The Knife Thrower (17 page)

In remote factories located in large underpopulated states, teams of workers trained in secret workshops taught by rigorous experts were producing replicas so skillful that the originals had begun to seem a little flawed, a little faded and unconvincing.

It was said that in a department on the fifteenth or sixteenth floor, near shades and drapes, in a small room resembling a travel agency, with maps on the walls and two old desks heaped with brochures, the heads of four major hotel chains, angered by the scandalous loss of billions of dollars each year to foreign countries through tourism, were discussing plans to purchase the exact replication of a small European country, with its lakes and mountains, its quaint villages with cobblestoned streets and carved door panels, its railroads and postage stamps, for placement in central Texas
or western Montana. The hotel executives believed that Americans would enjoy the convenience of visiting Europe directly by car or bus; the pleasure of the trip would be enhanced by the knowledge that, whenever the traveler grew bored or lonely, as so often happened in foreign countries, he could hop in his car and drive across the simulated border into America itself.

The brashness of the plan filled us with a kind of nervous exhilaration. Similar deals, we began to realize, were taking place in departments on other floors. We imagined mountain ranges of artificial snow, sparkling false lakes, replicated forests, nightingales, thunderstorms. We dreamed of Florence rising stone by stone from a desert in Arizona; we saw, in the depths of China, the slow and meticulous reconstruction of New England, with its sugar maples and old brick factories, its exact pattern of rooftops, stoplights, leaf-shade, riverbanks—and, on each riverbank, the precise shaft of sunlight slanting through pines onto a picnic table trembling with sun and shade.

There was no longer any need to verify such rumors and suspicions, for we sensed in ourselves a secret sympathy with the store, a profound intuition of its mysteries. The consortium was determined to satisfy the buyer’s secret desire: to appropriate the world, to possess it entirely. Countless factories were turning out precise pieces of geography and history, multiplying them relentlessly. In some department half-hidden by shelves of merchandise, plans were no doubt under way for duplicating and selling still larger pieces of real estate: the Mediterranean shore with its famous beaches and resorts, the Black Sea, ancient Persia. If we wandered here long enough, we would find departments so audacious that to imagine them clearly would be to suffer harm, as from the blow of
a hammer. With such visions and premonitions swirling within, we pressed to the utmost ends of the store, searching out unseen corners, feverishly ascending and descending a series of zigzag escalators, passing through departments we had seen so quickly that already they looked unfamiliar.

It was on one of these feverish journeys that we descended past the lowest of the subterranean levels to a new level still under construction. In a thick darkness lit here and there by greenish lights, tunnels braced with heavy posts stretched in every direction. Workers wearing helmets with lights in them raised their glistening arms to swing pickaxes against rockfaces. Even in this raw region of barely imagined departments, men in neat suits were measuring distances with metallic tape measures, marking the ground with chalk. A freestanding door lay against a rocky wall beside an opening, and a man in a necktie ushered us inside.

The department was almost black, lit by a reddish glow. Here and there men and women moved with strangely formal gestures, as if they were engaged in a mysterious dance. Women of intolerable beauty turned their faces toward us slowly, with sad smiles; we had the sensation of having entered some dark and melancholy dream. Only gradually did we realize that the figures were on display. The art of mobile holography, a salesman was saying, was on the verge of another breakthrough—these images, under carefully controlled conditions, were able to stimulate in the spectator a sensation of touch and to give the illusion of life itself. Slowly a demon-eyed woman glided toward us; as she came closer we felt, in our fingertips, a faint tingle or tickle. She continued to smile vaguely at us as we snatched away our hands.

We no longer resist it, we no longer try to resist it, the new
emporium. These dangerous descents, these dubious wanderings, tug at us even in our sleep. New departments spring up almost daily, sales records are continually surpassed, from the receiving rooms comes an unbroken rumble of arriving goods. There is talk of four new upper stories, of deeper excavations, of the purchase of a neighboring commercial building that will be joined to the old building by three glassed-in bridges; such rumors, however false, strike us as essentially true. In this we are merely acknowledging the power of the new store, the thoroughness of its triumph. For as the departments multiply, as the store grows and invents itself daily, so it expands within our minds until everything else is pressed flat against our skulls. Indeed it is not always pleasant to leave the new emporium, and as we glance irritably at our watches we search for excuses to linger among the winding aisles and sudden alcoves, to delay our departure a little. But at last we must step through the parting glass doors, bewildered to find ourselves in sunlight; across from us the buildings, dark rose in hue, lie in late afternoon shadow. In the black plate-glass windows opposite we see the bright green-and-white reflection of a passing bus, through which a row of half-closed blinds is visible. Overhead, the avenue-wide strip of sky is brilliant blue. As we hurry along the sidewalk, we have the absurd sensation that we have entered still another department, composed of ingeniously lifelike streets with artful shadows and reflections—that our destinations lie in a far corner of the same department—that we are condemned to hurry forever through these artificial halls, bright with late afternoon light, in search of a way out.

