A Fork in the Road Read online

  But then the friend had to return home and Mbella had to find a new shelter. Distress all around, until the friend suggested that Mbella simply stay on, under the bed, without alerting the new lodger. It worked well for a few nights, but the new occupant of the bed turned out to be a man with an active interest in politics. Every night there were vociferous political discussions, many of which began to upset Mbella deeply. For the first week he managed to keep quiet, but then it became too much even for a pacifist like him and one night he raised his hand from under the bed and expressed his unqualified dissatisfaction with what had just been said. Pandemonium. But when the consternation subsided and Mbella was allowed to have his say, the rest of the room was so impressed that he was promptly granted leave to stay on. And when the new man in the bed had to leave, everybody agreed that Mbella should move from under the bed and take his place on it. The authorities were left in the dark, and for several months Mbella slept like a king and royally entertained an impressive succession of eager French girls. Only when one of these became too loud was he asked to leave.

  One evening, in April 1968, many things came together. A protest meeting against the regime of the colonels in Greece had been organised in the Mutualité. This is something that defines so much of the fascination of Paris: not just its cosmopolitan quality, but the fact that nothing, absolutely nothing, can happen anywhere in the world without people getting passionately involved. Even so, this was a special occasion. The Greek colonels were indeed threatening us, every one of us. All the freedoms we were enjoying in Paris, were jeopardised by the threat to one seemingly remote – but shockingly close, shockingly intimate – part of the world. Ninety per cent of the audience must have been Greek. The remaining ten per cent represented the rest of the world. Barely a month after this protest we would all march through the streets of Paris shouting in support of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands! We are all German Jews!

  Most of the speeches were fierce and fiery. The evening began with a young girl who seemed to have mistaken that demonstration for another, as she broke into a passionate defence of Black Power and a ferocious condemnation of the assassination of Martin Luther King. Not a word about Greece. But a cry of outrage: ‘We’ve had enough of martyrs. Now we need something more: the violence of Stokely Carmichael is the only possible solution.’ How prophetic those words came to sound during the month of May! The solidarity of resistance against autocratic authority: students all over the world began to protest – against Spanish oppression, against tyranny in Portugal, against American atrocities in Vietnam.

  Then came Melina Merkouri. Those in the audience who only knew her from Never on a Sunday were stunned by the electricity of her presence, the passion and conviction of her rage:

  I have come to talk to you about Greece. Not the timeless Greece of the sun, but the torn Greece of today. Not the stones of the Parthenon, but the stones of prisons. The sons of the gods have been turned into slaves.

  Leading up to the ecstatic Death or Liberty! was the cry of Thanatos! which sent seismic vibrations through the entire hall.

  After the speeches, more music. The Theodorakis Ensemble, playing with stoic faces but with instruments of fire. A young crippled girl, Maria. Singing with a voice that did not sound human at all: it was is if the earth itself was erupting from that narrow, maimed female body to reach out to the heavens; it became that voice possessed by duende that Lorca once wrote about in an immortal essay about an Andalusian flamenco singer who followed an ordinary performance with an outbreak of unmatched fire:

  La Niña de los Peines had to tear her voice, because she knew that she was being listened to by an élite not asking for forms but for the marrow of forms, for music exalted into purest essence. She had to impoverish her skills and aids; that is, she had to drive away her muse and remain alone so that the duende might come and join in a hand-to-hand fight. And how she sang! Now she was in earnest, her voice was a jet of blood, admirable because of its pain and its sincerity, and it opened like a ten-fingered hand in the nailed but tempestuous feet of a Christ by Juan de Juni.

  And after Maria came a male singer. Then the incendiary Melina once more: theatrical and inflamed, seducing the microphone, undulating across the stage, throwing her hair backwards and forwards, closing her eyes, spreading open her arms, thrusting her breasts at the audience. Without the duende quality of Maria, but with an unmatched sense of theatre and spectacle, that drove the audience wild and caused the entire hall to reverberate with the cry of Thanatos!

