The Dreamers

by Gilbert Adair

  Nothing could detain them any longer, travellers as they were across a Lethe as polluted as any other river.

  Whether dead or merely asleep, they were not to be awakened by any crude, external alarms, not by any of the sirens, explosions, cries, screams, cheers, bowling-alley thumps, screeching tyres, whistles and songs which were none the less drawing closer and closer to them. As in a dream, as in a snowdrift, as in an avalanche of cocaine, the longueurs of eternity had already blanketed each of the occupants of this first-floor flat near the place de l’Odéon.

  Then suddenly, like Peter Pan, the street flew in through the window.

  A small paving stone, hurled up from underneath, came crashing into the bedroom. It sprayed the bed with fragments of glass. It landed on the record-player. It shattered the Trenet record.

  They were not dead.

  Through the star-shaped gash in the window bobbed a cold and misty sun. Noise, light and air transformed the room, the noise earsplitting, the light blinding, the air intoxicating.

  They opened their eyes. With the gait of astronauts inside an airtight chamber, they unsteadily pulled themselves to their feet. In slow motion they advanced towards the window, drawn to it as though about to be sucked out into space, one foot floating above the floor on which the other would alight with a muffled tread. Théo slipped. Isabelle overtook him. Matthew stumbled into the Empire table lamp. Its bulb exploded without making a sound.

  They reached the window. Drawing the curtains apart, Théo opened it and stared down into the street. This, the full length of the narrow, meandering thoroughfare, is what he saw:

  To the left, where it led into the place de l’Odéon, amid a débris of rocks, paving stones and lopped-off branches of trees, was a phalanx of helmeted CRS officers, advancing slowly, warily, like a Roman legion. Their leather jackboots crunched on the rubble beneath their heels. In their black-gloved hands were truncheons and riot-guns and metal shields interlocking as in one of those children’s puzzles which comprise sixteen little squares but only fifteen movable little tiles. As they marshalled their forces, any gap left by one of them was immediately filled up by another and the metal shields locked into place as before.

  Halfway along the street a car had been overturned and lay on its back as trustfully as a baby waiting to be changed. Ribbed, waffle-patterned iron gratings, like the sections of a Meccano set, had been ripped from the pavement and piled on top of it.

  To the right, spilling on to the pavements, flowed a river, a tidal wave, of youthful humanity, arms linked, fists raised in the air, led by an adolescent Pasionaria, a Joan of Arc in a duffel coat, bearing aloft an enormous red flag which fluttered and danced in the breeze.

  These young people were chanting as they marched, shamelessly playing to the gallery – which is to say, to the householders who had come on to their balconies and who, after a moment of surprise, of hesitation, started to join in, so that it seemed as though it was the street itself had at last found its voice. And what it was singing was the most beautiful, most moving, popular song in the world.

  Debout les damnés de la terre!

  Debout les forçats de la faim!

  La raison tonne en sa cratère

  C’est l’éruption de la faim!

  Du passé faisons table rase

  Foule esclave, debout, debout!

  Le monde va changer de base

  Nous ne sommes rien, soyons tout!

  C’est la lutte finale

  Groupons-nous et demain

  L’Internationale

  Sera le genre humain!

  Théo, Isabelle and Matthew were as baffled by the bizarre spectacle that met their eyes as Sarah Bernhardt, who, when her coachman took an unaccustomed route from her hôtel particulier to the Comédie-Française, is said to have exclaimed on passing the church of the Madeleine, ‘What on earth is a Greek temple doing in the middle of Paris?’

  Even if any of them had actually heard the rumour, the Babel, which had progressively supplemented the Trenet record as an accompaniment to the game, it would have seemed to them no less natural than the background music to a film, whose provenance one never thinks to question. What was their amazement, then, to discover that this half-heeded, almost subliminal reverberation was the soundtrack of a whole other film, one of which they were mere spectators, tenuously present, hardly there at all.

  *

  It was Théo who roused himself first. ‘I’m going down,’ he said.

