She hadn’t but Gerrard had told her a few of the stories. He’d told her about the toy animals and the forest. He’d told her about how Christopher Robin promised his bear to always remember.
“A Heffalump is an imaginary elephant,” Chris said. He poured himself the drink and sat down next to her.
“An elephant?”
“An imaginary elephant. It’s the kind of creature that if one sets a trap for it one will only catch one’s self.”
Natalie leaned back on her elbows and closed her eyes for a moment. “Gerrard says that we’re looking for Heffalumps.”
“That’s a damning assessment,” Christopher said perfunctorily.
“Gerrard doesn’t think so,” she said.
She reached out to Christopher and grabbed the back of his neck. He fell on her then, but not too clumsily. She put her tongue in his mouth. He tasted of coffee and spearmint gum. They rolled together on the bed, mussing the sheets, and she ended up on top of him, straddling his waist.
Christopher’s spectacles were askew. He took them off.
“Do you believe in God, Natalie?”
“No.” Maybe her parents had believed in God, but she didn’t believe. To her God was the smiling man on a billboard at the Metro station, or in a magazine. He was a new bra, a canned soup, or a wrapped stick of licorice. Natalie was no longer the good Catholic girl who prayed to Jesus and licorice. Natalie wanted to be an ingrate. She wanted to reject God and the society He spoke through.
“I don’t believe either, not in God or Heffalumps,” he said. He lifted Natalie off, set her to the side, and then sat up and turned to get out of bed. “You have to be going now.”
“I do?”
Christopher took Natalie’s pack of cigarettes from the shelf above the closet and took the bottle of gin from the nightstand. He held these out to her.
Natalie took the bottle from him, but had Chris tap out the last cigarette for her on the spot.
She breathed in the smoke and let it out.
“What is it that you want?” she asked.
“I don’t want anything.”
“Then what are you doing here? Why are you in Paris?”
Christopher didn’t answer, but opened the door. She took another puff of her cigarette and waited for an answer.
“Goodbye.”
She walked where he pointed, and it was only when she passed through, only once she was out in the hallway, that she remembered Gerrard.
“Wait. You’re supposed to come with me,” she said.
20
That morning, inside the art studio at the National School of the Fine Arts, Christopher joined the propaganda committee. The room was bordered by poster boards hanging off clotheslines. There were a half-dozen worktables, each with a plastic tub full of dyes and other chemicals, a clay cup filled with pens and scalpels, and a wooden silk-screen frame. A girl wearing round glasses and a denim work shirt with the sleeves rolled up, whose long brown hair was pulled up into a bun, took a rolling pin and pressed ink through taut silk. She used a putty knife to separate the paper from the frame.
The silk-screened monochromatic posters were colored red or black or blue or green, and Christopher felt strangely optimistic looking at them. The cartoon of a blue policeman wearing a helmet and goggles and brandishing a club behind a shield printed on cream-colored paper was somehow familiar.
“I have a poster like this, in this style, at home,” he said. “Found it in my shop back in 1961.”
“One of these?” Gerrard asked. “Which one?”
One featured a graphic that combined the Sorbonne Chapel with the iconography of a factory. The poster’s simple affirmation was “Popular University? Yes!” Another depicted Prime Minister Georges Pompidou as a chicken. Another featured an iconic factory along with the words “May 68, the beginning of a prolonged fight.”
“They’re all of a piece,” Christopher said. “They all have same graphic style, but none of these are exactly the one.”
There was a set of agreed-upon symbols, a particular aesthetic, that one had to adopt in order to join the committee, but once you learned the rules it was easy to participate. Natalie showed him a poster she’d designed. A hand smashed through the poster itself, a raised fist broke the medium, and the slogan was “Break through your life.”
Another poster depicted a woman with her head wrapped in bandages and with a safety pin holding her mouth closed. Her eyes were shaped targets. The caption read “A youth disturbed too often by the future.”
Christopher found his poster after Gerrard cut the paper into a stencil of a brown bear sitting with a honey pot in the middle of a circle of riot police. The bear bared its teeth as the police cowered behind their batons ineffectively. There were two figures with the bear. One was embracing the bear, standing on its lap and hugging the beast around the neck, while the other was kneeling to the bear’s left. The slogan written above the frame read:
VOUS NE RÉCUPÉREREZ PAS CET OURS DANS SON CAGE.
Gerrard made the poster with orange paint and yellow paper and a silk screen. He pressed out three hundred copies.
* * *
That afternoon the three of them joined a contingent of students from the occupied Sorbonne, mostly March 22 organizers and other members of Les Enragés, in a march to the Renault factory. Gerrard and Natalie carried bundles of posters and Christopher carried the red enamel stockpot full of wheat paste.
The other students were in dress clothes—black sports jackets and skinny ties on the men, khaki skirts and black turtleneck sweaters on the women—but Gerrard and Natalie were unwashed and ragged. Gerrard was still in the same American blue jeans he’d been wearing since Christopher met him in jail and Natalie in a no-longer-elegant evening gown. She was wearing a pair of saddle shoes instead of high heels but while these had flat soles they didn’t really fit her. Natalie’s shoes kept slipping off her feet as she walked.