  And I had an ecstatic thought, which I wrote in my journal before I went to bed that night: Suppose we could all come together in the Mutualité one day in the future, thousands of us, all spontaneously breaking into Nikosi sikelel’ iAfrika, with the same passion tonight’s Greeks have demonstrated in their Thanatos!

  Outside in the throbbing night, with the breeze cold on my flaming face, I remembered how a friend had once asked me what I regarded as one’s ultimate possession: what would remain, what would matter, on the day one lay prostrate at the feet of an executioner? I had always imagined, in such a moment, the presence of a woman, a last touch and expression of love. But on that night I suddenly knew that freedom was something as warm and physical and as necessary as love; and that this might well be what remains in extremis.

  POWER IN THE STREETS

  MAY, 1968. IT is hard to explain to anyone who was not there, but I know there is no way of getting out of it. Above all, it is a crucial moment from the past I have to revisit, mainly for myself. Certainly, much of it was directly connected to the events in the streets of Paris during that famous month of May. In my diary from those turbulent times I find this small note:

  God, what a year. The most extraordinary of my life. The most beautiful, the best, the worst, the fullest, the emptiest, the most meaningful, the most confusing.

  But that year began as a quest for H. After her months of wandering through Africa, I followed her to Europe in December 1967, hoping that this long absence would bring about the mutual rediscovery and confirm what we had both been hoping for. That miracle did not happen. And yet it was a wonderful year for us. Weekends or weeks in Paris, in London, in Scotland, and at last in a seemingly endless journey through Languedoc and Provence – reading, reading, talking without end, in dingy rooms or on sunlit terraces, in dark-green fields or among the grey rocky slopes of the Alpilles, on brown benches in town squares in the dappled shade of plane trees, at small round tables in cheap restaurants in lost villages with names like the titles of poems; getting soaked in an unexpected shower in Roussillon when all the ochre hills appeared to dissolve and came washing down towards us in streams of red and yellow and we had to strip off all our clinging clothes to dry ourselves in the new sun; attending summer concerts in Avignon or Orange or Carpentras; dining on a terrace among the folds of the Montagne Noire near Carcassonne, with Madame Marinette’s incomparable ratatouille or tender duckling or lamb prepared with thyme and rosemary picked in the mountains; listening on a derelict radio in an unprepossessing Hôtel Côte d’Azur far from the Côte d’Azur to news of Russia’s invasion of Prague; or spending a night in the long grass beside the swift and shallow stream at La Malène in the Gorges du Tarn; battling against the exhilarating wind on a slope of Mont Ventoux or fighting off dive-bombing mosquitoes below Daudet’s mill outside Fontvieille; huddling in a tatty little circus in Sault, and coming back to find our Hôtel de la Poste locked, so that I had to undertake a perilous climb along gutters and treacherous ivy up to our room, only to find myself at the wrong window and landing next to the bed of an elderly woman who broke into hysterics and woke the whole establishment with her screams.

  H first came over to Paris a day after my arrival, and immediately there was the feeling – renewed every time we met again – of resuming from where we had left off, as if there had been no interruption at all. But I made the mistake, I realised only much later, of being too greedy: not content with the admittedly
brief, but exhilarating past we had shared and with the present we were exploring in Paris, I also wanted to secure the future, driven by an overwhelming sense of insecurity and, perhaps, by fear of loneliness. Of course this could never work – not with H’s uncompromising honesty about relationships. The only solution was to decide not to be blinded or restricted any longer by expectations which, in the circumstances, could not but be unrealistic. We would face the rest of the year with open minds, live as fully and as deeply as we could, but without burdening each other with presumptions or hopes which would press too heavily on the present.

  There was a sense of release in this. And there were indeed splendid moments. Many of them unforgettable. Sometimes hilarious: as on the day when the two of us were ensconced in her small bedroom in London, from which I emerged naked into the large Victorian lounge, on my way to the bathroom, to find her formidable father sitting at a small ornate table at the window, bent over his dossiers and documents. We had no idea that he had come back a day early from the family’s estate outside East Grinstead. He had his back to me, but I was already in the middle of the room. Never had such a short distance seemed so vast as I retraced my steps across that wickedly creaking floor, back into the precarious safety of her room. I still don’t know whether he had seen me. His British – Victorian – sense of decorum and propriety might well have saved me from something worse than death.

