SAFER looks across Rue de La Fontaine and he unconsciously begins to shake his head at his family’s pizzeria La Cosa Nostra.
As its name suggests, Our House is a family business, popular for home-cooked Italian fare, friendly family service and is a popular fixture in Paris’ central 11th district.
But the 38-year-old Safer knows this has changed.
“Now people will see something else,” he says almost to himself, standing anonymously across the road as police hold back Parisians keen on getting mobile phone photos of the shot-up facade of the once much loved suburban eatery.
Safer and his family stand largely unnoticed because they carry the face of someone touched directly by grief, a face the whole city carries.
What Safer readily admits is troubling him and his family is what they saw in a spray of blood and bullets and why so many lives changed at 9.32pm last Friday.
That war has come to their city is a popular sentiment about the streets of the French capital, some still strewn with reams of red and white police tape or piles of sand scattered over the bloodstained streets and pavements where the wounded lay dying.
Some streets are still littered too with clothes and shoes or medical paraphernalia like IV lines, discarded by paramedics during impromptu emergency tirages in the doorways of ordinary homes.
While sand covers some spots of horror, in others blood still sits in pools in the cracks in pavements and cobbled streets, too thick and widespread to cover over and disperse. Soon candles and flowers may conceal the spot where an innocent was lost.
Police sirens are still wailing as a reminder to the city it remains under siege from cowardly forces, while fleets of morgue vans are running shuttle from the Bataclan concert hall, their distinctive marking promptings Parisians to hang their heads and others to weep openly as they pass.
Safer (who didn’t want to reveal his surname) told News Corp it was an unusually slow night with most of their regulars attending the sellout Stade de France football stadium down the road where their national soccer team was playing a friendly with Germany.
“Paul”, his cousin, who asked for a pseudonym out of fear ISIS will make him a target, left works at 5pm but Safer was still serving at 9.30pm when he heard a car pull up outside his and the Café Bonne Biere premises across the road.
“Dat, dat, dat, dat: we could all hear the sounds, the shots but we didn’t know what it was but it was getting closer then they hit our windows and we all just dived to the ground,” Safer recalled yesterday.
“Everybody just went to the floor, everybody was just hiding but two girls eating on the terrace were hit, one in the shoulder and the other in the arm.
“We got everybody into the cellar but the shooting just went on and on, three or four minutes even after we were in the cellar dat, dat, dat.
“We only had four customers inside and eight outside because everybody was at the football. Nobody died in our restaurant but across the road there were dead I know.”
There were at least five dead and 19 injured in that shootout.
Paul said: “They just shot everybody, anybody with no thought about colour, race or religion, just anybody they could see. None of us can understand this. What were they thinking? Why us? It really is beyond words.”
Seven minutes earlier at 9.25pm, gunmen a few blocks away at Rue Alibert made a more deadly assault.
Business consultant Rafiaa Benabid, 27, was running late from her work so a plan to have dinner at the restaurant below her flat with her parents Monlef and Nejla, visiting her from their home in Tunisia, instead turned into a stay at home in front of the TV to watch the football. The cancelled booking at Le Carillon saved their lives.
The three were in their fourth floor apartment when they heard what they thought was fireworks.
“We thought it was fireworks and so we went to the window and looked down at the restaurant and we couldn’t understand why the street below was empty,” Rafiaa said yesterday as she stood outside her flat where neighbours were now lighting candles, delivering flowers and whispering prayers.
We thought ‘what’s happening? Usually this place is very crowded, particularly Friday nights when the weather is mild normally everyone is on the streets but in the 20 seconds of the shooting there was nobody and then I noticed chairs and tables knocked down and people in the restaurant across the street were hiding behind the tables.
“I thought maybe people were settling some dispute, a fight, but then I noticed people were yelling “run, run don’t stay here”. I looked about and I saw two people who had been on bicycles riding past were now lying in the middle of the road.
“It sounds strange I know but it was just one minute of complete silence, everyone looking wondering what was going on then the scene came to life and people were yelling, the bicycle people were on the floor (road), the craziness, running, screaming and crying everywhere. It was unbelievable I think everyone just were stunned and trying to think what was happening then everyone moved and yelled.
She said the neighbourhood descended on the street corner, bordered by three restaurants including Le Carillon, Le Petit Cambodge and the Maria Louisa and begging to see if friends and family were alive but by then police were telling them to run away. Everyone was confused but in the end 15 people were dead here.
Rafiaa, who had lived in her flat for 18 months, said it was a horrible scene and people were trying to help bloodied others to safety.
“This area is usually families and babies then during the evening youngsters and drinking, it really is lively … its incredible,” she said.
At 9.36pm four minutes after the Cosa Nostra assault and 11 after the Alibert attack, the third deadly attack took place.
La Belle Equipe eatery on Rue de Charonne was packed, inside and on the sidewalk, with customers. Then the same black sedan seen by some witnesses from the other sites pulled up, two men got out and for the next three to four minutes blasted that eatery and the sushi joint next door. Nineteen people would die here with another nine remaining in critical condition. At 9.40pm the deadliest assault on the Bataclan concert would take place claiming more than 100 lives.
Today people crowd about the closed shops, not just the ones attacks but others next door, and stare blankly at their windows riddled with bullet holes and now emitting almost fake looking spider web-like cracks, the sort you would see in the frames of bars on Western movies.
It’s all an unbelievable a scene.
Parisians were told to stay at home yesterday, but some couldn’t resist.
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