The Merry Month of May

by James Jones

  Neither had Ferenc. “I expect so,” he said calmly. Then suddenly he grinned. “Thank you,” he said. “It’s been a great evening.”

  We sauntered on down rue des Écoles to where it crossed rue Cardinal Lemoine, not far, and turned back down Cardinal Lemoine toward our sanctuary of the Île St.-Louis.

  At rue le Regrattier we shook hands.

  “It’s amazing really, isn’t it?” Ferenc said in an odd voice. “Really, it is amazing.”

  I let myself into my door with my key, and he went on down the quai to “his” now proprietary couch at the Gallaghers’ apartment.

  16

  SATURDAY MORNING FERENC AND I walked Louisa and McKenna up to Boulevard St.-Michel to view the devastation. It was unbelievable. All the way up St.-Germain the streets were torn up, the tall gooseneck metal streetlamps were down, and turned-over burnt-out cars had been dragged to the gutters, sometimes encroaching up onto the sidewalk itself.

  At Place Maubert the innocent little newspaper-magazine kiosk had been torn completely apart and dismembered—for no apparently good reason, because it clearly had not been strewn on the barricades that had gone up there later in the night after we left it. At rue St.-Jacques more tipped-over cars had been dragged to the sidelines.

  Everywhere, work crews were at work trying to clean up. They were using bulldozers and those small one-man mobile cup-shovels and other pieces of roadbuilding equipment. But this time there would be no replacing of paving stones. Asphalt trucks and mobile road-rollers were already pouring and tamping their hot smelly asphalt into the places where the torn-up street had been cleared. People and students sat at the outdoor tables of the cafés having a coffee or an apéritif while the fumes from the asphalt rolled over them.

  But the worst place of all was the Carrefour, and Boulevard St,-Michel itself where it ran from there up to the Place Edmond Rostand at the corner of the Luxembourg. At the Carrefour itself nothing had been left standing. Nothing. And up the Boulevard at least one-third of the lovely old flowering trees, such a beautiful and distinctive part of Paris and of the Quartier, had been downed during the night and lay out in the street or up onto the sidewalk almost to the storefronts. They could asphalt the boulevards, all right. But it would take a long time to replace those.

  Hundreds of people were out strolling to view the destruction. They climbed over the tree butts when they had to, or passed around them out in the street when it was possible. We joined the parade.

  It was hard to believe where last night there had been such violence and wild emotion and potential danger there was now such quiet and order and amiable calm.

  At the rue Racine there was a phenomenon I knew about and I took the others to see it. Rue Racine was a short street which ran on an angle from Boul’ St.-Michel to the Odéon and on it was a barricade which the students had come to call the barricade pure, the “pure barricade”. It had been there for at least two weeks and had never been removed. It was made of nothing except paving stones. That was what made it “pure”. It had become a joke at both the Sorbonne and the Odéon. Nobody was allowed to put any streetlamps, trees, tree grilles, or traffic signs on it. I took McKenna’s picture standing up on top of it, from a squatting position in the street.

  Then as an afterthought I took one of the pavés from it to save for her. I thought someday she might like to have it. I thought I could have one of the sides ground down smooth and polished and then engraved with the place and date of the Paris Revolution for her.

  But then, after I had taken it, I felt peculiar walking along with it in my hand, as if some flic I met might think I meant to heave it at him. So I stuffed it into the pocket of my trenchcoat, where it hung down so heavily that it made me look like some kind of deformed semihunchback. So, in this odd fashion we made our way on up St.-Michel to Edmond Rostand and had a coffee there at the big café on the corner across from the Luxembourg. Everyone in the café certainly seemed happy and cheerful enough.

  After that we walked over to rue Bonaparte and took it down to the Place St.-Germain and had lunch at Lipp, where everything was business-as-usual. It was funny to note that at every table there was a silent transistor radio, and that somebody at each table had the tiny plastic earplug in his ear for the news.

  On the way home we took them past our own barricade at the rue des Écoles and rue Monge.

