The crowd at Charlety was not one mass of spectators, but was broken into pieces, multiple masses and cliques. There was constant movement, people shuffling back and forth and facing in all different directions. Chris couldn’t tell if people were listening to him.
“Punch from Punch and Judy is a puppet who carries a slapstick. Punch throws his baby down the stairs, he beats his wife, he even beats a policeman. Punch pretends to be too simple and stupid to understand what he is doing, and this is how he gets what he wants.”
Christopher reached out to pet William, but the bear turned his head away.
“Punch is like Pooh. How? They are both toys, imaginary, and they’re both narcissists who always get what they want,” Chris said. “The one difference is that Pooh is innocent, whereas Punch is guilty. Pooh is authentic while Punch is a fraud. Pooh really doesn’t know what it is he’s doing. Punch knows exactly what he is doing.
“My father made his fortune writing children stories. He was a success at Punch, but he made history with Pooh. And you should all ask yourselves why. It’s not just a question that is significant for me. These stories were wildly popular all across the globe. Why?
“The truth is that my father didn’t particularly admire children. He thought that children were charming enough, the way that puppies or kittens might be charming, but they were not interesting to him. More to the point, he felt there was nothing truly good about children. Pooh, for instance, is lovable but not because his motives are noble. What makes Pooh admirable is that his motives are undisguised. Pooh isn’t good at covering his own tracks. He isn’t clever, or even competent, and that is his secret strength and charm.
“The way my father thought of Pooh, this is how de Gaulle thinks of you. The myth of your innocence is what is supporting you, and de Gaulle thinks you’ve just been lucky so far. You are children, and as such you are guileless. Too many of you think the same way he does.
“In one of my father’s Pooh stories, one about an expedition, I organize a search for a stick, maybe for Punch’s slapstick. In the story I claim the stick is the North Pole. I get all of my imaginary friends together, all the puppets and toys, and we set off through the Hundred Acre Wood looking for it, and along the way Pooh gets hungry. He wonders when we’ll have time to stop for a little smackerel of something. He stumbles into a gorse bush. And, what else happens? Many things, mostly small and unpleasant things. The piglet becomes quite concerned about being ambushed by Heffalumps, for example. The donkey complains that he’s forgotten to bring thistles to eat, and, oh yes, the important thing is that a little baby kangaroo falls into a stream and nearly drowns.
“And in the story it is this last calamity that inspires Pooh. Pooh manages to find the North Pole just at the moment when it’s needed most and he holds it across the stream so that the little kangaroo will drift up to it and be able to rescue himself. Pooh finds the North Pole, but he doesn’t realize what he’s found.
“This is how the Gaullists understand your story. This is how they think you have discovered power. They think it’s just been an accident. You found something that was momentarily useful to you, it happened to be power, but given how clumsy and how inept you are you won’t be able to hold on to it for long.
“Listen. I’m not Christopher Robin from the storybooks. I am Christopher Milne who is a veteran of the war against the fascists and Nazis. This bear isn’t Pooh from my father’s stories. This Pooh has fangs and claws.
“Punch and Pooh are both fictions. They’re both of them a kind of puppet and the only way a puppet can pull his own strings is by being just as clever and remorseless as he has to be.
“Paris is a Hundred Acre Wood,” Chris said. “We need to find the North Pole.”
When Christopher descended from the platform the crowd moved quickly to get out of the way. He started toward the exit and the crowd parted for him.
Gerrard caught up to Chris, but the boy didn’t seem to have anything useful to say. There was no help there. Chris had to decide what came next on his own, and he did. He turned and addressed the crowd following him.
“We are looking for the North Pole,” he said.
When Christopher stepped away from the platform and into the mud the students moved out of his way. He wanted to make the ground firm again and so he guided William between the rows and the crowd parted around them. A few of the students must’ve understood his English, a few must have known of his father’s stories, because people were falling in behind him and following him as he led them.
