In the Shadow of the Fire, page 15
“Six bullets won’t be enough. See how many of us there are,” says a voice.
Night falls slowly on them all in a silence broken only by the pounding of the bombardment. Between the thundering impacts, which come closer and closer together, they can hear the sound of buildings collapsing. Their faces turn pale, almost white, and it is a strange, wan crowd that waits now for the officer to make some decision.
He looks at the revolver in his hand and shrugs, stowing it in his holster.
“Imbeciles,” he mutters between his teeth, looking around at all of them. “You really don’t understand . . .”
The men part to let him pass. He walks with his head down, then pauses. Slowly, he turns back to Red.
“How could you . . .”
His voice breaks. He clears his throat and resumes.
“How could you expect an officer of the Commune to fire on a soldier of the Commune? Have we gone crazy—you and me, but me especially—that it’s come to this, that we’d even think about it? After these weeks of mad hope, of dreams finally made possible? I’d like to believe we haven’t lost that—humanity that all this violence against us can never destroy. I don’t know how people will speak of us when we’re gone, but at least they won’t be able to reproach us with having killed our own.”
He tries to smile, but his face twists into a bitter grimace. He turns quickly and walks with long strides toward the ammunition wagons in the center of the square. The men disperse, murmuring. Red asks Nicolas if it was the Commune that produced this kind of men, upright and wise.
“Or is it these men that produced the Commune, instead . . . ?”
“Look at us,” jokes Adrien, “philosophers now, are we? I could use a drink to get the taste of this out of my mouth! What do you think—one last glass before the battle?”
He isn’t laughing anymore. He rummages in his pockets, where a few coins clink. He glances over at Madame Lucienne and her sister, who are just finishing hitching their donkey to the mess wagon.
“Well, shit,” he says. “Guess I’m going to see how these guns work, first. At least then I can be sure of understanding something.”
Nicolas and Red watch him set off for the barricade on the Avenue de l’Empereur, dragging his feet, his rifle on his shoulder.
“What are we waiting for?” asks Red.
“Beats me. It’s a funny question, isn’t it? In theory, we know what we’re waiting for, right? Or at least we’re hoping for something vague.”
“Bread for the kids and schools so they’ll be less stupid than us?”
“That’s one example.”
“But waiting’s not enough. It’s not like a train—it won’t come unless you go looking for it. That’s the Commune, I think. We’ve gone to look for it instead of waiting a few more centuries for it to fall into our laps.”
Close by, on the Rue Franklin, an artillery shell explodes on a rooftop, decapitating the building. Pieces of the roof fly into the air and crash to the ground around them. Loose stones roll at their feet. They smell gunpowder and burning wood. Red looks up at the cloud of smoke drifting over their heads.
“Will they ever stop?”
“You have a gift for asking impossible questions.”
Red sighs.
“I’m tired. I’m going to try and get some sleep. They’ll know where to find me if things heat up. What about you?”
“I’ll stay here for a bit.”
They go their separate ways. When he looks back, Nicolas can see nothing of his friend but a dark silhouette walking quickly toward a group of guards sitting or lying down alongside crates of ammunition. The night begins to blur shapes, to drain colors. He walks back to the empty quay and climbs over a barrier intended to defend the Pont d’Iéna, where a dozen guards doze, leaning against the parapet. In front of him, on the Champ de Mars, campfires burn in a village of huts where battalions from the 14th and 15th legions are billeted. He can make out the comings and goings of sentries, a few storm lanterns hung from posts casting their quivering gleam. His steps reverberate off the dark façades of the buildings lining the deserted streets. The gas lamps have been extinguished, and the night seems to spread outward like mist from the corners, the cellar windows, the alleys where rats scurry. Here and there he spots the flame of a brazier, hears the distant echo of the conversations around a barricade.