Christopher’s own loafers were still damp from having been washed in the sink in his hotel room, and as the cobblestones gave way to cement and then to mud as the streets widened he could feel water seep through the leather and into his socks.
* * *
A crowd of autoworkers milled around outside the gates as a union representative in a three-piece wool suit stood on a platform to the right and sweated through his clothes. He spoke slowly into a microphone and informed everyone that this was a one-day strike; they were occupying the factory and if the workers who were waiting outside would join their comrades inside they’d find a general assembly in progress.
Natalie nudged Christopher and pointed to the roof of the factory where about a hundred workers in overalls and caps were standing. They waved down to the pale, bespectacled students. When they had the students’ attention they pressed in together at the roof’s edge. For a moment Gerrard thought that they were going to jump, but rather than self-destruct the workers began to sing. Christopher recognized the tune.
It was “The Internationale,” and most of Les Enragés and the March 22 group sang back without hesitation.
“We should get to work,” Gerrard said. He pointed toward the double doors and then changed his mind and pointed to the left of these.
Christopher worried that the posters wouldn’t stick to the rough brick surface of the factory wall, but he followed him into the crowd and they used wide paintbrushes to apply wheat paste to the wall, filling the cracks with the snot-colored gel. They spread out a poster depicting Charles de Gaulle’s silhouette as the spokes inside multiple gears, ran their hands over the poster to push the air bubbles to the edges. De Gaulle’s nose was what made him identifiable; it jutted out well past the length of the brim of his kepi cap.
The slogan at the bottom of the poster read: “Let us break the old gears.”
The next poster also featured gears, only these were line drawings, circles without teeth. A hand emerging from the right side of the page was shown to stop the turning of the mechanism by sticking a finger between the ge
ars, and the slogan read: “To yield just a little is to capitulate much.”
As they worked they sang, “So comrades, come rally, and the last fight let us face. The international working class shall be the human race.”
When the song was finished the speaker for the Confédération Général du Travail stepped forward again but just stammered into the microphone. The problem of the milling workers who shuffled back and forth outside the factory became more obvious. They were immigrants and spoke Italian or Algerian Arabic, and they weren’t following the instructions he’d given them in French. The man covered the microphone with his right hand and leaned back to listen to another union official who had joined him on the platform. This second bureaucrat was thinner, seemed more comfortable in his blue suit, and he whispered instructions as the first man nodded. The first bureaucrat straightened his blue vest, wiped away the sweat from his brow, and pushed his stringy black hair back into place over his bald spot.
“I understand that the students from the Sorbonne would like to be of some use, and that there is a standing offer to translate the message of the strike for the foreign workers.” The bureaucrat leaned back again to his superior officer. “The CGT would like to accept that offer. And we’d ask that any of the students who speak Arabic or Italian approach the stage.”
They were pasting up the first Pooh poster when Natalie handed Christopher her bundle and stepped back into the crowd. Natalie walked up to the platform, stepped onto the wooden stage, and crossed over to the CGT official. When the bureaucrat handed Natalie the pages of text he’d been reading from and he pointed to where he wanted her to begin, she stepped forward, squinting against the sun, and cleared her throat.
She spoke Italian, not quite fluently, but well enough, probably better than Chris did. She read, “‘The workers of the Renault factory have occupied the factory. The CGT called a strike on the thirteenth in solidarity with those who had been arrested and against the mischief of the police, and today the workers have chosen to continue the strike not only out of solidarity, but out of self-interest. We have our own demands.’”
Christopher wondered how it could be that he had a duplicate of the orange or brownish poster that he’d helped bring to the factory stored in a cardboard box at home. What could the anomaly possibly mean? There was not, as far as he could tell, any mundane explanation for it, but if it was some kind of supernatural event it was one of those inscrutable miracles that in Sunday school had always seemed absurd to him. What use could the poster have been back in 1961, and what use was the strangeness of it now that he was in the right context for the message?
“‘We are forced to live in prefabricated rooms that are ugly and unsanitary, and we denounce the bunk beds stacked to the ceiling,’” Natalie read in her halting Italian. “‘The working man can’t sit up in the morning but must lie flat on the hard flat mattress provided by management. Even when we are out of bed there is nowhere to sit. In each room there are only six chairs for twelve men, and we take turns sitting down.
“‘We have no health centre. There is no first aid available. When we are sick we have to pay for our own treatment and stay in these small rooms, spreading our illness to our comrades.’”
Natalie glanced ahead on the list, flipped ahead in the pages, reading out loud, translating bits and pieces as she went.
“‘There is a total lack of entertainment, except for one TV set,’” she muttered. “‘All visits, including those by families, are forbidden. Taking photographs is forbidden. Newspapers, leaflets,’” Natalie translated. And then she looked up and spoke without the script. “Only none of this is true. Not anymore. Your comrades have taken the factory. Look and see,” she said. “None of these old rules apply. You don’t need to make these demands of the owners. The factory belongs to you now.”
Natalie dropped the notes on the podium, and then changed her mind and picked the pages up and threw them into the crowd. The bureaucrat rushed over to her and nudged her out the way. He said, in French, “These students are trying to arouse division in our ranks and weaken us.”
