The Poignancy of the Paris Targets

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/opinion/the-poignancy-of-the-paris-targets.html

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PANTIN, France — When we first heard about the Paris attacks, my husband and I watched the news unfold on TV while fielding and sending worried inquiries on our phones and tracking developments on Facebook and Twitter. As we followed the trail of violence through the 10th and 11th Arrondissements, we were, like most people, baffled. Why were terrorists targeting restaurants and the Bataclan concert hall in neighborhoods of little international importance?

But as the world has come to realize, that, apparently, was the point: Hit Paris where least expected. Attack an area where people feel so free that private life flows freely into public spaces. A place where men and women from all backgrounds form friendships that are like extended family, where they eat, drink, debate and laugh in local restaurants and cafes that become public dining rooms and salons.

Until 2013, I lived in one of the neighborhoods that was attacked. Le Petit Cambodge restaurant and Le Carillon cafe, where 15 people were killed, are just across the canal from my old home on the rue de Marseille. I have been to both places many times. I can imagine exactly what the scene was like there last Friday night before the terrorists drove up in a black car at 9:25 p.m. It is terrible to imagine the scene after they drove away.

The friend who introduced me to the Canal Saint-Martin neighborhood a decade ago, and still lives nearby, had planned to celebrate her birthday on Saturday night. After a flurry of calls, we decided the party must go on. “We won’t dance,” my friend said, “but we’ll drink Champagne — this is Paris! — and we’ll be together.” And so, 24 hours after the attack, my husband and I set out for our friend’s home. The Métro, normally packed on a Saturday night, was eerily empty. So were the streets.

At the party’s midpoint, our host asked us to reflect on what had just happened to our city. Everyone knew the restaurants that were targeted, and many had attended concerts at the legendary Bataclan. No one present had lost a friend or a family member, but several knew people who had. One story seared my heart: A friend, recounted a guest, had taken her daughter to the Eagles of Death Metal concert at the Bataclan. The friend survived but her daughter was killed.

On Monday, my husband learned that a colleague had been killed at Le Petit Cambodge. “She was 32 years old,” he said in the saddest voice I have ever heard him use. I knew then that I had to return to my old neighborhood, to see with my own eyes the sites of Friday’s carnage and to pay my respect to the victims.

By Monday afternoon, Paris seemed almost normal. The Métro was full of commuters. People were out in the streets. From the courtyard of the primary school on the corner of rue de Marseille came the sound of children playing. At Chez Prune, on Quai de Valmy, the sidewalk tables were full. But after I had crossed to the other side of the canal, I saw a crowd gathered, a French flag waving above their heads, and I knew nothing was normal.

The sidewalks around Le Petit Cambodge and Le Carillon were entirely covered with candles, flowers and handwritten messages. I flashed back to the weeks after 9/11 and the impromptu shrines of Lower Manhattan. I thought of my cousin killed in a hail of bullets fired by a Kalashnikov-wielding terrorist as she waited for a table at a restaurant in Mumbai on Nov. 26, 2008. I thought of the shock we had just lived through 10 months ago in Paris after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. And I thought that if there is one French expression I can no longer bear, it is “déjà vu.”

The blackboards on either side of the entrance to Le Carillon still had “Happy Hour” written on them in white chalk, which felt like a punch to the gut. I turned and walked past the police officers on wary guard and the television cameras set up to film God knows what at this point. I knew I needed a sweet French double-cheek kissed greeting and a face-to-face connection with a friend.

So I set out to visit a friend in the neighborhood. She opened her door and her arms to me, and, after we’d sat down in her living room overlooking the canal, said: “You know the terrorists knew exactly what they were doing. This is where Paris is happening. It’s what Montmartre was in the 1920s; what Saint-Germain used to be. But they can’t destroy us. In fact, they’ve made us stronger. Our defiance will be to continue to live exactly as we please, to live as only Paris lets people live. To do anything else would mean disrespect for the victims, and for ourselves.”

I left my friend feeling much better. As I headed back to the Métro, I passed a group of people painting a wall near the Quai de Valmy with large block letters spelling out the motto of Paris: “fluctuat nec mergitur,” or “tossed by the waves but never sunk.” My friend is right. Paris will survive because Parisians have no intention of changing their lifestyle just because a murderous terrorist group can’t abide its freedoms.