A pair of lamps mark the entrance to the clinic on the Rue Lecourbe where Caroline spends her days and some of her nights. It’s a school that’s been abandoned for ten days, evacuated as the bombardments grew nearer, its classrooms transformed into dormitories, and as soon as he steps inside, a fetid odor mingled with the smell of chloroform hits the back of his throat and makes his stomach flip over. Pushing open the door of the first room, he can see nothing in the gleam of the night lamps suspended from the ceiling but the row of pallets on which the wounded are lying. A sliver of light shows from another room at the far end of the chamber, and he picks his way on tiptoe through the darkness where he can sense, rather than see, the men moving restlessly in their sleep, mumbling and snoring, here and there a faint complaint or the whine of a sick child. Nicolas hardly dares to breathe for fear of signaling his presence to these exhausted bodies, the stench of gangrene and filth so thick in the air that it seems to cling to him, and he’s afraid that he stinks now, too, that he’s as grimy as they are, his skin crusted with dirt and permeated with smoke, soaked with sweat for two days straight. He feels suddenly ashamed of showing himself to Caroline in this state; he examines the hands he can’t see, knows they’re dirty, greasy, the fingernails black. He rubs them against his jacket, vowing not to touch her until he’s washed them.
In the next room, lit by two candelabra and an oil lamp, he finds a woman sitting asleep at a table, her head resting on her folded arms. All around her are piles of neatly folded cloths, vials of brown or transparent liquids, earthenware pots lined up on a shelf like at an apothecary’s shop. He knocks softly on the door, and she wakes with a start and a little cry, turning toward him openmouthed, eyes wide with fear. She is young and redheaded, her green eyes round with surprise and terror. She asks, stammering, what he’s doing there, who he is, darting dismayed glances around the room.
“Are you Émilie?”
She nods, her red hair gleaming in the flickering light.
“I’m looking for Caroline.”
She stands up, stretching, hands at the small of her back. He sees her fatigue then, her drooping eyelids.
“I was asleep,” she says, as if in apology. “It’s quiet tonight.”
The bombs are silent for a moment, and they look at each other, in astonishment, perhaps. Nicolas counts the seconds in his mind as if, by continuing to count, he could make the respite last. String time out like a rosary, to make the prayer go on longer. The parish priest did it in his ice-cold church, his eyes closed, lips moving, on his knees before a granite Christ. The silence seems to oppress the young girl, and she sits down again heavily, her face sorrowful.
“Who are you?”
Nicolas turns toward the new voice, a man’s. He is short and stocky, broad-shouldered, dressed in an overlarge smock of roughly woven cotton and an apron stained with blood. His sleeves are rolled up, showing powerful forearms. He looks like a butcher. He has the fierce air of a slaughterman, but he wears the fine gold-rimmed glasses of a philosopher.
“I’m looking for Caroline. Are you Doctor Fontaine? She told me—”
“She didn’t come in today. We were expecting her at six o’clock this evening. Nobody’s seen her since yesterday morning. Who’s asking for her?”
“Nicolas Bellec. Sergeant, 105th.”
The doctor scrutinizes his face. “She’s mentioned you. What are you doing out in this state, at this hour?”
“I’ve come from the Place du Roi de Rome. We’re holding three barricades there. My watch doesn’t start until five o’clock, so I thought I’d . . .”
The man listens, nodding. He takes off his glasses and wipes them with a handkerchief he pulls from his pocket.
“Do you think she’ll be in later? I could wait for her . . .”
“She’s never been late. She even has a habit of coming in earlier than she’s supposed to and leaving in the morning well after the day shift nurses have already arrived. You should go and rest, get a bit of sleep before your watch. I’ll tell Caroline you were here as soon as I see her. Isn’t that right, Émilie?”
They both turn to the young girl, who has fallen asleep at the table again.
“You see,” says Doctor Fontaine. “Everyone’s exhausted. A young girl like that, she should have been dancing at a ball tonight. Her friends came looking for her, but she preferred to stay here, to keep watch in this storage room amid the blood and the moaning, and look, the fatigue has caught up with her.”
In the common room, a man screams, then begins weeping and moaning. Émilie wakes up again, stands, but the doctor gestures for her to sit back down.
