On the Street at Place de La République, Paris
William Below, Jr., Paris Bureau
It’s hard to describe the feelings of just one week ago, because so many emotions have since piled up, one upon the other. You can’t peel it back. Unlike the rest of the world, and even most of Paris, this was happening in our neighborhood—a feeling too similar to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in January. The murderers chose the Boulevard Voltaire, surely not because such buffoonish and nihilistic individuals had any grasp of the symbolism; more likely, because the broad boulevard (where a million people marched in united outrage after Charlie Hebdo just 10 months ago), would not be congested on a Friday night. Unlike many of the arteries of the city, Boulevard Voltaire would be conducive to moving rapidly from place to place. A car could get in from the east or north “doors” to city and get about relatively freely.
There are signs that something is wrong—that second of doubt you look back at and recognize as the moment things changed, as the dividing line between before and after. These days that moment comes via Facebook or Twitter. For me, it was an online post on my phone, from one friend to another, with the deceptively mundane words, “We’re okay.” Seconds later, my youngest daughter was calling. She was at her mom’s house that night, 15 minutes by foot from our flat. Because we live right off the boulevard that the terrorists chose as their murderous axis, we were in the middle of the horror.
My daughter had left the house on foot an hour previously, just as I, returning from work on Line 9 Métro, had passed directly under the Bataclan concert hall. The Bataclan is two blocks west of us. The Belle Equipe café, where another massacre took place, is visible up the street. Further west down the Boulevard Voltaire is the restaurant and bar where the first hail of bullets was unleashed, where the first deaths set horror into motion.
I told my daughter we were fine. She was shaken. My wife, Amy, understood something awful was happening from the tone of my daughter’s voice. Her call was a clue that fell into place: the sound of sirens were already filling the night, nothing surprising in itself, the side street next to our house, a famous but narrow north-south axis, is a preferred route of ambulances going from the Place de la Bastille to hospitals along the less congested east-west boulevards to the north, of which Voltaire is one.
I was experiencing, but was not quite processing, the narrative of the evening. I looked at the street downstairs. All the shops and cafés were closed up. No one was on the street.
Ironically, the broad Parisian boulevards were designed in the 1850s by Baron Haussmann, in part so that the police and the army could move quickly through the city to put down insurrections—memories of the revolution of 1848 were still fresh. But Boulevard Voltaire also connects a number of popular neighborhoods—Oberkampf, Canal Saint-Martin, Charonne—that are teeming with mostly young people on any Friday night.The Bataclan is on the same broad boulevard, three blocks to the west of Place Léon Blum, just to the south of Père Lachaise cemetery.
One of the persistent but false media reports was of an attack on the Boulevard Beaumarchais, where my daughter lives when she is with her mother. Eventually, that bit of misinformation faded away. My daughter’s reports were more accurate than any network. But it was on that boulevard, a wide east-west avenue stretching from Place de La République to Place de La Bastille, that the emergency crews set up their staging area, dispatching the various vehicles carrying the wounded to hospitals on both sides of the Seine.
As we watched along with the whole world, news reports focused on the Bataclan, first announcing a hostage situation and then a massacre. As we heard the totals, as we watched the reports, how could we fathom any of the numbers, any of the images—any of what was happening, or even that it was happening right down the street? How could I get my head around the horror that was being inflicted upon people with whom I had no doubt crossed paths an hour before? Or people who taken Line 9 with me, traveled in the same car—perhaps in the next seat—but had gotten off the train one station before my stop?
We stayed inside most of the next day. The neighborhood was quiet, almost normal. In the late afternoon, I convinced Amy to come out with me. We walked down the street and lit candles in front of the Bataclan. Just as with the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the world press was camped in front of the site, their reporters, lights, satellite dishes and generators launching their accounts of events all over the world. There was a bizarre, almost festive atmosphere among them. Just another day at work, I suppose.
As Amy and I lit candles, a Los Angeles Times photographer snapped a picture of us, documenting our small, somber walk to get fresh air and somehow get our heads around what had happened. The next day our photo was on the front page of the Sunday paper.
We were safe. Our family was safe. One of my colleagues lost his wife. While he was in China on a photo shoot, she made the fatal choice to have dinner with friends at a local café.
Tonight, exactly one week later, Amy and I had dinner at La Robe de la Girafe, a favorite neighborhood bistro of ours. The owner wasn’t there. He was staying away after losing three friends last Friday. We knew we were among those spared direct tragedy.
Halfway through dinner, TV cameras appeared outside the restaurant window, their lights peering through the curtains like burglars. They were surely doing a one-week-later piece on the neighborhood, documenting the packed restaurant and the peculiar spirit of Parisians. At precisely 9:20 p.m., the lights dimmed and the music went up. Spontaneously, we all stood and took each other’s hands, forming an unbroken chain throughout the restaurant. When the music was over and the lights returned we all applauded, then returned to what Parisians do so well, enjoying life, food, wine, conversation, unafraid, unapologetic, indomitable.
William Below Jr. is a Los Angeles native with family ties to the San Pedro Harbor Area, who lives in Paris.