Why the attacks in Paris just feel cruel

My cellphone, furiously buzzing.  The messages, all asking “Are you OK?”

That's how I first found out about the terror attacks Friday night, 100 miles from where I've been staying. Part of me refused to believe this could happen in the City of Lights.

I took a deserted Metro line into Paris on Monday, seeing not just sadness, but pain in people's faces. No one was looking around nervously, everyone was looking at their feet. And everything was so quiet.

I can’t remember anything like it in the French capital, where I used to live before years in the United States. This place is always crowded, always buzzing with people, cars and mopeds. And it is just a really odd, sobering feeling, walking around and encountering those makeshift altars in front of the places that were hit, with piles of flowers, and sidewalks covered in tea candles.

Le Carillon café and Le Petit Cambodge restaurant, where 15 people were shot dead, are down the street from where I am staying. I was there Monday at noon for a minute of silence that was observed around the nation. People were crying, holding flowers, singing, or rather, whispering La Marseillaise. One man stood in front of the crowd and read a poem about the dead, by a Cameroonian author. There was a magical ray of sun in the midst of the grey day that gave the scene an incredibly heart-wrenching feeling.

Later on, I stood in front of the Bataclan concert hall, which was still being cleaned up. On my walk there, I saw blood-spattered doorways and bloody surgical gloves abandoned on the sidewalk, presumably leftover from a makeshift hospital, the kind that had to be improvised everywhere that night.

All of this really hits home for me because the entire Paris contingent of my family — my large French family — lives in the 10th and 11th districts. I used to live in the 11th myself before I moved to the US, and even though I am resident of Boston, I still have habits here, my cafés, my restaurants, my shops, people I still know. One of my sisters lives here, so does one of my brothers, and their adult children live around here too.

Unfortunately, they were all witnesses to what happened Friday, especially my 23-year-old niece Marieke. Like most bars and restaurants in the neighborhood that night, the bar where she was working shut down quickly after the first shots were fired close-by, on rue de Charonne, she and her team had to stay inside part of the night with customers and passersby looking for a place to hide, until the police told them it was safe to come out. A scene you could never have placed in Paris before last Friday.

Many of the people hit were young Parisians enjoying an unusually warm evening, relaxing at outdoor cafés and terraces at the end of their work week. This is the Paris way of life. If it had been colder, it might have been a different night. The warmth of the evening reminded me of the clear blue sky on 9/11. Something so pleasant, out which came such horror.

The 11th district is a bit like a village. In it, you will find old timers and young people, working class craftspeople, cabinet makers, upholsterers, printers, café and store owners, living side by side with hipsters or “eep-sturs” as they’re known here. It’s not a Paris neighborhood tourists flock to. From the place de la Bastille to the Canal St Martin, it is picturesque and lovely, and has the feel of a real, diverse neighborhood where people live, work, and enjoy themselves.

The people I talked to, from friends to passers-by, are certain such attacks will happen again soon. For most, this mass-killing style of attack reached a new dimension. We are no longer talking about a political target, or even a giant tourist attraction like the Louvre Museum, the Eiffel Tower or a department store, my friends tell me.

Last Friday, the targets were anybody, anywhere, anytime. If it was possible for authorities to miss this attack, why should we believe it will not be missed again?

It will take Parisians a really long time to recover from this. As for me, this is only beginning to sink in. I wasn’t there last Friday, but I’m really catching up.