landlady into letting her come upstairs.
“Jesus,” I said. I scooped up my phone, because I guessed whoever it was might be calling too—this would be a great time for Uncle Jack to arrive. Or Kelly McNair.
“Jesus,” I said again.
But when I looked at my phone, I knew it wasn’t Kelly, and it wasn’t Jack, and it wasn’t anyone else but my boss.
Because I saw all these banners, news alert after news alert on my phone, all of them saying something like “Terror Attack in Nice.”
And message after message from Rob lighting up my phone.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said.
It was Rob, of course, downstairs at my gate and then moments later, at my front door. I had just enough time to send Nadia fleeing into the bathroom to put all her clothes on, and to pull on my pants. There wasn’t much of a way to keep secrets in my little apartment.
“You have got to answer your phone,” he growled, every inch my boss, as I opened the front door and admitted him. “I’ve been calling for hours. There was an attack in Nice. Maybe a hundred dead. Son of a bitch used a cargo truck,” he mopped his forehead, panted. “Ran people down for blocks and blocks. I’ve got you and Ahmed on the first flight out. Then I want you back in the studio by 6 o’clock tomorrow night.” He plopped himself into my one good chair, which sighed audibly. “What the hell have you been doing?”
Then he heard water running in the bathroom, saw Nadia’s shoes in the corner, and he blinked a couple of times. “Nothing happened,” I said.
He shook his head. “Oh, I think something did.” And he mouthed to me, Nadia?
I nodded.
“I am so sorry, Nadia,” he called. “Je suis désolé.”
“Ne vous inquiétez pas,” she said. Don’t worry.
“Do you really need me?” I asked. “And I’m not just asking because—” and I indicated the bathroom with my head.
“Of course I do,” he said. “I’m not just sending you out into a storm to tell people not to come out in the storm.” That pet peeve of all newspeople. “We need our own footage, and we need your take on what we’re seeing.”
I nodded. Of course, he was right. That was the job. “Okay,” I said. “What time is my flight?”
“6:40 on Air France,” he said. “Your return is at 12:10. Ahmed has the details. A driver will pick you up here at 5 a.m.”
“Okay,” I said. “Listen, Rob, I didn’t know anything about it. I’m sorry.”
“It’s godawful,” he said. He checked his watch. “But that gives you a few more hours. I’d take advantage of them.” He nodded toward the bathroom.
“Yeah,” I said. “Nothing charges my libido like the death of innocents.”
I showed him to the door.
“This is it,” he said, working into his pep talk. “This is why I brought you here.”
“That and my sparkling personality,” I said. I nodded. I put a hand on his arm. “Don’t worry. I’ve got this.”
He nodded back, turned, and I closed the door behind him.
“Can I come out?” Nadia called, the bathroom door cracked just slightly. “Or, rather, how should I come out?”
“I liked what you were wearing while ago,” I said. Which was not much.
“Sadly,” she said, coming back into the living area, “that look is so last night.” She had pulled on her dress, and now was searching for her shoes. She saw my look—which I’m sure was disappointment on the scale of learning that Santa was actually my parents—and laughed sadly.
I reached out, touched that beautiful face. “Do you have to go?”
She took a deep breath. “I think I may have sown the whirlwind,” she said. “Is that how you say it?”
“I believe so. Let me focus my question. Do you have to go back?”
She had one shoe in her hand now, and she looked across the room at me. “Calvin, do you believe people can escape the consequences of their actions?”
“No,” I said. I shook my head firmly. “But—”
That was a big but. I couldn’t finish the sentence. Nadia jumped in. “Perhaps she will believe that I was out late walking, or that I made new friends at the fireworks, or that I went dancing at some fire station.” She shook her head. “But all of this will get back to Ali.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I could come with you. Stand beside you.” I felt the weight of her ring in my pocket, pulled it out, offered it to her.
She crossed the room, one shoe on, took it from me, and kissed me on the cheek. “You already have,” she said.
“I mean—”
She shushed me, kissed me on the mouth. “Meet me at Harry’s tomorrow afternoon when you get back.” She kissed my ear. “We’ll talk there. I’ll tell you what I know. You tell me what you’ve seen.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll walk you home.” I started getting dressed.
“To the hotel,” she corrected.
“Yes,” I said.
