In the Shadow of the Fire, page 41
“Rue d’Ulm!” Allemane cries.
“Go! We’ll stay here. They’re already in the Gardens.”
A little boy comes running, his legs stick-thin, his bare feet bloody. “There’s a column marching up the Rue Racine!” he shouts. “And another on the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince!”
Red runs toward the Pantheon, dragging his foot behind him like a dog caught in trap from which he’s trying to struggle free. Nicolas catches up to him, and they turn down the Rue d’Ulm. Citizen Allemane is ahead of them, a rifle in his hand, with five or six men. Farther on, beyond the barricade on the Rue de l’Estrapade, a column of infantrymen is spreading out. There are perhaps a hundred of them. Bullets whistle through the air and strike sparks as they crunch against the pavement. They run. The barricade is defended by five men. Across from it, the soldiers continue their progress along the sidewalks. Some others fire from windows. Red fires back, and they hear the sound of glass shattering, then a stifled cry. Red reloads. Nicolas sees a spot of blood bloom on his friend’s trousers. Red grimaces and shakes his leg, to shake off the pain, maybe.
“Wait,” someone says.
Suddenly, the soldiers throw themselves to the ground on their bellies in the middle of the street and open fire. A sharp rattling sound echoes off the heaped cobblestones, and bullets rebound to strike the façades of the buildings, leaving white gashes in the stone like chalk marks.
The barricade opens fire. Three Versaillais soldiers fly into the air, and others roll on the ground, yelling. They retreat, crawling, leaving behind their wounded comrades who thrash and call for help. Nicolas takes aim at a sub-officer who has foolishly stood up to give orders. He pulls the trigger. The man jumps and then abruptly clutches his neck as if he’s been stung by a hornet. He whirls around, and the blood flying from his wound looks like a scarf around his neck for a moment, then he drops to his knees. Another bullet hits him in the back, and he falls facedown on the ground. The others scuttle to safety in the Charité convent.
“Finished him off for you. He won’t bother anyone again,” Red says.
He sits down, pressing on his calf to stop the bleeding, breathing heavily, his face gleaming with sweat.
“Fuck, I’m thirsty,” he says.
Nicolas asks the others if anyone has a canteen. A comrade passes him a nearly empty one. “That’s all I have, my friend.” Red drinks greedily and then sinks back against a cart wheel leaning on the cobblestone wall and closes his eyes.
“How do you feel?”
Red plucks at his jacket, sniffing the collar. “I stink like I’m already dead. What I wouldn’t give for a bath.” He sits up straighter and reaches for a rifle, reloads it, reaches for another.
“At least I can still do this,” he says.
“Here come some more of them. They’ve got a mitrailleuse.”
The immense weapon approaches slowly, its gunners staying hidden behind its shield. The gunshots begin again from the windows. Thirty soldiers emerge from the convent, shooting at the barricade to cover the gunners’ maneuvering. And then the firing begins.
Nicolas lets himself drop to the ground. He can hear the humming of the bullets just before they strike. One of the two men hit flies into the air without a cry, as if yanked backward by the material ripping from his skull. The other man stands still at his gun carriage for a moment, his rifle aimed, before falling on his back.
“Retreat! Retreat!” shouts Allemane.
Nicolas helps Red to his feet. A comrade comes to take the rifles and hoists them onto his shoulders. They run as well as they can toward the Pantheon, pursued by a series of detonations. They don’t know if it’s their own ringing ears whistling and clanging and roaring under the effects of effort and terror or if the air around them is nothing now but a fiery swarm of bullets. They burst into the square at the exact moment an artillery shell explodes on top of the building above them. The blast of hot air, chunks of stone, and dagger-sharp fragments of glass knocks them to the ground, and they struggle forward on hands and knees, unable to see any farther than their own outstretched arms. Nicolas lifts Red by the collar of his jacket, but his friend is too heavy and falls back down on his elbows, panting.
“Leave me here. It’s not worth it.”