Christopher set off on an expotition from Charlety Stadium.
* * *
At first Gerrard felt disoriented and was glad to let Chris lead, but after a while he regretted this because Chris took a wrong turn somewhere and in his disorientation he must’ve lost track of time because in what seemed like a very short while they weren’t anywhere along Boulevard Jourdan but had arrived at Jardin du Luxembourg.
The bear pulled them to an apiary behind a white picket fence. First he’d stopped at the entrance, by the wrought-iron gates. He’d stood up on his hind legs and let out a roar that turned into a yawn. Christopher had abandoned any effort to control the bear, and just let William pull him this way and that, but everyone followed along, about two hundred students and workers, as Christopher was dragged down a wide path of mud between two neatly trimmed lawns and around the Fountain of the Observatory, and to a pavilion tucked behind tall bushes in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
The man-made beehives were constructed out of stained oak, designed for public display, and all of them stood by impotently as the bear smashed one after another. The ground was littered with green copper roofs from the wooden beehives, and William licked his paws. The bear ate wax and honey and ignored the bees swarming around him, but one crawled onto Gerrard’s collar, walked to the front of his neck, just above his collar and beneath his Adam’s apple, and impaled him with its stinger.
Christopher pulled on the bear’s chain, and Gerrard tried to help him. They both of them pulled as hard as they could. Gerrard’s neck and face began to sweat.
A student twirled his arms, spinning back and slipping into the grass.
A few more students helped them pull William away from the honey and eventually they managed to get back onto the mud path and set out in a new direction.
“Christopher, people are complaining that you did not say anything about bees before,” Gerrard said.
“Tell them,” Chris said. “Tell them that I apologize. Those were entirely the wrong sorts of bees.”
Gerrard translated for the crowd.
* * *
Eventually William brought them to the Eiffel Tower. Gerrard walked under the structure and looked up, craned his head back and examined the latticework, the iron beams and square platforms.
“I should have guessed,” Christopher said.
“How do you mean?” Gerrard asked.
“It’s the North Pole. Pretty obvious, don’t you think?” Christopher asked.
Gerrard looked up into the tower again, at the iron girders and rivets. The Eiffel Tower was a kind of clock. It was the kind of clock that broadcast time as well as measured it. The State broadcast television and radio signals and created time. If you were French you could tune in the Eiffel Tower, tune in the ORTF, to find out what that, what being French, meant.
Christopher asked if anyone had poster board and spray paint on hand, and was soon surrounded by a multicolored array of options.
“North Pole. Discovered by thousands with the help of a bear.” Christopher sprayed black paint on a rectangle of plywood. Christopher sat down on the cement and whistled to William. He leaned forward and whispered in the beast’s ear. Gerrard could just make it out.
“You’re some bear,” Christopher said. He ran his hand between William’s furry ears.
Gerrard sat down next to him and reached out for the bear, but William moved away. Gerrard stood up and took a step toward the bear, and William stood up o
n his hind legs and showed Gerrard his teeth.
“Do you know how to do a reality check?” Gerrard asked.
“What’s that?”
Gerrard told Christopher to check his watch and see if the hands ticked forward clockwise in the usual way. He told Christopher to try reading a newspaper or a book to see if the text held its meaning.
Standing under a TV antenna, under the monster, the smokestack, called the Eiffel Tower, Gerrard realized he’d fallen for a trap. He thought Christopher could fit the pieces together, but everything was even more fragmented. He’d meant to derail Christopher Robin, and to participate in the derailing of the city, but as the crowd of students mingled around him, some of them still carrying broken cobblestones, it seemed as though all Gerrard had managed to derail was himself.
Some students had musical instruments—bongo drums, horns, and what sounded like ukuleles—and they were playing “La Marseillaise” very fast. They were singing the lines in a jokey way, emphasizing the wrong words.
“Grab your weapons, citizens! Form your battalions! Let us march! May impure blood water our fields!”
