Birds of America

by Mary McCarthy

  As he did so, he heard a discordant sound of disapproval or derision, like the American raspberry; a policeman on the pavement whirled around and stared at Peter and his neighbor, whose face wore a sleepy, ironical smile, like that of a large pale cat. In a moment, the sound was repeated, and again the policeman whirled; the tall boy’s drooping eyelid winked enigmatically at Peter—he was a strange-looking person, with high cheekbones, a snub nose, and colorless beetling eyebrows that seemed to express perplexity. Peter, who liked to play the game of guessing nationalities, decided that he could not be French. A Russian, maybe, whose father worked at the Soviet Embassy? Then the boy spoke, in a slow, plaintive voice: “Jan Makowski. University of Chicago. Student of Oriental languages. Pleased to meet you.” He had a strong demotic Middle Western accent. Peter introduced himself. “I thought you were Russian,” he said. Makowski stuck out his lower lip, as though considering the accusation. “I’m of Polish origin,” he said stiffly. “Born in Warsaw. My old man ‘chose freedom’ when I was a kid. I went to grammar school for a while here, but he couldn’t make it in France; we just about starved. Now he teaches political science at Chicago. Full professor.” “Same here!” cried Peter. “I mean my father’s a professor and he used to be a refugee.” Makowski did not appear to find this an especially striking coincidence. “This is great, isn’t it?” Peter continued, looking around him. “Compared to those Cossacks back home, I mean. This is more like a game. Everybody here is having a ball.”

  “You think so?” Peter followed the other’s frowning, derisory gaze. The line of students with the streamer had re-formed. The flics charged them, striking right and left with their capes. A line of blood appeared on the cheek of one of the students; a second student fell to the ground. Peter could see no sign of a weapon and he looked at his neighbor, who stood with folded arms, for enlightenment. The police struck again. Then Peter understood. There was lead in those pretty blue capes; he had read about that somewhere, he now recalled, disgusted at his own simplicity. The students were counter-attacking, ducking the flailing capes. He could distinguish three principal battle-points in the confusion. Makowski nudged him. They watched a boy aim a kick at a cop’s balls; the cop caught his foot and swung him around by the leg, then let him drop. There was blood on the street. Behind Peter a woman was calling shame on the police. A flower-pot came hurtling down from a high balcony—possibly by accident. Two policemen rushed into the building. Peter’s hand tightened on his own clay pot; he selected a target—a tall red-haired gendarme who would make an easy mark. Then wiser counsel—if that was what it was—prevailed; his grip relaxed, and he started to get the shakes. His hands were sweaty. He might have killed a man a few seconds ago—the cop or even a student. “Peter Levi, Murderer.” The thought was strange to him and not unimpressive, though scary. He glanced curiously at Makowski, judicious, with curled lower lip, by his side, a mere scowling spectator. Nobody but Peter himself seemed to be particularly involved with what was going on. Clerks in their bright blue blouses de travail had left their counters and lined up on the sidewalk to watch; concierges, with their mutts, were standing in their doorways; shopkeepers, concerned for their property, were pulling down their iron blinds.

  The students broke and began to run, pursued by the police. A youth was passed, headlong, from cop to cop, and deposited in a Black Maria that had pulled up on the corner, just beyond a flower-cart, at the Métro entrance. The police were working fast. “Nazi!” yelled someone behind Peter at a flic who was tripping a student Two flics pushed past Peter and seized the offender, a young kid of about sixteen. When he resisted, they slugged him. “Nazi!” “Nazi!” Peter turned his head but he could not locate where the voice or voices in a funny falsetto were coming from. People were looking in his direction; he asked himself whether his plant could be acting as an aerial. Then he noticed that Makowski was slightly moving his lips. A ventriloquist! He wondered whether the Pole was crazy, playing a trick like that in a crowd, where he could get innocent bystanders arrested. “Cut it out,” he muttered.

