Hungry ghosts, p.25
Hungry Ghosts, page 25
‘What are they talking about?’ he asked.
‘That’s Marie and Michel and Antoine,’ said Isabelle. ‘They’re discussing the Communist Party and whether we should cooperate with them. Basically, the CP is a Stalinist party, and we fear they will sell out the revolution for reformist gains. Michel says they’re a virus and we should have nothing to do with them. But Marie and Antoine think we must cooperate, at least in the short term, to organise the masses with our superior leadership, and then people will come to us.’
‘Yeah, it’s complicated,’ said James. ‘But I don’t trust the Stalinists.’
‘We certainly distance ourselves from the CP politically,’ said Isabelle. ‘Any kind of alliance would only be temporary and tactical. We go on the same marches, and we shout our slogans, but we don’t want the same thing. Once the communists were a beacon of hope; now they’re fastened to the workers’ ankles like a ball and chain. I know. My father joined the communists during the war after the end of the Hitler-Stalin pact and fought with the resistance. He saw so many friends die horrible deaths at the hands of the Gestapo, and he knew that at any time that might be his fate too. He was a brave and principled man. We could do with that kind of courage today. He taught me a lot, and I loved him dearly. But times change, strategies change. What was once glorious is now broken, and we need to find new paths.’
‘Can we win here?’ asked James.
‘Hard to say. I believe we can win something. Whether we can achieve all we want, I don’t know. We’re hoping for revolution, of course.’
Frankie glanced at James and rolled her eyes.
‘I can’t wait to explore Paris, dude,’ she said.
‘That’s what I’m hoping for,’ said James. ‘The thing is, what will we get? What is possible under these particular historical conditions? That’s the question.’
‘Isabelle, qui sont tes amis?’ called the young man printing leaflets.
‘C’est James d’Angleterre. Il est venu nous aider. Mais il ne parle pas bien le français, tu devras donc pratiquer ton anglais.’
The man ceased his printing and walked over to them. ‘Welcome. I’m Jean. You like to come help us hand out leaflets?’
‘I want to go see a bit of Paris,’ said Frankie.
James glanced at Isabelle and then at Frankie, who shook her head gently.
‘We’ll be there for tonight’s march. But we might give the leaflets a miss and go sightsee a bit,’ said James.
‘The revolution won’t wait for tourists,’ said Isabelle.
James and Frankie skipped down the stairs and into the street.
‘Where shall we go?’ he said. ‘There’s so much to see. The Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, the Champs-Élysées. I don’t know where to start.’
‘Dude, do we have to do guidebook Paris right away? I’d prefer to just walk around the streets here and get our bearings. We’ve plenty of time for grand history later.’
James hankered after the monumental Paris of his imagination and was disappointed that on his first visit to the city of light he might miss out on the sights that mattered. But someone had to give way, and he didn’t want an argument. He supposed they could do those iconic places another day.
‘Okay, let’s walk,’ he said.
They set off to explore the streets of Montparnasse with no map, and no plan. As they walked in the direction of the Latin Quarter, they passed a multitude of cafés and bookshops, and Frankie pointed to an art gallery that she wanted to return to. The narrow streets and the bustling shops and cafés, combined with the music of the French language that sang to him as they walked, led James to envision himself as a modern-day flâneur strolling through the crowds, observing the colour and movement.
He breathed in the warm, yeasty scents of a boulangerie and admired the covers of novels ancient and modern in the window of a second-hand bookshop. He was pleased to see that there was no sign of World on Fire in the shop window. The French, at least, were not valorising his father. As they walked, he studied the young women as they passed by and endowed them with a special French élégance drawn from his cultural dreams. And he listened to conversations that he didn’t understand, but which filled him with excitement. In this Paris of his imagination, he and Frankie were Sartre and de Beauvoir taking a gentle stroll through the neighbourhood streets beneath spring flowers that burst with an explosion of reds and yellows and blues from the window boxes above. He was immersed in a romance into which the open hands of a beggar on the corner intruded only at the margins.