They’d shifted everything around, history had been deconstructed, and now they stood at the North Pole and surveyed the blankness.
Gerrard turned away from the ukuleles and drums, the big black bear, and from the sound of the fountains in the Champ de Mars. All of it stopped. The moment froze, and then the smell of asphalt and moisture, the smell of the city and with it the feeling of being located in real space, evaporated. Everything was still.
Champ de Mars disappeared, the Seine evaporated, and the world was left flat and grey and unmarked. Beyond the foundation of the tower the ground was made of mud or clay. Gerrard, Christopher, and the students were still on the concrete foundation of the tower, iron girders interlocked overhead, but the rest of the built world disappeared.
Gerrard had thought the dreamtime was a land outside of history, outside of the realm of cause and effect, that it was the eternal space behind the contingent space of everyday life, but the dream was just what was broadcast from the tower. It wasn’t eternal but was, in fact, exactly the contingent everyday life everyone wanted to wake up from. There was a black light in the Eiffel Tower, and this light kept everyone asleep, but Christopher Robin and the students had finally extinguished that black light.
Daniel Cohn-Bendit approached them. He moved slowly, trembling as he stepped past William. Cohn-Bendit had an electrically amplified bullhorn in his hands, and he held it out to Christopher.
“We would like it if you would explain what is happening,” he said to Christopher. Christopher just shrugged.
Gerrard got down on his hands and knees. The Earth was made of grey clay, but the moon was out and the lights in the Eiffel Tower were still getting electricity from somewhere. Christopher took the bullhorn.
Gerrard looked out at the crowd. He looked over their heads at the stars. The sky was a façade.
Christopher Robin let out a breath, a small whistle. “This is the North Pole,” he said. “And I am going to throw a party here.” Christopher hesitated. “It’s to be a special sort of party, a party to celebrate what you did when you did what you did to occupy the factories, what you did when you did what you did to occupy your lives.”
Christopher let go of the button on the bullhorn and turned to look at Gerrard. “Is that right?” he asked.
Gerrard didn’t answer, because that was the moment when he spotted Natalie in the crowd. At first Gerrard wasn’t sure it was her; he wasn’t sure he’d seen anyone at all. Christopher called out for volunteers who might want to loot the tower for items that would be useful for a tea party, and Natalie stepped forward.
“Where did it go?” she asked them.
“Where did what go?” Christopher asked.
“Paris,” she said.
Back at the hotel Abby opened the hotel casement window, swinging the left side in and then sitting at the mahogany table and enjoying the view of street lamps and wet cobblestones below. The city was reflected in the leaded glass panels in a fractured way, appearing on the panels between the brass frames. Daniel had adopted half a baguette as his new favorite toy and was wandering from room to room with it, apparently telling the loaf a story about big black bears and wooden-topped men who lived inside the television set. Daniel lost his top right incisor that morning, but there was no talk of a tooth fairy. Such compensation hardly seemed necessary. The loss of his tooth, normally the kind of traumatic event that would’ve sent Daniel into one of his fits, was simply noted by a few recitations of the Woodentops opening theme, and then forgotten. The fantasy that Paris had become was manna for Daniel. The boy’s smile was a facial fixture now.
“Mama, when will Papa be back?” Daniel asked.
“He didn’t say, Daniel.”
“I was hoping he would read me a story, perhaps one of Grandfather’s, or maybe a French story. A fairytale,” Daniel said.
“I’ll read to you, darling. In fact, we should draw you a bath now. It’s nearly time for bed.”
Daniel put his loaf of bread on the table and went to the bath and turned on the faucet there. She was certain that Daniel seemed better in Paris than he’d ever been in Dartmouth. It was unexpected, as he was a child who required his routine to be rigidly maintained. In fact, on top of the rest of the strangeness that had come along with his birth, the little anomalies that bothered Christopher so much, the rituals Daniel engendered, and all the other disturbances that had culminated in this trip to Paris, her son’s new coherence was unsettling in itself.
