Little Kabul

On Thursday evenings, as a prelude to the weekend, on my way home from work, I get off the metro a few stops from my home to go to yoga class. My teacher is an Australian named Louisa, gentle, tall, and slender. Soon she'll be my neighbor. She and her young family have just bought an apartment a few steps down the street from mine. If I lean out the window, a dangerous undertaking because the wrought-iron balcony is shaky and rusted, and it is the only protection between me and the street seven storeys below, I can see a narrow fringe of the vegetation at the edge of our neighborhood park, Buttes Chaumont. Louisa's apartment, which I can see from my bedroom window, overlooks the park and at night, from hers, she'll see the sparkling tip of the Eiffel Tower glistening miles away.

Though I don't know Louisa well, I imagine her life is a lot like mine, modestly comfortable, a good life in a pleasant neighborhood, a bit off the beaten track and far from the main attractions of Paris. The metro ride to the city's heart can be long, but we have more calm, more quiet, and more fresh air than the inhabitants of the capital's chicer neighborhoods. Calm, quiet, comfort, food on the table, a soft bed at night - unattainable luxuries for the inhabitants of Little Kabul, a hidden corner of Paris I recently discovered on my way to yoga class.

Where I get off the metro on Thursdays, the train runs aboveground, like the elevated trains in New York or Chicago. To get to the busy boulevard below, I have to descend a wide wrought-iron stairway. The train runs above ground at this point for a reason: beneath the street runs the Canal Saint Martin on its way to the Seine. In the winter, its banks are hidden in darkness. Now that the days are longer and the sun shines brightly at 7 pm, while descending the stairs, I can make out a large encampment, with camp fires, tents, and, in some cases, blankets strung up along ropes. On a very small scale, it looks like a refugee camp hastily set up after a terrible disaster: crowded, dirty, and with no sanitary installations. In this camp, however, there are no children running about, playing and even laughing despite the misery that surrounds them. Nor are there any women trying their best to wash clothes in basins or cook a meal for their family over an open fire. Here, all the inhabitants are young men. And nearly all of them are from Afghanistan.

At seven in the evening, they cluster on the wide bridge over the canal. Dark-haired, handsome young men, lean and desperate. Yet they laugh, they express easy affection of a kind not tolerated between men in the West, mostly because of fear of being labelled a homosexual. In their culture, men can hold hands, throw an arm around a friend's shoulder, and these gestures take on even greater importance for these young men thousands of miles from any member of their family, in a country whose language many do not speak. And who knows what horrors they had to withstand in order to make it this far, how much money their families paid to have them smuggled out of Afghanistan, across central Asia, and into Europe, all the way to France.

Some, before ending up in Paris, were inhabitants of "the jungle," a makeshift camp near the city of Calais, along the English Channel, where refugees from all over the world bided their time in hopes of jumping a truck, a train, or a boat, on its way to the British Isles. In the fall of 2009, the jungle was invaded by the French national police and destroyed. Those men and women who could escape, did; though many were rounded up and deported. Among the Afghans, those who escaped headed for Paris in groups composed of young men from the same towns or regions. They spent what has been a long cold winter as illegal aliens, sleeping outside in tents pitched in parks, beneath bridges, alongside highways. Some were picked up by the police, others found help and applied for refugee status. Now that spring has finally arrived, the living has become easier. Easier, but not more secure.

Last evening I saw the camp, the young men, on my way to yoga class. Just a few steps away, on the same bank of the canal, there is a warehous that has been transformed into an art center, with, on the ground floor, a café that is very "branché" (literally "plugged-in", in other words, the place to be). Last evening the terrass of the café was packed and groups of young, fashionably dressed Parisians wandered up and down the cobbled road leading to the canal, following the same path as the Afghan refugees. At the canal's edge, they parted ways - the Parisians headed south to the café, the Afghans, north, to the dank camp beneath the bridge, beneath the busy boulevard overhead.

Today, for the first time this year, temperatures in Paris will reach close to 80°. In warm weather, Little Kabul, deprived of toilets, of running water, of sinks, is going to start smelling pretty bad. I expect there will be complaints. Danger of disease and a bad image for the neighborhood. And I wouldn't be surprised if one morning before dawn a contingent of police show up to raze the camp.

In the meanwhile the Afghans of Little Kabul wait and worry. In many cases, their families back home went deeply into debt to pay for the journey. They placed all their hope in these young men who risked their lives to simply have the opportunity to work, to send money home, to pay back their families, and then to help them build better lives in a country wracked by war for over thirty years. Instead, they are idle, forbidden by law to work, and back home their families receive threats from the smugglers to whom they are deeply in debt.

I wonder how many will make it: who will be the lucky few - because on top of strength and perseverance, a hefty dose of luck is required. Some will turn to crime, some will break down, and some will return home to shame. Their families invested everything in them. Returning home is proof they have failed, and their honor will be lost.

Last night I slept in my lovely bed and this morning I sipped excellent coffee while listening to the morning news on the radio. I am showered and clean, ready to head to the market. I wonder what the Afghans of Little Kabul have planned for today....

Ascension Day

May 13, 2010. Ascension Day. The sky is a milky gray and the air is cool, hardly above 50°, too cool for the month of May. Too cool for the thousands of Frenchmen who've headed to the beach, to the country, or to the mountains for France's first big holiday weekend of the season, a summer preview of sorts. For you see, today is férié, a holiday. Stand on a street corner and ask random pedestrians why, most will shrug their shoulders. They have the day off, that's all that counts. One out of ten might be able to explain the religious significance of the holiday. Though the French are nominally Catholic in their majority, most have deserted the pews of their churches, and besides Christmas and Easter, they are basically ignorant of their faith. On Sundays, they "worship" at their neighborhood outdoor market or among the furniture displays of Ikea.

When a holiday falls on a Thursday, as is the case today, anyone who can, takes Friday off as well and this makes what the French call a pont, a "bridge," a long weekend of four days. Last evening, returning from work around eight, I rode in almost empty metro cars (at that hour I usually travel standing, cheek-to-cheek with other commuters). Holiday travellers were already packed into planes and TGV's, high-speed trains, escaping to beach retreats or family houses deep in the French countryside.

Was their ever a people who loved holidays as much as the French? They love them so much that the month of May alone contains four: May first, May Day, where the French celebrate workers' rights; May 8th, V-E Day, commemorating May 8, 1945, the Allied victory in Europe; Ascension Day; and then ten days later, the Pentecost. Some years that works out to at least three long weekends, three ponts, for the French. This year they'll only get two because the first and the eighth fell on a Sunday - which means today's bad weather is a big, big disappointment. The first long holiday weekend has begun with a fizzle, whereas the French were hoping for an explosion of heat and sun.

Oh well, in what is - at least for the time being (a national austerity program is in the works) - a true workers' paradise, the French can place their hopes in the long weekend of the Pentecost, only ten days away! Maybe the weather will have improved by then and they can get a head start on their summer tan.