Blue Lorries (7 page)

Gérard took me to the Sorbonne University courtyard. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘with us standing in the courtyard, is where the demonstrations of Friday the third of May took place. From here, on Monday the sixth of May, the eight students marched, singing the National Anthem; they passed through the ring of policemen encircling the campus on their way to the disciplinary hearing. The demonstration heated up and spread into other parts of Paris. While the procession was making its way back into the Latin Quarter, the police attacked it. So the demonstrators began throwing stones they picked up from the street, overturning cars and erecting barricades. Heated clashes ensued, and these were repeated in the days that followed. It wasn’t only the students who were setting up barricades, but the residents of the neighbourhood as well; workers, housewives, and passersby all pitched in, supplying stones, planks of wood, rubbish bins, and iron bars. The battles raged all through the night, and house-raids went on all night, too. The police would raid a house and set upon the person they were after with their cudgels and beat him, then carry him out by force and throw him into one of their cars, then move on to the next address.’

We stood in front of the university buildings, which were tranquil now, but in my imagination, and in Gérard’s words, they were crowded with demonstrators and police, vivid with slogans and banners.

‘I’ll show you where traces of the battles can still be seen.’

We headed toward Rue Gay-Lussac.

Gérard went on at length, as we walked along the boulevard, and in the succeeding days, telling me about the battles that had taken place in this street on ‘Bloody Monday’. He would talk about the violence of the police, the students’ resistance, how many were wounded on both sides, and how many arrested. I would see with my own eyes some of the slogans scrawled on the walls: ‘Let our comrades go!’ ‘Down with the police state!’ ‘Down with capitalist society!’ ‘Long live the workers’ assemblies!’ Out of the dozens of slogans, there were three, written in heavy black marker on the walls of one of the buildings, that would bring me to a halt. One of them said: ‘Be realistic – demand the impossible!’ The second: ‘Let us form committees for dreams!’ The third: ‘When they test you, answer with questions!’ (Later I would write them on the walls of my room in Cairo, and beside them I would hang the two posters Gérard gave me.) Also in rue Gay-Lussac I could see the shredded remains of posters, or spread-open pages from the newspapers, impossible to read because of the plethora of comments appended to them in red, green, and blue ink, in the margins and between the lines; I also noted that parts of the street had been picked clean of stones.

Gérard continued his story, moving from Nanterre to Paris and from Paris to Nantes, then returning to Paris, and from there to the Renault factories at Billancourt. He told me, ‘The students said . . .’ ‘The workers said . . .’ ‘The students did this . . .’ ‘The workers did that . . .’ I paid close attention, but when the moment came for me to ask questions, I was so afraid of sounding stupid that I held back.

I didn’t notice that we had been walking for hours on end until Gérard said, ‘It’s four o’clock – aren’t you hungry? I’m really thirsty.’

We took a road that delivered us to a broad avenue called rue des Ecoles. (I liked the name, and years later, on subsequent visits to Paris, I would be intent on staying in one of the hotels on this street, because I liked the name and because the memory of that day had stayed with me, recalling that nice boy I liked so much, who had conducted me of his own accord to a realm of knowledge that would change many things in my life, at least for some years to come.)

In the rue des Ecoles, we sat in a café and ordered juice and sandwiches.

I went home to my mother flying high, full of stories and questions. I questioned her, and she filled me in on some of the details, telling me where she had been, what she had heard, and what she had done. (I was surprised to learn that she had taken part in the strike.) I asked her about all those points on which I had wanted to question Gérard, but refrained, for fear of appearing ignorant in his eyes: the locations of certain streets and squares, certain people, and letters I knew were initials standing for the names of organisations or guilds or societies, but I didn’t know what they meant or what they represented. I asked, she replied, and then she brought me a map of Paris and pointed out places. ‘This is the river,’ she said, ‘and here’s the Place de la République, where the main part of the demonstration started out, on Monday the thirteenth of May. And here, on the other side of the river, is the Latin Quarter. This is the Sorbonne’ – with her finger she pointed to the location of the university, to the west of the Latin Quarter. She moved her finger farther, then stopped and said, ‘Here at the southeastern edge is the Censier Centre, the new building of the University College of Humanities, where the pamphlets were prepared and printed. And this is rue des Ecoles, where you were.’