By the time they reached the splendours of the Saint-Michel fountain, they were tired and searched for a place to rest.
‘Let’s go in that café,’ said Frankie.
As they crossed the square, he observed her: she was an American in Paris, a dreamy celluloid hallucination of love and romance. He imagined them dancing down the street to the music of Gershwin or exchanging philosophical ideas with the denizens of the Left Bank. They found seats at a table on the pavement outside the café under a red, white and blue stripy umbrella and perused the menu.
‘I’m hungry,’ he said.
‘Perhaps we’d better eat back at the apartment. This place will be pricey for sure,’ she said.
‘Do those guys look like they’ll get it together to cook? Come on. I’ll treat you. This is our first full day in Paris. Damn the expense. I’m having a steak.’
They took their time eating, chatting and watching the world go by. By the time they returned to the Montparnasse flat, there wasn’t much time to waste before the evening’s big march. James was looking forward to observing his first big Paris action, and this one was set to be the most significant yet. While the protests were still largely a student-led affair, the French comrades said that they were expecting the workers to join them soon.
Isabelle and her friends were wolfing down a hastily put together meal of baguette and cheese.
‘No one’s had time to shop or cook,’ said Jean, ‘but we’ll get by.’
‘No problem,’ said James. ‘I can’t wait to get out there.’
‘We hear rumours the workers will be on the move,’ said Isabelle.
‘And if they don’t join in?’ asked James, who was now mighty pleased that he had won the day and eaten at the café.
‘La lutte continuera. The struggle will go on. By all means necessary,’ said Isabelle.
Chapter 32
Later that evening, James and Frankie joined thousands of local students gathered in the Latin Quarter around the Sorbonne. James sensed that something immense was brewing. From the Haight to Paris, the world was changing. At last, they were escaping from under the cloud of post-war gloom.
When the march moved away from the university, James and Frankie were carried along with the first wave of students towards the Place Denfert-Rochereau, where they joined a crowd of protesting high school students. James estimated that there were already thousands gathered in the square, and their number was growing. He could hear the drone of muffled speeches in the background, though he doubted that even the French students could understand what was being said over the clamour of the crowd.
‘What’s happening?’ he asked Isabelle.
She leant towards him and whispered in his ear. ‘Some people say we should go to the Saint-Antoine Hospital. We will ask if they have any of our dead. Other people say we should march to the ORTF, that’s the radio and TV station that delivers lying reports. The man speaking now says we should go in small groups to the working-class neighbourhoods and spread the message.’
James knew all about lying media. His father worked for them. He whispered the dispatch into Frankie’s ear and was aroused by the brush of her cheek and the warmth of her body.
‘It’s decided. We march past the Santé Prison and then go to the ORTF,’ announced Isabelle.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ said James. ‘This is the real thing.’
The march streamed down Boulevard Aragon towards Santé Prison where the students believed those arrested during previous demonstrations were being held. ‘Liberté! Liberté’!’ they shouted at the lines of police. Someone threw a stone. And then another. Until the sky was raining with missiles. The police stood disciplined and motionless as rocks flew over their heads or struck their shields. An hour later, Jean reported, courtesy of his small transistor radio, that there were twenty thousand students and teachers on the march.
They strode shoulder to shoulder down Rue Monge en route to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where they came to a halt as word came down the ranks, via Isabelle, that the police had blocked all the exits towards the Seine and were funnelling the marchers down the Boulevard Saint-Michel to the Place Edmond Rostand.
She yelled over the commotion and into James’s ear that the leadership hoped to occupy as much of the Latin Quarter as possible and had asked the demonstrators to split into small bands and take up positions in every street held by the police. As they began to disperse, James watched a group of students tear down the fences that ringed the pavement trees and rip out traffic signs, which they then used to lever paving stones from the footpath.
‘Qu’est-ce que tu fais? La manifestation doit être pacifique,’ said Jean to one of the insurgents.