  Now the demonstrators were darting through the throng, wherever they could find an opening, dropping their streamers and placards as they fled into the side streets, into the Métro, into the Magasins Réunis up the block. And instead of just letting them go, the police were hunting them down, aided by embattled concierges and their shrilly barking dogs. They were piling everybody they could catch into the Black Marias. Hungry for prey, they began to grab foreign students coming out of the Alliance Française, youths coming up from the Métro and blinking with surprise in the sunlight. As far as Peter could tell, their idea was to arrest anything that moved in the area between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. He supposed that he and Makowski owed their immunity to the fact that they were stationary.

  What shocked him, as an American, was that the demonstrators, once captured, showed no signs of civic resentment. They did not go limp, like civil-rights workers, but hopped into the paddy-wagons without further protest; it was as if they had been tagged in a game of Prisoners’ Base. In the paddy-wagon on the corner, the majority were laughing and clowning; two were playing cards; one, with a bloody kerchief tied around his head, was reading a book. Only the Nordic types from the Alliance Française were giving their captors an argument, which appeared to amuse the French kids, as though being a foreigner and falsely arrested was funny.

  Detestation for all and sundry was making Peter nauseous. The Rights of Man were being violated, in the most elementary way, in broad daylight, before the eyes of literally hundreds of citizens, and nobody was raising a finger to help. At home, if this had happened around Columbia, say, there would be dozens of volunteer witnesses telling the cops to lay off, threatening to call up the mayor or their congressman or the Civil Liberties Union; at home, citizens were aware that there was such a thing as the Constitution. It came to Peter that he and Makowski, having watched the whole disgusting business from the sidelines, could do something about it. They could write a letter to the Monde, as témoins oculaires, and if the Monde would not publish it, they could take it to the Herald Tribune. Or they could go to court and testify in the students’ defense, assuming there was a trial or some sort of hearing; he was ready to swear that the demonstration had been completely peaceful until the police had used violence to break it up and he could swear too that several of the kids now in custody had not been among the marchers—the police had just arbitrarily seized them and roughed them up when they resisted. His heart thumping with excitement, he carefully memorized the features of two of the most vicious cops, so as to be able to make a positive identification. At the same time, his shyness made him hesitant of approaching the group in the Black Maria, to promise his support, as though a wall of glass separated him on the sidewalk from them, a few feet away, as though he would be intruding. A weird kind of politeness was gluing him to the spot. He put the question to Makowski. “Maybe we should give these guys our names and addresses.”

  But Makowski did not agree. He thought it was a lot of shit that he and Peter had a duty to offer themselves as witnesses. “Of course the flics are sadists. C’est leur métier. The French take that for granted. You can’t squeal about ‘police brutality’ in a court here. Everybody would think you were a fink.” His voice took on a note of whining, offended logic, as though Peter’s proposal caused him physical pain. “Besides, you’re a ‘guest of France.’ Remember? You don’t interfere in a family quarrel unless you want your head busted. These French kids would spit on us if we stuck our noses in. They know how the system works: if they behave themselves and keep their mouths shut, the cops will hold them a few hours and then let them go. It’s entendu that they don’t start yelling for a lawyer or claiming the cops have hurt them.” With foreign students, it was more serious; foreigners were forbidden to take part in political activity. “Those dumb Swedes and Germans in the panier à salade don’t dig it but they’re about to be deported.” “Deported?” Peter gulped. Of course, said Mako
wski; it happened all the time. The foreigners in the lettuce-basket were just unlucky. If you were a foreigner and got picked up in one of these bagarres, you were automatically thrown out of the country. Peter was incredulous. “Thrown out of the country?” he scoffed. “Without a hearing or anything? But these guys from the Alliance Française have an alibi. They can prove they were in class when the march was going on. You’re nuts!” But Makowski only laughed. He indicated two blond bespectacled giants whose heavy boots and white wool socks were protruding from the Black Maria. “Twenty-four hours to leave the country!” “Just like that?” cried Peter, who was starting to be convinced. A craven fear for his own tenure on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince entered his bones; in his mind, he slowly tore up the letter he had been writing to the Monde and consigned it to the ash can of history. “Just like that,” said Makowski. “They relieve you of your passport, and you get it back at the airport. I tell you, it happens all the time. That’s why I kept my cool just now. It gives me kicks to bait the police, but France has other things to offer me, and I want to stay a while longer. You know?” Peter supposed he meant women. Feebly, he continued to argue, unwilling to submit to the dictatorship of Makowski’s view of things, which, Peter clearly saw, would deprive him of his freedom of action. If you want to be your own master, his father used to say, always be surprised by evil; never anticipate it. Then he thought of his Norwegian friend, Dag. “I couldn’t figure out what had become of him. We had a date to watch the election on TV, and he never turned up. His landlady claimed he’d gone back to Norway. Finally I heard a rumor he’d been deported. He was great on attending rallies at the Mutualité. I guess that’s what got him. Poor guy.”