Natalie pushed back and shouted into the microphone. “The students support you.” Natalie said it in French, and then in Italian, and then in French again. “We’ve taken our university, and now that we have it, it is yours as well,” she said. “What is the union promising? A vacation? A color TV?” she asked.
When the CGT official took a swing at her Natalie backed off the platform. She walked away from the microphone and toward the factory gates, toward the double doors, and Gerrard pulled Christopher away from the Pooh poster so they could catch her before she went in.
They marched together to the entrance, to the factory doors, just the three of them, while the other students hung back with the foreign workers, talking to them, passing out leaflets.
Gerrard pulled on the latch; the doors were locked. The CGT had locked them out of the factory and no matter how hard Gerrard pulled, the doors didn’t budge.
21
Gerrard led Christopher down the narrow streets of Paris and as they walked along he examined the cracked mud that had replaced the cobblestones. It turned out that underneath the cobblestones there was mud instead of a beach. Gerrard had been hoping to find a forest with trees hundreds of feet tall, a forest to get lost in, but there was only mud, and the streets were still littered with the cobblestones that had been torn up, bricks that had been knocked down, and autos turned sideways.
Two women in wool dresses and knit jackets helped each other climb the remnants of barricades that blocked both the street and sidewalk on Rue Dante. They linked arms, held their shopping bags between them as ballast, and gingerly stepped up the pile of loose bricks.
“Yes! Factories Occupied.” The sign to Gerrard’s left was stuck to a lamppost with wheat paste and cohered to the ridges in the lamp’s base. The paste had seeped through the paper so that the red text on the poster had turned purple.
Gerrard had not slept in four days. He wanted to test out what was possible without it, what would happen if he continued to experience elements of dreaming while he was awake. How long could a waking dream be maintained?
“You need to invent a new game,” Gerrard told Christopher. “The same new game your father made up.”
“How do you mean?”
The idea was that by derailing Christopher Robin he might be able to find the Hundred Acre Wood, the dreamtime, that lay obscured under layers of stone and soot. Bringing Christopher Robin into the strike was Gerrard’s attempt to reuse his story as material for another dream, a new dream lived out at a higher level. Gerrard continued toward the river, counting his steps and breathing in the green air, and he tried to explain it to him.
“All the usual ways that we go about living our lives, the routines and reasons given, can no longer get a purchase on reality. We’re losing our grip,” he said.
“You’re losing your grip?” Christopher asked. “It seems like you’ve let go.”
They reached a small bookstore on Rue de la Bûcherie and stopped where shards of glass from the broken storefront, tattered paperbacks and shelving lay strewn across the hard mud. Christopher stopped and bent down to look at the titles.
“How can I look at this and think anything good about this strike and its aims?” he asked. “Where is the hope in this kind of thing?”
Gerrard picked through the books in order to see if there might be anything good to read among the loot. They were all in English, or were English translations, and only a few of the names on the book jackets were familiar to him (Coelho, Camus, Clausewitz) while most were unknown. The majority of the books left behind appeared to be fantasies or science fiction by Britons and Americans. They had green, purple, and black covers with names like Lafferty, Russ, and Silverberg underneath the titles.
Gerrard picked up one, a book titled The Time Hoppers that depicted a businessman with a briefcase with a rainbow emerging from his fedora. Green and blue arrows pointed back into the dark
ness. Gerrard turned the book over and read the blurb on the back: “A brilliant new novel about a future so suffocating that the only way to escape from a totally controlled environment is to ‘hop’ backward through time.”
Gerrard put the book in the back pocket of his trousers, and then looked down at the other titles to make sure there was nothing that he’d missed.
“You taking that?” Christopher asked.
“Or I could leave it in the mud?”
Gerrard picked through them, flipped each book over to read the back cover, but didn’t find anything else to his liking and was about to move on when he noticed something in the display case in the store window. A red-and-black wooden yo-yo was dangling out of the broken window. Gerrard fished it out from the shards of glass. He looped the string around his middle finger, tossed the toy toward the cobblestones, and was delighted to discover that the device returned to his hand before it hit the ground. Up and down.
Christopher frowned but didn’t object again.
On Quai de la Tournelle, Gerrard tossed his yo-yo toward the water, and it spun over the river before snapping back to his hand. He tossed it again toward his feet and the yo-yo went down the string, touched down on the mud, and stuck there. The line was taut. The yo-yo was caught in the soft, shifting ground of Paris.
“You need to invent a new game,” Gerrard said again.
But Christopher just shrugged. He’d never invented any games. Gerrard was misremembering. Christopher Robin, the character, was the straight man for the animals and if Gerrard wanted him to start adventures or make up rhymes then he wanted him to act outside of his character.
“That was Winnie-the-Pooh,” Christopher said. “That’s why the game was called Pooh Sticks.”
It had been the bear who’d stumbled onto the game of Pooh Sticks. The bear had tripped and dropped something into the river. He’d been surprised when whatever it was showed up on the other side of the bridge he’d been crossing. He’d dropped the thing on one side of the bridge but it turned up on the other side.
Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074) Page 14
