by Adam Thorpe
There were beds at one end of the attic. I was surprised to discover people sleeping in them. One of them opened his eyes, looked at me, groaned, and went back to sleep, smacking his lips with a noise like water going down a plug.
Above the beds were huge, round beams with crooked nails hammered in and smaller beams running the other way against old planks; I could hear a rumbling sound through the planks, and weird scraping noises. Dirty ashtrays were scattered about, along with old clothes, torn-up posters and magazines, empty bottles of wine, a plastic bowl with a brownish liquid in it, a guitar with a broken string, the chrome bumper of a car and, for some reason, the warning sign for a skiddy road.
When I looked back at the other end of the attic, I saw that my sister and Van had disappeared. I hadn’t heard them go.
A blown-up photograph of a girl burning the American flag, the flames almost touching her hand, decorated the crumbly end wall. There was a portrait of Che Guevara, rays of light pouring from the star in his cap. Lots of posters in Van’s curvy writing were stuck up: some of them showed naked women with large pointed bosoms standing in a kind of flame, others the face of Chairman Mao or a silhouette of General de Gaulle hanging somebody.
I wandered back to the silk-screen table and heard funny little cries through the cloth wall, as if somebody was being beaten. It went on and on.
I thought at first it was Carole, and that she was in trouble, but then I heard her laugh.
‘Yes yes yes yes,’ she cried, which reminded me of the song that my mother liked to sing to herself, half under her breath.
Oui oui oui, oui oui oui, ouiiiiiii
Nous ferons le tour du monde
Avec mon trois-mâts joli
Oui oui oui, oui oui oui, ouiiiiiii
It kept going through my head as if my head was a jukebox. About ten minutes later Carole and Van came out through a split in the cloth wall. Probably, I thought, they had been drinking wine together.
‘OK, let’s go, at any rate,’ said Van.
He didn’t seem much happier, although his cheeks were rosy and his shirt had a big dark patch of sweat on the front.
He picked up a wine cork and started rubbing the painted letters with it while Carole watched, her eyes all shiny. The gum came away in little white balls, so that the letters and the funny scribble became the gauze of the screen. I didn’t understand. He placed the screen on the printing table, went over to the window and opened it. Then he walked up to one of the beds, kicked at the blanket, told the person inside that we were printing and came back to the table. The person in the bed called out something rude and said he was ill.
‘You’re not ill,’ said Van, ‘you had too many bloody drugs.’ He turned to me. ‘OK, kid,’ he said, ‘you take it over from that overdone slob.’
He took one of the huge, heavy rolls of paper, with our help, and lowered it on the far side of the printing table. Then he unrolled the paper so that it passed under the screen on the table and dangled over the other side. Carole held the paper so that it was stretched taut, looking at him the whole time like a goody-goody looks at a teacher. He never once looked at her, though.
‘Take the end, kid. Don’t let it roll up. What they left after they printed Le Figaro two nights back. The fascists throw it out, you know? They get to the end of the print-run, and they throw out all the fucking newsprint what’s left. It’s called feeding the revolution. Better than paper table cloths from Maxim’s, hey?’
He laughed. It sounded like an old car starting. I took the end of the roll of paper from Le Figaro, wondering why he was being so rude about my uncle’s newspaper.
‘OK, at any rate, we can begin for the revolution. Let’s go.’
He dribbled some ink near the top of the screen. It was bright red, just like blood. Then, with the squeegee, he dragged the ink down across the gauze in a shiny film, pressing hard with both hands. When he lifted up the screen, there was a poster in red. The poster said:
La VICTOIRE
au Peuple Vietnamien
TOUS contre
les Bombardements U.S.!
His funny gum scribble had become a bomb with a dollar sign on it. I smiled at the trick. Carole told me to walk backwards holding the paper and I did so and then stopped. Van printed another poster. After a few goes, when the words were coming out faint, he dribbled more ink on the screen, my sister pulling on the paper just enough so as not to waste more than a few centimetres in between each poster, and me stepping backwards to keep the newsprint from rolling up. Soon I was by the window, standing in the cool draught of air with a view of shiny roofs.