  He turned away from the balcony and went into the bathroom to sprinkle his face with cold water. Matthew and Isabelle followed. For the moment no one said a word. They went about their toilet quickly, expeditiously. With his back to the others Matthew scrubbed the occult markings from his face and torso. The excrement, which had dried up and was as hard as mud, flaked off into the wash basin. Then, his San Diego upbringing reasserting itself, he stepped into the tub, unclipped its shower appliance and showered himself all over. Neither of the others did.

  They gathered up the clothes that were still heaped on the hallway linoleum, drew on underwear, shirts, jeans, socks and shoes and, still without a single word having been exchanged, ran downstairs into the street.

  It had rained all day. Now that the sun had come out, Paris was hanging up to dry. The pavements, the façades of the houses, the raincoats of the CRS glimmered wetly. The overturned car was a red Citroën whose doors had been wrenched off to serve as chain mail. Its windscreen was smashed, its boot caved in. The youthful demonstrators who had been marching to the Internationale squatted behind it in their blue jeans, their scarlet foulards and their two or three layers of pullovers.

  The cafés had closed, and chairs and tables had been piled up any old how. Holding glasses of lager or cups of coffee in their hands, their clientele peered through plate-glass windows. Some of them even continued calmly reading their newspapers, reading about just the kind of disturbance that was taking place in the street outside, a few yards away, like those music lovers at the opera who consult the score by the light of a pocket lamp.

  In one café a young North African with a gap-toothed smile and a scarred right cheek brutally jerked a pinball machine from side to side. Another man, a native Frenchman, leaning across the bar counter, chatted to the barman who, dishcloth in hand, was rinsing and drying one empty glass after the next with a graceful switch of his wrist. Behind him a coffee percolator was making a louder noise than any explosive.

  It was an instant of suspended activity, as at the filming of a battle scene when actors, crew, cameraman and extras await the director’s cry of Action!

  The din, even so, was appalling. In addition to the cries, whistles and loudspeakers could be heard a whine emitted by the Citroën’s klaxon: it had got wedged in by a fan-shaped slice of iron grating. And discernible, too, above all the noise, was a thin, reedy, almost inaudible strain of silence, the silence of suspense, of anticipation, the rumbling silence of the circus drum roll that precedes a perilous feat of acrobatics.

  During this moment of respite Théo, Isabelle and Matthew saw everything as though in stereoscopic detail: the CRS with their death’s-head gas masks, the litter of paving stones, the crammed cafés, the smoke unfurling from the Citroën’s gouged-out windscreen, the householders on their balconies, the head of a child visible through a gap in the balustrade, the demonstrators fanning out in every direction, the red flag borne aloft by the duffel-coated Pasionaria. And the graffiti. For, here, the walls had mouths, not ears.

  LES MURS ONT LA PAROLE

  SOUS LES PAVES LA PLAGE

  IL EST INTERDIT D’INTERDIRE

  PRENEZ VOS DESIRS POUR LA REALITE

  LA SOCIETE EST UNE FLEUR CARNIVORE

  ETUDIANTS OUVRIERS MEME COMBAT

  COURS, CAMARADE, LE VIEUX MONDE EST DERRIERE TOI

  LIBEREZ L’EXPRESSION

  L’IMAGINATION AU POUVOIR

  Then the director cried Action!

  The CRS started to advance. Their truncheons were as plia
nt in the air as though underwater. The Roman legion was no more. It was every man for himself. Singly or in pairs, gas masks investing them with a Martian otherness, they moved forward, each at his own speed, deflecting with their shields the stones, branches, mudguards and water bombs pelting them from the other side of the Citroën.

  At first, briefly, the demonstrators succeeded in standing their ground. A few daredevils among them raised diehard fists. They tried to reprise the chorus of the Internationale, but it petered out in a desultory exchange of cries and jeers. Then, when what little ammunition they had about them was depleted, they fought a rearguard action with whatever else was at hand, stubbing their feet on the street’s fissured, treacherously irregular paving and falling down hard on their knees and ankles.

