by Adam Thorpe
The worst thing was when a girl with long blonde hair suddenly stood up in the middle of the room and started screaming at the policemen about provocations. They went over to her and one of them grabbed her hair as she fought him and pulled her out of the room with it, like a caveman in a cartoon, her heels scrabbling on the floor. People had to get out of the way quickly as she was dragged between them, and no one helped her. The most painful thing is to have your hair pulled; just watching it was worse than being hit and made my eyes water.
My friend the student with long hair and legs joined us and then after about ten minutes we were led through a door out into the rain.
Everything was black for a few seconds, after the fluorescent lighting, and we stumbled a bit across the tarmac. The group suddenly stopped and someone’s heel scraped my shin. I was almost shoved over by the group moving back. I could make out some shiny raincoats and realised that we were being hit again. I tried to hide behind the large woman in the short white coat. A fist in a shiny leather glove went into her and she fell over onto me. The tarmac was very wet and gritty and my shoe came off. I was winded for a few moments as the group scrabbled around me, grunting and panting. I felt around for my shoe and someone stepped on my fingers. I managed to find the shoe and put it on and got to my feet, crouching down as the boots and fists appeared and disappeared. One boot caught me on the thigh and a fist hit me on the chest. It was horrible, being hit in the darkness, but people weren’t making much noise. The faces of the policemen doing it were almost invisible. There was panting and some ‘oofs’ and swearing and the sound of the thumps themselves, but no proper crying out. It was as though everyone was concentrating very hard. I was covered all over with pain, but it was diluted because it was spread over so many areas. My fingers were one far-off country and my shins were another. I had my arms crossed over my face and the cool air made my damp patch feel uncomfortable, even though worse things were rippling all over me.
Then the group moved forward and a door opened and we were forced down a corridor with cells either side, like big cages at the zoo. The light in the corridor was blinding, which made the cells look very dark inside. In one of the cells there was a black man shouting his head off, but the others were empty. A policeman opened a cell door and we all shuffled in and the door clanged shut. People were hanging their heads or shaking them, rubbing the places where they’d been hit. The smart woman had a cut lip and was shivering badly. It was quite cold. There were rude things scribbled on the walls, and lots of names. A policeman stayed the other side of the bars. People began to murmur swear-words and he didn’t tell them to shut up. The nail-biting student asked him if he had a fag, and we all chuckled.
My shin hurt the most, then my fingers, then my ribs, then my ear, then my shoulders. I sat cross-legged in the corner, feeling very tired. The ground was hard and cold, and smelt a bit of urine.
It was like being shipwrecked, on a raft. Most people were sitting down, now. Some were lying. They didn’t mind lying right next to someone else, probably a complete stranger, their bodies touching. An older man was having problems breathing, he kept trembling and trying to catch his breath; someone who said he was a physical education teacher helped him do the right exercises. I asked the person nearest to me where we were. ‘Nanterre,’ he replied, which made me think of Carole dancing nude in the hospital and Khaled finding us water. I wished Khaled could have appeared now. There were a few Arab faces in our group, but not his.
Helmut had gone. I looked over all the bruised faces but he wasn’t there. I’d thought he was in our group but he couldn’t have been, in the end. This was a bad shock, although my friend the joky student with long hair was there. He sat down next to me, trying to stop his nose bleeding again. He talked to me like that, with his head bent right back and his US cavalryman cravat held to his nose. He told me his name was Raoul and I told him mine. He seemed very excited, and I felt that nothing could stop him or even hurt him much. There was blood splashed on his jeans jacket. His long hair curled up on his neck and his Adam’s apple moved up and down as he spoke.
‘This is what you call order, Gilles, right? Remember the Rue des Rosiers! It’s civil war again. We love civil war. It always ends in a massacre. We French love it. Do you know how many Communards they did away with, Gilles? Twenty-five thousand. They had to bring out the machine guns. Our glorious patriotic French troops had to bring out machine guns.’
‘There weren’t machine guns in 1871,’ someone muttered, bad-temperedly.
