A Fork in the Road Page 35

  But the ambulances are stopped by police. So are Red Cross vehicles. Several of these, in fact, have their doors torn open and their drivers and paramedics pulled out and beaten up in the street. Fleeing students and wounded people try to escape into apartment buildings on either side of the street, but the police storm in after them and drag them out. Their flailing batons look eerie and unreal in the smoky night. The screaming and shouting, the wailing sirens, the cries of the wounded, of young girls beaten with truncheons or kicked with heavy boots, the rumbling thunder of exploding tear-gas grenades and more lethal mortars turn the night into a nightmare from Daumier or Gustave Doré.

  As the day begins to break the streets lie devastated and exposed. High up in the rue Royer-Collard small groups of students are still fighting; elsewhere everything is deserted. Here and there individuals are squatting on shattered pavements, supporting broken heads with bloody hands. All along the rue Gay-Lussac, uphill and down to the Luxembourg Gardens, the black carcasses of burnt-out cars lie strewn about as if some gargantuan baby has broken all his toys. Here and there a sobbing girl wanders through the ruins in search of who knows what.

  The long rows of black police vehicles are waiting for the wounded and the arrested to be herded in (most of them have first been driven into courtyards and lobbies to be beaten up) and driven off. One old man approaches from a nearby building in a flapping white nightshirt, to remonstrate with the police – until he too is grabbed unceremoniously by the front of his shirt and flung in among the turmoil of bodies already inside. And then a small, pale girl in a red dress arrives to add her own pleading to his – perhaps he is her uncle? or grandfather? But she, too, is picked up by the arms and legs, her bright red dress rucked up to her hips, and thrown into the truck amid the cheers and jeers of the berserkers in charge of the operation. One by one the trucks drive off.

  At a given moment, from the top of the long, wide rue Gay-Lussac, a single policeman approaches, his black cape swirling. He is bellowing like a lone bull. In both hands he clutches his long truncheon, swinging it this way and that, smashing all doors and windows along the way, until he disappears around the far corner of the boul’ Mich’.

  And then there is only silence.

  Exhausted to the bone I arrive back in our building where a bizarre sight awaits me in the courtyard: the occupants, in curlers and flapping gowns and striped pyjamas, talking and arguing and gesticulating and shouting like madmen: some want the huge front door to be locked and barred to keep out intruders or crazed police; others want it thrown wide open to offer refuge to the fleeing and the wounded – or merely to admit un courant d’air, a breath of air. And in the middle of all this stands our old concierge, holding her false teeth in one hand, hysterically interrupting all the diverse actors in this macabre comedy to narrate to all and sundry, at the top of her voice, the story of her life and the details of the flowers she once grew in her garden long before she came to this goddamned building.

  In my room I try to lie down. I am exhausted. But sleep is out of the question. Off into the new day I blunder again. By this time a new crowd is already gathering like swarm upon swarm of bees in the boul’ Mich’, shouting with a rage that makes me shudder: Libérez nos camarades! Libérez nos camarades! Followed by: Gestapo! Gestapo!

  Monday 13th. Yesterday the inquisitive bourgeoisie arrived in their Sunday best from the smarter suburbs to stare at what the restless natives have been up to.

  Another demonstration has been planned for tonight. Afterwards the students will occupy the Sorbonne, the workers their factories. A number of senior professors have resigned in protest. Ministers and syndicate leaders are scurrying from one meeting to another. There are more than a million people in the streets – no longer only students and workers, but academics, lawyers, film stars, doctors, industrialists, farmers, housewives.

  The power is in the streets! they chant. The imagination is taking over!

  Saturday 25. At eight o’ clock last night the whole of France came to a standstill for ten minutes. In houses, in Cafés, in bistros, in the besieged factories, on street corners and pavements, everywhere they clustered around TV sets and radios to listen, as in other moments of crisis in the country’s recent history, to General de Gaulle’s response to the situation. After the weeks of violence and near-chaos and all the desperate attempts to leave it to Pompidou and others to find a solution, the hour has come for the General himself to intervene.