“Daniel? Are you in the bath already?” she asked the now closed door.
Abby stood up from the dark wood table and went to prepare tea. The French tea she’d found was a loose mix of assam and little bits of flowers and lavender, but it had a nice kick. When the electric kettle sounded, however, Abby found that adding hot water to the mix produced something like mud in her teacup.
She wanted to check on him, not because she’d heard anything, not because he needed help, but because she needed him, needed his reassurance.
“I think I’m the wrong Daniel,” he said through the door.
“Are you all right, dear?” she asked. She’d left her teacup on the table by the window and pressed her ear to the bathroom. When she pulled away from it, she found on the right side of her face, from her ear to her chin, a crescent-shaped mud stain. The mud had to have come from somewhere, but when she looked at the door it appeared clean. She reached out to it, touched the frame, and her fingers sank into what should have been hard wood or plaster.
“I think I’m the wrong Daniel Milne. There might be more than one, mightn’t there?”
“Daniel?” She put her ear to the door again, not minding the invisible dirt there, and while she listened for her son, she glanced back toward the window and noticed that the streetlight had gone out. In fact, from where she was standing it looked as though all of Paris had grown dark.
Daniel opened the bathroom door, pulling it into the bathroom so Abby almost stumbled forward, and then stepping out with dripping hair and wet pajamas. He had not remembered to dry himself with a towel, and water was dripping onto the wood floor.
“If I were different, if I were the wrong Daniel, how would you know?” he asked.
She reached past him and took a towel from the back of the bathroom door, but while it was neatly folded it was covered in mud.
“Daniel, you should hold my hand now,” Abby said.
“Why is that?”
“Just take my hand,” she said. But as Daniel, perhaps the right Daniel but perhaps not, reached for her, the light inside the hotel room blinked out and they were in the dark. Abby reached for her son and found mud.
Wherever Abby placed her hand she touched mud and even this seemed insubstantial. She tried again, kneeling in the dark, and found wet dirt under her fingers, a loam that sifted easily and got caught beneath her fingernails. This was no more substantial than t
he simple mud she’d been sinking in before, but there was a difference.
“Is this the wrong mud?” Daniel asked.
He was somewhere nearby, but in the dark Abby was wary of naming possibilities. She was not even particularly confident that they were still in their hotel room.
In fact, they were not in their hotel room any longer but were standing at the edge. The edge of precisely what was as yet unclear, but Abby could see where the landscape ended and the horizon began. But now her eyes were adjusting, and perhaps there was some light after all. Not in the sky, but somewhere behind her, while in front of her there was a screen or a matte painting. Only instead of a sunset or a French promenade the screen displayed nothing but a light brown film.
“Daniel?” She called out for her son and then found him standing next to her. He took her by the hand and they turned to look at the source of the light.
The Eiffel Tower was a beacon. Abby, Daniel, and all the other people left behind—the butcher and his lover, policemen in kepis, Raoul and the girls from Nanterre, hundreds of anonymous people—stood huddled at the edge of the world. They were all facing the centre, turned toward the Eiffel Tower, and all of them were hoping it would hold together.
* * *
The network of lattices in the Eiffel Tower cast shadows on the steps in front of Natalie, but when she looked around she couldn’t tell where the light was coming from. Paris was pitch-black; the world had been erased.
She was still carrying her book with her but it was of little solace now because she wasn’t quite sure where the book ended and she began. It seemed to her that she herself might be something that had been derailed, a quote or a character from somewhere else. She was someone who had been derailed.
She’d volunteered to loot the Eiffel Tower. She was supposed to bring back wine, to help carry down chairs and round dining tables, but once she started up she stepped away from the others. She hoped to see something more, find something that was still out there in some real part of the city, if she climbed to the top.
Billy Moon : A Transcendent Novel Reimagining the Life of Christopher Robin Milne (9781429948074) Page 18
