Names

I enter the Malian consulate like a Bflat in the key of E major. All around me full lips close and part again speaking urgently in a language I do not know. Skin glows aubergine, bottoms bustle with cloth-wound babes bobbing on their ridges, and what I understand as order is replaced by chaos.

A thought: Our child is going to look like this.

The experience of sitting in that room with a hundred Malians is far from the conversation about Dogon art I had with friends in their Saint Germain apartment the night before over a Puglian pasta dish and a white Burgundy.

Another thought: Our child will not have Julian’s soft blonde curls. Nor my silky brown hair easily tied into a ponytail.

My name is called. I slide my documents under the window.

‘Come back in ten days.’
‘But…?’
‘You live in Paris?’
‘No’
‘Wait here.’

I look at the girls’names in the marriage announcements that are posted on the wall: Alissala, Typhaine, Opheline, Djenebou, Aminata, Nina…

The man on my right asks me to address an envelope for him. The man on my left holds his grandchild close as he breathes lungfuls of air in through spacious nostrils.

I can hear my documents being stamped. I will be out of here in no time and on my way to the Agence Française de l’Adoption with all it’s pretty pictures of Asian and African children in villages.

A question: ‘To which culture will our child belong?’

I think about Sarkozi’s instruction that every ten-year-old pupil should know the identity of one of the 11,000 Jewish children who were deported from France to their deaths at Nazi hands.What about the Iraqi children who were killed? I wonder. And the American soldiers too poor to have any choice other than to go to war? Sudan? Ireland? Brixton? The bird shot down for sport? And would such weight be helpful on a child's shoulders?

Another thought: Every life is sacred. Not just the victim’s.

I can see my papers waiting to be picked up behind the glass window, but my name has not been called. I continue to wait.

Now a memory from a film: A Janinst monk walks Dartmoor. ‘Forgiveness is love’ he says.

Another memory: Sitting in a café in Mexico trying to have a conversation about forgiveness with a Jewish friend whose family were exterminated.

How much longer can we keep separating ourselves out into cultures, countries, colours and religions?

People are elbowing their way to the window where our now fully legalised adoption papers sit. No numbers are being called. I look around. Things look different. I see parents loving their children, people laughing as they exchange gossip, smiling as they greet one-another and concentrating as they fill in forms. I see people. I see people being people. How could I have seen anything else?

I elbow my way to the window, and take my papers from the man with the trim moustache and large lapels.

I walk towards the metro, bound for Bastille. We are going to be a family, I think.

That night I dream: I am lying on the hospital bed. Cold blue gel is being spread on the huge dome of my jet black pregnant belly. I look at the image on the screen. Inside me there is a baby that looks like Joni Mitchell sketched by Matisse.

Joni Djenebou, I think. That’s a nice name.