‘Auto-défense en cas d’attaque surprise. On se méfie des flics!’ she said.
‘They’re preparing for a battle,’ said Jean.
James and his friends followed their French comrades through the streets and into Rue Le Goff, where they watched groups of students build barricades out of cars, fencing and paving stones. Jean, who still had his radio lodged close to his ear, reported that discussions were taking place between the student leadership and the rector of the Sorbonne. The students were demanding that the police leave the university, and that the authorities reopen the Nanterre and Sorbonne campuses. Jean reported that student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit was calling for the demonstrators to remain composed.
James was feeling jittery and disoriented. It had been a tiring, stretched-out night in which nothing major had happened, and yet the chatter and the shouting and the building of barricades made him feel that this was merely the calm before the revolutionary storm.
‘There’s been police action nearby and our comrades have been forced to retreat,’ announced Isabelle. ‘The word is spreading, strengthen the barricades.’
James and Frankie joined the frenzied search for materials with which to reinforce their defences amid an increasingly militant atmosphere. The central barricade that had been erected across the street was two metres high now, and the collective effort had given rise to a contagious exhilaration. Jean said that Radio Luxembourg was reporting the failure of negotiations at the Sorbonne and, with it, the likelihood of police intervention in the demonstration.
‘This will end in violence. Shall we get out of here?’ said Jean.
‘You’re kidding. I’m staying,’ said Isabelle.
‘Me too,’ said James. ‘Frankie?’
‘Sure, man. I wouldn’t want to miss the party.’
‘This is just a hint of what revolution might look like, and it’s going to get crazy. Are you ready to do what it takes, James?’ demanded Isabelle.
James found Isabelle’s fervour contagious, and if this was what revolution looked like, well, he would play his proper part in making history. Had Vic been here, he would doubtless have been snapping this and that, capturing the mood, being the big hero that people said he was. But photographs were taken by observers, while he, James, was in the thick of it. He didn’t want to just watch on; he wanted to do something.
‘I’m ready,’ he said. ‘Let’s get into it.’
‘Have you got a scarf or a handkerchief?’ said Isabelle.
‘Yeah. Why?’
‘The cops will use tear gas. Revolution isn’t for the faint-hearted.’
James felt the rapid beat of fear in his chest; he had no idea what tear gas felt like, but he had come to help the French comrades, and he wasn’t about to let them down. ‘On y va,’ he said, trying out his French.
‘Vive la révolution!’ shouted Isabelle.
Though the clock had ticked past midnight, the crowd remained full of energy and anticipation as they hung around the streets, waiting and waiting and waiting. Finally, the levee broke: tear gas flooded the street; paving stones flew; and “The Internationale” sprang from the voices of the remaining students. Was this what revolution looked like? thought James, as a Molotov cocktail burst into flame in front of the advancing police lines. The air was becoming unbreathable, and he was forced to wrap his scarf around his face as they began to retreat. Someone handed him an object, and he threw it.
Suddenly, the central barricade in their street tumbled, and lines of baton-wielding police were upon them. He grabbed Frankie’s hand, and they fled down the street, turning around the first corner they came to. Everywhere and everything was chaos.
They scurried away from the Latin Quarter in fright, past burned-out cars and broken barricades and through the haze of drifting tear gas. He wasn’t sure where he was going, other than away from danger. They walked and ran and walked and ran until they felt safe in the quiet streets away from the front line. He had no sense of where he was, or how to return to the Montparnasse apartment, but as the early morning light emerged over the skyline, he knew that he needed to sleep. First, he needed to think.
‘Let’s grab a coffee and get our bearings,’ he said.
They headed across the street towards a café that was just opening its doors and sat down at a table on the footpath. Breathless, they ordered coffee and croissants. What a night! He had never experienced such exhilaration and panic. And if what Isabelle said was true, this was only the beginning.
‘Man, that was wild,’ said Frankie.
