What Happens After a Terrorist Attack?
By Wendell Steavenson
PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER VAN AGTMAEL / MAGNUM FOR THE NEW YORKER
Late on Saturday, the evening after the terrorist attacks, a group of friends gathered at an eccentric dive bar, Stolly's, on the edge of the Marais. It's just the sort of small, hip place that exists all over the Eleventh Arrondisement and had been targeted the night before. The friends were in their early twenties, an international boho clan. Zorro, with hair to his waist and skinny black trousers, is studying Arabic at the Sorbonne, and works as a bartender at Stolly's sister bar, the Lizard Lounge, around the corner. He came with Ilona, who's Polish and works with him. At the Lizard Lounge, there had hardly been any customers, and it closed early. They introduced me to Murat, a Turkish Kurd (who was pleased to be congratulated on the battle for Sinjar), a Nepalese guy named Satcheen, and Gabriel, handsome and weary, who sat down with a beer and said, 'I knew they were gunshots, because I'm half Brazilian and I grew up in Rio. I've heard gunshots, but not so loud, not so close. So, when I first heard it, I thought it was gang violence, a drug issue. Most of the people knew better—one said, 'No, it's Charlie all over again.' "
The group started talking about the previous night. Gabriel had been working, only for the second time, at Le Marilou, a bar tucked a block or two away from the trendy Canal Saint-Martin stretch. There were twenty or thirty people at the bar, a few at the tables outside.
Gabriel said that, at 9:36, "we heard shots—Bang Bang Bang Bang Bang. Like that. Everything was embodied in the sound. Not like a burst but getting louder, as if they were coming closer. And then there were people running down the street, running away."
Le Marilou is only twenty metres from the intersection where Le Petit Cambodge, a popular Cambodian restaurant, and Le Carillon, a bar with draft beer, face each other. One of the jihadi groups opened fire on both places, killing fourteen people.
"Everyone stood up," Gabriel said. "We filed all the people behind the bar. There's a door there that goes out onto the courtyard, like a well at the center of the building, with a spiral staircase. We got everyone back there, the ones outside, too, and people on the street. We waited. It was very calm. No one said anything. I went back into the bar with my boss and another co-worker. One of the candles on the tables had set a napkin on fire, so the table looked as if it was on fire. It was absurd. The shots were identifiable. But the fire was just an abstract idea. We pulled down the metal grille. We called the police; they said they were on their way. We moved the tables and chairs to one side. We were cleaning up. I don't know why—it wasn't rational—but it was something to occupy our minds. We were waiting about twenty minutes. Then the fire brigade came, and police and ambulances. I went outside; there were twenty bodies on the ground. The people who died had mostly been sitting at tables outside. They were beginning to cover them up. I saw them as silhouettes. A torso. Feet. One guy was lying in the street next to a car, a bit farther away—maybe twenty metres, as if he had tried to run.'
The police told Gabriel and the others that they couldn't leave. They turned the radio on for news. Everyone began calling and texting friends and family and scrolling through Twitter. Gabriel called Zorro and said, "Where are you? Don't go out. Keep everyone inside—there's shooting." Everything was confused, and there were rumors—that someone was killed at the Bastille, that something had happened at the Louvre—that turned out not to be true. Then they heard there were bombs at the soccer stadium and they realized that there had been multiple attacks, that they were coördinated. Gabriel's boss buckled over and kept saying, "Quelle horreur, quelle horreur, quelle horreur."
For two or three hours, they stayed in the bar and tried to reach everyone they knew in the neighborhood: Stay inside! Stay safe! At Gabriel's bar, they served water and hot chocolate, and tequila for those who needed something stronger.
"There was no time to imagine anything. It was frantic, but at the same time very focussed, very tense," he said.
For a couple hours, everyone managed to reach loved ones, and then started to wonder when it would be possible to leave. The police told bargoers that they were inside a perimeter they could not leave, unless they had cars parked inside it. Most of the customers were local, and the people living upstairs from the bar offered to take the others in for the night. Gabriel slept on his boss's sofa.
He left at about 9:30 in the morning. There was already a small crowd gathered outside Le Petit Cambodge. Several people were silent and stared at the pools of blood on the ground and the bullet holes in the shattered glass of Le Carillon. Others were angry and talking animatedly to each other. One woman was shouting, "C'est un quartier populaire. It doesn't have institutions, officials. Just a peaceful cosmopolitan neighborhood, with a lot of coöperation, a lot of acceptance!"
The metal shutter of Le Petit Cambodge was pulled down. The police had already affixed a notice: "Le Petit Cambodge bar is closed due to murder in connection with terrorist activity. Prefect of Police."
At the Stolly, we drank to Paris, to alcohol, and to the freedom to drink. There were about twenty people in the bar, and everyone knew each other and clapped each other on the back, embraced. There was some laughter—everyone was together. The atmosphere was wry and defiant.
Gabriel told me he felt O.K., that he felt strong. He felt, most of all, he said, looking at me intently, eyes blazing, "Alive!" He said that the targeting of ordinary bars and restaurants felt different from the Charlie Hebdo attack: "Now terror has taken a further step, when you remove even the symbolism and just give in to the idea of blind violence." He shook his head.