  Makowski was unsympathetic. He knew Dag’s type—a law-abiding Scandinavian. They made the big mistake of always carrying their passport and their carte de séjour. Involuntarily, Peter’s hand flew to his jacket pocket to make sure his were still there. “Mistake?” “That only makes it easier for the police to deport you,” Makowski pointed out. He had a whole theory based on his discovery that the French were a lazy people. “If a flic asks me for my passport and I hand it over, I simplify his job. He passes it on to his boss, and they rubber-stamp me out of the country like a piece of second-class mail. But if I tell them my passport’s at home, they have to figure out what to do next. Send me to get it and trust me to come back? They’re not that dumb. Or send an agent with me to where I live, which is probably six flights up in some crummy mansarde? Nine times out of ten, they’ll weigh the headaches involved against the relative ease of just letting me go, with a warning to watch it in the future.”

  Peter listened with amazement to the wily Pole’s exposition, which sounded irrefutable, like so many statements coming from the East. This was quite different stuff from what they told you at the Embassy, where they advised you to stay glued to your documents and to carry a handprinted card in your wallet saying “I AM PETER LEVI. IN CASE OF ACCIDENT NOTIFY …”—a creepy self-advertisement that Peter could not bring himself to pen, even as an exercise in calligraphy. Yet he wondered how his companion, whose age he estimated at twenty, could know so much more than seasoned American officials. A tendency to boastfulness was becoming more and more evident in Makowski, as Peter, his foil, became meeker and meeker; it was an effect, he noticed, that he seemed to have on people. He was ashamed to think of the mole-like life he had been leading: since he had left his hotel, nobody ever asked him for his passport, except when he was cashing a traveler’s check at American Express—something Makowski, he supposed, would not be caught dead doing. “Number One, they’re lazy,” his mentor continued. “Number Two, they’re interested only in their next meal. If you put those two facts together, you’ve got this country in the hollow of your hand.” He scowled at the distant clock on the Montparnasse station. “Have you noticed—there are hardly any clocks in this town? They hate to give away the time, free.” Peter laughed. He had made the same observation himself. “Ten past twelve,” said Makowski. “The fun here is over. In five minutes, the flics will be knocking off for lunch, and Allee-Allee-Out’s-in-Free.” Appearances bore him out. The Black Marias at either end of the block were still waiting, with open doors, and Peter could still hear an occasional far-off police whistle shrill all by itself like Roland’s horn, but the householders on the rue de Rennes had retired from their balconies, shutting their French windows. On the street the traffic was running normally again, the curious crowds had dispersed, and noontime lines were forming at the bakeries. The two cops on the corner were stamping their feet and looking at their watches. Peter’s own feet were cold. “You want to have a beer in the café here?” he suggested.

  But Makowski was late already for a date with a girl at the Flore. “Why not join us? We can pick up another chick.” Peter was strongly tempted, but he had his plant to take home; he could almost feel it shivering in the autumn wind. Besides, in some crazy way, he felt he owed it to the group in the Black Maria not to leave the scene while they remained in duress, able to watch him depart. Somebody had to hang around, just as a matter of courtesy. “Maybe later,” he said. “If you’re still there.”