“Ali’s hotel,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“This is home,” she said, gesturing around the room as though I needed to be reminded. And perhaps I did. “Whatever happens, whatever I may have to do or say, please don’t ever doubt that I chose this place, this moment. I know you, Calvin.”
“Yes,” I said. She did, in a way no one ever had.
For the first time, Paris felt like home to me as well, like I belonged to it and it to me, and despite everything I did not and could not know about the future, I could not help but smile.
11.
Nice
July 15, 2016
Friday
At 9 a.m., I was in the city of Nice walking the Promenade des Anglais, the long avenue adjoining the Mediterranean Sea. It was mostly deserted except for news trucks, and police still working it as a crime scene, and sad ragged bits of human debris—bloodstains, baby carriages, clothes, shoes, and brand-new memorials of flower, ribbon, and paper. I was following the trail of the 19-ton cargo truck one Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had driven through a crowd the night before, the city on my left, the seawall, beach, and sparkling sea to my right. A team of four French soldiers in camo, assault rifles at the ready, walked in front of us down the wide promenade, a classic case of locking the gate after the cow has decamped.
We had gone first to the hospital in hopes of getting some comments from wounded or their families. The Pasteur Hospital, where many of the victims had been taken, was a madhouse, the emergency room stacked to the ceilings, and you could hear people crying, both back in the emergency bays and in the waiting room, where some of the less badly injured still waited to be seen.
I walked up to a number of people, asking them in French, Arabic, and finally, English, if they could tell me anything about the attack. Most of them didn’t even look at me. One looked at me, made an obscene gesture, and turned away. But a couple were willing to say something on background, an old man and a young woman. They were both very clear that they did not want to be on television. Both were French, both visiting Nice for the holiday, both had brought their families to enjoy the fireworks, and now one or more of the people they loved were fighting for their lives in the bays behind us.
The stories they told me were about chaos in the dark, people running and screaming, a white truck weaving back and forth, cutting people down like a scythe. The young woman’s husband had pushed her to safety, lifted her up over a fence or retaining wall of some kind. He had been hit before he could follow. His pelvis and four ribs were shattered.
“It is funny,” she told me, in French. “At first, I could not stop weeping. Now I cannot seem to remember how.”
The old man told me he had been separated from his family in the press and knocked over the seawall onto the rocky beach. His face was scraped and bruised from his fall, but when I asked if he needed medical attention, he looked at me as though I were crazy. “My son and grandson,” he said. “They are hurt. I am not hurt.” He indicated himself, shook his head. He could not be hurt. Not when those he loved were so much more badly injured.
It was a relief to be away from there now, to be outside in the sunshine, a long way from that chaos in the dark. Even though it was early morning, the light was intense and it was already warm, but the breeze was cooling. I walked underneath palm trees as I weaved back and forth, looking at the story from all directions. Ahmed followed me patiently, camera rig on his shoulder. I had asked him to get shots of a few of the spontaneous memorials, and we’d shoot the site where the driver was killed, maybe talk to somebody in authority or an eyewitness if we could find one willing to talk. But just now we were walking down the Promenade des Anglais, trying to figure how it happened, trying to imagine what it must have been like as a man driving a cargo truck plowed into an unsuspecting crowd with the intent of murdering as many as he could.
“What do you see?” I asked Ahmed. “What do we know?”
He shrugged. With his head, he indicated some tire marks. “They said he steered back and forth trying to hit people as they ran. Targeted them.” He made a disgusted face, for that, and for what he was about to say. “They say that he ate pork, and slept with men and women.”
Early reports were that the suspected perpetrator had been recently radicalized after a checkered past. He was married and divorced. Drank and did drugs. What Ahmed was saying was that he was not a good Muslim, or maybe not a Muslim at all.
But all the same, a local paper, the Nice-Matin, had a witness who reported hearing him call out “Allahu Akbar.”
This Lahouaiej-Bouhlel didn’t run down hundreds of people with a cargo truck just for grins and giggles.
I grew up Southern Baptist, and my most notable memory of religion, before I departed it, was the First Baptist Church of Killeen, Texas. Lots of Fort Hood families, of course, generally more when someone they loved was deployed in harm’s way. Since 2009, that place has been a looming gymnasium of a church, but the experience I remember is a little more intimate, a wall of contemporary stained glass, hymns instead of a worship band. And lots and lots of hellfire and brimstone.
