You Deserve Nothing

by Alexander Maksik

  I nodded. “He’s the first person for a long long time that’s really got to me, you know? He’s always in my head.”

  “He’s the only reason I’m here today. No offense, but last year, I wouldn’t have been here. On a Saturday? Sorry but fuck that. I’d still be asleep.”

  As we arrived on the place, a massive crowd was moving slowly up the Boulevard du Temple. All along were cheering spectators. We pushed in and stood at the edge of the sidewalk where we watched as wave after wave of protesters came up the boulevard. Various groups marched behind their banners—socialists, Union des étudiants juifs de France, other student unions, Democrats Abroad, Marxists, communists, Christians for Peace, Iraqi refugee groups, Hezbollah, Americans Against the War. There were girls wrapped in rainbow peace flags who danced unaffiliated. They held speakers above their heads and sang “Imagine.”

  I watched stern-faced men and women marching behind bright-yellow Hezbollah banners decorated with green fists clutching AK-47s. Bouncing university hippies flashing peace signs followed behind and I felt I was in the midst of something important, but I was chilled when I saw those yellow flags, having been taught early in life to fear Hezbollah, and to hate it. Standing so close, I felt immersed in a dangerous and exotic world. I was part of a true rebellion. All of us were together there in the greatest city in the world, all of us from everywhere, raging against the world’s bullies. Raging, engaged, participating in something. We were there. Present. Alive. I knew he’d be proud of me. For chanting “Non à la guerre, non à la guerre,” my fist in the air. And my parents? If they’d known I was cheering as Hezbollah marched past, they’d have been furious. American diplomat father, Jewish mother—with all our time spent in Arab countries, the ever-present anti-Semitic undercurrents, and then those years in Israel. They’d have been furious. Cheering was an ecstasy. Louder and louder I chanted “Non à la guerre, non à la guerre,” until the refrain took on a violence all its own. Colin leaned against a lamppost, smoked and watched the scene, keeping his eye on a group of hippie girls dancing braless a few yards away.

  “Really into this, aren’t you, mate?” he yelled.

  I turned to him, my throat raw, and nodded. “Got to be engaged,” I told him, mimicking Silver.

  “Fuckin’ right,” he said, bowing his head and putting his fist in the air.

  Flowing from Boulevard du Temple, the protesters spilled out onto the place, which served as a sort of estuary. The order the boulevard provided to the marchers was immediately lost as they flowed outwards around the statue of la République. Banners, which had earlier been drawn tight, drooped. Now red-shirted communists filtered among dancing rainbows. Eventually the last straggling protesters arrived, followed by city workers methodically picking up garbage, spraying the asphalt clean. And behind them a slow parade of CRS was flanked by their creeping blue vans.

  People distributed leaflets, chanting, screaming into megaphones. What had been a single massive protest had become a sea of smaller ones. We found a man selling sausages, bought our lunch, and ate sitting on a curb.

  “Who are all these people?”

  “Don’t know, man.” Colin shook his head.

  “They’re so into it.”

  “I bet most of them are just here for the fucking party. I mean look at those girls running around with their rainbow flags. In a couple years they’ll be looking for a job in a bank just like all the rest of us. Maybe those hairy fucking Marxists are in for the long ride, and those guys with the AK-47 flags, but mostly? Come on, it’s a street party.”

  “Those guys were Hezbollah,” I said, watching members of the Union des Étudiants Juifs de France form a small group across the street. “Anyway, maybe you’re right, but I’ve never seen anything like this, man. Look at how young most of them are. They’re like us. They’re out here.”

  The students wore white t-shirts with the words Juifs Contre la Guerre written across their chests. They were talking, laughing, leaning on their signs. They had a sort of glow, which I saw then as one of purpose and confidence. It was the same look I saw in a thousand people that day. Faces that seemed to radiate certainty, a passion for their cause, they were out there doing what they believed in. Living their beliefs, assuming responsibility, acting in accordance with their desires. They were all the things I was sure I was not. They were all the things that Silver expected us to be. As the crowd grew, there was a slow rise in volume, megaphones raised to the sky, chanting from across the place. I watched the faces, the backslapping camaraderie, and felt, yet again, challenged by a world that existed outside of myself, by a version of life I was not part of, a version of life I saw as infinitely more pure than my own, and by the growing sense that it was a life I’d never possess.