When I told her ‘good night’, she kissed me with a smile that seemed somehow odd to me, saying, ‘You’ve grown up, Nada, and – lo and behold – you’re interested in politics!’ She didn’t say ‘like your father’, but I now believe that the way she smiled had something to do with the words that would have completed her sentence. I finished the sentence for myself years afterward, when she told me that, not quite two decades before the summer of 1968, she had accompanied my father, recently arrived in the city, through the streets of Paris, in order to show him places connected with the soldiers of the German occupation and with the French resistance; and that, some weeks before our reunion, she herself had taken part in the momentous events of Paris.

At the time I didn’t understand my mother’s smile, and the only part of what she said that struck me was that I had become interested in politics, since it hadn’t occurred to me, as I listened to Gérard’s fascinating stories, that he was talking about politics. Despite what I heard that day, and over successive days, of battles, and of people injured and killed and arrested, of house raids, of truncheons, tear-gas, smoke bombs, stones, and barricades, the events seemed more like an exciting film than reality.

Two months into my stay in Paris, I knew to the day and the hour the details of the events of May, the student demonstrations, the street battles, the strikes by the workers at the Renault factory and other industrial sites, the positions of the guilds and the workers’ unions, what was said and done by the president of the university, the Minister of Education, the Minister of the Interior, and the municipal chief of police. It was as if I was a diligent student registered in an intensive academic programme, deriving from it the utmost possible benefit.

I had Gérard to thank for this, my first friend, and perhaps the first young man I became fond of, without realising that this fondness was known as ‘love’. Maybe after all it wasn’t love, but interest and admiration that came close to bedazzlement. I wanted to be with him, I looked forward to it, and I prepared for it; then when we were together I didn’t notice the time passing. He was a tall and slender young man, with rather coarse hair – or maybe it seemed coarse because he left it unkempt. He generally wore the same trousers and jacket, and a pair of athletic shoes. He was seventeen, or thereabouts. I said to him, ‘In two months I’ll be sixteen.’ (I lied, so that he wouldn’t think of me as much younger than he was.) I remember the places where he brought me, I remember the sound of his voice. I remember him telling his story, but I no longer remember his face in any detail, perhaps because I was too shy to look him in the eye or to keep gazing at him while he was talking. My glances at him were always furtive, as if stolen.

Everything Gérard told me was exciting – it stimulated my imagination. The most inspiring scenario of all was his account of what happened at the university after the takeover. The university gates were wide open to whoever might wish to enter. There were heavily attended lectures reviewing consumer society, organised resistance, self-governance, repression, imperialism, ideology and the tactics of disinformation. And in the large auditorium every night, thousands gathered to assess the events of the day and their performance. The dimly-lit corridors of the ancient building were suddenly illuminated with colours and posters and slogans. A photographic exhibition on the night of the barricades. Groups like a beehive whose every cell was busy working on an assignment, gathering its materials and researching the details, one group working on police brutality, a second studying an alternative to the examination system, a third looking into academic freedom, and a fourth, a fifth, a sixth . . . In the university courtyard, where the banners flutter and the young people gather in a circle for discussion and to exchange the writings and pamphlets of their organisations, a piano suddenly appears, on which anyone who wishes and who knows how to play may take a turn.