  Makowski loped off to the bus-stop. Too late, Peter realized that he had forgotten to ask him for his address, which meant, he guessed, that he was gone beyond recall. He was not sure how much he really liked the Pole, but obviously they had something in common as hyphenated Americans of an uncommon kind: accidentals, they would be called in the bird book. A 95 was coming. He watched Makowski get on, not waiting his turn, of course, but charging past a line of people that had been standing there patiently. Peter was spared the pain of grimly noting their reactions, for just then a small dark student came darting out of a building chased by a concierge with a broom. Peter recognized one of the leaders of the march. His pursuer, an aged Nemesis, was screaming for the police to apprehend him: he had been hiding in the service stairway, she panted, and he had done p.p.—“Oui, il a fait pipi dans mon escalier de service!” Immediately, a new throng materialized, laughing and passing the word along, as the boy dodged into a doorway. What floor, a joker demanded. “Le sixième, monsieur,” she answered with dignity, resting on her broom and regaining her breath; the gendarmes advanced. “Il n’était pas pressé,” an old man in a tweed overcoat said, winking, to Peter. “Il n’était pas pressé, hein?” the old man repeated, to a workman in a coverall. More people came, pushing and shoving, and the criminal profited from the confusion to race out, zigzag adroitly between them, and spring with a bound onto the bus, which had started to move as the traffic light turned green; the ticket-taker, like a trained confederate, had quickly released the chain barring entrance to the platform. The boy ducked into the interior of the bus.

  The police were slow in reacting; they stood as if mystified on the sidewalk, evidently not grasping where their quarry had got to. Then whistles blew. The cop on the next corner waved to the bus to halt. Peter ground his teeth. It was a tricky intersection, where three streets met—what the Romans called a trivium—an ill-omened juncture. And there were cops, all of a sudden, on every corner. From where he stood, he was unable to see exactly what happened next, but in a minute the forces of order were dragging the tall Pole to the lettuce-basket.

  At first, Peter was simply stunned. It seemed plain to him that everyone except the stupid police must see that they had got the wrong boy. Yet no one moved to interfere. The concierge of the violated building stood nodding with satisfaction as Makowski was tossed into the paddy-wagon. A wild conjecture passed through Peter’s head: could Makowski be doing a Sydney Carton? The Poles were alleged to be quixotic. In any case he decided to wait until the bus had crossed the boulevard Raspail, bearing the small demonstrator to safety. Then he counted twenty and approached a gendarme. To his surprise, he did not feel his customary worry about making mistakes in French; the words came out as though memorized ahead of time from a phrase book for the emergency, and in the back of his mind he recalled with interest the saying of Kant
: the moral will operates in man with the force of a natural law.

  “Pardon, monsieur l’agent; je peux témoigner pour mon compatriote. Il n’a pris aucune part dans la manifestation. Il ne s’est pas caché dans l’immeuble de madame. Il était à côté de moi, tout le temps, sur la chaussée, en simple spectateur. Et il ne ressemble en aucun détail au jeune homme que vous cherchiez.”

  The gendarme he was addressing had been joined by two others. Silence. They seemed to be waiting for Peter to continue. But he had stated the facts Makowski had been standing next to him on the sidewalk during the entire demonstration; he did not bear the slightest resemblance to the suspect they were after. “C’est tout,” he added hoarsely. “Croyez-moi.” The kids in the Black Maria had slid forward to listen. Makowski was smiling strangely. Peter became aware that he had said “pavement” when he meant “sidewalk.” “Je veux dire le trottoir.” Without warning, he had started to tremble violently; he saw the Fatshedera quaking in his hand and realized that he was having an attack of stage fright. It was like the time he had played Jaques in school and had had to lean against a tree in the Forest of Arden and all the scenery shook. He had not grasped at first why the audience of boys and parents were laughing—“Sembrava un bosco di pioppi tremoli,” was his father’s comment: “A Forest of Aspens.” It came to him now that all these people were staring at him dumbstruck because he looked weird with his tall companion-plant; the cops probably thought he was a “case.”