  I wanted to say something like this to Colin. I wondered if those people I saw as young, fiery, passionate examples, tempted him, seduced him the way they did me. I turned and was about to speak when, a hundred meters away, I saw Silver forcing his way through the crowd. I watched him weave in and out, moving in our direction. He stopped on the other side of the gathering Jewish student union to wait in line for a sausage.

  “Silver’s here,” I said not looking away.

  “Fuck off, where?”

  I nodded toward the sausage stand. It thrilled me to have this new power. To watch him, as Colin joked, “in his natural habitat.” I was fascinated. I watched the way I’d watch him waiting for the métro. But it also felt as if I were somehow betraying him. Suddenly the day felt delicate and fragile. I held my breath, waiting to see what he’d do. I expected something horrible, or I feared it.

  To our right there was loud laughter. A small group of tough-looking kids was standing in the street. Poor and from the suburban cités you saw all over Paris. They were the angry, swaggering kids Nicolas Sarkozy would, three years later, refer to as racaille and promise to clean out of France. They hung around métro stations, stole purses, harassed single women, rode the RER, mugged young kids, and fueled the xenophobia that was rampant throughout the country.

  I felt a shift in the mood of the crowd. People slowly began to move away and I had a clear view.

  “This isn’t good,” I whispered to Colin.

  “No, mate,” he said, straightening.

  Sitting with him I felt protected. He was small, but he could fight. I once watched him break the nose of a kid who’d tripped him in a lunchtime soccer game. I’d seen him take on Ariel. But this was something different, another level. This was not school. It was the world.

  I watched several of the kids tie patterned kaffiyehs around their faces as they began to taunt the Jewish students across the street.

  “Sales Juifs,” they yelled, spitting on the ground for punctuation.

  “Allez vous faire foutre, putains de Juifs.”

  The Jewish students didn’t react at first. They ignored the taunts and pretended not to hear. But nearby the crowd went quiet. Now there was a pocket of meanness amidst wild celebration. My heart was pounding.

  “Espèce de sale Juif, je vais me faire ta sœur,” a gangly kid in a Gucci T-shirt yelled, his face hidden behind a red-and-white kaffiyeh.

  There was little reaction. They stiffened at the vulgar taunting but otherwise continued to talk to one another. We stood up. There was too much violence in the air.

  Nothing happened.

  And then I watched as a short kid in a Nike cap hurled an empty beer bottle against the opposite curb. It exploded and sent shards of glass flying into the small group across the street. Finally one of them spoke. A tall guy with short curly hair turned around and said, “Ça suffit.”

  “C’est à moi tu parles, connard?”

  I’d forgotten briefly about Silver, who appeared just to the side of the students. He stepped quickly through the crowd to the curb where, perhaps for the first time, he was confronted with the source of the yelling. He held a sausage in one hand, his lips slightly parted as if he were on the verge of speaking.

  Silver�
��s presence calmed me and while I felt less afraid I also knew, in the moment I saw him there, that I was a coward. I knew it absolutely. He’d come to remind me, to show me what I was.

  What kind of person are you? he’d asked us in class. I was the kind of person who stayed still, who remained motionless while every bully in the world stormed forward in a blur of violence. I stood humiliated, paralyzed, and trembling with anger. I turned to those idiot kids. I stared at them.

  I would walk to the tall one with the scarf around his face. I’d step off the curb while all the rest of these frauds with their placards and slogans did nothing, stood waiting for something to happen. I’d defend myself. I’d defend all of us.

  I put on an angry face, hoping he’d glance my way and see my outrage, see that I was on the edge of action. Two of the kids in kaffiyehs stepped off the curb into the street, one of them holding a metal bar in his hand.