Sunday after Sunday, whether my dad was deployed overseas or grudgingly in the pew beside us, my mom and I listened to Dr. Frank Harkness tell us about the grudging love of God and the brooding anger of God, about how we were all one halting breath away from eternity, about how those who did not love this capricious God with all our hearts, souls, and pocketbooks were going to burn in hell for all eternity.
I have since come to understand—even before I met Episcopalians in Paris—that Dr. Harkness was not representative of the Christian faith. That not all Christians shared his belief in an angry God, that not all Christians lacked a pastoral response to those who were frightened for their loved ones, who weren’t sure how they were going to make their bills, who saw the world as a violent and dangerous place.
But I also know that Dr. Frank Harkness did what he did, said what he said—and what he didn’t say—because he called himself a Christian.
He didn’t shame those who fell short because he was required to by his fellow Elks.
He didn’t set out to frighten little kids just because he had a Y chromosome.
One person may not represent a faith, but the faith still has to reckon with that one person, and with others like him.
And while I knew gentle and generous Muslims, while my life had been saved many times by a Muslim, while I, had in fact, fallen hard for a Muslim, there was also this. The Muslims who killed innocents in Paris in a night club and a soccer stadium and a restaurant. Who slit the throat of a French priest. Who attacked a Jewish grocery store.
And who did it because of their faith, not despite it.
“Those plazas we saw in the Old Town, the architecture. This city doesn’t look French,” I told Ahmed. “It looks, I don’t know, Italian, I guess.”
“Nice was Italian until 1860,” he said. “We are, I guess, only a few of your miles from Italy now.”
“Hmm,” I said. There was so much I didn’t know about France. “You have been to Italy?”
“Yes,” I said. The previous summer I had been on a family vacation with the McNair family to Rome and Venice. I had left the theme t-shirt and goodie bag behind in Texas.
Dennis McNair was a typical Dallas oilman. He wore a gray Stetson. I don’t know how big. Do they make a 50-gallon hat? He was the classic “All Hat, No Cattle,” sort of person, and his wife, Camille, had had work done until her face was rigid, immobile. What she thought or felt behind that Kabuki mask I could not have told you.
I took a deep breath.
And I stood tall.
“This is Calvin Jones, reporting from the tower of the American Cathedral in Paris,” I said. A firework boomed behind me, and I tried not to flinch. Nadia squeezed my hand. “Behind me, as you can see, the July 14 fireworks display is being fired off the Eiffel Tower.” And I actually turned my head, got a look at greens and reds and sparkling silver fireworks arcing through the air.
It was beautiful.
“Today, the people of France celebrate what some call Bastille Day,” I went on, feeling Nadia’s hand in mine, feeling like I could do this forever if I had to, “and what the French call La Fête Nationale. This isn’t a French Fourth of July, as some people think, but it does mark the beginnings of the French movement toward independence, the storming of the Bastille Prison on July 14, 1789. Every year it is commemorated by parades, parties, and fireworks across France, as you can see. And this is one of the best views in all of Paris. We hope you’ll enjoy it as much as we do.”
Ahmed turned, focused on the glittering lights for a moment, then counted down from three with his fingers, and we were back in.
“This is Cal Jones for News Europe, wishing you un joyeux Quatorze Juillet and a very good evening.”
And we were out.
I handed Ahmed my mic.
I turned quickly and pressed my back firmly against the tower wall. “Let us out,” I begged Rob, and he scurried to clear the alcove and set us free.
How we got down the stairs, how we walked out into the streets, the fireworks still going off across the river—none of that matters much.
What mattered was that Nadia never once let go of my hand.
We walked down onto the crowded pier, past the spot where I had pulled her out of the water, walked along the Seine well down past the Tower, the moonlight flickering on the water, walked until the fireworks had stopped and the crowds began to disperse, walked all the way down to the Pont de Grenelle and began to cross the bridge there.
We could not at first stop laughing, which I guess makes sense, considering both of us felt we had somehow narrowly escaped extinction, but at last, we began to calm a bit, and to look down at our hands, still connected, and that sobered us.
My phone had begun to buzz in my pocket shortly after the fireworks stopped.
“Should you get that?” she asked me, now swinging our hands a little like sixteen-year-olds on a date.
I shook my head. “It’s Rob,” I said. “I’m sure he wants to chew me out, or to congratulate me, or to apologize, or something. I don’t need to hear any of those things at this particular moment.”
“What do you need to hear?” she asked.
