Liberty's Fire

by Lydia Syson

  ‘How can I leave Paris when I don’t know if Zéphyrine is dead or alive?’

  ‘You have to. Because I lied. I know. I know what’s happened.’

  Anatole stopped trying to push past him. Jules couldn’t quite look at him. Lying now was the only way. Hadn’t it been a kind of lie already, his failure to tell Anatole that the authorities already had Zéphyrine’s photograph, that they would be looking for her now, if she wasn’t dead already? It was time to go one step further. He coughed. He only had seconds left. He had to be convincing.

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you before. I knew how much it would upset you.’

  ‘Tell me what? For God’s sake. Tell me.’

  A whistle shrieked.

  ‘The day after you left, the morning after Montmartre had fallen, Zéphyrine came looking for you,’ said Jules.

  That much was true. The sudden joy on Anatole’s face was agonising.

  ‘She did come! Why didn’t you say? I knew she would come!’

  ‘She came because she wanted to make sure you weren’t at the theatre. She had orders, you see. She had orders to burn down both the theatres by the river. They chose her because she knew the lie of the land better than anyone else. Zéphyrine was on her way to the Lyrique. I couldn’t bear to tell you before. I wasn’t even sure you would believe me. Zéphyrine was a pétroleuse, you see. She destroyed your theatre. And soon afterwards they caught her and shot her dead.’

  The train began to move.

  33.

  27th May

  Saturday. All through the night they slowly jolted through darkness, and a barely perceptible trickle of rice fell from the window to lie beside the track. Jules was methodical, releasing handful after handful of the dusty grains, while Anatole kept watch for ticket inspectors, or worse. Neither of them mentioned Zéphyrine again, but Jules quickly became haunted by the idea that Anatole might do something stupid, something operatic. He thought of all those stage lovers united in death. You couldn’t see slaughter on the scale Jules had witnessed and have any faith in that. He prepared himself to act at the slightest warning sign from Anatole.

  At Troyes the train suddenly filled with brocade and weaponry, and Anatole clambered into the trunk just in time. For several minutes, feet marched up and down the corridor, and they heard doors sliding open and shut. Then it was their turn for the compartment to be invaded.

  Jules hated men like these, with their intrusive questions, their suspicious eyes. But he put on a brilliant act. He was the befuddled American tourist, too foolish to get out of Paris at the right time – it had all seemed an adventure, at first! – light-headed with relief that the city had been saved by the proper authorities. Now he was looking forward to joining his more sensible compatriots to recover on the shores of Lake Geneva. Just the thing after a fright like that. No, he agreed, Paris was not a pretty sight. And oh yes, he nodded, he was also sure that the city would soon be cleaned up, the boulevards blazing with light again, and the Americans back to do their shopping.

  Sickened, Anatole listened, counting the seconds till the men left. When the door finally shut, he heard Jules sigh, long and deeply, and Anatole whispered his thanks like a prayer.

  Marie sat in the armchair while Emile slept. From time to time she got up, lit a lamp and held feathers under his nose, to convince herself he was still breathing. There were lines in Emile’s face she never expected to see, deep grooves round his mouth, and on his forehead. She hadn’t thought a young man could change so much, in so short a time. It made her want to protect him. She never wanted to leave the room again, she felt. She would have been happy to stay within those four walls for the rest of her life, just her and Emile, nobody else ever again, if that were possible.

  At last he woke. Marie jumped up, and began to fuss.

  ‘What can I get you? Are you thirsty? What would you like me to do for you?’ she said, trying to plump his pillow, desperate to make him comfortable, and also to make him talk. The funny thing was that once he started, there was almost no shushing him. Marie quickly gave up telling him everything would be fine, and her mouth hung open.

  ‘We thought it would be easy when we first arrived. You should have seen how we marched straight through Passy – honestly, nobody even had to fire, though I can tell you I was ready to. We knew exactly how desperate – and how ruthless – the Communards were. We knew quite well they’d stop at nothing. Hadn’t they always said they’d rather see Paris fall than give her up? Oh we knew exactly what we were dealing with. Animals. They kept telling us that. They’d been telling us for weeks.’