‘OK,’ Van said, ‘drop it out the damn window.’
‘What?’
‘The paper. The fucking newsprint.’
‘Really?’
‘Like I said, kid. Then you go down to the ground floor and go into the room with a fist painted on the door and go to the window and open it big and wait for the paper to come down and then you take it in and some bloody fairy godmother, maybe that one in bed, will come and help you. OK?’
I nodded and let the paper fall out of the open window. It was very high up and I felt giddy, looking down over the rusty bar. The paper curled slightly, the wet letters flashing in the outside light. My sister took over by the window, keeping the paper taut, while I went downstairs.
The staircase was thin and spiralled down forever, like a whirlpool. The steps seemed to lean towards the hole, and the old banister wobbled; there was a disgusting smell of rotten vegetables mixed up with incense. I reached the ground floor and went into the room with the fist painted on the door. It was empty, but littered with shreds of paper, and there was a big peeling fireplace in which someone had burnt some planks.
I opened the window and leaned out to look upwards. The paper and its bright-red words were fluttering and billowing against the front of the house, dropping down slowly bit by bit. Passers-by were also looking up, surprised, some of them smiling. I felt very important. The paper looked like a long red tongue. The house, I thought, is sticking its tongue out at the city. At the whole world. At the universe. Then the paper came down far enough for me to grab it. The ink was already dry on the first posters. Someone else was in the room now; a thin man with long greasy hair and a stubbly face like a rat’s. He was dressed in a leather jacket with a big sheepskin collar and looked as if he’d just woken up. I couldn’t tell if he was young or old. He didn’t say a word to me, he just stood in the middle of the room and pulled on the newsprint. Then, against a big ruler, he tore the paper neatly between each poster.
A gust of wind came and I heard a loud clapping noise and leaned out of the window again. The long strip of paper was lifting away from the house like a ship’s sail, then collapsing back again. My sister’s tiny face was sticking out at the top of it, four floors up; I gave her a wave. Then I pulled on the paper. I could feel the wind pulling at it, too. I had to be careful not to let the paper crease or tear, holding it by both sides as I kept on drawing it into the room, with the letters underneath. My arms started to ache. I could read the poster backwards through the thin newsprint: La VICTOIRE au Peuple Vietnamien TOUS contre les Bombardements U.S.! La VICTOIRE au Peuple Vietnamien TOUS contre les Bombardements U.S.! La VICTOIRE au Peuple Vietnamien TOUS contre les Bombardements U.S.!
There were now about thirty people staring away in the street. Most of them were laughing and smiling, with one or two shaking their heads as if it was sad. I felt another wave of warm pride, something I had never felt in my life before. If only, I thought, the sail could make the house move like a ship and rise up and fly high into the air, as high as the birds, with Paris spread out far below and the crowds staring up, amazed.
It took another hour to finish. The rat-faced man had by now made a thick pile of posters. He kept muttering to himself or whistling or clearing his throat as he tore the paper. All he said to me now and again was: ‘Kid, keep in step.’
The sail suddenly fell in a clattering flash outside
the window.
‘The end,’ the man said.
I pulled the paper into the room, the last few posters creased and dirtied. I was cold from the open window, and my arms ached, and I had a headache from the smell of the ink. The last poster was cut and the man closed the window.
I went upstairs, the man following behind with the pile under his arms, panting heavily.
‘Not bad, kid,’ said Van. He was swabbing at the screen with a sponge. ‘You done a good job. At any rate, when we win the revolution you can be Minister of Propaganda.’
I said I was thirsty and Van shouted down through the door in what I guessed was Dutch or English. A teenage girl came up about a quarter of an hour later with a dented bottle of Evian, although it tasted like tap water. She had also brought some beer, which Van and my sister drank. The girl, who was very thin in the face and dressed only in a long purple jumper, sat cross-legged at their feet, like a beggar in the street. She kept smiling all the time and stroking Van’s ankle as if she was in love with him – though he took no notice, scratching his hair under his hat as if he had nits. She stretched the jumper to her bare knees, covering her thighs like a tent. I thought how that would ruin the jumper – Maman was always telling me off for stretching my sweaters. I started to grow bored, trying to warm myself up in a rough blanket, squatting under it like a Red Indian.