  But what an anticlimax! This was not the de Gaulle of the Liberation, of the Algerian war or the putsch of the army generals. This was just a very confused old man speaking. Never before has there been such weariness and pathos in his Vive la France!

  This must have been, effectively, the end of the de Gaulle era. The general may succeed in staying in power for some time to come. In his shrewd way he may manage for a while longer to manipulate the situation for his own benefit. I can well imagine the nation, exhausted and dazed by anarchy, rallying around the old man in desperation. But it cannot last. Last night was the moment of his fall. Only a year ago this would have been unthinkable.

  Does this mean that something similar could also, in a not too distant future, happen in South Africa? And should that miracle happen, where will it find me: here, 10,000 kilometres away – or there where it will be happening? More and more, in these chaotic days, I do wonder where I really belong.

  I’m not scared to be caught in a clash with the police. But what would be the point of it? I am deeply concerned by everything that happens here. But it is not my society. This was brought home most stunningly by yesterday’s events.

  After a long night in the streets – a few of us were in a small restaurant in the rue des Écoles when yet another street fight broke out and the patron helped us to get through a back alley; but then there was no way of getting home and we had to join the mass of demonstrators and fight on through the night – there was a brief pause in the morning before we went to the place de Clichy for the big march, more than a million people, to protest against the government’s decision to keep Cohn-Bendit out of the country. A sense of madness taking over, Nietzsche’s Umwertung aller Werte. The cabinet seems to have given up all hope of taking control of the situation: almost all the original demands of the protesters have been met, but still it goes on. Because the demands have been mere symptoms of the deeper anguish behind the revolt: the need for a new kind of society, a new set of values. (We can only hope that we will be spared Mao’s Red Guards!)

  Through the heart of Paris we marched and marched. Chanting slogans. Many of them outrageous or funny. Many not so funny. De Gaulle to the gallows! Returning every now and then to the key line: Nous sommes tous des Juifs allemands! We are all German Jews! In the circumstances it made sense. Excluding Cohn-Bendit from negotiations meant excluding, demeaning, humiliating us all. And yet something inside me felt uneasy about it. This is what I cannot stand about mass demonstrations: the glib simplifications. The denial of the one thing that matters: individual lives, sensibilities, needs, hopes.

  Then de Gaulle’s speech. And another night of madness. At two o’clock in the morning the crowd storms the police station in our quarter where a fleet of cars and paniers de salade have been drawn up as a shield. When the first of these explodes it turns into yet another scene from old-fashioned representations of hell. Soon all the vehicles go up in flames, a red sunset through the black clouds of smoke. And then scores of police vans come charging from behind and a counterattack begins. A cortège of makeshift ambulances – mostly private cars with red crosses taped to the sides – arrives to cart the wounded off to the impromptu hospital wards that have been set up inside the Sorbonne. Even wounded police are transported there to be nursed by students: once again it is the discipline in student ranks that amazes me. When scuffles do break out from time to time, there are always monitors and marshals available to restore order.

  The day breaks, yet again, over a wasteland of torn-up streets, broken trees, telephone
booths and newspaper kiosks overturned and destroyed. Even the sun seems reluctant to rise through the clouds. It is raining over the burnt city. From the kerbs and cobblestones blood and soot are washed away by the weeping rain. The streets are littered with soggy, dirty newspapers with the news of de Gaulle’s futile address. On one destroyed barricade a door that has been torn from its hinges still stands propped up, bearing its legend like a defiant slogan: WC Dames.

  Slowly, slowly, the city staggered through the mess. After two weeks, the strike had spread everywhere, paralysing everything, from banks and postal services and public transport to petrol stations, turning Paris into an Amsterdam of cycles and pedestrians. Everybody was on strike, from the prostitutes in the rue Saint-Denis to the gravediggers of Père Lachaise and the other sprawling cemeteries where macabre stacks of unburied coffins were piling up. The prostitutes generously offered to provide their services for free on nights of major demonstrations. Rats were scurrying everywhere. Scenes from Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year and Camus’ La peste were chillingly coming true in our everyday life. Every evening we gathered in Yolande’s kitchen, grimly to count our remaining, dwindling stock of tinned food, packets of pasta, berlingots of long-life milk, dry biscuits, wine. No sugar left. No bread. It is a singular deprivation to live without mail. No letters from home. No money coming in. On the plus side: no tax forms to fill in, no accounts, no tirades from friends complaining that I owe them letters. No regular newspapers. From time to time I had to telephone H in London to find out what was happening here.