She slid her hands across the table and onto his, where they settled and unsettled. She leant forward and gave him the lightest of kisses, almost imperceptible, and yet felt.
‘Thanks, man,’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘For being here.’
‘Are you glad you came?’
‘I’m having a ball. I loved it in the Haight. I’m loving it here.’
‘Such a different feel,’ he said.
‘There was a beautiful vibe in the Haight. But now it’s time to move on.’
‘But there’s still hope, isn’t there?’
‘Gotta have hope.’
He looked directly into her eyes. ‘Yes, you’ve got to have hope.’
She didn’t flinch, or look away, and they held their gazes until the waiter broke the spell.
‘Vos cafés, mademoiselle, monsieur.’
James’s French had been sufficient to order coffees, and though he could ask for directions back to the Montparnasse apartment, he would be unlikely to understand the reply. Besides which, he was dog-tired and wanted to get to bed as soon as possible. When they had finished their drinks, he hailed a taxi and showed the driver the address he had written on a scrap of paper secreted in his wallet.
After a long day’s travelling, and an exhausting night on the streets, all James wanted to do on their return to the flat was lie down and rest. He cuddled up with Frankie on the bottom bunk bed in their room, with her head resting on his chest while he stroked her hair. Frankie lifted her head, smiled at him and swung her leg over James’s midriff so that she straddled him. As she bent forward to avoid the bed struts, her dark hair enfolded him.
‘Kiss me,’ she said.
His mind and body split in two. To the left was his desire for Frankie. To the right was fatigue. He lifted his head up and kissed her. She unbuttoned his shirt. He lifted her jumper over her head. Her T-shirt followed. His trousers lay crumpled on the floor. His hand reached for her breast. Her fingers stroked his chest. Despite their exhaustion, their bodies knew what to do.
Chapter 33
Thunder crashed, dogs barked and men shouted. Alarmed, James rolled out of bed and leapt to his feet, only to be knocked to the ground by dark, looming figures who burst through splintered timber.
‘Police! Police! Descendre! Descendre! Sur le plancher. Immédiatement!’ they shouted.
A shadowy titan crushed him to the floor and squeezed the breath from his body, then a white-hot agony stung his shoulder as his arms were wrenched behind his back and locked fast with steel rings.
He was thrust to his feet, frogmarched out of the flat and dragged down the steep stairs. He stumbled, was held up, and stumbled again. He feared he must fall, but each time he felt himself go over the edge, he was held up like a puppet on a string and propelled forward once more.
The cool evening air pricked his face as he was bundled roughly into the back of a police van. He heard the metallic clang of the doors close behind him as he landed with a thud on the hard floor. Winded and terrified, he lay motionless as the will to struggle bled away. He dragged himself little by little onto the seat that ran along the side of the van. A man about the same age as himself, dressed in black trousers and a ripped black T-shirt, his nose bloodied and his knuckles scraped, glanced across at James from his seat opposite.
‘Putains de flics! Beurk!,’ he said.
James didn’t know what the guy had said so he just nodded.
The police van roared through the streets for twenty minutes before it came to an abrupt halt. James was hauled out of the rear doors, dressed only in the underpants and T-shirt he had slept in, and marched into an anonymous concrete building. He trembled as he stood at the front desk.
‘Nom?’ said the policeman behind the counter.
James gave his personal details and handed over his watch, his wallet and his belt before he was escorted down a corridor and through a steel reinforced door into a cell where the sharp light of an overhead bulb brought the boundaries of his world into acute focus. Through the pale-green paint of the cell walls, he could identify the outlines of each individual brick, and every rectangle underlined the solidity of his imprisonment. He slumped onto the concrete bench beside a neatly folded, yellowing, beige blanket. To his left, he observed a heavy cell door with its small, oblong slit, through which a face peered from time to time and then vanished. To his right, high up on the wall and well beyond his reach, a modicum of light fought its way through a small, grimy square window. In the far right-hand corner, he noticed a seat-less toilet and prayed he wouldn’t need to use it.