“Don’t stay here,” he says to Nicolas. “This is no place for you.”
“Not tonight, no. But who knows what tomorrow will bring? And besides, if you’re here, at least you’re not dead.”
Fontaine smiles sadly.
“Sometimes that would be better. Some lives are unlivable. Did you know some people here beg us to kill them? Twenty years old, blind and deaf, or with both legs amputated. Sometimes I don’t know what keeps me from . . .”
He turns away abruptly, takes a lamp from a desk, lights it. The man in the dimly lit room next door is still groaning. They can hear others stirring on their pallets and complaining. Fontaine walks off, the light in his hand casting its swaying yellowish glow on the men on the floor, on their bandaged faces.
Nicolas flees, pursued by the plaintive noises of the room, brushing and shaking at his clothing to rid it of the smell. He is almost running in the shadows beneath a lowering ceiling of clouds lit by explosions, tripping and stumbling, and he jumps with sudden fear when he sees a lantern bobbing at the end of a street. The Boulevard du Montparnasse is a dark trench dotted with a few quivering lights. He couldn’t exist there; there’s nothing beyond the fiery night but a hellish nothingness. He stops in the middle of the road, turns southward, and it seems that a horde of silent disembowelers, clawed demons, will come surging out of the blackness at any moment. He had the same terrors when he was a little boy in bed on his creaking mattress, on stormy nights when some elderly relative or other had woven horrible tales of ghosts and revenants in front of the fireplace. He imagined creatures emerging from the sea, hurled ashore by gigantic waves, crawling through the streets of the village, scratching at the doors and tapping at shutters, crying like children, and he thought that someone in his house—his mother, maybe, or one of his sisters—might take pity on them, moved by their groans, and would open the door and let them in, and he imagined the carnage that would follow. He lets these childhood obsessions wash over him now, and the memory of his sisters and his mother suddenly fills his mind, and once again he feels alone and lost in the depths of an endless night where all roads fade to nothingness.
From behind him comes a burst of booming laughter. Women’s shouts. A song. An out-of-tune bugle and cascading laughter echoing in the dim light of a lantern. The din is coming from the barricade on the Rue Vavin. An accordion whines and then begins its melody. A polka. They must be dancing. Nicolas smiles. The monsters withdraw back into the shadows.
Caroline.
On the Rue de Constantine, the sky is a shifting, red-tinged, glowing ceiling. The cannon fire is less intense here, but the closer explosions make the air vibrate, and occasionally they hear the leaves of an acacia tree whispering as it leans over the barrier from behind a garden gate. He goes into the building and up to the third floor; he wants to shout, to call out, but he stops on the landing because his legs suddenly refuse to climb the stairs. He stays there for a moment, leaning against the wall, and his eyes gradually grow accustomed to the darkness and he makes out a sort of ocher vapor cloud hovering in the stairwell like the breath of a dragon. He looks up at the chamber door and hopes, fleetingly, that it will open and that Caroline will appear, a lamp in her hand, smiling at him. But then he tells himself that she must be sleeping. He climbs the last few steps and feels for the key in the hole in the wall where they always hide it. When he opens the door, a faint scent of soap and lavender reaches his nostrils, and he goes toward the empty bed and lifts the blanket and sheet—in vain, he knows, because sometimes hope is so strong that it believes in magic. He lights a candle, and the golden flicker soothes him and he gives himself up, in the perfumed clutter of the room, to the deep, heavy sleep of brutes and lovers.
SATURDAY, MAY 20TH
10
They had to calm them down, because what happened on the Boulevard Saint-Martin had whipped them into a frenzy, and he and Clovis had to punch and kick them until they quieted down a bit, forcing them to drink large glassfuls of the potion so they’d go to sleep right away and allow themselves to be transported without alerting all of Paris, a city ready to gather into mobs on the slightest pretext at the moment, anyway. Now they’ve also had to deal with this other one, who all but got into the cab while it was moving, whom they knocked out and tied up, then hid in a trunk built beneath a seat. Pujols wanted to kill her and dump her body in the remote area where they stopped to bind her, but Clovis refused to do it, arguing that it was too dangerous so close to inhabited buildings.