  In Le Monde Robert Escarpitt wrote: No mail, no transport, soon no more radio or television. France is truly approaching its Golden Age.

  In the main thoroughfares the army started clearing up the burnt-out skeletons of buses and cars, but in the side streets the battlefields remained untended. With no trucks to collect rubbish, no street-cleaners to get rid of rubble and litter and dirt, there were whole neighbourhoods invaded by bins and boxes and bags of every description. And after a few days of summer sun, followed by an all-pervasive drizzle, the city was beginning to succumb to the smells of death.

  The situation had its lighter moments. Somewhere in the southern suburbs a hundred soccer players occupied their stadium to demonstrate their ‘solidarity’ with the strikers. One evening the city’s artists threatened to occupy and close the Musée d’Art Moderne, but when they arrived at the museum they found it already locked up, and abandoned their protest. The city’s writers occupied a building and started talking – which is always an unwise thing for writers to do.

  Talking had indeed become the main occupation of the city. For once in their long history the French had enough time to talk. And everybody took part: in the streets, on the open squares, in bistros, in occupied factories and offices, in the Sorbonne, above all in the Odéon theatre:

  This must rate as the most spectacular occupation of this month of May: when the students took over control of this playhouse and the manager, the legendary actor-director Jean-Louis Barrault handed it over with a grand gesture and a memorable line: ‘Today Jean-Louis Barrault is dead!’ Now the theatre has been transformed into a ‘permanent tribune’, and whether one visits it during the lunch hour, or in the early evening, or at two or four in the morning, it is always filled to capacity, with hundreds of people hanging like weaver-birds from the decorated balconies; and for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the discussions continue. On the Cultural Revolution. On the Third World. On Vietnam. On students. On the potato harvest in Brittany. On Johnson’s foreign policy. On modern art. On new trends in psychology. On Sartre and Marcuse and Guevara and Mao and de Gaulle. On everything in heaven, or on earth, or in the waters under the earth. With deadly seriousness. With humour. With rage. With passion. With wit and finesse and histrionic gestures. Sometimes a cabinet minister gets up to speak: and it is allowed, provided he awaits his turn, because there is no priority in this free tribune. A miner with blackened hands has as much licence to speak as a clergyman or a disciple of the president. Farmers, teachers, lawyers, students, stripteasers, factory workers, everybody speaks.

  One powerful farmer, like an overgrown potato, rises to his feet to say, ‘Comrades, this is what I want to say. I mean, where I come from, we are working like hell. And we have a lot of potatoes. That’s all I have to say.’ And then he sits down again.

  Another is more to the point: ‘Comrades! I am worried about all this talk of revolution and change. How do you think you’re going to make a revolution with the French? We are too set in our ways. Take the lot of us in Auvergne, where I come from. We have four beds in a bedroom and everybody in the house uses the same basin to wash their feet. This is how it’s been for weeks and months and years, for generations and for centuries. How are you ever going to change that? Who wants to change that?’

  High above all the orators there is a banner taped to the proscenium arch which proclaims in huge letters: EVEN A CHAMBER POT CAN FLOWER.

  Perhaps, in the long run, this is the sense of our revolution: a rediscovery and a celebration of the imagination.