  They were only a few feet from Silver, who stood still on the edge of the curb.

  The tall student from the Jewish union said nothing. A few others stood at his side. One of them, a young girl, sexy I’d thought earlier, with long blond hair tied back in a loose ponytail, screamed, “Vas te faire foutre!” Her face was flushed and she was shaking. Someone grabbed her wrist and told her to be quiet. She pulled her hand away and faced the two men.

  The one holding the metal bar said, grinning, “Quand je te sauterai, tu parleras moins fort, salope.”

  Someone in the crowd drew in a quick breath of horror. I looked at Silver. He wouldn’t allow this, I thought. The tall student looked out at the silent crowd facing him and shook his head, disgusted.

  The guy with the bar turned as if just then noticing his audience. He spread his arms out, raised his shoulders. Looking for a challenge, daring one of us to respond. When he turned to me, I looked away.

  He swiveled, searching, a smirk on his face, gauging the people surrounding him. The tall student stepped off the curb and walked toward the man with the bar who, when he saw him coming, swung it evenly, hitting him hard in the ribs. The student doubled over, holding his hand to his side.

  Silver stepped into the street and yelled, “Arrête!”

  The man with the bar looked at him, surprised. “Quoi? Qu’est-ce que tu vas faire?”

  They stared at each other. For a moment no one moved. Then with two hands he pushed the bar against Silver’s chest, throwing him backward where he tripped and fell into the crowd. He took a step forward with the bar raised. Silver flinched, covering his head with his arms. The guy spit, tossed the bar to his friend, raised his fists and said, “Viens, tapette.” Silver, staring back blankly, his face red, camera hanging over his shoulder, never raised his fists.

  “Viens.” He beckoned. “Pédé, va!” he said, and spit in Silver’s face.

  Cheek wet, he didn’t move.

  There was a strange silence, a radiating pressure. I remember thinking how odd it was that all of this was happening in the open that way, in dazzling daylight, all of us held down by fear.

  The man turned to look at us again, and when he did the tall student came from behind and punched him hard in the side of the head.

  And just before everything exploded, before the students rushed onto the street trying to protect their friend, bleeding on the asphalt, before the CRS came tearing through the crowd, dressed like storm troopers in full riot gear, before the short one who’d thrown the bottle grabbed the blond girl by the hair and threw her to the ground, I saw Silver wipe the spit from his cheek and disappear into the crowd.

  Colin grabbed my arm and pulled me away. The CRS came from all sides swinging batons. There were skirmishes throughout and whatever sense of peace, whatever illusion of order there’d been an hour before, had turned now to frenzy.

  Later a truck would arrive with water cannons to knock rioters off their feet. Metal tear gas canisters landed with hollow rattling clicks and the air filled with white.

  It seemed to me it was the moment Silver turned away from us and disappeared that the Place de la République fell into chaos.

  * * *

  That evening I sat on a bench in the Square Laurent Prache not wanting to go home. I thought about Silver teaching “Dulce et Decorum Est.”

  “Read this,” he said, “so as not to forget there’s a war coming.”

  “‘Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots / Of gas-shells dropping softly behind,’” he read. “What’s interesting here? What surprises you?”

  Hala knew immediately. “Softly,” she said. “He says, ‘softly.’”

  “So, why is that interesting?”

  “Softly. It’s like gentle, calm. It doesn’t fit. You have all of these horrible images—‘froth-corrupted lungs’ and ‘vile, incurable sores’ but then there’s this one word in the whole poem that’s, I don’t know, peaceful.”

  He smiled at her and nodded. “So why does he do it?”

  “The gas is a relief,” Colin said.

  “How?”

  “It saves them. They get to die, man. ‘Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots / But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;’ I mean who wants to live like that? Look, they’ve been marching with their dried-blood shoes, they’re totally broken, and they’ve got this stupid idea that they’re doing something honorable and here’s a way out, this canister.”

