The Dreamers (12 page)

The world at large, meanwhile, the world whose average, upright citizens they shunned and were shunned by, the world which came to a halt at the flat’s bolted front door as though no longer daring to put a foot inside, that world too, for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear, was treading air. How else to explain the telephone’s stillness, the drum roll of footfalls
reverberating
from the pavement below the bedroom window then just as suddenly pitter-pattering into silence, the city traversed by ambulance and fire-engine and
police-car
sirens, criss-crossing one another in the night,
traversed
as well by what sounded like explosions, even if these were never more than half-audible, like bombs detonated under glass?

And these noises, deadened, anaesthetised, heard as one hears things when cupping one’s hands over one’s ears before releasing them, these footfalls, sirens,
explosions
, this shattered glass, this whole end-of-the-world pandemonium, served as an accompaniment to the game’s very last phase when, clinging arm to arm, Théo,
Isabelle and Matthew would descend – or, rather, ascend – into Hell.

The flat was still, silent, sealed as tight as a coffin. The air was fetid. No ray of light pierced the bedroom
curtains
. Isabelle lay lengthwise on the bed, her head dangling upside-down, her hair brushing the carpet, her feet, as though foreshortened, those of a hanged man. Théo was curled up against her, a lock of lank hair obscuring his eyes. Matthew sat cross-legged on the floor, his head hung forward, his face and breast, like those of a Red Indian, blazoned with crosses,
crescents
and looping, curling lines, traced out in
excrement
.

Theirs was no longer the elegant entanglement of a monogram but the ghastly, grey-green quiescence of the Raft of the Medusa.

Nothing could detain them any longer, travellers as they were across a Lethe as polluted as any other river.

Whether dead or merely asleep, they were not to be awakened by any crude, external alarms, not by any of the sirens, explosions, cries, screams, cheers,
bowling-alley
thumps, screeching tyres, whistles and songs which were none the less drawing closer and closer to them. As in a dream, as in a snowdrift, as in an avalanche of cocaine, the longueurs of eternity had already blanketed each of the occupants of this first-floor flat near the place de l’Odéon.

Then suddenly, like Peter Pan, the street flew in through the window.

A small paving stone, hurled up from underneath, came crashing into the bedroom. It sprayed the bed with fragments of glass. It landed on the record-player. It shattered the Trenet record.

They were not dead.

Through the star-shaped gash in the window bobbed a cold and misty sun. Noise, light and air transformed the room, the noise earsplitting, the light blinding, the air intoxicating.

They opened their eyes. With the gait of astronauts inside an airtight chamber, they unsteadily pulled
themselves
to their feet. In slow motion they advanced towards the window, drawn to it as though about to be sucked out into space, one foot floating above the floor on which the other would alight with a muffled tread. Théo slipped. Isabelle overtook him. Matthew stumbled into the Empire table lamp. Its bulb exploded without making a sound.

They reached the window. Drawing the curtains apart, Théo opened it and stared down into the street. This, the full length of the narrow, meandering
thoroughfare
, is what he saw:

To the left, where it led into the place de l’Odéon, amid a débris of rocks, paving stones and lopped-off branches of trees, was a phalanx of helmeted CRS
officers
, advancing slowly, warily, like a Roman legion. Their leather jackboots crunched on the rubble beneath their heels. In their black-gloved hands were truncheons and riot-guns and metal shields interlocking as in one of those children’s puzzles which comprise sixteen little squares but only fifteen movable little tiles. As they
marshalled
their forces, any gap left by one of them was immediately filled up by another and the metal shields locked into place as before.

Halfway along the street a car had been overturned
and lay on its back as trustfully as a baby waiting to be changed. Ribbed, waffle-patterned iron gratings, like the sections of a Meccano set, had been ripped from the pavement and piled on top of it.

To the right, spilling on to the pavements, flowed a river, a tidal wave, of youthful humanity, arms linked, fists raised in the air, led by an adolescent Pasionaria, a Joan of Arc in a duffel coat, bearing aloft an enormous red flag which fluttered and danced in the breeze.

These young people were chanting as they marched, shamelessly playing to the gallery – which is to say, to the householders who had come on to their balconies and who, after a moment of surprise, of hesitation, started to join in, so that it seemed as though it was the street itself had at last found its voice. And what it was singing was the most beautiful, most moving, popular song in the world.

Théo, Isabelle and Matthew were as baffled by the bizarre spectacle that met their eyes as Sarah Bernhardt, who, when her coachman took an unaccustomed route from her
hôtel particulier
to the Comédie-Française, is said to have exclaimed on passing the church of the Madeleine, ‘What on earth is a Greek temple doing in the middle of Paris?’

Even if any of them had actually heard the rumour, the Babel, which had progressively supplemented the Trenet record as an accompaniment to the game, it would have seemed to them no less natural than the background music to a film, whose provenance one never thinks to question. What was their amazement, then, to discover that this half-heeded, almost
subliminal
reverberation was the soundtrack of a whole other film, one of which they were mere spectators, tenuously present, hardly there at all.

It was Théo who roused himself first. ‘I'm going down,' he said.