  ‘And …?’

  ‘Well, it was extraordinary at first. Do you know, for all the talk of mines and counter-attacks, all the rumours – there was no resistance at all? We couldn’t believe it. We laughed. Laughed! And you should have seen the crowds. It was the women I had to fight off, not the Communards. The women were all over us!’

  Emile wiped at his eyes. Eyes are often watery when you first wake up, Marie told herself, and gave him her handkerchief.

  ‘I’m not surprised … the relief they must have felt!’ she said. But Emile’s face had already darkened.

  Marie encouraged him. ‘So you came on Monday? Doesn’t Monday seem years ago? I didn’t dare go out, at first, and then, when I got your note, I didn’t want to in case …’ She squeezed his hand, and then couldn’t stop herself from hugging him again. She wondered what he would say about Zéphyrine, and how she should tell him. ‘I’d been waiting so long. I really had begun to think I’d never hear from you again. I didn’t even know if they had sent you back yet from the prisoner-of-war camp.’

  Later, she might tell him of her efforts to reach him, of what she had suffered in Rigault’s office. But that could wait, she decided. Despite his reluctance to take the role, she really did want to give him a chance to be the hero, the saviour of Paris.

  ‘I did write then, but God knows what happened to that letter. They told us nothing could get through to Paris. I hoped they were wrong.’

  ‘Well, never mind … it’s over now. You’re here. We’re together, at last.’

  Emile tried to make the effort Marie needed. ‘Yes, of course …’ he began to say. ‘That’s the most important thing —’

  But he couldn’t do it. An unwanted vibrato had entered his voice: he was struggling to speak. Avoiding his eyes, Marie stared instead at the Adam’s apple in his throat, frantically rising and falling and rising again in his effort to suppress his own sobs. Marie’s skin iced over, and she began to breathe more quickly. She couldn’t bear to know, but she couldn’t wait any longer in ignorance.

  ‘Tell me. Tell me what you’ve done.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  His tears began to flow quite openly down now; he made no effort to wipe them away. His face had frozen into the grimace of a gargoyle, with stretched lips and bulging eyes, as if every part of his body was straining to contain the awfulness inside.

  ‘Tell me. And afterwards I will tell you what I have done. And then you’ll see. Your little sister is in no position to judge.’

  It should have been no consolation. Two wrongs don’t make a right. But something in Marie’s grim expression seemed to release Emile’s final words. And confession felt good.

  ‘They told us we were fighting godless savages. They told us the workers hated us. They told us they were foreign infiltrators, not true French patriots. They told us we were fighting the enemies of the nation. They told us the Communards were crazed monsters, evil, inhuman … that the women were all —’ he whispered the words as if saying them more quietly might somehow protect Marie — ‘bitches and harpies and whores.’

  ‘I know,’ muttered Marie, who had from time to time told herself the same.

  ‘We had a duty to restore public order. Of course we had to do our duty. That’s what we kept telling ourselves.’

  ‘You were right. It was your duty.’

  ‘But then they brought them in. Lined them up.
We saw them all … There were hundreds of them.’

  ‘Arsonists and pétroleuses? Criminals?’

  ‘No, no … I don’t think they were … These were mothers with babies at their breasts, young boys, orphans, old men. National Guardsmen too of course. But just ordinary people, lots of them. Some were poor, some maybe getting by, not doing so badly, you know. Not so different from us, perhaps, if we’d been a bit less lucky. And now what will they do with them? What will they do with all the …?’

  He stopped. The thought was unspeakable. Marie put a hand on his, but he snatched it away, as if he didn’t deserve her sympathy.

  ‘I thought there would be court martials to find out the truth. I thought they would check, at least make sure they had the right people. I knew they couldn’t all be guilty. Anyone could see that. How could they possibly all be guilty?’

  ‘But surely they had a plan? The army … The government? They must have known what they were doing?’ Marie had to persuade herself. ‘They were looking for the ringleaders, weren’t they?’ That was what Anatole had told her. They would only execute the ringleaders.