  The CRS hurled tear-gas canisters which would land with the thud of a package through the letter-box. After an instant of uncertainty, when no one knew for sure whether they would prove to be operative, there arose out of them small, cone-shaped cyclones of orange smoke. These swelled to monstrous proportions, towering over demonstrators and CRS alike with the uncontainable energy of a genie released from a lamp.

  The householders beat a retreat from their balconies, slamming shutters and windows behind them. One after the other, with the gesture of knights-errant snapping shut their metal visors before joining battle, the demonstrators drew foulards up over their mouths and noses. Then they set to running, pursued by the forces of order.

  A young black man was cornered by two of the CRS in the doorway of a café. His eyes closed, squeezed tight, his fingers protectively splayed over his short, crimped hair, he collapsed on to the pavement under the blows that were methodically descending on him. From inside the packed café nothing could be seen but truncheons rising and falling, regular as clockwork. Flattening their noses against the glass, those clients who were positioned nearest the window peered downwards in a vain attempt to make out who it might be on the receiving end.

  Further off, a young woman in a trenchcoat, very photogenic, very Garbo, long auburn hair tucked under a floppy hat of the same material as her coat, was being chased across the street. She reached an open ground-floor window, passed it, doubled back. At first beneath the terrified gaze of the elderly couple who were framed in this window, then with their active assistance, she plunged headlong over the sill into their flat. Though the window was instantly locked behind her, a policeman’s truncheon nonchalantly smashed it in.

  Now, eyes streaming from tear gas, the demonstrators darted here and there, two steps forward, one to the left or right, the knight’s move in chess, swerving to pick up a stray paving stone and hurl it back over their shoulders, teasing, taunting, changing tack, skidding, falling, carrying the wounded out of the firing range. Meanwhile, diagonally sweeping the chessboard like caped and mitred bishops, the CRS relentlessly drove them on, down the congested street and towards the place de l’Odéon.

  It was at the corner of the street that Matthew, separated from Théo and Isabelle in the crowd, tumbled over a semi-conscious young man whose tenebrously handsome features were striped with blood like those of the Kennedy son in Isabelle’s photograph. He had lost control of his bladder. A triangular stain was spreading around the crotch of his jeans and down the seam of his left leg.

  Confronted with this derelict piece of flotsam, Matthew found himself so moved that his eyes overflowed their banks. An image flashed before them, the image of the ravishing monster he had seen crossing the street in front of the National Gallery. As then, he was impressed by the nobility of this young man, the nobility of his blood-streaked face, his twitching eyes, his foulard, his stained jeans.

  Théo’s telephone call had awakened him prematurely from his dream. This time, however, it was no dream. He would perform the miracle. He would raise the dead.

  He knelt beside the young man, who, mortified by his incontinence, clumsily tried to screen the stain with a limp hand. But Matthew was pragmatic, businesslike. Pulling the young man’s arm from his crotch, he placed it over his own shoulders and propped him up against the wall.

  ‘Can you hear me?’ Matthew whispered in his ear.

  The young man said nothing.

  Matthew raised his voice. ‘Are you able to walk?’ he asked. ‘I bet you can if you try, if you let me bear your weight. I’ll take you on my shoulders.’

  But, as soon as he was standing, the young man’s legs collapsed under him and he slid back down on to the pavement.

  ‘Give it all you’ve got. You can do it. That’s good, that’s very good.’

  Matthew contrived at last to get him into an upright position; and with the young man’s hands clasped about his neck, his feet dragging behind him, he started hauling him out of range of the CRS.

  He was stopped almost at once by a bearded man in his late thirties. His black leather jacket, beige cotton slacks, open-necked sports shirt and rimless dark glasses identified him as a plain-clothes policeman. His complexion was spotty and one imagined him badly shaved, as it were, beneath his goatee.

  Dangling on his shirt front was a camera. He had been photographing the faces of ‘ringleaders’.

  He shouldered Matthew aside so violently that the blood-streaked young man slithered back down the wall like a cartoon character flattened by a steamroller.

  ‘What the fuck are you up to?’ the plain-clothes policeman spat at Matthew.

  ‘Me? I –’

  ‘If you don’t want to join pisspot here in the jug, you better fuck off! Now!’

