The Dreamers (13 page)

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 yet 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.

A discussion was being conducted around the cadavers. If the school were to be besieged, should they be carried out into the courtyard and hurled over the gates at the CRS?

There existed, to be sure, a magnificent precedent in the Cid, whose corpse, strapped to his saddle, led the Spanish army into battle against the Moors. But no one knew what to do. No one dared take a decision. The young iconoclasts drew the line at the dead.

An hour later, news having arrived that the CRS had turned off along the boulevard towards Saint-Germaindes-Prés, the students who were not on duty that day, whose names were not posted up in the occupation
roster
pinned on to a bulletin board in the school’s central
hallway, sneaked into the street and made their way home.

Having chosen not to inform themselves for fear of being ridiculed, Théo, Isabelle and Matthew also thought it wise to slip away.

The absence of passers-by, of traffic, endowed the
carrefour
de l’Odéon with a draughty film-set vastness. On every side, along its tributaries, the rue de Condé, the rue de l’Ancienne Comédie, the rue Hautefeuille, in twos, threes and fours, bleeding or unhurt,
demonstrators
were tiptoeing off the deserted stage on which the drama had been enacted. There was, too, at the last, one young boy in a voluminous cape who momentarily interrupted his flight so that he might gather up, with the mischievous pirouette of a periwigged blackamoor, a bloodied red foulard which a fellow fugitive had let fall in the gutter.

That same afternoon, to their surprise, the place Saint-Michel had been spared. Even so, only one of the brasseries around the fountain was still open for
custom
. As they walked past it, their intention being to cross the pont Saint-Michel to the Ile de la Cité then
recross the Seine by a bridge further south, someone inside the brasserie rapped on its window.

‘Théo! Théo!’

It was Charles. A year older than Théo, he had
formerly
been his classmate, until they had lost contact with each other when he entered one of Paris’s
polytechniques
as a student of economics. Even at school, his politics had been conservative and capitalist. He read the
Wall Street Journal
, for which he had been obliged to place an order with a bemused newsagent, and he would airily allude to ‘seeing my banker’ when all he meant was ‘going to the bank’. But in a cynical world he was not a cynic. Théo was very fond of his starchy,
old-world
gallantry, his flapping arms and the silent
laughter
that would shake his tall, broad-shouldered frame.

They went inside.

Charles was standing alone at the window holding a glass of lager. He was unrecognisable. Instead of the parodically sober dark suit which had long been his trademark, he wore a leather bomber jacket with a filthy fur-trimmed collar, a pair of mottled jeans and a loud plaid shirt. Even more extraordinary was his head, which had been shaved all over, except for a thick
topknot
in the Chinese style.

He slapped Théo on the shoulder.

‘I don’t believe it! Théo! How’s life?’

For a moment Théo didn’t know how to respond.

‘Charles? Is it you?’

‘What do you mean, is it me? Of course it’s me. Don’t you recognise me?’

‘You, yes.’ Théo pointed at the topknot. ‘That, no.’

Charles gave it a tweak.

‘Don’t you like it? Don’t you think it suits me?’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘What don’t you understand?’

‘You,’ said Théo helplessly. ‘Always so chic, so
well-dressed
. Double-breasted suit, polka-dot tie,
Wall Street Journal
. Now look at you.’

Charles looked instead at Théo.

‘You’ve changed quite a bit yourself, you know. You stink, for example.’ He fingered Théo’s clothes. ‘And what’s with the rags? You look like something out of Zola.’

‘It’s a long story,’ said Théo after a pause.

There was a still longer pause, until, with a grin, Charles replied, ‘So is mine.’

Then, kissing Isabelle and shaking hands with Matthew, whom, being no cinephile, he was meeting
for the first time, he added, ‘Let me buy you all a drink.’

They asked for food instead.

‘Food? Well, I wonder,’ said Charles, glancing at the bar. ‘There’s a shortage, after all. But I’ll see what I can do.’

They didn’t understand what he meant by shortage. But there were so many things they didn’t understand.

Afew minutes later, when he returned with
sandwiches
and Coca-Colas, Théo put the question to him again.

‘So? The topknot?’

‘I’ve been living in Mongolia.’

Charles visibly savoured the effect which his revelation had on his friend. He wasn’t disappointed.

‘Mongolia!’

‘I spent seven weeks in the Gobi Desert with a nomadic tribe.’

‘But your studies? The polytechnique?’

‘Oh, my studies …’

He gazed blankly into the middle distance as though those studies belonged to some dim, defunct and
irretrievable
period of his life.

‘Look about you, Théo. History, knowledge,
imagination
– they’ve taken to the streets. They’re in circulation.
They’re no longer the private property of an élite.’

‘I didn’t know,’ said Isabelle, ‘that the
Wall Street
Journal
was delivered in the Gobi Desert.’

‘I don’t read Fascist rags.’

Théo and Isabelle were confounded by this impostor.

‘What’s happened to you?’ cried Théo.

He gaped at the survivors of the battle, now drinking beers and Cokes as though taking a break between
tutorials
. ‘What’s happened to everyone? Why are there these barricades, these CRS vans everywhere? What’s going on, for Christ’s sake?’

‘You’re seriously asking me that question? You really don’t know?’

Charles examined Théo’s features for a hint that he was being teased.

‘No! No, I tell you.’

‘Where the hell have you been?’

‘Away …’

‘Away? How did you get back in?’

‘Back in?’

‘How did you re-enter the country?’

There was no answer to that. His eyebrows raised like two bushy circumflexes, Charles returned Théo’s own blank stare.

‘I’m beginning to think it was you who were in the Gobi.’

Persuaded at last that, for a reason he could not as yet fathom, his friends knew nothing of the upheaval which had convulsed the faculty of Nanterre, then the whole of Paris, then ‘the four corners of the Hexagon’, as
newsreaders
like to say, he began to relate to them the legend of what was already coming to be known as
les
événements
de mai
.

And so it was they learned how the expulsion of their own Henri Langlois from the Cinémathèque had been the Sarajevo of these
événements
; how, at the very least, that expulsion had crystallised a spirit of revolt that was already in the air, had served to light a flame that was to be relayed from hand to hand like an Olympic torch.

‘It’s not just the university, not just Paris!’ said Charles, who was no longer able to contain his lyricism. ‘The whole of France is on strike. Phones don’t work, banks have closed, there’s no post, virtually no petrol left. It really is a general strike, students and workers united, a common front against a common enemy. A new society is waiting to be born, Théo, a new world! A world without
grands-bourgeois
and
petits-bourgeois
,
grands-fascistes
and
petits-fascistes
. A world that’ll no
longer have any need of the old world’s tired old
masters
! No more Leonardo! No more Mozart! No more Shakespeare!’

He paused.

‘No more Hitchcock!’

‘Never!’ cried Théo.

There was another pause.

‘You’ll see, my friend,’ Charles murmured softly. ‘You’ll see.’