Just when I thought I was going to go mad, Van stood up and sorted the posters into piles of about forty. He gave us our forty and told us we were to meet the others in Rue de Villesexel at midnight. The rat-faced man made jokes about the name and Van told him to shut up. We were going to operate in the Faubourg St Germain, he said, which is the very heart of the heart of the enemy, we would probably see Pompidou having a shit, OK? We bundled the roll of posters into a plastic bag. Van disappeared behind the curtain, slapping off in his broken tennis shoes. I don’t think he said goodbye, just as he didn’t say hello. The girl was cleaning things up a little as we left, walking over the mess in bare feet, while the rat-faced man had gone back to bed in his leather jacket.
We went out into the street and the noise was like a smack on the face, though the air was so fresh after the attic that it was as if we were visiting the country, not the centre of Paris. It was already dark. We went to a smoky café for an hour and then ate a croissant from a stall. My sister talked the whole time, as if nervous, with the big plastic bag at her feet. Van was a sad guy, she said, but she could understand why his wife left him. She added that marriage was stupid, anyway, a sentimental bourgeois invention that would soon be extinct.
‘If the flicks stop us, by the way, we’ll be done for,’ Carole said. ‘These posters would nail us to the wall. We’d be better to run, OK?’
‘Why is it the heart of the enemy, where we’re going?’
‘Because the Ministries are there. That’s the government. It has all its crap there. Twice a day you can’t see the pavement for all the bureaucrats coming out of their rat-holes. And guess who’s buried there?’
‘Papa?’
She laughed. ‘You know he’s buried in Bagneux cemetery!’
‘OK.’
‘Napoleon, that’s who. The biggest fascist of them all.’
‘Papa – I mean, Oncle Alain, he’s got medals with Napoleon on. You can collect them in garages on the motorway.’
‘Yeah. Exactly.’
‘I think they’re made of real gold,’ I added.
We took the métro to the Invalides without paying, and walked past what Carole told me was the Ministry of Defence, lugging the heavy plastic bag between us. We arrived in the narrow street where we were to meet the others. There was no one around, only a cat. I felt tired but excited, even a bit afraid because of where we were. It was cold, and my bare knees had goosepimples on them. A lot of clocks chimed midnight, near and far, but not at the same time. Then they chimed again, as if a wedding was on, and after they had stopped it felt very late and lonely. Our heels scraped on the pavement and Carole started swearing softly, as if the others were her enemies now. My eyes started to droop, my head still full of turps and ink and white spirit, and I was desperate for my own warm bed.
Twenty minutes later, a rattling old 2CV came up, echoing off the walls, and someone got out with a bucket. It was the rat-faced man in his leather jacket. The bucket was full nearly to the brim with wallpaper paste and had a big brush hooked onto the side. He would go slowly along next to us in case we needed to make a quick getaway, he told us, in a very loud voice. The others hadn’t turned up.
‘So much for the revolutionary struggle, comrade,’ Carole said.
‘My name’s Jean-Pierre,’ he said, as if it was a joke, and shook our hands.
We started where we were, and continued for two hours. Carole held each poster up against a wall or a lamp post or the shutter of a shop, and I slapped the paste all over it with a few sweeps of the heavy brush. Each poster stuck very satisfyingly, as if by magic, the wetness not ruining it but making it go stiff when it dried; I saw this whenever we went back down the same street. Because of my height, all the posters were lower than usual. Sometimes they creased or tore but we didn’t care too much. I was told not to dive into the car unless we saw a policeman. La VICTOIRE au Peuple Vietnamien TOUS contre les Bombardements U.S.! La VICTOIRE au Peuple Vietnamien TOUS contre les Bombardements U.S.!