‘That’s Marie and Michel and Antoine,’ said Isabelle. ‘They’re discussing the Communist Party and whether we should cooperate with them. Basically, the CP is a Stalinist party, and we fear they will sell out the revolution for reformist gains. Michel says they’re a virus and we should have nothing to do with them. But Marie and Antoine think we must cooperate, at least in the short term, to organise the masses with our superior leadership, and then people will come to us.’
‘Yeah, it’s complicated,’ said James. ‘But I don’t trust the Stalinists.’
‘We certainly distance ourselves from the CP politically,’ said Isabelle. ‘Any kind of alliance would only be temporary and tactical. We go on the same marches, and we shout our slogans, but we don’t want the same thing. Once the communists were a beacon of hope; now they’re fastened to the workers’ ankles like a ball and chain. I know. My father joined the communists during the war after the end of the Hitler-Stalin pact and fought with the resistance. He saw so many friends die horrible deaths at the hands of the Gestapo, and he knew that at any time that might be his fate too. He was a brave and principled man. We could do with that kind of courage today. He taught me a lot, and I loved him dearly. But times change, strategies change. What was once glorious is now broken, and we need to find new paths.’
‘Can we win here?’ asked James.
‘Hard to say. I believe we can win something. Whether we can achieve all we want, I don’t know. We’re hoping for revolution, of course.’
Frankie glanced at James and rolled her eyes.
‘I can’t wait to explore Paris, dude,’ she said.
‘That’s what I’m hoping for,’ said James. ‘The thing is, what will we get? What is possible under these particular historical conditions? That’s the question.’
‘Isabelle, qui sont tes amis?’ called the young man printing leaflets.
‘C’est James d’Angleterre. Il est venu nous aider. Mais il ne parle pas bien le français, tu devras donc pratiquer ton anglais.’
The man ceased his printing and walked over to them. ‘Welcome. I’m Jean. You like to come help us hand out leaflets?’
‘I want to go see a bit of Paris,’ said Frankie.
James glanced at Isabelle and then at Frankie, who shook her head gently.
‘We’ll be there for tonight’s march. But we might give the leaflets a miss and go sightsee a bit,’ said James.
‘The revolution won’t wait for tourists,’ said Isabelle.
James and Frankie skipped down the stairs and into the street.
‘Where shall we go?’ he said. ‘There’s so much to see. The Eiffel Tower, Notre-Dame, the Champs-Élysées. I don’t know where to start.’
‘Dude, do we have to do guidebook Paris right away? I’d prefer to just walk around the streets here and get our bearings. We’ve plenty of time for grand history later.’
James hankered after the monumental Paris of his imagination and was disappointed that on his first visit to the city of light he might miss out on the sights that mattered. But someone had to give way, and he didn’t want an argument. He supposed they could do those iconic places another day.
‘Okay, let’s walk,’ he said.
They set off to explore the streets of Montparnasse with no map, and no plan. As they walked in the direction of the Latin Quarter, they passed a multitude of cafés and bookshops, and Frankie pointed to an art gallery that she wanted to return to. The narrow streets and the bustling shops and cafés, combined with the music of the French language that sang to him as they walked, led James to envision himself as a modern-day flâneur strolling through the crowds, observing the colour and movement.
He breathed in the warm, yeasty scents of a boulangerie and admired the covers of novels ancient and modern in the window of a second-hand bookshop. He was pleased to see that there was no sign of World on Fire in the shop window. The French, at least, were not valorising his father. As they walked, he studied the young women as they passed by and endowed them with a special French élégance drawn from his cultural dreams. And he listened to conversations that he didn’t understand, but which filled him with excitement. In this Paris of his imagination, he and Frankie were Sartre and de Beauvoir taking a gentle stroll through the neighbourhood streets beneath spring flowers that burst with an explosion of reds and yellows and blues from the window boxes above. He was immersed in a romance into which the open hands of a beggar on the corner intruded only at the margins.