Nicolas grabs him beneath the arms and carries him, clutching him against his body. For a moment they look like a pair of drunken dancers, swaying and ungainly, then Red grips him and manages to drag his own weight. They head for the Rue Soufflot. Federates are firing ceaselessly from the pediment of the Pantheon. There is a moment when a gust of wind thins the smoke and Nicolas sees the Versaillais emerging from the Luxembourg Gardens and fanning out along the boulevard. Two guns are firing shrapnel at the barricade barring the street, manned by a dozen men. Shards of metal and nuts and bolts shriek through the air, shattering windows and pitting stone. Nicolas scans the chaos for the men who were with him on the Rue d’Ulm and doesn’t see them in the confusion of men running in all directions. Crossing the Rue Saint-Jacques, he sees another demolished redoubt, five Federates lying on their stomachs amid the tumbled cobblestones, firing and reloading and firing again. He turns down another street—he can’t tell which one it is; he only knows that it goes down toward the Boulevard Saint-Germain. He only knows that, here, the clamor of the battle is somewhat quieter and that the relative calm makes him feel a bit stronger. He holds Red’s arm firmly across his shoulders, his friend hopping on his good leg, and he wonders how long he can go on before he falls down and doesn’t get up again. “Leave me here,” Red says again. “Save yourself. It’s over for me. I won’t go much farther.”
Nicolas leans against a wall so as not to collapse. He can’t see anything anymore. It feels like his eyes are exploding from the blinding light, are tinged with red, maybe bleeding. He starts when he sees, through the painful glare, the face of a woman emerging from the wall and then leaning toward him, holding out a small, thin hand. “Come. Don’t stay there.”
He doesn’t know how he’s ended up in this crimson darkness, his arm still around Red’s waist. “Come,” says the voice again; he can hardly tell where it’s coming from, like a quivering phantom in front of him that could dissolve into the blackness at any moment. “It’s on the second floor.”
Red lets out a groan with each step they climb, his fingers clenching Nicolas’s shoulder. Once it even sounds like he’s weeping. They reach a landing, the floor creaking beneath them, and that familiar little sound abruptly banishes the violence out in the streets. They enter a dark apartment smelling of wax and old paper. And cake. The old lady helps Red stretch out on a sofa covered with a sheet.
“Madame, no . . . I’m so dirty . . .”
“Be quiet,” she says, gently.
Nicolas is afraid to sit down in this elegantly decorated apartment. All the shutters are closed. The fighting a short distance away has taken on the air of carnival noise. Nicolas feels a surge of anger at himself for the thought as soon as he has it. He pictures his comrades under fire. Those who have fallen and those who are still hanging on, despite fear or injury. Mitrailleuse bullets begin buzzing in his head again. He looks around, confused, shouldering his rifle.
“Have you decided to stand guard?” the old lady inquires, smiling.
He babbles an apology, not daring to lay a hand on the gun even to put it down, afraid of frightening her.
“Sit down, then.”
She walks out of the room with quick little steps. Nicolas sits down next to Red, who seems to be sleeping. He lays a hand on Red’s forehead. It’s burning with fever. His leg has stopped bleeding.
“You’ll see. It’s going to be fine.”
Nicolas says the words without really believing them. He knows nothing is going to be fine. The old lady is busy in the next room; he hears silverware clinking, pots and pans clanking. He closes his eyes for a moment and feels sleep settling heavily on him, so he gets up again, pinching his cheeks. Don’t fall asleep. He doesn’t know how many hours he has left before he’ll be taken, or killed. Killed. He knows how the Versaillais operate. The talk he’s been hearing since yesterday is about nothing but executions. Massacres, rather. Any man stopped in possession of a weapon, or even suspected of having one, is being shot on sight. They say some soldiers are opting to use their bayonets for the job instead, or even the butts of their rifles. Playing with the corpses. And women aren’t being spared, either. They don’t kill them right away, though. Not in the same way. They kill them twice.
Caroline.
He realizes that he hasn’t thought of her since yesterday. He murmurs her name to himself aloud, summoning her image, and he sees her in the middle of a group of soldiers. They’re tearing her apart. He opens his eyes to dispel the vision and lets his gaze wander around the furniture-crowded room.