At our last meeting Gérard gave me a precious gift, which I would bring back with me to Cairo exulting in its value and in the awareness of what it had meant for Gérard to have given up, for my sake, not just one, but two of the posters in his collection. (It was clear when he showed them to me how much he prized them and how proud he felt of having acquired them.) The first poster showed the head of a youth drawn against a black background, with only his eyes visible – wide-open, anxious eyes in a face entirely swathed in bandages from the crown of his head to his neck. Where his mouth should have been a safety pin secured the bandages. The second poster had a white background, and at the top were the words ‘The System’, and at the bottom the rest of the sentence, ‘is safe and sound’; in the space between, halfway down, were two figures drawn in black ink at opposite edges of the poster, carrying between them a stretcher as long as the poster was wide, on which was a person covered by a sheet, dying or already dead.

When we said goodbye, Gérard told me, ‘Nada, I’m very happy to have got to know you. If your mother hadn’t told me that the prevailing custom in your country is completely different from the way things are done here, maybe we could have been friends in another way.’ Then he laughed, ‘I’ve violated one of the basic tenets of the Movement: “Nothing is prohibited except prohibition itself!” But your mother assured me that could completely spoil the relationship, and do real damage.’

I don’t know whether I took out on my mother how upset I was at saying goodbye to Gérard, or how intensely moved I was by his gift, or whether it was in order to make it easier to leave her that I picked a quarrel with her. The moment I walked in the house and saw her I said, ‘What right did you have to say what you said to Gérard? How dare you tell him anything on my account without consulting me? How dare you interfere in my relationships with my friends?’

She replied with a strange calm, as if she was insensible to the magnitude of my anger and of the problem she had caused, ‘You’re only fourteen. That warning was necessary, because the way of life here is different, and especially with this generation of young people it’s totally different. He might have . . .’ I walked out on her before she could finish her sentence. I went into my bedroom and slammed the door.

How dare she appoint herself as my agent? If she hadn’t said what she said, maybe Gérard would have told me he cared for me, that he considered me beautiful, that he was wretched at the prospect of my departure. Maybe he would have liked to take my hand and squeeze it, maybe he would have liked to kiss me. He hadn’t even tried to kiss me on the forehead. No doubt this madwoman had told him our customs didn’t allow it!

My anger imposed itself on our parting the following morning. I said goodbye to my mother coldly, and when she tried to hug me I ducked out of her embrace. I said a curt, dry ‘
Au revoir
’ and I didn’t smile. Then I turned my back on her and walked away.

Chapter seven

Back to Cairo

My anger with my mother didn’t last long, perhaps because I received from Gérard a long letter, very kind and sweet, and from my mother I got a letter in which she apologised to me, saying that she hadn’t meant to hurt me, or to interfere in my business, and that she knew I was now a young woman who ‘understood something of politics’, and could make her own decisions. She repeated, ‘I’m sorry, Sweetheart.’

The two letters imparted to me a calm that allowed me to contemplate the spoils with which I had returned from my trip to Paris for their own sake, despite the unfortunate incident of the night before my departure: the discovery of the concern I felt for my mother, and my intense need of her. Then, too, I was preoccupied with parading my new knowledge before my friends and – more to the point – my father. I would talk at length about how the students raised their red and black banners over the Arc de Triomphe at the heart of Paris; how they took over the university, the College of Fine Arts, and the Odeon Theatre; how they connected with the workers; how the workers went on strike and work came to a stop at the plants and factories; how the transport workers, by striking, were able to bring to a halt Paris’s ground transportation system, and then the trains that connected Paris to other cities. I repeated, ‘Nine million went on strike – can you imagine?’ I would say this with pride, as if I myself had taken part in organising the strike, or even as if I had been one of its leaders. Carried away by my own enthusiasm, I would move on from there to an attack on the enemy: ‘Paul de Roche, he’s the one who . . .’ And, ‘Fouché declared . . .’ And ‘Gremeau said . . .’

He interrupted me. ‘Hold on, Hazelnut, hold on! Who is this de Roche? And who’s Fouché? And the other one, the third name you mentioned – who’s that?’

I puffed up like a turkey. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ I said. ‘Don’t you keep up with the news, Abu Nada?’