On Sunday, I went to the offices of the French Association for Victims of Terrorism, AfVT. The organization, set up in 2009 to counsel and support French people whose lives have been overturned by terrorist attacks, has a modest office on the ground floor at the back of a courtyard in the Seventeenth Arrondisement, near the rail tracks that run northeast out of the Gare Saint-Lazare. Its founding came out of a terrorist act: on September 19, 1989, Union des Transports Aériens Flight 772, a DC-10 flying from Brazzaville, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, via Chad to Paris, blew up above the Sahara. All hundred and seventy people onboard were killed. Among the victims was Jean-Henri Denoix de Saint Marc, a Total oil-company executive. His son, Guillaume, who started and leads AfVT, was twenty-six at the time.
"I always tell people who have become victims of terrorism that they have to start from a new position, the impact is so strong," Guillaume said to me. "It is a complete rupture. There is a life before and a life afterward. It's like when a billiard ball hits another—life goes off at a completely different angle."
Denoix de Saint Marc is gray now, but he has come to see his recovery as linked to his activity. He was part of an association for relatives of the victims that campaigned and petitioned the French government to investigate the crash. Eventually, in 1999, six Libyans, including Abdullah Senussi, Muammar Qaddafi's chief of intelligence, were convicted in absentia of the bombing, in a Paris court. The plane was said to have been targeted in retaliation for French support of the Chadian government against Libyan expansionism. Not content, Denoix de Saint Marc confronted Saif Qaddafi on a visit to Paris and became a chief negotiator for compensation for the victims of Flight 772. His efforts dovetailed with the negotiations over Lockerbie—Libya wanted to come in from the cold of international isolation—and, in 2004, the country agreed to pay a hundred and seventy million dollars to the victims' families.
It took several years to track down each of the heirs—the victims had come from seventeen nations. There were plenty of fraudulent claims. But, eventually, all the funds were distributed. When it was done, Denoix de Saint Marc set up the AfVT.
Before Friday, the group had represented and helped about two thousand victims of terrorism. Among them are people from both sides of the Algerian war of independence; a woman who was eight when she lost her arm in the famous Milk Bar bombing, in Algiers, in 1956; former hostages of the FARC, in Colombia; and several people who were caught in the attacks on Charlie Hebdo, on January 7th, and in the siege of the Hypercacher supermarket, two days later. The organization tries to take politics out of terrorism and treat the latter as a universal trauma, no matter the aims, justifications, and other circumstances.
"Terrorism is completely different to other grief," Denoix de Saint Marc told me. "You don't have the same vision, the same ideas anymore, about the police, the world, your own government. You can become obsessed by geopolitics, about issues that you never would have noticed before. Suddenly you become an expert on judicial legalities, or a whole new region in the world. The question is always why? Who? Why me? And then, every time there is a new terrorist attack, it brings everything back again."
Over the weekend, Denoix de Saint Marc had been busy. Journalists called to try to get access to survivors. Survivors and their families called looking for help. Volunteers called to offer their services. On Sunday afternoon, he fielded inquiries from CNN and conducted three TV interviews. A relative of a victim of the killing at the Bataclan theatre called because his niece had been left an orphan and he wanted to know what would be the best thing to do for her. A psychiatrist specializing in trauma called to see how she could help. At 6 o'clock, he left to meet three people who had been in the Bataclan and seen their friends killed next to them.
Denoix de Saint Marc has come to understand that there are different stages of trauma, and that recovery does not happen in a straight line. The first thing that often happens is that couples break up. Often, one person is overwhelmed and passive, and the other is running around, full of agency and focussed on practicalities—but then, in time, the roles switch, only to reverse again a few months later.
"Terrorism affects the way you see the world, the way you are in the world," Denoix de Saint Marc said. "It destroys comfort, identity, the idea of a safe home and all of the assumptions we usually carry around with us. It affects people's beliefs."
He has seen victims of terrorism become isolated, turning inward and bitter.
"As victims, we are used as a weapon to hit a society. If society then forgets, if society stops wanting to hear our stories, to take care of us—it's not about empathy and compassion. It's about acknowledgement, respect. We want people to understand that what happened to us can happen to anyone. That we suffered for the society."
As the calls kept coming from news channels on Sunday afternoon, Denoix de Saint Marc patiently explained that this was the worst time for victims and survivors to be faced with a camera. Often, he said, they regretted it afterward. Many said they hated that this one moment, and their most painful, exposed, raw self, was preserved on the Internet as their defining identity. Sometimes, he said, it happened with victims who had been photographed bloody and injured: having to see their picture again in the press year after year on anniversaries or in connection with similar attacks caused flashbacks.
Denoix de Saint Marc would like to take a step back from his role. Terrorism is relentless. Last year there were ten attacks either on French soil or involving French people abroad. This year, after the Charlie Hebdo attack, he had a "burnout," as he called it, and had to stop working for several months.
On Friday evening, he was watching a film on TV at home when he heard that there had been shootings in Paris. I asked if this attack was different. "No, it's the same," he said. "Only the number of victims is different. When I hear them talk, it's exactly the same story I had before them."
Read The New Yorker's complete coverage of the terrorist attacks in Paris.
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