The old lady comes back with a white bowl smelling of bleach, a towel draped on one shoulder and a linen cloth over her forearm, like a waiter in a boulevard café.
Red groans with pain when she takes off his shoe. Then she cuts off his trouser leg with a large pair of scissors, peels off the soiled dressing, and begins to clean his leg, which is black from his toenails to just above his knee. A blackish liquid seeps from the puffed-up wound.
“He’s feverish. He needs to stay here and rest.”
Red opens his eyes and smiles weakly. He holds a hand out to the woman, who places her own thin, frail one in his dirty palm.
“Gonna have to cut my leg off, aren’t they? When it hurts like that it’s because it’s starting to rot. Gangrene . . .”
His voice chokes slightly. He shakes his head, undoubtedly trying to clear it of the distasteful thought.
“Don’t talk nonsense, and kindly stop crushing my fingers.”
He opens his big fist sheepishly. The woman’s hand flutters out of it like a bird.
“What’s your name?”
“Guérin. Marie-Jeanne Guérin.”
“Mine’s Joseph Favereau. But everyone calls me Red, ’cause of my hair.”
“And maybe your ideas, too!” She lets out a small, tinkling laugh, and Red smiles widely as she rebandages his wound.
“And you?” she asks Nicolas, without looking up from her task.
“I’m Nicolas Bellec. We’re from the 105th.”
“My two sons are in the National Guard, too. The older boy, Louis, is a captain in the 58th. The younger one, Jacques, is a sergeant. They both came to see me the day before yesterday, as a surprise. Oh, they couldn’t stay long . . . two hours, maybe . . . but it did me so much good to have both of them near me. And they aren’t so very far away. They’re guarding the Hôtel de Ville. For now, anyway, they’re not in danger.”
She falls silent, drooping slightly in her seat. She wipes her hands on the towel slowly, her head down. She tosses the cloth onto a pedestal table wearily and gazes blankly into the distance.
“I want so much for them to come home. When this is all over. Because it will be finished soon, won’t it? And it will end badly, of course.”
“We have fought. We are fighting. But soon it’ll be a matter of saving our own skins.”
“It was so beautiful, though, a true republic . . . My husband and I were always in favor of that. If he were still with us, I think he’d be out there fighting and making me worry about him, too!”
She smiles sadly. Her eyes are bright. In the silence of the room, they listen to the sound of the battle raging outside. Red has fallen asleep. He snores gently.
“You should go,” says Marie-Jeanne.
Nicolas looks at Red.
“Leave him here. He won’t take another step. He must have lost a lot of blood; he can’t lose any more. And I’m afraid gangrene has already set in. Look how black his leg is. And the smell. Don’t you smell it?”
No, Nicolas doesn’t smell anything. He shakes his head. He rises, takes a few steps, incapable of thought. To go, to leave his friend, his brother, behind. He sniffs the air. There is something sweetish in it, slightly nauseating . . .
“I don’t know,” he says. “My nose is full of smoke and gunpowder. But—”
“Go on, or you’ll both be arrested, and me with you. If they only find Joseph, I’ll pretend to be a crazy old woman who let in a madman pounding on her door.”
Nicolas approaches the wounded man and takes his hand. Red opens his eyes.
“Don’t dawdle. They’ll cordon off this whole neighborhood, and it’ll be too late.”
“I’ll come back. I swear.”
“On Thiers’s head, I bet . . .”
They smile at each other. Nicolas feels Red’s hand squeezing his own with unexpected strength.
“You might come back, but I’m not sure I’ll still be here.”
Red looks steadily into Nicolas’s eyes as he says this. He adds, “No matter what, I won’t be here.”
Nicolas tries to think of what to say. He can’t let those words fall into a silence where they will reverberate endlessly.
“You won’t be here anymore, but we’ll find each other. Life will go on, and we’ll make jokes again, and have drinks. You’ll see.”
Red nods. He lifts a hand to his leg and grits his teeth.
“You’d better go now. You’re losing time. Listen, outside. They’re winning. They’ll be on every street corner by nightfall, and then it’ll be an enormous bloodbath.”