‘Yes, there were. I know, comrade, I’m a history student. At the Sorbonne, indeed. But they can all go fuck with their exams and lectures and bloody faceless amphitheatres—’
‘How are you going to get on in life, then?’ growled the older man with the squashed trilby.
‘Perpetual insurrection. Permanent revolution of the mind and spirit.’
‘Look where it’s got you. Eh? Or me. Your damn revolution. I was just having a drink.’
A murmuring noise from the others; I wasn’t sure whether for or against.
‘The veil’s lifted, comrade. Now you know how the Gestapo of power operates.’
‘I know all about the Gestapo, young fellow,’ the older man snapped. ‘I was in Paris during the war. Before you were born.’
An older woman nodded and said, ‘I agree.’
‘Give me the CRS any day,’ said the man.
‘OK,’ said Raoul, a bit impatiently, ‘let’s say you know now how the police state and all its socio-cultural structures operate, under their mummy wraps. SS, then Algeria, then CRS, with a nice little retirement villa by the sea at the end of it.’
‘Nothing wrong with a villa by the sea,’ said the older woman. ‘If you can get it.’
‘I lost my brother in Algeria,’ murmured a youngish woman next to me.
‘But we’re still free – free in spirit, comrades,’ Raoul went on, as if they’d said they weren’t. ‘It’s the ancient fossil traces of our essential spirit that’s rising up, now. That’s not me, that’s Antonin Artaud. You know who Artaud is?’
The older man shook his head, obviously unimpressed.
‘This is just the beginning,’ Raoul said, starting to talk very fast and excitedly, as if he liked people being unimpressed. His head wasn’t bent back, now. ‘No, it’s not the beginning, it’s just another moment in a permanent collective creation that’s going to dismantle bourgeois culture for good. Industrial bourgeois culture and its ideology of exploitation. We’re taking up where the Commune left off. Why did it leave off? Because it was crushed by the brutal force of state power. How was it crushed, the Commune? Do you want to know? These were our brothers in suffering, comrades. Do you want to know?’
‘Yes,’ said a girl with her hair in two pony-tails.
‘No I don’t,’ said the smart woman. ‘I’m tired of your voice.’
People laughed. Raoul took no notice. His nose was bleeding again.
‘Right, they took thousands of prisoners. Right? Men, women, children. They marched them past the tribunal. “Did you serve the Commune?” “No, sir.” “Show your hands!” If your hands were dirty, you had about three minutes left of your life. Pan! If they were clean, but you had an interesting face like one of us, Pan! You queued up in front of the execution squad and Pan! – that was your life done away with. Chucked away. In a common ditch.’
‘Like Mozart,’ someone said.
‘Like us,’ said someone else, showing a telephone number on his arm.
‘I can’t believe this is France in 1968,’ said the large woman in a trembly voice, as if Raoul had been talking about now. ‘Wait till my husband hears about it. He’s got influence.’
‘Right, so you reckon you’re innocent, madame,’ Raoul went on. ‘So do they, the tribunal, reckon you’re innocent. Right? The tribunal. The tribunal class you as an ordinary, back in 1871, because you’re not guilty. Nice and ordinary. One car, one washing-machine, two kids and a poodle.’
; We all chuckled. I had the feeling that everyone liked to hear one person speak, like a teacher telling a story. Even the policeman outside the cell was looking in.
‘You’re marched up to Versailles, chained to each other. Maybe tied, it depends. Maybe made to walk on your knees, right? And the nice people of Paris are spitting on you and throwing lumps of shit at you when a few days before they’d have been throwing roses, right? And then? The forces of law and order shoot you anyway. Pan! For being an ordinary. Up in Versailles. Nice, huh?’
‘That’s history,’ said the physical education teacher.
‘This is the present,’ said a black girl with shiny red lipstick. ‘And the future is Africa.’
Everyone looked at her. She suddenly went shy and hid her face.
‘Oh my God,’ she laughed, behind her black hands.
‘It’s all one,’ Raoul said, ‘we’re all one humanity.’