  It is a veritable funfair of slogans and ideas, most immediately visible in the rash of posters that have begun to spread across public buildings in Paris. There are enough of them to fill a voluminous anthology. Manifestos of Trotskyists, Maoists, Marxists, Anarchists, Fetishists, Sadists, Sodomites, Naturists, Gaullists, Dadaists, Filatelists – all the isms of the century. And quotations – from Valéry: The wind rises: we must try to live. Or Victor Hugo: The truth lies concealed under words like a field under flies. And many forms and turns of wit: Any view of the world that is not strange is false. Or: If a madman persists in his madness he arrives at the truth. Or: Only the truth is revolutionary! Beneath which someone else has written: Only the revolution is true!

  This is a wonderful safety valve for a society under pressure. And yet it becomes claustrophobic after a while. There are so many flies. And the truth remains so obscure and timid in the presence of the sun.

  Talking, talking, talking, a continuous happening. But there is something terrifying about so much talking while rubbish bins accumulate around you and the burnt-out wrecks of cars are lined up along the streets and the queues in front of banks and food shops grow longer. Among the piles of stones young girls are doing the rounds to take collections for victims of violence and workers who have lost their jobs, and the many victims. In the shacks of the poor the children are crying for bread.

  In the midst of the convulsions in the city it is often impossible to remain in contact with what is happening inside me. All I know, through waves of increasing fatigue, is that in a space still beyond the reach of reason and logic, these momentous events are beginning to shape, darkly, a deep-seated political and moral unease about the many things set in motion by Vietnam, by the Greek protest meeting, by the attempts of the French government to suppress the protests with brute force. Even in my dreams I can hear the chants: CRS – SS! CRS – SS! And at one stage, when the telephone lines were cut, students moved into the churches and started ringing the bells to accompany the cadences: Ta-ta-ta, ta-ta! Ta-ta-ta, ta-ta! Until the whole city was reverberating with it. All I know for sure is that, in the process, I have irrevocably become a ‘political person’. From now on it would be hypocritical to imagine that politics can remain a separate, clearly demarcated territory within my overall experience. It is everywhere, it permeates everything. It cannot ever again be set apart.

  Will there be room, in later years, amid the chaos of those impressions, to remember the frail, dark girl in the Malebranche crying in a corner over a glass of wine after her boyfriend has stormed out?

  In a way this is precisely what marks the whole earthquake: every individual, every group or groupuscule, every political faction, every separate corner of experience (students, artists, musicians, actors, gravediggers …) may bring to it a more or less subjective or private memory or expectation, an individual chip on the shoulder – but what makes it remarkab
le is that all of it is happening at the same time, and the co-incidence forces everything to merge and fuse into a much larger, massive social movement. A small group of students on the barricades has set in motion something a whole society will have to include in future assessments of their world. I am sure that much of it will dissipate again. But I am just as sure that no one who has been touched by it, however fleetingly, will ever completely forget that moment when the possibility of a new society became visible – a society of participation, which happens spontaneously, not because a national assembly or a dictator is demanding public endorsement for decisions or actions implemented from somewhere ‘up there’.

  When even our crusty old concierge stops me at the front door one morning with a hearty ‘Dis, camarade!’ I have to accept that the world has become a different place.

  For what seemed like a space beyond the reach or flow of ordinary time, the turbulence continued with unpredictable ebbs and flows. The government’s stupefying decision to ban Cohn-Bendit from returning to France after he had slipped out to muster support elsewhere, unleashed a new cycle of violence; then he proved, like the Scarlet Pimpernel he came more and more to resemble, that he could match them every step of the way by promising that he would be back – and materialising in the courtyard of the Sorbonne on the evening of 28 May to keep his appointment exactly as and when he’d threatened to do. And yet another frenzy of violence convulsed the city. There were indeed moments when it seemed as if the whole place was going to go up in flames.

  In the very heart of the eruption, de Gaulle disappeared. Just like that. It may well have been the closest, since 1870, that France had come to the abyss. And the numerous attempts at clarification or explication that subsequently appeared, including the old man’s own version, have not completely settled the question. A masterpiece of military planning? A desperate attempt to ‘get out’ and shove the mess on others? Certainly, in the few days of his absence, rumours had a field day: de Gaulle had fled and was going to resign; de Gaulle had escaped to Germany; de Gaulle was consulting his generals and planning a military coup …