By the time they reached the splendours of the Saint-Michel fountain, they were tired and searched for a place to rest.
‘Let’s go in that café,’ said Frankie.
As they crossed the square, he observed her: she was an American in Paris, a dreamy celluloid hallucination of love and romance. He imagined them dancing down the street to the music of Gershwin or exchanging philosophical ideas with the denizens of the Left Bank. They found seats at a table on the pavement outside the café under a red, white and blue stripy umbrella and perused the menu.
‘I’m hungry,’ he said.
‘Perhaps we’d better eat back at the apartment. This place will be pricey for sure,’ she said.
‘Do those guys look like they’ll get it together to cook? Come on. I’ll treat you. This is our first full day in Paris. Damn the expense. I’m having a steak.’
They took their time eating, chatting and watching the world go by. By the time they returned to the Montparnasse flat, there wasn’t much time to waste before the evening’s big march. James was looking forward to observing his first big Paris action, and this one was set to be the most significant yet. While the protests were still largely a student-led affair, the French comrades said that they were expecting the workers to join them soon.
Isabelle and her friends were wolfing down a hastily put together meal of baguette and cheese.
‘No one’s had time to shop or cook,’ said Jean, ‘but we’ll get by.’
‘No problem,’ said James. ‘I can’t wait to get out there.’
‘We hear rumours the workers will be on the move,’ said Isabelle.
‘And if they don’t join in?’ asked James, who was now mighty pleased that he had won the day and eaten at the café.
‘La lutte continuera. The struggle will go on. By all means necessary,’ said Isabelle.
Chapter 32
Later that evening, James and Frankie joined thousands of local students gathered in the Latin Quarter around the Sorbonne. James sensed that something immense was brewing. From the Haight to Paris, the world was changing. At last, they were escaping from under the cloud of post-war gloom.
When the march moved away from the university, James and Frankie were carried along with the first wave of students towards the Place Denfert-Rochereau, where they joined a crowd of protesting high school students. James estimated that there were already thousands gathered in the square, and their number was growing. He could hear the drone of muffled speeches in the background, though he doubted that even the French students could understand what was being said over the clamour of the crowd.
‘What’s happening?’ he asked Isabelle.
She leant towards him and whispered in his ear. ‘Some people say we should go to the Saint-Antoine Hospital. We will ask if they have any of our dead. Other people say we should march to the ORTF, that’s the radio and TV station that delivers lying reports. The man speaking now says we should go in small groups to the working-class neighbourhoods and spread the message.’
James knew all about lying media. His father worked for them. He whispered the dispatch into Frankie’s ear and was aroused by the brush of her cheek and the warmth of her body.
‘It’s decided. We march past the Santé Prison and then go to the ORTF,’ announced Isabelle.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ said James. ‘This is the real thing.’
The march streamed down Boulevard Aragon towards Santé Prison where the students believed those arrested during previous demonstrations were being held. ‘Liberté! Liberté’!’ they shouted at the lines of police. Someone threw a stone. And then another. Until the sky was raining with missiles. The police stood disciplined and motionless as rocks flew over their heads or struck their shields. An hour later, Jean reported, courtesy of his small transistor radio, that there were twenty thousand students and teachers on the march.
They strode shoulder to shoulder down Rue Monge en route to the Boulevard Saint-Germain, where they came to a halt as word came down the ranks, via Isabelle, that the police had blocked all the exits towards the Seine and were funnelling the marchers down the Boulevard Saint-Michel to the Place Edmond Rostand.
She yelled over the commotion and into James’s ear that the leadership hoped to occupy as much of the Latin Quarter as possible and had asked the demonstrators to split into small bands and take up positions in every street held by the police. As they began to disperse, James watched a group of students tear down the fences that ringed the pavement trees and rip out traffic signs, which they then used to lever paving stones from the footpath.
‘Qu’est-ce que tu fais? La manifestation doit être pacifique,’ said Jean to one of the insurgents.