“Well,” I said. “Maybe why you climbed up that tower even though I was kind of an ass to you. Oh my God,” I remembered, patting my pants pocket with my free hand. Yes. The iceberg was still there.
She smiled. “I saw how frightened you were,” she said. “And I thought, ‘He has already been punished enough.’”
“But you didn’t have to come after me.” And I stopped us there in the middle of the Pont de Grenelle bridge, where we could get a good look at the faux Statue of Liberty at the western end of the Île aux Cygnes, the Island of Swans, a long, narrow manmade isle in the middle of the Seine. It was just beneath us. “Seriously. Why did you?”
She shrugged. “I thought you might need me.”
I let go her hand. “I do need you,” I said.
And then I leaned in and kissed her.
It was not a monumental kiss, just a short one on the lips. The fireworks were finished. No tour boats blasted their horns in celebration. I pulled back to make sure I hadn’t just done a bad thing, but she was smiling.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll take you home.”
“I don’t want to go back to the hotel,” she said, and she took my hand again and pulled me back to her. “Just so you know: I don’t want to sleep with you. I am confused enough without involving my body. But I do want to know: why does an American boy jump off a bridge to save a drowning woman?”
“You don’t want to go home?” I asked.
“I want to go to your home,” she said. And she leaned in and planted one on me.
I believe there were actual fireworks with that second kiss.
And the next thing I knew, I was lying in bed, looking down at a sleeping Nadia with something dangerously like love in my heart.
Rob used to tell me about the early days in Baghdad, after Saddam fell and we had nothing to put in his place. How soldiers in Bradleys and Humvees would sit, still, their hands on their weapons, safeties on, as looters cleared out ministry after ministry, hauled off everything that had any potential value. He told me about how they sat outside the ministry of the interior or some such place watching people load air conditioners and filing cabinets and desk lamps into trucks. And then they stole the trucks.
“Shouldn’t we stop this?” one soldier asked his LT.
“How?” he asked. “This is their damn country. If they want to tear it all to shit, what can we do?”
These were our lives, to tear to shit if we chose.
Or maybe to rebuild something from the ruins.
So, anyway, I was lying partly awake, mulling that over in my head for some reason, my hand on Nadia’s hip, her head on my shoulder, when the doorbell started ringing. I remembered that scene in The Sun Also Rises, where Jake is already in bed and Brett talks his disapproving landlady into letting her come upstairs.
“Jesus,” I said. I scooped up my phone, because I guessed whoever it was might be calling too—this would be a great time for Uncle Jack to arrive. Or Kelly McNair.
“Jesus,” I said again.
But when I looked at my phone, I knew it wasn’t Kelly, and it wasn’t Jack, and it wasn’t anyone else but my boss.
Because I saw all these banners, news alert after news alert on my phone, all of them saying something like “Terror Attack in Nice.”
And message after message from Rob lighting up my phone.
“Oh, Jesus,” I said.
It was Rob, of course, downstairs at my gate and then moments later, at my front door. I had just enough time to send Nadia fleeing into the bathroom to put all her clothes on, and to pull on my pants. There wasn’t much of a way to keep secrets in my little apartment.
“You have got to answer your phone,” he growled, every inch my boss, as I opened the front door and admitted him. “I’ve been calling for hours. There was an attack in Nice. Maybe a hundred dead. Son of a bitch used a cargo truck,” he mopped his forehead, panted. “Ran people down for blocks and blocks. I’ve got you and Ahmed on the first flight out. Then I want you back in the studio by 6 o’clock tomorrow night.” He plopped himself into my one good chair, which sighed audibly. “What the hell have you been doing?”
Then he heard water running in the bathroom, saw Nadia’s shoes in the corner, and he blinked a couple of times. “Nothing happened,” I said.
He shook his head. “Oh, I think something did.” And he mouthed to me, Nadia?
I nodded.
“I am so sorry, Nadia,” he called. “Je suis désolé.”
“Ne vous inquiétez pas,” she said. Don’t worry.
“Do you really need me?” I asked. “And I’m not just asking because—” and I indicated the bathroom with my head.
“Of course I do,” he said. “I’m not just sending you out into a storm to tell people not to come out in the storm.” That pet peeve of all newspeople. “We need our own footage, and we need your take on what we’re seeing.”
I nodded. Of course, he was right. That was the job. “Okay,” I said. “What time is my flight?”