  ‘But, monsieur, you can see for yourself, he’s really hurt. He needs treatment.’

  The policeman seized Matthew by the lapels of his jerkin.

  ‘Well, well. You’re not French, are you? What do you call that accent?’ he muttered, clamping him by his neck. ‘Deutsch? English? Engleesh?’ he said, stressing the adjective to make himself better understood.

  ‘I’m American.’

  ‘American? Well, congratulations, my friend, my Yankee friend.’ He gave Matthew a kick on the ankle with his shoe’s metal toecap. ‘You just got yourself deported. De-port-ed. Capito?’

  Matthew wriggled in his grasp. The policeman’s nut-brown fingernails gave him goose-pimples. His breath smelt of Gauloise cigarettes.

  It was then that Théo magically appeared in front of them. There was a paving stone in his hand. The policeman had no more than a second or two to register his presence before Théo shoved the stone hard into his face. The blow felled him. With a groan he clutched at his nose, blood spurting out of both nostrils at once, his dark glasses dangling from one ear like loose bunting.

  Théo pulled Matthew away.

  ‘What about him?’ Matthew asked of the young man, who was still lying on the wet pavement. ‘Shouldn’t we –’

  ‘What are you, nuts?’

  Rejoining an anxious Isabelle, they followed the crowd of demonstrators, who were being swept into the carrefour de l’Odéon like a torrent plunging into the sea.

  The carrefour was a wasteland. The cars overturned, the buses set alight, the cafés wrecked, the restaurants looted, the last of the wounded limping down side-streets – everything brought home to them the fact that the encounter they had just witnessed had been a skirmish by comparison with the battle of which this scene represented the aftermath.

  In the middle of the square a barricade had been constructed. To build it the plane trees which had lined the boulevard Saint-Germain for centuries had been chopped down in a couple of hours. The battle over, lost and won, this barricade straddled the deserted street, undefended, good for nothing but a bonfire.

  An old man, wearing a navy blue beret and a black patch over one eye, sheltered in the entrance to the Danton cinema. Fragments of broken glass creaking like snow beneath his shoes, he strained to take it all in. Tears were welling in his good eye. To no one in particular he cried, ‘The scoundrels! The scoundrels! These trees were part of Paris’s history. It’s history that’s been destroyed!’ He hadn’t ye
t understood that history had also been made; that history is made, precisely, by chopping down trees as an omelette is made by breaking eggs.

  Near the metro entrance was a Morris column on top of which, like King Kong, that Quasimodo of the Empire State Building, squatted a pot-bellied young man wearing a pale green windcheater. After several attempts to stand up straight, when he would shakily position himself on an upright footing before dropping back on all fours, he managed at last to retain his balance. As he surveyed the wreckage, one expected him to beat his breast in triumph.

  Following their own instincts, Théo, Isabelle and Matthew raced along the south pavement of the carrefour, past the Danton cinema, past the bouche du métro, past the Morris column, into the rue Racine. There, the gates of the Ecole de Médecine stood open. Its courtyard was filled with demonstrators who had taken cover like refugees huddled inside the compound of an embassy. Its walls were plastered with mimeographed posters announcing committees and meetings and assemblies; plastered, too, with manifestos, ultimatums and stencilled, scurrilous lampoons of Marcellin, the Minister of the Interior, Grimaud, the Prefect of Police, and de Gaulle.

  Borne onwards by the crush, the three friends entered the building.

  The atmosphere inside was wayward and fantastical. Medical students scarcely out of their teens strolled along the corridors wearing surgeons’ masks to shield them from a tear-gas attack. Above the swing door to the operating theatre some scallywag had affixed a skull and crossbones – not a flag, but a real skull and two real bones. In the basement, in the school’s morgue, a half-dozen naked cadavers of frozen, bone-hard flesh were laid out on gleaming trolleys.

  In that cold white chamber, these statues of death, these chipped and dusty plaster-casts of death, exposed to obscene commentaries and unflinching stares, would have appeared dead even to the dead. They were riddled with death, as a dying man may be riddled with cancer. Not even Christ could have revived them.