‘Auto-défense en cas d’attaque surprise. On se méfie des flics!’ she said.
‘They’re preparing for a battle,’ said Jean.
James and his friends followed their French comrades through the streets and into Rue Le Goff, where they watched groups of students build barricades out of cars, fencing and paving stones. Jean, who still had his radio lodged close to his ear, reported that discussions were taking place between the student leadership and the rector of the Sorbonne. The students were demanding that the police leave the university, and that the authorities reopen the Nanterre and Sorbonne campuses. Jean reported that student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit was calling for the demonstrators to remain composed.
James was feeling jittery and disoriented. It had been a tiring, stretched-out night in which nothing major had happened, and yet the chatter and the shouting and the building of barricades made him feel that this was merely the calm before the revolutionary storm.
‘There’s been police action nearby and our comrades have been forced to retreat,’ announced Isabelle. ‘The word is spreading, strengthen the barricades.’
James and Frankie joined the frenzied search for materials with which to reinforce their defences amid an increasingly militant atmosphere. The central barricade that had been erected across the street was two metres high now, and the collective effort had given rise to a contagious exhilaration. Jean said that Radio Luxembourg was reporting the failure of negotiations at the Sorbonne and, with it, the likelihood of police intervention in the demonstration.
‘This will end in violence. Shall we get out of here?’ said Jean.
‘You’re kidding. I’m staying,’ said Isabelle.
‘Me too,’ said James. ‘Frankie?’
‘Sure, man. I wouldn’t want to miss the party.’
‘This is just a hint of what revolution might look like, and it’s going to get crazy. Are you ready to do what it takes, James?’ demanded Isabelle.
James found Isabelle’s fervour contagious, and if this was what revolution looked like, well, he would play his proper part in making history. Had Vic been here, he would doubtless have been snapping this and that, capturing the mood, being the big hero that people said he was. But photographs were taken by observers, while he, James, was in the thick of it. He didn’t want to just watch on; he wanted to do something.
‘I’m ready,’ he said. ‘Let’s get into it.’
‘Have you got a scarf or a handkerchief?’ said Isabelle.
‘Yeah. Why?’
‘The cops will use tear gas. Revolution isn’t for the faint-hearted.’
James felt the rapid beat of fear in his chest; he had no idea what tear gas felt like, but he had come to help the French comrades, and he wasn’t about to let them down. ‘On y va,’ he said, trying out his French.
‘Vive la révolution!’ shouted Isabelle.
Though the clock had ticked past midnight, the crowd remained full of energy and anticipation as they hung around the streets, waiting and waiting and waiting. Finally, the levee broke: tear gas flooded the street; paving stones flew; and “The Internationale” sprang from the voices of the remaining students. Was this what revolution looked like? thought James, as a Molotov cocktail burst into flame in front of the advancing police lines. The air was becoming unbreathable, and he was forced to wrap his scarf around his face as they began to retreat. Someone handed him an object, and he threw it.
Suddenly, the central barricade in their street tumbled, and lines of baton-wielding police were upon them. He grabbed Frankie’s hand, and they fled down the street, turning around the first corner they came to. Everywhere and everything was chaos.
They scurried away from the Latin Quarter in fright, past burned-out cars and broken barricades and through the haze of drifting tear gas. He wasn’t sure where he was going, other than away from danger. They walked and ran and walked and ran until they felt safe in the quiet streets away from the front line. He had no sense of where he was, or how to return to the Montparnasse apartment, but as the early morning light emerged over the skyline, he knew that he needed to sleep. First, he needed to think.
‘Let’s grab a coffee and get our bearings,’ he said.
They headed across the street towards a café that was just opening its doors and sat down at a table on the footpath. Breathless, they ordered coffee and croissants. What a night! He had never experienced such exhilaration and panic. And if what Isabelle said was true, this was only the beginning.
‘Man, that was wild,’ said Frankie.