  The lady painter from our American group who lived near Maubert was with us too, and we dropped her off at her place and went on home to the Île. She and Ferenc had been having a mild flirtation for the last week, and he had called her up, and she had met us at Maubert on our way up to St.-Michel. She, though I think not Louisa, was shocked as much as I was about the old trees. Louisa seemed to think it was all part of the Revolutionary game. Like the old saw. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.

  Actually, I had seen some of the first of those beautiful big trees come down myself the night before, along the Boulevard St.-Michel.

  After saying goodby to Ferenc and letting myself in, I found I wasn’t able to sleep. After standing at my windows with a drink for half an hour watching the heated glow in the sky over the Quarter, I had gotten dressed and gone out again.

  This time I went straight up Cardinal Lemoine and around the Panthéon and down through the Place Edmond Rostand and straight over to the Odéon. It was still the same jammed-up crowding screeching place it had been on my other visits. But now tonight with the renewed fighting the excitement was more intense. There were noticeably fewer Countesses and Baronesses with their tall black-tied escorts “touristing”. When I got back upstairs with my Laissez-Passer card, I found both Weintraub and Hill Gallagher there in the crowded steaming little offices of the Comité du Cinéma des Étudiants de la Sorbonne.

  Hill looked awful. He stood around like some kind of stork with his shoulders all hunched up and when I went over to him particularly to say hello he mumbled something and turned away from me. He looked like he had more misery in him than there was in all the rest of the world. But not Weintraub.

  “Hey!” he said cheerily, and came over to me. “I was wondering if you’d show up tonight.”

  “I almost didn’t,” I said. “But I couldn’t stay away.”

  “That’s the old Revolutionary spirit,” Weintraub grinned, and slapped me on the back. But for the first time I thought I could detect a haunted look underneath the grin.

  The usual groups of kids, all familiar faces by now, were all standing around the office. Daniel the Chairman with the steel-rimmed glasses was behind his desk. The usual democratic discussion and voting was going on just the same, at full tilt. It had become an almost unconscious ritual for them by now.

  “What do the Cinema Committee kids think about all the renewed fighting?” I asked Weintraub.

  “Naturally, they think it’s all a deliberate ploy on the part of the Government,” he said cheerfully. “The Government has been holding back hoping the Revolution would ‘rot’ itself out, as they say. When it didn’t, they decided to send the police in again against the students, to make it so unpleasant for the people that they will turn against the students, stop all the strikes and settle down and go back to work. In other words, the new fighting is to try and alienate the working people from the students and destroy the solidarity.”

  “Um,” I said. I did not know if I could subscribe to that.

  “Well, that’s what they believe,” Weintraub said. “Especially now that talks are starting between the Government and the unions tomorrow.” He added, “We’ve got three crews out shooting the St.-Michel fight tonight.”

  “They don’t really think they’ve got any possible chance of winning, do they?” I said.

  “We never talk about that.” He moved. “Let’s go in and have a coffee. I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”

  We moved through the democratic discussion of something or other chaired by Daniel and went to the door into the “kitchen” part of the Cinema Commi
ttee’s “offices”, which also, by its other door, led onto the tiny balcony high above the main amphitheater. The by now almost goofy 34-hour marathon discussion was still going on down there. But it had lost a lot of its energy, and most of its sense. There was a pot of stew simmering on one burner of the tiny butane hotplate and a pot of coffee on the other. There was one young couple necking on the mat in the corner but not as far as I could see, while trying not to look, doing more than that. Otherwise it was empty. “Did you see the ‘hospital’ on your way up?” Weintraub asked as we shut the door against the discussion.

  “I heard it,” I said. “As I came up the back stairs.”

  “They’ve got over a hundred more in there now than they had on Wednesday,” Weintraub said. He got two grimy looking cups. “They just won’t turn themselves in to the regular hospitals because the police keep a check on them all and arrest everybody.” He poured the hot black coffee for us both and then sat down against the wall on a mat at the other end from the necking couple. I sat down beside him, nursing the hot cup of horrible coffee.

