Paris Metro is full of bookish vocabulary, so I spent a lot of time on google. Sclerotic, recuse, calumny were new, peripatetic more familiar—Steavenson uses it to describe the nomadic lifestyle of foreign correspondents. Kit, the protagonist, uses it to describe her father. Google says it means “travelling from place to place, in particular working or based in various places for relatively short periods”. Peripatetic.
I kept reading. Paris Metro is a novel about journalism and my father is a journalist—until I was nine I would describe our family life as peripatetic. We moved from London to Paris, to Athens, and finally to Moscow, where we lived for four years before returning to London. We went all over Russia while we were there, taking the Transiberian Express all the way to Siberia or accompanying dad on a research trip to a remote monastery in Mongolia—I remember tramping across a wilderness and dad storming ahead while mum yelled at him that it was getting dark and we had to go back. When I was a teenager, he went to Yemen for a few months and we joined him halfway through to travel across the country together. I had my first period while we were camping with Bedu people in the Arabian Desert—it was not ideal.
My sister and I didn’t always appreciate the adventures. Looking back now, I wish I could remember more, but at the time we begged to return to London, or to Lesvos (mentioned in Paris Metro in reference to the refugee crisis), where my mum’s family are from and which we had always considered a kind of home. We didn’t much like the travelling, but we didn’t like being left behind either. Sometimes, our parents went away together and we stayed with our grandparents. More often, dad went on long (at least they felt long) trips to Iran, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Georgia, by himself. I remember when we were in Moscow—in what must have been around 2002 or 2003—dad being away for three months in Afghanistan. I remember moments of worry: of our neighbour superstitiously telling our mother to take down a poster of a stormy sea; I remember her getting upset once (or was she laughing?) when my sister and I stuffed a snowsuit full of balloons, drew a face on it, and sat it up in dad’s chair; I remember the stories upon his return about crossing mountains on the back of a donkey and being cut off from the world; mostly I remember the three of us being very close during his absences—dancing to Prince in our apartment, rollerblading or ice skating around Moscow’s parks, trying to track down fresh milk in the flashy new Swedish supermarket.
I didn’t appreciate at the time what any of this might have been like for my mum, looking after two young children in an entirely new and entirely foreign country with only a rudimentary grasp of the language, while her husband was away reporting on a war. Paris Metro is a very different story to mine, but it voiced elements of my life that I find difficult to put into words—the tension that I have always recognised within my dad, between the urge to protect his family and the urge to get deep into the heart of things and do an often dangerous and unpredictable job. Much like Zorro in Paris Metro, we used to joke that dad always survived against the odds, always managed to land his way into trouble and then charm his way out of it again. Deep down the joke always scared me. Kit is conflicted in this way when she rushes out into the Paris night, on the thirteenth of November, 2015, to chase the sound of gunshots, torn between thoughts of her son, Little Ahmed, and the story that is unfolding right in front of her. And she considers these conflicts again as she sits in the cell, thinking about (big) Ahmed and his relationship to their son, “I had not thought of Ahmed leaving Little Ahmed in terms of sacrifice before; I had only thought about it as abandonment”.
Reading Paris Metro this week I have been thinking a lot about borders and divisions. This book is about “shuffling loyalty” and Part I closes with this idea: “The Oberons and his Shakespearean brothers-in-arms fought, refought, changed sides, realigned with or against the Americans, the Shia government in Baghdad, Al-Qaeda. Shuffling loyalty jihad God and country; half of them ended up commanders in ISIS”. The same idea reappears when Kit and Zorro sit at Costas’s taverna in Kos and discuss the borders of the EU. Zorro says, “If Turkey joins the EU, you take away the whole argument of we-are-we and you-are-you. Take away the border between Europe and Asia, East and West, Christian and Islam. Erase it. Heal it. Anyone can go where they want, under the umbrella of Brussels and Strasbourg and human rights courts and anticorruption conferences and subsidies for minorities. International. Community.” Costas, “whose grandparents had been forced to flee Smyrna when the Turks burnt the Christian quarters of the city” plays along with Zorro’s fantasy of an ever-expanding EU: “If Turkey is in the EU, they will have to allow us to go back there! Freedom of Movement!”.
Throughout the book Steavenson emphasises the arbitrariness of borders and of lines, some of which have not existed for very long. What was once Greece is now Turkey, what was Turkey is now Greece. I have spent a lot of time gazing at Turkey from Lesvos, imagining the expanse that lies behind the outline of the mountains: the vastness of Turkey and then beyond that Syria, Iraq, Iran. The fragile border between those little Aegean islands, the frontiers of the EU, and the world that lies beyond it has always fascinated me—Greece as a meeting point of east and west, the physical manifestation of a conceptual divide, a divide made even more stark by the daily arrival of refugees on the island, and the overfull Moria camp which is currently home to 17,000 more people than it was designed for.
The things that characterise Lesvos are tied to its location—the mixture of Ottoman architecture with Byzantine castles, the huge Orthodox Churches and ruined Mosques, the combinations of eastern and western flavours in the food, and now also the refugee crisis. Just like many of the characters in Paris Metro, its identity is born out of a blurring of arbitrary lines.
March 2020
t-barnes 