  ‘No, no, Marie, you don’t understand. They wanted everyone. We didn’t know what we were dealing with until it was too late. We didn’t know there would be so many. That they would just keep on coming, and coming, and coming.’

  Hatred. Vengeance.

  ‘And then …’ His voice faltered again, and Marie closed her eyes. ‘They gave us the order to fire, and we had to obey.’

  Anatole’s head lay just above the train’s thundering wheels. When it speeded up, the rhythm made him think of machine guns. When it slowed, he heard crackling flames. Anatole longed for silence. It was so long since there had been silence. He needed to be still to understand. All the power turning and sliding and pounding beneath him made him feel more powerless than ever. He was carried away from Paris despite himself. There was nothing he could do about Zéphyrine. At four in the morning, the train began to slow, long before it was near a station, and both Anatole and Jules almost lost their nerve.

  ‘Chaumont! Chaumont! We will stop at Chaumont for fifteen minutes.’

  The guard walked down the corridor shouting the announcement. Then the train fell silent, and they waited.

  Anatole could just twist round enough to rap on the wooden strut, like a rib over his back. ‘What is it? Why aren’t we moving? What’s taking so long?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ muttered Jules, getting stiffly to his feet.

  Through a crack in the blind, he saw men getting on and off the train. Jules wasn’t sure if he was imagining the click of rifles being cocked. One bolt, two. Noise. Noise. How many more times did they have to go through this? He didn’t think he could stand it again. And at last the train began to move again.

  Anatole’s eyelids kept sliding shut. Each time he felt himself floating and falling, he thought of death, and twitched his eyes back open. His portion of air might not last him. He mustn’t breathe it in too fast. He’d almost been buried alive once. He couldn’t suffocate now. From time to time, Jules reached a hand under the banquette and opened the lid a fraction, to let in the air and reassure him that they were nearly there.

  Just as it was getting light, they pulled into another station, and it felt like a miracle. Jules slid back the window and put his head into the steam, wanting to be absolutely sure it was safe for Anatole to emerge. From the next carriage, a nun leapt onto the platform. ‘Vive la Commune!’ came her triumphant cry, as she threw back her headdress.

  There was nothing anyone could do. Perhaps nothing anyone here wanted to do. Anatole and Jules were safely in Switzerland, and like this Communarde, finally out of reach of arrest.

  Anatole was stiff and shivering when Jules helped him out of the trunk: he leaned on his friend like an old man. They embraced each other, and then they wept. Anatole screwed up his eyes against the sun, and looked at the wonder of a blue sky and white clouds, and gulped down all the sweet air he could, before heaving himself back onto the train to continue the journey to Geneva. Jules opened the blind.

  For some time they sat opposite each other in silence. Anatole stared at the carriage floor between his feet and thought of Zéphyrine’s naked body, golden under the flickering candlelight of her draughty attic, but pale next to his own. He remembered how they had tangled their limbs together, and how it had felt to love her entirely, skin to skin. All that burning energy. It couldn’t simply be gone, as easily as that, like a snuffed-out flame. He couldn’t believe it.

  ‘Jules?’ he said at last.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you think it’s not true then? I always imagined … Don’t they always say … that people know, somehow, you know, when someone you love has died? That you can feel it.’

  Jules looked out of the window. The pastures were very green, and clean, and normal. There were daisies and brown cows in them, and hay barns and sometimes orchards.

  ‘I – I don’t know.’

  Anatole persisted. ‘I know it sounds ridiculous … but I just don’t feel that Zéphyrine can be dead. It’s not that I don’t believe you. I’m not accusing you of anything of course. But could you tell me again, just tell me exactly how you know, how you can be so certain?’

  Jules couldn’t do it again. His lips began to twitch; his whole face seemed almost to disintegrate.

  ‘Anatole, I’m sorry. I can’t. I can’t be certain. I don’t know where Zéphyrine is, or what has happened to her. But I couldn’t let you go back, not when we were so close to getting out of Paris, so close to freedom. I couldn’t let you risk your life again when there was so little hope that it would do any good. And that’s why I lied to you. Forgive me. Please.’