  “Hill Gallagher is flipping his lid,” Weintraub began.

  “Oh?” I said. “How so? Why?”

  “You mean you don’t know about Harry taking Samantha off to Cannes with him?”

  “Do you know that?” I asked. “Or is it a supposition?”

  “Well, I don’t have any signed letters from either of them, if that’s what you mean,” Weintraub said. “And I haven’t tried to call down there. But it’s pretty damned obvious. Where else would she have disappeared to?”

  “Lots of places. Well, if he did,” I said, “I think it was a damned silly thing for a man in his position to do.”

  “I’ll concede that,” Weintraub said and again I saw that odd pained, battered look come onto his face that I was to see so many more times. “I guess I knew I could never keep her. Of course, she was shtumping Hill, and a lot of the other guys up here I suppose, but at least she was bunking up with me.” He drank from his steaming cup. “She’s still looking for that loot to get her down to Israel. Though I don’t know how she would get out of Paris now if she had it. Shit, only a damned diplomat can get out now, from those military fields that are still operating, or a big big-business man.”

  “But what about Hill?”

  “Well, I guess he’s flipped over her,” Weintraub said sadly. “I don’t know how he found out. I certainly didn’t tell him.” I felt a twinge. “But then he was bound to find it out sooner or later.”

  “And you’re absolutely sure about this, Weintraub,” I said.

  “As sure as I am about anything I’ve ever seen or done.”

  “Listen, Weintraub. If you ever intimate so much as one word about this, ever, to Louisa, I’ll—I’ll do something terrible to you,” I said.

  “Not to worry!” He raised his hand. “Poor Louisa is no concern of mine.”

  “Well, just remember that. I swear I’ll hound you out of Paris.”

  He shook his head. “Of course, that is not to say that Hill might not tell her.”

  “No he wouldn’t,” I said. “Never.”

  Weintraub shrugged. “Who’s to say? In any case, he’s been flipping his lid around here.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well, you know they voted in the Committee about Harry’s proposal he made before he left. Well, Hill came out against it. Everybody was clearly in favor of it, but Hill makes this long wild gnashing speech against it in the discussion about how his father was a commercial, revisionist bourgeois, who wanted to use commercial, revisionist bourgeois methods to make the Committee’s film, and that it would destroy the honor, the very precepts of the Committee, its film, and the Revolution itself, if they let his father make it his way, or even work on it at all. His father was a commercial hack, a paid pawn of the Establishment. He went wild. I mean, really wild. Waving his arms, and hollering, and grinding his teeth. I was there at the time.”

  “That’s all due to Samantha,” I said judiciously.

  “I don’t know if it all is,” Weintraub said. “But certainly some of it is, I’m sure.”

  “He’s fallen madly in love with her.”

  “Well, he ought to know better than to fall for a chick like that,” Weintraub said, sadly. “She’s not about to tie herself up with some guy. And certainly not some guy like Hill.” Or you, I thought. He had implied it. “Anyway, she certainly knows her business in the bed,” he said, “and maybe that got to him. He’s so young.” He sat musing for a moment, his back against the wall.

  “Well anyway, they finally got the floor away from him, and some other kids made short speeches about why they were in favor of the idea, Harry’s idea. It was plain they were all against him. But Hill couldn’t leave it alone. He kept breaking in out of order, and trying to make more speeches, and Daniel kept having to gavel him down. Man I mean but he really lost his cool, man,” the 45-year-old Weintraub said. (I suspect him of being much closer to 50 than 45, if not already 50.) My sadness for him over Samantha increased. He was taking it really well.

  “Anyway finally, they voted, and voted him down almost unanimously. The only two who voted with him were Terri and Bernard. And they clearly did it out of friendship, knowing they would lose beforehand.” He grinned suddenly. “After all, Terri is going to be the star of it if they do it Harry’s way.

  “And since then he hasn’t been the same boy. He just mopes around. The kids who crew with him say he isn’t doing half the job he used to do on his assignments. That’s why they didn’t send him out tonight. I think he’s in a pretty bad way.”