“6:40 on Air France,” he said. “Your return is at 12:10. Ahmed has the details. A driver will pick you up here at 5 a.m.”
“Okay,” I said. “Listen, Rob, I didn’t know anything about it. I’m sorry.”
“It’s godawful,” he said. He checked his watch. “But that gives you a few more hours. I’d take advantage of them.” He nodded toward the bathroom.
“Yeah,” I said. “Nothing charges my libido like the death of innocents.”
I showed him to the door.
“This is it,” he said, working into his pep talk. “This is why I brought you here.”
“That and my sparkling personality,” I said. I nodded. I put a hand on his arm. “Don’t worry. I’ve got this.”
He nodded back, turned, and I closed the door behind him.
“Can I come out?” Nadia called, the bathroom door cracked just slightly. “Or, rather, how should I come out?”
“I liked what you were wearing while ago,” I said. Which was not much.
“Sadly,” she said, coming back into the living area, “that look is so last night.” She had pulled on her dress, and now was searching for her shoes. She saw my look—which I’m sure was disappointment on the scale of learning that Santa was actually my parents—and laughed sadly.
I reached out, touched that beautiful face. “Do you have to go?”
She took a deep breath. “I think I may have sown the whirlwind,” she said. “Is that how you say it?”
“I believe so. Let me focus my question. Do you have to go back?”
She had one shoe in her hand now, and she looked across the room at me. “Calvin, do you believe people can escape the consequences of their actions?”
“No,” I said. I shook my head firmly. “But—”
That was a big but. I couldn’t finish the sentence. Nadia jumped in. “Perhaps she will believe that I was out late walking, or that I made new friends at the fireworks, or that I went dancing at some fire station.” She shook her head. “But all of this will get back to Ali.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I could come with you. Stand beside you.” I felt the weight of her ring in my pocket, pulled it out, offered it to her.
She crossed the room, one shoe on, took it from me, and kissed me on the cheek. “You already have,” she said.
“I mean—”
She shushed me, kissed me on the mouth. “Meet me at Harry’s tomorrow afternoon when you get back.” She kissed my ear. “We’ll talk there. I’ll tell you what I know. You tell me what you’ve seen.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll walk you home.” I started getting dressed.
“To the hotel,” she corrected.
“Yes,” I said.
“Ali’s hotel,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
“This is home,” she said, gesturing around the room as though I needed to be reminded. And perhaps I did. “Whatever happens, whatever I may have to do or say, please don’t ever doubt that I chose this place, this moment. I know you, Calvin.”
“Yes,” I said. She did, in a way no one ever had.
For the first time, Paris felt like home to me as well, like I belonged to it and it to me, and despite everything I did not and could not know about the future, I could not help but smile.
11.
Nice
July 15, 2016
Friday
At 9 a.m., I was in the city of Nice walking the Promenade des Anglais, the long avenue adjoining the Mediterranean Sea. It was mostly deserted except for news trucks, and police still working it as a crime scene, and sad ragged bits of human debris—bloodstains, baby carriages, clothes, shoes, and brand-new memorials of flower, ribbon, and paper. I was following the trail of the 19-ton cargo truck one Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel had driven through a crowd the night before, the city on my left, the seawall, beach, and sparkling sea to my right. A team of four French soldiers in camo, assault rifles at the ready, walked in front of us down the wide promenade, a classic case of locking the gate after the cow has decamped.
We had gone first to the hospital in hopes of getting some comments from wounded or their families. The Pasteur Hospital, where many of the victims had been taken, was a madhouse, the emergency room stacked to the ceilings, and you could hear people crying, both back in the emergency bays and in the waiting room, where some of the less badly injured still waited to be seen.
I walked up to a number of people, asking them in French, Arabic, and finally, English, if they could tell me anything about the attack. Most of them didn’t even look at me. One looked at me, made an obscene gesture, and turned away. But a couple were willing to say something on background, an old man and a young woman. They were both very clear that they did not want to be on television. Both were French, both visiting Nice for the holiday, both had brought their families to enjoy the fireworks, and now one or more of the people they loved were fighting for their lives in the bays behind us.
The stories they told me were about chaos in the dark, people running and screaming, a white truck weaving back and forth, cutting people down like a scythe. The young woman’s husband had pushed her to safety, lifted her up over a fence or retaining wall of some kind. He had been hit before he could follow. His pelvis and four ribs were shattered.