  Other moments had a touch of the sublime. Concerts or theatre (the Lawrence plays at the Royal Court, Beckett’s Oh les Beaux Jours in the Odéon, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio in the Salle Pleyel …), sunsets on the Seine or the Thames, children playing in the Luxembourg Gardens or on Hampstead Heath.

  Yet throughout the year, everything was pervaded by a sense of an ending; and this was marked by several separations, usually for a few weeks at a time, but sometimes for a few months, as we prepared, consciously or unconsciously, for the end. Then the miraculous discovery, when, literally, all had been said and done, was that what we had anticipated as an end, turned out to be a new kind of beginning: like a piece of music in which the key has changed.

  This was why the events of that May hit me with such ferocity. I was in London on a brief visit to see, after the first of the partings from H, whether we should try to resume the relationship. On Friday 3 May I left Paris in a cloud of tear gas after the closure of the Faculty of Nanterre and the invasion of the inner courtyard of the Sorbonne for the first time in seven centuries (except for the violation of its space by the Nazis) had provoked violent student demonstrations.

  For several years the new state-of-the-art faculty had been sitting on its site outside Paris – an ultramodern complex of buildings, with ultramodern amenities, but with no provision for the needs of young people outside of study hours. There had been petitions, deputations, memoranda, discussions, negotiations, protest meetings and street demonstrations, but French bureaucracy grinds more slowly than the mills of God. In 1968, much of the education system was still functioning according to the rules and rhythms determined by Napoleon in 1804. In the Sorbonne, more than 30,000 students in the humanities had to use a library with only 400 seats; to attend a lecture one had to queue for more than an hour – and then be happy to find a seat on the floor or a windowsill; if you were working on a thesis, you could count yourself fortunate to see the prof for perhaps five minutes a month.

  For generations the protests had been going more or less unheeded, or at least without tangible results; but it so happened that in this Year of Our Lord there happened to be a different kind of Angry Young Man on campus: the turbulent, red-headed Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Earlier in the year he’d already run into trouble with a minister who’d visited the faculty to open the long-awaited swimming pool. Cohn-Bendit demanded more say for students in university matters; the government, as always, prevaricated. Two weeks before the explosion in May, the students convened a meeting in one of the lecture rooms. Permisson was refused. The students responded by carrying the professor out into the passage and continuing on their own. That was when the rector ordered the university to be closed and police to form a cordon outside. Cohn-Bendit and five other student leaders were summoned to a disciplinary hearing on Monday 6 May.

  This was what had triggered the protests on Friday 3rd, when I left for London. How many rowdy meetings had I attended under the imposing dome of the old university chapel and among the symmetrical arcades surrounding the quad. But that Friday there was a different kind of unrest in the crowd. Fired up by what had been happening elsewhere in the world over the previous months – in Madrid and Barcelona, in Rome, in Tokyo, in the US and Latin America, most recently in Germany – there was a sudden movement to storm the lecture rooms and ‘take over’. Then came rumours that a group of ultra-rightists were on their way to the Sorbonne, armed with sticks and crowbars, one of them even with a meat cleaver. At the same time, from all directions, came the familiar braying of police cars. In a flash the whole Sorbonne was surrounded, allegedly to keep right and left apart.

  The rector gave the order for the police to move in and ‘clear the building’. Within minutes the first clouds of dirty yellow tear gas were billowing up from the pavements. After my return from London the news had spread with unbelievable speed, and students came from everywhere to join in the fight. They came on foot, by bus, by train and Métro. That afternoon there were 10-12,000 of them in the boulevard Saint-Michel. And police too: not the ordinary gendarmes but the most vehemently loathed riot police, the CRS, recruited from the ranks of veterans from the Algerian war, and mineworkers and jailbirds and all manner of durs: men who were not interested in playing games. When they struck, they meant to maim.