  We both sat in silence for a while, nursing our hot cups. I simply could not get that vile coffee down, though it did not seem to bother Weintraub. There just was not anything I could say about Hill that would do any good or help.

  “Is there anything you can do to help him?”

  “I never have been able to talk to him about Harry,” I said finally. “And not now either, about Samantha.”

  Weintraub appeared not even to have heard me. “Then there’s been another development. You know they stored all those cans of shot film at my place during that scare about a police raid. Well, they came and took them back, and all of them were kept out in the office there in those two big refrigerator boxes. There’s no way to get them developed here in France without the police and the Government confiscating them.

  “Well, about ten days ago one of the kids on the Committee came in here and took almost all of them, more than fifty, maybe sixty cans— that’s a lot of film—saying he had a ride to Italy that night in a private car and he would take the film to Italy with him and have it developed and bring it back. There was only one girl in the office, alone, at the time. She had no authority to say yes or no and she let him take them. They’ve had no word from him at all since then, and they’ve been beginning to get worried about the film. Do you know about all that?”

  “No, I don’t,” I said. I had not heard anything about it at all

  “Well, now they’ve got some garbled message back from Italy saying that he lost them all, in Rome. They were ‘stolen’ from the back seat of his car during a riot, or after a demonstration that he went to, or something. It’s a pretty garbled message. The kid who brought it back doesn’t even know him. And the kid himself who took them hasn’t come back. He’s still in Rome, trying to get a fix on where they went.” Weintraub smiled a bitter smile. “There seems to be some suspicion among the kids on the Committee that he just swiped them and sold them in Rome.”

  “Jesus!” I said. “But that’s irreparable.”

  “One bad apple in the barrel,” Weintraub said. “That kind of a story. It sure is irreparable. Almost all the stuff they’ve shot from the beginning up to then. All the stuff that Hill shot on the barricades of the Friday night of Gay-Lussac. All the demonstrations. All the stuff shot inside the Sorbonne. It’s more than irreparable. It’s a catastrophe.”

  “The idealistic students,” I
said. “The idealistic students of the Comité du Cinéma de la Sorbonne et Odéon.”

  “Yeah,” Weintraub sighed. “The idealistic students, and one bad apple. They don’t really know yet what really happened. They’re just waiting to hear.” He shoved himself up from against the wall. He had emptied his cup. I got up myself.

  “That must not make Hill too happy either,” I said.

  “I very much doubt if he’s even aware of it,” Weintraub said. “What with his misery over Samantha.”

  “Where can I throw this?” I said, holding up my cup.

  “There’s a little sink there in the corner,” he said. It was so dark and dingy in the corner that I had not seen the tiny sink before.

  “I wonder what’s happened to his live-and-let-live, screw-and-let-screw, anti-monogamy philosophy?” I said coming back.

  “I suppose, after the first time in your life you fall in love big, you’re more prepared for it,” Weintraub said thoughtfully. “You’re more prepared for the loss and the big knock.”

  “But you’ve got to survive that first time, though.”

  Weintraub sighed. “Yeah. That’s true. And you really don’t think there’s anything you can do to help him, hunh? Look. Do you want to go down and take a look at the old Boul’ St.-Michel? Have you been down there yet tonight? We can get that boy Raymond to steer us all around. He’s well known just about everywhere in the Quartier now.”

  “No, I haven’t yet,” I said. “I’ve been around other places but not there. Okay, sure. Why not?”

  The boy Raymond was out in the office, where some other heated democratic discussion was going on chaired by the tireless Daniel.

  Raymond had sort of become my official conductor everywhere since he had first shown me the Committee’s offices and the balcony over the theater. He said he would be glad to take us down to St.-Michel.

  “You’ll probably need a handkerchief if we get anywhere near to the Carrefour,” he smiled.

  I nodded and said I had one, and then he took us down past the moaning hospital and out through the kids with the chains around their necks, who were certainly not students. Grammar school dropouts or not, they were having the time of their lives guarding the Revolution with their chains.