He turned away from the balcony and went into the bathroom to sprinkle his face with cold water. Matthew and Isabelle followed. For the moment no one said a word. They went about their toilet quickly,
expeditiously
. With his back to the others Matthew scrubbed the occult markings from his face and torso. The excrement, which had dried up and was as hard as mud, flaked off into the wash basin. Then, his San Diego upbringing reasserting itself, he stepped into the tub, unclipped its shower appliance and showered himself all over.
Neither
of the others did.

They gathered up the clothes that were still heaped on the hallway linoleum, drew on underwear, shirts, jeans, socks and shoes and, still without a single word having been exchanged, ran downstairs into the street.

It had rained all day. Now that the sun had come out, Paris was hanging up to dry. The pavements, the façades of the houses, the raincoats of the CRS glimmered wetly. The overturned car was a red Citroën whose doors had been wrenched off to serve as chain mail. Its windscreen was smashed, its boot caved in. The youthful
demonstrators
who had been marching to the Internationale squatted behind it in their blue jeans, their scarlet foulards and their two or three layers of pullovers.

The cafés had closed, and chairs and tables had been piled up any old how. Holding glasses of lager or cups of coffee in their hands, their clientele peered through plate-glass windows. Some of them even continued calmly reading their newspapers, reading about just the kind of disturbance that was taking place in the street outside, a few yards away, like those music lovers at the opera who consult the score by the light of a pocket lamp.

In one café a young North African with a gap-toothed smile and a scarred right cheek brutally jerked a pinball machine from side to side. Another man, a native Frenchman, leaning across the bar counter, chatted to the barman who, dishcloth in hand, was rinsing and drying one empty glass after the next with a graceful switch of his wrist. Behind him a coffee percolator was making a louder noise than any explosive.

It was an instant of suspended activity, as at the
filming
of a battle scene when actors, crew, cameraman and extras await the director's cry of
Action!

The din, even so, was appalling. In addition to the
cries, whistles and loudspeakers could be heard a whine emitted by the Citroën's klaxon: it had got wedged in by a fan-shaped slice of iron grating. And discernible, too, above all the noise, was a thin, reedy, almost inaudible strain of silence, the silence of suspense, of anticipation, the rumbling silence of the circus drum roll that
precedes
a perilous feat of acrobatics.

During this moment of respite Théo, Isabelle and Matthew saw everything as though in stereoscopic detail: the CRS with their death's-head gas masks, the litter of paving stones, the crammed cafés, the smoke unfurling from the Citroën's gouged-out windscreen, the householders on their balconies, the head of a child visible through a gap in the balustrade, the
demonstrators
fanning out in every direction, the red flag borne aloft by the duffel-coated Pasionaria. And the graffiti. For, here, the walls had mouths, not ears.

Then the director cried
Action!

The CRS started to advance. Their truncheons were as pliant in the air as though underwater. The Roman legion was no more. It was every man for himself. Singly or in pairs, gas masks investing them with a Martian otherness, they moved forward, each at his own speed, deflecting with their shields the stones, branches, mudguards and water bombs pelting them from the other side of the Citroën.

At first, briefly, the demonstrators succeeded in
standing
their ground. A few daredevils among them raised diehard fists. They tried to reprise the chorus of the Internationale, but it petered out in a desultory exchange of cries and jeers. Then, when what little ammunition they had about them was depleted, they fought a rearguard action with whatever else was at hand,
stubbing
their feet on the street's fissured, treacherously irregular paving and falling down hard on their knees and ankles.

The CRS hurled tear-gas canisters which would land with the thud of a package through the letter-box. After an instant of uncertainty, when no one knew for sure whether they would prove to be operative, there arose out of them small, cone-shaped cyclones of orange smoke. These swelled to monstrous
proportions
, towering over demonstrators and CRS alike with the uncontainable energy of a genie released from a lamp.

The householders beat a retreat from their balconies, slamming shutters and windows behind them. One after the other, with the gesture of knights-errant
snapping
shut their metal visors before joining battle, the demonstrators drew foulards up over their mouths and noses. Then they set to running, pursued by the forces of order.

A young black man was cornered by two of the CRS in the doorway of a café. His eyes closed, squeezed tight, his fingers protectively splayed over his short, crimped hair, he collapsed on to the pavement under the blows that were methodically descending on him. From
inside the packed café nothing could be seen but
truncheons
rising and falling, regular as clockwork.
Flattening
their noses against the glass, those clients who were positioned nearest the window peered downwards in a vain attempt to make out who it might be on the receiving end.

Further off, a young woman in a trenchcoat, very
photogenic
, very Garbo, long auburn hair tucked under a floppy hat of the same material as her coat, was being chased across the street. She reached an open
ground-floor
window, passed it, doubled back. At first beneath the terrified gaze of the elderly couple who were framed in this window, then with their active assistance, she plunged headlong over the sill into their flat. Though the window was instantly locked behind her, a
policeman
's truncheon nonchalantly smashed it in.

Now, eyes streaming from tear gas, the demonstrators darted here and there, two steps forward, one to the left or right, the knight's move in chess, swerving to pick up a stray paving stone and hurl it back over their shoulders, teasing, taunting, changing tack, skidding, falling, carrying the wounded out of the firing range.
Meanwhile
, diagonally sweeping the chessboard like caped and mitred bishops, the CRS relentlessly drove them on,
down the congested street and towards the place de l'Odéon.