Pujols has made sure the girls don’t have too many visible signs of the beating they gave them; Clovis managed not to get carried away this time. The shapeless, inarticulate ape in his carapace of cloaks, leather boots, and battered hat, face hidden by the hairy non-beard clearly linking him to his tree-climbing cousins at the zoo—Clovis, savage and placid, can sometimes become a dangerous machine, quick and violent and difficult to stop. Fortunately, in the cramped confines of the cab, his punches lacked force and momentum, and they were enough to quiet the girls down without marking them too much.
Quickly they slipped into the inky blackness of a moonless night in a part of the city tapering quickly into a straggling bunch of ramshackle huts and tiny stone houses, sometimes former farm outbuildings, set on either side of streets that were still country roads and led to villages outside the fortifications. Clovis had to light the carriage lamps because the horse kept stopping and shying, frightened, maybe, by the shadows that swallowed everything up, the ground shifting beneath its shoes and the coach’s wheels in muddy puddles or skidding on the disjointed cobblestones.
On the Rue d’Aubervilliers, they passed the workshops of the Eastern railway, where lanterns were glowing here and there like stars fallen into the nothingness. Occasionally there was the whine of metal, a tearing, grinding sound, even though there were no trains coming or going from here anymore. Pujols had strained his eyes into the night, trying to pick out the slow movement of a maneuver, any hint of motion in one of the dark blocky shapes he saw on the rails, but nothing moved, and he shivered in the dark, hardly able to see his own hands in front of his face, and he cursed himself for such oversensitivity while the girls, forced to sleep by the drug, breathed invisibly near him, sometimes groaning softly or moving abruptly when their arms or legs stretched out involuntarily, striking him and making him afraid they would launch themselves at him again, like furies galvanized by a nightmare, suddenly transformed into ghouls determined to rip him to pieces with their little white teeth.
He’d felt better when he sensed the cab passing beneath the viaduct and then clattering along the rutted surface of the Rue de l’Évangile, alongside the gas storage tanks whose contents he sometimes caught a whiff of.
There’s a large bonfire burning in front of Gros-Tonton’s house. Pujols sees by his watch that it’s after midnight. A man is throwing the pieces of a chair into the fire; they can see a sideboard, some packing boxes, the corpse of a dog in the flames. Children run and yell and dance around the fire, their silhouettes sometimes seeming to dissolve in the light and then reappearing in a shower of sparks, laughing shrilly. A garish saraband. A gremlins’ Sabbath. One of them tosses a handful of black powder into the flames; a tongue of flame leaps, hissing, and the children shriek in fear and delight.
Pujols approaches and feels the welcome heat of the fire, the comforting light, and he watches the flames creeping over the surface of what they’re devouring, the skin of the dog gleaming with fat and then covered with light-blue sparks like a chiffon veil. Men stand on the edges of the bright clearing, sometimes visible in the flickering light only by the moist sparkle of their eyes or the glow of the pipes or cigarettes they’re smoking. There are six of them, and Pujols knows they’ve been observing him since he got out of the cab. Despite the crackling of the flames, he can hear the sound of someone breathing behind him, and then he feels the blade of a knife pressing against the back of his neck, at the base of his skull.
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
He slowly lifts his right hand toward the pocket of his coat, but the pressure of the knife blade increases, breaking the skin.
“Don’t move, or I’ll cut your head off.”
“I’m here to see Gros-Tonton. I have something for him.”
Another man has come up on his right. He holds an old single-shot pistol in his hand. The brim of his cap is pulled so low it hides the entire upper half of his face. Huge, light muttonchops frizz out from his cheeks. His lips are clamped tightly together, marked by a bitter twist. The children fall silent and then disperse into the night. The only sound now is the fire crackling. The body of the dog whistles and sizzles, dripping teardrops of fat into the fire.