  One street after another was cordoned off. No buses or cars were allowed to pass. Small groups of protesters were rounded up and marched off to the rows of waiting Black Marias, the paniers de salade. They had to keep their arms above their heads; and as they approached the police vehicles a black wave of waiting police engulfed them. One car coming down the rue Cujas was stopped, the doors torn open and the young girl behind the wheel was dragged out by five men armed with batons. It seemed like forever before she fell down, blood streaming from her mouth and nose; and as she collapsed one policeman gave her a last kick in the back.

  From all sides the cry went up: ‘Libérez nos camarades!’ For a while a new tear-gas attack forced the students to withdraw. Then small groups of youngsters started tearing off the steel grids surrounding the trees along the boulevards. This was followed by traffic signs and the grilles protecting shop windows. One group started breaking up the cobblestones, revealing the layer of sand below.

  ‘It’s the beach!’ the cry went up.

  ‘Back to the sea!’ shouted the crowd, as if Jean-Jacques Rousseau had risen from the dead.

  Then a new police attack began: ten or twenty paniers de salade came hurtling down the boulevard, sending students diving in all directions, followed by new columns of CRS hurling tear-gas grenades. And so it went on for most of the weekend. By the time I returned from London, late in the evening of Monday 6th, the Latin Quarter was in a state of devastation. The whole area around the Sorbonne had been cordoned off by police armed with Sten guns and matraques, wearing helmets and carrying shields, like unwieldy medieval warriors, surveyed by a helicopter circling like a vulture.

  At one stage a young American came up to me, gasping for breath, wiping blood from a wound on his forehead: scrambling furiously to find new cobblestones from the broken street, he asked, ‘By the way, what are we demonstrating about?’

  What, indeed? By that time Nanterre, or the obsolete and inadequate facilities of the Sorbonne, had long faded into the distance. It had become part of a much wider and deeper Revolt of the Young. And I find it fascinating, today, to page through my journals of those tumultuous times:

  I cannot agree [I wrote a week or so after my return to Paris, in a moment of reflection between outbursts of sound and fury] with violence or vandalism or chaos for its own sak
e. But what I do find horrifying is that a situation should have developed in which otherwise serious-minded and responsible young people should be driven to a point where they see violence as the only effective means of protest at their disposal.

  The young generation has always been, almost by definition, revolutionary. Without this, the world would have been fossilised, petrified, long ago. One is reminded of the poet van Wyk Louw’s words about the real danger in any society residing in an entire generation coming and going without protest. But today’s kind of protest is radically different from the timeless ‘clash of generations’. It is more violent; it has its origins in an all-encompassing despair.

  Of course, many of these demonstrations are still rooted in ‘local’ conditions: antiquated systems of education in Spain and Italy; a smouldering anti-Nazi conscience in the Axel Springer media monopoly in West Germany; resentment against the absolutist communism of the Novotny regime in Czechoslovakia; rage against the Johnson administration and its grotesque blundering in Vietnam, and so on. But this still does not explain the peculiar passion that informs all these explosions.

  The nature of the world in which this young generation has grown up, has caused the gap between their way of life and that of their parents to be greater than any comparable chasm in history. Today’s youth lives in the world on the far side of the deluge and beyond the traditional assurances and the soothers of conscience represented by religion and mercy: this generation, born after the Second World War, can no longer be surprised or shocked by anything. In a world where Hitler’s camps, the atrocities of the Congo, the horror of Hungary, the massacre of Vietnam, the extermination in Nigeria have become commonplace, there is not much room for hope or patience. To do nothing, or to offer only passive or non-violent resistance, merely allows evil to proliferate around you. The Martin Luther Kings who try to stop violence with reason or gentleness are murdered themselves. In this way an entire generation is driven back to the calm and moving dialectics of Camus: in a utopian world there will no longer be violence; but we do not live in such a world, and for us, in some situations, it becomes necessary to assume the audacity and responsibility of violence in order to come a little bit closer to peace. Our world is not absolute, but relative: injustice can never be eliminated, but it can always be diminished. And for that violence may sometimes be necessary. Truly responsible freedom is never offered to one as a gift: it has to be claimed, and conquered. Here in France, today: the reasonable demands, the pleas, the peaceful demonstrations, of a century have not changed anything – now it is time to grab with force.