And laughed, as if he was embarrassed at the silence, afterwards.
Later, I quietly asked my friend if we were going to be shot, too.
‘It’s the Revolution, kid. There’s going to be sacrifices. Like Che. You know who executed Che, in Bolivia? In cold blood? The Yanks. The Bolivians went to them and said, What do we do? And the Yanks said, Ya-ha, yip-yip, shoot the Apache bastard.’ His jaw had gone big, like an American’s. ‘Pigs! Our pigs are angry, too, but it’s not just that. It’s organised by fucking little Eichmanns in their centrally-heated offices. The state machine, right? An education system that makes robots. But we’ve got imagination on our side. The barricades of our imagination. The Commune was just one moment in a long, long story, Gilles. Even Che was, even Che. Social warfare goes on for ever, right? It’s up and down, but it’s always there, just waiting. Right? See?’
He showed me his handkerchief, completely red with his blood. He was talking faster and faster. I wondered how his brain could cope.
‘“Omo washes whiter than white,”’ he said, in a high voice, imitating the television advertisement. ‘But only so far. It’s never going to wash this. The red flag, see? It’s never washed the blood of the Commune, has it? There’s only one blood, in the end. Humanity’s blood. You’re privileged, kid. You’re where history is completely in the nude. Right? Completely stripped. She’s beautiful, naked. She’s a beautiful muse. She’s poetry, when she’s all skin.’
‘My mother was left in the car.’
‘Eh?’
‘I’m really worried about her. She was hit on the head.’
Raoul was resting his head against the wall, where rude graffiti were scrawled all over. He suddenly looked tired. He took a match out of the top pocket of his jeans jacket and started chewing the end of it.
‘Don’t worry about mothers,’ he said. ‘Mothers are banned from now on.’
‘Oh, will you please shut up, young man!’ screamed the smart woman. ‘And get your hair cut!’
It was the first time she had spoken. Then she started crying, but no one took any notice. Raoul smiled and lowered his head and murmured something, the match sticking out of the corner of his mouth. But he didn’t say any more.
Nothing happened for ages. The smart woman stopped crying and just sniffed, with someone’s arm around her.
More people were shoved in and the cell got quite crowded, everyone finding their own little space to sit in. Some of them had cigarettes and smoke began to curl up. The one who had reminded me of Van came in and sat down near me. His face was swollen and his hair was longer, but I was more and more certain it was him. He had the same round, gold-rimmed glasses and the same cleft chin under the stubble. He lifted a hand to his face and even in the bad light I could see how his fingers were definitely stained with different colours, like his jacket and his glasses.
He looked in a bad way. I got up and stepped carefully between people to get to him.
‘Van?’
‘Shit, what?’
‘I thought it was you.’
‘You thought wrong. Shit. I’m an empty shell.’
‘It’s Gilles, Carole’s brother. I put up some of your posters a couple of years ago. We went to your attic and—’
‘Yeah, yeah. The Minister of Propaganda.’
His swollen eyes peered at me through the stained glasses.
‘At any rate, fuck, don’t hassle me with your sister.’
‘Why should I hassle you?’
‘Just don’t hassle me with her. She’s crazy, at any rate.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Holy shit. Everyone’s crazy except me. I’m going to India. They’re not crazy in India.’
‘She’s not that crazy,’ I said.
He stared at me and then his big face cracked into a smile. You could see that he never brushed his teeth. He slapped me on the shoulder.
‘Holy shit, maybe she invented the whole crap. At any rate, who cares now? With the revolution started up. I probably got lesions in the cornea from that damn tear-gas shit, I can’t see too well now, your face might be a pancake. Can you see anything in there, Minister of Propaganda? Some lesions in the middles, at any rate?’