She slid her hands across the table and onto his, where they settled and unsettled. She leant forward and gave him the lightest of kisses, almost imperceptible, and yet felt.
‘Thanks, man,’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘For being here.’
‘Are you glad you came?’
‘I’m having a ball. I loved it in the Haight. I’m loving it here.’
‘Such a different feel,’ he said.
‘There was a beautiful vibe in the Haight. But now it’s time to move on.’
‘But there’s still hope, isn’t there?’
‘Gotta have hope.’
He looked directly into her eyes. ‘Yes, you’ve got to have hope.’
She didn’t flinch, or look away, and they held their gazes until the waiter broke the spell.
‘Vos cafés, mademoiselle, monsieur.’
James’s French had been sufficient to order coffees, and though he could ask for directions back to the Montparnasse apartment, he would be unlikely to understand the reply. Besides which, he was dog-tired and wanted to get to bed as soon as possible. When they had finished their drinks, he hailed a taxi and showed the driver the address he had written on a scrap of paper secreted in his wallet.
After a long day’s travelling, and an exhausting night on the streets, all James wanted to do on their return to the flat was lie down and rest. He cuddled up with Frankie on the bottom bunk bed in their room, with her head resting on his chest while he stroked her hair. Frankie lifted her head, smiled at him and swung her leg over James’s midriff so that she straddled him. As she bent forward to avoid the bed struts, her dark hair enfolded him.
‘Kiss me,’ she said.
His mind and body split in two. To the left was his desire for Frankie. To the right was fatigue. He lifted his head up and kissed her. She unbuttoned his shirt. He lifted her jumper over her head. Her T-shirt followed. His trousers lay crumpled on the floor. His hand reached for her breast. Her fingers stroked his chest. Despite their exhaustion, their bodies knew what to do.
Chapter 33
Thunder crashed, dogs barked and men shouted. Alarmed, James rolled out of bed and leapt to his feet, only to be knocked to the ground by dark, looming figures who burst through splintered timber.
‘Police! Police! Descendre! Descendre! Sur le plancher. Immédiatement!’ they shouted.
A shadowy titan crushed him to the floor and squeezed the breath from his body, then a white-hot agony stung his shoulder as his arms were wrenched behind his back and locked fast with steel rings.
He was thrust to his feet, frogmarched out of the flat and dragged down the steep stairs. He stumbled, was held up, and stumbled again. He feared he must fall, but each time he felt himself go over the edge, he was held up like a puppet on a string and propelled forward once more.
The cool evening air pricked his face as he was bundled roughly into the back of a police van. He heard the metallic clang of the doors close behind him as he landed with a thud on the hard floor. Winded and terrified, he lay motionless as the will to struggle bled away. He dragged himself little by little onto the seat that ran along the side of the van. A man about the same age as himself, dressed in black trousers and a ripped black T-shirt, his nose bloodied and his knuckles scraped, glanced across at James from his seat opposite.
‘Putains de flics! Beurk!,’ he said.
James didn’t know what the guy had said so he just nodded.
The police van roared through the streets for twenty minutes before it came to an abrupt halt. James was hauled out of the rear doors, dressed only in the underpants and T-shirt he had slept in, and marched into an anonymous concrete building. He trembled as he stood at the front desk.
‘Nom?’ said the policeman behind the counter.
James gave his personal details and handed over his watch, his wallet and his belt before he was escorted down a corridor and through a steel reinforced door into a cell where the sharp light of an overhead bulb brought the boundaries of his world into acute focus. Through the pale-green paint of the cell walls, he could identify the outlines of each individual brick, and every rectangle underlined the solidity of his imprisonment. He slumped onto the concrete bench beside a neatly folded, yellowing, beige blanket. To his left, he observed a heavy cell door with its small, oblong slit, through which a face peered from time to time and then vanished. To his right, high up on the wall and well beyond his reach, a modicum of light fought its way through a small, grimy square window. In the far right-hand corner, he noticed a seat-less toilet and prayed he wouldn’t need to use it.