T
HE
P
RUSSIANS SURROUND
us; there’s no way out; and so I rise jerkily into the air, one hand gripping the waist-high side of the swaying wicker basket, the other gripping one of the cords rising from the basket to the hoop above, while down below I see the upturned faces, the upstretched arms, the waving hats and kepis, I hear cries of Vive la France! and Vive la République! in the windy blue October air. Vallard, my pilot, stands beside me in his tight-wrapped greatcoat as calmly as though he were looking in the window of a pork butcher’s shop. My mission is simple: to fly over the Prussian lines, to land in unoccupied France, to organize resistance in the provinces. Later I will join Gambetta in Tours. The dangers are many; the destination uncertain as the wind; but now in the late morning sunlight, as I rise over the rooftops of Paris, I’m taken by the grand spectacle below, by the shining gilt dome of the Invalides, the uneven towers of Saint-Sulpice, the rows of
big-wheeled bronze cannon in the Tuileries gardens, flocks of sheep in the city squares, soldiers bathing in the Seine beside a blown-up bridge, and look! the semaphore station on top of the Arc de Triomphe, the river like a green crescent moon bending through the city, people on rooftops looking out toward the forts and hills. And on every street a tremor of light and color, National Guards in their red kepis and blue tunics and red trousers, ladies’ parasols yellow and violet and green, the glint of long bayonets at the ends of rifles, and there the red turban of a Zouave, over there a sudden flash of brass—a cavalry officer’s helmet with its mane of horsehair—as we drift in a southeast wind toward the northwestern ramparts.

•

The thick, crenelated wall that surrounds Paris is thirty feet high, with ninety-four projecting bastions. The wall is riddled with gun slits and supplied with heavy cannon. National Guards, army regulars, and Mobiles from the provinces stand guard day and night at the top of the wall. Paris, city of light, city of twenty thousand cafés, has become a medieval fortress. Beyond the wall is a moat ten feet wide. Beyond the moat is a circle of sixteen forts, each with fifty to seventy heavy guns. In the hills beyond the perimeter of forts lie the siege lines of Moltke’s armies. Was ever a city so well defended? Paris is impregnable. We will never surrender.

•

Below us I can see soldiers looking up from the top of the wall. They wave their kepis, raise their rifle butts in salute. Just outside
the western ramparts, on the Butte Mortemart in the Bois de Boulogne, I see an orange flash of fire, smoke like chimney-smoke turned sideways. The smoke sits on the air like snow on a wall. I can make out the red of the gunners’ caps. Barouches and landaus press close to the great gun, women in long-trained dresses stand watching, for the firing of the heavy guns has become one of the amusements of Paris.

•

Above me swells the great yellow balloon, made of varnished cotton and filled with coal gas. It is fifty feet wide—a fine target for a Prussian needle-gun. A single bullet piercing the cloth will turn the heavens into a ball of deadly flame. But the immediate danger, as we drift between the northern and western forts, is from the unpredictable motions of the balloon itself. Vallard can make it rise by casting off bags of sand, he can make it descend by pulling the valve rope and releasing gas, but even he cannot control the sudden shifts of wind, the swing and lurch of the basket, the temperature of the air, which causes the gas to expand and contract. Vallard studies the mariner’s compass that hangs on a rope from the hoop above, reads the barometer that swings beside it. Both of us well know that a balloon is unsteerable. Inventors have proposed sails, propellers, fleets of birds straight out of fable. If only the sides of the basket came higher! The hills, russet with autumn, conceal Prussian gun batteries. In the chill clear air I hear the sudden sharp cry of a cock, from some unknown farmyard.

•

I cling to a cord, steady myself against the low basket-edge, and look down at fields and copses, scattered farms, a village with a church. Vallard tells me we’re at one thousand feet. It is almost peaceful now, in the brisk October air. Hills red and brown, patches of yellow, the rippling shadow of our balloon. Up here you might almost forget the Prussian encampments in the woods, the sandbags in the windows of the Louvre, the dinners of horsemeat, the faces of the deserters fleeing into Montparnasse from the battle of Châtillon, the beds for wounded soldiers in the greenroom of the Comédie-Française, here in the sky, the calm blue sky, as we drift over the autumn woods, the sunny peaceful fields.

•

Suddenly, from out of a cluster of trees, a Uhlan appears on a black horse. His gleaming helmet with its high crest is like the dome of some exotic church. I can see the saber hanging by his leg, the white sash slashing his chest. As he looks up at our balloon, a second Uhlan emerges from the copse, gazing up at us, holding in one hand an upright lance taller than his horse. A pennon flutters at the top of the lance. Now they begin to pursue us; they shout; I see a third Uhlan, a fourth. I hear the sharp report of a rifle. A flock of crows rises screaming from the trees. Vallard cuts the cord of a sandbag hanging over the side of the basket, cuts a second, a third; we rush upward; the basket sways dangerously; something stings my hand; a streak of blood; the Uhlans are far below, eight of them, ten; I wrap my bullet-grazed hand. The Uhlans, growing smaller and smaller, ride after us as we ascend swaying into the cold regions of upper air.

•

We have ascended to an elevation of ten thousand feet, and in the bright cold air I look down at a world I no longer recognize: irregular patches of green and violet-brown, winding dark lines like scratches, bits of cloud like floating snow. Here, at this height, where men are invisible, where there is only Nature, one is shaken, disturbed. I think of the vastness of Nature and the littleness of Man, but my thought is inexact, it fails to express the feeling that moves in me like a darkness. It’s as if within me a rift has opened; a fissure; a wound; yes; not the bullet’s scratch, but an inner crack; and there in that blackness, all’s without meaning; whether I strive or sleep; yawn or bleed; accomplish my mission or drift to the moon; and in that ugly blackness, there’s no difference between Paris and Berlin; between Paris and pissing. Hateful heights! Here there is only the death of dreams, dark laughter of fallen angels with hellfire wings. A terrible indifference courses through me, shakes me to the core. And always a little voice that whispers, whispers: what does it matter, this thing or that thing … I look at my cold hand, clinging to the basket’s rim. Fingers, I say, fingers, fingers, but I cannot understand the word. People have hands. Hands have fingers. There are five fingers on each hand. There are ten fingers on both hands. France is a nation. England is a nation of shopkeepers. Clovis, King of the Frankish nation, defeated the Roman legions at Soissons. Gaius Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44
B.C.
I see an icicle on Vallard’s mustache.