He’d unhooked his wire spectacles from his ears and widened his eyes for me to look. His eyes were very blue, but a pale sort of blue, exactly like Nicolas’s. I’d never seen them properly through his smeary spectacles. The watery eyeballs were covered in tiny red veins, and the rims of his eyelids were bloody. My tiny face swimming in each one stared back at me. He kept his mouth open, and his breath was peppery and sour from smoking and not brushing his teeth. I realised he was older than he looked, from the wrinkles in his skin.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Hell, if I’m going blind, at any rate, you know what? I can print nothing on the paper and call it Silence. What about it?’
He laughed, and I pretended to laugh with him. Then he sat back against the bars and held his head in his hands, groaning.
‘What crap did she invent?’ I asked.
‘What?’
‘You said she invented some crap.’
‘Ah,’ he said, waving his hand, ‘all that baby crap. That I was the papa. I don’t believe in that papa and mama crap. I’m going to India. Did she take the pills?’
‘Pills?’
‘To deal with it. I gave her the pills. Out of my own wallet. My very own wallet. I paid for the pills, and she don’t even thank me. You know how much they’re costing?’
‘No.’
‘From Holland, they are. Fifty-one guilder. Fifty-one! I was cheated by my own friend, this doctor guy in Delft. Rich women, he’s dealing with. They don’t want their baby, poof! Magic pills. Forty, I should be paying. Instead, it’s fifty-one. Shit. Because he’s dealing always with the rich women. Everyone cheating everyone. I’m going to India, at any rate.’
‘Pills? You mean drugs?’
‘Poof! Magic. Baby hit on the head by the pills. Finished. Finito. I like to help my friends. I’m going to Katmandu. I’m going to look at the mountains with all that snow on them and I’m going to stand in the wind and let the fucking clean wind clean my head out of all the shit—’
I went back to my place while he was still talking, trying not to step on arms and legs. After a while I glanced over at him. He was asleep, his mouth open. I was having problems breathing – it was like being underwater, listening to him telling stupid lies about Carole and babies. I sat cross-legged and filled my lungs right up, but the air was sort of thick and sticky.
I tried not to look at him any more. Raoul was talking away, quietly, to the girl with two pony-tails next to him, his hand gesticulating like a conjuror’s. He still had the match sticking out of the corner of his mouth, and it moved up and down as he talked. She just kept nodding, arms around her knees. People kept saying they were innocent and that they were going to complain, but others said that there was only the police to complain to. A student in thick glasses said that the concept of innocence was meaningless in a guilty society. Everyone was thirsty. The floor got harder and har
der and the air thicker and thicker. The policeman was asked for water but he just turned his head away. The man with the telephone number on his arm kept chuckling to himself, as if he’d just told a joke.
It was one o’clock, then two o’clock. People sang songs. I recognised some of them. They sang the Serge Gainsbourg one about the ticket-man in the métro punching little holes and I sang quietly along with them because I knew most of the words. Someone was English and sang a Beatles song and then Blowin’ in the Wind, which I knew from my sister’s records. He had a bad voice but a lot of people were humming and it made me want to cry. Another political discussion started, but I was so sleepy that the words didn’t mean anything. I don’t know why, but I expected my uncle to appear and take me away. I was desperate to go to the toilet; something had given me the runs and I had tummy-ache from stopping it. From the smell in the cell, I obviously wasn’t the only one. At first the new policeman didn’t let us go to the toilet, but after a while several other policemen appeared and let us go, one by one. They didn’t hit us.
It was my turn, at last. The toilet was at the other end of the corridor. I passed empty cell after empty cell. The stink went right down my throat; the toilet didn’t have any paper and the places each side of the hole with the shape of your feet were smeared with brown stuff. I couldn’t believe it was what I thought it was. I crouched down, anyway, keeping my feet off the porcelain, feeling so filthy I wouldn’t have minded dying. I half-missed the hole because of my position, which was what everyone else had done, obviously. The chain didn’t work. I was very thirsty but the tap was broken. Somebody had written Dieu est mort with a Biro on the wall, which was the worst thing I’d ever read. It looked new.
The two policemen walked me back and then it was the smart woman’s turn. We heard her arguing at the end of the corridor, becoming hysterical, and then a smacking noise. She didn’t come back. I could smell my dirtiness.