  “Like an angel,” Lily said. “Landing softly to save them.”

  “Good. Great, yes. Anything else?”

  “The green?” Jane ventured.

  “Go on.”

  “‘The misty panes and thick green light, / As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.’ All that, it’s, I don’t know, peaceful too. The green, the sea, the panes, it feels calm and slow and even the drowning seems, I don’t know, like a relief, like the speaker is almost envious of his escape.”

  “What escape? Death?”

  “Yeah,” Cara said, looking up from beneath her black hair. “Like he’s lucky to die. He doesn’t have to make a decision, he doesn’t have to deal with stopping, he just gets to die. No choice. No choice at all.”

  It went on like that. We consumed that poem. We were, by the end of class, furious at the war, at the hypocrisy of government, or whatever it was we were furious about. It didn’t matter. It was that ecstasy of legitimate anger that mattered, and the thrill of doing it ourselves, unraveling a poem, so many of us in it together and Silver so proud, pacing around, driving us forward.

  Sitting beneath the trees now in St. Germain-des-Prés I kept hearing those tear-gas canisters clattering against the asphalt at République. Such a vacant sound. People running in fear. So much chaos. I couldn’t comprehend the distance between who we were that day in his classroom and who we were now.

  I read from his packet of Camus essays.

  It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.

  It was nearly dark and I was very cold. There was a man lying on a bench opposite me, wrapped in an old blanket with a wool hat pulled down to cover his whole face. I watched him and imagined I had the courage to spend the night there in the park. I’d never go home. Just take a breath and fade away. No phone calls. I thought about the man I’d seen pushed in front of the train. I’d pasted the article into my notebook. Christophe Jolivet was dead in a second. I thought about the sound of the train hitting his body and how it was so different from the one the metal bar had made against that kid’s ribs.

  Il n’y a qu’un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux: c’est le suicide.

  In pretending that I had the courage to sleep in the garden with this faceless man and Picasso’s bronze of Dora Marr, I also imagined I had it within me to kill myself. But I didn’t have
the courage for either. And I was perfectly aware, even at seventeen years old, how ridiculous I was sitting in St. Germain-des-Prés clutching Camus pretending to contemplate suicide. I was freezing and soon I’d go home.

  For a moment, I thought I might call Silver. Maybe he’d take me in, let me sleep on his couch for a while, until I figured things out. But of all I’d seen that day, all I’d proven to myself about my own character, what haunted me most was that single image: Silver turning away, his hand rising to his cheek to wipe the saliva from his face. What had I expected?

  When he came forward and cried out, I felt such relief. This would be the end of them, the end of all of it. I knew Colin thought the same. In that moment, he was ours. Righteousness had arrived in a sea of ugliness.

  But there was nothing more. What he had to give he gave. It was an inch more than the rest of us, a brief scream. Arrête. And then there was nothing but a diminishing wave of inertia leaving Silver standing there in the street, mute, as we all were, with fear. I saw him stumble backward, refuse to fight, and turn away. Gone.

  I couldn’t call him. There was nowhere to go but home. Nowhere I had the courage to go.

  A round man in a long black coat opened the garden gate. He walked to the bum lying on the bench and gently shook his foot until the man woke, pushed his cap above his eyes and sat up. He gathered his blanket, picked up a pack from behind the bench and limped silently out of the garden. The man in the coat glanced up at me.

  “Le jardin ferme, je vais vous demander de partir monsieur, s’il vous plait,” he said.

  I nodded and stood up, pulling my backpack over my shoulder. He held the gate for me and smiled as I walked past. “Bonne soirée,” he said, sliding a key into the lock.

  I went home. The apartment was warm and smelled of roasted chicken. I was hungry and the warmth of the place, the lit candles in the living room, the Bach cello suite playing on the stereo all made me grateful, in spite of myself, to be home. I’d imagined slipping into my room undetected. But now I listened to that doleful, keening cello, my cheeks warm with cold. The great strength I imagined I might possess upon my return home was lost.