“It is funny,” she told me, in French. “At first, I could not stop weeping. Now I cannot seem to remember how.”
The old man told me he had been separated from his family in the press and knocked over the seawall onto the rocky beach. His face was scraped and bruised from his fall, but when I asked if he needed medical attention, he looked at me as though I were crazy. “My son and grandson,” he said. “They are hurt. I am not hurt.” He indicated himself, shook his head. He could not be hurt. Not when those he loved were so much more badly injured.
It was a relief to be away from there now, to be outside in the sunshine, a long way from that chaos in the dark. Even though it was early morning, the light was intense and it was already warm, but the breeze was cooling. I walked underneath palm trees as I weaved back and forth, looking at the story from all directions. Ahmed followed me patiently, camera rig on his shoulder. I had asked him to get shots of a few of the spontaneous memorials, and we’d shoot the site where the driver was killed, maybe talk to somebody in authority or an eyewitness if we could find one willing to talk. But just now we were walking down the Promenade des Anglais, trying to figure how it happened, trying to imagine what it must have been like as a man driving a cargo truck plowed into an unsuspecting crowd with the intent of murdering as many as he could.
“What do you see?” I asked Ahmed. “What do we know?”
He shrugged. With his head, he indicated some tire marks. “They said he steered back and forth trying to hit people as they ran. Targeted them.” He made a disgusted face, for that, and for what he was about to say. “They say that he ate pork, and slept with men and women.”
Early reports were that the suspected perpetrator had been recently radicalized after a checkered past. He was married and divorced. Drank and did drugs. What Ahmed was saying was that he was not a good Muslim, or maybe not a Muslim at all.
But all the same, a local paper, the Nice-Matin, had a witness who reported hearing him call out “Allahu Akbar.”
This Lahouaiej-Bouhlel didn’t run down hundreds of people with a cargo truck just for grins and giggles.
I grew up Southern Baptist, and my most notable memory of religion, before I departed it, was the First Baptist Church of Killeen, Texas. Lots of Fort Hood families, of course, generally more when someone they loved was deployed in harm’s way. Since 2009, that place has been a looming gymnasium of a church, but the experience I remember is a little more intimate, a wall of contemporary stained glass, hymns instead of a worship band. And lots and lots of hellfire and brimstone.
Sunday after Sunday, whether my dad was deployed overseas or grudgingly in the pew beside us, my mom and I listened to Dr. Frank Harkness tell us about the grudging love of God and the brooding anger of God, about how we were all one halting breath away from eternity, about how those who did not love this capricious God with all our hearts, souls, and pocketbooks were going to burn in hell for all eternity.
I have since come to understand—even before I met Episcopalians in Paris—that Dr. Harkness was not representative of the Christian faith. That not all Christians shared his belief in an angry God, that not all Christians lacked a pastoral response to those who were frightened for their loved ones, who weren’t sure how they were going to make their bills, who saw the world as a violent and dangerous place.
But I also know that Dr. Frank Harkness did what he did, said what he said—and what he didn’t say—because he called himself a Christian.
He didn’t shame those who fell short because he was required to by his fellow Elks.
He didn’t set out to frighten little kids just because he had a Y chromosome.
One person may not represent a faith, but the faith still has to reckon with that one person, and with others like him.
And while I knew gentle and generous Muslims, while my life had been saved many times by a Muslim, while I, had in fact, fallen hard for a Muslim, there was also this. The Muslims who killed innocents in Paris in a night club and a soccer stadium and a restaurant. Who slit the throat of a French priest. Who attacked a Jewish grocery store.
And who did it because of their faith, not despite it.
“Those plazas we saw in the Old Town, the architecture. This city doesn’t look French,” I told Ahmed. “It looks, I don’t know, Italian, I guess.”
“Nice was Italian until 1860,” he said. “We are, I guess, only a few of your miles from Italy now.”
“Hmm,” I said. There was so much I didn’t know about France. “You have been to Italy?”
“Yes,” I said. The previous summer I had been on a family vacation with the McNair family to Rome and Venice. I had left the theme t-shirt and goodie bag behind in Texas.
Dennis McNair was a typical Dallas oilman. He wore a gray Stetson. I don’t know how big. Do they make a 50-gallon hat? He was the classic “All Hat, No Cattle,” sort of person, and his wife, Camille, had had work done until her face was rigid, immobile. What she thought or felt behind that Kabuki mask I could not have told you.