Someone dressed like a tramp shouted at us and called us names, and a drunk man in a smart coat and hat tried to put his arm around Carole, asking her to stick a poster on him. Otherwise there weren’t that many people around in the streets we were in; they were full of dark buildings with thick stone sills and tall windows and big doors and stone steps, and there were very few cafés. There were quite a few hairdressers, and a lot of shops that sold antiques and paintings. We made sure we stuck posters on the windows of these shops because they were for rich people. We turned into another street with old-fashioned streetlamps; they were thick enough at the bottom to stick a poster on. We came to a grocery store, a smell of cabbage in front of it and the cobbles all slippery. The columns either side of the window had realistic paintings of fruit and vegetables all the way up. Jean-Pierre got out, holding a spray canister, and sprayed Abbatez les Epiciers on the shutters. My sister said he was crazy and couldn’t spell. He laughed and said he hated spinach.
We wondered whether to stick a poster in front of the Ministry of Defence building, but we agreed we’d be shot. The parked cars, sloped towards the pavement as if sinking, were large and smart and shiny in the lamplight. Carole stuck a poster on one of them, which made my heart beat very fast; the paste dribbled like spit down the curved black bonnet. We came to a church wedged between two houses and Jean-Pierre sprayed Abbattez les Curés on the door. I didn’t say anything but silently asked God to forgive us. At the end of one street we saw what we thought was a policeman under a lamp in a hat and cape; Carole and I dived into the car with the bucket. The 2CV rocked and rattled down the next street, away from the policeman, and the paste slopped about and soaked my trousers and shoes. Jean-Pierre laughed and said it was a great getaway, no? Apart from his eyes, all I could see of him was his sheepskin collar, like a big fleur-de-lys. We got out of the car and my sister put her arm on my shoulder.
‘Hey, you’re really good,’ she said. ‘Really, Gilles. You’re cool.’
I could have gone on flyposting forever after that, but it was two-thirty in the morning and I was shivering in my wet socks and trousers and she decided we’d done enough. Only a few posters were left, by now.
We camped in one of her friend’s rooms, the rat-faced man dropping us off, the swaying of the car sending me to sleep in the back seat. I didn’t feel at all tired after this nap: it was as though the excitement had filled me with black coffee, though my hands were cold and raw and the paste had run down my sleeves.
I was very tired, though, when I got back to Bagneux, and my mother was worried. She sat with me over her Caro and asked me what time I had gone to bed.
> ‘Why?’
‘Because you look worn out.’
La VICTOIRE au Peuple Vietnamien TOUS contre les Bombardements U.S. kept repeating itself in my head, like a record with a scratch. I shrugged.
‘About eleven,’ I said, carefully – knowing that this was late, for her.
‘That’s late,’ she said. ‘That’s too late. What were you doing?’
‘Oh, just getting into trouble,’ I said.
‘Don’t be cheeky. What were you really doing?’
I deliberately hesitated. ‘OK, playing boring vingt-et-un, as usual.’
La VICTOIRE au Peuple Vietnamien TOUS contre les Bombardements U.S.!
‘In her flat, I hope, not in a bohemian café.’
I nodded slowly, and sneezed.
‘I hope you wrapped up properly,’ she went on, handing me a Kleenex. ‘Carole doesn’t think about that sort of thing—’
‘I did,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t cold.’
‘Your hands are all red and chapped, look. Has she been getting you to do all her washing-up? I’ll bet she does. I’ll bet that’s why she likes you to come over, so you can do all her dirty dishes from the last few weeks – that’s it, isn’t it?’
I half-shrugged, as if feeling the weight of the martyr. The fact is, Carole didn’t own a single dish, let alone a sink. My mother sighed.
‘Well, there’s not a lot I can do to help you. I’d be lucky if you did the same here, I can say that for sure.’
One of the posters was rolled up in my bag: Carole had let me take one. I took it out upstairs in my room. It looked strange, here, like something dropped down from outer space. I hid it right under my bed, behind some boxes where not even my mother’s vacuum head would find it.
For the next few days I was careful to watch the news on television. I was sure the American bombings would stop, now, after all our efforts. My mother and uncle were pleased to see me take an interest in what they called ‘the wider world’. The bombings went on, from what I could understand. The films and pictures were not very clear and the reporter kept using long words.