He closes his eyes and sighs.
“I think I’ll sleep a bit. I’d like for it to happen while I’m sleeping.”
He withdraws his hand, and Nicolas’s own hovers in the air for a moment before he lets it drop back onto the arm of the chair. He hears Madame Guérin’s light footsteps approaching behind him. She holds out a pouch.
“You really must go. He’s right. I’ve put something in here for you to eat and drink.”
Nicolas takes the pouch and grabs the strap of his rifle. The weapon is hard and heavy against his back. He suddenly doesn’t remember what he’s supposed to do. He feels as if he can’t move, like he’s nailed to the floor. Marie-Jeanne smiles at him and then taps him on the arm as if to shake him out of his numb torpor. He goes back to Red and crouches next to him.
“Do you realize how much we’ve been through together, my brother?”
Red opens his eyes. They’re very bright in the dim light. From fatigue, of course. And then there’s that leg, being destroyed from the inside out by the progressing disease.
“What we believed in, at any rate . . . We had good times.”
Suddenly, his big arm comes out and wraps around Nicolas’s neck and pulls him into a tight embrace, and Nicolas feels the heat of the fever and Red’s heart pounding, and he kisses Red’s stubbly, dirty cheek again and again, and his comrade, his brother, does the same, and they know they’re both remembering the same thing, the hugs of childhood, the comforting embraces of a parent when they were upset, the moments when they were strong, invincible, because there could be no danger in the shelter of those arms.
“Go on.”
Nicolas stands up. Red closes his eyes again and turns his face to the back of the sofa. When Nicolas pauses next to Madame Guérin to thank her, she caresses his cheek, and he kisses her fragile hand.
“Go, my boy. Save yourself. Save yourself.”
The street is full of black smoke. He runs, his rifle held in front of him, toward the sound of gunshots coming from the corner of the Rue des Écoles. A mitrailleuse is being fired, off to the left. A dozen men are crouching behind a pile of sacks of dirt, waiting for the volley to end. Bullets thud into the sacks like punches from a fist. Just behind them, five corpses lie in a row, their hands folded on their chests.
“Where the hell did you come from?”
Nicolas hunkers down beside the man who has just spoken.
“The Place du Pantheon. I don’t know where I am anymore.”
“Did you come here hoping someone would explain it to you?”
“Hey! Look who’s coming to visit!” another fellow cries, reloading his rifle.
Two Federates are running toward them, firing their guns. About thirty Versaillais come swarming around the corner of the Rue Fontanes, shouting joyfully. The Federates take down five or six of them, and that quiets down the others, who drop to the ground and aim their rifles.
Nicolas follows the others, who flee down the Rue Saint-Jacques. On the Boulevard Saint-Germain, three men fall. A group of infantrymen is entrenched behind the barricade just in front of them, guarding the intersection. Nicolas crouches in a doorway and reloads. He spots an officer who is commanding the snipers, saber in hand. He fires, misses, reloads, fires again. The officer spins and vanishes behind the pile of cobblestones.
Nicolas runs, bent double, pursued by gunfire. Bullets thud into the walls above his head like hammer blows. He doesn’t know where the others have gone. When he raises his head, he sees Versaillais soldiers pouring down the streets in every direction, stockpiling equipment in the Place Maubert. Someone shouts insults down at him from a balcony and then calls out to the soldiers: “Here’s one getting away! Over here!” He crosses the road and plunges into the Rue des Anglais. A volley of rifle shots seems to follow him, echoing in the narrow lane. He runs, trips, straightens up, hears shouts, and sees an entire patrol of soldiers advancing in formation down a street to his right, filling up its entire width. He finds the Federates from earlier on the corner of the Quai Saint-Michel, only six of them now, crouching behind an overturned cart and three barrels that must have rolled there God knows how. The men are reloading their rifles under fire from a group of soldiers standing at the entrance to the Petit Pont.
“Only five cartridges left,” one comrade says.
“Same,” gasps another. “Better not waste ’em.”
“We fire and run,” suggests Nicolas. “Otherwise we won’t get out of here.”
The others look at him, surprised, then nod silently.