  Anatole nodded, trying to take it in. Jules took both his hands, and looked straight at him, determined that Anatole would believe him this time. ‘When we get to Geneva, we will start trying to find out. I’ll help you. There will be a way. Someone must know. Maybe Marie can help us too. We won’t give up. We’ll do it together.’

  ‘Yes, and of course I’ve got my photograph of Zéphyrine, thank God. Perhaps that will help our search.’

  Jules steeled himself. Better to get this over with, he decided.

  ‘Anatole. I’m so sorry. They searched our apartment. They’ve taken the photograph.’

  The rain came back, more relentless than before. When it finally stopped, the flat plain around the prison was a sea of mud. Journalists came to stare. Their carriages sank up to their axles as they approached, and they were greeted by soldiers booted to the thigh in mud. Just outside the walls of the barrack yard, a group of disused tents lay collapsed in the mud, as if in surrender.

  Cannon pointed into the yard, through rough holes knocked into the walls, either side of a closely guarded gate. Artillerymen stood behind them at all times, prepared for mutiny. Inside the yard, thousands of men were crammed into vast open sheds, a line of guards in front of each, and thousands more lay on sodden straw in the open, blue with cold and misery. The only building there housed the interrogation room, and above that, the women and children.

  At least Zéphyrine was under shelter now. The shoes Marie had given her so carefully – her strongest shoes – had just about held together through the long march, but caked in ooze they refused to dry. There wasn’t room here to lie down, and barely enough to sit but Zéphyrine preferred to stand. She wanted to be upright. They had been ordered to their knees so many times on the journey here – before every church they passed, and in front of the palace at Versailles, the cry ‘À genoux! À genoux!’ was always repeated. Anyway, even with the layer of straw, the room’s only furniture, the closer you were to the floorboards, the harder it was to ignore the low rumbling of questioning taking place, hour after hour, immediately below. But whether your hands were clamped over your ears, or a borrowed shawl covered your head, you couldn’t help but hear the sound of picks and shovels outside, grunts and sighs of effort and despair, followed by the now-familiar
volleys of shots.

  All day the soldiers tramped down and up the bare board stairs. At night they arrived too, with lanterns swinging and always a list in their hands. When their heads appeared, the whole room seemed to catch its breath at once. Zéphyrine felt a fluttering ripple pass through her: the barely perceptible movement of several hundred heads, shifting at just the same time, in hope or in terror.

  ‘I wish they would say my name,’ murmured the schoolteacher eventually.

  Zéphyrine shifted her weight, and rubbed the front of one calf against the back of another. A crust of mud crumbled onto the floor and disintegrated into powder. She shook her head. She knew that she wasn’t ready to die without knowing what she was accused of, without a fight, without a trial. And if they said her name now, she could never find out where Anatole was. Even now he might be sprawled somewhere in the mud outside, just a short distance away. If they said her name now, she might never be able to find Rose’s family, and thank them for all they had done for her, and tell them how brave Rose was when she died. If they said her name now, she would never see her own family again, never put fresh flowers on her grandparents’ grave. Until they said her name, there was a chance. Until then, they could not destroy her.

  34.

  28th May

  Seventy-two days. That was how long it lasted. And when on Sunday the curtain fell on the Commune, everything was left on show.

  Victors and reporters came out to applaud and to condemn, holding handkerchiefs before their faces and treading carefully over pavements white-powdered with lime. Bodies were still warm in the cemetery of Père Lachaise when they arrived to inspect the battle scene, the boot-trampled flowers, funeral wreaths tattered to shreds, and sepulchres cracked open by shells. A journalist recorded fingerprints smeared in blood on a white marble slab, and imagined some wounded creature briefly clinging on in hope, dragging himself along the tomb before collapsing, or being dragged away for execution. Over the brow of the hill, he noted the blood-spattered wall and the burial ditch. There was no doubting that this city would never be allowed to rise in revolution again.